CALEN

  The shutters rattled particularly hard behind Calen's head, forcing his rheumy eyelids apart to interpret where he was by the glare of the torchlight flickering under the door.

  A chill had seeped into his bones, the stones below him having cooled significantly during the night, but after his fourth attempt at sleeping in one of the much more reasonably sized cots Viran had dragged in for them, forgoing the feather mattress had become a necessity.

  The floor might have been cold, but it was solid ground, so even in his half-awake state, Calen's stomach didn't drop, or send blood pounding through his ears and mana surging through his brain stem. The first time it had happened, he had spent an unknown amount of time with his eyes closed, shutting out the world and trying to force himself back to sleep before an overly sluggish attempt to roll over had cued him into the idea that he was stretching time on himself.

  With the mental focus required to draw the mana out of his brain stem driving him back to wakefulness every time, Calen had quickly given up on an easy night's sleep, and naturally turned to playing with magic. At least, until he was too exhausted to keep his eyes on the flimsy deadbolt that was all that stood between them and their captors.

  It was a decision he couldn't quite bring himself to regret, even if he was absolutely sure his sister would manage to minimize the discoveries he had made when she woke.

  Or maybe not. 'Magic is real' had been a tough sell yesterday, but she had just thrown them headfirst into some sort of indentured servitude for a magic shield. Emma might be a bit of a mule sometimes, but the scientist in her could never ignore solid evidence for very long.

  Stretching the knots out of his limbs, Calen finished rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and checked that the drooling lump across the room was still breathing. Emma helped him by letting out a soft snore past the pillow she had collapsed on who-knew-how-many hours earlier.

  Calen had no idea how on earth his sister had managed to sleep away most of a morning *and* sack out with the sun after one meal in a fortress full of magic aliens. Sure, his limbs had started to drag a bit after the endless climb up the stairs, but if they hadn't been left unattended with the food, he would have suspected hers was spiked with something.

  His own trouble sleeping had ruled out the possibility that both bowls were spiked, until paranoia had pushed him to take the time to turn his manasight inward. Or downward. Down, to his innards.

  The settings on 'detect magic with eyeballs' had been dead simple, despite Dovin's instructions otherwise. Squint a little bit harder, increase the sensitivity, mentally hold it there while you re-opened your eyes. Re-squint until satisfied.

  Range might be a different story. The trapezoidal room didn't exactly have a whole lot of space for testing, and the other source of mana in the room was Em, so Calen hadn't exactly done extensive testing.

  Yet.

  Either way, it had taken some pinching prickles manifesting themselves *in* his eyeballs to detect even a slight fuzz of mana in the food, and cranking his sensitivity that high had put a bit of a hum in the air itself that started to give Calen a headache while it interfered with his night vision.

  He had mentally marked that threshold as the 'upper limit', to be responsible.

  The interesting part of that was being able to track the way the food had moved through his system afterward. Sure, his upper torso and segments of his abdomen had buzzed much more strongly than Calen's extremities even before eating, hotly glowing channels excepted, but there was something almost nauseating about being able to *see* his stomach gurgle.

  And more importantly, see absolutely no brightening of his liver as time went on, which meant his body wasn't fighting off any blood-borne poisons while it digested the food. The glow was actually weaker than it had been during the cart ride out of the pass, when he still had snake venom filtering through his veins.

  Em was on her own there, but she was still breathing, so Calen would chalk it up as a win if she actually woke up any time soon.

  Maybe Mahira had been telling the truth about a 'durability curve' hiding things from manasight, maybe not, but it was much harder to see the wavy spiderweb of channels suffusing Emma's hands than it was to spot his own, and hers totally disappeared from across the room. Even a thin layer of cloth totally obscured any detail from him, no matter how high he had tried to push his manasight's sensitivity before giving up and making space while she slept.

  Being able to see through your own mana better than other people's would also make sense, unless it was something about the surface of his eye that was detecting magic, instead of the rest of the organ. The babelfish effect used the mana in the nerves coming from your ears, it stood to reason retinas were doing the detecting for manasight, which meant he could see through the mana in his own irises. Unless they drove it away naturally, or something.

