She handed him the empty scroll case. He was no stranger to the arcane, but the taint of mantic sight wasn't something controlled just by learned skill. Since her first so-called successful attempt, traces of the sight had never left her, and summoning it had never worked out well.
"It's not like what you do," she said. "More just intent, wishing, and focus… It's hard to explain."
And she didn't care to, especially not with how she used the memory of Chap as a means to summon her sight. When she lifted her head, Chane stood over her, arms crossed.
"No more arguments," she warned.
He stepped back, giving her space to lay out the scroll upon the floor.
Wynn pushed all thoughts from her mind. Domin il'Sänke had taught her tricks as well—not true ritual or spellcraft but some of their trappings. But even that hadn't been any use in ending the sight once it came. With her right first finger, Wynn traced a sign for elemental Spirit on the floor and then encircled it.
At each gesture she envisioned the pattern in her mind, as if actually drawn upon the stone. She scooted forward, kneeling upon the imagined symbol and circle, and then traced a wider circumference around herself. A simple pattern, but it helped bring her into focus and shut out the world for a needed moment.
Remaining still, Wynn closed her eyes.
She focused upon letting the world fill her with its presence and tried to feel for a trace of Spirit in all things, starting first with herself. Then she imagined breathing it in from the air, feeling it flow upward from the floor's stone. In her darkened sight, she held on to the first simple pattern stroked upon the floor.
Wynn called up—constructed—an image of Chap, just as she'd once seen him in her mantic sight, his fur shimmering as if made of a million silk threads. His whole body was encased in white vapors that rose like flame from his form.
Moments stretched on tediously, one after another.
An ache in her knees threatened her concentration.
She tried hard to hold on to Chap's image… to hold him there behind the envisioned circle around the symbol of Spirit. Until vertigo came—and nausea—in the dark behind her closed eyes.
"Wynn?"
She felt as if she were falling and threw out her hands.
They slapped hard against cold stone, jarring her shoulders, but she stopped herself from slamming face-first into the floor. In fright, Wynn opened her eyes too quickly.
Nausea lurched up her throat, and she gagged.
A translucent mist of white, just shy of blue, permeated every dimly lit object in the room. It covered everything in a second view of the world overlaying her normal sight… smothering her normal sight.
"Wynn!"
She raised a hand, weakly waving Chane off, but she didn't dare look up at him. She didn't want to see him with mantic sight. Turning her head the other way, a beacon of bluish light atop the bed nearly blinded her.
Beneath that brilliance was Shade's own shape and dark color. Her Fay-imbued body glowed more powerfully than anything around Wynn. But where Shade's father had been a blaze of fiery silken threads for fur, Shade was a wolf of night overlaid with a burning aura that hurt Wynn's eyes.
Shade lowered her head, her eyes like blue gemstones held before the sun, and her wet nose touched Wynn's cheek. So close to Wynn's face, Shade's light grew too intense, and Wynn flinched her head the other way.
Chane filled up her sight.
Wynn recoiled from him and then stared in shock.
Back when she'd first summoned mantic sight in Pudúrlatsat, she'd seen shadows. Small ribbons of black had flowed through Magiere's living flesh. And Vordana, the walking corpse of a sorcerer, had been pure blackness within. All the mists of Spirit had drifted toward him like an ebbing tide to be swallowed within his inner black silhouette.
And Chane…
He'd come for her when Vordana had cornered her in the town's smithy. She hadn't seen whether the mists were swallowed into him as well. But he'd been so black within, so devoid of elemental Spirit, that she could barely make him out in the forge's darkness.
But now he was just Chane.
There was no darkness, no shadow copy of his flesh—and no ghostly duplicate of blue-white mist permeating him, either. He looked exactly as he had before she began straining to call up mantic sight.
"Are you all right?" he demanded, crouching low to study her face, her eyes. "Did it work?"
His appearance, so untouched by Spirit, worried Wynn. She glanced at his left hand braced upon the floor.
The ring was gone.
She didn't remember seeing him take it off, and he wouldn't have, if it hid him from Shade's awareness. Nausea rolled through Wynn's stomach, and she clutched her mouth.
"Yes… it worked," she managed to get out.
Her doubled view of the world made her so dizzy and sickened. She wondered if she would be able to see anything in this state as she panned her gaze to the scroll.
It was not completely black anymore.
