"How do I scale it," Arthur said.
Roz's ear twitched once.
"That," the ancient bellus said, "is the question I have been waiting a very long time for someone to ask correctly."
He hopped off the table and landed on the bench beside Arthur. For something that small it had a way of making the space around it feel serious.
"The redirect you produced just now, was the first layer," Roz said. "Light bends around your aetheric field. Shadow forms where the light no longer reaches. That is the foundation."
He looked up. "But foundation is not use. A wall is not a house."
"So what's the second layer."
"Projection." Roz folded his front paws. "You have been pushing your aetheric field outward to move things. Redirect light. Produce water. The field extends from you and acts on the world."
He paused. "Now you do the opposite. You collect. You compress the field inward, dense and low, until the shadow your own body casts begins to respond to it. Gather it. Shape it. Give it a form that holds without you actively pushing."
'That sounds like a lot of work for a shadow,' Vexis said from behind Arthur's shoulder. 'You could just hit someone.'
Arthur said nothing to that.
He was already looking at the ground.
His shadow stretched long across the alley stones from the afternoon sun at his back. Rough shape of a person, slightly distorted where the ground was uneven.
It had been following him around his whole life and he had never once thought about what it actually was.
Absence of light. His body in the way.
His own.
He breathed in. Found the density behind his sternum, the old heaviness left of center that he was starting to know the way you know a room you sleep in.
He didn't push it upward. He let it drop.
Slow. Downward through his chest and his stomach and into his legs and further, until he felt the aetheric field sitting low against the ground the way cold air sits at the floor of a room.
Then he compressed it.
Not outward. Inward. Like closing a fist slowly.
The shadow under his feet darkened.
Not much. Just a degree. The way a shadow deepens when a cloud moves across the sun, except there were no clouds.
He pulled the compression tighter.
The darkened patch peeled away from the edges of his actual shadow. It moved toward the center. It thickened.
Lifted, barely, a paper-thin layer of concentrated dark gathering itself off the ground like something that had just remembered it had weight.
He held his palm down toward it.
It rose.
Slow and uneven at first, edges blurring and reshaping, and then it steadied. A rough shape sitting in his palm.
Dark in a way that was different from the dark around it, the way ink in water is different from just water. Fist-sized. Dense. It didn't glow. It didn't move on its own. It just sat there being exactly what it was.
Arthur looked at it for a moment.
'Okay,' Vexis said. 'That's a little impressive. Slightly.'
Roz said nothing. He was watching.
Arthur closed his fingers partway around it. The shadow held its shape inside his loose grip, no warmer or colder than the air, no texture he could name. Just present.
"Good," Roz said. "Now the hard part."
Arthur looked at him.
Roz nodded toward the alley entrance. Past the tavern wall, the alley opened into a small side street.
Late afternoon. Long shadows from the buildings stretching across the stones, dark and natural, existing without anyone's help.
"Send it there," Roz said. "Merge it with one of the natural shadows. Your produced shadow into an existing one. If the principle holds, your aetheric field travels with it. You become a point of perception in a shadow that is not attached to your body."
Arthur looked at the alley.
Looked at the blob in his palm.
'Why would you need to do that,' Vexis said. 'You could just walk over there and look.'
"That's not the point," Arthur said.
'Then what is the point.'
Arthur didn't answer.
He looked at the shadow of the building across the alley. Long and flat on the stones, a clean dark shape from a straight wall.
Simple target.
He thought: go there.
The blob lifted off his palm.
It moved the way shadows move when the light source shifts. Smooth and silent. No sound, no flash, just a dark shape crossing the alley floor and reaching the building shadow and touching it.
For a half second nothing happened.
Then it sank in.
The edges blurred. His produced shadow and the natural shadow met and the boundary between them dissolved and there was no seam, no visible difference. Just the building's shadow on the ground, looking exactly as it had before.
Except Arthur could feel it.
A point of warmth in the dark. His own. Sitting in that shadow like a coal sitting in ash.
A square of red light appeared in front of him, hovering at eye level. He almost lost focus.
He held on.
The alley opened up.
He heard the stones before he saw them in his mind. The texture of them. The particular cold that lives at the base of walls in the afternoon.
A cat somewhere further down moving along the edge of a building. Footsteps on the street beyond, two people, one heavier than the other. The smell of the alley, which was not good.
He pushed further.
The warm point spread outward from the merged shadow, reaching along the ground toward the next shadow and the next. Connected.
His field following the dark the way water follows low ground.
The street map opened under his awareness.
Every shadow on every stone. The dark under a merchant's cart. The shadow of an awning. A doorway. A gap between two buildings.
He was in all of them, a thin layer of presence spread across the whole block, hearing and feeling everything at once.
It was extraordinary.
It lasted approximately eleven seconds.
Then his legs stopped working.
He caught the alley wall with both hands before he hit the ground. His vision went white at the edges and then gray and the gray moved fast.
His hands were cold. Not cool. Cold, and his stomach turned over hard and the nausea that followed was not the kind that comes from movement.
It came from the blood.
He knew it even through the dizziness. He could feel the density behind his sternum, the place that had been heavy and deep since he arrived in this body, and it was thin now.
Thin and flat and scraped out.
He pulled the perception back.
The connections collapsed. Each one that released made the gray at the edges recede slightly. The cat. The footsteps. The cart. The doorway.
All of it going away until there was just the alley wall under his palms and the stones under his knees and Roz standing in front of him.
He had not noticed getting to his knees.
He stayed there for a moment.
The red notification was still floating in front of him. Waiting.
He read it.
[Massive Relevance Points Acquired]
[You just created a magic that doesn't exist yet]
[+50 RP]
[The Eyes are now available]
[You are the first of your kind]
[You have been bestowed an Epithet]
[The One Who Controls the Shadows]
Arthur stared at it.
Then he looked at his hands on the alley stones. Still cold. Still shaking slightly.
He let the notification fade.
"Aetherthin State," Roz said. His voice was not alarmed. It was the voice of something that has seen this before and knows it is not the worst version of itself.
"Your aetheric blood depletes faster than it replenishes. You extended across too much terrain."
Arthur breathed.
In. Out.
The cold in his hands faded slowly. The gray at the edges of his vision pulled back to the corners and stayed there, waiting.
"If you had held that another twenty seconds," Roz said, "you would not have made it to the wall."
'You went white,' Vexis said. Quieter than his usual register. 'Your face just went completely white. I have seen people take sword wounds that looked healthier than you right now.'
Arthur put his back against the wall and sat down on the stones.
He looked at the building shadow across the alley. Still there. Still natural-looking. The merged piece of his produced shadow sitting inside it, invisible, patient.
That part had worked.
The network was the problem.
The reach.
The moment he pushed his perception outward from the anchor point and tried to connect to every surrounding shadow at once, the consumption hit something his current capacity could not hold for any useful length of time.
He filed it.
Limitation one. Anchor cost was manageable. Network cost was not. Not yet.
He looked at his hands. Color coming back slowly.
"How long to recover," he said.
"Rest of the day," Roz said. "You ran it close."
Arthur leaned his head back against the wall and looked at the sky above the alley. Late afternoon going toward evening. Twelve days left. A killer with no name.
A black market operation involving a substance that could reshape the power balance of the whole city.
And he was sitting on alley stones because he overextended a fist-sized blob of shadow.
He almost laughed.
He was still looking at the sky when a voice came from the alley entrance.
"Vex."
He turned his head.
Cael stood at the entrance. Still face. Both hands at his sides. He had not moved toward Arthur.
He was just standing there with the particular stillness of someone who has something to say. Urgently.
He was alone.
"We need to talk," Cael said.