It only took a few moments to shape Chasma into a huge sphere within which forty-odd shadeling corpses were tightly packed together. Caen had paired Chasma’s spirit receptor with Body-enhancement.

  Sormot and the mercenaries wore amused looks as Caen bid them goodbye and began rolling his fragment away.

  Caen could not move through Drenlin, hauling a gigantic black ball, without getting in serious trouble with the city patrol. He’d need a permit for luggage this large. So he decided to curve around the outskirts and head back to Beslin.

  Body empowered, he ran as he pushed Chasma through stretches of open land, occasionally using the spirit receptor to steer the fragment when it rolled off course. He had to be careful, however. Chasma was spread out so thin that even a sharp rock embedded in the ground might punch through it.

  Drenlin proper was encompassed by a stone wall, but the city had long since expanded beyond that. The edge of Eastway was surrounded by large metal palisades. Some guards stationed at the entrance stopped him for questioning. After he’d engaged his Valiant tattoos and explained that he was transporting shadeling parts using an artifact, they let him go.

  The incline of the prairie required him to exert more physical force to roll Chasma onwards. He and the Chasma stopped several times to patch up holes in the fragment, or to wait for trains to pass by. The trip back to Beslin took over five hours, and getting the fragment up the stone steps was more difficult than he’d expected. He was sweating from the exertion by the time they reached the hamlet.

  After checking in with Chasma and making sure that it was alright, he left it out in front of the house to continue with its meal.

  No one was home, except for Zeris and Orissa. He could feel the weight of their presences upstairs. Caen retrieved four bedsheets from his room, then used Flora spells to stitch them together. He went back outside with the much larger sheet and draped it over Chasma. He patted the fragment fondly, expressing regard for it, and went in to freshen up.

  Caen took a quick bath, changed into fresh clothes, and sat on the meditation cushion in his room. He could easily feel Chasma through their bond.

  “The Seventh Guile That Twists Itself,” Caen said in Klakalk. “I need your assistance with something.”

  The shadeling flowed out of his shadow, and Caen connected to him.

  “You are already being masked by me,” his whispers echoed around the room.

  “I was going to ask for help with something else. I would like to observe your cloning process.”

  Caen sensed confusion and curiosity from the shadeling’s soul.

  “For what reason?”

  “Humor me,” Caen replied, a portion of his mind focusing on the shadeling’s soul structure.

  One of The Seventh Guile’s tails flowed away from the shadeling and reformed into an identical creature. There were now two six-foot-tall shadelings in his room, each with one tail, swaying in sync with one another. A cord of connection linked them to each other.

  Caen connected to the clone as well. One soul structure was clearly more significant than the other, yet they felt like the same soul to his senses. He could glean the exact same sensations from their souls, which intrigued Caen.

  “Recall your clone, please,” he requested.

  The shadeling complied.

  “Form the clone one more time,” Caen said, having already located the area of the shadeling’s soul representing this ability.

  When The Seventh Guile did as he’d asked, Caen nodded.

  “That’s enough for now. Thank you.”

  He began carefully imitating the web of thread clusters, which were even more complex than Stormsong’s. It took him nearly a minute, mostly because he kept trying to divert the changes away from his Dream-guarding affinity, but he was unable to do that.

  All his bloodlines and affinities were gone. His mind was filled with strange and vague instincts, but he wasn’t quite sure what to do.

  In many ways, this reminded him of that first time he’d Mimicked Chasma’s spirit receptor. It was like trying to move a body part that he’d never moved before, which was strange because there was no tail behind him.

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  He immersed himself in the instincts, but they were slightly garbled.

  “How do you go about making clones?” Caen asked The Seventh Guile.

  The shadeling watched him silently. “This is like asking me how I go about walking. I just do.”

  “Try explaining it however you can,” Caen encouraged.

  The Seventh Guile was quiet for some time. “Shadelings do not have shadows, as you know them. In some ways, our tails are shadows given life… extensions of ourselves. Just as you form shadows out of light, we form shadows out of our very essence.”

