“Three,” Sam said. “Left hand,” he said after Erianna quirked her eyebrow. “Four. Six. None. OK, very mature.”

  Erianna retracted her middle finger and smiled. “You can open your eyes now. And close your Sight.”

  Sam sighed as he terminated his second vision and reopened his first. “I can still go on for longer.”

  “You’re going for long enough. I’m not here to train you to be able to hold your Sight open for longer. You can do that on your own.”

  Sam pursed his lips. “Really? Do you know anyone who does?” he asked innocently.

  “Don’t be cute. I was at least three years into my training before I started practicing holding the Sight open for longer. Your pace is much better than me. But not by that much.”

  “Alright, I guess I’ll just wait until you leave.”

  “Right.” Erianna nodded and turned in her chair. For some reason, she always seemed uncomfortable when the topic of her leaving came up; probably her overdeveloped sense of duty acting up. Making her worry about the state in which she’ll leave Sam in. “But until then,” she said after a few seconds, “we’re focusing on the qualitative aspects of using the Sight. And in order to make sure that our training in that department is as efficient as possible…”

  Sam groaned as he nodded. “I need to make sure to limit my usage of the Threadsight. I know the deal. I might not like it. I might complain about it. I might not follow it if the fancy strikes me. But I know it.”

  “You don’t follow it?” Erianna raised her eyebrow.

  “What, like you waited the full three years?”

  She chuckled. “Fair enough. Ah…” She stretched upwards. “I need a bathroom break. You do you meanwhile,” she said and headed for the bathroom.

  Doing him was code for ‘I’m not going to tell you not to keep practicing because you wouldn’t listen to me, but I’m also not going to tell you to keep practicing so you have to make your own choices.’ Which he did and moved over next to the desk, and the open book laid out on it. Continuing from where they left off about an hour ago by trying to match the parts of the threads which were described and illustrated on the pages and those he could find by looking around him.

  He managed to get so immersed in the act that he hadn’t noticed Erianna until she tapped him on the shoulder. Which was also a pretty bad showing because it meant that he hadn’t noticed any of the threads he should’ve from her moment.

  “Move over,” she said, and Sam made space for her next to the desk. “I’m going to have to order some more books soon.”

  “Why? You said it yourself: the practice is to go over each book at least three or four times.”

  “That was my practice. The way they teach adult Thread-Weavers isn’t as… you know. Ugh, I’m going to have to ask for some more clarification and reading material from the instructors back home. You’re an asshole, you know that? I really thought that I’ve done my homework before coming here. And it still hasn’t been half a year.”

  “But it will be in like a week,” Sam tried pointing out the bright spot, which didn’t seem to help better Erianna’s mood. Oh well, might just go all in, then. “Now you know how your own tutors felt.”

  She gave him a sour look. “At least they had others to share the burden with.”

  “Why are you acting like you’re my only teacher?”

  “Because as amazing as your rate of improvement is with everything else, it’s still ‘reasonable enough’ that Lin and Dan and your other teachers whenever they pop-up don’t think too much about it besides saying, ‘that Sam sure is talented and hard-working.’ But as someone who was trained as a Thread-Weaver and saw other people trained in the way you are, I know very well that when it comes to threads and the Sight, you are a fucking freak.”

  “What does that make you then?” Sam smiled broadly in order to hide the blush creeping up his neck.

  “A normal kind of freak. Don’t try and compare you to me, at least not when it comes to threads—”

  “And muddling,” Sam coughed into his hand.

  “You’re lucky I made an oath to never strike a student.”

  “You’ve hit me plenty of times.”

  “I’ve made it just now because I really want to punch your face in.”

  Sam held up his hands in apology. “Alright. But whatever my… talent with thread and the Sight is, don’t you think that you ought to rely more on some of the resources from Maynil in any case? Farris has all the information you do. Just task him with preparing lesson plans and collating teaching guides. You have the authority. Just delegate some of the work.”

  She sighed. “You don’t think I am? You don’t think I will? I already did and will continue to do so. That isn’t the point. I wasn’t supposed to be so unprepared for teaching you. I’m always scrambling nowadays. It’s the fault of you and your bloody ‘talent’ which you won’t admit to!”

  “Now you know how everyone around you growing up felt.”

  “As if. The difference between me and you is that I am willing to admit that I am better than other people. You’re stuck in the mindset that if you think you’re better than someone else, then either you’re lying to yourself and being self-conceited, or you’re not and that it’s not fair that you’re arbitrarily better than another person.”

  Sam chuckled. “A little exaggerated. But not completely off the mark. But I guess that with threads I’d be more willing to admit that I am better. The initial allocation of talents being a matter of pure brute luck after all. And, more importantly, I feel like I am able to… I don’t know, give more of myself when it comes to threads than to other subjects.”

