Staring at the thick stone walls of the room, its gray surface just as smooth as some river rocks, Aurora twisted her fingers, tail stiffly swaying back and forth. It had finally arrived. The day Aurora has prepared for over the past five years, and if all went well, she could finally practice magic.

She and her parents were at least fifty meters beneath the surface, as mandated for any attuning that took place in a city. Not that there were many safe places to attune outside of a city anymore. At least the walls help contain energies from attuned items, and there isn’t a fee to use a room. Not that her parents couldn’t afford one. Despite the lack of light fixtures, a gentle glow emanated from the smooth ceiling, cleanly illuminating the entire room.

As her mother delicately placed a gilded bracelet which was continually contorted in a perpetually changing pattern in the ring around the center of the otherwise empty room, the fur of her mom’s iridescent tail stood on end, much like that of her father’s coal-colored tail. He had already placed down a few illusion-attuned items around where she would be sitting, closer than the space-attuned objects like the bracelet. 

The items emitted a palpitating aura, the space around the ring of objects quivering. A hand mirror, a crystalline eyeball, a blank mask, and a shriveled heart far too deformed to be from a humanoid were only a few of the expensive objects. The items weren’t required, but they would help bolster her odds of attuning to space, albeit only slightly.

“Aurora, are you sure you’re fully prepared?” her mother, Iris, asked, eyes tearing up. “We can always wait another week if you don’t think you’re ready today.”

“That’s right,” her father, Ignis, commented, “there’s no pressure to attune right this instant, if you need to wait longer.”

Aurora took a deep breath; they had kindly told her that every day over the past month, but today was the day. She’d long since memorized everything she needed to know, could recite her top hundred list of attunements better than her own name, and felt far better rested than ever before after her parents hired a young mage to put her in a deep sleep last night. Originally she planned to attune yesterday, but laid in bed the entirety of the night in fear and anticipation, unable to get a wink of sleep.

“I know, but I think I’m as prepared as I’ll ever be. I don’t want to wait any longer,” Aurora said, clenching her hands together to keep them from shaking. She didn’t expect to be among the third who died during the process, but then again, no one did. 

Her mother phased in front of Aurora faster than her eyes could follow before wrapping her arms and her silky smooth tail around her in a gentle hug. Her father joined in a moment later.

“We love you, you know,” Iris murmured, “you’ve made us very proud, and I’m sure you’ll get a good class after everything you’ve done.”

“I’m sure you’ll be able to attune to space and illusion, even with our harmonization,” Ignis gently chimed in, his tail squeezing slightly tighter.

A few minutes later when her tear-soaked parents, Aurora smiled. “I love you both, too. You’re the best parents I could ever ask for.”

The kitsunes’ eyes grew moist, and the three of them stood in silence for a moment. The aura from the objects near the room’s center gradually expanded, slowly pulsing as if in mockery of a heartbeat, until sharp inhalation from Iris broke the silence. “Do you want us to leave the room now, so you can start?” she asked, voice cracking.

“I- I just need another minute,” Aurora stammered, before taking a step forward and hugging them again as tightly as she could manage. They stayed in the embrace for a couple minutes again, yet it only felt like a brief moment when Aurora stepped back, wiping off her wet cheeks on her black and purple jacket sleeve. “I think… I think I’m ready now.”

“We love you, Aurora,” her father said, “and I’m confident that you’ll survive. We’ll see you in a few hours.” Her parents slowly strode to the door chiseled into the otherwise blank stone wall, maintaining eye contact. As they stepped in front of it, the door smoothly melted into the ground like butter, and Ignis stepped through, his tail vanishing from sight moments later.

Iris turned back to look at Aurora, her glimmering rainbow eyes watering. “Don’t forget, if you see even an iota of void during your attuning, your utmost priority is to quash that as quickly as possible”—she paused, her tail stiffly gliding back and forth behind her—“before it can grow, even if you have to forsake a space attunement to do so. Attuning to void isn’t much better than dying.”

Aurora’s mother was on the other side of the door before she could blink, and the view of her vibrant, ever changing tail was swiftly obscured by the door springing back up again, just as solid as the walls around her. Aurora stared at the door, its stone surface engraved with depictions of a myriad of races, from kitsunes to elves. The only thing in the entire room that was detailed.

Hands trembling, the kitsune shifted her eyes to the center of the room, which the mana from the space and illusion items filled. Aurora would walk out of this room triumphant, with one of her dreams potentially accomplished, maybe crushed from having to fully attune to illusion, or she wouldn’t be alive any longer. Her parents had already lost their first child during his attuning decades before Aurora was born, and she dearly hoped she wouldn’t leave them with another fresh hole in their hearts.

The energies filling the center of the room weren’t exactly visible, yet there was a visible distortion present in the region, a twisting and stretching of space that was just enough so things didn’t look quite right. From the few illusion items, there were occasional bursts of color out of nothing and a couple areas of the floor that were guised as tree bark, but nothing else out of place. 

Aurora pulled up her status and skills; if all went well, this would be the last time she saw them like this, as they have been for the past seventeen years.

Name: Aurora Dreamfire
Class: [Locked]
Subclass: [Locked]
Species: Kitsune
Attunements: None

Innate Skills (1/1):

Phantasmal (Racial) - As a Kitsune, you are Harmonized to Illusion. In addition, all illusion-related abilities have their cost reduced by 25%.

