"You're a shaper. You are a shaper. A. Shaper. Do you know how rare that it? Who even trained you? You're far too young to—no, that's not right."

Stan now knew exactly what to think of having a companion on the run. The words in his head were not polite.

"You can't have been trained. Training takes decades. Decades." She wasn't even talking to him. She was just...filling the air. "You're just too young. And crystal. You shape crystal. Nobody shapes—ah, ouch...gods dammit, why are we carrying our boots instead of wearing them?"

She wasn't carrying the boots. He was, in crystal boxes so clear they appeared to be floating.

Instead of answering, Stan paused and looked down at their feet, fully caked in mud.

"Okay, point taken. But there is a stream nearby, you know."

Min Li had the unfortunate habit of emphasizing certain words when she was excited. Or he really hoped it was only when she was excited. He couldn't recall her doing this before but then, he couldn't recall her ever talking so much before.

"Are you going to answer me? You've barely said three words since we started our journey."

Our journey. Something about the way she said that rankled him.

"Deeper first," he said in annoyed tone that edged on a growl.

The silence continued for a few minutes as they continued to weave through the trees. This part of the forest was flat with tall pines and very little brush. It made for easy walking even despite the mud and rain, which made him nervous.

Easy for them; easy for the Inquisitors. He'd need to find a different way.

"Correction: five words. You've said five words now." She somehow managed to deliver that in a perfectly flat tone while still emphasizing the word 'five'. It had to be a skill she practiced.

He winced as his foot turned on a pine cone hidden in the mud, again. She wasn't exactly wrong. Setting aside comfort, boots would make for faster travel. And he already accumulated a collection of small cuts on the bottoms of his feet.

Still, taking time to wash their feet felt like suicide by Inquisitor.

Wait, did he just emphasize a word in his head? Was it...contagious?

He increased his pace until they were both panting lightly.

"At least you mean what you say," Min Li grumbled as she struggled to keep up.

It's not like she couldn't keep pace. Stan was not a tall person. He thin, lithe even, strong but his muscle was dense and corded across a slight frame. Min Li matched him in every regard.

Which meant they both were panting too hard to have a conversation.

Win-win.

It took another hour for the rain to stop and half that again to see sunshine, bringing with it some needed warmth. Mud splatters climbed up half their leotards, most of gained from half crawling up and down the ever steeper-growing hills.

He'd long since lost tract of where the stream should be, not that he'd really been paying attention. Regret had crept up, though. His feet hurt. A lot.

Surprise slowed his feet when the tinkling of water reached his ears.

"Oh...oh, thank the Mother. I think my feet are..." She trailed off and cocked her head. "Is that what I think it is?"

A few sarcastic thoughts bubbled in his mind that he quickly suppressed, if only because actively antagonizing the woman next to him seemed like it would fall hard on him. Still, for a moment he considered steering away from the stream.

Which was stupid. Rivers were a fantastic way to hide one's tracks if you knew how. Stan's only reluctance was the fear driving him forward. That and he had no idea how long the woman beside him would take to clean herself.

Not that it mattered. She was already stalking toward the sound at a pace that beggared the one he'd set.

He stared at her for a few seconds. With a sigh, he followed after her.

---

Light folded itself into a crystal bowl. Of course, the bowl was made neither of crystal nor light, but graescent forces locked into a stable resonance. Those forces bent the light and reflected it rather like glass or crystal, thus earning its name.

Stan did not understand how it worked. He wasn't even sure what a "stable resonance" even meant. It was something he'd read in a library after he'd discovered his talent. Or, more accurately, it was a book he'd read once he learned how to read.

"I knew a shaper once," Min Li said as she dipped her feet into the water of a stream they'd found. "She was quite accomplished for her age. Thirties, I think."

He sent the bowl down and brought up water. He dumped it over his feet all at once. Runnels of mud dripped down the stone he sat on, but not nearly enough to reveal actual feet beneath the muck caked to them.

"She'd learned three shapes in less than fifteen years. They named her a prodigy and called her a national asset."

Stan snorted. A national asset indeed. He'd rather slit his throat then endure that hell.

His parents had discovered his talent at a young age. They'd fought hard to hide it. He never did learn why. As a child, he'd simply accepted it. Still, he'd been...rebellious was the wrong word. Curious. He wanted to understand this incredible part of himself. So he stole into their town library.

