Broken Lands

Chapter 362 – The Last Pieces

Sophia tugged at the remaining Abilities. She had to link them to something, even if it was only to the Grand Talent itself, if she didn’t want them to dissipate. Some of them were important, especially her newest Ability, Feathered Evocation. 

It didn’t really want to merge with anything else and she wasn’t certain if … wait, it had a shape a lot like Force Bolt, even though that was a spell. Maybe she could take advantage of that; Force Bolt was just sort of hanging around loosely after it fell out of her old Spells structure when she stole it and Plumed Spellcaster. It had a little fiddly thing to link with something else that Feathered Evocation didn’t, so maybe she could use it to hook into her new Hoard of Plumes?

It didn’t want to attach to the Hoard at all. That wasn’t good; it needed to be able to use the plumes that were in there, and she’d already used her only copy of Spread Plumes in the Hoard. 

A quick search through the remaining Abilities revealed that there just weren’t many left. She had Plume-Reinforced Spell, Force Blast, and Embody Element. That was it, other than Plume Shift (which she wanted to keep as it was) and her Species Abilities, which needed to be considered last. 

Force Bolt, Force Blast, and Embody Element completely refused to join Aural Plumes the way the other Spells did, so if she wanted to keep their functionality she had to do something with them. Force Blast was probably dead; there just wasn’t much she could do with it and she wasn’t sure she cared. She was going to get some of the point of the spell from the way her aura and Domain interacted with the rest of the world; the rest was never really all that useful anyway. 

If all she lost was Force Blast, she’d be well ahead of what anyone expected out of a Grand Talent. She’d even be ahead of her highest hopes, never mind her actual expectations.

Embody Element, on the other hand, was important. It was one of the Abilities she often used with Bond of Plumes. That made the fact that it didn’t want to be part of Aural Plumes puzzling. Maybe she could layer it in with the Plumed Knowledge Ability?

Days passed as Sophia tried different options. Nothing seemed to work, no matter how she shifted things around. She was going to have to use her third and final copy of Bond of Plumes to tie the last few Abilities together as she pushed them inside the Grand Talent and hope everything worked out the way she wanted. 

It was a frustrating plan, but it was the best she’d come up with after talking everything through with the handful of advisors they actually had. It was also the reason she had the “spare” copy of Bond of Plumes even though she’d only planned to use two; Bai, of all people, recommended it. Abilities that connected things often had good properties as merge candidates, especially if they were closely correlated to the central idea of the new Sphere. 

The moment Sophia tapped Embody Element against Bond of Plumes, it stuck in place. That was good, as was the fact that it drifted towards Plumed Knowledge and then both fell towards her Sphere, almost like the three Bonds were pulling each other closer. That was a good thing as long as they didn’t try to melt together, but they seemed to be keeping a small distance apart. 

Sophia turned her attention back to the Feathered Evocation and Force Bolt merged Ability. Maybe all she needed was for it to be “in” her Sphere with Hoard of Plumes? That was what she planned to do with her protective aura Ability and Plume Shift, but those worked separately, not with other Abilities.

It took her a moment to realize that she was, once again, missing the forest for the trees. She’d forgotten that she could steal the structure of her old Sphere. It wasn’t obvious, but it was still there when she looked. 

The Grand Spell and Grand Ability fell apart when she pulled everything out of them, as did Spells when she stole its structure along with Plumed Spellcaster for Aural Plumes. That still left the structure that originally held all of her spells for Plumed Domain! She’d merged the Sphere itself, but she hadn’t overwritten the structure and those Abilities worked together. Now, where was that structure?

It took some searching since it was the same shifting, oddly metallic feathery color as the Sphere itself, but there were little hollows set into the interior of the Sphere, clearly where things were supposed to sit. Weirdly, two of them were already filled with Prismatic Magic and Death’s Embrace. Why were those two Species Abilities slotted inside her Sphere?

Unless … did they need to interact with the rest of the Sphere? She knew she could share Death’s Embrace through Bond of Plumes; was this why?

Sophia thought about her Species Abilities over the next several days as she slowly coaxed all of her new Abilities into position in her Grand Talent. They had preferences about what could and couldn’t be next to them; if the wrong things were placed in adjacent spots, they wouldn’t stay in place. If other things were placed too far apart, they’d also move out of place. It was a headache and a pain in the butt, because she couldn’t even see her mistakes without several hours’ rest after each attempt to give them time to move.

At least it gave her time to figure out what she was doing with her other Species Abilities. Magical Translucence slotted into her new protective aura the moment she brought the two Abilities close to each other, which took care of that Ability. It was surprisingly simple, too, and it left the Ability oddly see-through, just like Magical Translucence itself.

