Broken Lands

Chapter 361 – Sphere Overhaul

During the downtime between working on their Spheres, everyone asked questions. Jaz, Sweetfire, Bai, and (when he eventually showed up) Arryn were all happy to answer whatever questions anyone came up with. Sophia found that answers to her questions helped with her specific problems, but answers to Dav’s questions helped her plan her entire setup. Sure, she had it partially planned already, but there was always more to figure out about how it ought to work as a whole. It wasn’t a simple process.

One of the biggest pieces of advice was that they should take inspiration from their current Spheres’ setup but not try to follow it too closely. The various structures, whatever they looked like to each individual, were useful; the overall framework wasn’t. It was too separate. When they were done, they’d have a single Grand Talent that was also their Sphere; it needed to hold or be linked to almost everything else. They might be able to keep their Species Abilities, and since they were Hallowed, they might also receive a Patron’s Gift. That was it. 

The more they managed to merge their Abilities, the more flexible they would be - but they also had to make sense or they’d fail to do anything at all. That was what the structure was for, apparently. 

Arryn spent a lot of time talking about how to change Abilities. It sounded an awful lot like shaping a spell with Intent to Sophia, and it gave her several ideas of things she could do that would seriously enhance her Sphere. The one warning he gave repeatedly was one that also allowed to Intent-cast spells: there was always a chance of side effects, and if you weren’t entirely fixed on what you wanted, you’d get something close that might not be at all what you wanted.

The fact that you could potentially try again was a plus, at least. First of all, you could keep trying to shape it until it did what you wanted. If you just couldn’t get it there and it also refused to return back to what it was because you melted the wrong things together and they didn’t want to separate, you could spend Wisps to undo things. Sophia didn’t have the spare Wisps for that, but at least it was possible if she really screwed up. 

From what Arryn said, you had to completely fail to end up there, and that only happened when you tried to do something huge. Some of his examples gave her ideas, and Sophia knew she was going to try something big enough that she might end up there if it didn’t work out. If that did happen, well, it would take out the particular Abilities she was working with but she ought to be able to contain it there. She’d still be able to fight; they could head back into the Maze.

The farther she got into the upgrade, the more amazing the Wanderer’s feat of completing multiple Spheres for them in Izel seemed. He either had a ton of experience or second upgrade Spheres were easier than third. Sophia guessed it was some of each, because a lot of Abilities were merged and shifted in the process. It was definitely similar.

Sophia’s next task was to do something about her Grand Spell and Grand Ability. They were excellent examples of the beginning of a Grand Talent, but neither of them was the Grand Talent she wanted. 

Her first thought was to pull the entire Grand Ability Plumed Insight under the umbrella of the Grand Talent she was trying to develop as one of the subsidiary Abilities, the way Plumed Insight itself had subsidiary Abilities branching off, but it didn’t work. Every time she tried, she could get a piece of it to stick, but it made everything go lopsided and stop responding when she tried to use it. 

She wasn’t about to give up those Abilities; not only were they hard-earned, they were vital to almost everything she did. MageSight and Aural Mage Sense were especially important, but Collected Knowledge and Domain Knowledge were also exceedingly useful when she shared them across her Domain.

Wait, didn’t Bond of Plumes play into that? Domain Knowledge was one of the reasons she had extra copies of Bond of Plumes, how could she have forgotten that?

When Sophia tried to create two separate merges out of Plumed Insight, it almost worked. Collected Knowledge, Domain Knowledge, and Bond of Plumes merged cleanly. When she couldn’t get Innate Communication to merge with the sensory Abilities, she tried pushing it into her new Knowledge Ability and it happily found a place in the new Ability Plumed Knowledge as if it had always belonged there. It felt like it took forever to jockey everything into place with as little time as she could spend at it each day, but it was actually only a couple of weeks.

With Collected Knowledge out of the way, Sophia’s next merge was her sensory Abilities. Aural Magic Sense formed the base, since it was in many ways the broadest of the set. MageSight and Excellent Ears nestled next to it and mostly disappeared. Spirit Sight was a problem until it occurred to Sophia that she was missing the point; she needed something that connected the two. Veiled Sheath overlaid the disk that the combined sensory Ability appeared as, then almost grabbed Spirit Sight and sucked it in to form a white rim around the edge of the disk. 

That wasn’t where she wanted to use Veiled Sheath, and she didn’t have an extra copy, which left her with a hard choice: did she give up on the other spirit-based spells or did she try to get another copy of Veiled Sheath somehow? It wasn’t as straightforward as her other Abilities, since it was inside a partially-formed Grand Spell; unlike her other Abilities, she couldn’t just buy another copy with Wisps. It came from a Challenge. 

Oddly enough, the answer came from Alley Sweetfire. He ran into a similar problem when he was creating his third upgrade, so he also had the fix: the Grand Spell itself. There should be a container that held everything together and it would retain some aspects of the Grand Spell. Since Sophia’s was Pierce the Veil, all of the empty slots in the Grand Spell ought to be usable as the overall link to let her Abilities do just that and affect spirits as well as the outside world. They wouldn’t be as strong as a specific Ability, so she might have to use several of them, but if she spread them around she might be able to turn them into something special.