The bowl expanded and then elongated on one side to form a spout. He sent it back down into the water and brought up considerably more water. He carefully poured it over a foot, wriggling his toes.

"She explained to me how difficult it was to shape. It took her years to learn how to control her graescence well enough to form it into even the most basic shape. A single edge of light-blue glass, sharp enough to cut almost anything."

Cut. That's what people wanted from Shapers. Cut things. Or, more likely, people.

Maybe that's why his parents had hidden his talent, uprooting their life every time a neighbor caught even a hint of what their prodigious child could do.

Maybe that's where he learned to run.

He sent the bowl for water a third time and cleansed his other foot.

"I asked her if she could do more than one at a time. She laughed at me and said such things were all but impossible. She likened it to solving multiple advanced equations in your head all at once."

That was another thing he'd learned. The reason it took decades to become a Shaper was because it was an incredibly difficult, complex task. And humans were imprecise, intuitive creatures. Their graescent flow had to be perfect, their understanding of the mathematics governing its behavior, absolute. It was, in a sense, mathematics manifest into reality. Or so that's what the author posited.

And Stan could do it as easy as breathing.

Not the mathematics. That was incomprehensible gibberish as far as he was concerned.

Stan blinked as a thought occurred to him. The rain had stopped over an hour ago, leaving a pleasant scattering of clouds and sun dappling the forest and shading it. He glanced up at the crystal umbrella he'd forgotten was there and let it go. It dissolved, seeming to fray at the edges first, and then unravel into strips that floated for a brief moment before disappearing in a riot of refracted color.

Crystal was beautiful when it unraveled in the light.

What would a government do to learn how he did what he did? Another reason his parents kept his talent hidden.

He turned to her to find her staring at him with an inscrutable look.

"You done?"

She pulled her feet from the stream and shook off the water, all without looking away from him.

"Good. We should go. The Inquisitors won't be far behind."

He split in half the crystal box holding his acquired boots and sent a pair to rest on the stone next to her. The box dissolved into rainbows, and she took the shoes.

"They're probably too big," he said, "but better than nothing."

He shoved his feet into his pair and then stomped around a little to get used to them. After he was satisfied he wouldn't get too many blisters, he gestured at her to come over.

"This part'll be tricky."

She jumped up to the larger boulder he was standing on and gave him a dubious look. Crystal formed from the top of the stone and stretched until it met another boulder a short ways up stream. A bridge and not a simple pane of crystal either. He'd arced the surface and formed a complex network of support structures underneath it.

Min Li screwed up her face. "We're walking on it?"

"Not like that we aren't. Hold on."

He focused on the feeling of the crystal, like a smooth texture in his mind, and willed a very specific kind of dissonance into it. At least that's how he thought of it. It was the opposite of resonance, so he figured it worked since he was introducing instability in the graescence. The crystal shimmered orange.

"Citrine glass?" Min Li asked, perplexed. "I wasn't aware such a thing existed."

"Citrine? Huh, I like it."

She knew her words. And wasn't that curious.

He stepped on the bridge and walked to the other side. When she didn't immediately follow, he gestured impatiently.

She knelt and placed a hand flat on the glass. "It tingles."

"From the dissonance. Creates friction so that we don't slide all over the—are you coming? I'd rather not repeat that encounter with our friends in black."

She stood and followed reluctantly, stepping lightly and eyeing the water as though she expected to be dumped into it at any moment. Despite the urge to do exactly that, he did not dump her in the water. He wasn't lying about the Inquisitors.

He let the bridge dissolve once her feet touched the stone. Another bridge formed, mildly arcing to a set of rocks he judged sturdy enough. In this way, they walked up river, bridging between boulder and rocks or downed trees, anything he could anchor to that wouldn't give away their presence. In a way, it was as though they walked through the air.

After some time, he found a perfect tree for the next stage of their journey.

"No, absolutely not." Min Li stared at a staircase of citrine glass—he was really liking that word—leading away from the stream and up to a low hung tree branch.

"I've found trackers don't tend to look up much."

He climbed the staircase and gestured for her to follow.

"There has to be a better way," she said, shaking her head.

"Come or don't, but I'm not waiting around."

