The Tide’s Song
Summer 20 – 80 218

Makeover Sequence

She accompanies the other women to the tailors more out of necessity than desire. Much of her clothing, although already large when she’d obtained them, had grown too small for her after her precipitous growth. She’s finding her shirts are straining uncomfortably in the shoulders and the pants riding too high on the leg, not to mention the bloodstains and tears that her clumsy mending can only do so much about.

The experience of ordering new clothing is disorienting, with the too-attentive tailor asking too many questions she doesn’t have answers to and the clothing being far more expensive than she’d ever seen clothing go for, and so she simply arbitrarily picks out a few of the ready-to-go underthings they had. There’s also the dress that the other women insist she get, for some reason (when is she ever going to be where a dress would make more sense than traveling clothes, anyway? They’re never going to have a fancy dinner with someone she needs to impress).

After that, she finds second-hand shops and rag vendors on the street, a more calming experience with relatively indifferent vendors and much cheaper things. She spends a few hours picking over the stalls for what she needs, and doesn’t even have to steal anything. The prize find is a navy wool coat with a gray silk inner lining, marred by some dirt and bloodstains and a distinct rip in the back that spoke to the former owner’s unfortunate fate.

She does get new boots from the cobbler, an indulgence that gives her an unexpected thrill when she picks up the finished product, smells the clean leather, and hears the creak as she pulls them on. She almost regrets it for a couple of weeks - she’s never had to break in shoes before, as any time she’s had them they’ve come to her soft and worn from age, if not already holed - but after that it’s an almost guilty pleasure to have had something made expressly for her that no one had ever worn before.

Most of the items still require altering, of course. It’s not just the dimensions, though that’s some of it; with her spending more time in the air or underwater than she’d ever expected, the presence of too much flapping fabric had become a hindrance. She hacks off most of the coat, including the blood-stained torn section of it, leaving a short length that covers her torso but doesn’t get in the way of her legs. Concealed pockets are sewn into the sleeves and added to any of the items that don’t have them already.

When the last item is cut down and reassembled and worn, she carefully steps into everything, tugs on the hem of the coat a little self-consciously and straightens her instinctive hunch, and looks herself over through Aloysius’s eyes. It’s almost disquieting. No one would think this person, with the sharp, if slightly over-large coat, the gleaming black boots, the multitude of bags and pouches and the elegant shining armor, to be a street urchin. A mercenary of some kind, perhaps, with the dagger and the crossbow hanging at her side.

Feeling a little peculiar, she strips off the coat, the armor, the belts and pouches - save for the one that holds the void inside, of course - and returns to bare feet, wide trousers and undershirt, before returning to the deck to aid in casting off.

But Like, What Is Time

The principle behind her silent use of the force that connects every physical object to every other one - she’s taken to calling it pull, although she’s beginning to think she should come up with a new term for it, or at least one less used as a verb - should be extendable to her more complex workings, she’s pretty sure. It is, after all, all the same Stuff. How to do so is the question, of course; it has become second nature to her to tweak the pull in a simple brute force way, but applying that to the more delicate weavings leads to a lot of failed attempts.

Eventually, after much experimentation, she figures out how to swallow the tones, to make the physical and aural vibrations she uses to shape spells more internal and mental than external. Perhaps unsurprising she lands on that first, given as so much of her life has been about creeping around to avoid notice.

She never quite figures out how to apply the second modification of her pull-manipulation to other spells. Instead, when she isolates the piece that governs how far she can affect things and focuses on pushing that in a similar way that she does with her mental pulls and pushes, the illusion of a purple barrel just appears at the usual limit of her range, on the other end of the deck of the Tide’s Song. After a minute passes and the purple barrel lingers, she realizes with some surprise that it had extended the time instead of the reach.

Connection between time and distance? she ciphers into her experimentation book, marking it with the symbol that means “must research more.” Thought I was pushin the space between but it altered time instead. She notes down the formulas that are shorthand for her manipulation of the Stuff, circling the specific equation of notes that she thought had governed distance. Does take time to go distance, unless extra Stuff is poured intae overcoming that. What is time? Can it be manipulated like distance?