  “Yeah, I know the feeling.” Erianna nodded. “It feels more important because it belongs to the realm of Rulers. And it provides such a distinct advantage that it feels so easy to focus on training with it.”

  “It’s not just that. I mean, it is definitely that, but there’s something… more, I guess. I feel like I really like studying threads—”

  “Must have a good teacher.” Erianna smiled and fanned her hair.

  “Eh… maybe in spite, which just goes to prove my point.” He gave Erianna an apologetic smile. “Don’t get me wrong, at this point I’ve learned to enjoy pretty much every facet of my magical training and studying. Even muddling to some fashion. But when it comes to threads; to using the Sight, I don’t know… I just feel like I’m having the most fun. Like it’s the aspect that I am most personally calibrated to.”

  “That says a lot coming from a man whose only reason for not spending 12 hours of a Saturday cultivating continuously is because it wasn’t the ‘most efficient use of his time.’”

  “This coming from a woman who had spent 14 hours cultivating continuously in order to prove to herself that she could do it.”

  Erianna laughed. “I never said I wasn’t a hypocrite for criticizing and being annoyed with you. And it does make sense that you’re so well suited to studying threads. I mean, you’re the only Thread-Weaver Taken, right? Seems reasonable to expect that you’d have a pretty good suitably to threads in that case.”

  Sam nodded while clearing his throat. “Right, yeah… that makes sense. So are we going back in?” he quickly tried to change the topic.

  Erianna shrugged. “You don’t really need me for this, right?” She leaned back and slouched with her legs forwards and hand contentedly on her belly. “I’m just going to sit here and laze about.”

  “I can see you cultivating.”

  “No you can’t.”

  “Sure I can. I see you not doing anything. And since you aren’t sleeping. That must mean that you’re cultivating.”

  “You must really think you’re clever, huh?”

  “I mean, you’ve just harped on and on about how clever I am.”

  She sighed. “Just shut up and let me dissociate in peace.”

  Sam smiled and went back to matching threads from the book to those around him. Actually, now that Erianna was here it was a little easier, since she brought with her a bunch of threads that didn’t require untangling from his own subjective ones. He obviously couldn’t read any of the information they held, but he could discern what interaction they corresponded to, and roughly what type of information they described.

  The rest of the hour passed by placidly in the same fashion, with Erianna opening her eyes sporadically to check on Sam and his progress and quiz him on this or that thread. When the hour passed, Erianna once again had to snap him out of his reverie and let him know that it was time to leave for dinner.

  “So what’s the estimate on when I can start incorporating the Sight during my combat training?” he asked her as they left his dorm building.

  “You haven’t even started fighting with anyone besides Lin yet and you already want to up the difficulty of your training?”

  “Why not? It’s not like there’s any reason for me not to utilize my Sight during combat. Are you just being a devil’s advocate again?”

  Erianna shrugged. “A little bit. But you’ll still need to wait a while longer. Two or three months. It’s better to spread things out at the start. Let you work on each element separately. Besides, this is something that I really do need advice on. And from plenty of other people. Need to know what Lin thinks about it, what Farris does. And then decide on the best way to combine it with your training. It’s not that simple.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “Isn’t it? I just use the Sight during combat and try to act according to what I see about my opponent. Not understanding, just recognizing.”

  “Sure, that’s the principle. It’s simple in theory. But how to best do it in practice? I don’t know. Especially since you’re already juggling so many other things and we need to make sure to keep it all balanced.” She stopped and narrowed her eyes at him. “You haven’t been sparring with your Sight on, right?”

  Sam crossed his heart. “I haven’t. Promise.”

  “Good. Well, I guess that I’ll take your advice, though. Just collect all the relevant information and pass it on to Farris. Then ask him—tell him, to do all the work for me and come back to me with a clear and simple plan and with all the relevant material.”

  “It’s about time you made better use of him.”

  “He’s the commander of both of our militaries, I can’t exactly just order him around.”

  “Yes you can.”

  “I can, but he might have better use for his time.”

  “Did that bother you when you needed him to use his time to help you with your training back when?”

  Erianna wrinkled her nose. “I see your point. Guess because this is like a job that I’ve been trying to tackle it without relying on him too much. Helping me was his duty. But helping you is mine.”

  “It’s also his.”

  She nodded. “Good point. Yeah… why do I have to worry about this so much? He’s the one who sent me here. He’s the one who named himself your mentor. And he’s the one with the experience teaching a Thread-Weaver. He can figure out where to go from here on out. And I’ll just do whatever he tells me to do.”

  “How do you rate your chances of still holding on to that determination in a couple of days?”

  “Not great, Sam. Not great. Some vacation this turned out to be.”

