7th of Darkfall, 412 AH
Pemberton left homework, geography chapters, a list of dates to memorize, and a passage on Thornwall's founding to summarize in my own words. I set all of it on the corner of the desk and opened On the Practitioner's Art to the technique chapter.
I'd been thinking about magic through the entire lesson, through the history, the etiquette, and the marriage politics. What I wanted was the chance to try magic myself.
I picked enhancement to start, internal reinforcement. No external discharge like fire shooting from my hands, nothing that made noise or left a mark on the wall or brought Ren through the door. If I failed, the failure stayed where nobody could see or hear it.
I'd appreciate it if it worked, though. Just once.
The instructions were precise. Plant the feet shoulder-width apart. Brace the muscles from the abdomen outward. Speak the intent word. Will the mana outward through every channel at once.
I stood up from the desk and planted my feet. Tightened everything from my stomach through my chest and out toward my arms, as the illustrations showed. The stance felt like a bad impression of someone lifting something heavy. I held the image of the body strengthening, hardening, becoming more.
"Harden."
Three seconds. Five. My thighs started to ache from the stance, this was not the kind of body reinforcement I was after.
But something moved.
It started in my chest and spread outward without arriving anywhere along paths or through anything I could trace, like ink dropped into still water, expanding in every direction at once with no structure and no destination.
I held the stance and tried to follow where it went. The movement was there and then it wasn't, already dissipated into whatever mana felt like when it was doing nothing.
I dropped the stance and sat on the edge of the bed.
That was something, though not what the book described. The book said "direct the flow." There was no flow. There was a shift, brief and shapeless, and then the mana was back to being everywhere and nowhere useful.
I tried again. Adjusted the foot position wider. Tightened harder. Spoke the word with an amount of conviction that felt absurd when you were alone in a bedroom speaking at your own skeleton. If any of my old colleagues had walked in on this, feet planted, forearms flexed, saying harden out loud to my own skeleton, I'd have had to leave the field immediately.
Same result.
I tried it two more times. Then I switched to Varren's Fire because doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting a different result was a cliché I'd rather not embody. Forward stance, lead hand raised, draw mana through the arm's channel to the palm.
I planted my right foot back, raised my left hand, and willed the mana down my arm.
A pull started in my torso, faint, angled toward my shoulder. Then nothing. My hand felt exactly like it had before I started.
I tried the right hand, same stance, mirrored.
The same diffuse shift. But... slightly different. The mana in my right hand felt marginally more present than the left had. Just more aware, as if those cells were paying attention when the others had wandered off.
I stopped. Tried the left hand again. Then the right.
The right was different, faintly but consistently. Both hands had the same anatomy, the same proportions, the same ten years of doing nothing useful. So why would one answer and the other stay quiet?
Except I'd pressed my right palm into the gate ward.
Those cells had sat in concentrated external mana, even briefly. Maybe that was why they responded differently. Maybe it was nothing. But if it wasn't nothing, it was a thread I could follow.
One data point from my own body, and not the first. Blackwall's margin note had circled the same thing. Practicing near active focal points aided in opening the channels. The books knew exposure helped somehow. Though I imagine that nobody bothered to think about the exact mechanics behind it all.
Four more attempts at enhancement, adjusting the stance, the breathing, the amount of focus. Each time the mana responded with the same formless shift and each time it refused to organize into anything I could use. The instructions assumed I could isolate something, like flexing a specific muscle, and what I was actually doing was flexing my entire body, hoping the right part twitched.
The afternoon light through the window had moved while I worked, I didn't notice until I stopped and saw how far it had traveled.
I sat on the bed, books open around me, Harren on one side, Blackwall's Enhancement on the other.
My feet were cold against the stone floor. I'd kicked my shoes off at some point, which Aldric would have an opinion about. Aldric seemed to have opinions about bare feet like other people had opinions about politics.
The problem was becoming clear, and it wasn't the one I expected.
Every beginner had to feel what I was feeling, the mana going everywhere instead of anywhere. This wasn't a secret insight. This was what "learning to channel" felt like at the start. The books even said so, obliquely. "With practice, the channels clarify." "Persistence rewards the student with greater control." They knew it started vague.
Every student in this world heard "keep practicing, the channels will open" and practiced. Months, years. The mana must have started responding more directionally because they'd willed it the same way a thousand times, like walking a path through tall grass until the grass stayed down. Eventually the path felt permanent. "My channels opened," they'd say. And they'd be right, functionally. The training worked.
Nobody questioned the model because it worked.
Maybe the channels weren't anatomy at all. Maybe they were habit.
The channel maps in Harren and Blackwall hadn't traced physical structures. They marked where mana felt strongest, which meant the places with more tissue. More cells. The authors had connected those dense zones and called the lines pathways. But if mana sat in every cell, those pathways might not be structures at all. They might only be the routes generations of practitioners had trained their mana to follow.
Which didn't help me cast.
I pulled my knees up. I'd been at this for hours and I had exactly one useful observation: mana concentration matched cell density, strongest in the torso, weakest in the extremities. The books said mana "originated in the core." It didn't originate there. It was concentrated where there was more of it, because mana sat in cells and the torso had more cells than the fingers.
I had a better model and the questions to test it. I still couldn't make mana go where I wanted. For that, I needed to watch someone cast and compare the books' instructions with what a trained body actually did.
I needed someone who could cast on command and tell me exactly what they felt while the mana moved.
I need a practitioner.
A knock.
"Young master." Aldric's voice through the door. "Dinner is being served."
"Coming."
I closed the books and stacked them on the desk. The geography homework sat untouched on the corner where I'd left it, still looking very much like something a responsible recovering child would have spent his afternoon on.
Tomorrow I'd do the homework. Tonight I'd figure out how to ask for what I actually needed.