CALEN

  "That was strange, right?" Calen whispered, watching Mirri retreat.

  A hand clamped down on his shoulder, roughly spinning him to face his sister.

  "She's disappointed her dream job died the day she got it. Now she's stuck babysitting two adults who didn't know magic existed a day ago, and one of them keeps being a jerk about it," Emma hissed at him. "*Strange* was you threatening to jab that guy in the eye with the only tool in the room that wasn't a weapon."

  "He was talking about breaking your fingers." Calen protested, not that that held much weight at the moment, now that they knew it had been a joke.

  "I can handle myself," Emma enunciated every last word through grit teeth, leaving no room for interpretation. "I need you to start thinking about what you're going to do if these people actually mean it, because if you haven't noticed, they're somehow still arming us, even after your little stunt."

  "Fine, fine," Calen held up his hands in a mockery of surrender. "You can handle yourself. Except for the part where Mirri literally just said you can't fight anything alone, like, two hours ago."

  The priestess had even specifically mentioned Calen as a possible solution to Em's combat autonomy issues, but clearly that part hadn't sunk in very well.

  "She *also* said I can take a hit or two better than most people on Avarea as a consequence," Emma rapped a fingernail off Calen's helmet. "Wait for that to happen next time, before you throw your extra-squishy skull in the way."

  Calen had a retort halfway up his throat when he realized Emma wasn't looking past him, she was *moving* past him.

  "Where are you going?" He asked when he caught her by the elbow

  "To do my part of this job, so they don't kick us out," She at least bothered turning around before shaking herself loose of his grip. "If you really think they want me more than you, then just try not to make yourself a liability while I handle it."

  And that was it. She crossed the room to join Mirri without waiting for a reply. The only eyes turned Calen's way were his own, reflected in the shield on Emma's back.

  He closed his mouth and looked away before anyone could feel him staring, or see his face.

  "Couldn't have just hit me. She had to go and make it personal." Calen grumbled under his breath, pretending to examine the weapon rack he had been abandoned next to.

  Being on a whole different planet should have felt like a fresh start, but instead, he had managed to find himself in the same old rut less than forty-eight hours after the apocalypse. Spinning his wheels and trying to stay out of trouble while Emma dealt with the actual work of surviving, because she had *real* potential.

  His restless fingers went looking through the pouches on his belt for metal to waste the time, and found a lump of melted plastic instead.

  The melted d4 was utterly useless as a dice, or a coin. The numbers were warped to unrecognizability, and even though it had mostly collapsed in a circular fashion, the various lumps and bumps on the top rendered the idea of a fair, fifty-fifty distribution when he flipped it laughable.

  Sure enough, it landed flat side down in his palm the first, second, and third time he flipped it.

  He kept going anyway, using the easy rhythm as a distraction while he scanned the racks in front of him. The axe head Em was in the process of requesting a new handle for looked wicked, and wickedly heavy to boot, but Calen's eyes kept drifting back to the sword.

  Yarrun was right, it was absolutely too big for Calen to use until it was melted down and reforged, which would leave him carrying... no Seraph Steel, and no real weapon, next time he and Emma made an appearance.

  Assuming the garrison hadn't already deduced that his channels were useless, it was the perfect recipe for showing everyone exactly who was important, and who wasn't. Which would focus all the pressure on Emma, and all the disdain on useless little Calen.

  Switching to a spear would still leave him lacking. Mirri already did that, *and* she had magic to back her up. An axe had the same problem, but worse, because it would take getting closer to whatever he was trying to hit, and he didn't have Em's durability, or the shield to throw in the way when whatever it was tried to eat him back.

  Just goofy noodle arms, mostly-useless mana investments, and no plan for the future.

  The lump of plastic flipped past Calen's face again, and landed wrong in his palm. Flat side up, finally.

  There was still no telling whether the twisted symbol had been a one or a four, the heat from Sariel's bolts had thoroughly warped everything about it except the basic layout of the indentation, even on the face that had been buried in the mud.

  How the Seraph had thought Calen was a good bet was absolutely mystifying. Maybe it had just been laziness, not wanting to carry the metal around. Dovin *had* gotten the offer of the wings first. Not Mirri, though. The Seraph hadn't ever held the wings out to the only one who actually had the anatomy to use them without a learning curve and extra investment.

