“How is this not important?” Biddle asked, throwing his arms up in frustration.

Ezyni rolled her eyes and looked back up at him, “I never said it isn’t important, Biddle. I said it isn’t as important as my research into summoning eidolons. Imagine what we could learn from immortal beings made of Ce itself!”

“I still think Ce is a dumb name,” Biddle grumbled. “Why couldn’t we just stick with ‘magic’?”

“Because-“

“‘Because ‘magic’ is an ill-defined, colloquial term that is unsuited for scholarly use,’” Biddle interrupted, mimicking the rough voice of their master, Mirilin. “Yeah yeah yeah, I know.”

Ezyni rolled her eyes again, a slight smile on her lips, as she returned to her notes. She was working on a ritual; the pages of her notebook were absolutely filled with arcane symbols, interspersed with regular old math, passages in Common, and a few unrelated doodles.

The symbols were absolute nonsense to Biddle. That was the problem with spellcraft. Because each wizard has their own perception of Ce, their method of recording it is unique. There’s no common vernacular, which prevents wizards from easily collaborating. Once she worked the spell out on paper, she would practice it for real. Once that was done, she could translate it into sigils, a kind of universal code Mirilin had developed for sharing spells. Unfortunately, that code was far too simplistic for spellcraft.

They sat in silence for a minute, until Biddle jumped down from the table he was sitting on. “But it’s teleportation, Ez! Tel-e-por-ta-tion.” He drew each syllable out of the last word for emphasis, earning another, more annoyed smile from Ezyni.

She sighed, closed her notebook, and stood up. “Once I’m done piercing the veil between realities, I’ll help you go from there,” she pointed to one corner of the practice room they shared, “to there,” pointing at the other, “slightly faster than running.

“Until then, however, I will be in the library.” She turned and waved farewell as she left. “See ya at dinner.”

Biddle huffed and hopped back onto the table. If Ezyni was too busy, he’d just figure out teleportation on his own. All he had to do was reduce his mass to nearly nothing, launch himself at near light-speed to a precise location, then return to his normal form. Shouldn’t be too hard, right?

First, he needed to clear his head. Biddle shifted until he was sitting in the center of the table, legs crossed. He pulled a worn wooden pipe out of a belt pouch and started to pack it with a collection of dried leaves he produced from another. He lit the pipe with an uttered word and brought it to his lips, hands slightly shaking. A small part of him acknowledged the early signs of addiction, but none of that mattered when the smoke hit his lungs.

Biddle’s eyes widened. His pupils dilated, then rapidly shrank to pinpricks while his irises expanded, quickly swallowing his sclera. As they did, Biddle’s perception changed. The physical world blurred, and currents of Ce snapped into focus. The drug, Epiphany, isn’t magical in and of itself. Made from the leaves of the oko plant, Epiphany is a mental stimulant and hallucinogen used recreationally by the tabaxi of Sylanor, Biddle’s lost homeland.

Under the effects of Epiphany, Biddle was free. He could shed his preconceived notions of what should be, and instead explore what could be. Seeing is believing, and as the Illusionist, Biddle had the power to make everyone see what could be.

Biddle exhaled, letting the smoke trickle out of his mouth to hang in front of him. With a thought, the smoke swirled in multicolored patterns and shapes, his version of Ezyni’s book of symbols. The magic-infused smoke filled the room, turning the space into a canvas. From his place on the table, Biddle conducted the smoke through calculations and experiments, occasionally taking another hit of Epiphany to maintain the high.

After just half an hour, Biddle’s pipe was empty except for a small pile of ash. Had he really gone through a whole pipe? That… wasn’t good. Epiphany had become an important tool for Biddle, especially as he experimented with stronger magic. If he was developing a tolerance, he’d need to smoke more, worsening his nascent addiction. Biddle pondered this while packing his pipe again, an action so routine for him that he could let his eyes wander around the room while doing it. He noticed Ezyni’s notebook, forgotten on the table when she left. Biddle sighed, and raised the pipe again.

---

Ezyni Razor, the Conjurer, paused her reading to grab her notebook from her bag. The book she’d been working through for the past half hour, A Study of Divinity, wasn’t as helpful as she’d hoped. She had to sift through the religious fluff, which there was a lot of, to get anything useful out of the text. This passage on how belief influenced the power of “gods” was the first bit she felt worth recording.

The notebook wasn’t there. She must have left it in the practice room with Biddle. Ezyni pushed herself out of the hard wooden chair, stretched, and went to retrieve her notes. Luckily, the squat tower they lived and worked in wasn’t very big, so she was at the door in a minute or two. Hopefully the brief distraction wouldn’t derail her train of thought.