  Caen glanced down and confirmed that he still had a shadow. “Thank you, let me think about that for a moment,” he said to the shadeling, mind already working through the problem.

  An extension of myself...

  Despite having Mimicked the shadeling’s soul, Caen did not have a tail, and he still possessed a shadow. What exactly was he supposed to extend?

  The borrowed instincts would take him several hours to piece apart without passive augmentations.

  He reverted his soul structure and tried again to Mimic the shadeling’s still-prominent web of clusters. Directing the changes away from his Dream-guarding affinity strained his willpower. The changes wanted to take up far more of his soul structure than anything else he had Mimicked so far. Caen persisted.

  After several failed attempts, he finally redirected the changes away from Dream-guarding.

  He split his mind in four and began focusing on various parts of himself, especially on the garbled instincts. He spent long minutes examining the instincts.

  He eventually identified… something within himself. Like a pool of sorts. Or a well. Something he could draw from. It reminded him vaguely of his mana reserves, which he couldn’t feel at the moment, of course. Could he perhaps extend it out of himself?

  Caen tried interacting with it as he would with mana, and little came of that. He couldn’t channel or expel the substance, but he could move it, somehow. The substance was malleable; it could be molded.

  Some of the instincts he’d been struggling to understand suddenly made sense. He was supposed to shape this into something specific, reform it… in the likeness of himself.

  He recalled something he’d heard the shadeling say in the mirror-room about how shadows and reflections were the same thing. It was a ridiculous statement to make, but he was currently dealing in the absurd.

  Caen sought to reform the substance in his image. Not just his physical form, but the way he clearly knew himself to be. Alive, aware, receptive to magic. The instincts grew even more garbled, but he was guided by the elements of it that he could understand. He exerted his will, and as he did so, something flowed out of him and formed on the floor beside him.

  A naked, olive-skinned man with long, white hair lay there, unmoving. His hair was splayed out, covering his face. And an incredibly stable cord of connection ran between him and Caen.

  Caen could feel unfiltered shock from both The Seventh Guile and the shadeling’s clone. But his attention was on the person lying on the floor. Caen connected to him and was greeted by a frail soul structure, frailer even than a dust sprite’s. All the elements of his clone’s soul structure were terribly muted.

  “I am not sure what is going on here,” said The Seventh Guile. “You just formed a clone…”

  Caen approached said clone and turned the body over. It looked exactly like Caen, except it wasn’t breathing. No pulse or heartbeat, even. Yet the body was warm. He tried probing its mind, but the result was no different from casting Dream-guarding spells on a rock.

  “I don’t think it’s alive,” he mused to himself. “Fascinating.”

  “If you had abilities like this all along, why did you not say anything?” the shadeling asked in Klakalk.

  “This is the first time I am making a clone,” Caen said, still inspecting his look-alike. “Tell me, why do you suppose it turned out this way?”

  He could feel fearful caution from The Seventh Guile. “You followed my advice and… created a clone?”

  “Yes,” Caen said simply.

  “I… do not understand,” the shadeling said.

  “You will, eventually,” Caen answered, pointing at his unresponsive clone. “You mentioned how reflections and shadows are the same thing to you, so I tried to shape this after my own image. Perhaps, I should have included my mind and spirit in that process?”

  The Seventh Guile watched Caen silently. There were no outward signs from the creature, but Caen could sense utter bewilderment from the shadeling’s soul.

  “I have no idea what you are talking about,” the shadeling said. “What do you mean by ‘including your mind and spirit’?”

  “Let us see…you said that you form your clone out of essence,” Caen mused.

  “... yes?” the shadeling answered uncertainly.

  “Give me a moment to think about that,” Caen said, already mulling the problem over.

  He tended to think of himself as a ‘physical body’ more than anything else. His mind and spirit didn’t have as much… substantiality. When he’d been forming the clone, he’d tried to imbue the idea of his body with consciousness and magical propensity.

  But the clone had taken after the likeness of his body alone.

  He needed a much more robust and accurate template. Something more representative of ‘Caen’ than his material form. Something that incorporated both mind and spirit.

  He looked at his soul structure and smiled.