  Pity seemed like the best bet, but a piece of Calen rebelled at the idea.

  It was only even half ego. Everything else they had discovered about this world was brutally pragmatic. Even after hearing that the ruined d4 hadn't been a weapon at all, Sariel had left the wings on Calen's shoulders, disappearing into the sky without saying a single word.

  Metallic clattering interrupted Calen's ruminations. The Venatrix's boots had just been pulled out from underneath the wings for Yarrun's examination. Rivets were bothersome, and he needed more measurements, if Emma would kindly get her sandals undone for Mirri.

  It would apparently be some kind of blasphemy, or disservice to Emma, to separate the boots and the shield, because the Seraph had insisted on their synergy, and Yarrun took one look at their soles and agreed, so the boots would be next, after Viran's weapon.

  Not a single person was concerned with what Calen was up to, and he was indoors enough, with his back to a stone wall.

  A veritable flood of mana buzzed through his brain stem, slowing everything to a crawl as the plastic bounced off his thumbnail into the air, wobbling all the way.

  Wallowing was stupid. What he needed was time, and a plan of his own.

  Whether Em was right or wrong, she had the leverage to keep them there, which meant Calen had to plan like she was right, and be ready for things to go wrong anyway. Coasting wasn't going to get them out of here if things started to go sour.

  The wings were more mangled than his channels, but Yarrun seemed confident they were fixable, and that there was a point to fixing them for Calen.

  Until that happened, there was no way to know how hard they would be to manipulate. Worst case scenario, he could keep them folded up behind him, and maybe avoid getting his spine shaved again. Armored backs seemed to work for dragonborn, maybe the obvious defensive measure would lend him some level of masculine credibility, despite his size.

  None of that solved his offensive issue, and the 'flashlight of doom' plan was still outside his capabilities with runework.

  Calen dropped the mana out of his head, caught the bit of plastic, and slipped it back into a pouch.

  He had landed on the actual problem again, range against risk. Even waving his practice sword at Viran would put Calen's head in arm's reach of those claws. The idea that he would ever be able to fight an armed Immortal with the stubby thing at his belt, or a sharp equivalent, was laughable.

  The sword behind him though, that had a bit more credibility behind it. A little more reach.

  And a nicely sized handle, which was convenient, because if Sariel's plan had been for Calen to flit around with borrowed wings, every scrap of weight was going to count. There was no way he was going to be able to lug a shield everywhere.

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  So why not just use two hands for the sword?

  The bronze blade lifted easily out of the rack after Calen checked once more that nobody was bothering to keep track of what he was doing. And after that, well, he had already gotten in trouble once for taking a combat stance inside Yarrun's forge.

  The sands just outside would be as good a place as any to test the viability of the tenuous 'plan' taking shape in Calen's head.

  It was less of a plan, and more of a desire to figure things out in silence for a minute, so he turned the corner around the building, and kept going towards the lake.

  The glistening sheet of ice stretching up the cliff was starting to turn orange in the sunset by the time he made his way around the back. There was a long stretch of 'beach' between the forge and the reservoir, but Calen stuck close by the rounded outer wall of the forge, so he would have a defense if anyone decided to see where he had run off to with the weapon.

  He *could* have gone further, but he hadn't even left the area of the building. Just tucked himself out of sight of the stubby 'watchtower' at the top of the Spire, in a way that also hid him from the front door to the forge.

  The warm-up exercises Dovin had shown him were far less grueling now that he knew what he was doing. He had to adjust his grip once or twice, after choosing the robust lump of ice at the back of the lake as his 'target', but eventually Calen got the damn thing to stop waving around in position one for a whole count to thirty Mississippi.

  That was the hard part. Position two was a little awkward, but the blade was surprisingly well-balanced for how long it was. Keeping his hands apart on the grip turned out to be the key to controlling the thing, using his 'front' hand close to the guard as a kind of fulcrum to manipulate the blade. Calen just couldn't grip too close to the end of the handle, or his palm would slip off the rounded end.

  Position three was when trouble arrived.

  "Tuck your elbows. You look like a chicken." She said from behind him.

  Calen graciously swallowed the barb about Mirri's talons that had made it to the tip of his tongue, and tucked his elbows closer to his ribs while he formulated an actual reply.

