Lillene

Enjoy!

Moving the stone slab that held the eight legacy orbs was more difficult than it seemed at first but was still within Serenity’s expectations. The siphon could indeed lift it; in fact, it made a great example of weight and mass not being the same thing. Serenity had to do everything very slowly to avoid having the large mass get away from him.

He couldn’t go alone or with only his friends, either. Serenity had expected Speaker Hulvex and possibly a few others, but the group he found assembled the next morning when he brought the Eight up from their centuries-long home was over a hundred people strong. They all expected to accompany the Eight and act as everything from guards to builders to cooks.Serenity grumbled to himself but at least it meant that Speaker Hulvex couldn’t hover over the Eight the way he seemed to want to; he was instead busy organizing the expedition.

The trip down to the nexus took hours. Based on Cymryn’s map, they could have intersected one of the ley lines closer to the settlement of the Shrine of the Eight, but Serenity decided that the nexus was a better choice. There had to be a reason dungeon cores normally popped up at nexuses, after all; they could survive with only a ley line but a nexus was better. 

The Eight were eight fake dungeon cores; they might well need all the power they could get. Serenity didn’t even have to ask to know that Speaker Hulvex wouldn’t want to separate them if there was any possibility of keeping them together.

Once they arrived, Serenity settled the slab of stone on a relatively solid seeming patch of land and detached the siphon. The legacy orbs were still dull and dim; it would take time to see if they had the capability dungeon cores had to naturally process the natural mana of the nexus or if he’d have to try something more, probably starting with the siphon.

The followers of the Eight didn’t seem inclined to wait. Moments after they arrived, before he even settled the Eight’s stone slab onto its temporary resting place, they were already starting to set up a camp. They were no army trained in quickly erecting field encampments but they were clearly used to digging and building and they’d brought along some tents from the settlement. 

Serenity had seen it before but he’d never cease to be amazed at how quickly a lot of muscle power and a few tools could set up a temporary camp, especially not with the nearby forest providing a convenient source of wood. Water was a little more of a problem, since there was no convenient stream, but the nearest creek wasn’t that far away; Serenity fully expected that they’d have some sort of water within the next few days.

“You’d like to stay here and find out if this works, wouldn’t you?” Those were the first words Senkovar had spoken to Serenity all day. Serenity didn’t think Senkovar was avoiding him; he’d just sort of seemed to fade into the background while he waited. It was a useful skill and one Serenity kind of wished he could figure out.

“Yeah,” Serenity admitted. “I have some ideas to try if it doesn’t work. It would be a waste of effort if we didn’t stick around at least that long.”

Senkovar shook his head. “You’re justifying it to yourself; we could always come back later, after all, and you’ve already said that this could take a while. It’s fine to want to see the outcome of what you’re doing. The one thing you can’t do is lie to yourself about why you want to stay.”

Serenity frowned. He didn’t think he was lying to himself. Leaving and returning would probably be fine, but he didn’t want to; that gave some weight to Senkovar’s argument, but Serenity still thought he’d given the primary reason. Maybe Senkovar’s suggestion was a secondary one?

Senkovar’s stern expression shifted suddenly to a grin. “I thought that would be your answer. It means you’ll have to learn how to perform a planetary search in a harder environment, but I’m confident you can manage. You did better with the environmental modification than I expected, and that’s similar.”

“Similar?” Serenity didn’t see how that was similar at all. “Isn’t the point of this to do it without Eitchen’s help? Creating the environment for the dome required Berinath’s help.”

Senkovar’s grin only grew wider at that. “Ah, but it gave you the perfect chance to practice a dozen different things you’ll need for the search. You didn’t bother Berinath every time you wanted to check the environment, did you? Or even make minor adjustments?”

Serenity shook his head. He needed Berinath’s help to get started, supply the energy that allowed the terraforming to happen, and to maintain the changes (and the new dome) until the trees were established enough to become a Forest. At first he needed Berinath to tell what was going on in detail, but over time he learned to check a lot of the different things Senkovar had him track without bothering Berinath’s consciousness. He was still asking her for help, in a way, but it wasn’t help she had to think about. “That’s why you had me do all those checks, wasn’t it? The daily ones? Were they really necessary?”

Senkovar grinned. “Early on, they were. I was doing additional checks and adjustments even when you weren’t around. Towards the end, the Forest was handling most of it. If you don’t have something like the Forest to hand it off to, you’ll have to keep at it longer. The point is that once it’s dynamically stable, it doesn’t need nearly as much attention. The dryads will be watching to make sure the Forest doesn’t get out of balance; it’s still young and underdeveloped, but they won’t be checking in daily.”

