Ranara and her little daughter Azabel move to Urtho's Tower when the latter can say six words ("up", "mama", "milk", "no", "now", and "please") and hasn't started to walk yet. Ranara sets up to teach little children to read, ones who don't have evident Gifts yet - Ranara herself has Mindspeech, is all, with about a classroom's worth of range. Azabel sits in on classes, worn on her mother's back or later plopped in a corner with toys or, when she's only four, plopped in a corner with a book, younger than the other kids in the class. When Azabel has in fact sat through her mother's curriculum she is turned somewhat loose, to walk very carefully up and down and around the Tower, exploring.
The little baby gryphon has SO much energy and does not question her assertion that she'll fall down if she runs. He's delighted to have a playmate and can absolutely try to catch the ball when she throws it and they bring it back to her in his beak.
He also falls on his face a lot while he's attempting this, but he doesn't seem to mind.
Awwww the hertasi are so delighted that their favourite baby gryphon has a new friend!
They escort Azabel back to her mother's apartment at the end of the day - they know everyone's work hours, and they don't want her to worry - but they'll be waiting outside in the morning, if Azabel wants to go back and play with Skan some more?
Happy snuggly gryphon is delighted to get scritches and hear all about the battles!
...It's not as exciting as he imagined, really, a lot of it is kind of repetitive, there are a lot of descriptions of where rivers and hills are and how many soldiers and mages each side had, and not nearly as many dramatic aerial duels as he'd been picturing.
"Mama, mama!" says Azabel, interrupting.
"- Aza?" says her mama, in the middle of explaining the different ways people sometimes spell "morning".
"Mama, this is Skan and he can't read."
"Oh, I see. How about you start him on the alphabet for now," says Ranara, with acceptable grace, "and he can see about enrolling next time I circle back to the beginning? I'm not at the alphabet just now."
"Oh, all right," says Aza. She swipes a spare alphabet book.
The elevator won't take them all the way to the very top of the spire, which Skan is disappointed about, but it does bring them to a sort of glassed-in observation deck that runs in a circle all the way around the spire, three-quarters of the way to its peak.
Skan skips and bounces around it, claws skittering on the marble floor. "Look! Itss sso high!"
Skan cheers up. He's very excited when he manages to spot her house, and he tries to find bridges he can point to as well, and then other sorts of buildings.
Eventually the sun sets. Skan admits he should go home too, but eagerly suggests they could play outside in the courtyard tomorrow? Maybe after he tries to learn a few more letters. Learning letters is really hard but being able to read books on his own is an appealing prospect.
Skan plays with Azabel most days after that. And diligently tries to learn his letters, and then puzzle through sounding out sentences, and eventually makes enough progress to join her mother's class, though he often can't make it through the whole class session because he's incredibly hyperactive and terrible at sitting still, which distracts the other students.
He likes his new friend a lot! He reads books about bridges and dams, and tries to get her to build sandcastles with him in the gardens. And sometimes to coax her into roughhousing, but eventually it sinks in that she's never ever interested.
Gryphons grow fast, and by the end of that year he's able to fly all the way to the top of the Tower spire and do aerial acrobatics. Within a couple of years he'll be strong enough to carry Azabel too.
She likes building sandcastles! She imagines people to live in sand cities and rules over them as their benevolent Queen. She does not want to roughhouse but she'll throw balls for him, or invent tasks for him - can he burrow, can he fly from there to there before the sun dips behind the Tower, can he catch the light that bounces off this shiny pail while she tilts it all over the courtyard? Can he carry heavy things in the air so that he'll be strong enough sooner?
Skan loves all her challenges! He's very competitive. He will ABSOLUTELY try to show off how good he is at carrying heavy things in the air!
This only leads to a couple of incidents of tiring himself out and tumbling down into the gardens in a semi-controlled landing, and only one of these ends up a broken bone and a lecture from an exasperated Healer. Skan is slightly cowed by this, and more nervous about the challenges for a few weeks even once his leg is healed, but after that he's back to his old self.
He grows more. He can pick Azabel up and fly short distances now, although only if she holds onto his forelegs, he can't manage with her riding on his back yet.
Skan likes scritches a lot!
By the time another year has passed, he's big enough to carry her properly; he's nearly full-sized, now, though he still has the general maturity level of a kid Azabel's age. He's big enough to join the other young gryphons in flying lessons, now, and is bursting with pride about this, especially because he seems to already be ahead of the others, maybe all his aerial challenges with Azabel are helping.
Skan continues to sometimes sigh and complain that he's stupid, since he's quite far behind Azabel on academics, and isn't learning fast enough to close the difference. He haaaaates mathematics but is convinced by his father to study diligently anyway, when informed that it can be important for fighting wars.
He stills talks a lot about learning to fight enemies, possibly because this seems to be most of what gryphon children like talking about amongst themselves.
Having a gryphon friend is very convenient. Sometimes she just likes to lean on him and read, sometimes aloud, glancing over now and then to see if he's paying attention or if he's imagining fancily tactical battles in the air with imaginary enemies instead. It's almost funny how his mind keeps winding its way back to the subject, like a -
- like a gear, turning, always rotating back into the same position, like -
- huh -
Skan is right there, the breeze ruffling his feathers, his beak hanging very slightly open the way it always does when he's daydreaming, and he looks exactly like he always has...
- And yet there's more, somehow, more to be seen than there was before, it's as though her eyes are sliding in and out of focus on it, the way you can look out a window or look at the window and suddenly see the reflections of the room behind you. It's not a room, though, it's...intricate interlocking parts, wheels within wheels, gears, laid out so clearly and straightforwardly, Skan isn't at all the sort of person who's ever pretended to be anything other than what he is. Which she already knew, of course, but she can see it, now, in a way that isn't metaphorical or at least not entirely, it's right there...
Skan is oblivious. He's imagining a battle where he does that cool diving move where you pull up at the last second right before you'd hit the ground and break every bone in your body, and the other gryphons are losing to mysterious enemies (as usual in his fantasies, they're dark and hazy and not entirely filled out, as though made of black smoke) except he's there, heroically intervening to save the day.
It's really not clear! Closing her eyes doesn't help, then all she can see is the turning gears. Trying to unfocus on it mostly makes it swim in and out of focus even faster.
Skan notices that she's distracted and seems upset, tears himself free of the daydream; gears spin, wheels suddenly switch direction, the whole pattern shifting direction. "Aza? Are you all right?"
He's tempted to fly, but maybe that's a bad idea if she might poke his clockwork by accident, whatever his clockwork is, he never heard of mages seeing clockwork inside people.
He spots an adult with a group of mage-students practicing shields in the courtyard, and jumps up and down to get his attention. "Hello! We have a quesstion!"
He is clockwork which is running smoothly, with more layers and folded-away inner parts than Skan, and he seems unconcerned and kind of bored.
"Well," he says a bit impatiently, "are you seeing or hearing things that you couldn't before? Is it just people or can you see energy all around us?"
"...Huh. I have never heard of a Gift feeling like that! I think perhaps I had better take you to Urtho, he knows how to test for Gifts, and he has seen even the very rare ones. One moment." He calls out to his class, informing them that they're dismissed, and then jerks his chin at Azabel, gesturing for her to follow him, and starts walking. Fast.
"Oh, goodness! Congratulations! Urtho is working, but he never minds being interrupted for that, so I will take you right there!"
This hertasi also has to be told to slow down by Skan, but after that they make their way down the hallway without incident. The hertasi knocks on a heavy oak door and waits.
A tall, thin man with silver hair falling to his shoulders and piercing blue eyes over a beak-like nose opens the door. Looks a bit confused, then turns his gaze downward and sees Azabel. He beams at her. "Why, hello there! What brings you here, child?"
His mind is incredible. The gears are in such an incredibly vastly complex pattern, so perfectly shaped, fitting together into such an elegant whole. Some of the movement is refocused on her, but most of it is still spinning and whirling away, absorbed in something else.
"Oh!" He's so excited! More of the gears switch directions, it's pretty self-evident that this represents his attention shifting to her. "Well, do come in and have a seat - tea? ...Where did I put the teapot, oh, thank you, Gesten... May I have a look?"
"Well, I imagine you are here because it was not obvious what the new Gift is, usually the youngsters are not brought to me right away if it is that obvious, and so the simplest way for me to check is to just go and look in your head. Only for a moment, and I will not be reading your thoughts or feelings at all, merely having a peek at the place where Gifts go. It does not hurt but it does feel funny, I am told."
"I am so sorry for startling you, dear. All done." He's grinning, though, his gears whizzing. "You are going to be a Mindhealer! A very rare and important Gift, I am so pleased for you. And potential for others, too! I expect you will be a Mindspeaker, and you have the potential for mage-gift, though I am not sure if it will awaken."
"Oh, I had better teach you to shield then - new Gifts can be so distracting, but no one will be upset with you for it, we understand how difficult it is. I am afraid we do not know the secret of why some Gifts awaken while others stay dormant, nor how to awaken them on purpose. You seem young for it, too - how old are you?"
"Fair enough, I suppose. It will be good when you do learn to shield reliably, just, do not beat yourself up about it if it takes time to learn. I must teach you to centre and ground, first. You need to focus on your breathing and - try to feel the point inside you that feels the most stable and still, that does not move even when the breath does - does that make sense?"
"I suppose not! Most people find a spot that is sort of inside their chest or stomach or throat, but perhaps feet will work for you. Now, I want you to try to clear your mind and focus all of your attention on that point, and when you have done that, try to feel the place where you and the floor beneath you connect. It might help to imagine the walls all the way down the Tower and how that connects to the earth and the bedrock. And feel how it is much bigger than you, and very stable, and you can use it to steady yourself."
"Good! When you are properly centered and grounded, it ought be less the case that any change in your own state or emotions causes your Gift to fluctuate at random, and so you will have the base to build control on. I want you to try a motion like leaning into it, try to bring it more into focus, and once you can do that, try leaning back and sort of folding it away."
She can stare hard at the gears and they get clearer and sharper and she can see way more detail! It takes a couple of tries before she can get the hang of the pulling-back, rather than just having the not-sight oscillate wildly in and out, but then she's done it, it feels a bit like changing the focus all the way on a telescope so that the sky is totally blurred and then unscrewing the eyepiece and putting it away.
"Not literally, no. Your Sight is a metaphor, just like how some Empaths see emotions as colours, except that mind-structure is more complicated. You ought to have lessons with an actual Mindhealer, I do not know much about it myself, but - well, sometimes people's minds do not work the way they want, and they need help setting it right. They might be uncontrollably sad all the time, or be troubled by memories of a very bad thing that happened to them, or be paralyzingly afraid of going outside or of small spaces or heights or snakes, or have trouble stopping themselves from losing their temper or drinking too much wine even though they regret it afterward. Things like that. And a Mindhealer can help a person understand what is going wrong, and work with them to put their mind into a shape they are happier and healthier with."
Urtho is smiling fondly at her. She looks so serious and he bets she'll be a diligent student. "Yes, there is. His name is Lionwind k'Leshya, he is of the Kaled'a'in people. He does tours of the surrounding area, since he is one of very few Mindhealers in Ka'venusho, but he will be back in the Tower tomorrow. I can arrange for him to meet you for a lesson."
Skan follows her when the hertasi escorts them out, and manages to wait until they're out in the hallway before BOUNCEBOUNCEBOUNCE.
"Aza that'ss sso amazing you can fix people'ss headss! I have to tell all my friendss! - Do you think you can make me read better? Is that a stuck gear? It feels like it ssometimess."
"I don't know! I didn't see any stuck gears but I was kind of trying not to look because I think it is RUDE to look at people's gears without permission probably. I can ask tomorrow but I should probably at least have one lesson so that if it is very easy I can just have the teacher tell me 'actually it's very easy' instead of guessing and if it's very hard I will need lots of lessons."
"- I can! Oh, I am very interesting to look at and I don't have to feel rude about it at all since I'm me. I have a really big gear that hooks up to everything else - I don't think you could actually build this, I think some of the gears are going through each other? But it works for imaginary gears..."
It takes a while to find anything! There are whole library sections for every other Gift, but not that, and they end up having to go find and ask the librarian.
Once that's done, though, there are a handful of treatises on it, tucked away in the depths of the very large section on ordinary physical Healing. The foreword in the first one warns that Mindhealing is an especially tricky discipline to learn from books, as different Mindhealers end up with different Sight-metaphors, and since they're so rare they often work mostly alone and don't have the same chance to standardize a curriculum that Healers do. This treatise is by three traveling Mindhealers who exchanged regular correspondence for decades and met up once a year to share case studies and get each other's advice. They want to disclaim that the things they're writing about is what worked for them; in cases where they disagreed with each other on what ought to be the theory or the best practice, this will be explained in the footnotes.
The three Mindhealers in question had the following Sight metaphors: city-maps, coral reefs (that Mindhealer grew up in a fishing-village on the far southern coast and used to go swim and dive around the coral reefs as a child), and kitchens. If they use descriptions reminiscent of these things, that's why.
To start! A lot of people think Mindhealing is like Empathy, but it really isn't! It's not that much like Thoughtsensing either! It's common for Mindhealers to have one or both of those Gifts too, but Mindhealing in isolation is its own thing, and pure Mindhealing-Sight doesn't show the content of thoughts at all.
What is does show is the structure, and also the - movement, or use-patterns, or shapes-of-thoughts, they never agreed on a good word for it. The rapid changes over seconds and minutes, is what that means, whereas changes to the deeper structure can happen but generally over weeks to years. Here is a page of tips for how to think about focusing your Sight in order to see one versus the other better. They're very poetic and flowery.
The different metaphors lean to different strengths; the kitchen one, for example, gives the Mindhealer in question much stronger guesses about the function of various mind-bits, what they mean to the patient, but it's harder to see fine detail by going in deeper. The coral-reef Mindhealer can very easily swap between focusing on the realtime patterns-of-thought (schools of fish or other sea life interacting with the reef) and more permanent structure (the coral itself), but needs to do a lot more back and forth with the patient to understand what it means in their particular context. The city-map Mindhealer can very easily see large-scale structure at a glance or zoom in closer and see fine-scale patterns, but finds it a bit overwhelming to focus on realtime thought-shapes.
The second half is mostly about that! It also opens with an opinionated preface!
The Mindhealer with the map metaphor is firmly of the opinion that seeing what's going on is the most important part, and changing things with the direct use of Mindhealing Gift should be done sparingly (there are many footnoted disagreements on what 'sparingly' means in practice.) In his opinion, patients will benefit the most from a Mindhealer helping them figure out what's already happening in their mind, so they can relate to it better and learn self-acceptance.
The Mindhealer with the kitchen metaphor thinks that helping patients 'clean up' and 'organize' their minds, with Mindhealing Gift, is often very helpful; sometimes certain skills, like calming themselves down by taking deep breaths, will be hard to use in, say, an angry argument, because that tool isn't very accessible from that 'corner' of the 'kitchen'.
The coral-reef Mindhealer thinks that you should find which parts of patients' minds are 'hidden' and can have emotions or habits build up in a way the patient isn't consciously aware of, and help them 'open' this so there are fewer obstacles to their feelings.
...
The textbook is not a replacement for an apprenticeship with an adult Mindhealer! You should if at all possible have that! It's much safer for an untrained Mindhealer to practice Gift-control on an adult, trained Mindhealer who can set their own mind right easily. That being said, they fully understand that sometimes this is impossible, given the rarity of the Gift. In which case you should practice on fairly mentally healthy patients (who've agreed to this!!) before you try to treat people who are very badly off and fragile.
'Detours' are a way of pinning down a particular reflexive thought-pattern, and changing it so it instead ends somewhere different and more helpful. For example, a child struggling in school might have a habitual train of thought of "it's hopeless, I'm just stupid" every time they find something difficult, or a man who sometimes loses his temper and hits his girlfriends might have the thought "that bitch isn't treating me the way I deserve" whenever she does something minorly inconsiderate, which most people wouldn't explode into anger over. These could be shifted to "I don't know how to do this yet but I can ask the teacher for help" for the child, or "but I remember when she did something very kind for me" for the man with a temper.
Fences are a more substantial and invasive technique, generally used when a patient is suffering because their thoughts keep going back to the same painful subject. For example, a mother who survived a fire while her child died might feel incredibly guilty and like she doesn't deserve life as much and wishes she could trade herself for her child, and this can easily become a sort of pit or downhill slope (in the kitchen metaphor, a hole shattered in the counter, or a place where it's cracked and everything slides downhill into the crack). In the long run these feelings need to be fully processed, in a safe context, but in the short run, the patient is only with the Mindhealer a candlemark or two a week, and the rest of the time they may not have the emotional skills yet to avoid making the problem even worse by ruminating. A fence is like putting up a guard-rail around the entire region of their mind, so they fall into it less. There is disagreement between the Mindhealers on how freely one ought to use fences; the kitchen Mindhealer thinks they're a very useful therapeutic technique, the city-map one is technically very good at them but thinks they ought be used sparingly and with a lot of forethought and planning, keeping an eye on not disturbing the overall structure of the patient's mind. The coral-reef Mindhealer haaaaaates them with a fiery passion and this is apparently an ongoing dispute between the book's authors.
Sometimes a Mindhealer will want to do the opposite of a fence! The patient's mind will have partitioned off an area, so they mostly never think about it, and when they do it may be overwhelming and distressing. For example, a man with unprocessed anger toward his neglectful father might believe that he's an adult and entirely over this petty childhood pain, but occasionally explode into rage at his wife when she nags him about not doing something in a way that reminds him of his own mother nagging her husband, and makes him feel as though he's being compared to his own father, who he can't bear the idea of resembling. The man might be baffled at his own behaviour after the fact, and regret it, but it's going to be hard to stop if he cannot even understand where this response is coming from, and getting to the root of the emotions often involves taking down the fences. The Mindhealer should make sure the patient is ready for this, and set aside extra time in case they need a longer session to process it.
This is a really good book! Aza doesn't think she wants any fences or detours in her own personal clockwork but she can try to figure out what they'd look like - maybe she could put a hinge on a gear, swing it out of the way of another that locks into it sometimes, put it either in empty space or meshed up to a different gear depending. Maybe she needs a book on actual literal clockwork?
Skan flops and purrs under her scritches.
His gears still look different from her own or Urtho's! There are fewer layers to his, nearly all of it is right there on the surface. He doesn't have a big central gear connected to everything else, like Azabel does, but he does have a couple of different...long gearshafts or something, which link up distant areas so that movement in a handful of specific gears can very rapidly grab and shift all of his mind toward it. This is clearly not something he can do for just anything, though, especially reading. The attentional-patterns in his gears are very distributed and a lot of them seem very deeply linked into the physical; it looks like it would be easier for him to keep his attention on something the more it involved all of his senses and using his whole body.
It's really interesting! Compared to the way Skan's mind is very distributed so it's hard to keep his attention on one thing instead of everything else, but he has the gearshafts that let him instantly engage nearly all of his mind for a physical response, Azabel's mind is the opposite! Her big central gear doesn't connect to the gears that are physically-doing-things, and those gears don't connect very well to each other either or to the gears that do seeing and hearing things and recognizing them. At a glance it looks like setup can sort of manage, but it's slow to react and clearly not doing as much fast complicated recognition of things like, say, a crack in the path ahead of her, let alone a ball flying at her face (which Skan can leap up and catch while not even pausing in their conversation.)
Zoooooom!!! Flyyyyyyyy!!!! Skan loves flying so much, and loves showing off, and especially both at once! He also knows exactly how much he can get away with things like sudden steep dives or doing flips without scaring Aza. He gets her home pretty fast, but finds time to have lots of fun along the way.
She has notes! About the Mindhealing book, about clockwork, and about people's gears (hers, Skan's, and her mama's, mostly, so she hasn't drawn firm conclusions about what differences if any are species-based). "What's your metaphor?" she asks as she skims these for reportable insight.
"I cannot tell you specifically who for reasons of patient confidentiality, unless I asked their permission for you to sit in with us as a student assistant - which you are not ready for, yet, that will come. In general, it tends to be people with calm, stable temperaments; people who are reliable and trustworthy while - perhaps not being the brightest or most ambitious. There is a range, rivers can be both fast and slow, and slow rivers begin to resemble lakes."
"Yeah sorry I didn't mean who specifically, just what makes somebody pondy. I was trying to figure out what about Skan is from being a gryphon and what's just him but I haven't looked at any other gryphons - and I saw a hertasi before I knew how to stop but I was trying not to look so I don't remember much and haven't looked at other ones -"
"Oh, clever girl! Yes, there are species differences, though - in general it is a matter of the average difference, there is always a range. Gryphons tend to be faster rivers with more rocks to my Sight, for example, but there are gryphons who are are more lake-like than some humans. And of course we will need to figure out how that corresponds to your Sight-metaphor. Often we Mindhealers learn very early on to - focus on, or emphasize, different aspects of the mind."
"Oh, hmm." He looks thoughtful. "I think that sort of thing involves problems that need fixing at a very fine scale, and I have not personally had much luck with it, but it is often easier to do fine-scale work on ourselves and it is possible your metaphor is more conducive to it than mine. What do you see if you go in closer, so you are looking only at that part and not the rest of your mind?"
"The teeth don't fit right. Sometimes there's a jam and a lot of force has to build up before it'll tick over. And other times they slide out of alignment till a counterweight sort of thing shoves them back together, I tried spinning around a little bit on my bed till I fell over last night at home so I could see what went wrong and that's what happened. I think if I could just make all the pieces be different shapes I would know how to make them fit, but I don't know if I can do it that way or not."
"Very good! Excellent control on the level of detail. We will need to discover if your Gift can change the shapes of gears in your metaphor; it may be that you are not strong enough yet but will be once you are older and have more practice, we will see. It would be better to test your strength on an area less critical than balance, though. Hmm. Have you discovered yet how to find a particular area by thinking of it, or having a patient think of it, and then seeing that area move or light up?"
"Can you try thinking of a particular memory, or habit you have, that is not of incredible importance to you? I am going to have you try to nudge it, and almost certainly you or I can put it back, but nonetheless I do not want you to try it for the first time on something very critical."
"I am sorry, I would try to slow it for you but thoughts are fast - it will be easier to catch it anyway with more practice. Watch it a little more, and then try that? You will want to start gentle, which will probably not move it at all, but better to ramp up carefully than hit it too hard."
"Oh, oh, that is just too funny!" He slaps his knee. "I am almost tempted to leave it like that, it is so... The memory was of a time I went river-rafting with my friends, we were being quite reckless, and we - might have caught our raft on a rock and made a hole in the bottom. And usually it links to the - broader concept, I suppose, more than a specific incident, of being scolded severely by my poor mother. Except now it is linked to - the first time I kissed my wife, in particular, and also the broader concept of first kisses - that is so hilarious, I am going to have to write to my colleague about this one..." He is almost crying with laughter.
"I do not think anyone understands why our metaphors end up being what they are! I had hardly had much to do with rivers when my Gift awakened. Though I did then find it valuable to learn more of their geography and features, and the detail in my Sight became more usefully interpretable as a result."
"Yes, of course."
Lionwind spends a while doing that, relating the stories of times he was called in - or stories his teacher told him of times she was called in, often from another city, to fix something some student had done to a patient or more often to their friend or classmate, while goofing around or just entirely by accident. A common beginner's mistake for students with strong Gifts, especially if they're strong Empaths too, is to be startled by someone's fear or sadness and fling a lot of poorly-aimed Mindhealing at them, which usually just makes people hallucinate; more subtly, it can make them see sounds, or taste colours. You can accidentally make someone unable to remember a category of words, like the names of colours or seasons; you can make people unable to recognize faces; you can scramble someone's ability to read or sing a tune; he once had a student Mindheal someone in some bizarre way where they could only sing, not speak. You can give people random phobias to things like stairs or cups.
In some of these cases he has theories of what was going on; often, he or whoever was there just did their best to set it right without ever understanding how exactly it went wrong in that way. Minds are complicated, even for experienced Mindhealers.
"I will be honest, we do not even understand which things in the mind are - objects that way, that can be modified as a single move, versus not. For example, it is very hard to block access to a specific memory and no others, though many Kings and spies have wanted this done. But you can quite easily make someone unable to recognize or recall the name of an object they are holding, even though they can describe its appearance and shape exactly! I do not know why!"
"Huh! Assuming you mean in the long run, I am actually not sure. There is a trick for making yourself more alert for a short period - Healers can do it too, coming from a different 'angle', our scholars think that this means the two Gifts are looking at the same underlying structure but it could be entirely distinct mechanisms. Anyway. I had never thought to even try whether making someone need fewer candlemarks of sleep per night on a permanent basis can be done. What an intriguing idea - you are so creative!"
Lionwind thinks for a moment. "- Hmm, I am not aware of any treatises written recently such that you could still find the patients studied. You may have to just ask your acquaintances. I suppose you could write to Mindhealers across the region - I could give you a list - but they will mostly only see very sick patients, who I think on average tend to sleep more - or else very erratically and poorly - because of their mental illnesses."
"I think that is another case where our scholars do not yet understand everything! The theories are that some mental conditions, such as depression, involve having less life-energy to drive a mind, which thus spends more time in sleep, whereas conditions like wild-madness involve an out-of-balance excess of these energies - where the patients sleep less and yet this compounds their imbalance and their madness and wildness."
"I'll see you then!"
And she comes back two days later with a great big list of questions. What makes people have mental problems in the first place? Why do people have to sleep at all? Why was the first kiss thing near the rafting memory? Why is anything near anything? What kinds of things can't Mindhealers do that it might seem they would be able to? Her mama wants her to ask if this will help her defend herself when she goes on the long trip to visit her papa, it's usually not very dangerous but it would be good to know. Can she make her other potential Gifts awaken? Is there a standard best practice for making very sure someone is REALLY okay with letting her look besides just what she's been doing.
"So many questions! You are such a wonderfully curious student." And Lionwind sets himself to answering them methodically, one at a time.
It's not entirely understood why people have mental problems! Some of it seems to be an inborn predisposition; the same way some people are physically frail and prone to sickliness, or born with heart problems, or end up falling ill with cancers, some people are prone to nerves and phobias and melancholy, or succumb to sudden madness. Sometimes it's caused by stressful or traumatic life events, but how damaged different people are by the same event also seems to vary. It's a known pattern that many women because depressed after giving birth, and some much smaller fraction have bouts of madness, and honestly no one has any idea why!
There are theories about sleep but it's mostly Healers who've studied it, she could go look at books in the library on it. The current understanding is that memories end up near each other because of similarity, where the similarity can be on a number of aspects - place or time are one kind, but he suspects the rafting and the kiss were already near each other because they were both exciting, exhilarating experiences.
He's not sure how to answer her question on kinds of things Mindhealers 'should' be able to do but can't, maybe because he's had such a long time to get accustomed to the reality of what's easy or hard or impossible; she has fewer preconceptions, maybe after this she could list out what she would expect and he can correct her?
...There are ways a Mindhealer can incapacitate people but he wouldn't recommend she try that in self-defence this early in her training, unless she's literally about to die, it's a lot harder to undo than it is to do in the first place. Depending on when the trip is planned, though, she can ask him about it again later. He doesn't know whether one can awaken potential Gifts much less how.
In terms of best practices for consent, the other thing to keep an eye on is whether people will feel like they have to say yes, either because they want to please her or think she'll be disappointed in them otherwise or are scared of the consequences if they aren't cooperative. Probably she doesn't have to worry about this yet, since she's a young trainee and he doubts her friends are worried about losing the friendship if they decline to let her practice on their brains, but it'll be something to keep in mind more once she's an adult and a trained Mindhealer.
"Well, like, you said you can't just make people forget only one thing, why not? It seems like we should be able to. Can you tell in advance who's going to have a problem? What is the self defense thing, I won't try it. Why do we have metaphors at all, nobody else does with other gifts."
"- I will start with the last one first, because in a sense I think that many Gifts do have metaphors? Thoughtsensers often experience 'hearing' thoughts, but thoughts are not really sound, and some Thoughtsensers instead 'see' words written down. I have heard Empaths describe what emotions feel like to them as everything from a smell to a taste to the sense that they can half-feel the other person's body as well as their own. Mages see glowing lines of energy in the world, but a ley-line is not really a glowing river, and different mages see it differently! Some mages instead experience it as 'touching' magic, not visually at all. I also know of a Healer blind from birth who instead of Healing "Sight", has Healing-touch and Healing-smell. This becomes more obvious when Gifted people work together in larger numbers and learn concert-Sight and concert-work."
"The most common kinds are mage-work and Healing-melds. I am not sure I have ever actually heard of Mindhealers doing it; there are not really enough of us, and there is the question of patient confidentiality, which does not apply at all to mage-work and which Healers have different protocols around. The key part is that people must be in mental rapport with each other, but of a different kind from what Thoughtsensers do to either establish a formal Mindspeech link or to share thoughts more directly. Healers will often merge only their lower-level shields, in order to make their reserves a common pool, and then one Healer will use that to take charge and direct the energies into Healing a critical patient. Done skillfully with the right training, this does not require exposing one's thoughts to one's colleagues, though I think many rural Healers without that training find it easiest to just merge everything. Mages will more often also share senses with each other, since large workings are very complex as well as power-requiring, and require tight coordination of who will do what; the communication can be done either via formal Mindspeech with a conductor, or by thought-sharing, this is mostly a matter of preference and local practice."
"Probably it is not uncommon. I think I avoided it; I have done Healing-melds sometimes, since I see patients at the healing centre sometimes and the Healers can call on me as an extra body in an emergency, but I was already fully trained when I first started that, I suspect accidentally sharing thoughts is more common for Healing-trainees who need to learn melds in their first year."
"Hmm. So the question of memory blocking comes down to the fact that any one memory is linked to a huge number of other things in the mind, and - our Sight does not quite work in a way where a 'memory' is a particular object, that can be plucked out without affecting the rest. What you saw in my mind, the other day - my memory was not a gear, it was somehow held in the pattern of how the gears fit together. Trying to erase it by removing a gear would probably both not have worked that well and caused more extensive damage to nearby memories."
"In terms of predicting problems in advance - I think this was studied once, but it was by a Mindhealer who had...questionable ethics...and went around looking at everyone's mind at the academy where he worked, and then kept personal records on his predictions of who would have troubles later. And I have only heard of this secondhand, anyway, his work was never published in a treatise." He frowns, rubs his chin. "The risk for some problems does seem to run in families? Becoming addicted to drugs and sudden madness later in life, in particular, are more likely if someone's parent or sibling suffered the same problem."
"I mean, yes, but if you include alcohol, most people will have some at least once in their lives, though of course most never become addicted. ...Also there is likely a factor that children with parents who drink or take drugs will likely have those drugs around in their homes. I am not sure if it has been well-studied whether children by blood, but raised elsewhere, still have the higher risk."
"Oh. Hmm. I am not sure that is something where Mindhealers have a settled answer. Healers might, there are more of them and they sometimes want to study healthy patients for comparison and will pay them to sit still all afternoon for it. Many people feel more private about their thoughts than about their bodies, but Mindhealing Sight per se does not actually look at thoughts. I think it would be all right, but you would want to explain and get their opinion before telling them how much money, and be cautious of the fact that very poor people might think it worthwhile to make themselves very uncomfortable for twenty coppers."
"I continue to be very pleased with how carefully you think about this. Ah, and your last question was about defence. There is something that a Mindhealer can do called a set-command; it involves imposing a certain intent on a patient, usually expressed as an imperative word or phrase in Mindspeech, and pushing it into place with your Gift. You could, for example, force someone to 'stop moving', and they would stop attacking you. The single positive quality of set-commands is that they are fast, a second or two to place. They are very sloppy, will not wear off, and take much greater skill and time to undo afterward, which is why I do not recommend this unless you are in critical danger."
"I suspect your mind is still trying to absorb all of the information involved, and find ways of working with it. I - admit that your concept of more than one imaginary direction makes my head spin a little, but that may work fine for you. For myself, I found as a teenager that I could imagine the water of rivers and lakes as coloured, and this gave my metaphor a way of conveying more. The metaphor seems to respond to visualizations in this way."
"Hmm. I think that it is not uncommon for Empaths to sense emotion as a colour, or smell, or equivalent to another sense, and emotional valence - or simpler valences - is a quality that can be attached to a gear or a cluster of gears but is not necessarily about the way they touch... I am not sure. This is something that is worth extensive consideration on your own, I think." His lips curve into a smile. "Which I am certain you will do. You are every teacher's ideal student."
"So, one of the most common actual uses of our Gift that we will be called on to do with patients, is when they are troubled by an association - emotional or otherwise - with a particular situation, and - at least in the short run - would find it easier to go on with their lives if they did not have this. So I am going to give you a situation that I associate with strong emotions, and I want you to try to do a detour or fence around this. - I will of course put it back afterward. However, do you have any questions, first, about this practice in general?"
"Of course. You can watch now - tell me when you see it."
Lionwind takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and settles himself.
After about a minute, something several-layers-deep in a different corner of his mind moves - and then suddenly the movement is radiating outward, being conveyed in a sort of ripple or wave to other areas, including quite distant ones.
He closes his eyes again, takes a few moments to focus, and then - something shifts, in the layer of his mind where the reaction spread outward. He nudges a gear a little to the side, so that the drive-chain stringing it to another gear that conveys that initial spread slips off and hangs loosely, no longer able to transmit the movement of the first gear.
"Now watch." And he does the focusing-on-it motion again, whatever 'it' is in this case, and there's a little ripple but it almost instantly dies out rather than being echoed around.
Azabel's next few weeks and months of lessons go well! Lionwind still has nothing but praise for her, though he says it'll be at least a year before she's ready to see patients partnered with him. He finds her some books of patient case studies (with names and other personal facts obfuscated), and gets permission from some of his own patients to share his notes with her. Mostly he has her practice refining and interpreting her Sight, knowing which questions to ask to clarify it when the Sight alone isn't enough information, and various basic Mindhealing techniques like the fences and detours.
Skan continues to be a willing and eager volunteer for having his mind looked at, though his attention-span difficulties with reading prove non-obvious to fix, at least at her current skill level.
...And nine months later, shortly after her eleventh birthday, she's sitting out in the garden with Skan, who's reading a book, murmuring the words out loud to himself under his breath, which he hasn't needed to do to manage reading in years -
- or, wait, maybe it's not quite reading out loud...
Bounce bounce bounce. "It sseems sso usseful! For doing Mindhealing. If your patientss ssay you can usse it, I mean." He's quietly reflective for a moment. "I think I'd let a Mindhealer read my thoughtss. Ssometimes it'ss hard to ssay what your feelings are in wordss."
"I can teach you the basics, yes. You may want to seek another teacher if your Gift proves strong enough for long-distance Mindspeech, which is a valuable skill to have and not one I am equipped to teach you. We need not get ahead of ourselves, though, there are many basics. Have you been able to figure out shielding?"
At first she doesn't feel anything, and Lionwind makes a quietly approving noise. "Well, you are not leaking anything to a passive read, that is a good start."
- then there's a firm, very weird sensation of pokepokepoke, and the third or fourth poke seems to slip through something, for only the briefest instant before the pressure vanishes.
"I apologize. That is a pretty good start for a shield, though. To make it stronger and more proof against probes, you will want to - usually I describe this to students as weaving it finer and tougher, rather than thicker. Some people find it useful to imagine literally weaving, as though shaping the energy around you into cloth, others use different visualizations such as shaping armour."
"Fair enough. All right - you will want to check your shield often, at first, and practice reinforcing it. It will not be instinctive at first. Once you are comfortable enough to find it easy, you can start practicing building multiple layers, which will make it less brittle to strong probes."
"Hmm. With attentiveness, and perhaps more practice, you should be able to feel yourself, from the inside, whether your shield is tightly-woven enough. If it is not obvious, it might make sense for you to take it down - I will not look - and rebuild it a few times, and then try to predict how strong I will find it when I test."
And they go back to Mindhealing!
