Sam watched the globe of Maynil slowly rotating in his hand. Making sure to avoid looking at any one area too closely, and thus get entranced in the information the threads held. Sam’s mind was filled with the pictures of towering mountains and green oceans as the information encapsulated in the artifact’s threads was translated into visual meaning. And not just visual meaning, of course. There were sounds there if he focused on those—stereotypical and general for each location they might be, they were still incredible. And the written information on each location and point of interest would’ve been enough to wow anyone who had grown up without the internet.

  It still wowed Sam. “This is awesome.” He looked up at Erianna, giddy as a dog who had found a puddle of mud.

  She rolled her eyes at him and said tiredly, “Frankly, I grew out of it by the time I was fifteen.”

  “Mhm.” Sam nodded and started repeatedly stabbing her shoulder with his finger. “Sure.”

  “Alright.” She smiled. “It is awesome. And it was a personal present from my grandmother. So don’t drop it.”

  Sam suddenly recoiled and tightly squeezed the rather small ball-shaped artifact in his hands. “I’m just joking.” Erianna laughed. “I mean, it was a gift from Grandmother. But it’s not going to be dented by falling. It was made by a Chosen, after all.”

  Sam looked at her accusingly as he released his tight grip. “That was cruel, princess.”

  Erianna smirked and put her hand forward to ask for the artifact back. “In truth, she only gave it to me when I was seventeen,” she said after Sam handed it back to her. “So it was definitely supposed to be an exercise tool. And it served me very well as one. So now I’m loaning it to you.”

  “I thought that I’m ahead of where you were at seventeen.”

  “You sure know how to ruin a moment, huh? You were, but that isn’t the point. I still used the artifact for training until about a year or so ago. It’s really practical. You can train all aspects of the Sight easily and effectively with it. You start by practicing both your recognition and understanding until you can easily recognize the entirety of the artifact by sight and don’t need any time to process the information. Then, but obviously before that point as well, you can easily manipulate the threads, it’s literally built to make consolidating and differentiating easy.”

  “Won’t that ruin the point of the practice, though?”

  “Start with training wheels, Sam. Work your way up to actual weights in a month or two.”

  Sam laughed. “Hopefully, it won’t take me longer than that. Would be really embarrassing if I had to give it back to you because you’re leaving and I haven’t even finished practicing with it.”

  “Yeah. I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.” She cleared her throat. “I mean, obviously your pace is going to be much better than that.”

  “Still, I’ll be sad to see it go. I’m sure I won’t be as good as you were a year ago in half a year’s time.”

  “Nice to hear I mean that much to you.”

  Sam shot her a finger gun. “I mean every word of it.”

  “So you can keep the artifact for the meantime. Use it to practice on your own. Combine it with your other exercises and homework. Should keep you busy for at least a couple of weeks, right?”

  “So that’s it? Just because we have tests coming up, you’re abandoning me all to my own?”

  “Pretty much, yeah.” Erianna clicked her tongue. “Surely you can go one week without seeing me.”

  “What are you talking about? We have like four tests we’re taking together.”

  “Tsk. Don’t remind me. Fucking Epirak studies. And screw you for deciding to advance ahead with the material to keep up with me.”

  “It seemed like the most practical thing to do. My progress was already all skewed up before you joined, anyway. Made the most sense to follow your lead and just get it all done this trimester. Especially since I could use all four of you to help me with different aspects.”

  She nodded sarcastically. “Don’t act like you needed the help.”

  “No. But neither did you. And we still managed to help each other. Amazing how that works, huh? The power of the social contract prevails again. Besides, don’t act like spending time reading stuff and answering ‘open-ended questions’ with only one correct answer is some great achievement. Everyone at this academy could finish their Epiraks studies courses ahead of time if they wanted to. They just don’t have a reason.”

  “And what’s your reason?”

  “I have so much free time that I can’t actually use for doing what I want because I’m afraid that it will cause me to start slacking and prevent me from actually utilizing that time when I need to.”

  Erianna’s mouth curved downwards in embarrassment. “Oh. Well, I don’t think you need to worry all that much, though.”

  “It doesn’t matter. The more stuff I get done now, the more time I’ll have later to catch up. In essence, I don’t really have free time in the long-term.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Let’s not get into a discussion about the future, shall we? We still have actual work I want to get done.”

  Sam raised an eyebrow. “I thought you said that I’ll only start practicing fighting with the Sight once the third trimester starts.”

  “God, Sam, not everything is about you. It’s about the essay we need to prepare for our joint course.”

  “Which one?”

