11th of Darkfall, 412 AH
The body in the mirror was mine now in a way it hadn't been a week ago.
My balance was automatic now and my reach precise with the pain being only a memory now. The healer had finally signed off on supervised training. For the last week, that was all I'd cared about.
And there'd been the nights spent working on mana. Most of the difficulty was making it go somewhere. I'd lean my will against it, then the mana would budge a fraction, drift maybe a finger's width up the forearm, hold there for a moment, then fray out every time. Moving it was the wall, and progress had been microscopic.
So, formal training. Finally.
The knock came while Aldric was minding the wardrobe. I'd had a picture in my head, some retired soldier, broad, scarred, a voice like a parade ground. The woman in the doorway was old and unhurried. A single long white braid down to her waist, dark plain clothes well made and without one ornament on them. Her eyes though, pale silver-grey, the pupils vertical and a touch narrowed in the lamplight. When she turned her head I could see the tapered points of her ears. Feline.
I wanted, immediately and inconveniently, to take her apart so I could see how she was put together. I had just enough sense left to keep that off my face.
"You're the boy I've been hearing about," she said. Her voice arrived after a small pause. "Sera's brother. Your mother's put you on my schedule, and the healer's cleared you, so we'll start." I nodded. "I'm Vael. Follow me. There's something I'd rather show you than describe."
This was my new teacher then.
She led me down. Not toward the yard where I'd half-thought training would be, but down, through a service stair I'd never had reason to use, the warm corridors giving over to plain stone as we descended.
As we went, I felt a change in the air. Sort of like pressure increasing on my skin. A faint prickling of mana in the air was becoming noticeable enough to feel on the skin as increased sensitivity, similar to the air before a storm hits. The feeling thickened as we went down the stairs, with the hair on my arms stood up.
"You feel it?" Vael said over her shoulder, not slowing. "The estate keeps its mana down here. Up there what runs in the walls is drawn out thin, spread to reach everything, while down here it's concentrated. The body opens its channels faster against a strong field of mana. Easier to learn the shape of a current standing in the river than guessing at it from the bank." A few steps. "Most nobles do their early opening like this."
She'd reasoned it out for me instead of making me guess. A teacher, then, and the kind I could use.
The stair ended at a door, iron-banded, set deep into the stone. She opened it. Ren came through with us, and put her back to the wall just inside.
The room had no windows. Every surface was engraved, fine grooves cut into the stone across walls and floor, all of it running toward a single point at the center, pooling there. On a low stone pedestal at that point sat a crystal the size of a man's torso, faceted, catching the lamp deep in its planes. The air around it carried a faint heat-haze. Grooves sank out of the base, crossed the floor to the walls, climbed them, then vanished. The crystal was the room's heart. A single chair had been set a careful distance off from the pedestal.
Standing this near the crystal, I understood I was in trouble. My body felt uncomfortable all at once. The skin started going oversensitive everywhere. Under that came a swimming, light-headed thinness, as if I stood up too fast and the blood hadn't caught up. I sat down quickly.
"Whatever else you do, don't touch the crystal. The mana in it is concentrated past anything your body can use. Put your hand on it and it'll burn straight through your channels before you've finished deciding to be sorry." She said it flatly. "People have learned that the hard way."
Either this is normal, or putting a light-headed ten-year-old beside a crystal that can burn through me is spectacularly irresponsible.
"Understood."
I sat. The ambient mana in this room was dense.
The thread I'd hunted under my right wrist for a week, the few-second flicker I'd been so absurdly proud of catching at all now ran through the entirety of my body at once. Mana ran through my palms, up both forearms, across my chest, down into my legs, into every part of my body, all of it lit.
I felt it slowly saturate even the deepest cells of my body. The right-hand difference I'd agonized over, the one ambiguous data point, gone, drowned, washed flat under a flood that lit the left exactly as bright as the right. I'd been measuring a candle against the dark. This is the sun.