Over the next few months, Lionwind teaches Azabel the basics of holding a Mindspeech link and communicating with other Mindspeakers without leaking accidental thoughts through in either direction, and he also has her practice Thoughtsensing on him - with his insistent consent - since he says that sometimes patients will actively request this.
It turns out that she does have a much stronger Mindspeech Gift than his, so he sends her for some extra tutoring with a powerful Mindspeaker, his childhood friend Summerhawk k'Leshya, now also on and off an instructor at the Tower. Summerhawk is less patient as a teacher, and less thoughtful about what she seems to consider Azabel's unreasonable aversion to ever leaking thoughts by accident, but she's very well trained as a Mindspeaker and can explain it fairly clearly.
When Azabel is twelve, Lionwind has her start sitting in on sessions with a handful of his patients who agreed to his student being present. At first he just has her observe, occasionally making comments to her in private Mindspeech, but after a while he starts inviting her to use her Sight and ask the patient questions to understand what's going on for them, and after six months of that, even to sometimes do basic Mindhealing techniques. Which he uses sparingly, only a couple of times per session and sometimes not at all.
He continues to have mostly praise for her. She's a very diligent student, and smart, and she has a lot of original ideas which tend to be pretty good.
Skan moves to the senior division of the gryphon flying classes. He does competitions nearly every week, and brings home prizes for most of them. He still struggles a lot more with academics than athletics, but nonetheless he's apparently doing better than nearly all of his gryphon classmates. He thinks this is because Azabel is the SMARTEST and the BEST.
Azabel is very glad she could help!
She's curious about what gryphons who didn't happen to be introduced to her by hertasi when she was little are like. She is also curious about hertasi. And people from all different places. There are a lot of things people don't know about why minds are how they are! And some of it is probably by species but to make sure she has to check, and she may as well check lots of other things, ask lots of questions.
The hertasi are politely bemused by all her questions but are happy to answer them anyway! Gryphons are less inclined to constant helpfulness, but Skan recruits some of his friends and his parents to the project. Of the human population, the students at Healers' are the most inclined to participate; they're always trying to find people to study too, they get what it's like and don't find it weird, and some of them can recruit parents and acquaintances too.
Hertasi almost universally have their attention very oriented to other people! Plenty of humans are set up that way, too, but nowhere near the majority. On average, hertasi get bored less easily when doing repetitive tasks like tidying or cooking than humans do, and tend to instead find them soothing and satisfying. They're novelty-seeking in their own way, though, most often showing up as a relentless curiosity for social information and gossip, but the hertasi with Gifts, or those who work as scholars, often end up at the top of their field, they tend very good at obsessive study. They also don't have a trait that many humans and gryphons do have, of feeling most at ease with their own species; they're basically never racist. They also almost entirely lack privacy intuitions, between each other, and find Azabel's meticulous insistence on explaining what she needs consent for and what she won't ever tell anyone else to be charming but odd, and why shouldn't they have three of their friends there to all answer questions about their brains at once?
Skan is unusually straightforward for a gryphon, but on average their minds do seem more all-on-the-surface than humans. They're less often people oriented, and very likely to share Skan's traits of being very good at situational awareness and reacting quickly to new information, especially in physical combat. They tend more competitive and to some extent more aggressive than humans, and far more than hertasi, though it's a little unclear how much of this is culturally conveyed. They are not, in general, all that patient, which includes patience with Azabel's questions; Skan is an exception, but even he has a short attention span for how long he'll sit still for it, unlike the hertasi who will delightedly gossip about themselves and their feelings to her all day.
Humans from different parts of the world don't seem to vary much on average in terms of how their gears look to Azabel's Sight, but there is a lot of variation in how they answer her questions; people from some cultures, especially north, tend not to talk much about their emotions, or even to have the same vocabulary for it that Azabel does. People from the far south, Acabarrin or something, often use metaphors to do with their bodies, saying 'my stomach felt heavy' instead of 'I was sad' and suchlike.
This is all terribly fascinating! Since individual variation is just as interesting as group variation she will not run out of material any time soon. She writes up a little something aping the style of formal papers about the emotion-vocabulary thing and turns it in to Lionwind to see what he thinks.
Lionwind is so pleased with her! She could probably actually publish this as a short treatise, he thinks, if they do enough back-and-forth work on it, he can give her a round of suggestions? And then at some point she'll want to find a full-time scholar willing to review it for her, he hasn't published anything himself so he won't know all the expectations for style and footnotes and such.
Skan is of the opinion that actually Azabel is very good! (...Maybe someday if he wins enough of the flying competitions, Urtho will send him a personal note of congratulations... He's definitely never going to get one for academics.)
...
Life goes on. Azabel has lessons and works on her interviews and her treatise write-up and goes flying with Skan. Her teachers, and the scholar who volunteered to review her treatise draft for her, have a lot of praise for her.
She's acquired a bit of a reputation among the other students training Mindspeech, at this point, as the girl who HATES MINDREADING and is always very very careful when practicing Mindspeech links to shield so hard. Mostly they're respectful about this, though she gets occasional eyerolls.
At some point Skan warns her that he overheard some gossip from other gryphons he flies with, who sometimes play betting card-games with the older mage-students, some of whom are BULLIES and think that her aversion to mindreading is hilarious and he thinks some of them are Thoughtsensers? Anyway he just wanted to make sure she knew, so she can keep an eye out.
Skan thinks she is totally right and they would DESERVE it and then no one would ever dare bother her again! (He is perhaps slightly wishing in the back of his mind that someone does try, just because it would be so cool if Azabel WON a FIGHT with Mindhealing, but he knows this isn't a very nice thing to think, and doesn't bring it up.)
She doesn't know who any of the bullies are, which makes it hard to avoid them on purpose, but no older boys try to follow her over the next week.
- at some point, though, she's walking along a perfectly innocent path in the gardens, with no one nearby, and suddenly there is a VERY HARD POKE at her shields, it doesn't quite penetrate on the first probe but it's enough to hurt and there's another poke right on its heels.
She still can't see anyone, but the poke stops and there's a very startled squawk and thump in the bushes.
At the same moment as her shoe catches in the crack between two paving-stones and sends her toppling toward the ground -
- and a different person bursts out of the rhododendron. "You bitch!" he shrieks at her, "what'd you do–" and he raises his hand; based on his uniform he's a mage-student, and based on his face he is terrified and angry, and one can assume that the thing he's about to do about these two faces is throw some magic at her.
Skan is practicing in the aerial obstacle course, and a gryphon with slower reflexes than his might have plowed headfirst into the hanging wall of canvas in a frame, but he swerves instantly skyward, does a midair flip to turn himself around, beats his wings. Coming, he thinks loudly back at her, he can't actually project but he can shove the words right to the surface so she picks up on them without reading his actual surface thoughts. Are you hurt - should I pursue or help you–
I'll be there in thirty seconds -
(His mental 'voice' in his thoughts is like his normal voice but without the sibilant gryphon accent, which Skan has in any case been practicing avoiding, it's considered uncouth for adult gryphons in mixed company.)
He pumps his wings, gains speed an altitude, and then dives, Aza where are they now -
They sit up, cautiously, seeming to expect Skan to change his mind and eat them at any second. (He does look very intimidating; at roughly his full adult size for a gryphon, he looms over them, and just his beak is the size of their heads.)
Less than a minute later, there are running footsteps audible in the distance. "Report of someone needing help!" an adult voice shouts.
"Eep!" The second part gets a lot more alarm and a sympathetic look. "Er, good work defending yourself, very relieved you aren't hurt. And this is unacceptable behaviour, we'll haul them right along to the office for questioning."
"Who's the gryphon?" one of the other guards says, addressed to Azabel rather than Skan per se.
"Mmm."
Lasi falls silent, and doesn't speak again until they reach the Guard-building and she's led Azabel to her office and offered her a seat.
"So. My...understanding, Azabel, is that the average age for a Gift awakening varies, but - when Gifts awaken late, whatever 'late' is for a given person, it's usually..." she clears her throat delicately, "because of something traumatic. So - I did want to ask, now that we're alone and in private. Did those boys do anything worse to you, or threaten it, than what you described to my colleagues?"
Nod. "I see. I suppose I understand why you didn't report it, for something that vague, it's - not the kind of report we have much ability to act on. I'm very sorry this happened, though." She frowns. Clears her throat again. "Are you, um, feeling calm right now? ...I'm sorry, you look it, just, the usual protocol for taking a report from youngsters who've just had a Gift awaken in possibly-traumatic circumstances includes asking that."
"Skan told me the rumors he heard a few days ago. Just now, I was walking - I was actually going to go to the bathroom so please don't keep me here too long - and I felt the first boy give me a hard shove in the Thoughtsensing shield, like he wanted to break it, and I tripped and I set commanded him 'don't', which might make him stop doing anything or might only make him not do Thoughtsensing, I'm not sure, and then the other one jumped out and called me a bitch and he was wearing mage student clothes and he went like this," she imitates his gesture, "and I set commanded him to stop which doesn't let him do much at all, and he did stop but not before a little fire happened, only it turned out I had shields, so I'm okay. And then the other two started running off from where they were hiding and I called Skan over to chase them and he pinned them down and I told them it'd look better for them to not make the guards chase them, and I called my teacher and he was with a patient but I explained and he called the guards over."
Then Lasi will escort her to the door, tell her to wait there a minute, and slip back into the Guard-office. She returns a couple of minutes later to give Azabel a room number and the name of the officer she should ask for, to find the set-commanded boys once her Mindhealing instructor is available.
They do look different, although maybe not as different as she would have expected. Set-commands show up to Mindhealing Sight as a sort of governer-switch imposed in placed and slammed down over a broad area of gears. The 'don't' set-command is somewhat narrower; the second, 'stop' set-command covers the area it did plus several on either side.
From Azabel's perspective, it really does look like the set-commands are very neat and self-contained and should be easy to remove as so, but in fact they appear to be shoved quite hard and deeply into the gear-structure, and she watches Lionwind needing to push with his Gift and soften all of the linkages in each section in order to pull out the bits and pieces of her set-commands.
Lionwind, distracted, answers in Mindspeech. :It would depend how quickly, and how much I was using my Gift to make it easier to manipulate - if his mind were not malleable enough then it would simply not work, if it were the right amount of malleable and I went too hastily, then I would cause damage in the process:
It's a personal note from Urtho! He congratulates Azabel on her new-awakened mage-gift, and says that he would like her to report to his office at her convenience so he can check her Gifts again and make sure she ends up placed into the right classes for her strength of potential.
"Ah." Urtho doesn't especially look as though he understands. "I see. Well, in any case the upper-level courses are not mandatory and it is up to you what you want to take, but you can consider it then at the appropriate time. ..."
(Long pause.)
"May I check your Gifts, now?"
"Go ahead." Why is everybody so confused about this all the time? Surely if you want people to know what you are thinking the thing you do about that is you say it and under circumstances where you're not doing that it is obviously undesirable for thoughts to escape. Well, Lionwind is not confused, Lionwind thinks she's very responsible, so probably someone agrees with her and that's what being responsible is for.
"I should really have a lot of questions but I think actually I don't! I know the cool things like Gates take years and years and you can't just tell me how they're done right now." She will spend the week looking at things with mage-sight and reading books and then she will accumulate more questions.
There are two bunk beds inside, one against each side, as well as a table and washstand against the far wall, beside the window. Several of the bunks appear to have been slept in, with clothes draped half over the chests of drawers next to them, but there's only one person currently in the room.
The boy's head jerks up, his hands raising as though to defend himself against some unknown threat. He looks somewhere between twelve and fourteen, but very underfed; he's not even wearing a school uniform, yet, just a ragged off-white homespun tunic.
If Azabel is looking with mage-sight, she'll be able to notice the very clumsy shielding and wards that the boy appears to have placed around the perimeter of his bed.
:We're going to start magic classes at the same time, Urtho mentioned, so I thought I'd come meet you. He said you didn't have as much educational background and might want to catch up?: This suggestion has one entire thought put into how to say it diplomatically, specifically "this might require any diplomacy". :My name's Azabel:
Ma'ar nods, a little doubtfully. He's still trying to parse her remark, Mindspeech conveys language-independent concepts, of course, but he suspects that the concepts themselves - and the motivations behind them - are the thing he's confused about here, not the language barrier,
He takes a deep breath. :I need to practice speaking Tantaran, and reading and writing it, and doing figuring with pen and paper instead of just in my head. Can you help with that?:
Well that's nice and straightforward. :Sure!: She shuffles over to plop down next to him and has her notebook on her knees in a minute. "I'll just send you what I'm saying while I say it and if you want a word you can ask me and we can start with the alphabet. This part I've done before, I taught my friend Skan the alphabet." She writes it all out neatly.
He stiffens slightly when she moves to sit near him, but doesn't object, just digs out his own school notebook and pen. He holds the pen awkwardly, like no one taught him how to do it, but he follows her explanation with far less difficulty than Skan did; he copies each letter with great care and then stares at it for ten or twenty seconds and from that point seems to have it memorized, though he also sketches what seem to be little mnemonic drawings for himself, of various objects or animals that start with the letter-sound.
"Oh." He peers intently at how her fingers are arranged, then tries to imitate it; his next attempt at copying a letter is a bit clumsier, probably because he's less used to writing this way, but he nods. "I'll see if it makes my hand less tired. We could do numbers next?" Hopeful.
There's clearly some additional conceptual insight here; Ma'ar stares at the numbers she's writing out in puzzlement, asks a couple of questions - and then his entire face lights up. "Oh. That is such a good idea!"
The simple addition and subtraction problems seem if anything too simple for him; he squints at the numbers, and then instantly solves them in his head, he seems impressively good at mental arithmetic.
"- Whoa, you can do that?" He's astounded. "I wish I'd known that last year - I worked for a mage, for a bit, I helped him with his records, but the numbers they write with in the north are way worse for doing arithmetic and so I always did the figuring part in my head."
"Here, I can show you." He flips to a different page of his notebook and starts drawing them out. "Up to nine it's just line-strokes, like a tally," he shows her, "and exactly ten is a long rectangle like this - it's like, imagine you were looking at a tally of ten except from far away so it blurred together and just looked like a rectangle. Twenty is two rectangles stacked on top of each other, like so, thirty is three, forty is four... And then fifty is a triangle, for some reason, and a hundred is a square, like a shipping-box full of tens - or like two triangles glued together this way, maybe - and two hundred is two squares on top of each other, like boxes. And a thousand is a circle like this. But they don't have zero and there's no...place-marking...you just need to draw more and more of the symbols and long numbers take a whole line to write."
"They use it for trade and shipping on the river, up north, because usually if you're shipping goods they're in boxes or crates that have about a hundred of whatever it is, but it doesn't matter if it's a bit more or less than a hundred as long as it's full - or I think a thousand is a circle because that's what a barrel looks like from the top, and I guess someone decided a big barrel was the right size to fit about a thousandweight of something-or-other. I'm not sure why a triangle for fifty. Maybe that's because just piling up a heap of fish or apples or something looks sort of like a triangle."
"I like them, though!" And he wants to dive back into trying to do the problems where you solve for a variable, which is fun even if it's harder since he'll forget to write down what he's doing and instead attempt to do it all in his head like he usually has, and then get confused and need to start over.
He is not nearly as patient, or as neat, about writing down his work, but gets more in the habit of it as he watches her.
- at some point the door bangs open, and Ma'ar startles again and flings up a hand to shield himself. His other hand darts to his waist, gripping the hilt of what looks like a sheathed dagger.
:...you're a mage! Also a Mindspeaker! How about I introduce you to some guards so you can call for help if anything happens, and also I know how to do shields kind of and I don't know if they're very good but they're not nothing and I can show you?: Why has this kid her own age been getting into KNIFE FIGHTS.
Poor guy. All her lists of things that can go wrong with people's minds when bad things happen to them (such as KNIFE FIGHTS) are spinning through her brain right now.
She takes him to the nearest guard office and tells him everybody's names, and buttonholes a passing hertasi to get him their name as well, and then continues out of the tower to bring him home with her.
(This is an overwhelming number of people to be introduced to, Ma'ar's head is buzzing with it, and it's stressful that he can't read Azabel's mind to help figure out what she wants here. Her body language isn't hostile, though. And she's even newer to being a mage than he is, and clearly not used to being in fights, it seems likely he could win if she wanted to start one for some reason. ...Unless Mindhealing is useful in combat, he's never met another Mindhealer before and doesn't really know what the Gift does.)
He relaxes a little out in the courtyard, where he can see his surroundings better, and follows Azabel without speaking.
Ma'ar's main experience with gryphons so far has been that they're four times his size and have beaks that could swallow his entire head and claws larger than his fingers, and also when he was approaching the Tower on foot some of them were flying around and seemed to think it was very funny to dive right at people on the path and get them to shriek in surprise about it. He would prefer it if they stayed well away from him, at least until he knows how to shield better and can do it all the time, right now maintaining a physical shield over himself is very tiring.
He follows Azabel all the way out to her house.
"Yes, please, if that's all right." Ma'ar has been avoiding the dining hall for the last couple of days because there were some boys there who thought it was hilarious to mime being about to throw food at him and make him jump, and he hasn't figured out their schedule yet in order to avoid them. It's easier to ignore hunger than to ignore having stuff maybe thrown at him.
She goes and slices bread and cheese and brings him a plate. "If you stab somebody and they didn't stab you first you will be in very big trouble, you know. So it only makes sense to have a knife if you're only going to threaten with it, not use it - only everybody else can figure that out if they're smart so they'll know it's probably a bluff - or if you really expect somebody to stab you."
"They thought it was funny I don't like mindreading and snuck up on me and one tried to bust through my shield," because they SUCK as PEOPLE, "and when I did a Mindhealing thing to him his friend tried magic but then my mage-gift woke up and I did shields, even though apparently that's weird for first magic to do, and also I did the same thing to him. And then their other friends ran away and I got Skan to catch them and called the guards. And my teacher to help me undo the Mindhealing thing."
He shivers. "It seems really unfair when people think something is funny just because you hate it. There were some boys at the dining hall who thought it was funny to mime throwing food at me because it'd make me jump," he adds, sympathetically. "Why don't you like mindreading?"
"I can't think right if somebody might be watching me do it." It's like having to be diplomatic with her brain. Diplomatic, not thinking of pink elephants, graded on her performance like it's one of Skan's flying competitions except for thoughts, she can't do all that at once and also get any useful thinking done especially if she might need to do any of it about pink elephants.
"Huh. Can you also not, uh, write, or - I dunno, do math problems on paper, if someone's watching?" Ma'ar hasn't ever considered that being a reason to disprefer mindreading. He would prefer people who want to harm him not find out his weaknesses, but that seems different.
It's really helpful having her translate in Mindspeech as she talks; Ma'ar has been trying to listen in and pick up Tantaran since he arrived in the country, and already understood significantly more than he could speak, but he's starting to find it much easier to remember words and use them himself. He's getting faster and more fluent with the math problems too, and is so pleased with himself about it.
He thanks her and goes at his plate with gusto, though he has to slow down halfway through it, he's still getting used to getting even two meals a day consistently and he's so full.
:Maybe you can teach me how you do a shield?: he says after. :I figured out how to do shields a bit but it's exhausting so I think I must be doing something wrong:
"I promise I won't." Ma'ar fidgets. Switches back to Mindspeech, it's still exhausting trying to keep up in spoken Tantaran. :If it helps you feel safer I can put my knife on the other side of the room: This is clearly an offer he finds nervewracking to make, but his expression is very sincere.
Yes, well, anyone who feels like it can just say that, Ma'ar thinks but doesn't add out loud. It does seem like Azabel is upset about the knife; maybe she never learned to fight with knives so they just seem pointlessly scary to her?
He unhooks it from his tunic belt, still sheathed, and leaves it on the counter opposite, before sitting down and closing his eyes.
Shrug. "Ready."
He doesn't shield as tightly as she does; plenty to avoid leaking any surface thoughts to a passive read, but he habitually keeps his Othersenses open enough to feel nearby people before they're in sight or earshot, and at his current skill level this involves shielding less effectively; his shield feels springier and a bit more porous, or translucent, than hers.
:...Yes: He tenses a little. :I don't like not knowing who's nearby. I - I wasn't reading your mind at all, I promise, I - usually only try to read people if they're bigger and stronger than me and I think they might want to hurt me:
He's scared that she's going to be very angry and shout at him, or that this will turn out to be some other school rule he had no idea of, but he doesn't want to lie to her, and besides she could get through his shields if she wanted and read it straight from his mind, so it's safer not to lie too.
"Mmm." Ma'ar retrieves the knife, but tucks it into his tunic pocket so it's at least out of her sight, he's less worried than usual about being able to get to it fast. He...has more of a read on Azabel now, though a very tentative one; he thinks he's met people like her before, usually being like her would be a way to get yourself hurt, but maybe someone in her family is important or something and so not as many people are willing to mess with her.
Ma'ar has never read a novel before! It's slow going, he still needs to sound out most of the words under his breath and semi-frequently runs into Tantaran words he doesn't recognize and has to ask Azabel about it, but he goes at it with impressive determination.
Several pages in he lifts his head and gives her a puzzled look. "Did this - really happen...?"
"Oh." :Where I come from, stories are usually in rhymes, like songs, so they're easier to remember: He supposes he's heard more non-rhyming stories since he started travelling through Tantara, but he can't recall seeing someone read one right out of a book, though the concept makes sense and it's neat.
Ma'ar is still kind of on edge, twitching whenever there's a random house noise, but reading is satisfying and Azabel is mostly not being alarming at all, and he gradually starts smiling more.
Eventually he notices that the sun is sinking in the sky. "- Should I go? Before your mother gets back."
Ma'ar goes very still for a moment, thinking. He has no idea how to explain - or whether it's even safe to try to explain - that he doesn't much want to eat at the dining hall and might just...not...but also a randomly selected adult is way more likely to be threatening than a kid his age who's also a girl.
(That makes a surprising difference, actually, he's never had a girl his age try to stab him and only once had one try to pickpocket him, and Azabel seems rich so she probably wouldn't do that - also he's noticed she often moves clumsily, when she's walking around, so probably she couldn't sneak up on him anyway... She would probably be very offended if he said that was part of why he likes her, so he isn't going to.)
"Ranara won't mind, I'm allowed to have people over." She doesn't often use this ability because gryphon diets and sizes do not lend themselves to sitting at a dinner table noshing on bread and beans but still. "I could walk you back to the Tower if you're nervous about that..."
He takes a deep breath. It's - probably not going to be worse than the dining hall, he feels like Azabel would come across differently to him if her mother were often angry or mean, and if she turns out to be nice, then he'll know and can come back again later. "I'll stay."
"Okay! Ranara will be home any minute." They can keep reading until then.
Ranara is home soon enough. "Oh, you have a new friend!" she says.
"Mama, this is Kiyamvir Ma'ar."
"Hm - Predain? Last name first?"
"- I didn't actually ask, do I call you Kiyamvir or Ma'ar -" says Aza.
"Kiyamvir is my father name," he says woodenly, staring at his feet - he can't remember the Tantaran word for 'clan', and also now he's on edge again and trying very hard not to look like he wants to reach for his knife, since that seems like it'd make this situation more threatening rather than less, if he offends his hosts. "You can call me Ma'ar."
:Should I help?: Ma'ar asks Azabel. He's confused; in Predain usually people rich enough to go to a fancy mage-school are also rich enough to have servants to cook for them, they're letting him into the school but he figures he'll be expected to work in the kitchens here or something.
"Well, thank you very much," says Ranara, and she collects the onion and the cabbage and dumps them in her pot, alongside beans that have been slowly simmering over the fire since lunchtime. When that and a bundle of herbs are simmering away she sits down at the table with her daughter and Ma'ar. "Did your whole family move to Tantara, or did you come all by yourself for school?"
"Mage-gift and Mindspeech," Ma'ar says, a bit haltingly. "I need to do reading and math better. Azabel helped today." He has to pause a lot to retrieve words, but he's a lot more confident in his vocabulary than he was before he had a chance to check all of it with someone.
Ma'ar isn't really sure if that's what he was wondering about, but he nods. "Thank you." He's feeling kind of overwhelmed, but if he wants to study at a huge school constantly full of people, he needs to practice being less jumpy around strangers. Or at least showing it less.
She leads him back to the Tower. It's fairly well lit, but she steps carefully anyway. She's kind of wondering if she should have sent him off sooner and he only stayed to be polite, or, contrariwise, if the rude person he has for a roommate is so unpleasant that she should have tried to get him permission to stay overnight, but - she doesn't want to overthink it. She does ask, "Are your other roommates nicer?"
"Mmm," Ma'ar says, noncommittally. The trouble is that all the questions he wants to ask, to figure out what's safe, are in themselves things he's not sure it feels safe to ask about, and also it seems very hard to communicate it to Azabel, it keeps feeling like she's answering a slightly different question from the one he expected or meant.
"If you want to." Azabel's lived here her whole life, probably she knows how to ask for things in a way that doesn't offend someone or make them mad, and if not then maybe they won't be mad at him. Aza's position here is a lot less tenuous than his, maybe it makes sense that she's less worried about it.
The boy from earlier is home still, along with another roommate; they're sprawled on the opposite bottom bunk, playing a game, but turn to look speculatively at Ma'ar and Azabel, and then the first boy starts up a singsong rhyme about boys and girls kissing, except he replaces kissing with 'figuring', making his friend burst into gales of laughter.
"Ma'ar, hmm... Oh, you mean Kiyamvir Ma'ar, the youngster from Predain. Is he unhappy there? There wasn't really a perfect place to put him, there are only a dozen boys his age starting this year and none from Predain, we assigned him with some others from rural northern Tantara but they might still not have a lot in common."
"Fair enough. - Oh, here, I think thiss iss it. There is a whole row - what do you think...?"
There are four different books on medicine as practiced in Predain, for some reason, and a couple of Predain language primers, a couple on geography of the region with maps and one on Predain's agriculture. And then tomes of varying thickness mostly on the history - this one on military history in particular, this one on the initial period when the kingdom was founded, this one on civil wars and conflicts within Predain.
"I'll take that one." It's a shorter primer on Predain's history in general, less intimidating for Skan's current reading level, which is...fine, but he still isn't a fan of books that are mostly pages full of very small dense text and don't have ANY architectural diagrams in them.
Predain has had a lot of civil wars and smaller-scale conflicts! Way more than the history textbook about Tantara mention. There have been several bloody succession crises in its four-hundred-year history as a kingdom, and it also sounds like there are semi-constant family feuds between nearby landholders, or conflicts between different ethnic groups. In particular there are some arid steppe areas that, while ostensibly part of the country, don't really have much rule of law at all; they're inhabited by several different clans of nomadic herding peoples, who spend a lot of time raiding and killing each other and are likely to respond with violence to any outsiders entering their land. Predain also has a long history of being less able than Tantara at maintaining the security of its roads and river trade routes; merchants consider it advisable to always hire mercenary guards, including a mage, when passing through.
The local-scale conflicts have varied over time depending on how strong the central government was at the time, and in particular were at a lull from about a hundred and twenty until fifty years ago, but since then (at least according to the book, last updated twenty years ago), there have been less popular kings, local revolts, a mild succession crisis, and several multi-year droughts, all together leading to a resurgence in banditry. Some criminal rings from the east are suspected to have taken advantage of this to snatch or buy kidnapped locals for the slave trade further south, especially Gifted but untrained children, but this is unconfirmed since the actual government of Predain is apparently uninterested in confirming it.
It's a less detailed skim of the entire history, starting from the founding - which happened initially as an alliance between several major landholdings, followed by an expansionist period of conquering nearby territories, mixed with several coups between the original families angling for the position of greatest power - and covering up until about fifty years ago. Predain has had one border war with Tantara, two hundred and fifty years ago, during which they conquered some territory, which was later given back under a different administration as part of a formal treaty with the then-King of Tantara fifty years later. (This was during a major drought and famine, during which Tantara provided aid to starving people in Predain.) They've had several more wars with Utanz, a small mountainous kingdom to the west. They have a larger standing army than Tantara, but one that's mostly been wielded in internal civil conflicts. They've also been invaded on a couple of occasions from the north, by several different tribes of nomadic horse-riding peoples, though the last of those was a hundred and fifty years ago, ending in some sort of bizarre ritual exchange of hostages and a marriage; at this point they've built a wall to secure their northern border and have it thoroughly guarded.
There's a chapter on the Predain College of Chirurgeons, one of the best-known academies of medicine in the world and the only one that focuses mainly on training un-Gifted doctors.
"I was thinking that I could teach you Mindspeech protocols so you could call me if you wanted anything and otherwise I wouldn't have to bother you, if you don't want company." He sure looks like he doesn't want company but that's what the point of the mindspeech protocols are and they aren't that complicated and he's smart so it'll be fast.
Probably Azabel isn't trying to get him in trouble, Ma'ar thinks, she wouldn't gain much from it, and she's been here a long time and has lots of nice things and probably lots of friends, she's not going to be worried about trying to impress the other students.
"The other boys were trying to get me in trouble," he says dully. "They lied to me about the rules," he sounds very offended, "and - got me kicked out of the room - and they - told a teacher about my knife and the teacher took it."
Ma'ar's expression is particularly devastated about this part.
"Oh... the hertasi said you had nightmares and they'd said it was a noise violation, which isn't very polite but since it got you your own room and that seemed like a good idea to me anyway I hadn't thought it was a big deal. Did you want to stay in that room?" She isn't sure what to say about the knife, he really shouldn't have been carrying a knife around though she didn't know there was a specific no-knife rule. "What rules did they lie about?"
"I think they thought it was funny because I didn't want to." (He does more than think; he miiight have read some people's minds about it, after, he was trying to do that less but now he sort of regrets it, it just let them try to hurt him. Azabel will be angry if he says that, though, so he doesn't.)
He looks doubtfully at her. "Why - do you want to help me. No one else does."
"Hertasi are really neat, I've studied some of them. They're all different like humans are but not as much since somebody invented them to be how they are, so you can make more generalizations. They're really interested in people, and they like gossiping and moving things around so the people around them are comfortable, and they can sort of understand but don't really have privacy intuitions or being speciesist. And they don't get bored the same way, they can do chores all day long and they think it's fun. I think they think of the Tower as sort of like a weird giant dollhouse they're trying to set up to be pretty and well-organized, and it's sort of like a puzzle to them, only a puzzle that keeps moving around. So if you tell them a bit of puzzle has moved they'll want to fix it up for you!" She really likes hertasi.
"I think maybe they wanted servants? I don't know a lot about inventing species, it seems like kind of a weird thing to do, but I guess it's kind of like having kids and people do that all the time. Anyway if you want a servant species hertasi are a good way for them to be, I think, since they like it, and if they want to do other stuff they can." She's not sure of this but will think on it in more detail if she's ever considering making a species. Or having kids.
Is that, like, a prolonged dismissal, or just a desire to get back on topic - eh, same response either way. "Sure, so if you're not right in a room with somebody and you don't know if they might be busy or asleep what you do is -" She has it all neatly written up but reads it to him with Mindspeech translation for Efficiency.
Ma'ar is quiet. He's feeling tense and out of place, like there's something expected of him and he has no way of knowing it, or knowing what the implicit rules are and what will make them angry with him, because he can't read their minds. Also being places without his knife is surprisingly stressful even if Azabel is right that he's incredibly unlikely to need it here.
He sits very still and tries not to take up space or be very noticeable.
He startles a bit, even though it shouldn't be odd or surprising for her to talk to him when he's sitting at her dinner table eating her food. "Mmhmm thank you," he says tightly, and he wants to run away and be where no one can see him and he wants to ever know what's going to happen next -
Also it's objectively stupid to be scared here, there's no indication of a threat, but then again he keeps not seeing the danger coming, over and over.
:Azabel this is really scary right now: he sends to her in Mindspeech, he doesn't know what else to do and this seems better than running away.
:- well, do you want to leave? You can say 'excuse me please' and go if you want: She would be so bewildered if it weren't for her Mindhealing lessons but under the circumstances she tries not to be offended that he thinks this of all things is scary, it's just he overused his scary-meter and it broke.
"She likes teaching little kids - like half our age, or smaller - how to read and count and stuff. And she likes meeting people from far away but you're very jumpy so she hasn't been asking you all about Predain.
I read some books about Predain from the library the other day." She isn't sure that's wise to mention but oh well.
"To the hertasi, or the guards, or a teacher, depending on the problem? You could have gone and gotten another plate in the dining hall when someone milked yours, and could have asked for a room on your own when your roommates weren't friendly before they forced the issue..." What does he think those people are all there for, they aren't furniture.
The look he gives her clearly indicates that this concept isn't really coming together for him. "I guess," he says, sounding dubious. "The hertasi are- I'm getting used to them. The guards..."
(Are terrifying, especially since many of them have magic to shield them against Thoughtsensing and so he has no idea what they might be thinking about doing to him.)
Ma'ar walks with her. He stays close to steady her if she stumbles, since he's noticed that she's clumsy - it makes him sad, she would have died probably if instead of here she'd been born with Clan Kiyam. Maybe not, she's a girl and they don't send girls on raids, but sometimes you still have to run away from them and she's already way too big for an adult to carry, and there are other ways to die on the Plains. And certainly he can't imagine her making it from there to the Tower, unless Mindhealing is even better in a fight than he realized.
He thanks her and locks the door to his room and sits down on his bed, to think very hard about how not to look as scared.
Other children are arriving now; Azabel was a little early. Ma'ar leaves it to the very last second, appears with the bell. (He's been up for a while, actually, he decided to get up very early for breakfast so the dining hall would be less crowded, in addition to not wanting to run into bullies he just really really hates crowded rooms. He's been hiding in the gardens, watching.)
"Generally yes - also, as a mage, you yourself must be centered and grounded in order to channel that much power. I...suppose it is not necessarily the case that you need to be literally on the ground, physically, to do that? But for most mages it is much easier to lift a large object and remain in control if they are themselves in a stable position on the ground."
Snowstar turns to address the class, introducing himself and getting all of their names, and then starts leading them through an exercise to center and ground and then open mage-sight and look around them; he goes around the class in a circle, asks them to describe various features they see around them.
They both get nods and pleased looks from Snowstar; many of the other students struggle more with the exercise, and need coaching just to focus their mage-sight on particular features like the ley-line nearby.
After making his way through all the students, Snowstar hands out little stuffed leather balls; he wants them to practice, for now, just trying to push them on the ground so they roll, and then hitting them harder as though kicking them. He circulates through the group, giving commentary and suggestions for how to think about shaping the mage-energies into force.
This works reasonably well! Both of them get praise from Snowstar and are clearly ahead of the rest of the class; one other boy gets the hang of it almost as quickly, but many of the others struggle, their balls either barely moving or going off in random directions at random speeds.
Snowstar gives Ma'ar and Azabel and the other boy a harder exercise, to try to lift the ball a few inches in the air and drop it again while staying in control the whole time, and then spends the rest of the class moving amongst the others giving suggestions.
Ma'ar mostly just imagines using his hands except it's not his real hands it's his magic, like how he imagined slapping the cows when he used to use teeny levinbolts instead of running and prodding them with a stick. It definitely takes focus, and he feels the fatigue of it sooner than Azabel - he's still not as well fed and he slept badly last night because of nerves - but it works well.
Eventually Snowstar dismisses the class for lunch, with more words of praise for Azabel and Ma'ar in particular. He pats Ma'ar on the shoulder, which makes Ma'ar jump and then forcibly try to relax and not look scared.
"Next class is in two days," he says. "You can take your balls home, if you wish, these exercises are safe to practice on your own time."
Ma'ar was trying to decide whether to ask about coming over for lunch, because he really doesn't want to be in the dining hall when he's too tired to fight back with magic if anyone tries to hurt him but skipping lunch seems like a bad idea when he's used up so much energy. He's not actually hungry right now but he feels weak and dizzy the same way he does after days without food. Stupid of him. He should've been less stupid and not tired himself out so much... Anyway he's not sure he feels up for walking that far to her house, either.