  “You know damn well which one.”

  “Oh. Well there’s still a couple of weeks, right? What’s the hurry?”

  “A couple of weeks before the deadline is late for me, that’s what. I want to finish it this weekend after we’ve finished with all the tests.”

  “Don’t call it a weekend.” Sam sighed.

  “Why not? You do it sometimes too.”

  “That doesn’t make it right.”

  She waved him off. “Stop trying to change the subject. Are you going to help me or not?”

  “Of course. But I don’t know how. We’re writing about two radically different topics. I haven’t done any research into dwarven artificery.”

  “Besides what we’ve been taught in the class, you mean? And the supplementary material that we didn’t have to read, but you still did.”

  Sam shrugged. “Sure, I guess. But I’m sure that you’ve done a ton more research into the subject.”

  “Not really.” She gave her own shrug.

  “What? Are you serious?”

  “Why are you so surprised? I’m a hard worker, not a dumb one. The professor told me that what we’ve covered in the lessons and the mandatory reading was enough for me to go on. Even the recommended reading wasn’t required to write a good essay.”

  “But you did read the parts that had to do with artificery, right?”

  “Mostly, yeah.”

  Sam rubbed his forehead. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all. I shouldn’t be the kind of person who puts a ton more effort into his studies than everyone else.”

  “Shouldn’t you? What the hell have you been doing for the last year?”

  “Mhm!” he grunted in dismay. “Quick, tell me how many hours you spent cultivating yesterday.”

  “About six. Why?”

  Sam lightly exhaled. “Good, I only did four.”

  “You have problems, Sam. Anyway, are you going to help me or are we going to keep fucking around?”

  “Alright, alright.” Sam waved his hand dismissively. “What can I do to help?”

  Erianna smiled and pulled a notebook out of her bag. “First,” she said while pointing to a cluster of bullet points, “I want you to help me describe what Lancilari’s Whip is in simple words. I banged my head against this problem for twenty minutes last night. The best I can come up with is still way too technical and convoluted.”

  Sam scratched the back of his scalp. “Hm… Well, I guess that you should start by saying that it’s a dependent of… Or that it interfaces with…” He closed his mouth, pursing his lips in thought.

  “You see what my problem is? How did you overcome it in your essay?”

  “Well mine isn’t finished yet, so stop talking like it is. But I didn’t really bother with it. My topic is too niche and technical to bother trying to write it clearly enough so that a layman could understand it.”

  “That’s allowed?”

  “Of course it is. Most academic papers are incomprehensible to people not in the field. In philosophy, for example, most academic papers are incomprehensible to the people in the field as well.”

  “OK then, problem solved.

  “Er, well, no. Because you’re writing on a general topic and how it compares to something that our peers have very good knowledge of, you probably can’t just throw in the towel in this respect.”

  “Ugh. What help are you?”

  Sam held his hand up. “Let’s try looking at this step-by-step. If I were a good-looking twenty-year-old gay man who had no knowledge of dwarven patterns. How would you explain to me what Lancilari’s Whip is?”

  “Seriously? Do you need to make fun of Felix even when he’s not here?”

  “First of all, I wasn’t making fun of him. Secondly, yes.”

  Erianna massaged her forehead. “Alright, Felix is a lot like me when it comes to dwarven patterns, I guess. He has no reason to learn about them because they don’t serve any use to him. So if I wanted to explain something about them to him, I would start with how he could use them.”

  “Right. Their functionality. And we can just build our explanation from here. Teleology never really went out of style.”

  “OK, so Lancilari’s Whip is… it’s used… Ugh! That doesn’t help. I can only think of its use in overly technical terms.”

  Sam rolled his hand. “Sure, but what is it’s the general functionality? What purpose do the patterns that utilize it serve?”

  “The ability to interact with non-dwarven patterns?”

  “Exactly!” Sam smiled and crossed his hands. After a while he said, “I’ll be honest. This is as far as I got.”

  “No, that’s actually good. The most common use of Lancilari’s Whip when it comes to dwarven artificery is to allow dwarven patterns to affect and be affected by patterns that don’t utilize their fundamental principles. So far, good?”

  Sam nodded. “I think so.”

  “Then we slot in a couple of lines about how it actually works, using a copious amount of parallels to other patterns and their components. I actually have a pretty good working explanation for this part, just need to reword it now that I know I’m not actually going to explain Lancilari’s Whip from the perspective of dwarven patterns’ mechanics. Then, we say that it allows us to bridge the biggest difference between dwarven and common artificery by letting people who aren’t used to dwarven patterns use dwarven artifacts which have been imprinted with a common interface. There we go!”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “Sure, but you haven’t really explained anything about dwarven artificery, though.”