  “Come on. Don’t be grumpy. You’re having fun.”

  She shrugged with a smile. “Yeah, I guess I am having fun.”

  After a few moments passed and she still hadn’t said it, Sam groaned. “Really? I set you up and everything.”

  “Your jokes are getting old, Sam. There’s only so many ways you can make fun of yourself for not being fun to be around.”

  “Ha! Shows what you know. I haven’t even begun to exhaust my many ways of self-ridicule.”

  “Oh goody. I can’t wait for the hundredth joke about how noble and selfless I am by sacrificing my sanity in order to stand your presence. This after we had just spent a whole Saturday studying in your room.”

  “What’s your point?”

  She threw him a sweet smile. “That you should be thankful I need your help with dwarven patterns.”

  San nodded gravely. “That’s what I thought.” He turned from her to look at the mess hall, and after a few second of scrutinizing the threads emanating from inside, he said, “Looks like we’re here first.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?”

  He raised an eyebrow and turned his Sight back on. “Did I miss something?” he asked as he narrowed his eyes at the mess that was the gathering of threads inside the building. But try as he might, he simply couldn’t find any significant enough thread leading to him that would identify any of his friends being inside.

  “No, I was just agreeing with you.”

  Sam sighed and turned off the Sight, giving Erianna a sour look. “There are much better and understandable ways to convey agreement.”

  “Look at the bright side, you immediately tried reconsidering your priors. This kind of instinct will come in handy when you’re up against those who can manipulate threads. Which follows from the point that, theoretically, you can never truly trust a thread by its surface.”

  “That’s nice and all, but I bet you were just trying to get me to doubt myself.”

  “Two things can be true at the same time.”

  Felix arrived soon after, and a minute or two after him came Sarah and Yvessa from their shared class. The five of them then grabbed some food and sat down after finding an empty table. “How was your lesson?” Erianna asked Yvessa and Sarah.

  “Interesting, but still really hard,” Yvessa said. “I guess that artifcery is just not for me.”

  Felix nodded. “It’s like I said, unless you’re a genius who’s predisposed to it, or you’re willing to dedicate a lot of time to studying it, there really isn’t that much of a reason for people like us to go deeper beside the basics of how to best use and care for weapon artifacts.”

  “That’s a little defeatist, don’t you think?” Erianna asked. “A better understanding of how artifacts work and how to make them could be very useful even to someone who isn’t interested in creating artifacts.”

  “Maybe… So how is studying dwarven patterns going for you?”

  “That’s different. Mine is harder. Sarah said so.”

  “Well it was harder for me.” Sarah smiled. “It won’t necessarily be true for everyone else.”

  “Guess there’s only one way for us to find out.” Felix looked over at Sam.

  “Why me?” Sam asked. “Yvessa can take dwarven patterns next year.”

  “Oh come on… don’t tell me you don’t want to see whether you’re also annoyingly good with artificery?”

  “I will tell you that. When it comes to science, I was always predisposed to the theoretical as opposed to the practical. Artificery is like engineering. It’s really hard, and the only reason to study it is because you want to do it. Everyone wants to learn how a black hole works. No one cares about the correct way to design… I don’t know, a scaffold.”

  “Ah. The humble scaffold. The pinnacle of engineering.”

  Sam shrugged. “You get what I’m saying.”

  Felix smiled at Erianna. “Well, it looks like you’re saved from having to test your beliefs about the validity of studying artificery in depth.”

  “The course is only offered in the first and second trimester so she won’t have been able to take it anyway,” Yvessa said.

  Erianna squirmed in her seat. “In any case, artificery isn’t for me. And I already subjected myself to one of Sam’s difficult course choices. I don’t see a reason to suffer yet another.”

  “Hold on a minute,” Sam said. “That course of action was your idea. If anything, I’m one-down because I didn’t get to subject you to a difficult course that you didn’t want to take.”

  “Yes you did. I would’ve changed electives if you hadn’t strong-armed me into staying with it.”

  Sam shook his head with a tsk. “Nah, that doesn’t add up. You’re talking consequentialism to a strict deontologist. It doesn’t matter what ended up happening. What matters is your intentions before the act. And you intended to do me grave harm, which resulted in your being harmed. I still deserve my own chance to intend you great harm.”

  “Alright. Pick a course for the next trimester. But make sure that it’ll turn out awful for you and nice for me.”

  “Ah… I didn’t know I was going to get homework when I started this.”

  “Bet you’re wishing you were a consequentialist now.” Erianna smiled.

  “Never! Unless the numbers are big enough. Or the subject matter amoral enough.”

  “Or you just want to prove a point,” Felix said.

  “Oh that goes without saying. I was assuming some degree of sincerity and integrity. Theoretically, of course.”