No wonder he was willing to skip a day to talk to Lex!

Serenity wanted to grumble. Seriously, all Senkovar had to do was say something, Serenity wasn’t opposed to learning! He’d have been willing to practice even if it wasn’t directly applicable to the task at hand. 

Serenity shook off his annoyance at Senkovar’s sneaky teaching methods. They did at least seem to be effective, and they weren’t actively harmful, so Serenity could only grumble. “So what do we need to do? You said it would be a matter of meditating at the nexus?”

Senkovar nodded. “It will for me. You can use whatever method it was that you used to check on the dome; I know you weren’t meditating. You’re bad at it and were too fast with the checks to be meditating. You were accurate, and that’s what matters.” 

Serenity wasn’t sure if he should take that as a compliment or not. He was bad at the sort of meditation Senkovar preferred but at least he’d found a way around it. Maybe that was the real reason Senkovar spent all that time with him on Berinath? Maybe the World Shaman wanted to teach him a different method of interfacing with the planet, or at least to force him to find one that worked? 

If so, the sneaky old man succeeded.

“First of all, we need to find a quiet place where we aren’t in the way. Preferably away from the legacy orbs; I have no idea what their presence will do to the nexus but distance should help.” Senkovar looked around and sighed. “This may take some time.”

It did take some time before Senkovar was able to get a private tent set up for the two of them. 

“I’m not sure if this will work. I’m usually good at meditating, but this is a bit much,” Senkovar admitted. The tent was small, clearly intended as a place for one or two people to sleep and nothing more, but it was large enough for the two of them to sit away from everything else. What it wasn’t was soundproof and the construction outside was loud. 

Serenity had to admit that Senkovar was right. It was easy enough to make a spell to reduce the noise coming in from outside, even if he was terrible at sound magic; he didn’t have to use sound magic. He could use liminality and the edge of the tent; that was a boundary and if he defined it correctly, it could block noise. It would be a lot like a low-powered shield, but that was exactly what they needed. The spellform would take a few minutes to build but there was no reason he couldn’t do that while Senkovar told him what to look for.

Senkovar’s explanation seemed to boil down to looking for anything unusual, anything that didn’t seem to follow from the local surroundings. The search would be the most accurate near ley lines, but apparently even if the damage wasn’t near a ley line it would show up once it was bad enough. Unfortunately, Senkovar didn’t seem to be able to give Serenity a good idea of what it would look like. “You’ll know it when you see it; that’s another reason we started with environment creation” was only a partial answer. Serenity would simply have to ask Senkovar to check on anything he found that was odd. Senkovar seemed to think Serenity would find a lot of things odd at first.

When Senkovar seemed to be done, Serenity pushed his mana through the spellform and the outside noise dropped from a level that made it a little hard to hear each other to nearly library levels. It was still possible to hear some noise from outside but it was nothing like it had been before. 

Senkovar started and started to rise, then froze and looked at Serenity. “Is that your spell?” At Serenity’s nod, he sighed and returned to his original position. “I always forget you’re a silent caster. You’re too young.”

Serenity could only shrug. They’d had that conversation before and Serenity had settled on the explanation that it was simply the way he was taught. “It could be worse, I could be an Intent-based caster. I know someone who casts most of his spells that way.” Serenity knew a lot of that was because Blaze was a healer and wanted to shape his magic perfectly for the exact situation he was in, but it showed a level of focus and skill that was extremely unusual. Serenity didn’t trust himself to cast without a spellform.

Senkovar shook his head. “Reckless. It will go wrong eventually. It always does.”

Serenity nodded. “I know it would for me. It seems to work for him.”

The World Shaman shook his head again and muttered something that sounded like “Youth” before he raised his voice back to a conversational level. “For today, the goal is to see what you can find. We’ll look for a couple of hours, probably until it’s time for the evening meal; we can talk about what we find over the meal and see where we need to go from there.”

It wasn’t the most detailed set of instructions, but Serenity knew that a lot of that was because he didn’t interact with worlds the same way Senkovar did. He also had Aide’s help, which was absolutely huge for “feeling” his way through the inputs on Berinath; hopefully it would be helpful here as well. 

Lillene

Serenity isn’t keeping many secrets from Senkovar at this point; that’s impossible for him when he’s in close contact with someone. About the only thing he’s still protecting is the fact that he came back in time, and as you can tell the only reason that the secret's still safe is that it’s not a reasonable guess.