  He had filed those musings away in the steadily growing pile of 'questions for later,' instead of testing something that might permanently affect his vision while they were trapped in a tower at the mercy of complete strangers.

  Not being able to see would put a hell of a damper on any escape plans if things turned sour on them. And blinding himself would definitely damage his ability to keep an eye on things while Em had her head buried in the sand. And in the imaginary fairy-tale version of events she seemed to believe was happening, it might damage his ability to be useful enough to earn his meal ticket.

  "Same bullshit, higher stakes. Somehow." he muttered, levering his back away from the wall to hoist himself to his feet.

  Higher stakes for them, personally, anyway. There was a little too much healthy greenery outside for Calen to believe Avarea had been as poisoned as Earth must be right now. Five billion 'souls' worth of nukes getting through the debris field meant they hadn't just gotten unlucky, the planet was toast.

  Assuming that their captors had actually been telling the truth, and had a reliable way to even *get* that number.

  Emma snorted again in her sleep, and Calen turned away from the endless abyss of overthinking that side of things. They would get answers in time, or there were going to be way more important things going on.

  Keeping up was going to mean keeping his eye on the ball, and that meant gathering information on his own. Getting caught sneaking around a stranger's house on their first night there was off the table, and sure to get a guard posted on the other side of the door even if there wasn't one already.

  The latch on the shutters was tighter than Calen had expected, mostly because of how high he had to reach for it, making the angle awkward. This place was definitely built for someone the Warden's size, which meant doorknobs barely lower than his shoulders, and reaching up to unlock windows.

  Still, he managed to silently undo the latch, and even avoided letting the wind slam the wooden slats against the windowsill.

  The sun was nowhere to be found yet, but Calen still examined the roiling grayscale sea of forested hills that stretched out beneath 'Eastwatch' in the fading moonlight.

  The fortress was essentially a tower built into an unnaturally sheer cliffside, with a ring of walls forming a semicircle at its base. Calen would have bet a whole lot that magic was involved in getting those cliffs smoothed out, and he could even see their tops if he looked up and to the side.

  Someone had mentioned a lake on the plateau, maybe fed by rainfall, and the actual mountain stretched much higher than the tower. With human 'tribes' on the other side of the pass, crossing couldn't be easy, unless the top of the tower was fortified as well, but maybe that was more a practicality thing.

  Half the people who lived on *this* side of the mountain had wings, so if there was a trail or pass or another way to summit, it would be much easier for them to defend than for an organized force to climb over while it was being defended. The supplies on that rickety contraption masquerading as an elevator had to be used for *something*.

  That didn't mean there wasn't a way for just the two of them to make an *exit*, if things got to that point *and* they managed to sneak away quietly. He would just need to do some scouting, if they ever got out of this room.

  Calen once again filed that thought away for later. He didn't know enough yet, and Em still wanted to stay. Dragging her up the last few flights of steps to see if they could climb over a mountain faster than the Warden woke up wasn't on this morning's agenda.

  And escaping by taking the stairs down would be an exercise in futility for the same reasons. The moment anyone in this tower decided that the two humans from Earth needed to go to the dungeons, Calen and Emma were a ten minute trek down thousands of stairs away from the singular choke point at the bottom of the tower, while anyone with wings was a minute or two of flight from being ready and waiting for them at the bottom.

  Maybe even as fast as thirty seconds. Mirri had managed a headfirst dive and caught him after a much shorter drop, and the walls below were only...

  Calen leaned back, gasping air and stepping away from the tilting tableau below him. He had failed to fight off a wave of nausea that struck as he tried to calculate just how far down the yard was.

  "No big deal. No big deal." He muttered, gripping the windowsill and trying again.

  The pre-dawn air washed cold over his face that would only have prickled so much if he were starting to sweat while Calen leaned forwards again.

  His knees bent and locked up against the wall as he dragged his eyes down past the horizon and over the moonlit canopy.