  “Theoretically, could you pass the salt? Thanks,” Felix said as he took the container. “You remember we have a study session tomorrow, right?” Sam frowned in thought. “Dude, seriously?”

  Sam waved his hand. “No, no. I totally remembered. Ehm…”

  “Epirak studies.”

  “I was just about to say that.”

  “It was your idea, man.”

  “I know, I know. But I just… Well Dan still hasn’t fully released me to other teachers or the general classes, but there isn’t that much material that we need to go over together nowadays. It’s mostly practice. So when we’re taking a break from training, it’s mostly to go over some of the less magical subjects.”

  “How is that an excuse?”

  “Because I caught up in the material, so I forgot I needed to catch up.”

  Erianna chuckled. “Catch up meaning of course, to be ahead of the curriculum by at least a couple of months.”

  “Did you remember at least?” Felix asked her.

  “Of course I did. I was looking forward to it. All four of us are in different stages and come from different backgrounds of studying Epiraks. It’s bound to be a very illuminating experience.”

  “I reminded her about it two days ago,” Yvessa said. “She also forgot.”

  “You assholes.” Felix huffed. “Two peas in a selfish pod.”

  “Come on, Felix,” Sam said. “You’re being too harsh on Erianna. You have to remember that she was raised in a palace. With everyone waiting on her hand and foot. It’s hard for her to remember details when they concern little folks like us.”

  “Yeah,” Erianna said, “and you have to remember that Sam is an asshole.”

  Felix groaned. “God, you two are so annoying. Fine, whatever. Just be there.”

  “Didn’t we schedule it instead of our evening workout? So it’s more like just come after we eat dinner.”

  “I’m starting to regret agreeing to this.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Sam said. “In a couple of days you’ll get the opportunity to kick my ass with your full strength.”

  “You still need to finish your last two patterns,” Sarah chided him.

  “I will. I’ve already laid out all the groundwork for the first. Just gotta spend an hour or two tomorrow bringing it all together. And the last one I’ll just knock out on Saturday.”

  “Leaving it all to the last minute…” Felix mused. “How dangerous. How unlike you, Sam.”

  “But it is very much vintage me. I’ve always found great solace in the fact that I’ve never failed to deliver an assignment on time. Which helped me greatly when I only started working on one a couple of days before it was due.”

  “Sometimes I wish I could go back in time to meet this magical and less than perfect version of yourself that you keep on harping about. What changed?”

  Sam shrugged. “Besides the obvious? Probably that I got my brain adjusted. I’ve been thinking about this a lot—not like that.” He raised a hand to calm Sarah. “But as Taken, the changes we’ve undergone in our physical bodies shouldn’t be seen as lesser than the changes in our magical selves.”

  Sarah nodded. “That’s true. While Taken aren’t, in general, given physiques which allow them to break medals in an Olympic sport, we are left with incredibly resilient and well-adjusted bodies. Perfectly healthy and perfectly balanced for any activity we might undertake. We might not be the greatest sprinters or swimmers. But we can be great at both and at the same time.”

  “Right, but more than that is also the change to our neurochemistry and… the whole brain thing, in general. I no longer need to take amphetamines to be able to sit on my ass and work for three hours straight. Sarah doesn’t physically recoil from certain sounds anymore.”

  “I still don’t like them.”

  “And Maurice doesn’t have partial face blindness anymore.”

  “Maurice had partial face blindness?” Felix asked.

  “It was really mild,” Sarah said.

  “Where does not having dreams fall under?” Erianna asked Sam.

  Sam shrugged. “I’m not sure, because it’s something that happened later in life. But I assume it’s still there. I mean, onset damage is still damage? I have all my limbs back. Why can’t my brain or whatever glands made my life miserable also be fixed? The important thing is that it stays this way, and as long as it does, I don’t care what caused it.”

  “A long way off from worrying whether you were still the same you,” Felix said with a smile.

  “Well, I got used to being who I am now. This ‘perfect me’ as you’ve so politely termed it. But I assure you, the facets of my personality that encouraged procrastination in the past are still there. Just no longer habituated and helped due to the structure and function of my brain.”

  “OK, so what you’re really saying is that you were actually always ‘perfect’ but just that your bad genes prevented you from fully capitalizing on your amazingness. Is that supposed to make me feel better how?”

  “Why would I care about making you feel better?” Sam smiled. “Besides, you know who you sound like right now?” He gestured with a thumb at Erianna. “A certain princess who complains the moment she’s not the best at anything. Let’s see what the other thousand or so second-year cadets think about you calling other people ‘perfect.’ I bet they’d just love that.”

  “Alright now. No need to use such incendiary language. We’re all on the same boat here, after all.”