  She waved him off. “I’ll have a chapter that gets into the more technical details of it. That way, I can separate the stuff that matters to the layman from the information that most people won’t care about nor understand.”

  “You still need to actually talk about some of what we learned in the course.”

  “I will. When explaining the fundamental differences between dwarven artificery and common. That’ll be… either the second half of the first chapter or the second chapter. We’ll see. Anyway, moving on, what do you know about dwarven arrays and formations?”

  “That they’re mostly outside the scope of our course and way outside the scope of your essay.”

  Erianna wagged a finger. “But that’s the problem with the dwarves, isn’t it? They make much greater use of the two in artificery than we do. I can’t talk about dwarven artificery without mentioning that aspect. And we barely touched on it during the course.”

  Sam sighed. “Alright. So the main difference between our arrays and formations and dwarven ones is the number of components required to call one by its name. For us, a formation requires five patterns working in tandem, but for the dwarves it’s only three. And our arrays are three formations, while for the dwarves it’s two.”

  “But that’s just semantics.”

  “Well, yes, but no. The reason for the semantic difference is the whole basis for comparing dwarven and common patterns. Having different requirements to meet the same definition means that the underlying mechanics behind dwarven patterns are markedly different from those that we use. At least when it comes to defining what is and isn’t a formation and an array. And it is, more or less, a technical definition.”

  Erianna nodded. “Right. Yeah, that’s definitely true. It’s the complexity threshold. Well, obviously dwarven patterns are more complex, but how does that factor into their artificery?”

  “I don’t know.” Sam shrugged. “The only thing about artifacts I know is how to use them.”

  “Move over.” She moved her chair to sit next to him in front of his computer and started typing search queries into it. “There’s got to be one simple article that explains the prevalence of arrays and formations in dwarven artificery.”

  “You do know that you need to use peer-reviewed material, right?”

  “Bah. You Terrans and your ‘academic standards.’” Erianna scoffed. “A lot of the research that goes on in the dwarven scientific community is word-of-mouth. The only peer reviews there are social niceties. Besides, I just want to figure out where to come at this problem from.”

  “Honestly, the biggest reason for why they use formations and arrays is probably that theirs are better suited for creating artifacts. It’s just that the complexity of mastering them isn’t really worth the effort for non-dwarven artificers. But for dwarves who are already familiar with their system, it only makes sense.”

  Erianna stared at him. “Come again?”

  “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Do I look like it’s obvious to me?”

  “I’m just assuming that the dwarves make use of the major, and I would honestly say only, advantage that their patterns have over ours, which is that they allow non-physical interaction in some capacity.”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean, what?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? We never covered this in the course.”

  Sam furrowed his eyebrows. “Really? Must’ve been in one of the recommended books, then.” He quirked his lips. “Or maybe I read that while researching?”

  “Are you seriously saying that dwarven patterns allow them to externalize magic?”

  “Hell no. Shoo.” Sam gestured for her to make room for him in front of the keyboard. After half a minute of clicking and typing, he opened a diagram that showed one of the patterns he was talking about. “As you can see, this pattern has a whole section dedicated to interfacing with a nonexistent pathway.”

  Erianna twisted her head. “Yeah, I guess I can see that.”

  “So what some dwarven patterns are able to do is maintain a connection between two patterns that aren’t physically linked. It’s not external magic because the magic doesn’t actually exist externally to the patterns.”

  “How the hell do they move energy between the patterns, then?”

  “They don’t. They just control the energy within each pattern. What it does is basically link your mind with the pattern, but not your body. I haven’t looked into it too deeply, but I’m assuming it works on the principle of duplicate threads. The patterns are designed to correlate to the same information such that they can coalesce into the same single thread if given the incentive to describe the same action by an external source.”

  “Since when do you know about duplicate threads?”

  “I learned about it while researching patterns.”

  She looked at him with an annoyed face for a few seconds before letting out a breath. “You’re a nerd, you know that?”

  “So are you.”

  Her shoulders sagged in defeat. “So obviously, if dwarven artificers can control multiple arrays or formations at once, it makes sense to use them more regularly when making artifacts. Tsk. But in the end it doesn’t really matter, does it? Because the quality and quantity of dwarven artifact production isn’t all that different from their counterparts.”

  “But it does suggest that there is room for improvement.”

  “That’s the same as with regular artificery.”

