Chapter 192: Book 3: Call and Response
It had been a long time since He-Who-Guards had attempted a phase shift.
The first phase shift was usually something that occurred almost at random. When a practitioner's Firmament reached the right state—when they were sufficiently in tune with both themselves and their power—the base, foundational layer of their core would evolve. Any practitioner nearby, if they were willing, could donate samples of their own Firmament to help with this process, influencing that base layer of the core in turn.
Guard remembered legends about this, even. Legends that a long, long time ago, ancient practitioners would sequester themselves away with powerful imbued artifacts for precisely this reason. They didn't need donors if they could use those artifacts instead, and they wanted their first shift to be something that matched whatever their plans were for the growth of their power. Someone who was wealthy enough might, for instance, carry an imbued lightning stone into a deep cave and meditate until they struck their first shift.
It was different these days, of course. For one thing, imbued artifacts weren't nearly so easy to acquire anymore, and even those that could be acquired were relatively weak. Shifts were not nearly as easy to predict in terms of when they would happen. As a result, most practitioners made do with whatever they had when the shift triggered.
And then there was He-Who-Guards. It was a little different for him.
Failing that first shift wasn't unheard of. It was common, even. The process often required a practitioner to do battle within their own cores against a daemon created from their own Firmament. More often than not, a first-time practitioner would lose that fight.
As He-Who-Guards had.
His first shift had triggered early in his life, when he was little more than a wispling. He'd lost that fight almost immediately—hadn't even known what was going on, for the most part. But a failure to complete the first shift didn't make for a permanent failure; the Firmament donations were locked in place, but a practitioner could always rest and try again.
Guard had tried it at least a dozen times over the course of his formative years, and he'd never once won.