  He should have had one ready, should have known the peace wouldn't last long, given how few places there were to go on the plateau. It wasn't like he could have climbed up the thawing cliff face, or hopped off the edge of the plateau safely. Out of sight or not, he was still just as trapped as before, even without accounting for the way Em seemed to be all in on this insane plan.

  It took a second to figure out what he would have said if he trusted any of these people further than he could throw them.

  "I thought you would have something important to do right now." He settled for a half-truth.

  He hadn't actually given any thought to Mirri's opinion before walking out of the forge with an admittedly expensive-looking chunk of metal.

  "This is important," She surprised him, before immediately undercutting the impression. "You were training alone, and I'm responsible for making sure you're a passable fighter someday."

  Calen's eyes rolled themselves as he worked his way into position four.

  "Lucky me. I get to be *passable* someday." He grumbled.

  "Not if you keep sliding your feet apart to maintain your balance while you hold that steady," The criticism continued. "It's lowering your center, you're too grounded to avoid anything that comes your way, even if you see it coming."

  Calen pretended she meant it, and pulled his feet closer together.

  "Better?" He asked.

  "Wrong question," Mirri sounded far too smug about that, and seemed to realize it even without being able to see Calen's face. "But yes, it's *good enough* for now. Warn me if you're about to start swinging that thing. Better yet, take a few more steps away."

  Calen turned to check how close she was, and got too busy examining the flow of power through Mirri's wrist to roll his eyes. She had a hand outstretched to a metallic plate mounted on the protruding wall of the forge, and she was dumping an incredible amount of mana through her channels.

  Which explained why *he* was the one who needed to move, at least. And why she had found him so quickly.

  She hadn't come out here after him at all.

  "What are you even doing?" he asked.

  Usually when that much mana was cycling through her hands, it was accompanied by a glare pointed his way. This looked like an almost safe opportunity to wheedle another lesson on mana out of her, while she was bored enough to prod at him.

  "Feeding the forge. You might have skipped the queue by picking that up as it was, but Viran still needs to be armed," Mirri blew air out of her nostrils, apparently amused by something. "He's lucky even dead steel just needs a bit of shaping to hold an edge. Your new weapon likely took days of hardening to hold its own weight at that length."

  Wondering why the forge needed to be fed outside was less interesting than the other thing Mirri had said. 'Your new weapon' only had so many meanings.

  "I'm allowed to keep this?" He confirmed.

  "As long as you keep it pointed at the enemy," Mirri's eyes narrowed, and she actually bothered looking away from her task. "And thank Yarrun for the work he put into it, without being rude if he doesn't respond the way you expect him to."

  "Deal." Calen agreed instantly.

  'Useful jerk' was out of his reach for the moment. Hell, 'useful' was a pie in the sky dream for him, according to Mirri. The least he could do was avoid being a jerk until Emma snapped out of it, or someone gave him an actual indicator that betrayal was on the way. Or until the Seraph dropped back out of the sky and decided to tell him what he was supposed to do with light channels that would put him in the same league as Viran and Mirri.

  But for right now, it looked like they actually meant it, and the problem was that living on Avarea required a lot more risk tolerance than living on Earth. Not that Calen planned on being stuck with a bit of sharp metal as his only weapon forever.

  Mirri's hand gave one last pulse of mana before she withdrew her hands from the bronze plate, with significantly dimmer channels than when she had started. She was glowering at the metal, for some reason.

  "Need some help?"

  Even if it wasn't useful, the offer had to count for something.

  "You can try," Mirri snorted, then seemed to rethink her words. "Actually... yes. Come try. Call it an experiment."

  Calen felt the remaining hairs on the back of his neck prickle just a little at the sudden shift in her focus.

  "What are we testing?" he asked, approaching anyway. "Is this going to hurt?"

  "No," Mirri paused. "Stop if you feel the Measure, that would hurt."

  That seemed to be the best answer he was going to get until he started cooperating.

  "Same process as getting the rock to glow?" Calen asked.

  "Yes. Exactly the same process, if you can," Mirri sounded almost... excited? "That's the only time I've felt your regeneration tug on the aether, I want to know if it was a fluke, or if there's something we missed."

  Calen shrugged, and put his hands out on the plate, happy to be a guinea pig now that he knew what they were looking for.