Prismatic Magic was a bit harder to figure out, but Sophia knew her real problem with it was that she wanted to use it as an attack but didn’t have a proper vector. That meant she needed to look at Plume Strike, the merge of Force Bolt and Feathered Evocation. It sort of made sense, too, since what she wanted to do was run the magic of the different feathers in Hoard of Plumes through Feathered Evocation and she also wanted to be able to make a simple magical strike. Prismatic Magic might be able to do that; it could probably also disrupt an existing spell. If she did the merger right, maybe she could use Prismatic Magic to guide the rest of the Ability?

It took a week to convince Prismatic Magic that it wanted to work with Force Bolt and Feathered Evocation rather than split them apart. In some ways, the most annoying thing about that time was that when she complained about having to redo the merge again

, Jax laughed at her. Having an Ability that could undo merges was something he’d dreamed about during his long upgrade progress. He had no sympathy at all for her.Dav seemed to understand, at least. He was having his own unique difficulties with his upgrade. All of his Abilities were easy to merge, no matter whether the merge was useful or not. The only solidity in his Grand Talent was what he imposed, which made some things very easy and others extremely difficult. Even the original structure of his old Sphere seemed “sticky” to him, unlike Sophia’s malleable metallic glass that almost seemed to help her find functional combinations. He had more flexibility but also had to be more careful.

She could have stopped there, with Scaley and Manifest Wings outside her Sphere. They were Species Abilities and might well survive as such if she simply left them alone. There was a vague nearly-invisible set of bands that held them in place; it would likely work.

It would also leave the annoying “Warped Human” notation on Sophia’s Status, and she was very, very tired of that. It was true enough that her mother was human, more or less, but her father wasn’t. He was an Asuryan Arcane Dragon, and that wasn’t the same thing as being Warped! She might look like she was mostly human, but that was simply because her father looked like he was half-human when he walked among humans, and she looked somewhere between that appearance and her mother’s.

Her attempt was based on old information from Bai; Sweetfire, Arryn, and Jax had never heard about anyone attempting to alter the Species noted in their Status, but  Bai had. Oddly enough, it sounded somewhat familiar to Ci’an; she didn’t have any useful tips, but she was able to say that her uncle Los’en had made some comments over the years that sounded an awful lot like Bai’s information. Ci’an hadn’t paid too much attention; it didn’t align with the Nightowl Sphere at all. 

What Bai said was that to influence your Species, you had to realize it in yourself first, then push that truth into the Species section of your Sphere. He suspected that was where inherited Warps came from; it happened naturally to an extent, the same way Dav had gotten some of his Abilities. Minor effects like Ci’an’s ears didn’t even seem to require full Ability slots. Ci’an was pretty sure it was related to Los’en’s ability to completely become an element.

Back in the time of the Empire, it was a known method to potentially exhibit your parents’ Abilities as Species Abilities rather than Sphere Abilities. The knowledge had clearly been lost since then.

Sophia had it “easy,” far easier than what Los’en must have done. She was simply trying to get the Guide to recognize who she already was and maybe bring out some of her latent heritage, the heritage she regretted not pursuing in the past. Looking back, there wasn’t any real reason she hadn’t; she’d simply been blinded by the feeling that she should have had what her oldest sister Jenna had naturally. It was a ridiculous feeling; her brother Xavier had followed every step of the Path that led to their shared heritage, which meant he had a far deeper version of it than Jenna, who simply had what she was born with in that sense, yet it was Jenna that Sophia envied.

Maybe that was part of the answer. She saw how hard Xavier worked at it and didn’t want to put in the same effort. In a way, this was also a shortcut, but she couldn’t bring herself to regret that. Not at this point, anyway.

Sophia reached for her knowledge of who she was, what her Species was.

Her mother, Rissa, was the strongest Oracle on Earth. She rarely issued prophecies, unlike the others, but when she did, it was best to heed them. That was Rissa’s mother’s bloodline; her father’s was one of telepathy and empathy. Sophia didn’t have that, at least not as far as she knew, but it was probably there as well.

Sophia’s father, Serenity, was far more complex. He was the Incarnate of Death and the Lord of Dungeons, but those were both things he’d earned in his life, not his Species. His Species was Asuryan Arcane Dragon, the first Arcane Dragon and the first Asuryan born in many generations, the union of the Suras of his father’s heritage and the Archon of his mother’s bloodline. 

Sophia concentrated on every bit of that she could think of, then tried to push mana filled with her intent into the open glass hooks. That wasn’t quite what Bai recommended, but mana represented her heritage just as much as her Intent did and more than any of her Abilities other than the ones she’d left there. She was no Oracle or telepath and she certainly wasn’t a Death mage, for all that the Guide recognized her Abilities as carrying True Death. Both Scaley and Manifest Wings spoke to her Asuryan Arcane Dragon heritage, but they were incomplete without magic.

It was just going to have to be enough. She held the magic in place as she carefully sealed the openings in what she hoped would be her new Sphere and then told the Guide she was done. She was finally ready to advance to the third upgrade.