  “Sure, but think about it: If we assume—and I don’t know for sure that it’s true—that the underlying principles of artificery are the same between the two disciplines, then that means that the dwarves have an edge in artificery that they’re simply not utilizing correctly. I mean, that’s the whole point of Lancilari’s Whip, isn’t it? Dwarven artifacts operate the same as ours, at the end of the day, they’re just designed differently. It’s like two phones with different operating systems. The principles behind the hardware are the same.”

  “So are you saying that the dwarven operating system sucks?”

  Sam shrugged. “I mean, why not? Despite their cosmopolitan nature, the dwarves are still pretty insular when it comes to magic. Think about it: what is Imbsard’s actually famous for? Translating the innovations that Terran technology had helped bring along in common pattern theory and magical engineering to the dwarven magical system. He simply released a new fork of their software.”

  “You’re not usually so authoritative on subjects with which you’re not that familiar.” Erianna smiled.

  “I’m not really trying to make an objective statement. Just my observation and opinion. Besides, it doesn’t matter, does it? We’re veering way off from your essay topic, aren’t we?”

  “Ah…” Erianna sighed and dropped her head to the side so that her hair landed on Sam’s shoulder. “Why did I have to pick this course…”

  Sam patted her on the head. “There, there. It’s almost over.”

  “I hate writing essays. You know that, right?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “And I hate it twice over when it has to do with stuff that doesn’t have anything practical to do with combat.”

  “Again, who doesn’t?”

  She twirled her head and shook off Sam’s patronizing patting. “Alright, it’s time to get serious. I want you to help me go over the course material and pick the best sources for me to use.”

  “That sounds like actual work.”

  “Sucks, doesn’t it?”

  “Fine, but I’m going to the bathroom first.”

  “Sam, why do you have a folder about threads?” Erianna asked once he came back.

  “Hey!” He wrestled control of the mouse back from her. “You weren’t supposed to snoop.”

  “You weren’t supposed to be studying threads on your own.”

  “I wasn’t. I was simply collecting information and sources of information for when you left.”

  Erianna stared at him blankly for a few seconds, seemingly gathering her thoughts before saying, “What information could you possibly have even found on the internet?”

  “There’s a lot of Terran research about the affects of ‘normal’ aspects of magic on threads. It’s why I had the idea that those dwarven patterns work through duplicate threads. This kind of stuff is more about pattern and tracing theory than about threads.”

  “Why were you even searching for this stuff in the first place? It’s not like you’re going to get left by the wayside if I’m not here.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with that. I simply thought that when you leave, it’ll be a good time to start branching my own studying based on my own choices a little. You know, when I’ll have a good enough foundation to research the stuff I’m interested in and not necessarily just follow the curriculum. So I’ve just been collecting a bunch of information, papers, articles and the like, that seemed of interest to me and concerned threads and which I found while researching other stuff. Sort of a collage of stuff I might be interested in pursuing once I’m good enough.”

  Erianna frowned at him while biting her lip. Finally, she sighed and nodded silently to herself with her eyes closed. When she opened them, she said, “Alright. Sorry for accusing you of… I don’t know, reading ahead.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I can see why you might be worried about that. And why you might suspect me of doing it. But the only advance reading I’ve done so far is that which you’ve allowed me to.”

  “Good. Good. And you don’t need to worry about what you’ll do after I leave.”

  “I wasn’t worried about that.”

  “Because I’m not just going to leave you in the dark, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “I’m going to make sure that every aspect of your studies is thought through and planned. It’d be like I never left, really.”

  “Sounds great.”

  She looked at him sideways. Sam gave her a thumbs up. “Good,” she said. “So we squared that. No need to worry about what’s going to happen in half a year.”

  “I wasn’t worried.”

  “Well maybe you should be.”

  “OK…” Sam gave her a quizzical look.

  “I’m sorry.” Erianna rubbed her eyes. “I’ve just spent too much time stuck with this essay, I guess.”

  “Want to take a break?”

  She shook her head. “No, let’s just finish what I wanted to do. And I really did want your help. You remember better than me where everything we read was, right? That’ll save me an hour or two.”

  “Alright, move over, let’s see what we can find in under an hour.”

  “You’re kicking me out?” Erianna’s lips quirked into a smile.

  “No. I’m simply putting us under a deadline so that we’ll work faster. I promise you, in forty-five minutes you’ll have a full bibliography.”

