With Los’en gone, Amy asked Dav and Sophia to explain how they got kicked out of the Registry Library. Once they explained, Amy’s only real comment was that it was just as well he’d waited until she was gone; it wouldn’t do to get blood on the records.

  After that, she was finally able to tell the others why she was called to speak with the Registry Master. It wasn’t because Los’en arrived; instead, he interrupted them while they were discussing options. They had a choice: if they wanted to get the required Abilities for Night Owl as fast as possible, they could take the Wyld Hunt Challenge in four days, then the Batcave the following day, then leave without gaining the optional In My Defense Ability.

  If Amy really wanted In My Defense, they’d need to do that Challenge instead of the Wyld Hunt. The Colors of Magic Challenge that In My Defense came from closed for a tenday per Color traced. That made it easy enough for Ermine to fit in a group that only wanted the single color In My Defense required, but the next group that was otherwise up was planning to try for four colors. That would delay things far longer than waiting for Wyld Hunt to reopen in a single tenday. They could still do the Batcave the following day.

  Registry Master Ermine’s recommendation was to take the chance and pick up the optional Ability; five options wasn’t very many when one would be a direct upgrade of Amy’s current Sphere and another would be a more generalized multi-animal shapeshifter. The rest weren’t as set, but the optional Abilities would make getting the option she wanted more likely.

  Amy admitted she’d quizzed the Registry Master for a while about the situation with the Broken Temple after that. At first, she said it wasn’t anything for a group before the first upgrade to worry about, but Amy persisted and eventually got the Registry Master to talk about the situation.

  Registry Master Ermine didn’t think the tension between the Broken Temple, Clan Aurora, and the Registry was likely to boil over in the next fourteen days. They’d arrived at an uneasy truce, with the Registry providing a relatively neutral space for the discussion between Aurora and the Templars. Master Ermine was confident it was working, now that the Broken Temple quit trying to get her to commit the Registry to fighting alongside the Templars.

  That was why she removed the carpet in the entryway. Ermine didn’t specifically support the Tower of Kestii, but she wasn’t about to cave to the Broken Temple, either.

  Amy was pretty confident that the Registry Master didn’t know she was an Aurora, though she was certain Ermine knew she supported the Tower of Kestii. Amy was even pretty sure that Los’en managed to cover his familiarity with her as if he knew her as a child of a fellow supporter of the Old Ways, rather than as a relative.

  Los’en didn’t agree that the situation would be easy to resolve, but he also thought there was time before anything would happen.

  With the recommendations of two people who knew the local situation, Amy had picked the Colors of Magic Challenge. They could change their mind in the next day or two, but if they didn’t, they needed to stay in Izel for the next fourteen days. That made it even more important that if they wanted to find Abilities from Challenges that would help Sophia and Dav change to Spheres that suited them more, they had to look.

  They were just about to head down to dinner when Dav asked a question that made Sophia facepalm at the fact that she’d missed the obvious. “If the Registry Master doesn’t know you’re from the Aurora Clan, how are you covering the entry to the Challenges, especially fast entry? You traded one with the Cloud Clan, too, so how does that work?”

  “Lan’ti handled it.” Amy rubbed her palm against her hip as she spoke. “I expect he used some of the Clan’s Challenge Tokens, or maybe his own. Modir gives them out to everyone with the right to them. That’s one of the things Uncle Los’en was supposed to be here for, to give me mine and cover the entrance fee for the Wraithwood Challenge for the Challenge Trade with the Cloud Clan. I … huh. Now I wonder if that was deliberate; if he’d covered it, it would be obvious I’m linked with my Clan.”

  Amy wrinkled her nose. She didn’t look happy. “I’ll have to pay for it. I guess we need to make some time to sell some of the stuff we’ve picked up, like the stuff from the Hungering Spark. That ought to cover it.”

  “Challenge Tokens?” Sophia was pretty sure they hadn’t been mentioned before. She’d at least half assumed that it was like the Casterville Registry, where you were paid to do things, but that didn’t make sense for the Stable Challenges. They were a reward, not a task.

  Amy nodded. “If you have a Called Sphere, even if you’re now a Professional, you agree to help in Izel’s defense if it’s needed, and you stay in Izel for a year, you get a Challenge Token that will get you into a Stable Challenge. Actually participating in a defense can get you another.”

  Amy paused to think for a moment. “The best way to get a lot of them is to bring in a Challenge Seed; once it’s placed, a portion of the slots go to the team that provided it to be used, turned into Challenge Tokens, or sold. Tokens are also handed out for any significant task in aid of the city, though some people prefer to be paid in actual cash. They can be sold, too, just like you can buy a slot in a Stable Challenge. Challenge Tokens can even let you bump another team to a later slot, but only the Registry Master can approve that.”

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  She looked down and bit her lip. “I wouldn’t have any, but Modir set aside some of the Clan’s tokens for me. One a year. That’s … well, it would get us through all of the Challenges I need to reach Night Owl even if Lan hadn’t already paid for them. It would even give us priority, letting us move ahead of anyone who hasn’t been waiting too long. What it wouldn’t get is the absolute next opportunity for anything but the Mass Challenge, where there are a lot of different groups. I don’t know what Lan’ti had to pay for that.”

