Rex chewed, swallowed, looked at the pyramid, and in a smooth motion took another spoonful. The movements were smooth and unhurried and completely ordinary for a well-raised noble boy eating breakfast on an expedition.

I could not find anything wrong with the way he was sitting, moving, or breathing.

And yet, there was this sort of stillness around him that I did not know how to describe precisely, and I was not sure I was seeing it rather than inventing it, but there was a quality to how Rex occupied space at this hour of the morning that was not quite the same as how Bari or Dara occupied it. A certain economy. The small constant adjustments that most bodies made without awareness, the shift of weight on a crate that was slightly uncomfortable, the small correction of posture against the angle of the morning light, were less pronounced in him. Not absent, just less pronounced.

I had not spent time around him much before now, so I wondered if this was simply discipline.

Noble children were trained in deportment from a young age, and Rex was the type to have absorbed that training thoroughly.

A noble who sat too still was not a noble with a secret... He was a noble.

I told myself that, and I went back to my porridge.

But I had learned to pay attention to things that did not quite fit, and the stillness was a small thing that did not quite fit, and Observation did not distinguish between evidence that meant something and evidence that meant nothing. It only registered what was there. I would have to collect more before I could decide what any of it meant.

[Observation 31 → 33 (Acolyte)]

The notification arrived as I set my bowl down. Observation crossed firmly into the Acolyte rank.

I felt the shift the way I had felt Concentration cross, quieter than a discipline crossing but real, a sharpening of what I was already seeing, the details that had required active attention now arriving without me reaching for them.

Two auxiliary skills at Acolyte now. Concentration and Observation. Both crossing in the same hour of subjective time.

I stood up and began to walk towards the south side of the pyramid.

"Cartography?" Dara asked when she saw me moving, and I smiled inside my head at how she was able to interpret a lot with so few cues, and I nearly smacked my head when I realized she must know how much I was attracted to her.

"Not today," I said, knowing that my answer was a bit strange. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

She looked at me, and Bari looked at me too. Rex, briefly, looked at me, and then returned to the pyramid.

"I am going to practice at the south face," I said. "By myself. I will see you at sixth hour."

I walked away from the fire before any of them could ask why. The answer I had not given was that Cartography had been a cover story for reaching the south face in the presence of Bari and Dara. I did not need the cover story anymore.

This loop, I was going alone, and I was going to spend the hour before the eruption on something I had been putting off for too many loops.

I was going to push Spark to the Acolyte threshold.

®

As I walked away from my friends, I looked at Dara and just realized that my Concentration was now 35, just two ranks below hers, and I remembered admiring that she was ten ranks above me in Concentration at the start of this expedition, and now, in what seemed like the blink of an eye, I had almost reached her position.

I tried not to dwell on this, but it was a reminder that I was on a path that none of them was able to follow.

Twenty meters from the crack, I raised my staff and began to practice, but before I did, I quickly changed my Title to Acolyte to get the slightest edge in my practice.

While Death Touched was fantastic in keeping me alive for as long as possible, I figured it was not the best Title to have if I wanted a quicker skill growth in the time that I had.

My Anima Depth was deeper than it had ever been before, and my Auxiliary Skills had grown, so it should not be too hard to push a spell to the rank of Acolyte.

Spark at twenty-eight, two ranks from thirty, from the threshold, from whatever Spark became when it crossed out of Initiate and into the tier that the spell had been waiting to reach for as long as I had been casting it.

Spells like Spark had a different path it could take every time it crossed a threshold.

As Acolytes, we did not have much control over what the spell could take until we reached the Adept level, which was when our Anima Depth reached rank 60.

However, we could influence the path that this spell would take by the way we used it, and I don’t know what would come out of it when I have been casting it with Surge.

Every Acolyte discipline transformed at the threshold crossing. Threadwork had changed shape when I crossed thirty in it two years ago, as an entire new range of configurations opened as though a door had been unlocked.

Surge had crossed at the same time, the raw discharge gaining a controllable quality it had never possessed as an Initiate spell.

Spark was going to change.

I did not know how. That was what I was here to find out.

I cast. Not combined casts, not yet, just pure Spark discharges into the empty air ahead of me, the channel opening and closing in rapid sequence, each discharge precise and clean under the Concentration grip that no longer fractured between casts.

Ten. Twenty. Thirty.

[Spark 28 → 29 (Initiate)]

One rank from thirty sustained casts. Slower than I wanted. The ranks near the threshold always slowed.

The final ranks of a tier required more sustained practice than the middle ranks because they were approaching a transformation rather than continuing an accumulation.

I kept casting.

Forty. Fifty. Seventy.

My arm was tired, and my focus was drained. The edge of boredom arrived, which was its own test, because boredom in sustained practice was exactly what the final ranks of a tier were designed to resist. I cast through it.

At cast one hundred and ninety, I had been counting, because counting kept me present, and the notification arrived.

[Spark 29 → 30 (Acolyte — threshold crossed)]