The white light that Janna drew from the borrowed body held its shape: the outline of Liam, condensed and bright, suspended above the possessed man like a second self. She turned it in the air the way you might turn a letter to see it from all angles.
Liam had been in a lot of unusual situations over the last several years. He had possessed bodies, absorbed death, communicated through marks at continent range, and spent time sitting inside natural energy fields that could restructure a person's biology. He had been in the presence of strong practitioners, of ancient Nen constructs, of things that did not have categories in the standard framework.
This was the first time he had been in the presence of a living creature made entirely of energy.
Not aura. Not natural energy in the sense he understood it. Something that had been natural energy a long time ago and had organized itself so completely that the organizing principle had become the primary fact of the existence, with the energy itself as secondary. A person made of wind, in the sense that a person can be said to be made of childhood, or made of a particular grief.
He found this difficult to describe, and he had encountered a lot of things he found difficult to describe.
"Janna," he said, mostly to himself.
"You seem confused," Janna said, from the wind, through the voice of the wind. "Messenger of Wind."
The title was interesting. He noted it. "I have a question," he said. "How does one become you?"
The breeze circling his outlined form had the quality of amusement in it, the way wind has a quality of impatience sometimes, or grief, when it moves through the right landscape.
"You want to know how to remove the limitations of flesh and blood," she said. "How to become an unfettered natural spirit."
"Yes."
"Your thoughts are not original. Mortals with similar questions have come to me throughout my entire existence. They are not uncommon."
"Then perhaps you have a prepared answer."
"I have an answer," Janna said. "You will not be satisfied with it."
The wind moved around him in a slow circle, the way water moves in a bowl when you set it spinning.
"How would you make a natural spirit become mortal?" she asked. "How would you give me flesh and weight and a heartbeat and a fixed location in the world? Even the most accomplished arcanist this world has produced could not tell you. The same is true in reverse. I cannot tell you how to make a mortal into what I am. I can only tell you what I remember of becoming myself."
The voice settled into something that had the quality of a story that has been told before, not many times, but enough that the teller knows which parts matter.
"There were sailors," Janna said. "Along the Shuriman coast. They prayed before each voyage. They named what they were praying to: Jan'alem. In Shuriman it means guardian. The word was directed at the sea wind, because what they needed was for the sea wind to be kind to them.
"The first awareness, the first coherent sense of being a self rather than a force, was born from those prayers. Not created by them. I do not think I would have come into being in a sea with no life above it. But the prayers were the shape that the first awareness formed around. I was born with a very strong instinct to answer them.
"The moment I first understood that the wind was me, I did not answer the sailors' prayers. Not that day. The wind is me. The sailors' prayers to stay safe from the wind were, properly understood, prayers addressed to me asking me to stay away from them. I spent some time being genuinely troubled by this. Not long, in the way I now experience time. Long enough that I nearly lost myself back into the undifferentiated sea breeze I had come from.
"I did not lose myself. I helped them anyway. The prayers became more elaborate as the miracles became more frequent. The accumulated faith and the accumulated practice of directing my attention toward the protection of living beings made me more than I had been. I became more, the more I did. At some point I noticed that I had become something that did not require the faith to persist. The faith had been scaffolding. It was no longer structural."
Liam listened to this and let it settle.
"I read something once," he said, "about a spirit in the wilderness. Far from any settlement, no worshippers, no prayers. Born and present regardless."
"Mmm." The sound the wind made when it carried her acknowledgment.
"So your awakening. Was it caused by the concentration of natural magic in that sea region? Or purely catalyzed by the sailors' faith? Which was primary?"
The wind held still for a moment. The quality of Janna thinking.
"Why," she said, "do you think the dimension of magic is called the spiritual realm?"
Liam waited.
"Mortals, mountains, rivers, all living things: these are the body of the material world. The spiritual realm is what covers and permeates that body. It contains the vitality of everything that has ever lived. The material world and the spiritual realm are not two things. They are two ways of describing one thing. A natural spirit born in an uninhabited wilderness is still connected to everything else through the field. All things flow in the same current." A pause. "The sea in that region was ready to produce a spirit. The sailors' prayers provided the first direction for the forming awareness. Both were necessary. Neither was primary. You cannot separate them."
Liam sat with this.
"I understand it," he said, "and also do not understand it."
"That," Janna said, with what he was fairly certain was the wind's equivalent of a fond exasperation, "is the most honest answer you have given me."