:- Just did too much magic, I think: he sends. :Don't feel good:
This lesson they're doing shields! Well, mage-barriers to be exact, Snowstar instructs them to start with a disk of force about an arm-length across and a few feet in front of them, and once he's given instructions and then he and the new teaching assistants have made the rounds to poke their barriers and give feedback, they're paired off. Snowstar lets them choose partners rather than assigning them.
If she just leaves it hanging, this does not work. She can - anchor the stem to herself, sort of, focus in particular on the power flowing from her to the shield, let the shield share in her sense of being grounded in something solid - which, in fact, is only metaphorically about what her feet are resting on...
It's definitely a lot weirder to try that; the thing that happens by default is that she stops being grounded properly and then wobbles a lot and expends a lot of energy. If she focuses in just the right way, though, she can center and ground and then stay 'grounded' even as she steps onto the barrier.
"Eeeeeheehee!" she cackles. Who needs to be physically on the ground, there is air between her and the ground, that's good enough - who needs the actual ground, even, what she's doing is organizing her thoughts, making those gears click that way, that has nothing to do with the ground at all and she can do it in the air!
"Sure! Uh, I should try the normal shield first before I see if I can stand on it too." He rolls the ball back to her, rather than throwing it for her to catch - it seems very likely it'd just hit her - and then whips together a shield. He does it very fast, in well under a second, and it's more powerful and springy than hers, but also sloppier and seems to use at least three times as much mage-energy.
Ma'ar concentrates and bends his knees, bracing himself against it a little as though catching the blow with his physical body; he isn't doing that, it seems like purely a concentration-aid, the way having her feet on the ground helped her stay the other kind of grounded.
His shield flexes more against it and doesn't quite dampen all of the momentum, when the ball fall it rolls back a little ways toward her, and Ma'ar breathes out in a little oof, but his shield is still intact.
Ma'ar does not seem to find this mental image reassuring! "Leaves...aren't that strong," he says uncertainly. "I could try making mine - thinner and harder, though, like an eggshell. Maybe an eggshell with cloth glued on the backside, so if it breaks it'll bend or get floppy but not just fall into bits..."
His shield flexes less, this time, and he seems to have it well secured, it doesn't shudder or move noticeably either. The ball bounces off, more like it did with hers before.
Ma'ar looks down at it. He's learned his lesson about speaking his mind out loud, here, but: :If someone's throwing a weapon you don't want it to do that, you'd want it to land by you so you can grab it before they can:
"Ha. What a clever trick to have! You may end up finding that very helpful, for mastering more unusual mage-techniques. Anyway, congratulations. Both of you. You are making excellent progress. Hmm - I think I will send over one of the assistants to give you some more complicated exercises for your day off."
Ma'ar has managed to either pace himself better or just be better fed and rested going into this class, and isn't as exhausted, but he's not going to try his luck any more. He writes down some notes in his own notebook; he saw some students had them instead of just sheets of paper, and got up the courage to ask a hertasi, and they very helpfully found him one.
:- Do you maybe want to practice tomorrow?: he asks Azabel, shyly. :I mean, both of us together. I could throw the ball for you:
:Yeah, I'm gonna: She writes this down. And then she writes down a bunch of experiments she wants to do. Can shields hold water, be umbrellas... can Skan wreck one, and does it make a difference if he claws it or just swats it... can she squish stuff in shields, if she gets the hang of moving and reshaping them...
Ma'ar is also thinking of things he wants to try, though they're much more, well, fighting-focused. He can make a shield to block a knife; can he make one to block fire, or levinbolts? Can he make a shield 'thin' and 'light' enough that he could wear it all the time on his body, without it being in the way? He might have to eat more if he's burning mage-energy on it constantly, but it's not like the dining hall has a shortage of food, and he would feel much better about going there if he knew how to shield properly.
When class is dismissed, he says goodbye to Azabel and that he'll see her tomorrow, rather than asking to come over; his mind feels tired in some way even though his body and Gifts don't, and also he wants to test if the dining hall feels less scary, and if he can correspondingly look less scared and maybe not get his plate milked.
Huh. It seems weird that it should be harder. The first inch should be difficult, sure, but after that why... She writes this down when they land, and then she makes shields for Skan to pounce on. She has to tell him where they are so he can aim at them instead of having to pretend to attack her.
"Aww." But Skan obediently backs off, moving on the ground rather than taking off again in case flying is itself scary. Gryphons are not optimized for either bipedal or quadrupedal walking on the ground; he can move effectively enough but looks ungainly and kind of silly doing it.
He can't tell if she means literally right now or later and either way the idea is the opposite of reassuring. "No thank you. We can - I can meet your friend if he. Comes up slowly." This isn't going to be pleasant but Ma'ar is fairly sure that if he keeps the shield up, he'll be able to keep himself from either running away or freezing so much he can't introduce himself back.
Ma'ar is quieter, but doesn't seem to have a notably harder time doing magic at this level of scared. (Most of his magic use in the past has been when he was very scared.) He does keep tending faster and sloppier on his own shields, but notices and corrects himself. Over fifteen minutes of practice, he seems to get used to Skan's nearby presence more.
He will pounce in slow motion first to demonstrate! (This is actually a very hard skill, he knows this because he's now senior enough among the gryphon students that he teaches flying to the little ones, so he feels like he is still kind of showing off.) Then normal speed but still delicately, then a regular pounce, and he looks at Azabel questioningly in case she can tell whether this is too scary.
Ma'ar holds the shield firm; it doesn't budge. If anything he seems calmer, now, very focused.
(It's simpler, in a way, when he's actually fighting off a threat instead of looking for one, it makes everything feel clear and sharp, and this isn't a real fight but it still has some of the same feeling.)
"You're welcome." Ma'ar still having a very hard time not visibly shaking. "I - think maybe I'm tired now. And should go. See you at class tomorrow. Skan it was nice to meet you."
Probably that's all the polite things he should say? He flees. At a calm walking pace, he's been practicing doing that in the hallway.
Ma'ar makes it back to his room, locks the door, curls up on the bed, and spends the next while hugging himself and shaking. And also smiling. His body still seems to think that was extremely dangerous and scary, but he did it ANYWAY and it was FINE and Skan and Azabel were impressed and this means that it doesn't make sense at all to keep being this scared.
He goes to (a very late) lunch, and dinner, and breakfast the next morning, and is early for their next mage-lesson.
He smiles at her. "Good morning!"
They spend that class covering more variants of shield; Ma'ar and Azabel are even further ahead of the others at this point, including the one other boy who continues to pull ahead and under normal conditions, if not for the presence of two significant outliers, would probably be top of the class. Snowstar assigns one of the teaching assistants to work with them on moving mage-barriers.
The next lesson everyone else is still working on the basics; Snowstar brings up the layering technique but says that many people take six months of practicing control to get it down. Ma'ar and Azabel, of course, both have preexisting practice with Gift-control; Azabel's with different Gifts but a lot of it seems to transfer. The teaching assistant jumps ahead to the body-hugging personal shielding that Azabel had already figured out, which Ma'ar has also mostly gotten on his own by now (he feels a lot calmer in the dining hall when he can shield himself.)
Classes continue to meet three times a week and Ma'ar continues to be interested in practicing with Azabel on the days between classes, and gets more and more comfortable with Skan, eventually to the point of asking if he can fly on him. (He then escapes and spends the next several candlemarks in his room calming down, but it's still so worth it.) He discovers the library, finally, and that it has BOOKS on MAGIC and he can start figuring out all the kinds that even exist. He's gotten fast at reading and writing by now, and takes almost as many notes as Azabel does.
The rest of the class is still only halfway through the usual defensive-shielding curriculum by the time Azabel and Ma'ar have jumped through all of it, so the teaching assistant tries to show them how to make stabilized mage-barriers that they can leave in place. They won't be able to do very powerful or long-lasting ones, yet, their Gifts are still developing and not at full strength, but both of them will eventually be Adepts with the ability to touch nodes.
(Snowstar doesn't agree to teach using ley-lines yet; he says he wants students their age to have three to six months of regular training under their belt before he's confident they can do it without injuring themselves.)
Five weeks in, Snowstar throws up his hands and graduates them early to the next level of mage-classes. They'll be starting out behind the rest of the cohort, so he assigns them a week of one-on-one tutoring first, covering the very basics of offensive magic - fireballs, levinbolts, whacking things with aimed force.
Ma'ar, unsurprisingly, is VERY GOOD at this from the start. The tutor assigned to them is impressed and perhaps a tiny bit alarmed.
Azabel doesn't like this part nearly as much. For one thing, the standard way of teaching it involves Literally Any Footwork, and for another, when is she going to have to get into a fight - given her lack of Literally Any Footwork making it kind of dumb for her to risk it? She makes up other theoretical uses - she might ever need to hunt or start a campfire if she goes wandering in the wilderness for no reason, say, and thwacking things could, uh, break up rocks if she wanted to... tunnel through a mountain... why is there so much fighting in this curriculum, whose idea was this.
Ma'ar helpfully tries to find ways to practice it with her that don't involve the footwork part, since that does seem very stupid. Also he suspects that the very basic techniques are going to be useful for things that aren't fights? Based on the book he's been reading about magic theory, heat-spells and mage-lights are both subtler, more precisely-targeted uses of similar kinds of energy to fireballs and levinbolts respectively, and he thinks the throwing force around is going to be related to some of the techniques mages can use in construction and artificing work, though he doesn't know if she would end up wanting to do that.
They both pass their week of tutoring, though the tutor hmms and aahs more about Azabel and warns her that she may be starting out still a little behind and should feel free to ask for extra help. They join the next session, made up of students who've been studying much longer, three to six months.
They're also getting some classroom work, now, on the other two days of the week, where they'll talk about the theory behind magic and its practical uses in Tantara, and various other topics. The first session of that involves a discussion of magic use in metallurgy. Ma'ar sits very quietly and, by great effort of will, doesn't read anyone's mind and instead writes down everything that confuses him, more of it about what questions and sorts of answers are acceptable than about the content, and asks Azabel later.
In the regular mage-lessons: they're learning how to shield against mage-energy! This requires trickier shaping of the energies in the shield than just blocking physical force, but quickly graspable for both of them. The rest of the class has already been drilling it for a few lessons and they spend another week on it.
The first class the next week, they're led to a set of practice Work Rooms and paired off to spar, with a teaching assistant supervising each pair! Ma'ar makes sure he's right next to Azabel so they end up partnered.
Ma'ar is at some point going to be good enough at shields that this strategy doesn't work, but for now he's still worse than her, and he's also very careful with her, gauging the strength of whatever he throws at her to be within what her shields can take. He would - feel bad, he thinks, doing this for someone who actually needed to learn to fight, but Azabel explicitly doesn't want to do that, and he can see that it's just not smart for her to learn it the usual style anyway, it wouldn't work for her.
So he'll play along and get her through the class; it's not like any of the other students are good at practicing real fighting with each other, either, occasionally the teacher shuffles their pairings and he ends up with someone else, this was terrifying the first time but they're so bad at fighting and barely even manage to startle him. He's a little worried that if he does ever get spooked he might react instinctively enough to actually hurt someone, but the teacher seems to be taking this kind of thing into account, making sure everyone is very solid on shields before sparring and that they're supervised.
In general Ma'ar is much less visibly scared all the time, these days. (This doesn't mean he's not scared a high percentage of the time, but he's gaining skill in doing it invisibly to everyone except Azabel, and sometimes including Azabel.) He still has a lot of nightmares but most days he makes it to class having slept enough, and he eats in the dining hall for most meals and gives the bullies a blank-eyed stare when they hassle him and they do, after a few weeks, mostly stop.
Ma'ar asks about when they'll learn nodes, at one point, and the teaching assistant actually makes a pretty good point about why their current class is useful. Drilling simple offensive magic is one of the best ways to toughen up young mage-channels, get the students used to channeling raw energy fast, which will leave them much readier to learn to tap ley-lines and eventually nodes. There's a test for it, actually, throw as much lightning as you can at a shielded target over thirty seconds, and an Adept with the right training can use that to judge who's ready for those lessons. It'd be very early, for them, but they're both making such rapid progress, given previous experience, if they want he can schedule them to do the test early and then maybe get tutoring?
They can do that! The school does hold that all mages should know basic self-defence with magic, which includes subduing attackers as well as shielding yourself, since you might up menaced by bandits out on the road with some non-mage friends and other innocent people in danger. But there will be lots of more complicated techniques for that later that don't involve zapping or dodging, she may just do better with that. In the meantime: target! He takes them over to a different room to try it.
They rest and then practice it some more until they're both out of breath and sweaty - it turns out that doing magic with the goal of maximum zap ends up tiring the same way running is, not that Azabel would presumably know - and then the teaching assistant dismisses them early, with the promise of booking the Adept who does the assessments for next week.
Nod. "I guess if you...thought it was likely you'd ever end up in an emergency that bad, like if there was a war, you'd want to - get good at doing them really exact? So it'd stop people from hurting anyone but not from, I don't know, eating or going to the bathroom, and then it'd - be kind of bad but not a disaster if you couldn't fix it until later."
"That does sound like a bad idea!"
(Ma'ar is noticing that he is a person she could practice on safely and plausibly this is very very important but also, aaaaaaaaah. Well, it probably isn't urgent, there isn't a war right now and he has the sense that Urtho's Tower is the sort of place where a thirteen-year-old girl would absolutely not be dragged into a war even if there was one, and the Tower...does seem, if not entirely safe, at least not the kind of dangerous where Azabel might not have time to fix a set-command right away.)
"Anyway I'm going to go rest. See you in class tomorrow?"
Classes continue. The Adept who tests people is very busy, so their exam is tentatively scheduled for two weeks from now, but the teaching assistant lets them mostly practice blasting the target, and when they also have to practice shielding he lets them stand still against the walls for it, why not, it's not like the thing they were doing before was particularly effective training for a real fight anyway.
A few sessions later, in their classroom theory section, the teacher brings up the topic of blood magic. The explanation of it isn't very detailed - you can kill people and get magic from it, SOMEHOW, also it corrupts people and makes them evil - and the teacher explains with an expression of deep distaste. The students make various horrified sounds and gasps.
Ma'ar thinks about raising his hand, and then thinks better of it and doesn't. :Azabel?: he sends. :Does that - also not make sense to you?:
:What, it corrupting people and making them evil? I mean, there's mind problems that soooort of do that - some people don't have the thing where they care if other people are okay and that looks kind of like them being evil - I don't know exactly how getting energy from a dead person would make that happen but I don't know for sure that it can't? I've never heard of anybody having a patient with that problem from blood magic instead of being born that way though... and I've read all the Mindhealing books in the library:
He used it once. It was an accident. A boy from another clan was trying to kill him, on a raid, and Ma'ar killed him first, and then there was MAGIC - not like the scant flows of ambient energy sometimes near the watering-hole, this was a lot of magic - and he grabbed up some of it and then he got through the rest of the fight. He...doesn't feel evil? He remembers it feeling weird and disconcerting - at the time he likened it to how drinking someone's blood might feel, it's in some sense just another liquid like milk but the taste and smell would feel so wrong for drinking - and he remembers feeling odd afterward. And noting that this was maybe useful, but he's never actually used it since, not once on his long journey. It'd slow down running away, and usually he wasn't being attacked by enough people that the smartest idea wasn't just to run away.
It's a little alarming, but mostly he's just confused. And kind of dubious, since the whole thing feels like a fake explanation.
He raises his hand. "Could you - explain what sort of corrupted and evil, and how that works?"
"I've read all the Mindhealing books in the library," she says out loud, "and don't remember anything about somebody having a patient who got evil because of blood magic. Also evil isn't a diagnosis? 'Addicted' is kind of but most addictions don't make people evil, even if they sometimes help... Do you know more specifically what happens?"
The teacher seems to feel just as unprepared to deal with this question! "It's not like I have any friends who've done this, miss! Uh, so 'bloodpath' mages refers to mages - usually bandits and criminals - who use blood-magic as their main source of power, and they're nearly always - the sort of people who do a lot of evil things."
"But you'd have to be..." Ma'ar kind of hates the word 'evil', he's decided, also it's been said enough times that it doesn't sound like a real word anymore, "- you have to be - the sort of person who doesn't care or think it's bad to hurt and kill people, already, to do that? So maybe it doesn't make them like that, they already were, and - uh, do you know what happens if someone only uses blood-magic when someone was dying anyway? Does it even have to be someone they killed, or could it be, I don't know, soldiers in a war are fighting and the mage with their unit gets blood-power whenever someone dies so they can fight better? Because I don't see how that could turn them into a different person who thought murdering people was fine, if they weren't already..."
Aza gets up and draws an oval and writes BEING EVIL in it and then an arrow from that to another oval reading KILLING PEOPLE and from there to one reading BLOOD MAGIC and then she draws a separate chain of ovals where it goes BLOOD MAGIC to BEING EVIL and then both of the chains lead to the same rectangle which says EVIL BLOOD MAGES. "You'd see the same thing whichever of these it was, right?" she says, tapping her rectangle and looking quizzically at the teacher. "And you're saying it's this one where it goes blood magic then being evil but it could be the other one and it would look the same?"
"- Would it?" Ma'ar leans forward in his chair. "I mean, sometimes you have to do experiments, right, to know how things actually work - I read a book about how Healers do that, and they sometimes kill animals on purpose to understand how different injuries kill humans - they won't kill people who weren't going to die anyway but if someone's dying of a rare disease I bet they'd have students come watch for their lessons... And I read that Healers've watched executions before to understand how being hanged kills people, because it helps with saving people who're trying to kill themselves by hanging. Uh, you could do that to study blood-magic too?"
The teacher is also so frustrated. "Healing isn't evil! It's - well, distasteful and unpleasant, to study executions, but - Ma'ar does have a point, it helps them save more patients later. Blood-magic is completely different, it's never going to be about saving people, only about killing people, so I'm not sure what it would accomplish to run that test!"
"I think it could be, though. Like if there were a war, or - what if the Guards were fighting bandits who were trying to kill students, and the bandits were mages and they killed one anyway, sometimes the Guards do kill bandits, then - what if getting blood-magic from that meant they could save the students when they couldn't otherwise because the mage was too tired?"
"What if there was a famine and you needed a Gate to get food from far away and people were already dying of hunger - or a wildfire and people were dying of the smoke and you could scoop water out of a lake to put it out - or an earthquake and you could unbury people if you could use the people who were already crushed to death - me and Ma'ar are Adept-potential and can just use nodes but not everybody can -"
The teacher is also attempting this. Classroom debates don't normally go this out of control. "I - hmm. I...suppose that isn't evil the way bloodpath bandit mages are, but... I don't know, I'd feel uncomfortable about living somewhere where that was something everyone thought it was okay to do? It'd - weaken the line against it. And then it could be tempting for mages to justify doing it even in circumstances where it wasn't as clear-cut."
"I don't think it's just math - like, if you're in a terrible hurry to go save some people and somebody is... uh... asleep on the very narrow stairs between you and them... you don't fling them down the stairs even if that would be faster than waking them up, because you can't just attack random people for being asleep on the stairs. And it might be that it's better to spend the same amount of classroom time on learning to be more efficient in the first place than on learning to do emergency blood-magic, the math might work out that way, and maybe people would be scared if they heard that people learned blood-magic in school even if we were very careful about it because it's impossible to make everybody include all the details every time they repeat something they heard once, and maybe it actually is addictive and if people took it up me and Lionwind would be buried in addicts who constantly wanna kill people and need help with that..."
Ma'ar is thinking that this is why he likes Azabel so much more than this teacher (or most of the teachers), she has points that actually make sense! The example about the stairs isn't a very good one - waking them up is almost as fast and you could accidentally kill someone by kicking them down stairs if they landed wrong and besides you could maybe just jump over them, but because she's Azabel he trusts her to know that and she did just have to come up with an example on the spot and probably could do ten better ones if she had ten minutes.
"I don't think you should teach it in school, probably," he agrees. "Just, it seems important to do the test on whether it's addictive or bad for people in other ways? Like, what if a mage in the Guard breaks it and does it to save all their friends from bandits and then they get addicted, you'd want to be able to help them, because they - did a brave thing and hurt themselves... And if it's not addictive then maybe it'd be all right to - I don't know, have some special rules that only count during war, I read about that too - there are lots of different laws in war, like, it's illegal for Thoughtsensers to just read people's minds but it's sometimes allowed if you really urgently need to interrogate a captured soldier to find out the battle plans so fewer people die."
The rest of the class goes normally and Ma'ar doesn't raise his hand to say anything else. By the end of it he's only fuming internally a tiny bit. It helps him calm down to instead focus on how Azabel is smart and has good arguments for things.
(The teacher looks a bit like she's considering calling Ma'ar over to stay after class, and she shoots a few uncertain looks in Azabel's direction as well, but shakes her head tiredly and seems to decide against. The other students are less restrained about their disturbed looks, mostly at Ma'ar but Azabel gets some as well. And a few impressed looks too. Talking back to the teacher like that is pretty brave.)
Ma'ar follows Azabel after class, head down. He's suddenly very tired and doesn't want to go to the dining hall at all. :...Can I come over for lunch: he asks her.
Ma'ar unlocks the door to let her in and then goes to sit on his bed; she can join her there if she wants or take the chair at the desk. He looks exhausted and sad, more than scared, and spends a minute picking at his food in silence because he suddenly has no idea what to say.
:It was when I still lived with Clan Kiyam on the Plains. They - sent me on a cattle raid once I was old enough, to fight one of the other clans. I think I was twelve. Someone tried to kill me, from the other clan, and then - there was all this magic suddenly - the Plains don't have a lot of magic, hardly even any ley-lines, it doesn't rain enough. I didn't know why but it was right there so I took it and then I didn't die in the rest of the fight:
:...Not really? It - felt like I imagined drinking someone's blood would, it'd be sort of like water but not the way that'd help if you were thirsty... And then I felt kind of weird after. I don't think it made me want to use it more? I...could've, later, I knifed a bandit once who tried to grab me on the road and I - killed a caravan guard by accident when I was traveling with them and they - attacked me at night when I was asleep - but it would've slowed me down and running away was smarter so I did that: He shrugs. :I don't know why people like alcohol either, it just makes you stupider:
:Yeah, I don't get it either, but people do it kind of a lot, so they probably like it. Huh: Ma'ar doesn't seem evil to her but if she had to rank all the people she knows from most to least evil he probably would not rate dead last, and he's only done it once, but also the teacher had no idea what she was talking about and she should wait for books.
"It seems really important that someone study it? I mean, if it doesn't make people evil and addicted by itself then - a lot of people are wrong, that should matter even if there are other reasons it's a bad idea to use it. And...if it does then that's something I don't understand about how magic works? I've never heard of other kinds of magic being addictive or - making you care about different things," shudder, that's incredibly horrifying as a concept, "but if magic can do that at all, then maybe there are other kinds that do and it's just harder to tell because they don't make you want to murder people? And I'd want to know that because even if, I don't know, some kind of magic just makes you love flowers, I don't want it to accidentally change what I think is important!"
"Yeah, I've never heard of anything else working like that either. If there's nothing to it at all then it's very weird that they want to teach us to fight so bad and then also there's this, that's so strange? Hitting somebody with a fireball will also kill them! So I wouldn't be surprised if they had some reason to believe blood magic was specifically a problem but I'd really like to know why they think that besides that somebody who already attacks people for a living doesn't stop doing that if they wake up a sneeze of magic and figure out how to combine their skills."
Ma'ar closes his eyes. "It's - really upsetting - that she thought I didn't care about killing people and just - wanted excuses for it to be fine! I've - met people like that," (read their minds, he doesn't want to think about that at all right now), "and I'm not and it's not fair that she goes thinking that just because, because..." Yet again he's run out of words.
At least Azabel believes him that he cares. That helps a little. "...I guess if it turns out there aren't books, we - probably shouldn't say anything about studying it until we're older? Because they - don't take children seriously here, and they'd just think we were evil. But we should find out if there're books before we worry about that, probably."
That...isn't a no, but it's also not obviously a yes and he's suddenly so scared. "Aza please don't tell him I don't want any grownups to know when they - might decide I'm evil and kick me out of the school or - think it's okay to hurt me because I'm bad -"
And now he's crying even though this is incredibly stupid and unhelpful. He curls up and puts his head down on his knees.
Oh no is she also going to stop believing him about things he says. It's too hard to talk because he's crying. :I really really don't want to kill people! People dying is the worst thing and I want to make it stop! I - if I kill anyone else ever it'll be because they're trying to kill me or other people or doing worse things than that...:
"I don't think you do, just, like, if something's actually gone wrong with all your gears they might do stuff that they wouldn't do now, and I can't promise I still wouldn't say anything if that stuff was killing people..." Should she hug him. He flinches when people touch him, so probably not?
"Huh! ...You know, I had heard that bit of folk wisdom before, when I was a child, and it had never occurred to me that if it were true I ought have been taught about it as a Mindhealer - you really are so clever sometimes! It - hmm. I think it is somewhat complicated, the claim is...not false on the surface but also not straightforward as that implies. And you are right, no Mindhealer has written about it. Have a seat and I can tell you what I know?"
"I have never treated someone where their main issue was use of blood-magic and resulting addiction much less - losing the ability to care about human life, or however we might translate what your teacher meant by 'evil'. I have on a few occasions worked to rehabilitate mages - usually teenagers, sometimes younger than that - who were captured when the Tantaran Guard fought bandit groups. Since trying a child for crimes as though they were an adult is - obviously monstrous, especially when many of them were themselves kidnapped, practically slaves - this has been rather concerningly frequent on our border with Predain in recent decades - or in one case raised within the bandit camp from toddlerhood. I think most of my conclusion here is that being put in such a situation is horrifically bad for a child, and use of blood-magic is the least of it, but - that does not make it not a problem, of course."
"It is not physically addictive in the way that the most dangerous drugs are, or even to the extent that alcohol is. There are cravings, often, but - I think of a different kind. It looks more similar to the way that some patients crave - bullying weaker people so they can feel powerful and in control, or taking risks for the thrill, or cutting themselves because it gives them relief from emotional pain. It usually helps a great deal when they feel safe, and therefore do not need to be powerful to protect themselves - and in one case the child had an Adept-potential Gift and training her to use nodes made the cravings for blood-power vanish entirely. But often it is the case that these youngsters are not strongly Gifted, and the only way they can ever be powerful in a fight is to use blood-magic, which does not need an Adept-strength Gift to wield. And they crave it in the exact way they might long to keep an especially good weapon, because it makes them strong and they - were raised and shaped in a situation where that is the only thing that mattered."
"Because if they ever learned further details, it was decades ago in a classroom and they have forgotten? Teachers have not learned everything, Aza, and we sometimes forget things we were taught. And - we bring our own prejudices into the classroom, sometimes even when we are trying very hard not to." His mouth quirks a little. "I suppose some of us try harder than others."
She comes and knocks and then sits back down in his desk chair. "He says people get attached to it because they don't, uh. Feel safe without being able to sling around a lot of power, sometimes, and the bandit cases are sometimes basically slaves to their bandit group - you can just read this page if you want -" She passes him her notebook.
He reads through it.
"That - makes sense." He shudders. "Some bandits tried to do that to me, I think. That's probably what the one who I killed would've done. I - I don't feel like it's worth it to kill people just so I won't be scared! I mean I probably would if I'd literally die otherwise but it seems different if I kill someone who's literally trying to kill me and then also I get blood-magic for it instead of just wasting it." Shrug. "I would be - really really upset, though. I want people to not die. Even if they're bad people. They're still people." He closes his eyes. "Lights in the world."
"I mean, if everyone is going to starve otherwise - if there's, I don't know, a war and a siege in your city or something - then I think you should eat people! And it'd be stupid to ban it just because it's gross! ...It doesn't feel wasteful not to use blood-magic if there's lots of mage-energy and everything important is getting done already. Maybe that's true at the Tower right now. I...don't think it's true in lots of places, though."
"If I - knew there was going to be a war and a siege next year then maybe I'd want to try to persuade important people that they ought to be willing to make it not-illegal if that happened? Because otherwise I bet they wouldn't because grownups are stupid."
He shrugs again. "There's probably not going to be a war, though, so - in this actual world I'm not going to prioritizing thinking about either blood-magic policies or people-eating policies very much. Just, I wish more people felt like it was a thought they'd be allowed to have, if things started getting really bad - I don't think it is, did you see everyone else's faces. But if it was then it'd feel less like it has to be me - us - who think about it even though it's horrible and upsetting."
"I told you that I don't feel tempted to do it at all! I could've done it so many times when I was trying to make it here by myself, and been in less danger, because then I'd have gone to sleep with more magic instead of having none because I had nothing to eat. But I didn't because people dying is bad. And I didn't do it even when I'd just killed someone anyway - which was really horrible!!! - because I also don't like it and it didn't seem important enough!" Ma'ar is getting so. incredibly. tired of how it keeps feeling like people don't believe him when he's being very clear about what he thinks!
She sighs. "I'm really sorry all that bad stuff happened to you. But even if blood-magic doesn't do anything to your gears at all bad stuff happening to you can. It's not fair! It's horrible that if somebody has awful things happen to them they don't even just have those awful things to live with but also extra awful things that live in their head! And if you won't go see Lionwind and everybody else is totally crazy about everything to do with blood-magic then I am the only person here to worry about it besides you personally, and I'm not calling you names, I'm not saying it's your fault, I'm not saying you can't be okay or can't be a good person or anything, I'm just - noticing. And telling you since you didn't want me to tell Lionwind."
Ma'ar listens her out, hugging himself but otherwise looking calmer. He nods.
"I - thank you. For looking out for me. I...don't think there's anything wrong with my gears that would make me - want to hurt people - but if it looks like I'm going to do that then you should stop me. You - have my permission to do that and I wouldn't be mad."
Blood-magic is understood to work by releasing all of a person's life-energies at once, via a violent death, in a format such that a mage - even a mage with very poorly trained or minimal mage-sight, and there are rumours this includes people without mage-gift at all - can wield them. Bloodpath mages commonly torture their victims first, on the grounds that this releases more energy; the book doesn't know if this claim is true, obviously no scholars have tested it. There are a couple of quotes from anonymous sources about the 'rush' and 'high' of wielding blood-power. There's also a mention that it makes some people very ill after using it; the example given is a farmboy with an untrained and unrecognized mage-gift semi-accidentally used it when under attack by nomadic horsepeople, bloodpath mages don't tend to collapse after fights, the theory is that they become inured to the horror of it and so don't get sickened afterward.
Blood-magic, in addition to its addictive high, is suspected to damage the minds of people who use it regularly; the main source for this claim given is that bloodpath mages generally have very sloppy control and, for example, almost none of them can Gate even though taking in blood-magic provides more than enough power.
Blood-magic use is also damaging to the land, in the short run; it behaves differently than the naturally released mage-energies that emanate from living things and eventually trickle into ley-lines and finally to nodes. It's 'stickier' and tends to block up these flows, causing particular problems with the weather and making people with certain Gifts or sensitivities sick.
There are almost no official schools of magic that train it, for the obvious reason. There are the usual unskilled criminal groups, who are assumed to be self-taught or maybe apprenticed with more experienced bandits, and there are rumours of very secretive mage-cults that teach it in more elaborate ways, but of course nothing much is known about the specifics of this.
Blood-magic is illegal in Tantara because it involves murder which is almost never justified, it's harmful to mages who use it and to the land, and because obviously letting people just do that is a terrible terrible idea.
"I was thinking that. Gates are - I asked and they're not normally even covered until two years in, that's a lot of classes and tutoring they think you need first. Probably these mages out on their own don't even have books! And I thought that too, doesn't any really big use of magic mess with the weather? Even draining nodes for doing construction or something, if you do a lot of it fast in one day, it messes up the ley-line flows nearby, I read that somewhere."
Nod. "I - think that's my impression too. It doesn't seem urgent to figure it out all the way, I guess, I - think it's right, for it to just be illegal here, and I'm not going to do it, so... I don't know, maybe when we're older we'll have a teacher who knows more and thinks it's okay to tell us."
The chapter explains that trap-spells - a variety of set-spell, which is a kind of spell that's laid permanently or semi-permanently on a physical focus - are an accepted use of magic in war or for border defence against hostile regions. A regular trap-spell is basically a detection ward plus a triggered spell that can set a fire, or paralyze a person nearby, et cetera.
Cursed artifacts are items - they can be sold as magical artifacts for some other purpose, or just functional like a sword or decorative like a tapestry - which also secretly include some sort of trap-spell. Often they're made to purpose for assassinations. Sometimes they can be triggered by a mage from a distance, for example that lovely tapestry on the wall above the baron's mantlepiece could be triggered to explode violently when he's known to be sitting there having his evening nightcap. Or they can be triggered by a nearby action, like someone touching or picking them up. (Weapons triggered like this are legal in war, though there are strict rules about it; the illegal thing is specifically selling or installing such an artifact with deceptive intent, hiding its true nature.)
"I read about demons in a different book about a war, they sound horrible, they just eat everything including all the magic and they're not smart enough to obey orders, even, just magic bindings." Shudder.
Ma'ar looks at the index again, flips through, stares into the distance. "...It's not illegal if you have to do Mindhealing set-commands, right?"
"No - though I guess that's probably just because we're too rare for there to be a lot of laws about us. Maybe it would be if there were lots. - also mages have more self-defense options than Mindhealers do that aren't that, if I'd already been a mage at the time I probably wouldn't have needed to that once."
He nods, thoughtfully. "I - think we're probably going to learn lots of kinds of self-defence that don't kill people or hurt them really badly, like the paralysis trap thing, and I guess that'd be better. But - if the alternative was killing someone, it...just seems way better to do a set-command? Or a compulsion. And I can't do set-commands but I could do the same thing, and - and then I'd never have to kill someone because they were trying to kill me, ever ever again..."
"It doesn't say, hmm..." He reads a bit further.
Although any and all use of compulsions is banned in Tantara, the theory behind compulsion work is taught in schools at the highest levels, since this is necessary to remove compulsions safely and they are often used by criminal mages in bandit groups, and sometimes in wartime in other kingdoms.
"- So they're going to teach us about it at least. Eventually. But if random bandits can do it then it can't be that hard - I bet you could do a simple one like 'stop' fast if you had practice. Except it's still illegal." He makes a face. "- Why don't they use it in the army, you could just make all the enemy soldiers stop fighting instead of killing them!"
"...well, if it were very common maybe everybody would wind up standing there including a lot of the people who could unfreeze them, and then they'd die of thirst, especially if the civilian mages who weren't there at the time were scared to come unfreeze them in case the other side had mages doing the same thing at the same time and would stop them too. Since, look, it says they're low power, I can't set-command a whole army but a mage could compel one, or a chunk of one..."
Ma'ar considers it, seriously. "...Okay, that makes sense, it's probably a rules of engagement thing like not torturing prisoners and keeping parleys, that was in the book, that's important or - each side would just do worse and worse things." Shrug. "I don't - I still sort of wish it could be allowed in self-defense? You're allowed to carry a sword and if you kill a bandit with it because you were attacking you, you'd - get questioned by the Guard about it and all but if it really was self-defense you just get let off with a warning. Same if you're a mage and you fireball someone, I think."
Somehow going to Lionwind's office seems scarier, even if it's just to ask questions, because it's...more the sort of context where he might look at Ma'ar's mind and then decide he's evil? He probably wouldn't, because he seems like a sensible person, but...
Ma'ar tries not to look scared, though, and nods. "I think it'd be good if he said it to the whole class, so they all know his smart and sensible opinions too? But we'll see."
Lionwind is very good at addressing a classroom and holding their attention! Also at blackboard diagrams! He gets up and explains approximately the same things he did to Azabel, though it takes a lot longer because he needs to back up and summarize a lot of Mindhealing context on why, for example, being enslaved by bandits is generally bad for children's wellbeing - in a way that (very unfairly) affects their moral character - completely separately from blood-magic. This is testable, even, since bandits sometimes enslave children who aren't mage-gifted at all, and he's also treated some of those cases and they struggle nearly as much to adjust to not being criminals.
