"I suppose so!" Savil passes him a bowl which she's loaded with food. "Eat up. What did you and 'Fandes get up to this afternoon? You've got colour in your cheeks, looks like you got some sun and exercise."

"We went for a ride and swam a bit and talked about math! Yfandes is so nice."

"I'm so glad, kechara." She squeezes his shoulder. "Now, eat." 

By the time they finish, the sun is down. :You look tired, love: Yfandes sends. :Bedtime?: 

He eats, and strongly agrees with the suggestion of bedtime. He's worn out enough from the day's efforts to fall asleep almost instantly, but that still leaves him a few minutes of being alone in bed thinking about what 'Lendel would have thought about this place.

He has no shortage of nightmares, but the strange ice-dream doesn't return that night, and if the nightmares wake him, Yfandes is there in his mind instantly, with wordless soothing and love. 

The next day is much like the previous day, except minus the lesson. Yfandes nudges him to bathe and soak in the hot springs, and breakfast appears while he's not looking, and Savil invites him on a walk through the Vale. Both Savil and Yfandes nag him every few minutes to re-centre and ground and check his shields. Hopefully with more practice it'll start to become easier. 

He practices and eats and practices and bathes and practices and walks and practices and tries to hide his frustration at how slowly he's improving and practices and looks at plants and practices and practices and practices. It does get easier; he learns to associate the feeling of centering and grounding with safety, not danger, and his attempts at shields get gradually and inconsistently steadier. Whenever his thoughts threaten to turn to fire and aloneness, Yfandes or Savil is there with a diverting comment or a reminder to practice. The worst times are at night, when he has to let his mind go blank to sleep and DEAD DEAD DEAD is right there to fill the gap. He stays up as late as he can manage, tries to exhaust himself with walking and practicing so he can sleep too quickly and deeply to remember the nightmares. It almost works.

Several days later, Starwind turns up while he's eating breakfast. "Abras. My shay'kreth'ashke tells me you are ready to begin lessons. I would like that you finish eating and then come with me." 

Right, yes, lessons! Gods, he should have practiced more. He checks his shields and hurries through a couple more bites of food and checks his shields and jumps up (and steadies himself on the table) and follows Starwind.

Starwind leads him through the Vale in a new direction, eventually reaching what seems to be an enormous domed rock at least fifty feet high.

There's something that looks like a door– no, it's not even actually a door, just a carved outline of one.  

"Follow me," Starwind says, and...steps through the 'doorway', vanishing into the stone. 

Wow, illusion door! He pokes a hand into it, and if that works he tries walking through.

It does work! 

Starwind is waiting for him, sitting cross-legged on the floor. "Come here, boy." 

He goes over there and sits down facing Starwind.

"A simple physical barrier-shield," Starwind says. "That will be the first lesson. I will go into your mind and show you the correct technique, once, and then I would like you to practice it as many times as needed to match that. Ready?" 

"Ready." Getting shown stuff is fine, it's harmless, Starwind being the one doing it doesn't make it suddenly dangerous just because Starwind is unrelatedly scary, it's fine. It's fine.

Starwind does it a lot more abruptly than Moondance did – he closes his eyes and suddenly there's a different, this time blue-greenish ribbon in Abras' mind, and it grabs onto something at the level below thoughts and yanks him through a motion that's a lot more complicated than 'finding his centre'. It's sort of like having someone seize control of his body and make him very quickly lace up his boots (assuming he had never laced boots before), but using the strange other-places in his mind that correspond to his magic. 

Starwind finishes and immediately backs off. "Now you try." He waits. 

He's a little too busy going "woah aaaa what" to catch all the parts of the thing and needs to try to figure out what they were from the parts he did get, and then he needs to figure out how to actually do all of it. Also it turns out that doing novel things with his magic still feels like he's about to fuck up and start a fire, so the internal screaming doesn't really go away.

Starwind waits, but looks increasingly impatient and annoyed. 

"Sorry I'm taking so long," Abras says. This causes him to drop the bit of magic he was holding and he makes a frustrated noise.

Starwind sighs, and rolls his neck, and seems to make a deliberate effort to look less visibly irritated. "Have patience, boy. It is your first attempt." Pause. "What are you finding difficult? Do you needs I show you again more slowly?" 

". . . if it's not too much trouble?" This time he is watching and he will not miss any bits. Every muscle in his body is tense.

The blue-green ribbon slips into his mind again and this time Starwind is evidently making an effort to slow down there as well, making each step clear. There's a sort of pulling the energy out of himself, but in a sheet rather than a thread, and then sort of folding and shaping it into a hemisphere in front of him, and adding another layer and another until the magic is actually visible, hovering faintly.

This time Starwind doesn't immediately wrench him through taking it down; he backs off while the spell is still there, sitting in front of Abras. "Examine it if you wish," he says. 

Abras examines it carefully with all the senses he can point at it, and reaches first a hand and then his magic out to touch the shimmering barrier.

It feels solid to his hand, in a weird way where it's impossible to tell what its temperature or texture are.

His magical senses 'see' (or feel? it's hard to tell which it's more like) it as a glow of formed energy, with a 'flavour' that's recognizably his own. The layers are still sort of distinguishable but not fully, like they've started to melt into each other. It's also slowly leaking energy at random into the air, like a dried but un-fired piece of pottery placed into water and very gradually beginning to dissolve. 

Hm. If he "reaches out" and "grabs onto it" and tries to "hold it still" does it leak more slowly?