Ari stared off into the distance.
She was standing on a cliff and all she could see was ocean.
Endless ocean.
She turned around and walked back to the monastery.
It was time for Work rounds and she was needed in the lab where the final step in the preparation of the brew was performed. She'd learned the techniques from her mother so many years ago that it felt like lifetimes.
Solid State Alchemy it had been called then, but terminology was constantly being updated as new theories came along and old ones were proven wrong.
She cared little for what it was called, only that it meant she could transform material components into states of matter those components would not ordinarily exist in, then in combining them with other similarly transformed ingredients, she could brew mixtures that weren't quite tea, but were ingested as such, and imbued the drinker with special effects and even in some of the rarer mixtures, special powers.
---
Ari opened her eyes.
She was back in her room in the War Abbey.
Alone.
That was not a Thread she'd ever seen before.
She was having a hard time feeling where in her personal timeline it was - obviously, it wasn't her past. She had no memory of that ever having happened. She'd clearly been in a monastery, but she wasn't at all familiar with which one as it looked like none of the ones she'd visited in her years of study.
Which meant it could only be a Thread of the Future.
But that didn't feel right, either.
Viewing Threads of the Future was fuzzy. It wasn't like visiting a memory, where'd you been there and could relive it again and again. Future Threads were tangled, thin, bits and pieces unresolved as choices had yet to be made.
This Thread, though, was as clear as any that she'd visited from her past - a number that far surpassed what other trainees in the Aleatoric Sorcery programs undertook. Visiting a Thread from her past was as easy as closing her eyes and thinking about it now. She had to take care not to Walk full into the Thread. To hold some of her consciousness back or she might influence the Threads of the Past and change her current reality, but she'd learned how to handle that over the last few years of working with Sister Tara.
But to see the future that clearly?
She'd been taught that the Threads of the Future were so fuzzy because the future wasn't fixed. As people in the present made different choices, the Threads of the Future would change. A skilled Aleatoric practitioner could tell which threads were more likely to become reality, and how to shift the probability of the various threads to lead to the desired outcome, but even in the most probable threads, there was still some fuzziness as there was no way to control all variables.
Even the gods had failed to do that.
But that Thread? Ari puzzled about it. It was her, she was certain of it. As with the Threads of her Memories, she had been consciously present - not quite in control, but there, in her future body, conscious of her own intentions. Or the intentions of her future self anyway.
She was making something powerful. A blend of enchanted plants using her mother's solid state alchemy techniques to change the properties.
She was making a Threadwalking brew.
But where was that monastery? She'd never heard of any like it before.
She had to find it.
---
Ari sat back down at her loom and looked over the current patterns of the weave.
"Yes," she said to herself, "that will work."
She began to weave a new set of threads into a previously empty spot of the tapestry she'd spent years working on.
It would take her time to connect it to the rest of the pattern, but time was something she had plenty of.