With a stiff tail and a pounding heart, Aurora took one step forward, then another. She walked into the mass of energies, where the distance each step moved her across the stone floor was slightly off, her shoes not making contact with the floor the way they normally should as she stepped over the ring of space-attuned items, over a two-faced mask her father placed, before she stood in the center of the room far too quickly. As she sat down, legs trembling, Aurora took a glance at the door her parents were surely waiting on the other side of, and noticed, tucked away in a corner of the engravings, a phoenix.

Her eyes dwelled on it for a brief moment before she carefully laid down on the unyielding floor. It wasn’t comfortable, and the base of her tail was pressed into the ground, so she shifted onto her side for the moment. Bringing her tail around to her front, Aurora squeezed it tightly, pressing the fur against her face. Her physical comfort wouldn’t matter once everything began, but it was still nice in the moment.

With the space around her contorting, Aurora anxiously closed her eyes, focusing inwards. Out of everything she did to prepare for her attuning, learning how to perceive her soul was one of the least difficult, surprisingly. She could only begin to vaguely perceive the exterior, but the people who could glimpse beyond the soul’s shell and peer into the interior, the very core of someone’s being, were few and far between. The ones who stayed sane were even fewer.

Her soul didn’t look any different from any other unattuned soul from the outside. Merely a featureless, colorless sphere. Nothing surrounded it, nothing at all. Not even empty space. Her soul was anchored to her body—more specifically her brain—yet she couldn’t perceive anything else while looking at her soul, both spiritually and physically.

Tearing her mind’s eye away from her soul, Aurora opened her violet eyes. She drank in the various scenes engraved on the stone door again, relishing in the sight of every single artifact her parents purchased just to give her the slightest edge in her attuning. She reluctantly closed her eyes minutes later. If something went wrong, that would be the last thing she ever saw. Shuddering from the thought of her parents only finding her cold, lifeless corpse, Aurora focused back onto her soul.

In order to complete her attuning, she needs to expose her soul to outside influences, where it temporarily becomes malleable for a brief period of time. Thousands upon thousands of different types of mana pour into the exterior of the soul in varying amounts, and her soul will begin to be molded by them as they gradually, painfully creep deeper. When that begins, she’s on a timer. If her attuning takes too long, the various mana types will react with each other more and more violently, and tear her outer soul to shreds, killing her on the spot.

Aurora needs to swiftly identify the type of mana she wants and make it grow, forcibly unattuning the surrounding regions of her soul. She needs to have her soul fully become one attunement, or find equilibrium with a select few, so that the inner region of her soul can grow to match that balance. If she accomplishes that successfully, Aurora will gain system access, with the ability to gain skills, classes, and level. Many people go through their lives without risking an attuning, but while they didn’t have to risk dying as a third of those who attune do, they rarely grow beyond the circumstances they’re born into.

Aurora’s dream has been to attune to space and illusion; the thought of it practically made her salivate. Attuning to illusion was significantly easier for her because of her racial skill’s harmonization to illusion, which was a blessing for her. Illusion could take hold on her soul far easier than other attunements, smoothing her attunement significantly, and practically guaranteeing she’d get illusion, at least. Even with all of her preparations, however, space has always been notoriously difficult to attune to. She could still dream, though. Failing space, Aurora’s other top picks were light, crystal, air, life, iridescence, and inferno, the last two being her mother and father’s attunements, respectively.

Clenching her sweaty palms, Aurora took a deep breath, her mind’s eye fixed on her soul, and willed that her soul be unsheltered from the world, that she would begin her attuning, and let the next few hours determine the trajectory of the rest of her life, or if she’ll lose it today.

The thought was nerve wracking, yet Aurora couldn’t help but feel a glimmer of excitement. If she attuned to space, not only would she be extremely well-equipped to fight both fragments and void mages, she could also take a subclass that would let her research the underlying makeup of reality, and how space could tie into it. After the Voidfather, no nation could get enough combatants or researchers in those fields. She’d make the choice when the time came around, but maybe she'd take something related to exploring instead. After all, she and her friend Honora had fantasized about that so much; teleporting across the world at a whim, the perils of trekking between nations on foot unknown to them. Aurora could explore the world in a way that would otherwise be denied to her.

Do you wish to Attune?

Not only that, but she might be able to stand by her parents—strong as they are—on equal footing one day. If she didn’t die. As the system-imposed question reverberated through her mind, the exterior of Aurora’s soul trembled ever so slightly. With her tail moving back and forth, stiff as a log, and her body soaked in sweat, Aurora willed for her attuning to begin. Without any fanfare, where her perception of reality halted at the edge of her soul, there suddenly was more. 

Mana, having been denied access for so long, flooded into her soul, which absorbed it like a sponge. The very fabric of her being was permeated by all varieties of mana, each seeking purchase on her soul and clashing with their surroundings. Its surface was seized by a myriad of colors, textures, and sensations. Her soul was unsheltered by the barrier that had kept it isolated, and the thousands upon thousands of affinities fought for dominance as they began to slowly seep deeper.

A scream slipped through the kitsune’s lips.