"I may or may not already have one."

(He does, in fact, have one.)

"I remember there being some other reason you wanted me to meet Vallyn," Arik comments to Taharqi. "Besides the obvious."

Vallynn's bed isn't quite large enough to hold them comfortably but when they're kind of snuggling against each other like that it works alright. "Yeah, he's exactly the right kind of nerd you need."

"...you need a nerd?"

"He said you'd have an easier time making sense of... something about where I come from? Maybe what I do? He seemed confused by most of me, honestly."

"Okay that makes me curious, what's so confusing?"

"He was raised in the mountains by an evil witch, didn't know about resurrection points when we saved him from being mauled, was told some very interesting theories about Eden, has Skills I'd never heard of before."

"...wow okay that's. A lot. 'We'?" he starts with, because that's the part of it he has the best handle on.

"Annika and me."

"Oh, so you went to visit her before me, I see how it is."

"I can explain!"

"Later, he's more interesting."

"Ouch, wounded."

"I really don't know where to start, I don't actually have a baseline here. Would you like to know about the Skills."

"Absolutely not, I will want to write them down and I don't want to uns—I am being an idiot." He peers at a satchel that's hanging from a hook on the door, and it obligingly opens itself to allow a sheaf of paper and a vial of ink to float out and hover above the bed. "Alright, carry on."

"So..." Arik closes his eyes. "It's kind of odd. Because I do have Skills, definitely. I've got Light, I've got - something about being very good with a sword, and something else about hitting people really hard with the sword when I need to, and healing, and I worked something out yesterday for making my sword more effective against the unclean beasts of - agh. Demons and undead.

"But the main thing I do, the Art. It lets me have a sword, even when I don't have a sword. And armor that isn't armor, and I can flicker through things and I've been working on control over my personal gravity. And there's more to it than that, a sword that isn't a sword can't be blocked unless you do it the right way. But those aren't Skills. They don't have a channel apiece. It's all just the Art. The Art has a channel. I can widen it as much as I want, I think; I certainly haven't hit diminishing returns. And it lets me use the Art. I do my own detail work, mostly. I know about techniques that Beuriman - um, the witch - told me about, and some of them are beyond me, but I don't hit them all at once."

"...okay that continues to be a lot," he says, not looking away from the paper where he's frantically writing things down as Ari says them. "I'm going to ignore everything you just said about 'the Art' and we can come back to it later because what, no, that makes no fucking sense, let's focus on the Skills first. Can you explain them to me one by one? And I'll have questions, probably."

"I started out good with a sword. I've widened that channel as I grow, because it seems like the kind of thing that keeps being helpful. I am now very good with a sword. That doesn't feel like one of the complicated ones. Then-"

"Wait, hold on, so when you say widen that channel you mean you've strengthened the Skill?" he interrupts to ask. "Just to make sure I get you."

"Oh. Yes. That's the phrasing Beuriman used, the 'channel'."

"Alright, okay, gotcha, carry on."

"I can focus for a second, and smite people with the sword. It hits about... twice as hard, I think, as a normal blow, the way I do it at the moment... I can heal; that one took me a while to work out. It came to me in dreams, first, I'd see myself laying hands on someone and their wounds would close, but it wasn't 'til I was cut halfway open by a fire drake that I worked out how to actually do it. I can heal my own wounds right up to the brink of death, not quite casually but without too much fuss. Other people, it's harder. Healing your friend Annika made me almost pass out on the spot."

"What's the heal like? Can you control how much you heal, or is it a single burst, or is it several bursts? How is it harder for other people, does it cost more or does it do less per cost? Also when you say 'in dreams', what's up with that? —let me not just dump a bunch of questions on you," he says, pulling out another piece of paper from the sheaf and writing down his questions on it, with large enough handwriting that it should hopefully be readable.

(The ink on the other piece of paper is also being rearranged, a little bit, and expanded upon, though not much because he can't multitask that well.)

(It's still kind of impressive, especially compared to the version of it he had back at the Academy.)

"It's best on flesh and bone, won't do much for poisons except keep you alive long enough to purge it. I've never really tried healing less than I could, I just focus on the healing, and sort of... force it all out as fast as I can? More like a single burst, but I guess it pulses a few times in there. With other people, it feels like I'm forcing it through a smaller hole, and it wavers... pulses... more.

"And the dreams. I have these dreams. I'm the same as I ever am... mostly, I think I've got a beard sometimes... but I have a real sword, a great chunk of steel, and there's a woman with me. My wife. And we're fighting together. There's others there too, sometimes, but she's the one who's always by my side. And I can do incredible things. Not the Art, but I see myself bringing back men half-dead, cutting through a troop of warriors all in the same swing. Killing a dragon the size of this building, taking its legs out one by one like chopping trees and then driving my blade through its eye, burning gold. Glory, everything drenched in glory..."

He shakes his head vigorously. "Sorry. I don't talk about them much. Apparently I say strange things when I do."