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((The Wednesday Triple: page 1 of 3))
For a time, Hector merely sat there, mulling over what he’d just done. He supposed the only explanation was that his degree of control over iron was simply higher than he’d realized. Granted, he had lost control there at the end, but the point of interest was how fast the cubes had gotten before escaping him, not to mention how many revolutions around him that they had made.

It was true that he hadn’t tested the limits of his materialization in a while. And had he achieved emergence recently? He didn’t think so, but as he thought about it, he realized that he wasn’t actually sure--a thought which he found slightly worrisome. Shouldn’t that have been something he could be certain about? Maybe this was all just the result of meditation. Or Rasalased’s “tempering,” perhaps.

Or both?

Agh. He couldn’t help feeling like he was losing himself, somehow. He wished he had more time to practice, to fully understand his current limits. He hated this feeling of unpreparedness. And he’d been feeling it all too often, lately.

He stood. If nothing else, he wanted to use what time he did have as efficiently as possible, and it occurred to him that he should perhaps locate the iron cubes and see what kind of state they were in before trying to draw any further conclusions.

It took a bit of searching, but he found them on the ground in front of an apparent sleeping quarters, having penetrated a second wall beyond the first and left a pair of cracked dents in a third.

He was surprised, however, to find that the cubes were no longer cubes at all. But after thinking about it more, he supposed that only made sense. When he’d lost control, they’d become distorted, because his control was the only thing making them hold their shape.

...And perhaps that was important to know. He squinted as he eyed the dents in the wall before him another time.