"Hmm, give me a moment to think - retraining control wouldn't be my focus, right, these teenagers would have mage-tutors as well, who would also teach them what's legal versus not, I'm not an expert in that either. So take whatever I say with a grain of salt, but...my guess is that blood-magic behaves pretty differently from casting from reserves, especially for kids whose Gift wouldn't be strong enough to touch nodes. There's a lot of it so the easiest thing to do with it is big and sloppy, and you'd build that habit, and not the habit of being precise. ...I reckon it's not that far off from what you see sometimes in youngsters whose Gifts awaken traumatically at full strength, usually you get years of practice before that, but if you're an Adept from the start you've got more power than you know what to do with."
"Kiyamvir Ma'ar," Ma'ar says very politely. "I wanted to ask you a question - it's a bit complicated - the book we read the thing about blood-magic in also had other kinds of illegal magic, and one was compulsions, which are sort of like set-commands except not Mindhealing, and...set-commands aren't illegal, right, even though compulsions are. I figured there're just way fewer Mindhealers, but - what do you think, about whether they're different and should be treated differently by the law?"
"Oh. Hmm. That is a complicated question - let me think it through for a moment... First of all, set-commands are against the rules in all but a few situations - if a patient is emergently a danger to themselves or others, or if the Mindhealer themselves is in imminent danger. It is true that this is prosecuted by the Healers' guild, not the official Kingdom law - that is also true for crimes regular Healers commit with their Gifts, though murdering someone with Healing would fall under both. Anyway, there are a few historical cases of Mindhealers losing the right to see patients, and in one case having their Gift blocked permanently, due to misusing Mindhealing and particularly set-commands."
Ma'ar nods. "So it's illegal to do crimes with it, the same as it's illegal to do crimes with a dagger, right? And if you hurt someone with a dagger because they attacked you, you'll get questioned about it, but not get in trouble if you really were going to die otherwise."
"- Yes, that seems about right, though it's a less formal process than the Guard-house and courts just because there're so few of us. Compulsions are... I suppose not different in principle, but it would be much harder to enforce, since there are so many more mages. And there are fewer licit uses, right. Mages do not use set-commands to treat patients, and they have many other options for self-defense."
Ma'ar nods. It's nice how it's so much easier to have a reasonable calm conversation with Lionwind because he isn't constantly saying things that are incredibly stupid. He's jealous that Azabel gets such a good teacher.
"I thought about mages having other options and it's true, but some of them hurt people a lot more, and might kill them?"
"...I guess." Ma'ar thinks he would still prefer it to being stabbed, probably? Since if someone stabs you wrong you might bleed out before a Healer gets there. "- Could a mage use compulsions to, uh, I guess stop someone if they're about to try to kill themselves? I feel like that should work."
Azabel writes down that it's possible actually that with a light enough touch compulsions could do some replacement Mindhealing tasks and that would make it less of a problem that there are so few proper Mindhealers but it doesn't seem like it needs getting into in this class right now when she can ask Lionwind in private later.
"- Oh, you know, I do actually have some stories about that! One of my own teachers is a Mindhealer who traveled to many parts of the world, and further south in the Ceej, placing compulsions on someone secretly or against their will is illegal - though poorly enforced, I hear - but it is allowed, and as I understand it not uncommon, for nobility to require their servants to be under compulsions - they call them 'loyalty' compulsions but as I understand it, they are mostly just making them not able to assassinate the people they serve or be agents to other families. Apparently otherwise the other nobles will try to get spies and assassins in. It all sounds rather exhausting."
"...Yes? I think they do not last forever, but - months, at least, and these nobles would have house mages to check. And I imagine it works better if it is not something the person is fighting very hard - which likely the servants are not, since this practice makes it less likely that they will try to be assassins, if they expect to fail anyway."
"It is kind of gross and I sort of think it might be sticky? If you stop compelling all your servants one day then you're fine to begin with because nobody tried to be your servant in order to assassinate you but sooner or later you have to hire a new one and that one has probably heard that you're the only person in town who doesn't, and maybe that gets you some perfectly normal gardener who just doesn't want a compulsion on but maybe it gets you an assassin, just because all the other targets are harder to reach, so nobody will be the first to stop and it would be better to find some other way to solve your assassins problem."
Ma'ar is frowning. It's hard to find the right words for the point he wants to make, and he wouldn't even try with the normal teacher, but Lionwind is smart.
"I...think it'd be stupid to do in Tantara where mostly there aren't assassins anyway," he says slowly. "And - it seems sort of bad to do to servants serving nobles, because - the nobles already have more power than the servants, right, they get to make the rules, they have other options. But...okay, if it's the city Guard, not in Tantara where they're mostly following the rules but - in Predain the Guard is really corrupt and - and that's sticky, I think, it's - it pays horribly and it's not fun if you're a person who - cares about things being nice and the law being followed, I think, because they're not. And - and the Guards are the ones who have power over everyone else and they use it to hurt people and take their money and - and rape them, because they can get away with it, they're stronger."
Shrug. "Just, I - think it'd be different if someone made a rule, all right, if you want to be a Guard who's allowed to carry a big sword and arrest people whenever you feel like, and have them be scared of you, the rule is you need to have a compulsion not to rape anyone. Because then that would be the thing that was sticky, and - and I don't know how else to get away from the problem where it's hard to make the Guards not corrupt and horrible because mostly only people like that want to have most of their colleagues be like that..."
"I think it might be good to read more history in this kind of class? And try to figure out why it got like that in Predain in the first place and why it isn't in Tantara, in case there's something else you could do instead. - also you'd have to be really careful with the exact kind of compulsion even if it's only on people who are like 'yes go ahead I want this job anyway' - for them, of course, but also if one finds a way around it then there being a compulsion would mean nobody'd believe their victim -"
"Yes, that is a good point, Aza," Lionwind says, looking grateful. "And, yes, I think this type of question is mostly about history, and ethics and some philosophy, rather than anything specific to magic. ...To be honest this is true of Mindhealing as well, many problems that patients can have depend on their life situation in context, which has a great deal to do with the history of the world around him..."
This is extremely a digression but it's interesting enough to get the room's attention onto something else, and then Lionwind segues into asking whether the book Ma'ar read had other types of illegal magic listed.
Ma'ar is feeling very scared right now because it feels like he said something wrong but he isn't sure what. "Uh, demon summoning. And making artifacts that secretly murder people, and enslaving elementals. All of them seem like they should just be illegal, I think? Unless elementals aren't people but I think they are."
"This is well outside my expertise now! I think I will prevail on your usual teacher - do you know the answer to his question...?"
Lionwind keeps almost-but-not-quite glancing at Azabel, like he very badly wants to Mindspeak something to her, but he doesn't through the end of the class.
Another heavy sigh. :Then this is especially awkward and I should arguably not be having this conversation with you at all, but - that exchange earlier would trigger the usual protocols to have a student speak with a Mindhealer, to...see if they are all right and whether some - very bad thing that others are not aware of happened to them. And, having been there for it myself, I am - actually quite concerned already. However it is not especially appropriate for me to ask you for your impression of whether your friend Ma'ar is...okay. However, that is the matter on my mind:
:I think probably there is not more to say that would not already be self-evident to you? ...He is not in trouble, to clarify. Making controversial arguments in class is allowed, or at least it should be and I will argue that firmly to your teacher if she disagrees, my concern is...separate from that:
That kiiiind of sounds to him like he's in trouble, but - well, at least it's better than being in trouble with their regular teacher, he trusts Azabel a lot and she seems to think Lionwind is a reasonable grownup, which...at a glance looks plausible, anyway.
He lets her in.
In she comes. Down she sits.
:Apparently if you bring up certain things in class Lionwind is supposed to have a sit-down with you to figure out if any of the things happened to you but I convinced him that I could just tell you about this policy instead since you're shy: Well, paranoid, but "shy" will do.
....Probably it's a rude thing to say that a lot of people are really really terrible at being careful enough.
:I had Gifts before I left the Plains: he says. :They're - dangerous but not that way. ...I guess unless you have awful parents or relatives but mine were fine: He lifts his eyes to hers. :By the time I got to the city I'd...figured out Thoughtsensing again and I was -: he curls up slightly, :- I was reading everyone's mind all the time, so...I had warning:
This is Azabel, of course, so he is probably about to get snapped at.
:Yeah.
I know some other bad things have happened to you though. And I asked Lionwind if hypothetically I would be ready to see a patient alone if it was you and you weren't comfortable with him and he said I should still be supervised but it could be written-up summaries after the fact - maybe not even with him, sometimes Mindhealers send letters long distances with anonymized cases in them to get advice without spreading somebody's secrets around identifiably:
Ma'ar takes a deep breath and - makes a deliberate effort to calm down and remind himself that Azabel is his friend and hasn't turned into a different person just because he's in some sort of obscure and confusing trouble about saying things in class.
He considers it for a while. :I - think that seems less efficient than you explaining it, or showing me your notes, it's not like I think you'd lie about it and I could always go look it up in the library later:
Ma'ar's eyes are closed. He seems, if anything, calmer than before.
His gears are - very unusual, but a lot of the unusual parts aren't along dimensions related to trauma. He does have a lot of the patterns she's studied before, the outer 'surfaces' of his mind almost entirely oriented toward threat-detection, strung with the sorts of long gear-shafts that would instantly propagate a reflexive response. It looks...organized, though. Almost as though half of it was deliberately planned and then tidied up on purpose, and the rest just hasn't been gotten to yet. The organized aspect seems newer, somehow, layered and partially rebuilding whatever used to be there, and a lot of the linkages are - not really about triggering a fight-or-flight response, if anything the opposite. Ma'ar's mind contains a lot of patterns aimed at deliberately calming down.
And that's mostly the edges, anyway. The deeper core of him - almost resembles Azabel's own mind, in a way, with a single central gear linking to nearly everything, though the layout is different in some hard-to-describe way. It's incredibly purposeful. ...One of the easier-to-describe aspects of the difference is that his mind is more layered, the central driving gear deeply buried and protected, visible more in the way it connects and directs everything else than in itself. His mind is also more... 'Tightly constrained' isn't quite the thing, neither is 'bunkered down', his attentional structure is very outward-oriented and not just in the sense of immediate threat-sensing. But it does look like the centre of Ma'ar is - shaped by danger, and by a lack of something, in a way somehow fundamentally different to how Azabel ended up with her organized layout.
:You're really organized in there. I am too but not this way... It looks like you're really oriented toward reacting very fast if anything happens around you, not in a panic way - there's a little of that but it looks kind of like you're re-doing it on purpose so you can be calm instead - that's so cool - it looks like you are very shaped by having been in danger a lot but not in a conventional presentation... and I don't know quite what's not here, I can maybe figure it out...: Lack of what, clockwork mind.
Ma'ar looks pleased. :Oh, good, is that working? I thought it was but I wasn't sure how well:
It's in general tricky to figure out that kind of context just from the clockwork structure, and Ma'ar's mind in particular seems to in some sense not want to be figured out, but... It's not a lack of safety or security, not quite, though that's close, and definitely part of it...
Most people's minds, especially young people, have very deep-set structures around interreliance on other people, attachment to loved ones, love and connection - the parts of them that, in times of stress or of striving, reach out for those supports. Ma'ar has very close to literally none of this.
This is a pattern Azabel recognizes, but most minds she's seen with a similar lack are deeply unstable. His isn't. The central gear and structure are very strongly self-stabilizing. The lack is still costing him something, probably; all of the self-soothing patterns he's effortfully building in to replace the panic reactions need to be anchored just internally. But it works. His mind holds together as a structure and it looks like he ought to be able to exert deliberate control over most of it, if not quite all at this point.
:You've got almost a - a gyroscope in there -
- most people especially kids kind of grab at people around them, family and stuff, to do things without going too far off course, and people who don't have that are sort of collapsey... and you aren't collapsey but it means you're kind of psychologically trying to balance on one foot, even if you're good at that...:
:Whoa, you can just see that!: Azabel's Gift is sososos cool actually!!! :I - huh - that makes sense. I...think that's a good way of putting the thing that...confuses me a lot about some people: Moreso back when he made a habit of reading minds all the time, but the confusion hasn't gone away, people are presumably still like that even if he's not reading them and sometimes he can notice the pattern just from their words and actions. :The...grabbing at people. Even when it's - obviously not going to work, because their grownups are bad at plans too:
:Well, grownups can be bad at plans and still know more about what's going on just because they're older - or even if they don't have a good plan a nice grownup can still get different kinds of attention from other people, and reach things off high shelves, and stuff, and people go to them for that and it's close enough as long as nothing really bad happens - this might be one of the reasons bad things happening is so damaging? Because then it much more obviously doesn't work:
Ma'ar fidgets and spends a long time trying to pick out the right words.
:I - think it's really bad to believe things that aren't true: he says finally. :And - it's not true, almost ever, that people's grownups could stop really bad things from happening. And they do happen. Less here but still, and - and everyone knows they happen more in Predain, but...: He can't figure out how to explain the next piece. :I don't know, just, it feels maybe related to why most people are crazy about blood-magic. Because it's a really bad thing, and it - only makes sense when it's instead of an even worse thing, but...people have to believe that things that bad couldn't happen to them? Or something? And...I feel like that makes it so people have to not notice problems in other places and then no one fixes them and it's BAD:
:I think knowing whether or not it's true that I'm safe makes me better at doing things: Shrug. :I was...worse at doing things at the start, here, because I was used to places that were less safe and so I kept believing wrong things, you were right about that, but then I noticed and changed my mind:
:I think it's actually working really well! Just, this is extremely weird of you and you shouldn't expect other people to work that way: Gears are so pretty. She has a good angle on the gyroscope thing now and it's so lonely and pretty like one single cloud wafting across an empty sky.
:I mean, no, but I feel like a lot of the time they - don't check if the things they're doing are actually solving the problem they want solved? Or they're not even seeing it that way, that solving it is their responsibility instead of it just being - a good person thing, to do things, whether or not they work: Shrug. :I - think Tantara is less like that, or - at least it's mostly fine even with people being like that. Predain really isn't and I'm going to go back and fix it once I'm old enough:
:Uhhh - so when I was first here, some boys were bullying this girl, they - weren't actually breaking the rules and fighting physically but they were saying mean things and making her cry, and - doing things that were almost but not quite breaking the rules, like tripping her so she fell and pretending it was by accident. And there was a teaching assistant right there and he wanted them to stop it and felt bad - I, um, I was reading people's minds still, this is before I talked to you about not doing that and also I hadn't - realized yet that not everyone had knives all the time and things like that... Anyway he felt bad and it was his job to look after the students and he sort of told them 'that's not nice, stop it' except they were obviously going to keep doing it the second he went away, only he...felt all good about himself anyway for being brave and saying something, but it wasn't even brave because it wasn't dangerous for him to do... I don't know: Shrug. :I understand how the rules work better now and maybe he couldn't've done a smarter thing very easily. But it bothered me:
:I don't think there was an obvious smarter thing for him to do, just - creative things that might've helped. I think actually it wouldn't be very good if everyone tried creative things that might help whenever they had any kind of problem? Because it'd make absolutely everything harder to predict and make even boring non-creative plans around... and sometimes people's judgment would be bad and they'd make it worse... also people have to be brave to do things that aren't literally dangerous a lot and that's not even a weird one, it's like stage fright:
:- Huh, really? I don't think I have that, that seems weird. I'm - scared sometimes in a way that's wrong here, because in Predain if you said something that upset people they might decide it was rude enough to hurt you over, or just notice you existed enough to want to hurt you. And sometimes things are scary because - if people decide I'm evil then I'll get kicked out of the school and then it'll be really hard to learn enough things that I can go back and fix Predain. But it doesn't make any sense to be scared if you already know it's definitely not dangerous, or - or only dangerous in a way you're strong enough to handle:
:People's feelings don't always make sense! People with stage fright can't stand - being the center of attention, or they can't bear to look silly, it all blows up to huge proportions in their emotions even if they can tell you 'in fact no one will throw a tomato at me and even if they did that wouldn't be lastingly injurious':
:Huh. I...guess my feelings are mine but that's sort of not the point, obviously they're mine, who else's would they be. I - want my feelings to be - about things in the world that are true, instead of being caused by something I'm wrong about, and I want my feelings to help me get things done that are important, or at least not stop me from that. I - don't think I'm that good yet at just having feelings that make sense, I keep getting so mad in class and I know it doesn't help, I'm going to work on only being as mad as I want to be once I finish with the scared thing:
Ma'ar pauses, goes quiet and pensive for a while. :...No, actually I think it does make you better at doing things, or - better at knowing true things, at least? Or maybe I don't mean true, not in the sense of...how it's true that the sun will rise tomorrow, but - whether something is bad, whether it'd be better if something changed. People dying is bad, right? I'm - still really sad and angry about my mother dying, I think it's - important, to not just - decide that's an okay way for the world to be just because I couldn't change it. I don't want to break my ability to tell that sometimes the world is a way but it shouldn't be:
:I can think things shouldn't be without having a lot of feelings about it. Like that the library should be organized differently, or even that guards in Predain should be nicer, I'm not really emotional about that although I could get that way if I thought about it enough:
Shrug. :I mean, sometimes I decide to only feel a little bit sad about something because it's distracting and the best way to - make things like that not happen again or be different - means I have to not be distracted. I don't go around actually feeling that sad or angry about Predain or about my mother most of the time, just...if something reminds me and I do feel that way and - it's not a huge emergency where someone's going to die if I'm distracted, if that's true I just decide to not have very many feelings - then I guess it can be inconvenient but I don't mind?:
"I guess so!" He pats her shoulder. "- Oh, hmm, one last thing - which of course you know already - people are generally happier when they have attachments and loved ones, and know how to trust other people? And I expect this would be true of him as well. It is his mind and his life, of course, and up to him how he wants to live it."
Sigh. "It - could be stable and self-sustaining for him. Some people are like that their whole lives - driven, but not happy. Still, it is...it feels to me that something is lost, especially when it is not clear that this is an intentional and informed choice rather than...failing to realize that personal happiness is one of the things that one can care about. I will leave it up to your judgement whether that is productive to bring up, though."
"Honestly I have not seen very many minds that looked like yours on the relevant dimension! So I am not sure his would appear the same, to me. For you - I see a long strip of exposed bedrock along your riverbed, a single unbroken piece the whole way down, determining the overall shape."
At their next lesson with that teacher, she acts as though nothing out of the ordinary happened, though she does stick to some particularly uncontroversial curriculum for the next couple of weeks.
Ma'ar doesn't particularly acknowledge his most recent interaction with Azabel either, he continues to interact with her exactly the same way he did before, which includes practicing magic together in the afternoons after class, and sometimes flying with Skan or going to the library.
The next week they have their test with the specially trained Adept who clears them for private tutoring on the use of ley-lines and eventually nodes. They both pass with flying colours (Ma'ar by a greater margin, but he's also concealing a headache afterward). For simplicity they're scheduled with the same tutor, twice a week, in the afternoons after their theory course so they won't be going into it tired.
Ma'ar is pleased about this!
Ma'ar smiles slightly. "That - seems good, I guess."
Their first lesson with the tutor is a couple of days later. He seems very surprised to have students so young, but diligently takes them out to examine some nearby ley-lines very closely and then try 'scooping' a bit of the flowing energies into their own reserves.
This results in something quite slow but it's much better than the last try.
"Good!" the tutor says. "...Try holding the link to take it in, and casting a simple spell at the same time using the ley-line energy? A lot of people find it helpful to imagine the power coming in one hand and moving through them and coming out the other hand, but whatever works for you."
Ma'ar tries. He imagines shaping his magic-not-hands into - hmm - into a siphon, like that one kind of river-snail has, or maybe a leech, something in between those things - and he latches it onto the flowing magic and doesn't even need to suck, really, it's moving fast enough that the greater challenge is slowing it down.
It burns a bit but this doesn't especially bother him. He pushes the power into a shield, hard, because there's a lot of it; he's drawing it in at a substantially faster rate than Azabel was.
It doesn't hurt anymore as soon as he stops, which leads Ma'ar to think he was right, it wasn't the kind of hurting that meant actual injury, it was more like the way your muscles hurt when you run very fast for a long time. The kind that makes you stronger.
They do a few more exercises. Trying to take in as much energy as possible and just hold it. Trying to hold the connection while casting a slightly more complicated kind of shield.
At the end of it Ma'ar is tired, but it's a pleasant kind of tired, and the tutor has high praise for both of them.
Their lessons continue. Azabel and Ma'ar continue to be ahead of the curve in their basic-offensive-magic class, and the teaching assistant supervising them continues to let them mostly not spar and instead stand still and practice the relevant spells at shielded targets. The theory class has no more especially controversial incidents, since Ma'ar has decided it's simplest to either let Azabel talk first or just ask her about it after class. (Also the teacher and students both seem more tolerant of certain arguments after Lionwind's guest lecture and presumed private lecture with the teacher.)
Ma'ar and Azabel both graduate 'on time' with their cohort, in both classes, six weeks after joining mid-session. There's a school-wide holiday break for two weeks, after which point they're both entered in the next level of lessons, now covering more complex techniques - not Gates, yet, but permanent room-shielding and various set-spells and simple metallurgy and glasswork done with magic.
They also have theory classes two days a week. They're now, apparently, senior enough that Urtho himself shows up for the last candlemark of the second weekly class, to observe and occasionally participate in their discussions.
Several weeks in, at one of their end-of-week sessions with Urtho watching in the back, the topic of mages in the Ceej Empire comes up. Apparently, there, the royal family carries mage-gift in their blood, and the ruler is almost always a mage - in fact, often a younger sibling is chosen as heir if the firstborn turns out not to be mage-gifted. The discussion shifts to the pros and cons of this system.
Mages understand what can be done with magic better, someone points out, that's useful for a ruler.
Also it'd be - harder to assassinate a mage, which is good for avoiding succession crises, someone else says.
Someone else suggests that this is probably related to the whole thing where it's normal to compulsion your servants not to murder you, someone else argues, and there's some debate on whether the Emperor even came up with this practice originally.
Aza thinks that being a mage is not actually a good predictor of being a good monarch, but neither is being born first. Mage-gift unlike being born first does imply that you will spend some time learning magic, which takes a lot of investment to be good enough at it for any of the pro- considerations to come up at all, and probably distracts from statecraft. It might encourage them not to always put sons on the throne, though, if they're putting other criteria first or allowing them as inputs? Though picking firstborns does not consistently have this effect and she doesn't know if picking mages does.
After a while, Urtho clears his throat.
"Personally I believe that this practice is very unfortunate," he says, "and I hope it is never adopted in Tantara. Too much power concentrated in a single person is - never good, either for them or for the world around them that they control."
A sigh. "Power is corrupting. And - the drive to seek power is a dangerous sign. In anyone, really, but us mages can cause far more damage by our actions, and so we bear a greater duty to be appropriately careful - to have the humility required not to abuse the power we already have, let alone seek to concentrate even more of it in ourselves."
Urtho looks pleased. "What a good question! I think that Tantara's leadership does not centralize power nearly as much as the Ceej - this school is not a political institution, it is not the case here that most mages are conscripted to work for the King - but, yes, I think there is a strong case to be made for placing less power in the hands of a single monarch. There are also difficulties in changing the state of affairs that everyone is used to, though, and - well, it is not really my place to try to reform the political leadership of Tantara. That in itself would be - seeking to exert more power and influence over the world than a single person ought."
Urtho frowns. Considers it for a while. "...Less so, perhaps? And - I suppose I can imagine a person who happens to be born with mage-gift, but whose temperament is much better suited to, say, being mayor of a city, and...it seems a little unfortunate if their mage-gift does not see as much use, but it would not be morally wrong of them to instead focus on what they are passionate about, and not all mages are passionate about the study and teaching of magic. Just, I - think that the hunger for power for its own sake is not a healthy human trait, and - mages can be more tempted toward it than most."
Urtho seems to consider this a very self-evident question. "Well, we can already do things that most people cannot, right? This by itself gives us a certain authority, especially since magic is so key to most countries' functioning. Those who are not mages will defer to mages on questions of magic, since they are not the experts and we are. In itself this is perfectly fine, of course, and it is not unhealthy in itself for being respected and listened to, to feel good, but - the problem is that can easily make a person used to deference, expecting it in other areas as well, even ones where they are not and should not be the expert authority. Does that make sense?"
"I would feel much more this way about Healers if there were countries where it was common for Healers to dominate the political leadership! ...I do think it is less a concern, there, because everyone understands Healing-Gift and healing expertise to be limited to the specific area of curing sick and injured people, and one hears of mage-warlords claiming territories in the north, but not of Healing-warlords."
"- I mean, probably not if they hate them, but...I think it is a bad sign if a King is too fond of wielding power, enough that it would be tempting to do it on a whim rather than only when necessary. I - suppose that probably it is healthiest for leaders to be neutral on the matter?"
"Hmm. If - it is the only way to prevent crimes or harm. Tantara has a Guard to enforce the laws, and sometimes doing that takes, well, force. We would raise an army if there was a war and we needed to protect our citizens. ...And I suppose leaders have a useful role in coordination, asking for taxes is a use of power but it lets Tantara build new bridges and roads and such that serve everyone."
"And someone has to decide where the bridges go, right? And someone has to mint coins and someone has to make sure we're getting along with the neighbors and someone has to fund schools if they aren't paying for themselves so people will learn to read, and someone has to coordinate weather magic and someone has to evaluate new ideas and see if they're worth public support and someone has to decide how members of the guard are trained... I think that sounds very different from being a warlord, I don't believe those mint coins at all."
Urtho chuckles. "Yes, it is certainly very different! The day to day work of running a country is - well, for one, it is done by hundreds of people, the King does not personally decide which schools get how much funding. And it is tedious and mostly made up of meetings and ledgers and committees debating the merits of different paint colours. The world benefits a great deal from people who are passionate about accounting and I am very glad I am not one of them. I - think that taking satisfaction in a job well done, in the endless essential details of holding a country together, is quite different from - enjoying power, per se."
"So if a mage thinks being on committees and appointing ministers of education sounds fun that's probably very different from thinking being a warlord sounds fun and the real problem would be if one thought being a king was like being a warlord and tried to become one to make it that way?"
Ma'ar definitely believes that Azabel is making progress here and he's very impressed and should ask her how she's doing it, later, when it won't distract her - but also he wants to SCREAM.
:Does he not get that the point of trying to make a country better isn't whether it's fun?: he sends, even though probably Azabel's already noticed that on her own.
"...Well, no, though I think it has greater risk of coming to like feeling powerful and renowned, since it involves parades and speeches in front of applauding crowds far more than, say, writing the next great treatise on Mindhealing. Also I am not claiming that wanting to - accomplish something great and important with one's life, is always bad, it can be a noble drive as well. It is just that...when doing large things, it is easier to do harm then good, even by accident, and so humility is very very important." He smiles slightly. "Even if one is only trying to be a great teacher, it is essential not to feel better than one's students."
After class is dismissed, Ma'ar peels off with her. He's gotten the frustration calmed down at this point. :I still don't get what he actually believes, here? He thinks it's good to...do good things with power you have...but bad to want to be more powerful or try to get that way on purpose so you can do important things?:
:No, I think he's wrong, I just think it's easier to have that kind of conversation when I pretend I'm right about to believe whatever he says as soon as he answers my questions. He has like a little bit of a point where if you just charge in because you want things to be different and aren't careful and ready to learn a lot of stuff you'll probably break stuff?:
:Yeah, and I think most people who think being a warlord sounds fun are not also appreciative of how complicated things are. Also maybe sometimes people think even sitting on committees and appointing ministers of education sounds fun, and then they try it and it's not but they don't want to go do something else, so they get sloppy and start throwing orders around to make problems go away and stop being annoying?:
:I think probably he mostly runs into people who... want to do good things, but can't see themselves doing them forever if they aren't also at least kind of fun? I think I have that a little bit, like, I would dig ditches if for some reason that were REALLY the best way to do things but I would take a lot more convincing than I would if there were reason to believe the best way was reading books or being a queen or something cool like that:
Shrug. :I think digging ditches would be a bad use of a you and if that were the most important thing you'd be better off - making a lot of money by, I don't know, writing a book or inventing magic or some other thing you're really good at, so you could pay hundreds of people to dig ditches:
:I think I would really like being a queen, not that I have an obvious way to do that without actually attacking people or something. So there's sort of a point there that I should think pretty carefully about whether also believing I'd be good at it is just wishful thinking:
:Huh. I...never really thought about whether I'd like being a King, if - if fixing problems wasn't a worry - I did think before that probably being King isn't the best thing to do anyway, for that, Kings have to spend all this time in meetings and parades and giving speeches, it'd be better to be - I don't know, an advisor who has time to read all the treatises in the world on ways of running countries, and think about it a lot and give advice. And I dunno if that'd be fun - I guess it'd be interesting but that's not the point. Why do you think you'd like being Queen?:
:Well, if I read all the treatises in the world on ways of running countries and gave advice and then the monarch was like 'actually nah I will do this other thing instead' I would be pretty annoyed. Also I think it would be delightful to go around wearing a crown and stuff but I think that might just be that this is part of how you pretend to be a queen when you're six years old and I did that a lot:
:...Maybe. It does seem important, I guess, to - ask yourself if you're motivated to do a thing for real reasons, because it'll work, or - because it seems good to you personally in some other way...: He frowns for a while, thinking hard. :I - suppose being King seems kind of bad because people try to assassinate Kings more than advisors, so maybe I actually just don't want to be a King because it's scarier - but that's also a strategic reason, right, being assassinated - or having to put a lot of energy into preventing it - means you've got less time to think about fixing problems:
Shrug. :I - don't know how I'd even tell if I wanted to be an advisor more because I'd like it more. I haven't done either one, right:
:Maybe?: Ma'ar closes his eyes. Tries to picture it, what little he knows - probably he could learn more from reading books about Kings, or treatises written by their advisors, probably that's good to do anyway for actual strategic reasons... Focus. He's a King - he runs meeting with his council of Lords, he gives speeches in front of crowds at big holidays maybe, he signs declarations, he - approves funding schools after someone else did the thinking for it... Imagine being an advisor - he reads lots of books, he...maybe travels around the Kingdom to talk to people and read their minds no just talk to them, and figure out what's making them unhappy...he meets the King, explains ideas to him, tries to be persuasive if the King is doing something he thinks is wrong and stupid...
:...I guess being a King seems more - constrained: he says finally. :I think I'd feel less - able to have my own thoughts. I guess maybe that means I'd like being an advisor more? But I don't really know and it - still doesn't seem like the point:
:...I don't know. I don't think I like going on walks for no reason, sometimes I like other things about it maybe, if we're talking or something. I - guess reading about history feels important and interesting so probably I like it? I...like having enough food to eat but I can't tell if I like dessert more than just food in general:
:...it's not about thinking your gears should be a certain way exactly. Like, sometimes gears don't work right, they jam or something, because somebody has a tic or a phobia or a stutter or an obsession or whatever, and not liking stuff isn't like that. It's just that liking things makes people happy and it's better if people are happy or what's even the point of all your important stuff, right, and you're a person:
:Oh. I guess: Ma'ar seems to have genuinely not thought about it from that angle before. :I'm - not unhappy, I don't think? And a lot of people are and they're starving or - being raped by guards because they can't protect themselves - and I...I don't know, just, it feels more important to fix that than whether I'm having a great time in life:
:Hmm: It's surprisingly hard to remember what he was feeling, even though it was just moments ago, mostly he only bothers to remember his thoughts. :I - think I was appreciating how even though it was a joke, you - joke about that thing because you really are the - sort of person who wants to do big important things with your life?:
:I'd rather he was right but I don't feel really hung up on it? I have most of the conversation we had written down and if he storms up to me in five years being all 'Azabel, how could you possibly run for mayor, we discussed this' I will be able to pull it out and explain to him that I have addressed all his points and am running for mayor very humbly: Also, like, that's not very plausible in the first place, she's kind of not sure Urtho would notice if she ran for mayor.
:It just seems pretty bad if he's the most famous mage-teacher in the whole world and runs the most important school in Tantara, and also he thinks mages shouldn't try to do important things with their lives! Because probably a lot of the students will just believe him!:
So the next time there is a class there is a neatly block printed slip of paper on each chair somewhat before anyone else arrives, unobtrusive, reading "Opinion Poll: to your way of thinking, should mages be wary of seeking political office? Should others frown on this behavior? Please place in collection box when completed" and little checkboxes for yes and no, and she puts a box on the teacher's desk behind the filing tray where the teacher will not immediately notice it. Azabel arrives very slightly late.
The students are very confused and curious about this! A handful of them are glancing at Azabel, thoughtfully, but they're discreet and the teacher, who's also regularly late for this class, doesn't seem to have noticed anything. The students who come in later than the teacher make no comment about the bits of paper, though there are some Mindspeech-looks exchanged between the Mindspeakers present.
The teacher gets started with class; he's not a morning person and usually comes in still bleary-eyed and nursing his tea. Today isn't one of the sessions with Urtho and they're just talking about distributions of defensive wards - a limited resource in Tantara since it takes a skillful mage to do them - across various high-priority locations, and whether this could be done better.
That's an interesting question! They often are done with artifacts, or at least built on a crystal focus, but moving them around on a randomized schedule hasn't been a practice in the past - it could be a clever thought! Though they'd probably take some tweaking, to be moved between buildings, and also it's trivially obvious to anyone with a sniff of mage-gift whether a building is warded or not.
Since this is apparently a SECRET project (well, except from all the other hertasi, who are gossiping about this delightedly in private, but they're very good at keeping secrets from the non-hertasi in the Tower), the hertasi glances around to make sure no one else is watching before conveying the box to Azabel.
"...Sort of? I think running for political office is - only sort of related to the thing I was worried about Urtho making people not do, but that is what we were talking about in class." Shrug. "And whether someone said yes or no doesn't say that much how they think about it. But...I guess it seems less bad, if less than half of people are going to judge other people who've got ambitions."
Their classes continue. The next classroom session with Urtho does drift back to a much less controversial topic, that of how much mage-work ought to be allocated by funding from the Crown for projects versus by independent merchants and landholders paying for mage-services in their local spheres. Urtho seems more warmly inclined toward Azabel than before, or at least he calls on her a couple of times to ask her opinion on something, and smiles at her when she answers. Nobody mentions the poll.
In their mage-practice lessons and tutoring, they keep learning more varieties of set-spells and permanent spells build on focus-stones - how to shield rooms against other Gifts, Farsight and Mindspeech in particular, how to make a renewable mage-barrier anchored on a focus that can be triggered by a non-mage. In their private tutoring they get more comfortable with ley-lines, and by the end of the three-month session they can both use even the most powerful of them, at least for short periods, and know how to set up a passive link to weaker ley-lines, to absorb energy even while they're not actively focusing on it.
Ma'ar finds books in the library on all sorts of additional kinds of shields and wards, and plays with them on his own as well as with Azabel. Practicing magic is most of what he does in his spare time, which he has more of because he's not also a Mindhealing student. By the time their final exams for the practical class roll around, they're both well ahead of the others. The teaching assistant says they can pick up to two mage-courses to take for the next session after their break, since they can clearly handle it.
Ma'ar opts for one on crafting more advanced artifacts - still not that complex, they're less than a year into their training, but ones that can do things like light up or produce heat in the absence of a mage there to maintain the spell. He also wants to take a course that's technically for older students, but which the teacher thinks he can handle, on more advanced combat magic, trap-spells and force-nets and such. He's not sure if Azabel would prefer to do something else, though.
The illusions course is pretty advanced for someone who's been in training less than six months, but she has very good control and it doesn't require a lot of power, and the teacher thinks she can handle it. Weather-magic is less complicated in some ways but also takes more power - weather, after all, happens at a large scale - and he thinks she might enjoy it more once she's strong enough to handle nodes.