  As it turned out, Amy was very, very wrong about the value of both the Hungering Spark’s tongue and the sparking partially melted knife. She’d expected them to barely cover what they needed, if they even did that.

  The man evaluating goods at the Izel Registry told her to sell them outside the Registry, because a good smith would give her far more than he could offer as long as she sold them as a pair. He even told Amy where to go. It took a couple of hours to handle the sale, but he was correct. She made enough to cover not only the Wraithwood Challenge slots but also enough to cover armor designed to last both Amy and Sophia well past their first upgrade.

  When Amy brought Sophia to see the smith the following day and she asked about incorporating the dragonscales she had in her repair kit and possibly also the ones on her slowly disintegrating armor, he wasn’t interested at first and had to test one of the scales. Once he did, he offered to handle the additional task for a very modest additional cost. It wouldn’t be ready in time for the Colors of Magic or Batcave Challenges, but he could have it ready before the Wyld Hunt Challenge.

  The rest of the time before the Colors of Magic Challenge was spent preparing for it and looking for options for both Sophia and Dav. They didn’t have much success, but Sophia was able to almost completely avoid Aric.

  She counted that as a win.

  When they finally stepped into the Colors of Magic Challenge, Sophia was floored. She’d read the descriptions, but she’d somehow expected it to actually look like being in space when it was described as floating in blackness with magical lights and colored streamers of magic. It wasn’t at all like being in space.

  They weren’t even weightless! Sophia was standing on a floor of some sort. Sure, it was black and there were strange dots and circles and pointy smears of both light and magic that were visible without an Ability that helped see magic, but they didn’t look like stars and planets. It was closer to a dream of space as seen by someone who’d never actually been outside the atmosphere than real space.

  All in all, it was a huge disappointment. Sophia hadn’t been in space in a couple of years and she’d hyped up the Challenge to herself as an opportunity to bring back fun memories and maybe fly a little. This was definitely not that.

  The magical streamers were just as difficult to categorize as a single color as the pamphlet said, at least. They seemed to change colors as they looped and swirled and dissolved and reformed. Worse, they all looked colored, not black. In the distance, it almost looked like they framed a black road, but Sophia had no idea where to step onto that road; she couldn’t see it except in the distance, where the absence of other colors made it obvious.

  That wasn’t a surprise, at least. The pamphlet on the Colors of Magic Challenge said that black was for defense and it was the hardest one to find; for any of the main colors, you simply had to get close to something headed in the direction of the color you wanted and step on it when it switched to the color you needed. For black, you had to find the streamer that didn’t glow with color. It didn’t change, but it was also always hidden by the others.

  There were some good things about the black streamer. As long as you didn’t step onto another color as it moved by, you didn’t have to worry about it changing color under you if you weren’t careful. All of the monsters would be purely defensive, too. You could even just shove them out of the way if you couldn’t get through their defenses; the worst they could do was push you around as long as you didn’t get another color involved, and they weren’t supposed to be very strong.

  All four of them searched for the black streamer. As soon as Taika yelled that he’d found it, Sophia knew that she should have expected that; Taika was the expert with colors. Of course he’d be the one to find the hard-to-see color.

  From there, it really was just a matter of walking slowly along the ribbon of darkness, one person after another. Other colors moved erratically around them and forced them to halt until the color passed. More often than not, it left something behind. About half of them were floating clouds of darkness that evaporated immediately when Sophia smacked them with a True Death Bolt, while most of the rest were basically floating crustaceans that were better dealt with by Dav’s sword.

  By the time they finished and the colored ribbons withdrew, leaving a darkly gleaming black pattern barely visible against the “floor,” Sophia was surprisingly tired. That didn’t let her get out of trying to get an Ability, but her tiredness was probably as much to blame as the fact that the pattern was barely visible for the fact that it seemed to take forever to build the surprisingly simple spellform.

  Her reward was a Spell Fragment of her Grand Spell, Part the Veil. If she understood it right, Veiled Sheath would let her reduce the effect of things that struck her by making them no more substantial than an attack by a spirit. It sounded horribly mana-hungry but also potentially very effective.

  Dav’s new Ability Fragment didn’t belong to his only Grand Ability. It was called Eldritch Elasticity and had the same sort of terrible description most of his Abilities had. “Bounce Back” wasn’t much to go on.

  Amy was far more successful; she actually managed the In My Defense Ability she was aiming for.

  Taika was even more successful, earning his first Grand Ability, Illusionary Aegis. Once again, Sophia knew she shouldn’t be surprised; this Challenge was literally perfect for Taika. They were even aiming for a defensive Ability that fit Taika’s Sphere.

  I doubt it’ll ever be relevant, but the Colors of Magic Challenge does actually offer a Grand Ability (or spell, as the case may be) that doesn’t require the sort of perfect match Taika has with the Challenge. Unfortunately, it requires solving all of the colors, which is something that Sophia and her group can’t be expected to survive at this point in their journey.

  It’s not in the pamphlet. Whether that’s because it’s never been found or because the Registry Master in place when it was found decided the information was too dangerous (because of how tempting it was) … well, either is possible.