  He almost immediately ran into a problem.

  "This is not the right rune for my channels." He mentioned as the background hum of power in his fingers dropped precipitously.

  Feeding the lightstone had felt almost sluggish, but the plate in front of him had no problem drinking the power immediately. Worse, from what he could see, the conversion rate was terrible. His channels had dimmed significantly by the time he bothered to look back at Mirri, wondering at the silence.

  "There's... something happening, but it's weaker than it was before," A buzz around her eyes told him that her manasight was active, but she gestured for him to keep going. "Don't worry about actually filling the forge, I can do it in less than an hour myself."

  Less than a minute later, Calen felt a dull ache prick one of his fingers, and withdrew. At the same time, Mirri sucked sharply at the air.

  "Measure. I think." He hedged.

  "What did you do differently, the moment you took your hands away?" Mirri had an intent gaze fixed on his hands. "That stirred the aether properly."

  "Nothing, I just took my hands away. Stopped feeding it power?" Calen guessed.

  "Do it again, without your hands," Mirri backed up, looking him up and down. "Anywhere else, but don't flow power through your arms this time. Unaligned mana will convert better anyway."

  Calen shrugged, and backed up against the plate the moment his fingers stopped feeling numb. The swoop of the tunic designed to accommodate wings made for the perfect point of contact, given where his *other* channels were, pointed up the top of his spine towards his brain stem.

  It took an incredibly frozen moment where Calen spent some time examining the minutiae of the way the muscles at the corner of Mirri's eye flexed while she blinked before he figured out how to get the power to go the *other* way, instead of into his head before he got the forge to take the power, and dropped the remainder out of his brain stem.

  The change was dramatic, and immediately noticeable even to him. It was like the air pressure around his arms increased tenfold, and a moment of concentration allowed him to feel the same sensation creeping up his ankles into his calves, then his knees.

  Mirri's reaction confirmed it.

  "I'm such an idiot," She muttered. "Of course the Seraph saw. I just wasn't looking."

  "Care to share?" Calen asked, glancing over Mirri's shoulder. There was no sign of Emma coming to investigate. "Is this dangerous? Do I stop?"

  "Not unless you feel the Measure. See whether it stabilizes, and where." Mirri ordered. "This is... possibly good news for you, if you can figure out the rest of what you're doing with your channels."

  Caution with magic was apparently for suckers, when something exciting was happening.

  Someone would have to tell Emma, when they were done here.

  "Stop smirking and get to work, unless that's your limit."

  It wasn't.

  The sensation crept its way down to Calen's elbows, up his biceps, and halfway up his thighs before completely capping out, creating a draining sensation in his torso until he throttled back on the power he was feeding the forge.

  Mirri watched the whole thing, and gave her verdict while Calen finished tuning his output to match the flows of aether rushing into his limbs.

  "You're lopsided," She declared. "The most lopsided person I've ever even read about, much less seen. You pushed so much power into forming your channels that you starved the flesh around them, and now your density is unevenly distributed."

  "What about my legs?" Calen asked. "Those were doing it too."

  "Those are doubly lopsided. One of them is just generally weak, but the other must have burned power, likely on that venom, so it's doing almost a third of the work."

  "And all of that meeaaans?" Calen wheedled.

  "Your limbs are going to intake aether rapidly when you run low on mana, but your actual mana pool is going to be much, much smaller than it would have if you had a normal distribution," There, the end of Mirri's snout wrinkled. "And it doesn't work nearly as well when you use the actual channels in your hands."

  "Sure is lucky I've got the backup set up here then." Calen jabbed a thumb at his neck, unable to stop a smile from creeping across his face.

  Mirri's tail whipped the sand behind her nearly level at the sight, which was the perfect amount of payback for the amount of time she had waited to tell him what was happening.

  "People avoid doing things like that for a reason, you know." Mirri grumbled.

  "Well yeah, but I'm stupid, and there's no fixing it now," Calen countered. "Might as well find a way to make the best of it."

  The Warden's daughter ugly-snorted, which was worth the whole ordeal.

  "Idiot." She muttered, turning away.

  Calen still caught sight of the grin that flashed across her snout for a moment, even through the deepening twilight.

  laser was built in 1960 by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California. It is widely considered one of the most important inventions of the 20th century.