Ma'ar is kind of excited that they're going to be taking different classes, actually. He thinks he's had enough practice now to hold his own and not say anything stupid - and if he isn't sure he can always Mindspeak her, they've both got the range for that - and then afterward they can tell each other about it! Azabel doesn't need to take the fighting class but maybe there'll be a really good trick that doesn't hurt people and still works even if you can't run or do footwork, and then he could teach her she'd have a way to defend herself even if she were being attacked by more people than she could set-command. Ma'ar thinks he's probably terrible at illusions, Azabel's always had better fine control, but she could still show him what she figures out and he could help her test ideas.
"Yeah, it'll be lots of fun! I'm going to need to find out who else is in the class and ask them to take notes for me the first class or two if I'm late, though, sometimes the roads between here and my dad's house are bad and it takes longer than expected." Presumably a roster is available and she has some idea who in this class has ever taken a note.
She can easily get a roster, at least of everyone signed up so far, sometimes people don't pick their classes until the veeery last day of break. She doesn't know who most of the people are, since they're now several cohorts ahead of the one they started with, but this handful of names are familiar and this girl was a teaching assistant back in their very first class with Snowstar and seems like the type who might ever have taken a note.
Ma'ar is a little nervous about starting his first week of classes alone without Azabel there - especially the combat magic class, nearly everyone else is fifteen or older and they're huge, Ma'ar has grown a bit after a few months of regular meals but he's still very small for his age. And most of them know each other already, he's the odd one out, and he can't even read their minds so he has warning if they're planning to bully him... Though he's gotten a lot better at reading people's faces, probably he'll notice.
He's gotten a lot better at not being scared on purpose, though, and he arrives at the first lesson one minute early and looks around but not in a scared way, makes eye contact with the other students. There's a girl in the class who's older than him but still small for her age, standing by herself in the Work Room waiting for the teacher, and he joins her.
The teacher arrives, and Ma'ar knows the answers to all eight of the questions they ask in the introduction, though he only raises his hand for some of them, when no one else is. He gets a smile for it, both from the teacher and from the girl he's standing near.
Maybe this is just going to be fine.
Aza makes it to her dad's house without incident and he's taken the week off work to watch her do magic and talk about books they have both read and try to convince her to come fishing (she does, but only to see if magic makes fishing interesting; it turns out that it can but at the cost of scaring away all the fish and making him raise an eyebrow at her). She is cooed over by various people who have been vaguely aware of her since she was a baby and they don't write to her but they are permitted to assess her increased height and impressive Gifts. She picks up a Mindhealing patient, a neighbor with postpartum depression who Aza can meaningfully improve in the time available and who can probably make do with occasional check-ins whenever she's back in town for another visit; she writes up the notes on what she did and gives them to the patient in case she needs to see a different Mindhealer at some point, such as if Aza's struck by lightning or something.
She gets on the coach going the other way, and is a tiny bit late for next term. She'll need to get notes from her classmate on the first class of illusions, and from Ma'ar on artifacts, but she'll catch up.
Talking is hard and his head also hurts but Mindspeech is tolerable. :I was scared - I don't like sleeping in strange places if I can't put up wards... I'll try to explain but it's - complicated...:
He hasn't cried at all up until this point and now he really really wants to, for some reason, even though that doesn't make sense at all.
He curls up more. :It was in the class on combat magic. Uh, the optional afternoon practice session, I guess, but everyone went. Over lunch we'd been supposed to go over our notes and write up a sheet to take in the Work Room with us, to cast a force-net, and - there was this shy nice girl in the class, bit older than us, and also some older boys. And they were - messing with her, and changed her notes to something wrong - um, I didn't know that at the time and I swear I didn't read their minds, I - sort of half guessed and then how they acted confirmed it: He takes a shuddering breath. :The change they made would've made it explode, hurt her badly or - killed her - but I saw her casting it, looking all wrong, and I shielded her, and then -:
He trails off, his breath catching.
:...I don't know. I - started trying to ask, but that's when things got, uh. More messy. But they'd've had to be stupid not to notice, it was obvious just from looking at the shape of it, that's - I wasn't even looking on purpose and I still knew to shield her before it actually exploded:
He squeezes his eyes shut. :I - no - the teaching assistant wasn't nearby, he'd gone to watch other students or something, I asked if they'd changed it - I might've yelled a little bit, I was mad - and they...got all threatening... Said I was lying and no one would believe me - but they said it in a really guilty shifty way - and, and that I'd better not make them have to teach me a lesson, or something, I don't remember exact words...: He's kind of shaking now. :Her notes got singed a bit so you couldn't see what it'd said, they said everyone would think Illa just made a mistake, but I knew it wasn't, Illa is smart and wouldn't make a dumb mistake copying the assignment:
:...No, but -: He tenses even more, then grunts in pain again and tries to un-tense. :They were being threatening and - one of them raised his hand, he was moving fast and did the sort of crackly-mage-energy-fingers thing right before someone throws a levinbolt - he told the teaching assistant after he was just kidding around and wouldn't have, but I - panicked kind of a lot - and I...might've thrown one at him first and then. There was a big fight. Which I technically started, even Illa saw that part. ...And she couldn't - didn't want to, I think, a bit - believe anyone would've messed with her that way, so after when the teaching assistant broke it up, she - said she'd probably made a mistake...:
He makes a very minimal shrugging motion. :I think she - doesn't believe in herself much. But I know it wasn't a mistake and I know the boys got threatening because they were scared and I, just - I shouldn't've panicked or started a fight, I should've just gotten the teaching assistant, he might've believed me then...:
At this point he involuntarily starts crying.
:Sorry: He sniffles. :I - decided I'd better not keep arguing, and just wait until you got back and maybe you'd know what to do without making everyone even more mad: Another half-shrug. :I think I'm already kicked out of that class, though: He's not as visibly upset about that part, but mostly he just has no space left for other emotions and he's so tired.
Ma'ar holds their faces up in his surface thoughts as clearly as he can.
One of the boys, a tall redhead, is unfamiliar to Azabel, but 'Conn' she recognizes as one of the hanger's-on who Skan pinned in the earlier incident, and the third one is the boy who lost his temper at her and tried to attack with magic after she set-commanded his friend.
:He's the one who - attacked me hardest: Ma'ar clarifies. :Conn is the one who was trying to scare me first but after I started fighting, I mean:
:The teaching assistant who broke up the fight is Journeyman Levitt. Our teacher for the whole class is Adept Liora but she wasn't there for the practice session. Some of the other students for the class were sort of - gawking in the background, but no one else talked or did anything: He shudders. :I think I scared Illa a lot: He feels terrible about it.
:I...don't know for sure but I think it was probably Conn, I saw him go by her desk for no reason when she was in the bathroom - I wasn't really paying attention...: He'd been working on his own preparation. Stupidly - well, except, why should he have been expecting it? Students don't normally go around sabotaging each other's work. And it's not like they'd dared do it to him.
:Okay:
It feels like he's way too scared to possibly be sleepy, but Ma'ar closes his eyes anyway and tries to get comfortable, which isn't trivial when neither of his arms are that usable.
The wards he can sense vaguely with mage-sight are soothing. By the time Azabel finishes, he is in fact fast asleep.
Illa flinches, then takes a deep breath. "...I don't know, I wasn't - I guess it looked wrong and I was - being an idiot and should've noticed it wasn't right, but I wasn't done, I'd only put half the power in and then Ma'ar - surprised me, and I triggered it early. It...made a loud scary noise, it singed my notes and they were behind us, but I - I had my eyes closed and it was Ma'ar's shield not mine, I dunno how much force he caught with it." Shrug. "He said it would've killed me, if I'd tried to finish it."
"A couple of those boys have track records. Months ago one of them whose name I don't know attacked me in the courtyard while Conn was watching from the shrubbery. I'd have lost my eyebrows, or worse, if I hadn't woken up my mage-gift right then and managed to do shields as my first accidental magic. I'm not sure if Ma'ar's been kicked out of the class and don't have a very strong opinion on it, but I think those boys definitely should be out of it. Will you come with me to talk to your teacher? Since Ma'ar can't right now."
The teacher blinks. "Oh. Goodness. Well, you two had better come in and have a seat and tell me what this is about, all right?" She ushers them in and uses magic to pull out some chairs in front of her desk, which she resumes her seat at.
Illa sits and twists her hands together in her lap and stares at the floor some more.
"I don't have a particular opinion on whether you should reinstate Ma'ar in your class," she says. "If you decide that being that flinchy and aggressive when spooked is a dealbreaker, then that would be entirely reasonable of you. I do think you should know all the details, including the other boys' track record, what they did to Illa, and maybe reconsider how the practice sessions are supervised. What Ma'ar told me is that he noticed Illa's spell was going to go dangerously wrong due to her notes having been sabotaged - he suspects Conn of pulling off the actual alteration to her paper but isn't sure - and he shielded her, and then confronted the other boys, who denied it and became threatening. Conn looked like he was about to throw a levinbolt, you know, like this," she does the sparky fingers thing, hand pointed safely away - "and Ma'ar struck first, which does leave it open to interpretation whether Conn would've actually instigated an all-out brawl, but."
"I - see. I had gotten the part about the spell going wrong and the shield, which is - good on Ma'ar, I suppose, whatever else happened. Journeyman Levitt said that Illa thought it'd been an accident, though. Illa?"
Fidget fidget fidget. "I - thought I was being careful and doing it right, but I'm not that good."
"- I disagree, actually." Adept Liora's voice softens. "I've seen your grades, girl. You're not sloppy."
Illa turns even redder. "Oh."
"I know it can be hard to believe that people will cause trouble on purpose, when you and I wouldn't dream of it, but - it's unfortunate, sometimes others don't see things our way."
"...Oh."
Adept Liora turns back to Azabel. "So we don't have a conclusive witness for the, er, sabotage, and it sounds like the boys are denying it. I'll go question them myself, of course, but - I'm not really sure where to go if it's just Ma'ar's word against theirs plus another teacher's personal impression that Illa is a careful student."
"And their track record. Not all of which may have made it to the school authorities, and even if it has you apparently didn't hear about their disciplinary run-in over me before your class started, so that might be worth looking into." And maybe there's a way to just straight up detect lies with Mindhealing-Sight? She'll ask Lionwind.
"Oh. It may well be in their student files, I teach too many classes to make a habit of reading those all the way through before a new session, but for this of course I'd better go look it up." Sigh. "Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Do - you happen to know why Ma'ar is flinchy like that? Obviously it's very rude to - be threatening that way, but it's not against the rules - boys will be boys, we couldn't possibly enforce no goofing off like that - and everyone present including Illa and Ma'ar himself agreed he was the first to throw magic around. But he's a good student, I don't want him kicked out of my class - if there are somehow extenuating circumstances..."
Adept Liora nods. "Noted. Illa - listen, I'm very sorry this happened, I know it was frightening, and - it wasn't your fault? Even if it does somehow turn out to be just a mistake, that isn't your fault either. I'm proud to have you in my class."
...Illa does not know like she has any idea how to respond to this and just turns somehow even brighter red and bobs her head.
Adept Liora rubs her hands together, briskly, and stands up. "Well, let's get going on sorting this mess out, then."
"Goodness, you're a Mindhealer too? I'd appreciate that - I never heard about that being possible, but it's not like I know much about Mindhealing, there aren't many of you."
Adept Liora nods to her and sweeps them all out of her office, locking the door behind her before forging off down the hall at a fast walk.
Illa hovers, looking uncertain. "...I guess I just - go back to my room... Um, thank you. For - doing that." She bites her lip. "Ma'ar's going to - get better from his injuries, right?"
Lionwind holds up a hand. "- I am sorry, that was - quite a lot of things. One moment... I have very many questions, but - yes to the last thing, there is a trick to doing it without invading privacy any more than that, and - we do not advertise this since there are not nearly enough of us to advise the Guard and the courts on criminal investigations let alone adjudicate schoolyard brawls, but I know it. What happened?"
"Oh no. ...Poor boy. Ma'ar, I mean. I think it is very likely it was sabotage, though - probably it was not intended to be harmful to her, just embarrassing. I imagine most mage-students cannot tell just by looking what alteration will have which effect, and Ma'ar - has more reason than most to have acquired that skill."
Nod. “What an unfortunate situation. I will offer my lie detection services since this is important to you, while making it clear I am not generally available for all student disciplinary disputes, and... Should we talk more about Ma’ar? This - seems unfair to him, but also that level of flinchiness is actually a safety issue in a class of that level.”
"Of course. It is an unusual application of Mindhealing and takes some time to get the knack, but once you have it it is not complicated. You know, it is actually something I learned of from the Haighlei Empire, my very well-traveled teacher visited their southernmost city once. They ban all Mind-Gifts except for this application, and given the number of 'Truthsayers' they have available, she suspects they have found a way to train people with any mind-Gift including Thoughtsensing or Empathy to do this. I have no idea how, though."
"With Mindhealing maybe doesn't mean no, it means sometimes, it depends. I think yours would probably be pretty easy because they're probably to do with things that happened to you, so I can find where the memories live and muck up the gearshaft between that and your dreams, but we don't have a way to fix kids' nightmares that are just about monsters chasing them that happen for no reason, say."
Ma'ar still seems confused about why this would be relevant. "I - guess it's not fun? And it's annoying if it means I get less sleep. But I'm good at going back to sleep fast. ...If I had this many nightmares all the time it'd be annoying, I guess. I think it'll go back to usual once I'm back in my own room and...it's been longer since the fight..."
He has quite a lot of them! It does look like something recent, probably the stress and fear from the fight and being hospitalized, have put a sort of shear pressure on the overall shape of his mind, bringing the various gears that represent nightmare-worthy memories closer to the area where dreams happen. They don't look like they'd be that far away at the best of times, though.
Nudging the stress-distorted area related to nightmares would also affect his situational awareness reflexes, but not hugely. More relevantly, it's close to one of the regions that Ma'ar has obviously been trying to restructure on purpose away from fear-reactions, but where the process is only half done. Given the incompleteness, it's not totally clear what nudging at this would do, whether it would undo some of his work or the opposite or some third thing, but it seems very likely to affect it somehow.
Ma'ar's mind is complex and intricate to begin with, and made even more complicated by both the patterns of fear-reflexes imprinted on it by his past experiences, and the systematic nudges he's been making all on his own. If she stares long enough, though, she can find a spot to poke that looks like it ought to soothe the uptick in nightmares without affecting too much else.
Ma'ar drowses for a while, squirming to get comfortable, and eventually falls into a deeper sleep. He's so tired.
Ma'ar spends the rest of that day alternately sleeping, yelling himself awake from nightmares, slipping in and out of a half-doze, semiconsciously checking Azabel's wards, and being prodded by the Healing staff when they want him to drink water or take painkillers. He doesn't manage to drag himself to full alertness and actually notice and read Azabel's note until after sundown.
:..Azabel?:
She consults her notes, finds the spot again, checks it from all angles. Clockwork is regular and mechanical and predictable but a) it's metaphorical clockwork b) it's metaphorical n-dimensional clockwork, so it takes a lot of checking.
"I'm going ahead," she murmurs, and she pushes till it clacks into place and all the teeth are locked where they can roll just right.
"Mmm. That makes sense for now, I guess. Just - I do want to take that class someday, and - I don't know how to. Make it so I won't fight if I think someone's attacking me. ...Honestly I think it'd be really stupid to - turn that off? I would've died in Predain if I were any less careful, and - I want to go back, right..."
"Oh. I...guess so. I'd need to get so fast, though. I do shields all the time but - not enough that I'd feel okay just...letting someone levinbolt me. And doing a better shield takes longer than a second and attacking takes less than that. Maybe if I practiced a lot..." He looks thoughtful. "I wonder if there's a class in really advanced shields. I could try to get into that instead of the fighting class."
"Mmm. For that I think I might need a different kind of shield, that's designed for that..." He trails off. "Oh! I just remembered, there was a book I read that talked about important generals in the army in war wearing magical artifacts to shield them, so they'd be protected even if they weren't mages. I dunno if I could wear that and have the shields on all the time, it'd need to be re-powered too often, but if the spell were mostly a set-spell on a focus, then it'd be way faster to put the shield up all the way."
The illusion class is pretty good - her classmate has notes for her, and the rest of the class is more than half girls and pretty welcoming even though she mostly doesn't know them.
That afternoon she's scheduled to buddy with Lionwind and see a couple of patients. Usually she gets there half a candlemark early so they can discuss who they're seeing, but this time Lionwind doesn't immediately open his notes.
"So I spoke to the school and I lie-detected for them to question the, er, culprits," he says quietly.
"Well, as soon as it was obvious the adults knew the deal and were taking it seriously, they confessed. Conn did sabotage Illa's work. He didn't mean to hurt her, but that was mostly him being an unforgivable level of idiot about it, he - seems to have not considered that a random modification to a spell might make it explode instead of just not working? Anyway, they're all suspended for the rest of the session and they'll have to do more remedial ethics counseling to be let back into classes. Adept Liora also gave them a whole tirade about it not being safe to feint as though you're going to attack someone, in an advanced class, even if it's not technically against the rules." His lips twitch. "That woman's got a wicked tongue, I like her."
"Exactly. And - he is not wrong that he could be attacked even on school grounds. You were that one time, after all. In this instance the boy in question claimed he was not planning to actually strike, and it was not a lie, but - well, things were happening very fast and people are known to have trouble recalling their true thoughts and motives if there is an incentive to remember a particular story of it."
"Yeah. And it's maybe guessable that Ma'ar's provokable, anyway... though probably he got more than he bargained for if he were thinking along those lines at all." She sighs. "I did a little nudge to help Ma'ar with nightmares, he was having more than usual. I think everything went fine but thought I should say just on general principle."
Ma'ar sitting up in bed, looking a lot more alert and healthy than before. The bandages are off his arm now, showing the pink flaky skin of a mostly-Healed burn, though the other arm is still bound and in a sling. He's picking at some food off a tray and reading a magic textbook.
Yep! Ma'ar has finished copying them into a spare notebook that the Healer must have given him, since his school things are mostly back in his room which is very thoroughly warded against intruders. His handwriting is messier than usual since he's writing with the wrong hand, but it's legible.
He thanks her politely and yawns again.
He's there! It's the artifact class, which inconveniently he also missed the first day of, since it was first thing in the morning on the day Azabel got back from her trip and he was in the hospital. They can get notes off a classmate, though, and the teacher is content to accept both of their reasons for absence and will let them submit the first class's homework next week instead.
Ma'ar continues to write notes more messily than usual, since his broken arm is still bound up and he's writing with his non-dominant hand, but when they're handed out blank quartz crystals for a practice exercises, it doesn't seem to affect his casting at all.
That's because waving your arms at stuff to do magic to it is kind of silly. (It's good for dramatic effect and for keeping some parts of spells you are first learning located outside your mind while it's still hard to juggle, like notetaking with the position of your arm, but otherwise it's silly.) What will they be doing with this quartz today?
They are supposed to make them glow! Specifically they're supposed to cast the basic semi-permanent mage-light spell, which was covered in the first class - Ma'ar and Azabel can get an explanation from the teacher and some help from their seat-neighbor. Today's additional exercise is to practice altering just the part of the spell that does the color, without redoing the rest.
Ma'ar isn't as good at fiddly and delicate magic, and is still patiently attempting it when the class ends. To be fair only two people other than Azabel were able to get it, and both of them are older with more months of total schooling behind them and were there at the first class.
The teacher tells the rest not to be discouraged, they can keep working on it as homework and they won't be behind as long as they can demonstrate it successfully at the beginning of next class.
Ma'ar works very hard on it, asks to practice specially with her, and gets the hang of it by the next day. It turns out that putting spells into artifacts is harder than it looks, but he's so so determined to get good at it.
They attend the second day of illusions class together. Azabel is apparently a natural at it and gets considerable praise from the teacher. Ma'ar is very much not natively talented in this area but, again, he works extremely hard, and is pretty sure he can get caught up with the rest of the class by the next week if he practices a lot in his free time.
Ma'ar would appreciate her help! They're both very busy now, with other classes in addition to the magic ones, but time to practice can be squeezed in.
He tells her that he did have fewer nightmares last night and he's grateful.
He gets the splint off his arm two days later and is pronounced fully recovered by the Healers, though it still takes another couple of days before he moves with as much energy as before.
And life goes on.
Illa shows up to thank Ma'ar in person for saving her life, blushing very red and stammering, and she gives him some nice flowers. Ma'ar is confused about the right social response, here, and settles for 'you're welcome'. It's not like he's going to see much of her, at this point, she's not in either of the other classes.
Both of them get caught up in their magic lessons. Azabel continues to be significantly ahead with illusions, but by putting in a truly absurd quantity of practice, Ma'ar is somewhat better than her at the artifact work by mid-session.
They don't have a discussion class this session, but Urtho drops in every so often to watch bits of their practical classes. He smiles at Azabel in particular, and makes no comment to Ma'ar about the fight incident. Adept Liora does seek him out mid session, again, to ask if he's made progress on his plan to be less jumpy. Ma'ar has to confess that he isn't there yet, artifacts are really hard, but he thinks he can join by the next session. Adept Liora encourages him to register anyway and then talk to her the week before, he can always defer at that point if they don't think he's ready.
He finds books in the library on shielding set-spells, and tries to design his own that does exactly what he wants.
They both pass their end-of-session tests with flying colors. Ma'ar has a prototype of his shield-artifact and is very pleased with himself on both counts.
"- I think maybe I feel happy right now?" he says to Azabel. "I can't tell for sure if it's that."
"And I've got space for a second one but haven't decided which yet. I'm - thinking about taking the seminar class about magic and ethics? Apparently they have interesting discussions and it might be more okay to say slightly controversial things. But it'd be less scary if you wanted to take it too."
When they sit down in the class together, the next day just after lunch, it's immediately apparent that it's not going to be four candlemarks of lecture.
There are only nine students, a wide range of ages from fourteen to nineteen; unlike their previous classes, this one seems to mix up students from different age cohorts into the same block. The main instructor is a grey-hair, shriveled-looking old man who introduces himself as Adept Egark.
"Ideally," he says to the class, "I am not going to be talking very much at all! I will explain each class's topic and then, hopefully, I will not need to open my mouth again. Here are the rules of debating civilly..." He lists them. They're fairly common sense: no name-calling each other, arguments of the nature 'but that's just wrong' or 'but that's gross' will not be taken very seriously, etc etc.
Today's topic is explained: mage-gift and gender dynamics! Specifically, currently Tantaran law allows a wartime draft. Of men. Not women. Mage-gift, however, appears equally in men and women, and unlike with, say, upper body strength, men don't tend to be more powerful mages. There's been talk in the past of making a separate draft law for mages, but it was politically unpopular and never passed. Anyway. What does the class think of this? Is it unfair that mages will be drafted for war only if they happen to be men? Or would it be unfair to change the law to be different for mages and non-mages? Discuss!
"Generally lawmakers aren't considerate enough to write down all their reasoning," the teacher confesses. "I think - yes, that, but broader culture too. It's common for people to see women as the fairer sex, right, not intended for violence, in need of protection. ...Not to mention women tend to be the primary caregivers of children, and young people up for the draft are often the age to have young children at home, that may have been a practical consideration. I am not sure. I believe the main reason that changing the law was politically unpopular is that many people think sending women to war is somehow worse than sending men."
The class is a very even split, five girls and four boys. Another student tentatively raises their hand and asks if it's true that women are more squeamish than men and don't like hurting anyone, on average of course, because that might make them worse or at least much unhappier mage-soldiers. There is some argument about this; it's pointed out that plenty of men also are squeamish about blood and don't want to hurt people, and this is very subjective, you can't exactly draft based on 'how much do you not want to kill anyone.'
"You know, I do not have a definite answer there! What do you all think?" He addresses the class.
Some possible answers are volunteered. For glory? For money? Because everyone will think you're a coward if you don't. Because it's the right thing to do. Because your friends are doing it. Because girls will think it's cool. Because your parents expect it of you.
"I think funding a war is hard already, right?" Ma'ar points out. "The King would have to raise taxes even more. But - it does seem like you should pay people a lot of money if you want them to risk getting killed. And I would sort of expect that people who signed up on purpose would be more motivated about it than if they got drafted against their will?" He's not sure. It seems complicated. A lot of things do, lately.
When that line of debate fades out, Ma'ar tentatively raises his hand. "Would - women get treated all right?" he asks. "I think it doesn't matter if it's a draft or volunteer, probably it'd still mostly be men, since - that's what everyone expects. And...in Predain if you were one of the only women in the army, it'd be - not great." He is not going to say out loud that someone would probably try to rape them. "I know mages can defend themselves but it could still be really miserable. Probably Tantara isn't as bad that way, just..." Shrug.
And eventually Ma'ar dares to raise his hand. "This is - not really about the draft again," he says tentatively, "but mage-gift runs in the blood, right? So it's bad if a lot of mages die in a war when they're young and haven't had children, but - it could be even worse if men and woman die. Since, uh," he's just realized this is the sort of thing that people probably make faces about, "since a man can get a lot of women with child if he's, um. Trying."
"In practice is that very likely to actually happen, though? I think if a huge fraction of the population around me had just died, and I couldn't actually find anyone I wanted to marry, I probably wouldn't want to have any kids right then regardless - is that me being weird, would a lot of women rather go ahead even then?"
There is disagreement on this point! A couple of girls in the class seem to be very much looking forward to having babies, and express that they'd be upset if they couldn't get married until they were thirty and maybe they'd move into a house together and be pretend-married to have their babies instead, at which point they might as well find some mage father to, well, do the deed. A different girl is firmly on Azabel's side. The boys mostly seem nonplussed.
Coparenting with another girl does seem better than nothing if she were baby-crazy, and she might get that way in a couple years. If she had a close enough friend by then. Anyway, if some girls would do it that might be enough for it to be an important policy consideration.
Some other boy in the class, NOT Ma'ar, brings up the point that if a lot of mages die, having more mages is pretty important to Tantara and maybe after the war the Crown would want to pay women with mage-gift who wanted to raise babies with each other. This gets a lot of slightly uncomfortable laughter and an amused look from the teacher.
"Oh! Yes, of course. I prefer not to- run it on a fixed schedule, I look to see what sort of mood the class is in, but I can give you the usual list."
The usual list includes:
- What the laws and enforcement should be on un-Gifted people faking mage-gift, or on weaker mages passing themselves off as much stronger than they are.
- Relatedly, whether Tantara ought to use more credential systems for mages. Or fewer. Apparently this is controversial.
- The ethics of creating species. Hertasi and gryphons as examples.
- Whether and how young untrained mages ought to be punished for accidental use of magic causing harm or death
- Whether there are ever any ethical uses of Final Strike
- Whether there are ever any ethical uses of various magics classified as "dark" and illegal in Tantara, like demon summoning
"Hmm. There's a whole legal section in the library, if you want to know what the laws are for those topics, but to be honest they are quite dry. I could recommend you these books on the history of hertasi and their creation - there are not any on gryphons, Urtho's notes on that are unpublished." He gives her some titles.
"Wait here, Miss Azabel!" The hertasi bustles off, and comes back a few minutes later to tell her that Master Urtho has a committee meeting this afternoon but he should be in his office and not especially busy tomorrow morning.
(Unfortunately Azabel has weather-magic class scheduled for the morning tomorrow.)
Urtho is in the process of being nudged over by a polite but insistent hertasi from his desk to the conference room next door, where lunch appears to be laid out for both of them. He looks absentmindedly confused about this, but his expression clears when he sees her, and he smiles. "Azabel! You asked to eat with me today, I heard, how delightful."
"Well, intelligent creatures have large brains, right? Which are heavy. Gryphons would actually be much too heavy to fly without magic; they are based on eagles and also several different species of great cats, but I worked in substantial natural magic as well."
"- Hmm, let me think. Two hundred and...something...adults. More children than that but -" he looks a little embarrassed, "but I am still perfecting their species and the children sometimes have fatal medical problems. I am hoping to eventually have enough of them for a healthy breeding population."
"Approximately yes, if you count Skandranon's generation as not yet being adults, which I think is right - gryphons will physically mature faster, like their source species, but mentally they are more similar to humans on that, and the oldest generation born to gryphon parents instead of, well, in my laboratory, is not yet twenty."
"Oh, the two hundred adults are all quite healthy and well - it is just that in the early stages of species-creation their traits will not always breed true, and there is not really a way to test it except for having them breed and - well, saving the healthy children and not the others."
"Did you raise them yourself or did you have help? What do most of them do all day, I know Skan's parents are busy a lot but I don't know what they do. How much did you decide about how they are and how much just happened? Did you make any species before gryphons, ones that weren't people or that didn't work at all?"
"Oh, I certainly did not raise them myself! The hertasi did most of that, they are very good. In terms of work, right now, the gryphons do aerial scouting for the Crown - it helps replace Farsight checks - and some of them are mages, I cannot recall which breeding pair are Skandranon's parents so I am not sure what they do in particular. I - decided some things? I wanted them to be graceful in the air, and have good distance vision, and be strong. ...I did run some experiments before the gryphons, with smaller animals, it is recommended to try on that first for mages engaged in species creation. None were very successful."
"He started with lizards as a base, so the earliest attempts would not have been people. I am not sure whether that is in his books on it. But...yes. Personally I think that trying so many times just to get a species with the exact personality one hopes for is - not especially kind to the discards."
Urtho blinks a few times, as though he needs to actually stop and think about that. "...Well, I have some decades left in me. By the time I am in my dotage, they ought be completed as a species and then I will, I suppose, let them do as they wish." He sounds a bit reluctant about it.
"That's good. Nobody makes sure humans would be good parents before they have babies! Especially not any one single person! I guess maybe it would make sense to offer parenting classes or something but I don't even know that Skan's parents are especially good, they're gone all the time and have never wanted to meet me even though we've been friends for a really long time."
"Hertasi are smaller than humans and have slower metabolisms, it would have been much easier - if not the default - to give them long lives. I needed to work quite hard to attempt to give gryphons a comparable lifespan, they are larger and both of their source species have shorter lifespans and higher metabolisms."
Urtho is quiet for a few beats, sipping from his water glass, but he doesn't seem angry. Curious, mostly.
"Azabel, you seem to have - some opinions on this subject. And, well, not the predictable ones. I find myself wondering both what truly brought you here, today, and - what you are thinking now."
"...I got the list of topics we'll be covering in ethics class and one of them was about creating species and then I heard that you hadn't published your notes, so I came to ask so I'd know more specifics for when we have that topic in class. - oh, and I also want to know how you made them, did you make, like, eggs, or did they have surrogate parents who were animals, or did they just appear as babies somehow -"
The hertasi considers this for a moment. "Well, all right, follow me. I suppose you could say we have a school of sorts - mostly the little ones do not need formal teaching, they are eager enough to ask us about our work..."
The hertasi ushers her down the hall, and then stops at what looks like a random section of stone wall, and then - unlocks and opens a door, somehow perfectly camouflaged with the wall. "This way!"
The big hertasi takes her down a spiralling stone staircase, also very well-made; the steps are shallower than usual, hertasi have shorter legs than humans, but this incidentally makes it easier for Azabel too, and there's a railing.
And then they're in a surprisingly spacious stone room, though it seems to be designed on purpose to feel more like a cave, all curving organic-feeling contours.
There are little hertasi! A few litters of them, apparently. There's a sort of nest of blanket-bits on top of a mattress in one corner, with a little safety railing around it, and the babiest baby hertasi are flomping around in it. They're SO small and seem to be mostly head and eyes, their bodies still scrawny and uncoordinated and their scales almost colourless.
"Those ones hatched last week," the hertasi guiding her explains. "They do not talk yet but they are very sweet. The older ones are this way."
There's a play area. It has a toy kitchen in it and a toy - classroom? - and various other toy versions of places to be found in the real tower. A cluster of hertasi about half the size of the adults appear to be having a doll tea party.
"You can hold one! You do need to hold up their heads, and they can be wriggly, but it is not too hard, I will show you."
Shortly later Azabel has a newly-hatched baby hertasi trying to crawl up her chest and eat her hair.
The older children have announced that two of their dolls are in LOVE and getting MARRIED and there is eager discussion of doll wedding planning.
"They have to be good at listening to your problems and giving you advice, and getting you stuff if you need stuff but maybe since you live here hertasi do that for you, and if you have a problem with another grownup they're supposed to talk to the grownup for you if the grownup won't listen to you, and make sure you eat vegetables - I guess you don't eat vegetables - and go to the healer if you're sick and stuff."
"Oh." Skan considers this very seriously. "- I think they are good parentss then. The Healer comess to uss, ussually, and the trondi'irn to groom uss, but my parentss give me advice on flying and come to all my competitionss and ask about ssschool and they tell me what to do if the insstructor is being unfair."
Skan will fly her over to where his parents live! The gryphon eyrie is a big stone-walled section at one end of the Tower, with a cloth-canopy roof that can be folded aside during the day when it's nice out, to let the gryphons fly in and out. They seem to approximately all live intermingled inside it, with nests but not really separate rooms.
She wants to concentrate on the math, but afterwards she can follow up. "Girl gryphons are infertile by default and Urtho has a spell to let them have babies, and he doesn't do it whenever they want, and for some reason he's making medical decisions for their babies instead of them which I THINK is illegal so I'm going to Healer's today when I have a bit to check."
"A lot of them are born so they won't live very long and he's telling the Healers to give them painkillers and otherwise just let them die, which, like, should be allowed but he's not their parents? Their parents are right there and he got to pick them and at least sometimes they'd rather take care of the baby for as long as they can, I asked."
"Huh. I wasn't sure how much owning people being illegal is - a real law, here? I think it might supposedly be illegal in Predain too but everyone ignores that." Shrug. "Although I guess at the Tower people don't seem to go around having slaves, so...it'd still be Urtho doing something different."
"Yeah. If the Healers tell me they let him do that because he owns all the gryphons I will ask him to confirm this. In front of the whole class. And then I will bother him about how much it would cost me to buy them all and set them free. Also I think I might hide in the eyrie and watch him cast the spell so I can learn it and it's not just him. - he does have it written down but still."
"...what's he going to do about me asking him awkward questions and hiding in the eyrie, expel me? I'm a prodigy. Also a Mindhealer. With a perfectly clean disciplinary record. I'd need to find at least three things that disruptive to do before he'd consider it. And if he does I'd probably be able to get Lionwind to quit in protest."
It's pretty easy to locate the gryphon section; it's the one that has a withdrawable canvas roof so it can be accessed from the air, and a very wide door at ground level that can accommodate adult gryphons comfortably. It's also entirely open space inside, rather than divided into rooms or curtained cubicles.
A couple of adolescent gryphons are there, being examined and groomed. One of the Healers waves to Azabel.
Most of the policy handbook seems to be about how often gryphons should get various kinds of preventative care and check-ups, and when the junior Healers and un-Gifted staff should refer them on to a senior Healer for investigation. Gryphons apparently get a lot of weird digestive issues; they're obligate carnivores, as were both of the source species, but apparently combining raptors and great cats still leads to some weirdness there. They also have a lot of issues with feathers and skin oil.
There's an entire section on gryphon births and care of new gryphon chicks in the first week. Gryphon births aren't as fraught as human ones on the mothers end, not being bipedal means that their hips are set up differently and leave more space for babies to come out, but they tend to have twins or triplets a lot, and it's still very common at this stage for the newborns to have health problems. Most of these are treatable, or resolve on their own with supportive care, and just mean that it's standard to keep the chicks at Healers for a week so they can be monitored. There's a long list of health conditions that are considered curable, and then another list of rarer more serious conditions that aren't, and protocols for catching and diagnosing conditions appropriately. A subcategory of the non-curable congenital problems are listed under a "supportive care only" protocol.
The manual...doesn't actually make it all that clear whose call this is, though.
She has to talk to a different senior Healer to get access to that manual, and they're again confused about the request, but they grant it.
Human babies have a lower rate of fatal-in-early-childhood congenital defects, and most of them are recognizable enough to see when the child is still in the womb, at which point the policy says it's up to parents whether they still want to carry the pregnancy to term. There is an official policy, at least here, against trying to provide curative or even life-prolonging treatments for babies with unavoidably fatal birth defects, or in cases where the child's life could be prolonged but they would be unavoidably in pain, but it's up to the parents whether they want to stay with the baby at the hospital while the Healers provide pain relief for the child, or whether they want to give birth at home.
