After everyone finished greeting each other, it was finally time to pick up where Adrian's lessons had been so rudely interrupted back in Paris.
"So, how much do you actually know already?" Max asked, dropping into the chair beside Eric.
Adrian took a moment to think, mentally sorting through the last hour's flood of information. "Okay, uh. Charms. A little about mystical and dreadful relics. Pathways, sort of. I've heard the word 'uniqueness' thrown around, but nobody's actually explained it yet. Aura basics, how awakening works, the whole subconscious-taking-over-your-body thing, which, cool, love that for me. Ranks. A bit of history. The three regions, the universal walls, the four great bodies."
Visie nodded, clearly impressed. "Not bad. That's most of the essentials, actually." She tilted her head slightly, studying him. "Do you know anything about sub-pathways? Unofficial or Minor pathways?"
Adrian shook his head. The little cherry-colored bubble drifted lazily near his shoulder, undisturbed.
Visie raised her hand, and a stream of white liquid flecked with tiny black particles poured from her palm onto the table, spreading and shaping itself under her will into thirty thin strings, each one ending in a small glowing ball. From every ball, three smaller threads branched outward, thinner still, trailing off without any endpoint of their own.
"There are thirty pathways total in the universe," she said, and the point she referenced lit up briefly on the table as she spoke. "These are the primary, or official, pathways. You can tell them apart from unofficial ones just by how they look up in the Layer of Natural Aura. Primary pathways have more Auras and more Walkers belonging to them, so naturally their regions come out bigger, denser. They've also got clear boundaries separating them from everything else."
"What are the boundaries, exactly?" Adrian asked, arms folding as he leaned in.
Visie shrugged lightly. "No idea, honestly. We're only Lysi Novas. That kind of knowledge is sitting well above our pay grade." She caught his slightly deflated look and smiled, something teasing creeping into it as she leaned forward across the table, resting her chin on one hand. "Don't look so disappointed, cutie. Plenty of mysteries left for you to solve when you're older and stronger." She finished the line with a slow, deliberate wink.
Adrian's brain short-circuited on the spot.
"Visie," Eric said flatly, not even looking up.
"What? I'm being encouraging."
"You're being a menace."
"Same thing, really."
Max snorted into his own hand, badly failing to disguise a laugh as a cough. "Careful, Adrian, she'll have you falling head over heels in about eleven seconds flat. Ask me how I know."
"I did NOT—" Adrian's voice cracked halfway through the sentence, the bubble flushing a deep, humiliated red. "That was completely different! You tricked me! That doesn't count!"
"Sure, sure." Max grinned, entirely unrepentant. "That's exactly what falling for it looks like, by the way. Denial's step one."
"I am not FALLING for ANYTHING, I am simply—" Adrian floundered, gesturing vaguely at Visie, at himself, at the general concept of dignity currently evaporating in front of everyone. "I am processing information! Academically!"
Visie's grin only widened at that, clearly delighted, and she gave him a small, unbothered shrug before continuing, as though she hadn't just single-handedly demolished the poor boy's composure. "Anyway. Unofficial pathways don't have sub-pathways at all. Their regions stay small, boundless, thin, and they're constantly getting pulled around by the influence of whichever primary pathway sits closest to them."
Adrian nodded quickly, several times too many, desperately grateful for the subject change, though his ears stayed a stubborn shade of red for a good while longer.
Visie's palm shifted, and the three thin strands trailing off the first ball on the table began to glow one by one as she spoke.
"Every pathway splits into three sub-pathways," she said. "Small, specialized branches that carve up its powers into distinct facets. Every Aura user ends up sorted into one of those three, whether they realize it or not. You, for instance, Destruction Aura, Apocalypse pathway. That splits into three: Luck, which covers possibility, probability, misfortune, randomness. Chaos, which covers disorder, catastrophe, cataclysm, destruction. And Disaster, which covers exactly what it sounds like: natural or man-made."
Something cold settled into Adrian's chest with each word.