I want to stay here forever.
The joy of finally having more than a thread to work with.
"Tell me what you feel," Vael said. She'd come around to the side of the chair where I could see her, watching me for an answer.
The whole apparatus came up at once to answer her properly: a field at roughly even density across the major muscle masses, significantly denser in the torso than the extremities, the open question being whether that difference was stable or whether the mana was still diffusing toward equilibrium and I shut it in my teeth before a word of it got out, because a ten-year-old needed a simpler answer.
"Warm," I said. "Tingly. Like pins and needles, but everywhere, and it doesn't hurt." I went for the right amount of wonder, which wasn't hard, because the wonder was real and I only had to amputate the rest of it. "It's nice."
"Mm. It's nice for most. Some find it too much the first time and we cut it short." A pause. "Sit in it. Let the body get used to the volume."
So I did, and I mapped it.
I couldn't not. The first pattern I could make out through the noise was the order it had filled. It hadn't arrived all at once. The hands had filled first. The skin and the extremities lit before the rest, the field wicking in from the outside. The deep places, the organs behind my sternum, were filling last and still filling.
The saturation varied, as I'd expected. The torso was still filling, and with more tissue there, my best guess was that it would end up holding the most in total. That was my own model taking shape, the one I'd built through a week of sensing. What I hadn't predicted was the order.
Vael was talking again. "First time through, most of what you're feeling is from the room, not you. The body takes the mana everywhere, it sits where it lands, makes no distinction yet between where it's useful and where it's not." She watched me a moment.
Close enough. What Vael described lined up with what I'd just been mapping, and I had to work to keep my face mild. She'd set it down as the ordinary first-timer's channel opening, everything at once and nothing sorted yet.
A question came up, fully formed. I had it half-built and aimed before I caught what it was. "What's the crystal's..." The rest of it was already forming inside my head. Throughput, the rate it's pushing mana into the room. If I knew that, I could put a number on the dose and start treating this as an experiment instead of a feeling. I rotated it a quarter-turn into the question a boy would actually ask. "What's it for?" I tipped my chin at the crystal. "The big one."
"It powers the house," Vael said. "Stores the mana the estate draws and feeds the wards off it. The wards in the walls, the gate-work, the light-stones, all of it runs back to that. This room's the heart of the Silver estate," she said. "The concentration down here's a side benefit. It's the strongest mana field on the grounds, so it's where we do it."
A furnace long since put to use opening channels for noble children. Useful. And a little unfair, which I could live with.
"You're very still," she said. "You've been sitting in this without moving." Her eyes were on me. "You're all right? It's not too much?"
"It's interesting," I said. Maybe I should have picked a different word.
"That's enough for a first day," Vael said, and the word enough landed like a door. "Stand up slowly."
I stood reluctantly.
She locked the door behind us, turned the key. The field kept draining off me as we stepped away, slower than it had filled. Aftereffect persists past exposure. Track how long. I wanted to walk back in already.
"Daily," she said. "Half an hour, no more. You'll want more, everyone wants more." A pause. "Past half an hour the same concentration that opens your channels starts to cook them from the inside. Daily and brief beats long and rare, every time. The room will still be here tomorrow."
Half an hour daily. I had the protocol before she'd finished the sentence. The rest of my mind was already three steps past it. A daily timed exposure with a hard ceiling and a measurable aftereffect was an experiment with the apparatus pre-built, the schedule handed to me.
Track the ghost-sensation's duration each day and watch whether it lengthened as the channels conditioned. Find the threshold. Questions stacking faster than I could rank them. The best kind of problem to have.
"This way," Vael said. She'd already turned to go, up out of the bare stone toward the warmer part of the house. "You've found your mana, and now we go and see what you can't yet do with it. The training hall has better light and worse manners." A glance back. "Keep up."
Ren came off the wall and fell in behind. I followed Vael up the worn stair toward the training hall.
Time to see what magic can do.