"Yeah. It turns out the policy isn't actually very different and it's just gryphons are born there and not at home like human babies sometimes are. And that part makes sense since some of them can be fixed if they get help straight away. I'm still kinda concerned though... Do your parents get paid for their jobs?"
"Well, yeah, but you could say that about a lot of things! My parents shouldn't have gotten married even though I like existing. And I still exist even though they got divorced and you'd still exist even if you could have kids with whoever whenever you thought it was a good time."
Urtho isn't at their next seminar class, as it turns out, but they end up covering a different (and less interesting) topic anyway.
He does appear at the class the week after, sitting in the back of the room as the students arrive, and when everyone's there the teacher introduces the topic as 'ethics around created species' and asks if anyone has any opening remarks on it.
Aza DOES. She DOES have remarks on this.
"I think," she says, "that people should probably not create person-species at all; that if they do so, they should make it not require a research project to determine whether those persons are legally chattel; that presuming they are not, they should not then proceed to breed them like livestock however soft the pressure they place on people whose environments they've controlled since infancy. I think this is a great example of mages accruing, by virtue of being mages, power that magehood does not render them exceptionally suitable for."
"I see." Urtho doesn't seem upset, or angry, just - politely puzzled? "I think I disagree with you on the question of creating species; I believe the world benefits from a greater variety of intelligent living beings to contribute to it. That being said, it is not at all unreasonable to disagree on how this ought to look, since I myself have some disagreements with the creator of the hertasi on his process. Assuming you had decided that it was positive for the world - and for the gryphons themselves - for my gryphons to exist, how do you think you would have gone about it?"
"I like having gryphons and hertasi around too. But just because somebody's going to be positive for themselves and the world doesn't mean it's right to create them! Gryphons would still be nice to have around even if many more of their babies were born defective than the already huge fraction that actually are, and even if you could have made them have bigger litters and more surviving babies who'd be positive for themselves and the world by existing if you'd made them in a way that also had more dying malformed ones, you shouldn't have done that. The additional surviving gryphon babies wouldn't be worth killing more of them on purpose. But if I decided I just had to have a new species I'd practice a lot on non-person species and try to solve the birth defect problem till I could get it right on the first try when I made people, and I'd also bet really hard that I was going to be able to make them smart enough to, given the amount of education and parenting I would also be responsible for supplying, figure out whether it was a good time for them to reproduce and with whom, and I would make sure it was very clear to everyone that they owned themselves instead of leaving that kind of unclear. Also I wouldn't make them obligate carnivores because that makes it hard for them to strike off on their own and afford their own food."
"Hmm. ...So something I thought about, when I was deciding whether or not to embark on this project, was how earlier species felt about the matter, so I spoke to a number of hertasi about it. They were, nearly universally, very adamant that they thought it was good they had been made, that the world would be lacking without them, and that they thought this reasoning ought to generalize and therefore it would be, by their thinking, very good for me to create another new species even if I did not make every decision perfectly along the way. Also, well, the early days of creating a species are more difficult, while the problems are being worked out, but that will end up being only a small fraction of their existence, right?"
"I'm glad you asked the hertasi about that first. But even if I'm being too conservative about whether people should create species, and even if it's impossible to be perfect at it, that doesn't mean it isn't worth being as meticulous as possible about their design and care and course-correcting if still-fixable errors are pointed out, and making all that meticulousness very obvious to everybody so that no one will be inspired to carelessness if they try it."
"- Oh, certainly, if you believe I am making errors that can still be corrected then I wish to hear about it, I am simply making it clear that I am unconvinced of your first point." He turns to the rest of the class. "And I would like to hear if the other students have anything to add."
Many of Azabel's classmates still seem half-stunned, but eventually some of them start raising their hands and adding in their own points, or asking questions - mostly about why created species have so many birth defects in the first place, is that really inevitable, or are people just used to it being but really it could be avoided with more effort.
Aza writes up a list of his errors that could still be corrected (gryphons should have control of their own matchmaking and reproduction or at most he could impose a population growth cap if they're that hard to feed and an age limit if they're physically mature well before their emotional adulthood; it should be Very Obvious that he doesn't own them if he doesn't and if he does he should Stop; he should publish his process, even with some technical detail redacted, so people who are considering making a species have his example, and his hindsight perspective, to learn from; it should be clearer to the gryphons when he is imposing something on them versus e.g. it being a general Healers' policy that just hits them more frequently than it does humans). She presents it to him neatly numbered and bulleted at the end of class. There is a footnote that she would be delighted to help him with writing up the gryphon process book as a side project if they can come up with a meeting schedule that works around her classes.
Urtho asks her opinion on other students' points a few times, but the discussion wanders pretty far afield; someone asks if it's true that gryphons are all very bloodthirsty and if THIS was ethical, and Urtho argues that no of course they're not all bloodthirsty and then there is argument.
At the end of class, he accepts the paper from her sort of absently and pats her shoulder. "Thank you very much, Azabel, I will definitely get back to you about this."
If she gives it another week, she will in fact receive a note from Urtho before that deadline, apologizing for being so busy and saying that he's taking her feedback into account and is she available at this time next week to have lunch again and discuss.
There are multiple published works about the hertasi! The Adept mage who created them published his notes as a sort of treatise, after the project was done and shortly before he died; the 'sort of' seems appropriate because they're not exactly well organized, or very complete. The exact details of the spells involved seem to have either been redacted or not considered important enough to write down. The notes also don't get into his thought process much, either the decision to make a species at all or the reasoning behind various judgement calls. There are some early design plans, with sketches of several different possible hertasi appearances before he settled on one, and then dated entries describing various stages of the project. It looks like he mostly worked on embryos in unhatched eggs, and transformed the original lizard stock into the final hertasi species over about four generations; only the final one was smart, however, he does note that he 'discarded' multiple attempts and started again from one of the earlier stages. (It doesn't sound like 'discarding' meant killing the adults, though he did have Healers permanently sterilize the reject-hertasi who he didn't want reproducing further.)
There are also other books by later writers. Including a sort of memoir by one of the first hertasi in the final, approved cohort. He describes being born in the mage's creche, raised by human staff. He recalls, at one point, meeting his 'parents', from the earlier intermediate stage of non-sentient lizards, and how strange it felt, how it always seemed that his real parents were the humans who actually raised him and taught him to talk and read. He describes the awe and wonder of falling in love with a fellow hertasi, and having children together, the very first generation of hertasi with hertasi parents. (It doesn't sound like the mage who created them particular restricted reproduction, though partly this might be because he was very old when he finally managed a version he liked.)
That's all very interesting, especially the hertasi's memoir. It's a pity there's not more on the earlier sapient drafts, she wishes she knew what those were like - though a few non-sapient generations to work out some kinks seems like a good idea to her. She brings all her notes on these books to her appointment with Urtho.
"Oh, very busy as always, but not bad. I did some thinking about what you said to me, and, well, made some announcements to my gryphons that I do not think were very surprising to them, but were in fact overdue. And - I think you are right, that there is not a good reason to delay writing up a treatise, aside from it being quite a lot of work."
"I think probably it's also important to be clear to everyone else that you don't own the gryphons. So people don't think this is a good way to get slaves, or people who can't complain to the guard about anything. Also so people don't think you might be the sort of person who'd do that. I was pretty sure that you didn't think you owned them after I asked a lot of questions but it did take a bunch to be clear."
"It doesn't exactly look like you do, but it doesn't look like you don't - like, if you had a human child the usual way, that's fairly common, people know what that's like and when they'll be legally independent from their parents and what your rights over them are in the meanwhile. It wouldn't look like you owned them because it would look like a specific other thing instead. If you make two hundred gryphon children I don't imagine you necessarily automatically own them unless you explicitly set them free, but if I haven't thought about it particularly and then I learn that you're deciding who they can have kids with and when, and hear that you're making medical decisions for those kids - I have since read the Healers' handbooks and no longer especially think you're doing that but when I first heard it sounded that way - and you're providing them all room and board and they'd have a hard time earning enough money to feed themselves on their own because of the diet you gave them... it starts to look kind of concerning."
"...I think that will be less true once people are more familiar with gryphons and their full capabilities," Urtho says. "Er, the part about having trouble earning enough to feed themselves. I think in twenty years, once more of them are trained and out in the world, the Crown will be eager to hire them for many purposes. ...Also I think you might underestimate how hard it would have been to make them not carnivores, given the source species, I am not actually sure it could be done at all and it would very likely have given them more health troubles had I attempted it."
"They left out some things I would have liked to read about - he did a few versions before he got the kind of hertasi we have now and there was barely enough about those I could be sure he didn't outright kill them, let alone find out what he didn't like about them or how they felt about the whole process - but they were pretty usefully structured, and I think gryphons didn't have versions so if we copy the outline we won't be leaving out important gryphon facts. There was also a first generation hertasi memoir, I might do one of those since gryphons have a hard time writing and would want help but probably don't need your help with that."
"Oh, you read that!" Urtho lights up. "I spoke to the author of it, you know, twenty years ago or so..." He frowns. "Maybe thirty, it gets so hard to keep track once you are my age. He was delightful. He might even still be alive, you know, hertasi have longer lifespans than humans."
"Hmm, let me think. He'd settled out in Ketaran when I saw him - that's just outside Ka'venusho, cute little town on the river - but it's been a while. I am sure someone among the hertasi here would know if he is still alive, and if so where he lives."
Urtho waits for her to finish. "So - where do we want to start on this book project, and how do you want to divide it up? I - confess I will have difficulty freeing up time to work on it aside from the occasional meeting like this, but I can give you a section of my notes to read through and then get your suggestions later?"
"They generally are! There are quite lovely that way. Anyway, yes, I think my plan for our next steps would be to ask them to help organize the notes, and send you a section to start with, and then you can write to me, and tell me once you are ready to meet in person again. Anything else we ought talk over first?"
"Yes, that seems right. We can try to find a level of it that is interesting and not repetitive, and perhaps put somewhat more in the footnotes? ...I do not especially want this to be a detailed instruction manual on how anyone can make a species, to be honest, I think it - goes better, when doing this requires substantial proactiveness from someone."
:There've been a few places where he could've been mad but he didn't actually get mad. He seems pretty mellow honestly. It might be an inattentiveness-supported mellow but still: Also she can profit from his flaws by writing his book for him, thereby causing there to be a book people will want to read that she wrote such that she can build on that basically guaranteed success.
:The way the gryphons described it made it sound like he was making medical decisions for baby ones instead of their parents but when I checked the handbook it turned out that they have the same policy about humans, and the only difference is humans aren't always at Healers' in the first place and gryphons are since so many of their babies are going to need some help to start out. Also some of them have in fact flown off to do their own thing already, it could just stand to be clearer to all concerned that this is allowed. I still think he should cut it out with breeding them but they didn't seem super urgent about it, though I'll talk to more of them over the course of the book and find out exactly how hard I want to push on that, if he doesn't back off on his own. Plus I might wind up with his actual notes on the spell since the hertasi are going to be ferrying me gryphon-related materials and then I won't have to hide in the eyrie to be able to alternately source the spell for them:
Ma'ar thanks her and heads off.
It takes either Urtho or his hertasi an entire week to organize his notes, but after that interval, an initial box of notes is delivered to Azabel's house along with a polite note from Urtho saying that these are from his earliest work, ten years' worth, but before he started trying to create people-gryphons in earnest.
Random gryphons find her questions kind of odd, but agree to answer them!
The cohort of gryphons raised by hertasi in Urtho's creche mostly seem to recall quite happy childhoods. Some are still in touch with their surrogate parents, though on average they do seem to describe less strong attachment than most humans would have to their families, adoptive or not. Some recall being treated for serious medical problems as babies, which was sometimes painful or difficult but doesn't seem to have been too traumatic for most of them.
Urtho's notes require a lot of sifting. There are some incredibly gorgeous and well-done sketches of gryphon anatomy, and a lot of tables of figures, where it's sometimes very hard to figure out what the figures are records of.
She can find plenty of references to gryphon reproduction, including a detailed diagram of their internal reproductive organs, and eventually with a lot of digging plus asking the hertasi, she can turn up a one-page specification of what's...probably the spell that makes females fertile?
Notation for complicated magic workings is tricky and not actually standardized all the way, and the instructions do not at all provide enough detail clearly enough that she could figure out how to cast the spell herself.
She copies them anyway - maybe with more exposure to Urtho's work it'd be usable, and at least it would clarify a covert espionage visit so she'd only have to do one of it. She can't copy the drawings and marks the ones she wants to include with colorful bookmarks to find them again later for copying into woodcut by a skilled artist once this goes to print. Mystery numbers get different bookmark colors till she finds what they're for and indexes them.
Her heroic indexing effort is mostly invisible to Ma'ar, who isn't first seeing the messy un-sorted version.
Their current session ends before she's finished reviewing everything. Urtho ends up coming to several more of their discussion seminars, and praises both of them for their contributions; Azabel still speaks up more, but Ma'ar is getting a bit braver by the end of the class.
He learns a clever self-defence spell, a soft force-net that pins someone without any risk of injury, and he thinks it could probably be done as a trap-spell built on a focus, and maybe he and Azabel should figure out how to make that so she can wear it in case she ends up under attack and can't set-command the attacker for whatever reason?
She supposes this is a reasonable side project, though it is not an especially high priority for her since she is not frequently attacked and isn't typically in, like, a boat, where a pirate might attack her and drown if carelessly set-commanded. She will help him out with it especially when she is between batches of notes. And go shopping for nice foci.
Ma'ar is delighted to do most of the work. He thinks that Azabel shares Urtho's inexplicable trait of not thinking very much about all the kinds of possible danger that could happen to her. Also he can try to make it a pretty piece of jewelry too, because why not.
He decides to take the weather-magic class with the next session; it's been nine months of training and enough food, and he's grown several inches and also has noticeably more magical strength and gets tired less quickly. He thinks he'd like to take a second practical magic class, too; is Azabel particularly interested in doing a class together?
Urtho is so pleased with how neat and organized she's gotten all of it, and praises her work warmly! He has thoughts on things to include or omit, but they're very indecisive rambly thoughts.
He doesn't make any comment on her inclusion of the incomplete outline for the gryphon reproduction spell. (Azabel was not, at any point, able to figure out the intricacies of it from further notes.)
Well, if he wanted to just hand it over he's had lots of chances, now.
She writes down all his opinions and finishes her outline and gets underway on drafting proper. And asks Skan to keep an ear out for moments she might hide in the eyrie, if anyone's likely to be granted the option to have a kid soon.
Once she's properly underway on the draft and reading through in more detail, it's - notable that the section on the design of the gryphon reproductive system, which was apparently complicated to figure out given their mixed-origins anatomy, is very detailed and also...does not contain any kind of cross-referencing with the spell described elsewhere for gryphon fertility.
It looks like there's something to the low-not-no fertility aspect for males specifically. Their resting body temperature is too high? (It looks like this is less a deliberately planned restriction, and more just because, as flying creatures, they have a higher metabolic rate and run hotter than the lion source stock.)
The females...have some sort of mechanism for going into heat. It doesn't look like a seasonal or cycling thing, though. She probably needs to read the section on their endocrine system to figure out what would trigger it.
There aren't enough gryphons for gryphon baby requests to come up all that often, but a fortnight later Skan very eagerly goes looking for Azabel, bouncing with excitement. "Urtho'ss doing the sspell! My parentss' friendss, the oness who weren't mature enough lasst time they assked. I guess Urtho changed hiss mind."
"It looks like it's not actually impossible for gryphons to have babies without the spell - which makes sense, if you think about it, he had to use actual animals and none of the animals need magic to have babies, the spell has to do something to the biology involved and I think you could do the something without the spell. But the spell's probably easier. Where should I go and when?"
It's also kind of necessary, in this case! The eyrie where Urtho does the spell is a different one than the gryphons' usual living area; it's a sort of terrace higher up on the Tower, and while it looks perfectly accessible from inside, the door is locked.
Skan glances around, then points at a corner, which has some tasteful ivy draping up against the stone. "I think you could hide there?"
There's shielding on the stone wall, though that's pretty low-magical-leakage, like all of Urtho's work, and doesn't look much like a person's life-energies. The ivy itself gives off ambient life-energy, enough to at least blur a person's mage-aura. ...Also there's a gutter pipe or something, to one end of the enclosure, which has some sort of stronger magical signature, maybe for self-clearing debris that ends up inside it from the roof.
Skan is so excited! This is such an amazing idea and he would feel kind of silly for never thinking of it before, except that even Azabel, who is the SMARTEST, didn't think of it until now.
He finds a clay shape that feels comfortable to grip, with indentations for his claws to rest in so it doesn't slip around. "I'm worried it'll be lesss comfortable when it'ss hardened," he confesses.
Skan is so flattered that Azabel wants to do that with him, and yes it would make him very happy.
There are a couple of drawing classes being run in the Tower, it turns out, only one of which is compatible with Azabel's schedule or in a room that Skan can easily fit into (most of the Tower is gryphon-accessible but the belowground levels are pretty cramped for him; Skan is at this point unusually large and brawny even for a fully adult gryphon.)
It's in the evenings at the end of the schoolweek. The teacher is surprised but pleased to have her first ever gryphon student! It's a beginner class and fairly well paced.
The session continues, uneventfully. Skan's parents' friends successfully get pregnant with their first child and are, apparently, very very happy about it.
Three weeks later, Skan reports that another gryphon couple asked Urtho about children and were - well, not quite denied, but informed he wanted them to wait a month so he could think about it.
"- Oh, right, yess." Lythar glances at his wife. "He ssaid our baby might be born very ssick, becausse of - I didn't quite follow, did you, dear?"
"Becausse of what liness we come from, he ssaid."
"Right, that." Wing-shrug. "He ssaid that a year ago he'd have told uss no, but - that thingss are different now." A questioning look at Azabel.
"That we are mature enough ass a sspeciess to - make ssome of our own decisionss," Lythar says.
"Whether we want to take the rissk," Eshata adds. "It iss not for certain that our baby would be ssick. And - if we were brave enough we could try more than once, I ssuppose."
Azabel can find their names fairly easily in the records. They're somewhere between first and second cousins - first-generation gryphon relatedness is messy, due to all the crossmatching of the source stock and modifications in-womb - and also they're both identified as probable carriers of a particular gryphonic defect. They had minor birth defects which were fixed easily by the Healers, but now after further decades fo study, it seems likelier the trait that caused those is inherited and that a double dose of it in their child would be fatal in early childhood unless treated - and isn't something the Healers know especially how to treat. It's only speculative that they carry it at all, though, this isn't something the Healers can See closely enough to diagnose directly.
The session continues. Azabel and Ma'ar's class on long-distance communication is interesting, and definitely more challenging than anything else they've done yet.
As usual Ma'ar defaults to partnering with Azabel, but he's less picky about it these days, since he gets along fine with all the other students. And there's some competition for this slot, lately. Another boy in the class, Shann, two years older and from a local noble family, is starting to angle toward partnering with Aza almost every class.
...okay? She doesn't especially care as long as Ma'ar isn't left in the lurch, it's good that he's making more... acquaintances? Probably not friends at this point. She doesn't make a fuss when Shann heads in her direction.
"It's sort of odd that we're practicing long-distance communication with each other. I was expecting to be spending more practice time talking to my dad," she remarks.
He doesn't try to draw attention to it.
Two classes later, though, he sidles over and manages to arrange to be paired with her again. "I think this exercise is a step on the way to that spell you wanted!" he offers brightly. "For talking to people who aren't Gifted, I mean. Where does your dad live, anyway?"
:Yeah, she said I'm a good age to start thinking about what I like in boys and dating some of them is a good way to find out as long as they're nice and not, like, a lot older than me or otherwise sketchy, and then I had to sit through her entire lecture on sex even though she also did that when I was eight and again when I was eleven and I still have the notes from both times, and then she gave me a script for if I don't really feel like going out with him again after the once, but she said that when her mother did that it turned out not to work well because the way people talked had changed too much since her mother was a girl so I am encouraged to improvise to suit the situation:
:...I guess that would demystify some stuff!: A lot of things Ranara covered were not just basic mechanics you could pick up from being in the same tent but Aza doesn't SUPER want to go into it. Except what if he's not in fact going to figure the rest out on his own or something even though Aza is pretty sure she could have. :If I were you I might find a grownup to ask about - not even just that but all kinds of stuff, just in case, because it would suck to be time-sensitively confused and not already have that lined up: she says.
"Well, I'm doing a book on gryphons out of Urtho's notes, and it has really good illustrations and I felt like I wanted to be better at drawing, and also my gryphon friend and I recently figured out how to adapt a pen so he can hold it, and he liked the drawings even more than I did, so we're taking the class together."
"...there aren't that many gryphons, can't you just figure out what would be perfect and check if she is? Anyway I think if someone were perfect that would have to include having complementary ways of figuring things out in the first place so it wouldn't be particularly awkward."
And their routine continues. Shann studiously avoids looking at her in class but keeps any other awkward feelings to himself. She can go back to partnering with Ma'ar, who has at some point gotten moderately ahead of her in the curriculum by dint of copious practice on his own - he has more free time to dedicate to this, since he's neither doing Mindhealing training nor currently writing a book.
They're learning a spell that works to communicate with un-Gifted people! It does require anchoring on a focus, which they're going to learn how to make, so talking to her dad will need to wait on visiting him or maybe sending a package.
"...Not sure. I don't know what the law is, really? I just know what I - saw people doing. Maybe they were breaking the law. But - people have slaves, there, I want to change that. And - no one seemed to think they could do anything about the King's Guard - raping people, or stealing from them..."
"Nice. And then you'll have more free time for a bit to study, I guess. Are you taking the longer break before the next session?"
They're about to be a year into their training, and were mildly encouraged to take a month or two off, or do one of the more self-paced curriculum classes.
"I think those being obviously distinct depends on our - ontology of what Gifts are? I have read about places that do not distinguish Gifts from each other at all, and call all of it 'magic' and simply think that different people have different strengths at 'magic'." Shrug. "I am really very far from being an expert on this, though, I am just remembering things my teacher said to me decades ago."
"It would be wonderful!" Lionwind looks thoughtful. "- You know, you have both Gifts as well, and stronger than I. And the mental flexibility of youth. Once you master the trick of doing it with Mindhealing, perhaps you could make some headway imitating it with Thoughtsensing, and beat me to it."
She makes another focus, and she goes on her trip, and catches up with her patients in her dad's town, and checks in with Lionwind about them. She has a nice time hanging out with her dad, comes fishing and scoops fish out of the river with MAGIC and cooks them with him for dinner, and comes back in plenty of time for the start of the next term.
Ma'ar seems glad to see her again, though as usual he's not very demonstrative about it. "I did a study project on Gates," he tells her. "Not permanent Gates, but there are other variations on it - you can do Gates just from pictures, if you're really really good, or using a direction on a map..."
"Me too!"
They don't have Gates on their curriculum yet, not until the second half of the year, but they've been graduated by the tutor who was working with them on ley-line and node use, to join the students learning to cast various kinds of larger heavy-duty spells that can't be done without nodes. Most of that cohort is at least eighteen.
Ma'ar wants to take the concert-work class too, but he expects Azabel maybe won't want to?
The classes run for a full three-month term, but the very very specific ones meet once rather than twice a week. The Healing one is a full-sized course; there are a lot of spells to cover; the book-preservation one needs a couple of months work of building up with simpler and then intermediate-complexity preservation spells that don't, for example, allow the necessary handling that books are submitted to.
And Ma'ar takes concert-work and emergency medicine as well as the practice sessions casting from nodes, which is a very heavy course load but he is, at this point, fairly sure he can keep up fine.
The teachers are decent and the students are easier to get along with, maybe by dint of being older.
Ma'ar finds Azabel after his second concert-work class (the first one was just discussing theory.)
"It was fun! - Uh, I don't think you should take it yet, some of the other students were really not that good at shielding once we were doing something weird with it. But I can teach you the basic exercise and if you're good enough at it then no one will be able to read your mind by accident." He makes a face.
"I think I figured out what kind of shielding I have to practice to make sure I don't pick up things from other people, on top of them not reading me. I'll tell you if that works, and then if I teach you before you take the class then it should be fine? Uh, if you don't mind that other students might read each other's minds by mistake, but not yours."
The session continues. They learn a mage-gift technique for how to stop bleeding in an emergency; it basically uses a very local burst of heat to cauterize open blood vessels, so it needs cleaning up by a real Healer later, but the teacher has some testimonials about how it's Saved Lives. They move on to learning targeted heat-spells when people are in a bad way because of exposure to cold weather.
Ma'ar thinks he's gotten the hang of how to manage his personal shields so he can neither read anyone else's mind nor have anyone else read his, even though at least some of the students in his concert-work class are definitely not up to speed on this. (He doesn't mind either thing much, so he's tested this by deliberately partnering with the worst students and then not shielding properly.) He can teach Azabel if she wants?
Then Ma'ar can set aside a time that weekend to show her what he's been learning!
First he offers to demonstrate a few rounds of lowering his low-level shields, the part relevant to allow concert melds of reserves, first while keeping everything else up and then doing it sloppily and then alternating some more. "You can watch me with Mindhealing Sight, if that helps," he adds.
It's really interesting, actually! He - seems to have built in a pathway to a part of his mind that would normally be totally subconscious, something that would happen without his even having to think about it. And there are two versions of that pathway, now - one of them is sort of hasty-looking, thrown into place without much attention to exactly where it landed, and another is very very carefully placed to only turn this gear, right here, while touching nothing else.
Ma'ar thinks that she's very quick at this kind of thing! He waits, gives her a chance to practice, and after a few minutes asks her if she's feeling ready to practice a reserves-meld with him.
"I promise if you're not shielding right then I'll stop right away and not read your mind at all," he adds. "I can do that - I tested it, with, uh, the students who are bad at this."
Ma'ar nods, and lowers his inner-level shields as obviously as he can, without moving anything else. He - offers out a sort of metaphorical handshake to her, or no, not quite handshake - it's not the same thing Mindspeech links do at all, maybe more like - bumping hips while dancing, or something...
There are a few awkward nudges and near-misses and almost but not quite falling into rapport, and then - there - their minds are still fully separate behind individual shields but their reserves are somehow a single pool, blended, still and quiet and almost thrumming with readiness for whatever they want to do next.
And, on an entirely distinct level from that merging, Ma'ar reaches out with formal Mindspeech. :You can try some magic, if you want - you should be as strong as both of us together:
Oooh. What would benefit from this that she knows how to do... well, there's weather magic but the classes always cleared large practice workings ahead of time to make sure they wouldn't make a mess...
...she hasn't worked on flying in a while. She wraps herself in a sling of force and wafts up, up, up, not too far to catch herself safely if she should make a mistake.
Ma'ar thinks this is AWESOME.
He's also very, very tired by the end, despite not having done any magic himself, since he was lending his reserves as well.
"You did great," he encourages her. "We're going to learn concert-Sight next, in the class - once I figure the shields out for that I can teach you as well."
Ma'ar complains that getting the shield-alterations right for concert-Sight without accidental mindreading is way harder than just sharing reserves - the shields are at a more similar 'level', just for different mental faculties, but even he is getting more of an earful, well, Thoughtsensing-ful impression of his classmates' heads than he would really prefer. He thinks he'll have it down in a few more weeks though.
"I mean, I used to skim surface thoughts a lot? That's fine. I'm just really bored of people having the same feelings all the time that this is embarrassing or too hard or they feel awkward. You don't really get emotions as a Thoughtsenser unless you're in a meld, I think, but - they get repetitive."
"One of the books I read in the library thought that maybe they're not as distinct as everyone says?" Ma'ar says, thoughtful. "Mindspeakers get overtones, and good Empaths can get images and bits of memories, which is content not just emotions. They're just - focused differently? Specialized differently?"
"Oh, the Haighlei apparently don't let anyone use Mind-Gifts for anything except truth checking, and have a way to do it with any Mind-Gift, and me and Lionwind are having a race to see who cracks doing it with Thoughtsensing first. But anyway that means they don't really know over there how many Gifts there are or which ones are the same versus different."
"Wow. That...seems like a waste of Gifts, really, but I guess it does mean they're not going around mindreading." Ma'ar has spent long enough around Azabel, at this point, to at least slightly feel like this is, perhaps, arguably, an advantage more generally and not just something that would appease her. "Oh, did you figure out how to do lie-detection with just Mindhealing yet?"
"Right. I - can talk about things from Predain before I came here, then."
And Ma'ar starts attempting this. He thinks he was thirteen winters old when he left the Plains. (True.) The roads in Predain are red. (False.) The first town he passed was called Three Mills (arguable, it depends how you define 'town' and whether the settlements he passed before that were closer to villages...)
Ma'ar is glad that it's useful! He can keep going for a while until he's out of ideas for true or false or arguable things to say.
It's a fun game for him, too, and he's more relaxed after a while and also running low on content.
"- And the chief of my tribe killed my baby sister before she was a person because there was a drought and too many cows'd died that summer," he adds.
(This is true. Ma'ar says it very matter-of-factly, like it's exactly the same level of salient as 'I met a person at an inn once who had red hair.')
Ma'ar is so startled! He goes rigid for a moment, holds himself perfectly still, then very deliberately relaxes.
:What?: he asks - in Mindspeech, both because his face is currently sort of smushed against her which will muffle talking, and because it means her answer, if she follows his lead, will have Mindspeech overtones that might help him figure out WHY she picked this exact moment to do this unexpected thing.
Azabel's reaction to all of that was disconcerting, even if he wasn't originally upset about it, and Ma'ar doesn't really feel like continuing the practice. He feels very off-balance.
"Is someone's sister being dead - normally the sort of thing you'd hug people about?" he says uncertainly.
"- I think it's less sad because she was a tiny baby and not a person yet? And that's - sort of the point, right, if they'd waited until she had a name then my mother would've been attached and way more sad about it, and they already knew the clan couldn't feed another person..."
"I'm...not not sad about it?" Now Ma'ar is feeling like there's something important here that he's failing to convey and he has no idea what it is. "Just, it's - I'm not more sad about her than I am about - all the women in the capital who'd had the King's guards do bad things to them, or - farmers whose children starved or died of the flux...or all the other things wrong in Predain..."
Shrug. "And - she didn't suffer much, right, not for long - he didn't just - leave her out to die of the cold, he clubbed her in the head until she wasn't alive anymore, and - and no one was lying about what they were doing, or - or pretending it was actually good and righteous..."
Ma'ar is now feeling even more off-balance and like he miscommunicated something even worse somehow.
"No, I - didn't mind - I liked that you hugged me," he manages. "I...just don't get why you hugged me about that and not, I dunno, about the time the caravan guards I was with tried to rape me in the middle of the night and I had to run away and I probably killed one of them with magic–"
He cuts off. "...I guess I didn't. Tell you about that properly - felt like it'd come up but maybe it was just in hypotheticals..." Now he feels SO AWKWARD, which is a very unfamiliar feeling and he has no idea what to do with it.
"Well, it's always happening all the time and if you aren't partial to misery in the universe that happens to you then it seems weird to be partial about whether it happens to have come up in conversation so I would have to carry you around at all times and that would not work."
"- Sorry? I didn't - I don't mean..." Ma'ar has no idea what thing he doesn't mean; he feels like Azabel somehow took his words and turned them into something completely different and now he's just confused and dizzy with it and it feels like all the words are quicksand. "Sorry. I - think you're good and I don't think you're bad and - I am going to go back to my room now -"
And he runs away before whatever incredibly stupid and pointless emotion he's having now has a chance to become any more inconvenient.
(Ma'ar is also still kind of disconcerted by the whole thing, but he's not sure how to bring it up usefully at all, at least not until he understands a lot more things about other people which - are going to be hard to learn without mindreading, honestly. He wonders if he should try harder to make friends with some students other than Azabel so he can ask them without poking her on whatever made her upset earlier... Anyway this is not on-topic for class and he sets it aside and focuses on the practice exercise.)
Lionwind is, as always, very perceptive. They're seeing a patient together first and he doesn't say anything during that session, and addresses Azabel in Mindspeech exactly as usual, but afterward, once he's caught up on the bare-minimum for his notes but before they discuss it fully, he peers at her.
"Is everything all right? You seem a little preoccupied."
"Um, he told me about how his baby sister got murdered when she was born because his clan couldn't feed another person, and I hugged him, and he was like, why did you hug me about that when I am equally sad about bad things happening to people I have never met, and I said most people are partial and he said it was better to be able to do math about it, and then asked why that and not the time caravan guards tried to rape him, which I guess he didn't see fit to bring up when I specifically asked about it because he was successful at self-defense and therefore it's irrelevant?? And then we got onto - whether either of us have feelings about all the misery in the world all the time, which we don't, and I said something defensive about being able to do math, and he, uh, apologized and ran away."
Lionwind nods, thoughtfully. "It sounds as though there are several layers to unpack there! ...I would ask you if he seems to still be upset about it, but given - everything I know about him - I doubt you would be able to tell, so. Did you get a sense of how much he was bothered by - being touched in itself, separate from how you prioritized what to hug him about?"
"Hmm. My guess is that he trusts you more, or feels more that you are a friend, now than he did then? ...Also it sounds a little to me as though it were some sort of - conversational counterattack, where he felt defensive and was perhaps on some level bringing it up because he thought it would be upsetting? I am not sure, though, that is very speculative and probably not the most important aspect of this anyway."
"Yes, that would fit." Sigh. "I am sorry - this all sounds rather unfortunate and stressful for you, and you were just trying to be friendly and help. ...You know, though, his thinking here does not surprise me, given the other things you have said to me about him. If you consider it now, does it make sense why he would have his emotions set up this way?"
"It sounds to me as though he did not intend to cause you to feel defensive, and was surprised and sorry about this part - which fits, too, modeling the emotions of others is a skill that many people your age have not yet acquired. And - I imagine for him it is protective, deciding not to be more devastated by the loss of family than by other more distant wrongs in the world. Since he has no family left, right, at least in his mind he has no one and is on his own."
"I might! The trouble is I'm not sure who to practice on. When I was trying it the Mindhealing way the worst case was I'd accidentally see their gears, which isn't very invasive, but with Thoughtsensing it's worse... will the truth checking thing work with their shields up? I'd think probably not except there are different kinds of shields for all the gifts, and people sometimes wind up with Thoughtsensing shields even if they don't have any Gifts of their own, and in Haighlei that would look like... I guess it might just look like some people being better at questioning uncooperative subjects."
"Hmm. You know, if my teacher's theory behind this is correct then it ought to work, and might even be helpful for learning. Her idea was that Gift-channels are - somewhat specialized, but not necessarily as rigidly as people tend to think? And that, for example, a Thoughtsenser can learn to 'unfocus' their senses - in a way that is actually much less useful for reading the content of thoughts, just as a poorly ground telescope lens is no good for looking at stars, but that also picks up on broader patterns of the mind? In which case learning to 'unfocus' Thoughtsensing in this way, to also cover what Mindhealing Sight generally does, would mean looking around the usual Thoughtsensing-specific shields? ...I am not sure, though, this is all very speculative."
"...Okay, when!"
Skan is very determinedly thinking about RACING MOVES. The one where you need to make a really steep turn and you sort of scrunch one wing and tuck the other one under you and it feels like you're about to flip over but you DON'T and instead you're suddenly going the other way. The one where you need to dodge a brick wall at the LAST SECOND and the best way to do it is to very very suddenly bank upward and your belly almost touches the bricks but it doesn't quite... Skan's visual-spatial imagination is incredibly detailed and this is filling nearly all of his attention.
Wow it's really hard to think of lies on the spot! "I, ummm, I - like the colour red." (True.) "My father is better at flying than me." (So, so false.) "My teacher iss nice." (Duuuubious, his teacher is nice to Skan but Skan, having had Azabel as a friend from babyhood, is very aware of bullying in general and his teacher isn't horrible to the less popular students but 'nice' would be a stretch...)