Sophia hadn’t even noticed they were there. The reason was obvious when she went back into her trance: they were tiny translucent things that clustered near the rest of the Grand Spell. Now that she knew they were there, it was simply to peel them off and spread them around. She tried doing the same thing with Plumed Insight, but she couldn’t find anything left; it looked like she’d used them on either Plumed Knowledge or her new sensory Ability, Plume of Perception. Maybe they were the reason the two Abilities formed so easily?

Whatever the reason was, now that she knew the other reason for the empty slots, everything was suddenly much easier. It did beg the question, though: this was taking forever. Why hadn’t they started earlier?

Jax’s answer that it wasn’t the way it was done frustrated Sophia. Fortunately, Sweetfire had a far better answer: Abilities that were merged before they were capped were permanently weakened. Worse, working with your Abilities could damage them; it was necessary in order to reach the third upgrade but it would stop Abilities from being improved normally before that. That was the reason Grand Abilities and Spells no longer had levels and Abilities couldn’t be bought for them; they were outside the setup of the first two upgrades. You didn’t want to break that until you were completely ready.

The more Sophia moved things around, the more she realized that there were several possible functional configurations. Abilities could merge, but they could also chain, the way her “Spells” did. Sophia was more certain than ever that they were simply Abilities with another name, but that meant she could repeat the setup with something other than “spells.” Was that how Dav’s Calls were set up? They seemed similar.

She grabbed Plumed Spellcaster and layered it with one of her Bond of Plumes copies; she wanted to keep Bond of Plumes’s full functionality, with Plumed Spellcaster providing the structure. She added one Ability after another and found that they snapped into place almost like clicking Legos together.

Well, it was a little more difficult, but it wasn’t really that hard. Maybe she went a little overboard, but she pushed in everything that was willing to fit, including some things she’d expected to completely lose. By the time she was done, she had more than a dozen different things that she could push across her new Aural Plumes Ability.

She had only a few things left in her plan. The absolute most important was one she left until near the end, an Ability she’d once thought was useless: Firewater Plume. It was not only not useless, it was vital to her plans for the future. She was very, very tired of having to carry feathers. It was fine that she had to prepare, but having to dig exactly what she needed out of her pack every time was slow, possibly dangerously slow. She needed to have her weapons ready, not tucked away where they were easy to carry.

Firewater Plume was about freezing something in place, turning it into a feather. She’d originally planned to expand that to other elements so that she’d have choices, especially powerful ones that she could gain with others’ help the way she’d borrowed Sweetfire’s power with her Firewater Plume, but she had a much better idea now.

It was a risk, but it was a risk worth taking: she was going to try to turn Firewater Plume into a way to capture and store power as plumes. If it didn’t work, she would probably break it beyond recovery without the Guide’s help, but that was a risk she was willing to take. She doubted anyone else would mind.

Xin’ri certainly wouldn’t. She’d already made a mistake like that, after all. She had enough Wisps to cover the recovery fortunately, but it left her in the same position Sophia was now in.

Sophia tried to make it worth with Plumed Spellcaster first, since Plumed Spellcaster had the link off to a something else that was now nearly empty. It didn’t work; the two Abilities just didn’t want to talk to each other. She tried pushing a few other possibilities into the mix, but eventually it was clear: Firewater Plume completely did not want to work with anything else. It was simply different.

There was only one thing left to try, the one thing that would break Sophia’s entire setup if it failed: Spread Plumes. Without Spread Plumes, she couldn’t control or use the Plumes that she sent out, and it did have the ability to generate “plumes” of magic that looked like feathers and formed the control points she used for everything. In many ways, it was the best possible fit for what she wanted to do with Firewater Plume, even better than Firewater Plume itself.

She just hadn’t started with it because it was her Anchor Ability, and messing with your Anchor Ability was like messing with your overall Sphere: it could break almost everything. It was also really expensive to restore if you couldn’t fix it yourself, and on top of that the very last thing you had to do to finalize your Grand Talent was incorporate your Anchor Ability into your new Sphere, linking it together. If she merged Firewater Plume into Spread Plumes, it would become part of her base Talent, rather than something extra she could do. It would flavor everything else, sort of like a lesser version of what her Plume Signature already did.

Sophia pushed the two Abilities together slowly and carefully. She wanted them to match up with each other and blend, but she was ready to pull them apart at the first sign of trouble.

Trouble never came. Firewater Plume slid into Spread Plumes like a key slipping into a lock. A stippled pattern at the joint made Sophia think about Plumed Spellcaster, so she set it into place. The Ability almost seemed to cough as it ejected the handful of spells that remained, but moments later it vanished as if it had never existed.

Sophia checked the Ability name and had to laugh. Her new Ability was called Hoard of Plumes!