Vibing
After she’d learned to swallow the tones she speaks and still the gestures she makes to be wholly internal, she begins to realize that internal vibrations are an entirely new area she’d not delved into before. Part of the difficulty in inhaling the vibrations of a working came from having to align it with her own internal energy, so that both the external magic and her own Stuff could coexist in harmony without ripping either her or the spell apart. (Indeed, some of the earlier failures had left her with a pounding headache, deep bone aches - though that could have been the growth spurts, as she can’t recall a time in the last year where her body hasn’t ached to some degree - or, in the most horrifying moment, bleeding from every opening in her head. She’d quit the experiment for a few days after that. Inevitably, the open question and the frustration of failure drew her inexorably back, as it always did, and triumph followed, which it didn’t always.)

Once she realizes that, she spends a good deal of time trying to turn her attention inside herself to listen to her internal vibrations, an exercise that proves futile as her thoughts run amuck. Nurie’te, chiming nearby, gives her a moment of inspiration. Humming the note of E♭ that he normally runs at, she focuses her attention on the note and stills her ears and mind to listen to herself.

After twenty minutes of humming different notes and feeling like an idiot, it suddenly resolves when she pulls her mind away from the notes themselves and focuses her mind and her ears in a subtly subterranean way. Her entire being resonates in vibrating harmony, in a way akin to but not quite the same way as when she reaches for the Stuff to manipulate it.

She jerks in her surprise and immediately loses it, falling into the regular world with a gasp. The experience stays with her, nevertheless, as does the method of focusing her attention. It is not so easy to align herself with the resonance of others, though. Much trial-and-error with Astarael while they study together proves to her that the internal tone of a person sings through strongest after they’ve sloughed off one of her workings, an assertion of identity that shouts to her senses and allows her to pull her workings into harmony with their notes - or into perfect opposition, to cancel out their resonance.

It’s the Size of the Ocean

It’s something of a side-project that she dallies with when they’re docked and she has nothing else to do. At each port, she finds the best information - and maps, if they can be rustled up - on the location of the place and distances to other places she’s been, charting their progress and distances as accurately as possible.

The real breakthrough comes when they spend the summer solstice in a tiny village. Aflutter with excitement, she finds an empty patch of land, jams a straight rod into the ground, and waits for noon. At noon, she carefully measures the angle of the shadow cast by the stick on the ground, compares it to the compass from the mapmaking supplies she’d rustled together in Northgate, and makes a note. Pulling out a much-battered notebook, she flips back to a much earlier time in it - and didn’t that seem like a lifetime and an entirely different person ago - to find the similar sketches and notes from last year’s summer solstice, spent in the Northgate Observatory.

A furious afternoon of calculations ensues, alongside comparisons to star charts and land maps, lamentations about the inexactitude of map distances and measurements, and her memories of previous books on geography.

As the sun sets, she looks at the incomprehensible mess of formulas and jargon, nods in satisfaction, and folds them up. She returns to the ship beaming with pride, says to York, “I just discovered the world is right huge,” eats whatever potato dish is served that night, and falls asleep still glowing in accomplishment.

Broken Connections

The first secret found within the tetrahedron comes relatively easily to her, as it matches up with lines of thought she’d already been exploring. When she finds the arcane coordinates inscribed within the dense network of information she’s been picking apart, she begins to shake with excitement and, without thinking about it, folds them into the scaffolding of the Stuff she builds as she puts together her final understanding of the work.

When it fizzles and collapses, she deflates. She’d been certain she’d built it correctly that time. Perhaps, though, the location indicated simply wasn’t… there any more?

Aloysius creaks disapprovingly, and she blushes a little. “Ye’re right, of course. Wouldae had a hard time explaining why I rushed in with nae thought of gettin back.” She glances over at Nurie’te, bobbing in the corner of the study. “Ye dinnae work in quite the same way, do ye? Else I think ye’d be out of luck beyond just not havin’ enough power tae do it. An’ the forms dinnae quite match up.”

She paces around, gathering up the supplies - at least those hadn’t been used up in the failed attempt. “Still though. This is a workin’ made before, an’ if valid locations were transcribed in this thing, ‘tis more than likely that perhaps other locations existed. Mayhap not still existing, but more must ha’ been made, and mayhap some do still exist. Perhaps even some back home for ye, Nuri, even if these two are no. Might be in other fallen crafts, or copied in books by people with no idea of the significance. I’ll find somethin’ eventually, and then we’ll go where nary a body has gone in lifetimes, most like.”

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