Even with her level of trained control, it's hard! It's really really hard!
- but she gets a flicker of it, just for a fraction of a second, she couldn't say anything specific about Skan's thoughts except that he's definitely lying about liking the gargoyles above the rose-garden entrance. And then it's gone and she's lost it, but it happened!
Oh no now he has to come up with more ideas for truths and lies and in-betweens, this game gets hard after a while!
"- I read a book about a bridge that collapssed because the inventor wass drunk when he dessigned it." (Not quite true, the bridge collapsed and the engineer had been negligent but probably not drunk.) "My friend Latiksha likess the colour blue." (True.) "My father was sscared of the dark when he was little..." (False; it's his mother who was.)
"Yes - maybe - I'm not sure..." He trails off, avoiding her eyes, and switches to Mindspeech. :I - wanted to say sorry. About snapping at you the other day. It was rude of me: Ma'ar isn't at all sure this is the right thing to say but he's had days to think about it and hasn't come up with anything better.
Ma'ar listens to her recounting of the conversation notes. He seems calm and thoughtful about it, with no current sign of defensiveness.
"I didn't expect it to make you defensive," he admits. "So - I wasn't understanding you right and making good predictions. Which is bad and I - think I could do things better if I understood other people more. What do you think?"
"Oh. I - get that, I think. Sorry." Ma'ar shakes his head. "I don't think it'd make you worse at it, really. But...i think that's because you're self-aware about it? And careful, and - if you were Queen you wouldn't put, I don't know, your mother first ahead of your kingdom, right? But - I think a lot of people would, or wouldn't even know if they were doing that..."
The gyroscope-like part hasn't changed much, since she last looked, though the outer surfaces of his mind have, the fight-or-flight triggers almost entirely overwritten and reorganized into the main structure.
"- I guess it's more - self-contained, than most people probably are?" he ventures.
And their lives fall back into the usual routine of classes and discussion seminars and magic practice. Ma'ar, if he in fact thinks about what Azabel said to him, doesn't bring it up with her again. He's maybe just a little bit warmer in his manner toward her, but it's hard to judge for sure.
They both pass their exams, and move on to the course on Gates; Ma'ar is also taking a more advanced artifact-work class, and a combat magic one. The Gate curriculum is six months long, meeting twice per week plus extra practice and optional tutoring sections.
Urtho continues to be very slow and not the most communicative on the matter of the book, but eventually, a couple of months into the Gate classes, he signs off on the final draft, having added a few sections of his own.
Actually publishing it is a matter of months more; another editor will review the manuscript for minor spelling or grammatical issues, and then Urtho's hertasi will start the long process of actually having it printed and bound. Still, he thinks it's going to be out for public consumption within another six to nine months. He invites Azabel for lunch and praises her warmly on all her work.
Ma'ar also picks that session to have another impressive growth spurt. He's almost sixteen, and finally looks around his actual age instead of a few years younger than that.
They both get the basic Gate technique down by two months into the session, but neither of them are at their full strength yet, magically speaking, and it takes substantial efficiency improvements and tweaking to get to the point that either of them could Gate to five hundred miles away. When Ma'ar asks, though, the teacher thinks they'll probably get there by the final exams.
"I can get us a map from the library, I think. Probably we want to arrive near the village that's closest to the Plains, rather than right in the middle - we might still get harassed by bandits but at least we won't risk landing on top of some other clan... We should maybe pack a tent, with wards on it, I think it's more than a day's walk to get to Kiyam clan lands. And protective shields, and a comms artifact just in case we need to contact someone and we're both too tired to cast it directly over that distance..."
The teacher is a bit surprised, and then says she can't see why it'd be impossible; all artifacts store power, when you think about it, usually just enough to power the set-spell for a few days but still. It might be very hard to do a general-purpose one; set-spells tend to be 'brittle', with limited flexibility, so it might be a lot easier to design a backup power reservoir for one specific artifact than to solve the general problem. But it sounds like an excellent idea for Azabel's class project!
Ma'ar, for his part, planned out an artifact to replace having a tent entirely; it'll need repowering every day, but that should be feasible even from reserves, and it'll be much less weight to carry around and won't tear or wear out or get dusty. He thinks he can get it to both project a physical shield-barrier and an illusion to make their presence almost unnoticeable, and also to retain heat. He's making solid progress on it.
He finds maps of Predain to look at. Wow, in hindsight he made a really long journey to, eventually, reach Urtho's Tower.
They'll still need to recharge that, but less often and it'll give them wiggle room if they have a particularly tiring or eventful day.
Both of them receive excellent grades on their projects, and do very well on their final exam in the Gate course; the teacher is confident they could both easily manage a Gate five hundred miles, if they know the destination reasonably well. And now they have the next two weeks conveniently off.
"He could be pretty helpful to have around! And it'd be safer if he could fly us in - although maybe he can't carry both of us... My clan would be terrified of him, if they're still around, but I guess he could hang back for that. Do you think he'd want to come, if you asked him?"
:First thing tomorrow and I packed, uh, clothes and notebooks and magic items and food, which you probably do not need to bring - I guess you could bring food if you want to carry some emergency jerky but meat's difficult enough that it might make more sense for you to hunt rabbits there:
:I can do that!:
And the next morning Skan is ready bright and early, with his parents' permission to be gone up to a week, wearing a harness and pack with enough jerky to minimally feed a gryphon for two days, albeit very tediously. He's hoping the Plains have lots of those big fat jackrabbits, and maybe even wild - not deer, they're forest animals not plains animals, but something big and fun to chase.
Her backpack is full of notebooks and a spare outfit and a blanket and a water bottle and camping dishes and various artifacts and some sandwiches to eat for the first day and nuts and raisins and rice and lentils and fudge to eat later and, also, several paper packets of spice blends, a lemon, and a bulb of garlic her mother insisted on to give the rice and lentils more variety. It's heavy. Probably she can convince Skan to carry it if she gets too tired. "Ready!"
"No, I told her I'd be able to Gate back if anything got to be too much for me and promised I'd do it if it did." She did also make Aza endure the sex talk again even though Aza told her like seven times that she is not in fact going to sleep with Ma'ar who, might she remind any nosy maternal influences who might be about, has a physical contact history with her limited to "one hug leading to a weird fight".
Skan oohs and aaahs appropriately. He's seen Gates before, of course, he does live in Urtho's Tower; his family even went on a trip once through one of the big permanent termini; but he's never seen one of his FRIENDS cast an actual Gate that he was going to go through in order to join them on an ADVENTURE.
Ma'ar, he thinks, isn't as cool as Azabel, who is the SMARTEST, but he's pretty cool.
And then it's up! The other end is built on the big doorway of an outlying barn behind one of the farms he remembers passing; hopefully they won't startle anyone coming through, and if they do at least he knows the local language and can reassure them.
Ma'ar hefts his pack and steps through into...very tall grass, it looks like it hasn't been cut in months or maybe years. Huh.
"I wonder what happened?" Ma'ar peers around a bit. "- Can't feel anyone nearby. Huh. I...guess the land here is pretty marginal for farming, soil's too rocky. So maybe they got driven out by bandits and no one's bothered reclaiming the fields yet." Shrug. "It's only been two years! I - don't like it. But I guess it's not our problem right now."
Skan follows, clumsily. Gryphons aren't especially built for tromping, and after a bit he gives up and takes off, flying around and getting a view of the river and road.
- then, suddenly, he dives, vanishing past some trees. There's a squawk-grunt from some startled animal, and a gryphon shriek of triumph.
And they resume their trek. Skan isn't noticeably slowed down by the additional forty pounds of dead pig, and flies circles around them as they reach the road and turn left, following it along the river. Past the apparently-abandoned farm is some uncleared land, short scrubby trees that gradually trail off into brush. The river is running low in its banks and the foliage looks half-parched.
"It wasn't this dry ten years ago," Ma'ar says, distantly.
They do pass an area where the other side of the river looks recently-burned. The road has already turned into a narrow windy path, and eventually peters out to nothing.
And then Ma'ar stops, looks around.
"- I think we peel off away from the river now. That way."
He points. There isn't much to see, just mostly-flat grasslands, occasionally a hint of low rolling hills, as far as the eye can see.
It's certainly not very scenic. The plains go on and on, dusty dun-coloured grass, occasional muddy patches that might once have been proper waterholes.
Ma'ar stops at one, peers around. "...I'm not sure I remember all the landmarks. This - looks different from when I passed, but maybe it's just dried up."
Ma'ar doesn't appear to notice much one way or another. He doesn't seem troubled by the boredom, either; he walks, occasionally pauses and glances at his surroundings and then slightly adjusts course.
Eventually the sun is low in the sky and they reach the watering-hole Skan picked out.
Yawn. "Good, I'll just do an illusion on you then."
Ma'ar does this and then sits on top of the canvas sheet he brought to go under the tent-barrier, between them and the grass, and unrolls his blanket. He waits for Azabel to come in as well before raising the barrier.
And they go to sleep.
...Ma'ar has nightmares much less frequently, nowadays, but still sometimes, and it turns out that sleeping out in the open, exposed, in a place he's not used to and in a context that has all the associations of never-being-safe of his childhood, is not great for this. He doesn't actually wake up screaming, but he does toss and turn and whimper a lot, and occasionally startles awake and needs to spend a while calming down.
Unfortunately all the different clans wear approximately the same style of clothing and have similar-looking tents, and cows look mostly the same as each other from a distance. Skan wasn't close enough or at a good angle to quite make out faces.
"- Maybe?" he allows. "Seems worth getting close enough to check. I'm not too tired, I can Gate us out if it's a different clan and they attack us. Azabel, does that seem all right to you?"
Skan, full of energy, bounces around ahead and behind them, or flies circling low over their heads.
At one point he shrieks and dives, and manages to catch himself some sort of small squirrel-like rodent, which Ma'ar identifies as a prairie dog. He eats it approximately whole and is SO pleased with himself.
"That's true. It'll probably be all right, and - even if not it's still worth having come."
The second part in particular seems reassuring to him. He keeps walking, and is more attentive to the game.
And eventually they get close enough to see a smudge of something on the horizon. A little ways further it resolves into the humped-peaked shapes of tents.
The figures approach. In front are two boys of maybe eight or ten, wielding sharpened sticks. They're flanking a woman, whose white hair and wrinkled, weathered skin makes her look very old and frail; despite that, she moves briskly enough.
She stops ten yards away, shades her eyes and glares at them and snaps a phrase in the the Predain tongue.
Ma'ar, holding himself stiffly, says something else in his native tongue, ending in Azabel's name, then turns back to her. "Aza, this is my - grandmother, I guess, also the... I'm not sure exactly how to translate it. The elder woman of the clan, I guess. Her name is Ta'ana."
The old woman leads them to a very smoky dung campfire. There aren't any chairs; the other inhabitants of the camp, all women or children under ten, are squatting around it.
The woman smiles toothlessly at Aza and offers her a wooden cup full of some pungent-smelling, slightly lumpy off-white liquid.
The old woman barks something at another woman across from her, who twitches a bit and then nods and starts ladling out stew from a pot for them.
The next few minutes pass in mostly-quite-tedious silence, as food is handed out and the women and children eat while shooting frequent, vaguely worried glances at the horizon.
And shortly later Skan is back! This time he lands well away from the camp and approaches slowly, in the ungainly waddling way that gryphons have of walking; by the time he's within range to talk to them, the children are giggling about this and seem entirely at ease, though the younger women are still tense and trying to tuck their children protectively behind them.
"I ssaw them!" Skan calls out. "Everyone is fine."
Eventually Ta'ana seems to have the men and boys convinced that Skan is, one, real and not a demon trying to trick them, two, a person, and three, friendly.
They join Azabel and Ma'ar at the campfire. The adult men greet Ma'ar stiffly and ignore Azabel completely; the teenage and preteen boys also do, but sneak a lot of curious glances at her.
:Not continuously? And maybe it wasn't drought the whole time, maybe at the start it was some other problem. Things were good when I was born, in terms of rain I mean - gods, I think that's probably why I'm - smart, and stuff, I had enough food when I was really small. But...it takes longer than that for people to really feel safe enough to change how they do things, right? And - then it got bad again:
:I don't know how much of that I can cover myself but I can make a dent... if you're doing it too that'd be better. Or - would they not stop attacking each other and stealing stuff from each other if the weather were better and there weren't a drought, are they stuck like this now?:
The sun eventually starts to set; just before it does, another young woman with two preteen girls gets back as well, leading a herd of a dozen thin, dusty and unhappy-looking cows, which are penned in with a rope strung between stakes.
Ta'ana gets up and, in the same gruff manner as ever, asks Azabel and Ma'ar if they need space in a tent.
Ma'ar gets out the tent artifact and Azabel's power-reservoir artifact for it, and makes it opaque immediately so he won't have to keep dealing with the feeling that his entire once-clan is staring at him. They probably aren't even. He's just gotten used to not feeling so exposed all the time.
Skan is kind of offended that she thought he might! He is very hungry, that was not enough prairie dog and he didn't spot anything bigger all day and didn't feel like chasing down the tiny field gophers or whatever they were that he saw around. However, unlike THESE PEOPLE, he knows how to be POLITE.
He ruffles his feathers a bit and then tucks his head under his wing and curls up and goes to sleep.
Skan is SO HUNGRY but wasn't sure if saying something would be rude. He already had a fly around so he could drink from the gross muddy watering-hole - gryphons drink a lot of water, too, and it's especially annoying to carry the weight while flying. He didn't see anything other than a couple of the prairie dog things and it didn't feel worth chasing them.
Ma'ar comes back over.
"There's - an old tradition," he says slowly. "If you approach another camp and slaughter a cow in front of them and say you're offering a feast and tonight all men are brothers. ...Apparently my father came from another clan, from one of those nights. He never said."
They're my people, he's about to say, I want to help. But...it's not like they're more deserving of help than the entire rest of Predain. Or even necessarily that they need it more. They seem to be managing, mostly; glancing around at the people present, it seems like only a handful of the young children and one of the adult men have died since he left.
He shrugs and stares at the horizon.
"I wonder how much Predain is... a... country? Like, do people show up and track down clans and collect taxes. If you went to somebody and were like 'they stole my cow' would they... care. For that matter if you went 'hey some foreign soldiers have been seen in our area' would they listen."
"Right. And then it's not like the rest is that much more cohesive. I remember when I was travelling and, uh, reading people's minds a lot so I wouldn't get caught by surprise by anything. The common folk were scared to go to the Guard for anything, because - maybe they'd help but maybe they'd just laugh and demand bribes." Or rape you, but he doesn't say that out loud.
"I think that's right. And - hmm, I should maybe ask Ta'ana if they used to send tax collectors here. I think it's not just the Plains that got hit by the last few decades being bad. Maybe the King used to have the resources to send armed escorts with the tax collectors - it's not like you need much to hold off a clan, we - they - barely have weapons, and the King has trained mages..."
Azabel does not especially care if Ma'ar's mean grandma approves of her but it's fine, she guesses.
After dinner they can put a Gate on a tent-flap and send Skan across so he can get dinner. She picks a door with a nice view of the Tower in case anyone wants to gawk through it while it's up.
Ta'ana does not seem to think that Ma'ar sitting quietly by himself is annoying, and doesn't go at him with the stick. She doesn't seem very interested in what he's doing either.
...
Eventually, within about a candlemark, clouds start to roll in. The clanspeople look up curiously but then go back to what they were doing before.
Ta'ana seems a little more impressed once the drizzle starts.
And eventually he uncurls himself and stands up, stretching and shaking out his arms. He looks very tired.
"Rain," he says, with quiet pride. "- Did you ever have a chance to look at Aala - uh, sorry, the one we thought might have Mindspeech. I tried Mindspeaking her, earlier, it - might've been easier than usual? And she wasn't as freaked out by it as you'd expect for someone who'd never been Mindspoken to and wasn't Gifted. It was hard to tell though."
"- Oh, that's a good idea. She might still - not update, I think people here...learn not to be curious or expect to understand the world, or something... But it's worth trying. And probably the littles will think it's a fun game to watch."
He goes off to recruit the children for this.
And Aza will hold up various numbers of fingers while not looking at anybody. She wonders if Ma'ar's gloss on this is the most charitable - like, the clanspeople could be being reasonable if, say, charlatan scammers came by claiming wondrous powers on a routine basis? And also they don't think highly of Ma'ar personally and wouldn't think him beyond reproach. Or maybe they're... choosing skepticism as a low-energy option, because if they were more curious, more lively, they'd be burning calories they don't have? She doesn't know how many calories being curious burns. Hitting people with sticks seems like a waste of calories they don't have though.
:Yeah, she's got Mindspeech awakening. It'll probably get the rest of the way there if we talk to her a little? - and maybe we should stay back a bit in the morning and give her the basics of how to shield so if she reads everyone's minds all the time it is a conscious defense against stick-based abuse and not an accidental atrocity:
:- I think it'd be really good for the clan to - have someone who's...: and he hesitates for a long time trying to find the right word, :who's - normal - have them go go to the Tower for just a little while and then come back knowing more things but...still one of them...:
Yet again Ma'ar feels like he has none of the right words to convey what he means.
:I'll go talk to her:
And he goes off and does this.
...will she still be one of them after several months in a no-hitting-people-with-sticks zone. (Aza considers if she is dwelling too much on the sticks thing. It was only Ma'ar's grandmother in particular who she saw do it, and she knows they kind of base their whole economy around stealing cows from their neighbors, which is also bad, except it's a form of bad they're driven to by being starving, whereas the stick thing seems totally unnecessary. It's metonymy for all the unnecessary badness, she decides, of which sticks are merely the most obvious.)
And a few minutes later, Ma'ar walks back over to her. Still holding Aala's hand.
"She's willing to come back with us," he says in Tantaran. "On the condition that she can sleep in my room and that I'll Gate her home again if she asks."
His expression is more sad and tired than pleased.
"I'd prefer that to her not getting proper training at all? And - I think the alternative is her not getting training at all - she's scared, right, she doesn't know anyone but me and she barely remembers me..." Shrug. "I think once we're actually at the Tower and it's been a bit, she'll be less scared, and then if I don't like it I can persuade her to get a proper room the normal way."
In the morning the cows look very wet and bedraggled and resentful of the change in their fortunes; they, of course, aren't aware that this will mean more grass to eat and less stagnant water in the watering-hole. The clanspeople are smiling and cheerful, shaking out their wet tents.
Azabel and Ma'ar get a sendoff from Ta'ana. She playfully waves her stick in Ma'ar's direction but doesn't actually whack him; she's smiling.
What a hilarious joke! She'll just about die laughing! Aza unpacks all her remaining food and hands it to one of the friendlier midsize children who is willing to approach her. "Can you make sure Aala's ready so she doesn't hold us up dithering about going through the Gate, Ma'ar? And do you want to do it or should I?"
A few minutes later Ma'ar rejoins her, holding Aala's hand. "Let's go."
He raises the Gate. The clanspeople are a bit more curious, this time; a couple of the men approach close enough to peer through at the Tower courtyard.
They cross and Ma'ar takes it down. "Here we are," he says to Aala, gently. And to Azabel in Tantaran: "Maybe you can help her practice the language, like you did with me? And she doesn't know how to read or write either."
...Ma'ar feels vaguely like this is the sort of social interaction that has SUBTEXT, and he puzzles at it for a moment and then switches to Mindspeech. :Uh, do you have a preference? ...I mean, if you'd prefer I just do both things, that's fine, she's my relative not yours:
The next morning, Ma'ar Mindspeaks her and confirms that Aala has a class schedule for when the session starts next week, and he's taking her to get fitted for uniforms tomorrow, and she seems to have already started making friends with another girl her age they ran into at the dining hall, who also speaks the Predain language? Ma'ar is pretty impressed, honestly.
Aala is wearing one of Ma'ar's old school uniforms that he's outgrown, since she doesn't have her own yet; it's still much too big for her, she's just as small and scrawny for her age as Ma'ar was. There's a bunk bed in their room now and she seems to have proudly claimed the top of it; she waves to Aza, happily, and greets her in hesitant and strongly accented Tantaran. "Hello, how are you?"
Aza takes the chair, and goes over the alphabet with her, and the numerals, and starts spelling some of the words Aala's already learned for her. If Aala will not sit at the desk this will involve rather more picking up and displaying her notebook than she'd imagined but it's not a big deal.
Ma'ar eventually gets up and explains to Aala what chairs are for. She has not, previously, encountered the concept; Ma'ar had at least seen plenty of furniture in use by the time he reached the Tower, but Aala had a much shorter and easier - and correspondingly less educational - journey.
Ma'ar keeps her updated over the remaining days before the session starts, and invites her over once more to show Aala more reading and writing. Aala has uniforms now! She seems to be having a much easier transition to life at the Tower than Ma'ar did; she's nervous and shy, and practically glued to him every time they leave their room for the first several days, but she's nowhere near as jumpy as Ma'ar used to be.
And, it feels like very soon after, the next session is starting! Ma'ar and Azabel are embarking on their third year at the Tower, now; they have more advanced classes, on more durable long-lasting set-spells for warding and shielding, and on scrying, and on the theory behind permanent Gates. Ma'ar is also doing advanced combat magic.
Aala is in the basic Mindspeech curriculum and also has her class on reading and writing and figuring, and she seems very content.
The session gets off to a good start! The scrying teacher in particular is very good. Ma'ar still spends most of his time practicing magic, but sets aside some of it to help Aala with things, and to walk her around the Tower. Aala gets along very well with the hertasi and makes more friends as she learns more Tantaran.
Lionwind nods. Settles himself more comfortably in his chair. "So. This is a patient from out of town - Small Springs, a hundred miles east. Her family brought her here in search of a Mindhealer, claiming she had an episode of madness. She is convinced that it was not madness at all, and rather that - oh, for background, she is a worshipper of Vkandis. She states that He possessed her to perform a miracle."
"Her parents worship a different god - the Twain, They are popular south of here. She converted. I...get the feeling her parents disapprove." He shakes his head. "If I had seen her immediately I might have been able to tell from her mind alone, but possession by a god is also disruptive, not entirely unlike organic-caused madness, and a week had passed already by the time I saw her."
"Very odd! I have only seen it once - it is not exactly a common occurrence, for people to be possessed fully by their gods. And it was a Kaled'a'in shaman, so he was more prepared for it. It is hard to explain... His mind looked - flattened, and widened, as though a great flood had passed through it, and the banks of his river were now much larger than they needed to be, to contain only him. At the time he was very dazed, he was lucid but found it hard to focus on a conversation. It was normal again within a fortnight."
"Healing her best friend, who was giving birth to her first child and the birth was apparently going badly. The trouble is that it is only the two of them who were present - the friend's husband had been sent out to urgently find a Healer, and by the time he succeeded at this and returned, the babe was born and the girl's bleeding had stopped. The patient does not remember any of this, though - which would be expected for a god-possession in a non-shaman, but is unhelpful. The friend supposedly claimed that it seemed miraculous, but - well, sometimes a woman's labour is stalled and then it resolves itself when the baby turns around, or something, and a woman who was in the throes of childbirth at the time also cannot be expected to remember it with perfect clarity."
He shakes his head. "- And then everyone agrees that the patient seemed very mad afterward - she did not know where she was and at moments seemed unsure who she was - but that, too, is not incompatible with a true possession."
"If it was ordinary madness then it is much more likely to recur the next time she is under extreme stress, or has stayed up all night, as she did this time with her friend. In very clear-cut cases I would want to place some preventative measures, but those would be unnecessarily invasive if it were unlikely to ever happen again."
"...You would have to ask a shaman or priest for exactly how it works, I am not sure. I - do think that a god needs some sort of connection to a person, in order to possess them? But, for example, in sufficiently dire circumstances it would be enough that I am of the Kaled'a'in people, who are Hers. And possessions do not always take place at convenient moments for the possessee."
Lionwind seems so nonplussed by that question!
"I...do see why not? But - I am not sure why anyone would - choose to leave the protection of any of the gods–"
He stops himself. Lifts a hand, takes a breath, and then shakes himself a little.
"I am sorry. I know this is - a personal topic - I generally avoid bringing up the subject of the gods with either my patients or my students, for that reason."
Blink. "Oh, no, it does not bother me to talk about it, if you are interested - I just do not want to pressure you into it..."
He shakes his head. "I do not even have any idea what god you or your family worships - because of that same policy that I keep, I suppose." A self-deprecating chuckle.
An apologetic head-shake. "It is hard - perhaps impossible - to explain. This is why I do not generally bring it up, and - well, I ought assure you that whatever you say now, I will certainly not hold it against you as my student. But - hmm. Since it is relevant in this patient case... What about faith in the gods does not make sense to you?"
"...well, apparently you have no particular reason to expect that She is not a volcano. Metaphorically. But even if She issued an annual statement about how She is still not a volcano this year or something it's pretty obvious none of the gods are actually doing a good job at... any... thing."
"...I suppose they could be doing incredible heroics in the background all the time against threats we can't see and it just so happens that the best miracle I've heard of is a dubiously legitimate healing about as good as what a normal Healer can do and which caused a lot of side effects for a bystander. But that's not very impressive."
Lionwind seems to shake himself again, and then sits back.
"...Sorry. I.... Just. I - do believe in my Goddess. And that Her priorities are - worthwhile, and that as one of Her people, I ought respect and serve Her. Also - she is not your Goddess and She has no claim on you, and I respect that. I am not sure what else to say..."
Lionwind looks seriously into her eyes. "I believe it because - hmm - because I believe that She could only have chosen my people at all, as Her servants, if - if She shared our priorities, as a people. And so, well, I might sometimes disagree - not that any disagreements have in fact come up in practice - but, I would have less information than the sum of my people together, right? And thus also less than Her."
"- Do not most farm owners care about their animals? Or pet owners about their pets? ...I suppose I have no personal example to bring up for slaves, but - it would seem unsurprising if most slave owners did not care about their slaves in a similar way..."
Lionwind shakes his head. "And, given the realities of the universe - I do not see why our gods ought consider us mortals any different from - pets, or farm animals, or - ants - we are so small and unintelligent compared to Them -"
"...I think farm owners routinely kill their animals and pet owners drown their kittens," she says. "And I'm especially confused how you can think well of her priorities if that's how you expect her to think of people though I guess it would explain why they don't seem to be good at anything."
:That's sort of what the conversation was about, I wanted to know why he expected the Star-Eyed to have a good plan that he'd approve of if he understood it when he in fact doesn't understand it, and he said because She's his people's goddess, and I said people are not always acting in the best interests of their farm animals, and he said oh yeah humans might as well just be animals to gods who are so big and see so much and I said okay but what about my actual question and he said it came down to faith and couldn't explain any farther than that:
:Also, it just - gah! It seems really important to understand! If the gods are so big and powerful and They - invest in a particular group of people and do things for them - then shouldn't that be, I don't know, politically relevant? Why doesn't anyone talk about that! ...All right, I didn't even think of it until now and I feel stupid, but. Still:
Their patient is a very young woman - older than Aza, of course, but maybe seventeen or eighteen. She seems anxious and fidgety, and like she has a hard time focusing on the conversation with them.
Her mind, when Lionwind gets her permission for Aza and him both to look, definitely looks like something happened to it; a wide section of gears appears shoved out of alignment, and like it's only gradually shifting its way back to normal.
Huh! Aza can bounce this to Lionwind. She doesn't actually see any large objects in here that could have done that on their own, though mind-clockwork does not consistently obey the laws of cause and effect in the way that physical clockwork would, so that isn't a guarantee that Vkandis did it, but she tentatively indicates to Lionwind that she leans toward the hypothesis based on her admittedly limited experience looking at ordinary psychosis.
It's really very useful having Aza's Sight to compare against his! Lionwind bounces back his impression of a river, which also looks as though some force carved one bank out to the side, adding a curve where there oughtn't be one.
:I am inclined to agree with you: he sends to her. :It is not conclusive at all, but - well, it is a good prognosis even if this was ordinary psychosis, her mind is not too disorganized and it looks as though it should return to normal in time:
Lionwind's face stays perfectly professional, but his mindvoice is amused. :I like that idea for a framing of it! ...As long as she does not take offence at us making her god sound like, oh, a teenage boy who cannot be bothered to clean his room:
And he turns to the young woman and, very kindly and respectfully, describes what they're noticing, and admits that, as a Mindhealer, he isn't a priest or shaman and cannot diagnose 'miracles' as a sure thing, but he leans toward that. And in any case, she seems to be getting better, which is very good, and is what Vkandis would want for her if this was in fact his miracle. And they can help her get all the way better sooner, if she's willing to let Azabel nudge her mind back toward its mundane ordinary-life shape?
Aza recites her typical spiel about how she will go slow, it may look like the room is going blurry or melty and she can close her eyes if that bothers her, Aza can stop any time if she's uncomfortable, etcetera, and then she cleans up after the god who cannot be bothered to clean his stolen brain.
And Lionwind reassures her a bit more and gives her some advice for how to defuse the tension with her family; which god she worships is none of their business, he assures her, but it is something that brings up a lot of feelings. He says that he knows they love her deeply and this is part of why they're being so obnoxious about it, because they're scared for her wellbeing. He suggests she be very obviously well at them, and boring and neutral on the topic of gods until they've calmed down about it.
The patient listens through this, paying better attention now that her gears are less out of whack, and then thanks both of them and leaves.
Lionwind shuts the door behind her. "Good work," he says to Azabel. "What did you think?"
Aza is not sure why anyone cares much which incomprehensible dubiously-competent brainthief somebody likes to have their supplicatory chats with but she doesn't say that. "You'd talked to her parents, right - I wouldn't have been particularly promissory about their motives since some people's parents have bad motives but you met them."
"I did talk to them. I think they are average parents - they may not always love her effectively, or know how to put her first when their own feelings come into it, but they do care about her, and I think my advice to her will work well with them. If I had not met them, I would have caveated everything I suggested to her much more."
"- Hmm. How much do you feel you understand the human drive toward religion and worship more broadly? People vary on how much they seek this, and - I would guess you are on the lower end, given that you are not religious."
He shakes his head. "Which makes me suspect I did a bad job of explaining my own feelings on the matter to you, the other day. I am sorry - I suppose I am less practiced when it comes to talking about myself in this context, since that is usually off topic."
"Mmm." Lionwind doesn't seem to feel embarrassed or self-conscious about this, just a bit apologetic. "Well, for many people I think it is - not entirely dissimilar to the drive to know one's family history and feel a part of that, or even to feel patriotism for one's country. There is a human desire to feel a part of something bigger than oneself - something that has more meaning, a greater story, than just one's mundane day-to-day life. Does that make sense to you?"
He's definitely kind of defensive and frustrated, and - maybe a little offended, moreso than he is almost ever in their one-on-one conversations; he's doing a lot of motions with his gears to try to defuse that and approach the conversation calmly and helpfully. She's seen him do that before with patients who were poking sore points for him, sometimes, but never just with her.
"Well, I think part of it is the usual teenage desire to - find oneself a place in the world, to establish independence from one's parents. And I think that she feels a great deal of - need-for-meaning, something in that sphere, and the temple to Vkandis that she joined has many more ceremonial trappings of religion. Festivals, special dawn prayers, candles and incense, songs - all things that she gets a feeling of belonging and meaning from, I think."
Lionwind frowns again, looks thoughtful. "I suppose part of what it cashes out to is - solidarity with the others in the temple order, and feeling that, because she is one of them, a greater Power loves and cares about her and her life. But - hmm. I think that it is within the normal range of how human minds and emotions work, to not need 'meaning' to mean something concrete and measurable? Clearly you are not set up like this - I imagine your friend Ma'ar is not either - but many people are."
"Yeah me and Ma'ar talked about this actually - I didn't mention the patient - and he's like me about it pretty much. He was wondering if it would be useful to get a god to look after the clans in the Plains in Predain but it's not actually clear that it would be useful. Is it like... you could say some nonsense syllables not to mean anything in particular, and then keep saying those same ones, and it's not that they ever start meaning anything but you can still be saying the same ones or different ones and all these people have decided to say the same ones and being in the Same Nonsense Club - I don't know how to not be rude about this -"
"- No, no, I do appreciate your curiosity! It goes along with the rest of you, that you will be curious about even those areas where people do not have clear explanations in words to offer you. ...Honestly I think that many, many cultural and ethnic traditions are not entirely dissimilar from one group of people choosing some nonsense syllables to chant together, and different people choosing different ones, and - both getting a sense of shared heritage and togetherness from it. I...do think it is an important thing to understand, that for many people this would feel real and meaningful and emotionally important to them?"
"- Yes, good, that is part of what I am trying to convey - that even if a person's emotional needs are not ones you resonate with, it is still their mind and up to them what to do with it. ...But, anyway, I do think that worshipping the gods is less, hmm - epiphenomenal, than choosing one set of nonsense words over another. For myself, I - suppose that on an emotional level it is more than half just about my feeling of belonging with my people, but if you were to talk to a shaman, I think they would have more to say about what the Goddess does for our people. I cannot say I have ever sat down to interrogate them in detail about such things."
"Actually, I suspect they are much more used to difficult questions on this topic than I am! It is their job to answer all the questions from young people who have strong opinions, and also from anybody who is considering converting, or deconverting. Whereas...I will confess I am unused to this."
:I guess that'd be important for you to understand as a Mindhealer. And...maybe just in general, it seems like religion might be relevant for politics even if the gods themselves aren't really. - Want to come over at some point? I found some books in the library and did research about what the gods have supposedly done:
:There are some really famous miraculous healings - some of them are actually pretty well documented, too, Healers who weren't even worshippers of the same god confirmed it. Lots of cases of praying about the weather and claims that it helped, probably some of those were real but it's harder to tell... Supposedly Vkandis set a battlefield on fire once to help His people's side win a battle, which...honestly seems pretty horrible:
:I don't know if any human mages could set an entire battlefield on fire! Though I guess maybe they teamwork it: Shrug. :What else... The Twain are claimed to have sent an earthquake once to express displeasure at two different temple sects dedicated to Them having this stupid religious war over it:
There's a disagreement on whether the Twain are two sets of twin god-goddess pairs or a single pair where the god and goddess have different facets of Themselves. There's also a dispute over whether the true inheritance of the priesthood is the one passed down generationally since the main order was founded, or whether the 'divine revelation' that led to a young priestess starting the breakaway sect is what truly reflected the will of the Twain.
...It doesn't seem like these disagreements were actually settled in the aftermath of the war, the earthquake, or the visions; the two sects just agreed to stop fighting and coexist (mostly) peacefully.
The Star-Eyed seems less into earthquakes and setting things on fire. She has spirit avatars that can travel around in the spirit world, and human priests and shamans can project their minds there and talk to them for advice, and sometimes convey messages or requests. The avatars apparently tend to be cryptic. There are claims of getting warning about natural disasters and such before they happened, but of course, human long-range Foresight can do this too.
The Kaled'a'in temple to the Star-Eyed Goddess isn't much to look at on the outside; a simple, low stone building, with a garden out front.
A youngster meets them and, when told they're here to see Summerhawk, ushers them in.
Summerhawk is waiting in a simple stone room, its furnishings very basic; a rug, which she's kneeling on, and a low wooden table, which has a book on it.
"Hello?" she says.
"Hmm. That is quite an interesting question - and I must first caveat that I do not know Her mind and so cannot say for sure. But - my understanding, here, is that She - and all of the gods - have only a limited presence in the material plane, unless They have mortals to work through. And They are very, very big; we are as ants compared to them, or even lesser; and, while this means They can see and fight threats to the safety of the world that we cannot, just as an ant could not see a tidal wave coming, it also means that many important things happen at a scale too small for Their senses. And so there is a collaboration; we can help Her, by using our prayers and requests to tell Her what is needed on our tiny local scale, and She can use us as a window into this plane."