She bit her lip, looking deeply conflicted. She stepped tentative on the staircase. Then another and another, slowly growing her confidence. She placed a hand on the tree trunk and let out a slow breath he belatedly realized she'd been holding the entire ascent.

He formed a new set of stairs to another tree and walked up it, allowing the first staircase to dissolve. Min Li, stranded with only one direction to go, followed reluctantly. She kept glancing at the brush below her, which irritated him to no end. He wasn't going to drop her, dammit.

Well, not on accident, at least.

Once they were high enough, he formed simple bridges, allowing them to walk high above the thick undergrowth. Despite the effort of forming so much crystal, he found his shoulders relaxing the further they walked from their pursuers.

Min Li was not relaxed, at all. She walked carefully, uncertain, her eyes darting between the trees and him. He knew what she was thinking. Just one lapse of concentration, just one little mistake in the advanced calculus required to form such shapes, and he would dump both of them over fifty paces into the thick underbrush below.

It just wasn't advanced calculus to him. It was innate, like moving his arm. One didn't have to think much about it.

"Was she happy?" Stan asked, his pace leisurely now that they'd gained some distance. "Your shaper friend?"

Min Li startled. "I... I would imagine so, though we were never friends."

"Why?"

"...why what?"

"Why do you think she was happy?"

Min Li snorted. "Money? Respect? She's probably one of the highest paid people in the province."

"So money is what it takes to be happy?"

"No, of course not." She frowned. "It does help, though."

"What did she do?"

"Guarded the Matron."

"Ah, a guard." He couldn't quite keep the distaste from his tone.

"It's an honored position," Min Li bristled, "that raised her whole family."

"Of course it did."

She huffed, looking as though she wanted to argue. She closed her mouth instead, glancing nervously at the bridge of citrine they stood on.

"I'm not going to drop you, dammit," he growled, picking up his pace. "Come on."

They walked an hour before Stan began to feel the strain of making so much glass, like a pressure built up in his mind and body. He could still go on for quite some time, but not without needing to eat a lot of food to recover his energy.

Crystal was easier for him. Ironic that to create imperfection required so much more work, the exact opposite of every other shaper in existence. He had no doubt Min Li spoke truth about her shaper friend, who'd devoted her life to approaching a perfection he couldn't help but create naturally.

Once he found a reasonable clearing, he formed a long staircase down to it. On a whim, he added handrails, which earned him a look of gratitude from Min Li.

She visibly relaxed when her feet touched the ground.

He scowled at her. They'd literally been walking among the tree tops, a thing he'd once thought would be a great way to woo a woman. Instead, he got Min Li.

"Why are you even here?"

It really bothered him. Not just her presence, but her decision to come at all. He could certainly understand running from someone—he'd be a hypocrite if he didn't—but placing yourself in the path of Inquisitors was like jumping into the ocean to save yourself from drowning in a pool.

"Which way now?" she asked, ignoring his question as she looked around the small glade they'd stepped into.

Several paths led deeper into the forest. Stan seemed to consider them for a few moments, then chose one at random. The path was more of a suggestion of the imagination than any real trail. He formed crystal walls to carefully press back the foliage, while trying to avoid breaking it. It would have been far easier to cut a path, but he was still wary about leaving a trail.

They walked until, apparently, Min Li couldn't take it anymore.

"Where are we going?" she asked in an accusatory tone he was beginning to hate.

He paused, then point down the not-trail. "That way."

"No," she huffed, "I mean what's our destination. I cannot think of a single city, town, or village in this direction."

"This way," he replied without pausing.

She growled something incomprehensible under her breath and stomped after him. Another hour passed trudging through the undergrowth before they reach another glade. This one was long with trees lined up on either side, hinting at something like order or design that wasn't actually there.

They followed it for a while before Stan abruptly veered off to push through undergrowth again. It took a few seconds to realize Min Li was no longer following him.

He turned around and found her still standing in the glade, looking at him with an incredulous expression.

"You're lost," she accused him.

"Yep." He blinked, then turned and continued to press through the forest.

"No no no no no." She rushed to him and grabbed his arm, spinning him about. "No! Why...why would you get us lost? In a forest of all places? Where are we going to sleep?"

He glanced at a sun whose color had just begun to deepen into evening.

"The ground, probably."

Her face fell. "Noooo..."