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  He tucked his chin, trying to get it over with by ripping off the band-aid, and forgot to breathe, absolutely transfixed by the pair of tiny people pacing the wall.

  Not enough air was getting through his nose when he tried to inhale, but Calen persevered, tracking the tiny figures.

  He wasn't scared of heights. He had never been scared of heights. He had climbed mountains before. On a trail, with a guide, up a slope, over the course of hours, sure, but he could look over a bluff just fine.

  His face started to tingle, and he felt like he was rotating, falling forwards as his sense of balance utterly collapsed.

  The pair of guards broke their pattern and the spell, moving into the gatehouse, and that left him reeling. His eyes darted around, narrowed vision restricting what he could see.

  The torch on top of the gatehouse was useless, there was nothing to focus on.

  Someone was stacking lumber in a pit on the paved section opposite the stables, but that was too close to the base of the tower, he was practically leaning over the edge to watch, making things worse.

  Another set of guards wandered beneath an overhang almost immediately, and stopped moving. Calen waited, but his vision was getting narrower and narrower, until he could almost pick out the individual clay tiles on the tiny shelter.

  His grip on the stones started to slip, his palms slick when they hadn't been a few moments ago, and that was all Calen could manage.

  He sank to his knees, forcing the ground out of sight until his chin was resting on the windowsill, fixing his gaze on the horizon.

  It was, in fact, a big deal.

  And just another reason to get out of here. Especially if the 'best' case scenario was these people actually wanting him to put magic wings on.

  Calen's breathing calmed over the next minute, but he couldn't quite bring himself to try again. Knowing was half the battle, and that meant he was halfway done already. He would just need to keep trying, and avoid showing any signs of weakness.

  Giving their hosts easy leverage over him right now would be a mistake. Worse, they might be accustomed to the idea of 'helping' someone get over a fear of heights and fly. The last thing he wanted to do right now was be subjected to a slew of cultural experiments designed to help young dragonlings achieve takeoff.

  They had to learn to fight and use magic first anyway. He had time before he had to tell then 'no.' Time he could use to figure out what the practical consequences of saying 'no' would be, and convince Em that this plan was absolutely nuts, by coming up with a better idea.

  Calen watched the clouds retreat north under the fading stars with his elbows perched on the windowsill, and tried to work on that through the fog clouding his mind.

  He must have drifted off again, because the next thing that happened to him was the sensation of falling backwards.

  His heels hit his butt and stopped him with a jolt, but his face jerked forward in a panic, and he headbutt the wall. Lightly.

  It still hurt like a bastard when he rubbed at the lump he could already feel forming in front of one of his temples.

  "Healing potion has definitely worn off by now." Calen grimaced at the open window before freezing.

  The rustling of cloth behind him informed him that his exclamation of pain must have woken Emma, and the much brighter sky convinced him that he had actually gotten a bit more sleep. Now he just needed a way to pretend he hadn't almost scrambled his brains in front of Em, before she got even more paranoid about his head spontaneously exploding due to magic.

  A firmer rustle announced that she wasn't even having the decency to drag her feet this morning.

  "Why is it so cold?" Emma grumbled, then; "Calen? Calen!?"

  She was fixated on his empty bed on the other side of the room. Which at least looked slept-in, due to his earlier tossing and turning.

  "Over here Em," He waved, pinging the brass disk off a thumbnail *very* carefully near the long drop. His demonstration wouldn't work without it. "Just checkin' out the view."

  He got an exhausted sigh back, and heard the gentle creak of wood.

  "Where are my—"

  "Stacked under your bed neatly instead of thrown all over the floor, you slob," He interrupted her, waving to the clothing. "Hurry up, I want to show you something before breakfast. Assuming they let us out for that."

  "Don't be ridiculous. They're not going to deliver food to the guest room for every meal." Emma missed the point, and Calen let it lie in favor of the big reveal.

  "C'mon Em, get your panties un-bunched and get over here," He said. "You get to see me do a real magic trick. Not even sleight of hand."