The wind moved around the outline of him one more time. Then:
"Good night, Messenger of Wind. Have a sweet dream." The voice was already becoming distant, returning to wherever it came from, which was everywhere. "Next time: come and see me in person."
The man with dreadlocks opened his eyes.
He was standing in front of a large mural on a wall in a part of the lower city he could not immediately account for. The paint was old. The figure in it was a woman with long hair and a staff, dimly lit by what remained of the ambient light from the street. He had no memory of how he had arrived here or how long he had been standing.
"Next time, come and see me in person," he heard, distantly, fading.
Some distance away, in The Last Drop tavern, Liam opened his eyes and briefly and internally said something impolite.
His real body was in the tavern. It had been in the tavern the whole time. The possessed man was standing at the shrine. If "come and see me in person" was a meaningful instruction and not a piece of atmospheric closing dialogue, then either Janna did not understand how the possession technique worked, or she understood exactly and was making a very specific point about the difference between a borrowed body and his actual presence.
He could not rule out the second option. She was several centuries old and had been watching mortals for all of them.
He noted this for future reference.
The tavern's lights were still on.
Jayce had fallen asleep on the table sometime in the middle hours, surrounded by his notes and the experimental housing and three empty cups that had contained something warm. He was breathing with the deep regularity of someone whose mind had finally agreed to stop for the night.
From behind the bar came the occasional small sound: movement, concentration, the very specific quiet of a person engaged in something that requires their complete attention. Vander had been sitting there since the last visitor left, working through the basics with the focused patience of a man who has spent his life learning difficult things from a starting position of having very little and making them work anyway.
Shizuku watched him from her position at the table, eyes slightly narrowed.
The aura he was moving through Ten, Zetsu, and Ren was not skillful yet. It was not supposed to be skillful yet. But it was consistent, which was the harder quality to develop in the first hours. He had a feel for it that most people had to spend weeks building.
She looked at Liam.
"Genuinely talented," she said.
Liam was already extending his En across the tavern and through the floor into the basement below.
Vi was down there.
She had been at it for most of the night. The aura was moving through her with the restless energy of someone who has found a framework for something they had been doing instinctively and is now running it against every application they can think of. She was not at Ren yet. She was still in the loop between Ten and Zetsu, learning where the on and off switches were, but the loop was clean and getting cleaner.
And beneath the clean loop, faintly, the particular character of a Transmutation type beginning to understand that the aura it was moving could become other things.
Liam saw her thought, in the way that his particular kind of perception could see the direction of a person's aura before the technique formed: she was thinking about something that stretched. Something with reach. Something that remembered where it had been.
The morning came without announcement, the way mornings do.
"What."
Mylo's voice.
From the basement stairs: footsteps, then Powder at the top, then Claggor, then Mylo immediately behind Powder with the expression of a man who has just received information he does not know what to do with.
"You completely mastered the four basics?" Mylo was saying. "How is that possible? Overnight? You're you."
"I can demonstrate again if you need," Powder said.
"That's not—" Mylo looked at Claggor. "Did you know about this?"
"In terms of technique," Claggor said, pushing his goggles up, "how is Powder not better than you?"
"I can pick locks!"
"Tsk," said Powder, making the face.
On the table, Jade opened one eye, assessed the noise level, and resettled.
Vi had come up from the basement behind the others and stopped in the middle of the room. She was not contributing to the argument. She was looking at her sister.
"Powder," she said.
Powder turned.
Vi's expression had changed. Not a combat-assessment change, not a threat-response change: something slower and less categorizable. Her eyes moved from the top of Powder's head downward.
"You're taller," Vi said.
It was not a large difference. It was, perhaps, the kind of difference you would not notice if you saw the same person every day. But Vi did not see her sister the way you see the same person every day. She saw Powder the way you see someone you are always trying to make sure is still there.
She reached out and touched Powder's hair.
It was longer. Not dramatically, not overnight-long in any sense that could be explained by sleep and time. Longer in the way that something that has been waiting for a condition to be met grows when the condition is finally met.
The blue was the same.
"Your hair," Vi said.
Powder looked at it.
Around them, the bar was waking up, the city outside beginning its morning. Jayce stirred over his notes. Vander emerged from behind the bar with the look of a man who has not slept but does not regret it. The morning light came through the patched windows and fell on Powder's hair, which was slightly longer than it had been yesterday, and on her face, which had the expression of someone listening to something just at the edge of hearing.