He screwed up his face. Hadn't she ever travelled in a lessor troupe? Sleeping on the ground was all there was for them.

He shook his head and began walking again, leaving her to wallow in distress. He'd only taken a few steps before she caught up to him again.

"But why? Why would you do this?" 'To me,' seemed to be the implication.

He shrugged. "Cause they won't expect it. Or, even if they do, it's really hard to find a person lost in a forest."

"No, that's not...no, just no. We need to find a village or a town or something."

"And you don't think they'll anticipate that?"

"So we be careful."

She was emphasizing her words again.

He stopped and turned to her, giving her his full attention for once.

He spoke slowly, deliberately keeping a level tone. "There is no careful, Min Li. It's not just two people we have to avoid. Or four, I guess, with whomever's after you. And if you'd like to share why..." Her face clammed up. "Right. Well, it's their entire network. And let me tell you, Inquisitors have a very, very thorough network."

"But—"

"The only thing we can do is avoid their network," he gestured around, "until we can go where they aren't looking."

And now he was emphasizing his words. It really was contagious.

"...where is that?"

"Far, like weeks far."

Min Li pressed her face into her hands and moaned.

"How are we going to eat?" she asked through her fingers.

"Oh, there's plenty to eat in a forest."

"No—"

"You say that a lot."

"—I cannot eat only meat for weeks on end."

"...sorry?" His brow creased. "I don't know what you want from me, Min Li. I have Inquisitors after me, Inquisitors."

At least that emphasis seemed appropriate.

"You seemed to handle them easily enough. I've never heard of anyone incapacitating Inquisitors quite so quickly as you...or at all, for that matter."

He took a deep breath. Calm. Patient.

"And then what? I can handle two, sure. Four? Probably. But six, eight, ten? I don't want to escalate things, Min. I want them to leave me alone."

He spun on heel and stomped into brush, crystal pushing it back as he progressed.

"Li," she spoke quietly to his back. "My name is Min Li."

He continued for only a few minutes before stopping again and turning back to her, fuming.

"Why are you following me, anyway? You clearly know where the nearest village is or whatever. Go there and sleep in a bed and eat...not meat, or whatever. And you know what, here."

He reached over to the money folds he'd secured with a small strip of crystal, crystal that had been floating so close to his hip she hadn't realized it wasn't attached.

He thrust the money at her.

She glanced at it contemptuously. "Oh yes, I'm sure you'd love that. I'd make a perfect decoy for the Inquisitors to follow."

"That's not what I—"

"Why are they after you, Stan Li? I get that you're gifted—"

"Don't call me that," he growled.

She rolled her eyes. "Inquisitors don't go after the gifted, Stan Li, they go after..." Her faced paled.

His face blanched as a deadly silence was born between them.

"I am not one of them," he said in a thin tone filled with too much fear and pain.

She did not appear find it convincing.

He turned from her and pushed through brush again, his body leaning forward in effort as the crystal pressed back the vegetation that would normally make passage all but impossible. More impressive, he wasn't forming solid walls of crystal. They undulated around the foliage, pressing each branch back individually just enough that they wouldn't break.

He wasn't perfect, and occasionally branches did break. Yet the display demonstrated a proficiency that was all but impossible. Min Li knew there were gifted that could modify the shape of their glass, but it took decades of practice to manage the simplest changes and, generally, the practice was considered academic and impractical. Better to learn well simple shapes that could be called into existence easily.

Of course, shapers only ever made glass too, and Stan created crystal, a feat most considered theoretical.

"Were you tested?" she asked after a few minutes.

His body tensed, but he didn't stop. "I've never destroyed a town, or a village, or even a building," he said defensively. "I've never blown up or anything like what they say godlings do."

"Yeah," she said slowly, "but were you tested?"

He said nothing, which was answer enough. She matched his silence. Judging, no doubt.

He could feel her uncertainty, her suspicion, her accusation in the words she didn't speak. He was a walking bomb and anything could set him off. At any moment he could destroy everything because that's what godlings did and that's why Inquisitors hunted them.

He didn't even blame them for it. He couldn't. Godlings were a blight. They needed to be hunted down and destroyed before they could threaten all society.

He just...didn't want to die. He was scared, and the shame ate him from the inside out, a slow burning cancer that destroyed every home he tried to make.