Destruction. Chaos. Disaster. Every single facet of his own pathway sounded like something ripped straight out of a villain's origin story, and the longer she talked, the harder it became to shake the question forming somewhere deep in his gut. Was that actually him, underneath everything? Some quiet, waiting reservoir of hatred he hadn't even known was there, patient enough to sit hidden his entire life until the universe decided to hand him a name for it? If he, someone who considered himself pretty normal, pretty calm, had ended up here, what did that make everyone else in this pathway? What did it make him, eventually?
He pictured it without meaning to. Buildings collapsing. Screaming. Some future, unrecognizable version of himself standing in the middle of it all, calm, satisfied, exactly the kind of monster every story he'd ever grown up on had trained him to fear becoming.
He went quiet, and it didn't take long for Max to notice.
"Hey." Max nudged him lightly with an elbow, voice dropping out of its usual joking register. "Don't spiral on me. Most Apocalypse Pathway users I've met are actually pretty chill people. A little bottled-up, sure; everybody's got something simmering under the surface, but chill. It is not exactly a pathway full of lunatics plotting the end of the world over breakfast. Can't speak for what happens once someone gets seriously strong in it, though, but that's a problem for future-you. Present-you's fine."
Adrian let out a slow breath, some of the tension easing out of his shoulders, though not all of it.
"Okay," he said, mostly to convince himself. "Okay. Cool. I am not doomed. Great." He shook his head slightly, forcing his focus back onto the table. "So what are the sub-pathways for everyone else? If every pathway's got three, and there's thirty total pathways, that's, what, a hundred and twenty pathways total?"
"That number only grows," Eric said quietly, not looking up from the charm he was still turning over between his fingers. He hadn't meant to say anything at all, apparently, judging by how briefly he glanced up afterward, like the words had escaped before he'd properly decided to release them.
"There's a lot to cover," Visie added, catching Adrian's attention again. "Every pathway shapes a completely different philosophy, a different worldview, honestly. I could talk your ear off about all thirty for the rest of the night, but we genuinely don't have that kind of time tonight. I'll get you a book instead; it has everything laid out properly. Powers, philosophy, sub-pathways, uniquenesses, all of it."
"A book." Adrian perked up slightly. "Like an actual book, or one of those weird floating knowledge things that just downloads straight into my brain?"
"An actual book with physical pages. You'll survive."
"Damn. I was hoping for the download option."
"Life's cruel that way." Visie's mouth curved into a small smile before she continued. "Next question?"
"How do new pathways even form in the first place?"
She took a slow breath, gathering her thoughts. "There are two kinds of primary pathways. Origin pathways, which start as Minor Pathways and eventually earn their way up. And derived pathways, which split off from the existing ones entirely." She paused, tapping one of the balls on the table lightly. "Every origin pathway grows its own sub-pathways over time, and if one of those sub-pathways keeps expanding- more Aura users, more distinct Auras- it eventually hits a breaking point. After crossing a certain threshold, the sub-pathway splits off entirely, becomes its own primary pathway. Beauty Pathway's a good example. It used to just be a sub-pathway under Deceiver, before it broke off on its own."
"So pathways just... give birth to other pathways."
"Basically, yeah."
"That's simultaneously the coolest and weirdest thing I've heard today, and today has had a lot of competition."
Visie laughed at that, genuine and unguarded, before Adrian's mind snagged on something else entirely, a word he'd caught bouncing around in conversation more than once without ever quite understanding it.
"Okay, actual question now," he said. "Eric keeps saying 'uniqueness' like it's supposed to mean something obvious. What is that?"
Something in Visie's expression softened at the question, a flicker of quiet fondness passing behind her eyes that had nothing to do with teasing this time. There was something about his relentless curiosity that tugged at an old, familiar memory, some version of herself from years back, sitting in this exact tent, asking exactly this many questions, wide-eyed and hungry to understand everything about a world that had just cracked open in front of her.