  They exchanged smiles. It was nice to find a kindred spirit when it came to a person’s methodology of writing an academic paper. In both of their cases, their methodology could be simply described as: First, locating too much information and saving it for later reading. Then, starting to read said information, while also continuing to search for new information. And of course, the crown jewel, deciding before starting to write exactly which sources they were going to rely on. With the final step, of course, needing to add two or three more sources after they actually started writing. But the end product wasn’t all that different from the initial estimate.

  Of course, Erianna didn’t really need Sam’s help all that much. She came prepared, and while she might not have enjoyed studying the subject matter as much as he had, she was, at the very least, just as intelligent and diligent. Sam ended up not really helping her all that much. And she didn’t seem like she wanted all that much help. Maybe she just wanted company. Someone to amuse her while she was going through busywork. Sam could easily understand that.

  “Done.” Erianna smiled as she stretched upwards. Her shoulders extenuating her hard-earned flexibility as she let out a small self-satisfied groan. Sam had to admit, that was a cute look for the princess.

  He smiled as he handed her some water. “Good job. Now you can finally rest.”

  “Nope. Still have to put in some training time. Need to practice my Sight and cultivate a bit.”

  “It’s almost eleven.”

  “So? You’re the only one with the hangup about having a red line between your daily schedule and the last hour of the day. I don’t need that artificial barrier to make sure I’m getting enough sleep and relaxation.”

  “Liar.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Are you saying that I don’t know how to maintain my state of mental health?”

  “Oh, I’m sure you do. You maintain it in a constant state of ‘this is so fucked, we should’ve crashed years ago.’ But you’re just too stubborn to let a silly thing like your psyche tell you what to do.”

  “Hpmh! Show what you know. Just for that,” she said as she quickly stood up and slithered over to his bed, making herself comfortable, “I’m going to spend some time cultivating here. Then train my Sight during the walk back to my room. That should give me about fifteen minutes of free time. How’s that for being stubborn?”

  “I stand corrected. Which is what I wish you would do instead of treating my bed like your own personal feline scratching mat. You know what, if you really want, you can just stay here.”

  Erianna’s head shot up. “What?” she said weakly as Sam turned back to the monitor, not paying much attention.

  “Sure,” he went on, while sending the file that Erianna had worked so hard on over to her—not quite finished with her work, then. “You can just stay here. I’ll go to your room and spend the night sleeping in a cozy king size bed.”

  Erianna let out a rough laugh as Sam heard her head hitting the mattress. “You actually expect me to believe that you won’t have trouble falling asleep in a new place?”

  “Hey, I’ve grown since I was a child of a year and a half ago. I’ve changed. Matured. I can fall asleep much more easily now. And soon…” His voice turned wistful as he looked out at the night sky. “Soon, I’ll be level two and never have to worry about falling asleep ever again.”

  “Yeah… it’s a good aid, it’s not a miracle cure. You’ll still have sleepless nights.”

  “You just think that because you have awful sleep hygiene. I, however, keep my bed separated from my daily life so that the distinction between going to sleep and the rest of the day is as pristine as my sheets. I assure you, I will have no problems falling asleep.”

  “Pristine my ass.” Erianna fanned her arms wide, making a snowman. “You only change it once a week.”

  Sam raised an eyebrow. “Remind me who constantly moaned to me about having to do laundry and change her sheets? And who slept with the same sheets for almost three weeks once?”

  “I was busy!”

  “You were filthy!”

  “You try taking care of yourself for the first time in your life.”

  “You know what? You have a point. And technically, you have done something that I never had the opportunity to.”

  “What?” She tilted her head, which, with her eyes closed, almost made Sam snort.

  “Moved out.”

  “Oh.” She pursed her lips and fell silent.

  “Jeez, lighten up. I wasn’t trying to be depressing. It was a joke. And it’s true. You did move places. While I never had the experience of picking up my stuff and getting it to a new home. That’s gotta count for something. When it comes time for me to go to Military Training, I’ll be a virgin mover.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that…” Erianna muttered before clearing her throat. “After all, I’m sure you’ll get plenty of help from the military. Not to mention you’ll have Felix and Yvessa with you.”

  “I’m not worried.” Sam waved dismissively. “It’s not like I’ll have much to think about, really. Not like I had much to think about then. At the end of the day, moving out is one of those problems that aren’t really a problem because they can easily be resolved without giving you any trouble if you have money. And those kinds of problems are the ones I never truly worried about. And now, when I have plenty of money, I’m free of even slightly worrying about them.”

  “I’d say your viewpoint seems very naive. But honestly, who am I to criticize?”

  “At the end of the day, a little naivety isn’t so bad if it helps you sleep at night.”