The sun dipped into the horizon, hidden beyond their sight yet tainting the sky's blues with colors his citrine bridges could almost disappear into. He stopped at a small clearing, barely even a glade at less than ten paces in size.

Min Li watched expressionless as he put on a display that would make the most accomplished shapers green with envy, all to collect sticks into piles. It took her too long to realize what he intended.

"Won't the smoke give us away?"

"Not if there's no smoke."

Her face turned perplexed as he formed a tall, narrow cylinder of crystal with vents along the bottom. He packed it vertically with the smallest of the sticks he'd gathered. He formed a sliver of crystal above, took a deep breath, and drove the dissonance into gold.

Her brow pinched. "Yellow glass now!?"

Gold. It was...no, she was right. It was yellow.

"Don't touch it," he replied in a strained voice. "It's very abrasive."

He thrust the glass into sticks. After a few seconds, a thin line of smoke threaded its way out of the pile. He maintained the yellow even as sweat began to bead on his forehead. Finally, he saw the flicker of a flame. He let the sliver of glass dissolve, which it did quite readily.

"I don't understand. How can glass make fire?"

"Friction," he replied with a sigh, wiping his brow, "a whole lot of friction."

She cocked her head at him. "And that was hard?"

He nodded. "Yellow's not stable. Takes a lot to keep it formed."

"But crystal, the same crystal everyone says is impossible to make, that's...what, easy?"

He snorted. "Very. It's stable. Once it's formed, it takes almost nothing to keep it there."

She blinked slowly at him. "That...that's not how it works."

He shrugged, then sat down in the dirt to watch the flames grow. He kept careful eye on the smoke, ready to close off the crystal if his fire produced too much smoke. So far, the forest canopy dispersed the little smoke drifting through the leaves.

"I've never talked to another shaper before, but I think... I think it does work that way. I'm just coming at it from the other direction."

She sat down next to him. "What do you mean?"

He turned his hand palm up and formed a crystal ball above it.

"This? This took nothing to make. No no, I mean it," he said, laughing at her expression, "feeding a light takes way more graescence than forming this. The graescence this takes is so little I can't feel it leaving me at all. I'm...not sure it even is."

He concentrated a moment and the crystal turned into a light green glass.

"This is...well, I can feel it, but it's more like holding a marble in your hand. You know the weight is there, but you can ignore it."

He took a breath and focused again, turning the light green glass into a light blue.

"This is hard, like holding a large dog with one hand. I can do it, but it's a lot of effort."

He let the glass dissolve.

"And violet?" she asked.

He shook his head. "I can't really make violet. It's just too much dissonance. My shapes sometimes turn violet if I send them out of my range, but they dissolve quickly. I can't support them; they take too much graescence."

Min Li fell silent, her brow furrowed in thought. The fire had grown large enough that Stan felt comfortable adding to it. He expanded the cylinder, allowing the half-burnt twigs to drop to the bottom. He then inserted new, larger twigs to the mix. It was a careful balance. Too big and the fire would burn dirty. Too small and it would burn too quickly. He carefully watched the smoke, making sure it wouldn't plume above the forest canopy.

"You realize this changes everything? If we could just teach people how to form crystal first..."

"We could what?" He turned to her, fire in his eyes. "Kill our enemies better? Easier? We could invade other provinces with impunity, maybe? Frozen hells, perhaps we could even challenge the Empire itself!"

"That is not what I mean."

"I know. But you can't deny it's what would happen."

She didn't deny it. She stared at the fire instead, watching it grow. Stan's construct was fascinating. The crystal made the fire look as though it were floating in air, which was halfway true. But she also watched a dried leaf flutter by one of the vents as it pulled in air to feed the fire.

Such innovation from pure imagination, formed into reality with no effort at all.

What would people do with that kind of power?

"I don't want to be a weapon," he said finally in a small voice. "I just want to..."

Make art. Beauty. He wanted to dance and flip through the air; he wanted to move like those dancers; he wanted to become something to enlighten others. And yes, he wanted to use his gift; he wanted to use it to show the world a different way, a better way. Yet he couldn't put the idea into words. He wouldn't.

"You're delusional," she said as a matter of fact.

He hated her for those words, but he nodded anyway. Some dreams were too fragile to speak out loud.