"Uniquenesses are passive traits," she said, warmth creeping into her voice now, "little enhancements every pathway grants its Aura users, on top of the actual Aura itself. Every pathway hands out a set number of them, and they get stronger and more numerous as you climb ranks. Most common example: premonition. Different pathways give different flavors of it. For you, that'd be a premonition tied to disaster, danger, misfortune."
"Wait, so that's why I felt that gut-drop thing right before we got followed earlier?"
"Exactly that. Your Aura was already trying to warn you before you consciously clocked it."
"That's so cool," Adrian said, grinning now, some of the earlier heaviness finally fading from his expression. "Okay, keep going. What else?"
Adrian nodded slowly, absorbing it, when something else surfaced in his mind, a detail that had been sitting quietly in the back of his thoughts since the café.
"Wait, actually, hold on." He straightened slightly. "Eric mentioned something earlier: that an Aura user can have two primary Auras. One's the natural one, and there's another way to get a second. Is there more to that?"
Visie's mouth curved into a small, pleased smile, resting her chin against her palm as she studied him. "There is, and good catch remembering that detail through everything else I've thrown at you tonight." She tilted her head. "You're sharp, you know that? I wouldn't have blinked twice if someone told me you were secretly Knowledge Pathway."
Adrian felt nothing in particular at the compliment; he was too focused on the question itself to register it properly. The little cherry bubble drifting near his shoulder, however, flickered briefly into pink before settling back into its usual color, a small, private reaction entirely on his behalf.
"The thing you want to ask about is the Law of Aura Symbiosis." Visie continued, straightening up and gesturing loosely at the thirty glowing points still scattered across the table, "Among the thirty pathways, some are synonymous with each other, some are antonymous, and the rest sit neutral. Let's use you as the example, since you're already sitting right here. Say you're Apocalypse Pathway, and you go looking for a second primary Aura. Best case scenario? Another Apocalypse Aura. Two Auras from the same pathway reinforce each other hard: a fifty percent power boost, both ways."
"Fifty percent," Adrian repeated, eyes widening slightly. "That's insane."
"It is. But say you can't find one, or you want more range instead of raw power. Next best option's a synonymous pathway. For Apocalypse, that'd be War, Time, Death, or Weapon. They are different enough to diversify what you can actually do, but similar enough in nature that the two Auras still get along. Twenty-five percent buff, both directions."
"Okay, that's still really good."
"It's solid, yeah. Now the bad end of it. Antonymous pathways. For Apocalypse, that's Justice and Birth. Grab an Aura from either of those, and the two sit in genuine conflict with each other, actively working against one another. Twenty-five percent penalty to both, easily." She paused, letting that sink in before adding, more gravely, "And if the two pathways are true opposites, not just antonymous but extreme antonyms, Life and Death, Light and Darkness, that penalty can climb all the way to fifty percent. Basically sabotaging yourself on purpose."
"Why would anyone even do that, then?"
"Desperation, mostly. Sometimes it's the only Aura available to them at the time, or there's a specific effect they need badly enough that the penalty's worth eating." She shrugged. "And everything that isn't synonymous or antonymous just falls into neutral. No friction, but no buff either. Completely indifferent to each other."
She reached for a glass of water sitting nearby and drained half of it in one long go, exhaling afterward with the particular relief of someone who'd been talking far longer than she'd originally planned to.
"Okay," Adrian said slowly, mind still turning everything over, cataloging it somewhere alongside the mountain of other information he'd absorbed today. He opened his mouth to ask something else, paused, considered the growing, dull ache building steadily behind his eyes, and reconsidered.
"One more," he said instead. "Last one, I promise. What about relics? Like, actual relics, not charms. How do those factor into all this?"
His head was pounding by now, thick with everything he'd taken in over the past few hours, cosmology and ranks and pathways and buffs stacked on top of each other in a way that made thinking feel physically effortful. And yet, underneath the ache, something else sat there too, quiet and steady and entirely new. Something that felt, against all odds, a lot like excitement.