  "They're not— shut up dork," She complained, futilely delaying the inevitable. "You couldn't have waited for me to wake up to enjoy the view? It's freezing in here."

  "Nope," Calen lied smoothly. "Are you really gonna crawl back under the blankets on the first day of magic lessons? There's a whole new undiscovered force in the universe that's never even *heard* of the scientific method, and you're sleeping through discoveries left and right."

  *That* got her feet slapping the stones, one sandaled, one not.

  "I swear to god if this is something stupid like that pack of gum that fakes an electric shock I'm gonna—"

  "Oh shut up and look." Calen rolled his eyes, turning around with the brass disk pinched on either side to interrupt the faithless grumbling.

  Emma squinted at the grooves full of mana.

  "Oookay, looking. Is there supposed to be something going on?" She asked after a second.

  "It's almost full, right?" Calen asked.

  "Full of what? Calen whatever made that go off is long go—"

  Calen pushed just a little more mana through the grooves inside the disk, and the hole in the center popped with a dramatic shower of sparks that nova'd around his hands just a little more strongly than he had anticipated, discharging all the stored power in the tiny object.

  Em flinched back, but nobody was on fire when the fireworks faded.

  "This," He declared to her almost-suitably-intrigued expression. "Makes fire. And has the same rune the heater inside the tower did."

  "Okay. We knew that. Mirri makes fire too. She does it without a rune," Emma's nose crinkled. "Do you think she has one of those like, carved into her claws?"

  "No, Em," Calen said patiently. "This makes fire all at once, from stored power, no matter what I try to make it do, instead of just releasing heat slowly like the generator in the tower. With the same rune. Which means all the other lines surrounding it are what modify the way the energy gets expressed."

  *That* got her attention, judging by the way her whole face crinkled this time.

  A way to decode how magic acted was the perfect bait to get her engaged with it. She would always be able to dismiss a black box that could have anything inside it as confusing, but *rules*?

  Em needed those. And the more advanced their collective understanding was to start, the faster they were going to be able to hit the limit of what these people would teach them, and find out what happened next.

  "Show me again. I wasn't looking at the... *mana*." She demanded, somehow sounding reluctant to use basic terminology.

  Calen pressed one of his thumbs to the back of the disk, forcing a bunch of power through it all at once this time. It was easier when he fed it gradually and then tipped the reaction over the edge, but he hadn't tested much last night, for fear of waking her.

  *Now* though, he could just—

  With a bright pop, burning pain assaulted Calen's thumb.

  The disk clattered to the stones, and he stuck the lightly seared finger in his mouth while Emma flinched again.

  "What did you do different?" She asked, grabbing for his wrist. "Let me see."

  "Cooked myself a little. I had by thumb on the hole because I'm a dummy." Calen admitted, removing the stinging appendage from his mouth for an examination.

  The skin too-smooth layers of skin that remained were already turning an angry red, shining under the limited illumination from the window behind him.

  "Dummy is right." Emma chastised him, cocking a shoulder and balling a fist as she released him.

  Calen knew that look intimately, and resigned himself to taking the lump. He braced himself for the always-too-hard punch in the arm, and inhaled sharply when a wave of energy arrived alongside it.

  The mana from Emma's fist rippled down his arm and up his shoulder, reverberating through his skull and down into the injured thumb simultaneously. With both of their eyes fixed on Calen's hand, it was impossible to miss the minor roil of flesh that smoothed away the angry red, leaving behind pristine skin.

  By the time the power had exhausted itself, both his fading headache and his newfound burns were gone, the replacement skin perfectly blended with the rest of the flesh on his fingers.

  Emma's channels faded from Calen's vision in the momentary silence that followed.

  "Em. Did you just do that without a rune?" Calen asked.

  Her eyes were still fixated on his hand.

  "I... maybe? We should ask if that's normal," She sounded more confused than excited, but quickly transitioned to accusatory as she looked up. "Right after you tell me what was wrong with your head."