Ezyni opened the door to a wall of colorful smoke.

“Wonderful,” she said under her breath. “He’s high now.”

She took a deep breath of clean air and plunged into the room. Secondhand Epiphany smoke was mostly innocuous, but Ezyni didn’t want to breathe the stuff regardless. She squinted through the haze, eventually spotting her notebook. Not on the table where she’d left it, but floating in front of Biddle, who had recreated some of her magical notation in his weird smoke tableau.

As if sensing her gaze, Biddle turned his head to look at her. Ezyni’s breath would have caught if she wasn’t already holding it. She had seen Biddle high many times, but she’d never gotten used to his eyes. Two orbs of stormy blue, marred only by the miniscule black dots that were his pupils. The Illusionist reached his hand out to her, and in a dreamy voice, said, “I think I’ve got it. But I need your help.”

Ezyni took a moment to steel herself and, still holding her breath, took Biddle’s hand and climbed onto the table next to him.

“Luka has been working on a new spell to detect the surface thoughts of others. If I cast it while you’re thinking about your notes…” Biddle’s sentence trailed off as his focus shifted to something visible only to him, doubtless one of Epiphany’s hallucinations.

Ezyni’s eyes widened as she picked up Biddle’s line of thought. If he cast this spell on her, he might be able to understand her perception of Ce. He’d be able to absorb her work through a medium more perfect than speech and symbols. All she needed to do was expose her mind to her drug-addled, less-than-sane friend.

Biddle’s alien eyes rolled back to meet hers. “Do you trust me, Ezyni?” Biddle asked.

Biddle understood the weight of what he was asking of Ezyni, and his subconscious caused the smoke between them to gather and still. It was as if the question literally hung in the air.

Ezyni let out the breath she was holding and took another. The Epiphany smoke tickled the back of her throat and she coughed. One more steadying breath. No cough this time.

“Yes.”

Biddle cast the spell, and Ezyni immediately felt another presence in her head. It was… timid. Every time it brushed against a thought, it recoiled from it. The spell, it seemed, was like Luka, the Diviner, himself: gentle, but incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands. Ezyni presented her thoughts to Biddle through the spell. She found that she had to focus very hard on one concept or symbol for the spell to read it. Then, Biddle had to interpret what the spell was conveying and apply it to his own magic. It was working, but the process was slow and exhausting.

---

After their fifth attempt at working through a particularly difficult concept, Biddle winced as Ezyni projected raw frustration at him.

“Sorry,” she muttered.

The corner of Biddle’s mouth quirked in a weary smile. “Let’s try again.”

---

They did. When that failed, they did it again. And again. In a last ditch effort, Ezyni threw every scrap of focus she had left at the concept. Instead of directing it at the presence of the spell, she mentally followed it back to the source and shoved the thought directly into Biddle’s thick skull.

It was like a dam breaking. Ezyni’s mind flooded into Biddle’s, and his into hers, the Epiphany with it. Ezyni felt the drug take her. She screamed in pain when her eyes ripped apart and knitted together again to accommodate her rapidly expanding irises. The world was ablaze with light and shapes that refused to go away when she squeezed her eyes shut. Phantom sounds drowned out her thoughts. Ezyni tried to take a breath, but found that she couldn’t. Her body had forgotten how. Her lungs screamed for air, her vision blurred, and she began to drown in the smoke

Just before the darkness took her, Ezyni felt Biddle reach for her through the spell. She grabbed onto the spell like a lifeline, and he mentally hauled Ezyni from the depths of her thoughts. Then, she was back, sitting on the table, her hand held tight in Biddle’s.

Biddle slowly loosened his grip. “Sorry,” he whispered. “The first time is… a lot. I should have warned you.”

Not trusting herself to speak, she gave his hand a quick squeeze before letting go. Then, she slowly opened her eyes.

The room was still awash with smoky shapes and colors. Ezyni forced herself to look despite the mental strain. And… It started to make sense. The smoke swirled around her while symbols from her notebook clicked together in the rush. It was simple, really. She didn’t need to launch herself across the room in the material world. If she shifted into a bordering realm where reality was more malleable, it would be trivial to fold the physical distance over itself, then just cross over again. To the Conjurer, the barrier between realities was just an Illusion.

And just like that, Ezyni was sitting on the floor in a rapidly dissipating cloud of mist. Thirty feet away from the table she was on a moment ago. Her face split into a wide, slightly manic grin, mirrored by Biddle’s own. They were going to make one hell of an entrance at dinner.