  "I bumped it waking up, it barely swelled at all." Calen caved immediately, his mind too busy racing.

  He let a trickle of mana feed through his skull, jumping ahead of his words to make sure it all made sense as he continued, waving away Emma's hands as she reached out to examine his head.

  "Em this might be the reason they want you under some kind of oath. Why else would everyone have one of those patch things in their gear?" He asked. "If you don't have to filter your mana, you get to fix people at full power."

  "Maybe they just did something different with their channels," Emma suggested, blowing a giant hole in Calen's logic. "We should *ask* about the very dangerous, un-studied energies you're playing with, and get a second opinion from people who know about common pitfalls before we do more weird stuff while unattended."

  The no-fun party pooper was unfortunately at least a little right.

  They just didn't know enough to be sure, and the only way to find out was to ask the same dragonborn who were currently their only source of information about the planet, and hope they could spot any inconsistencies if they were being lied to.

  "Fine," Calen huffed. "Kind of seems like everyone who wants to get into a fight should have made some of their channels like that unless there was a reason not to, though."

  Emma was frowning at her splayed fingers by the time he finished, but Calen was rescued from having to dig whatever thought had just occurred to her out of her head by a knock at the door.

  It was Viran, carrying a tangled pile of leather, brass, and cloth.

  "The quartermaster said you don't want the human clothes we have, they get treated for scalemites every time we use them, so they smell. I didn't know what size belt anyone wears either. Dovin says we can get you real weapons after you train with fake ones for a while," The big guy rumbled without preamble, dumping everything on the floor. "But there's a scabbard in here somewhere for that dagger, if you want to put stuff on before breakfast."

  Calen didn't have to turn around to see Emma's enthusiasm at *that* idea. She was already pushing past him to dig at the slightly musty pile of leather.

  "Uhhhh, thanks big guy. Where is breakfast, anyway?" He asked. "Up by the lake?"

  Cooking near the theoretical water source on the plateau would have made sense, but Viran was shaking his head.

  "No, the mess hall is in the throne room, all the way at the bottom of the Spire. It would be hard to feed wounded in the infirmary or prisoners if it was up all those stairs," The gray proudly flashed his teeth, then drew his lips back down with a glance at Emma, who hadn't noticed. "I'm supposed to make sure you don't get lost or bothered by people on the way there. Mirri is busy being early to her first officer's meeting."

  A little huff of air escaped Calen's nose, but Viran didn't react like he had been joking about Mirri.

  Being let out of the room was progress, even with a chaperone, but it was too early to let his guard down.

  The big guy could say anything, and then lead them anywhere he wanted.

  "Sounds good to me." Emma declared, having finally produced the scabbard and tucked her new toy loosely into the pocket.

  Viran looked down at where Emma was currently measuring a belt for her waist, and rapidly drew back outside the door, pointing his face to the side as he backed up.

  "Sorry," The big guy sheepishly told the hallway ceiling, fumbling for the door. "I'll uh, wait outside while you two finish dressing."

  Calen half chuckled despite himself. It was just a belt, both of them were already dressed.

  "Oh it's fine we're—"

  The door closed in his face.

  Emma was frowning back at him and throwing her own confused glances at the iron-banded oak panels.

  "That was a little weird, right?" She asked, tucking her borrowed tunic back into her waistband and fumbling with the belt she had selected.

  Calen shrugged.

  "Unknown cultural values. Maybe putting on a belt counts as getting dressed," He suggested. Then; "Hey, stop hogging all the pouches, my skirts don't have pockets either!"

  "You're just going to collect junk with them!" Emma bickered back.

  "Exactly! I'm going to use them!"

  For just a minute while they squabbled over the gifted clothing and prepared to face the day, the tension in Calen's shoulders relaxed, and he tried to tell himself that everything might be fine after all.

  They were just going to have to roll the dice today.

  hypnic jerk is the sudden contraction of muscles as a person begins to fall asleep, which often drives them back to wakefulness. The involuntary action is often accompanied by sweating, quickened breathing, or a sensation of falling.