"Well, She is not limited on power as a human would be, right? We have cases in our histories of miraculous healings when there were many human Healers there and there was nothing more they could do. And other cases of very critical moments where a Gifted Healer was not available. And for weather magic in particular, She has the advantage of seeing the bigger patterns, right? And so we can be sure that She is aware of whether She is taking away someone else's badly needed rain, and that if so She has weighed it up and judged it worthwhile."
"- Well, She does not protect us from the vagaries of old age. But - as a people, as a culture, we have been around for a long time. And that is at least in part thanks to Her. Our histories tell of how She warned us to leave our first homeland in the south, because drought and war were coming. And She directed us here, decades before Urtho's Tower was built - but She saw it coming, and that it would strengthen and benefit our people in our future..."
"Yes. Well, to the extent that 'our culture' is the kind of concept that She can reason in - my teaching has been that She sees the world from a very different angle from us, and therefore I should not assume any of our words for things can directly translate. But, yes, that is part of what it means to be Her people."
"Hmm." And Summerhawk gives this a long moment of careful, thoughtful consideration.
"I - suppose that it makes our future more predictable, and the same for Her." She tilts her head a little to one side. "Sometimes youngsters born to the Kaled'a'in people choose to leave the faith. If they value their freedom, as individuals, more than that safe future. It is, of course, their prerogative. But - for myself, I like the security of knowing that I have a people and a Goddess to fall back on."
"Well, it is of course not a signed contract as humans do it, that is not how the gods work! But our histories speak of the first shaman to speak with Her - what is really the beginning of the Kaled'a'in as a people - and, it is as I said before. She will give our prayers priority, and protect our people against threats we could not see coming, and warn our shamans of danger, and in other ways promote our wellbeing. And in exchange, we will serve Her."
"For those of our people drawn to the calling of a priest, to become shamans to Her - not that we exactly need conscript people, there are always enough youngsters interested, and -" a crooked smile, "- and some of us older folk as well. To pray to Her first and foremost. To listen to Her advice and consult Her avatars before our people make major decisions such as moving a clan to new lands. And - apart from that, She will ask for what She requires of us."
"You must keep in mind that I know only of the most famous and well-remembered historical cases, but - hmm. For us to move at particular times, to particular places - occasionally, for certain decisions to be made rather than others, in politics or war, or for certain policies..."
:I'll ask the Healers if they know any or know who I should ask:
A pause.
:I...sort of get it, maybe? Why...someone might want to belong to a god, even if it meant they were like a pet. If you were scared, and - there was a way you thought you could be safe...:
An uncomfortable shrug. :I'm - not sure it makes less sense to me than - how people trust their parents to look after them:
:...I guess that does make it different, that - in the usual order of things, children grow up into - the same sort of thing as their parents. And farm animals and humans who worship gods...don't grow up to be like those...: Shrug. :I don't know. For all we know maybe the gods would be delighted if humans grew up and could work with them as allies instead of little ones:
"Our histories as a people! I am afraid that for the most part they are very dry and repetitive, but - all the questions that you were asking, the most true answers known by mortals are to be found here."
And she sets the books down on the low table and starts riffling through them.
Summerhawk seems to know the texts well and is mostly flipping through too fast for her to catch anything.
"...Ah, here we are - you wanted political advice or policy decisions, right? This is one historical case - a shaman of our people received a vision from Her, of - various cryptic but clearly bad events happening in conjunction with a particular candidate for the clan leadership. The clan chose a different candidate and the next decades went well instead."
"It seems like that would really suck, having everybody associate you with visions like that just because you wouldn't have made a good leader! Would people not take her seriously if she used... words? She has avatars in the spirit world, right, even if she can't just send a letter."
Summerhawk ducks her head and goes back to flipping through the books.
There are a few more historical cases of Goddess-granted advice that fit Azabel's question. Once an avatar of the Goddess told the shaman that they ought to plant beans instead of barley, and then later a blight ruined all the barley crops. Once the Goddess sent a vision of floods and so they were forewarned to evacuate the women and children and put up flood-blocks. Another time there was a long argument over whether to break off a new clan or not, and the Goddess's avatar gave advice that they ought to, and then they did and this went well.
"We cannot speak with the avatars arbitrarily; we can call to them, and see if they answer. We can go to the spirit world anytime, though it is somewhat tiring. It is very beautiful!"
She spends a bit describing it. It's dark and sort of starry-looking, except for sparkly mist that lore says consists of dead spirits, though humans don't know how to speak to them directly. There are also - more dangerous entities, there, which can harm a mind projected to the space. Because of this, the Goddess created the Moonpaths for their people; these are roads made of light, and mortal shamans are safe as long as they keep to those.
Ma'ar keeps walking, absently kicking at a pebble on the path.
"I think you're doing something specific, even if it's not on purpose? Because, I don't know, you - grew up learning a certain way to be, that works well here. And I...didn't...and I don't think I can just 'be a clever curious student' like you, and I'm bad at pretending and - don't really understand what I'd have to pretend anyway, just, I think there's something..."
"I think I'm - more risk averse than you are?" Ma'ar says finally. "I don't think what you're doing is wrong, for you, just - I have less to work with, right. I don't have parents, and I don't have a really rare Gift like Mindhealing where one of my teachers is going to care especially hard what happens to me. And...it's not like I'm worried about getting kicked out of the school, at this point. But - if I want to be able to fix Predain someday, starting from this, then - I need to do better than 'not getting kicked out of school'."
"Predain doesn't have nearly enough mages. Definitely not enough trained mages, who could be teachers - I can't teach literally everyone myself. So I've been thinking that I need to be on good enough terms with people here that I could talk them into moving, or at least coming over to visit and teach for a bit." Shrug. "And - there's probably all sorts of things like that which I haven't even thought of, but where it'd matter whether people like me here."
Ma'ar thinks that he takes all sorts of social risks, actually, even if they don't seem like that to her. And possibly drawing negative attention from literal gods wasn't something he felt like risking - coming along at all was nervewracking enough.
(He feels maybe a little bad now that if the shaman does go tell a spirit avatar about this and the Goddess is mad, it'll be mostly with Azabel...)
He does not bother to answer.
"You should practice," she says, after a minute's attention to what would adequately compensate for being mean. "You should... come with me next time I visit my dad and meet a bunch of people who are not important to your plans and who you'll never see again, and - try stuff, expand your comfort zone."
"A bit? Some of it's - hard to test or even have guesses about, like whether someone being a certain amount of friendly means they'll say yes if I ask for help later. I - usually have hypotheses when I'm thinking about whether to say something, though, of how people will react." He makes a face. "It'd be so much easier to tell how they were reacting if I read their minds too, but I know I shouldn't."
Then they can head up to his room.
Aala isn't there, and has left a note on Ma'ar's bed saying that she's going out to do things with her friends tonight and won't be back until late.
Ma'ar reads the note out loud to Azabel, and smiles. "Look at her! She's popular. I'm so proud of her."
It's a book describing all the various rites and rituals for seasonal festivals, marriages, births, deaths, coming-of-age ceremonies, etc etc, as well as for other rarer and higher-stakes occasions. For most of the ordinary day-to-day ones, invoking the Goddess's presence or blessing or whatnot is purely a formality; for some rites, though, like the ones associated with trials for serious crimes - for which the punishment, if convicted, would be formal banishment from the Kaled'a'in people - the shaman is required to actually summon and speak with a spirit avatar.
They...give advice, it sounds like? Well, sometimes; in many cases they'll just say that the Goddess trusts Her people to carry out Her will. And when they do give advice it's often cryptic, but it's always taken very seriously. There are a couple of historical cases given. For example, once a man was pardoned after raping his wife's sister while very drunk (he claimed afterward that they looked very alike and he was confused), partly on the spirit avatar saying that 'the fruits of forgiveness will feed our grandchildren'; a couple of years later, the pardoned man was the only able-bodied man in his village not taken ill by a plague, and his work with their livestock and crops was the only thing that saved the rest of the people from starvation.
It does not! At least not for this particular case study.
The book does have a few footnotes with advice for shamans in training, though, and this includes some mentions of the Goddess's limitations as understood by their people's lore. She is very powerful, obviously, compared to any human, even a Gifted human - but not infinitely so, She still has limited resources. It may sometimes feel inexplicable and dispiriting, the author of the book writes, for a young shaman faced with the Goddess's failure to help in some situation that seems very important. But they need to trust that She is the one who sees the world world at a glance, and that She is allocating her strength as well as She possibly can.
"The Star-Eyed is basically their eccentric neighbor who helps them out sometimes. She says things that don't make much sense that they read into with an admittedly decent track record - I'm not sure exactly how you get that result, it probably isn't 'speaking a human language like a normal person' but if She were just being bad at speaking a human language like a normal person I bet they'd misunderstand her more... those incidents might not make it into the book. Though I didn't notice obvious gaps in the jurisprudence timeline so maybe She has a way of making herself understood anyway. - could be Foresight, I guess, you could try Foresight on - combinations of sounds? Or meanings, if they're usually Mindspeaking, it hasn't specified yet. And see which combinations of sounds or meanings get the right decisions made, which would let you skip past accidentally claiming the sky was plaid but you'd stop looking for rephrases around when you had something cryptic and sufficiently relevant that people derived what you wanted them to."
Ma'ar nods along; he giggles slightly at 'claiming the sky was plaid'.
"I think we need to learn more about Foresight, but that does sound like - about the right level of weird and alien, or something? For how different you'd expect a god to be from people."
He glances down at his own book. "This one is about the Kaled'a'in history as a people. I - skipped through a lot of it, it's kind of repetitive, it's mostly genealogies of when various clans split off or when groups of them moved to a new part of the world. The footnotes are interesting, though. Since they talk about the Goddess sending visions to shamans, or having a spirit avatar give them advice. It's also pretty cryptic but I think if I'd been them I could've guessed if it were a yes or a no, for a given move? And it generally hasn't turned out badly for them. Although I don't know if that's really Her work, or - if it could've been better in some other version where they just made their own decisions about it..."
"Yeah. And - I think she's more talkative than most gods? I'm not religious but Ranara tries on religions occasionally and I think the Star-Eyed is the one with the most spirit-avatar-type behavior. If this is as talkative as they get it's hard to - negotiate, if all you can do is follow the advice or not follow it and following it works out fine..."
"Well, if my guess about how She talks is right that would make it really hard! Foresight can tell you to say cryptic things and not to say the sky is plaid but I don't see how it would help you understand at all. From that perspective it's sort of impressive she's aware people prefer having enough to eat and not being plague-ridden."
Grimace. "That makes it sound like it'd be so frustrating to - be a god who did care and want to help people, but you wouldn't even be able to figure out what they needed, you don't speak the same– not even language, it'd be all different concepts too... Not that we can exactly tell if She does want to help, or not."
"Yeah. I mean, most of the things She does seem like they could be helpful, She isn't - acting randomly with respect to helpfulness - but it makes it really tricky to figure out if She's like, doing it because She likes and respects and appreciates people, or if it's incidental to something, or if they're farm animals to Her."
"Honestly the way Lionwind was talking about it was at times SO weird I made use of my standing permission to look at his gears. - I didn't see anything very out of the ordinary though, I guess it's just how he thinks about it. I think maybe they don't care? Which would be one thing if they were going - okay, there's all kinds of reasons the Star-Eyed could be doing us favors, but they're still favors, it'll tend to go well if we take them, we may as well do that like we may as well put out rain barrels even though the rain is not certified benevolent. But it seems different if they're having all these feelings about her as a person - if she's even a person, which I'm getting less confident of! - based on those favors while having no particular reason to think the regard is mutual."
"These ones seem - dumb but not weird? Like, it seems to me like they're treating the Star-Eyed as would be appropriate for... one's weird great grandmother who never really learned the language you grew up speaking but knows a bunch of stuff and shows you when you manage to make it clear what you're asking for and smiles at you when you go by and who is also, uh, the mayor. It's not weird to have that set of feelings available as a thing your mind can do. It's just weird to -
- people can assume certain things about each other because we're all sort of similar, right? I can tell species apart by the gears but even gryphons and hertasi aren't that far off from us. And hertasi specifically don't have a thing most people do where they're more comfortable with familiar kinds-of-people, like their own species or ethnicity or language group or nationality. Humans usually do have that, and it's not a particularly admirable character trait but it makes sense because the more someone is like you in the broad strokes the more you know about the space they'll be drawing their motives and context and norms from. And now that I put these facts next to each other I'm surprised both that hertasi aren't more religious and that humans are not racist against gods, who have absolutely no credibility about drawing their motives and context and norms from a sane place!"
"...Huh. - Sorry, now I'm just distracted wondering about hertasi religion. Would we know if they were very religious - I feel like they don't tell us anything about their personal lives. Although maybe all their religion-energy just goes to being helpful, they do so much stuff, I don't know when they'd have free time to worship gods."
"Mmm. ...Anyway, I wonder if people - kind of want to have something powerful to have their 'weird but friendly great-grandmother' feelings at? Because it's reassuring, or something, to feel like you've got someone like that...?" Shrug. "I dunno, just, in Predain when I was still reading people's minds a lot, it - seemed like lots of people had some beliefs that were - about feeling reassured, more than about being true..."
"It seems like it! But I guess we also know the most about Her. Maybe we should try going to other temples too." He takes a deep breath. "...It's kind of scary. Feels like - priests are people who have a powerful ally I don't understand, and - so it makes it hard to figure out what's safe, because even if I can tell what they think of things I say, I can't tell what the god would think." Shrug. "Maybe it's fine because we're ants or farm animals to Them and they don't actually care what I think, but..."
"I guess it'd be more efficient to split them up? Also it'd mean we don't need to coordinate who's doing the asking. I might want you to be in Mindspeech range the first time I go alone, in case I - get stuck and scared - but my range is pretty far at this point so that should be fine."
Well, it seems like in some situations (historical cases given: a plague, a severe multi-year drought across an entire region, a barley-blight that hit crops heavily across many towns), the Star-Eyed can't intervene to help just with Her own resources, and the advice given by the avatars to the shamans is to seek alliance with other faiths. Or, sometimes, the priests of other temples are the ones to reach out to theirs.
In terms of the how: there are a lot of suggestions given by the book's author for scripts to use, though they seem to be somewhat culturally-specific and the books is three hundred years old and by an author who lived well south of Tantara's borders, before the time when most of the Kaled'a'in tribes chose to move to Tantara.
The advice given for when to consult a spirit avatar is maybe more generalizable. The priests of other temples might be venal and want to extract political concessions from the Kaled'a'in people before they agree to pray to their god as well! If that happens you should talk to a spirit avatar about it! And here is a long list of additional scenarios that could happen and where the Goddess is willing and in fact would want to directly provide input through Her intermediaries!
The book does not make this totally clear!
It mostly sounds like the shamans would talk to spirit avatars for advice in a lot of situations, including less-dire ones where the Goddess either didn't think it was worth personally intervening at all, or did but could fix it Herself with a miracle or two. The list here is curated from past times when neither of these was enough.
Going by Ma'ar's notes, the Kaled'a'in have had fewer and less stupid internal disputes over their history than the war mentioned with the two factions worshipping the Twain; their doctrine seems to be broader, more allowing of variations in local worship, and the spirit avatars usually resolve succession disagreements. The disputes that managed to happen anyway were mostly between rather than within clans, sometimes over territory and only incidentally religious in nature; once a family feud managed to last for an entire generation before the shamans got fed up with it enough to get spirit avatar advice on it. On a couple of occasions, people have impersonated shamans and faked advice from the spirit avatars, and only been found out after months or years of this.
"I don't know! That is pretty weird."
Ma'ar's notes about the spirit world are less useful, apparently the book was very vague. There are legends about various dangerous monsters there; it's hard to tell, Ma'ar adds in the margin, whether they're anything more than just legendary. There is a lot of advice which is hard to interpret in the absence of ever having been there.
"Right, I think blind humans have to end up learning - a lot of ways to fake things you'd normally do with seeing, and also they can listen to stories where people describe seeing things, and... I don't know, I think the metaphor isn't right, because - human minds are made to have a seeing part, right, Azabel? And blind people still have that, it's just their eyes that don't work. But...humans must not even have the mind-part that gods do, for Foresight..."
He suddenly looks very curious. "I wonder what a god would look like to Mindhealing-Sight."
"I can't quite figure out why gods want things. Or I suppose you could say I can't quite figure out what gods want, because - it seems pretty likely that a lot of the stuff we see them working towards is instrumental? Like if you work to make money it's not because you want money because it's shiny, it's because you can spend it. I think it's more likely that gods want people-allies to spend them than because humans are cute or whatever, and I have no idea what on."
:It would probably be dangerous. I'd want to wait and see if any of the other temples also go there and are willing to show us. But if they're not, well, it still seems important to understand? Especially if that's where all the spirits of dead people are, and they...still exist...:
:...yeah: It seems very hard to calculate the value of taking an unknown risk (unescorted spirit jaunts) in pursuit of an unknown amount of information (regarding dead people in their millions) in order to pursue an unknown feasibility of goal (having them not be dead, somehow) but it's at least worth not dismissing out of hand.
:And I read through the whole book Summerhawk lent us, so we know something about what to look out for. I bet there's more in Urtho's library, too, now that I know what keywords to dig around for. We'd want to be smart about it, obviously - take our time preparing, maybe make special protective artifacts for it if we can figure out what we need to be protected against...:
Ma'ar is not immediately apparent. Neither are books about the spirit world; there doesn't seem to be a category for it, so she needs to guess at which related categories to check, and the first book she finds, under 'Theoretical Magic: Extraplanar', is...very theoretical and clearly written by someone who had not, personally, ever visited the spirit world.
:Ooh, I should've looked under extraplanar theory, that's smart. Even if it's not useful by itself, maybe we can combine different books to get a picture:
Ma'ar joins her, slinging down his bookbag and reaching into it. :I found this book in the practical section on extraplanar work. It's mostly about the elemental planes, and summonings, but it has actual instructions on projecting your mind to other planes in general. And on safety. It sounds like the spirit world is actually safer than, say, the elemental plane of Fire, so probably the precautions they suggest would be enough?:
The book is, as mentioned, mostly about the elemental planes. The Elemental Plane of Fire and the Abyssal Plane both sound incredibly dangerous, though! In fact it's not recommended for anyone to try exploring the Abyssal Plane at all unless they're an Adept with decades of experience projecting their mind to the other planes, and have a guide who's been to the Abyssal Plane before.
In general, the plane of Earth is safest, followed by Air and then Water. (None of them would support human life if you were to literally transport your body there; their physical laws are believed to be different from in the material plane, and certainly magic behaves differently.) There are instructions given for mind-shielding techniques.
The 'fire' in the Elemental Plane of Fire isn't exactly the same thing that ordinary fire is, but in any case that's not the dangerous part in itself. The main risks are, one, the ambient density of magical energy is several hundred times higher there, and a mage projecting there is, by default, opening a channel between that and themselves – if they're not careful, the energy will follow the gradient 'downhill', just like when tapping a node, except intensely enough to seriously damage mage-channels.
The other risk is the local life. The more intelligent Fire elementals can perceive the mage-energy signature of human visitors, and will tend to go investigate. And, being native to such a magic-dense place, they're absurdly powerful and can accidentally cause serious magical injuries just by trying to communicate. (And sometimes it's worse, and they're hostile...)
The demons native to the Abyssal Plane are the main danger there. And, unsurprisingly, they're a lot more dangerous in their home environment than when they're summoned to the material plane in construct-bodies.
It's mentioned a few times – it's in the list of planes that can be visited by mind-projection, and in the section on existing and historical practices around extraplanar projection, where it's specified that this is a skill priests and shamans of some religions pick up. It's rated as somewhat less dangerous than the Elemental Plane of Water, but more dangerous than Air and Earth.
"Oh! I forgot to say - I asked the librarian, and there's a class on extraplanar projection! It's an advanced one but I might be able to get permission to take it next session anyway. If I'm properly trained on the elemental planes then it feels more like I can judge how dangerous the spirit world actually is."
Nod. "Probably! Maybe you can take the summoning class and I'll take the projection class and then we can teach each other? Anyway, this is the most on-topic book I found - there's another one about historical magical accidents that mentions a few mages who got killed doing projection to the Abyssal Plane or the plane of Fire. No one's listed who died going to the spirit world, but it could just be that usually that's done by priests or shamans and they get taught properly - oh, and probably aren't trying to do it for combat, the thing that got these mages killed was deliberately trying to track down hostile natives, in order to try to put bindings on them and use them as weapons."
"Well, if you run into one that's more powerful than you were expecting, or if the extraplanar beings catch onto what you're doing and start teaming up against you - some are smart enough to do that - then they can get past even very good mage-shields. The book did say that no one's ever died projecting to the plane of Fire if they had proper training for it and weren't looking for trouble on purpose."
Ma'ar digs out some notes. "There's a temple to Vkandis that's kind of far, but I can go on the day I don't have any classes. And then there's a temple of the Twain which is a lot closer, and a small one for - Bestet the Battle-Goddess? And also the Nameless God of Eternal Flame, but that one's way at the edge of the city."
"How they communicate with the gods, if they do - how often priests get visions from Them, or other communications. How much history they have recorded, whether it goes back far enough to cover how the temple was founded and why people started worshipping that god to begin with. What miracles they have on record. Whether they work with other temples that worship different gods, and how that works. I've got a list that has more but it's back in my room."
Skan takes her down.
The copper-roofed building does prove to be the temple to the Eternal Flame. It has a decorative rock garden out front, and a stone bowl sitting on a pedestal, in which a little fire, cleverly fed with lamp oil through some pipe below, is burning. An acolyte in off-white robes is guarding it, and waves to them.
The inside of the temple appears to be all one room; it's spacious and quiet and surprisingly well lit, by discreet windows just below the eaves on all four sides of the building. A couple of chandeliers hang down from the rafters, candles presumably lit at great inconvenience by people on stepladders (unless this temple has access to mages who can do it from a distance.)
A few people are sitting on a rug to one side of the room; one of them rises. "Hello?"
The other robed priest brings them tea.
Alat sits down on a cushion and gestures for Azabel to do the same. "So. I am still not sure where to start, but - our lore says that the God of the Eternal Flame is among the oldest of the gods. And also among the most forgiving. They welcome everyone, great and small, saints and sinners. To Them, there is no such thing as evil - there are only times when mortal beings, small and limited as we are, cannot perceive the truth, and so instead we squabble pointlessly."
"- Honestly I am not sure that anybody knows! It is not as though any mortal has been able to observe it." A wry chuckle. "I read a theory once that powerful extraplanar beings who are not quite at the level of gods can grow to become gods. And legend says that our Nameless God of the Eternal Flame arose from the chaos of the Void itself, so that it would have a voice. But it is a very old legend, passed down through many generations, and I cannot say if it is literally true or more figurative."
"That all living things are precious - each moment of our existence is snatched from the void, something where there could have been nothing. That to be alive, and to have a mind, is to be capable of growth and change - and of finding forgiveness, and redemption. That is the core of our temple's teachings."
"Sometimes people do bad things, that harm other beings. Sometimes they are...shaped in a way such that they do this over and over and over. But - this does not make them any less the kind of being that the Eternal Flame sees as precious. They are still moments of existence snatched from nothingness, and - because they are living, and changing, there is always a possible path ahead where they stop harming others. And it is worth helping them find that, no matter what evils they have committed."
"Those are two different questions, I think. The mission was conveyed to our order centuries ago, by a series of visions to our founders." The priest makes a face. "...Unfortunately, gods - are not really a shape that can speak safely with mortals, and repeated visions of that kind tend to drive people mad. So it is a rare thing, nowadays. But! Now that we know our sacred mission, we can mostly direct it ourselves, which we are better placed to do, as mortals among other mortals. And we pray to the Eternal Flame when our temples are in particular need of good luck, for an important venture, and if that venture is according to the will of the Eternal Flame, then good luck is granted."
"Our core mission is to see the value in all sentient beings - and even in all nonsentient but still-living beings - and, in particular, to try as hard as we can to provide all such with the support needed to find growth, and forgiveness for the harms caused when they had not yet grown. ...We run free kitchens for the impoverished, because people are better able to grow and improve themselves when they are not starving, and we also run free schools and offer an education to anyone who needs it."
"...Hmm. I think that 'altruistic' is an odd framing to apply to gods, here. They are not beings like us, who have separate sorts of motivation for selfish needs and for altruistic endeavours. I...think that what the Eternal Flame wants, insofar as the word 'want' as we conceive of it can even be applied to Them, is - a world vibrant with livings things, taking actions and working together and simply...being alive, with all that entails."
"...Again, I think this is something that is difficult for any mortal to judge. We do have reason to believe that the gods communicate with one another; one of our ancient texts tells the tale of how the Eternal Flame sought out the Star-Eyed and implored Her to convince Her people to end a conflict. I...am less sure if gods sharing Their values with one another would particularly resemble what we would call missionary work."
"Hmm, I am trying to think of good recent examples. Mostly it is for major endeavours - purchasing land to build a new temple, for example, or starting a new school, or sending a missionary order to a new country. ...Every so often in our history, it is recorded that the priests would start praying for much more minor and routine things, like a good harvest, and once in a while the Eternal Flame will send a vision to remind us that Their power cannot stretch to cover everything, and must be husbanded for when it is most needed."
"Usually it comes in the form of visions. Which are cryptic, but - not actually hard to decipher, given all of the context that we have. Occasionally in our history, the reminder has come in the form of egregious bad luck on a particular venture that the Eternal Flame wished to remind us was unimportant."
"I think the idea is that, well, the entire point of prayer is to provide Them with information about our needs and circumstances as mortals, which is more difficult and costly for Them to seek out from a god's angle. And so, yes, superfluous prayers would cost Them something, if it forces Them to put resources into judging whether the prayer is in fact worth responding to."
"Oh, right, that is worth some clarification! There are many kinds of ordinary prayer that do not unduly attract Their attention; our worshippers, and even priests, are encouraged to pray to Them for comfort and guidance, though those prayers are rarely answered. If a prayer is very important, there is a special ritual to perform first; that part, I am afraid is a closely kept secret, only taught to our priests after their apprenticeship is over."
"Well, yes, in part because of that - but there is a reason why the Eternal Flame did not advise us to start those missions, even though of course They would ideally want all sentient beings in the world to receive our teachings. They are not all-powerful, and especially in territories where one other god in particular has strong influence, there are god-to-god negotiations involved."
"I am not sure we understand what differs between people here! At a guess, some of it might be - curiosity, or openmindedness, something in that direction. ...And, of course, a predisposition toward being calm and unflappable helps, when one is receiving visions that are often very baffling and disturbing."
"- I knew a man once who claimed to have spoken to an Abyssal demon. Not the usual kind, but a very smart one. The sort of entity that is several steps further than us mortals toward being a god. He said it was...uncanny. Recognizing another being's intelligence and purpose, but - with nothing human in it at all, or humanlike at all, far more alien than gryphons are." The priest shakes his head. "When I told my teacher about it, he said that receiving visions from Them was like that, in a way."
One of them is, basically, just a ledger of all the times that the priests prayed to the Eternal Flame (via the special attention-getting method) for good luck, and whether they received any visions, and then the result of the venture. It does look, at a glance, like in the cases where they prayed and didn't receive any warning vision that the prayer couldn't be fulfilled, their ventures went well pretty much every time. Without more context, it's hard to tell how likely this would be just as a result of chance plus organizational competence.
Another of the books is a record of all the visions received by priests in this region over the last three centuries, and the interpretations, both at the time and in hindsight. The descriptions of visions do sound very cryptic and confusing, and it's noted that the warnings weren't always interpreted right; in one notable case, a priest received a vision that after the fact was probably about floods that spring, but he didn't figure that out until afterward.
The other two books lent to her are about the temple's actual mission, of helping people (of whatever species) to grow and redeem themselves from past misdeeds. One of them is clearly written for children; the other seems to be a reference book for priests.
Based on several offhand references, it sounds like there are a substantial number of hertasi who participate in the temple's mission and worship the Eternal Flame.
It's a small, plain wooden building surrounded by a fenced lawn. There are some children outside - all girls, between the ages of about seven and twelve, in exercise attire and practicing some sort of martial art. Currently they're paired off for sparring while an instructor, a grey-haired but still incredibly fit-looking woman, watches.
The inside of the building is all one room, with a half-loft. The decor is very plain.
A short-haired woman in boiled-leather armour over a homespun tunic and trews is sitting on a crate, next to an open chest of weapons, polishing one of the practice blades. She lifts her head, nods tersely to Azabel. "Hey."
"Was taking my little sisters to the market, we were ambushed by some bandits. I'd - worshipped Her before, but casual-like, you know? But I started trying to hold them off and - I prayed, and She took over my body, and..." Her expression is almost blissful for a moment. "And then all of a sudden, they were all unconscious on the ground. Not dead, none of them, which was a real relief taking the matter to the city guard."
"Let me think a minute." The woman frowns intently. "Glimpses of my sister's faces. I remember Her moving my body - I felt so strong, when She was working through me." A sigh. "Wish I remembered more of the actual fighting moves. I'd barely had any training, back then. Twenty years and I'm still not as good as I was in that one fight."
"Well, there's a lot of cultural baggage, right? In terms of how little girls and little boys are expected to be, and what they're expected to want to grow up to be... And we find it's easier for the little girls here to - see themselves as tough and strong and self-sufficient, if they've got more of a break from those sorts of pressures."
"Huh. Let me think a moment." Another intent frown. "Reckon She doesn't like monarchs who abuse their power. Maybe because it's bad for women, maybe just because it's bad for freedom for anyone? Oh, and once She intervened in a revolution against a corrupt King, that led to the country becoming a democracy, so maybe She likes that idea."
"...Well, that would hardly make it a bad thing to ask questions, would it - the Goddess doesn't want men to be weaker, that would be silly, She just wants women to have equal chances at strength and power and glory and all those sorts of things. - That being said, I might've felt less personal onus to answer your questions."
"So this is just what I heard, but - the story goes that a woman who worshipped the Twain was in dire need. There was a mage-school for women and it had come under attack by dark mages, who had kidnapped everyone but her. And she prayed for help in rescuing or at least avenging her comrades, and the Twain prevailed upon Bestet for aid."
"There are a couple of versions of the legends. They say She provided magic for the Twain's worshipper to become a living - well, kind of - magical artifact, with uncanny magical powers, in order to enact her revenge. The stories are a bit unclear on what the artifact was, but in the widest-known legend she became a sword - she had been a mage-swordsmith, who made enchanted blades. And she enacted her revenge and freed most of the fellow women, and then - moved on, to continue rescuing and freeing women everywhere."
The priestess is quiet for a while.
"- Hmm, sorry, I'm not really sure what sorts of things you ought to know. There's an old saying that She blesses sailors, I dunno if that's true or if so why She cares about that in particular. ...Also there's an old story that She disagrees with the Star-Eyed Goddess on some things, but there's not much detail that comes with it, could just be something that made good gossip once."
"Hmm. I'll start with the temple to Vkandis. They had a lot of miracles on record, and showed me the books on it - uh, a kind of disturbing number of them had to do with setting people on fire - I think people who were 'bad' according to Vkandis and who the priests prayed for help resisting? Though I guess that was really only five times, in their histories."
A pause.
"Anyway. Their written histories on-site didn't go back far enough to cover the temple's founding - I asked for how to get older books but I'm still waiting. I get the impression that Vkandis' order is pretty centralized compared to some of the others, and that He cares about the people worshipping Him being a single political body? ...The priest told me about some visions they think Vkandis sent to priests or political leaders, historically - the stories about them were really confusing but it seems like maybe it helped the temple order make some decisions right? Because they had warning of political turmoil or natural disasters. That's also most of the cases where they talked to other temples who worshipped different gods. I...think usually it was the human priests deciding to do that and asking permission or interpreting some past cryptic vision that they thought counted as permission, I - didn't really get the impression that Vkandis was on top of that part personally."
"Well, if you want to postulate that gods are all actually indifferent or worse to mortal travails then I suppose it could be choosing this strategy to be appealing to people rather than because it actually endorses it but I'm not sure we have that much reason to so postulate."
Ma'ar turns and shuffles through the notes splayed out on his bed.
"...The Twain are confusing. I didn't get a satisfactory answer on whether They used to be separate gods or at least more separate than now - or on what it means that there are two of Them, even. The temple I visited did say there were two, not four, and the priestess said that They represented different aspects of..." a pause while he looks at his papers, "- uh, of something related to masculine and feminine traits, it wasn't very clear. It sounds like They've been worshipped for a long time by various different temple orders, although it was hard to get any specifics on that, or on what They want. ...I asked about Them working with other gods, and apparently there's a legend about Them working with Bestet?"
"I don't know what she'd be defining as 'done bad things' - I've probably been rude to women or inconvenienced them by accident..." Ma'ar shakes his head. "- That's not really the point. I - think I also just feel nervous about the idea of a person becoming a sword because of a god-miracle, and - why the gods bothered, whether They slipped anything else into them in the process."
"They probably don't, it's rare and it's also hard to distinguish from having a psychotic break even if you haul them to a Mindhealer. I suppose Vkandis might favor setting people on fire because it could prevent his followers from being in legal trouble since that's harder for a normal person to do but it's a stretch."
"Apparently!" Ma'ar shrugs again. "I'm thinking a bit about whether it makes sense to, I don't know, try to help the order that worships Bestet open temples in Predain - obviously I'm not making a decision on it now, I'll have much more information later, but...well, it might help with the problem where I think women get mistreated a lot there. Maybe. I don't think I understand it well enough yet to know."
They're mostly further guidance and suggestions for priests and ministers in the Eternal Flame's temple order to support their communities. One book consists almost entirely of anonymized case studies of people who 'found redemption and healing' after various kinds of past misdeeds. The priestly responsibilities, as described, actually have some overlap with what Mindhealers do for their patients, though obviously without the aid of the Gift and Sight.
She also gets a note from the temple, stating that they now have the very old records that she had requested.
(The books don't exactly give a clear definition of their terms; from the examples, though, they're talking about things like: criminals learning skills to make an honest living; people who hurt others recognizing the harm done and trying their best to repair it; estranged families rebuilding their relationships; and, in general, people forgiving themselves for things in their past that they were ashamed of, while growing enough not to repeat their misdeeds.)
One of the younger priests offers them tea while they wait.
The senior priest is back a couple of minutes later, carrying a wooden box. It holds a couple of books, beautifully bound in ancient-looking but carefully preserved leather, wrapped lovingly in velvet.
"Here you go," he says. "Do be careful with them, please."
The text is handwritten, in beautiful skillfully-inked calligraphy, with fancy illuminated capital letters at the start of each section and borders drawn around the pages. It's in Tantaran, but old Tantaran, a number of spellings are different and there are a few entirely unfamiliar words.
It tells the story of the founders, seven different men and women from all over Tantara and the region south of it, who one summer about six hundred years ago, all received dream-visions of a particular valley, and of meeting the others there. It took almost a year, but eventually all of them followed the visions and made their way there. At which point, since they had clearly been entrusted with a sacred mission to carry out together, they tried to pull together the contents of their various visions and dreams, and they built the first temple to the Eternal Flame in that exact valley, and put together its doctrine.
It sounds like they had been worshipped in various forms before, for a long long time? The founders all recognized Them as a god they had heard of, even one worshipped locally by some people. But this was the start of the formal, organized religion of the current temple, and its mission and practices.
Most of the order's current doctrine! ...Though it sounds like there was quite a lot of human interpretation involved; the visions described are things like 'I saw a hanged man wake up, cut himself down from the tree, and get up and walk', or 'I carried a crippled man on my back to the top of a mountain' – not exactly clear instructions.
Ma'ar glances up from his book, which he started reading after finishing the book-preservation magic on it. :...That makes sense. This one is about the first hundred years of the temple and its leadership - I'm pretty impressed with them, actually, but it doesn't seem as though they got a lot of useful advice from the Eternal Flame:
:- Oh, that reminds me of how some cattle herding works! If there aren't a lot of you then it's too hard to run around and whack them to get them to go where you want, but you - sort of get good at predicting how the herd of them will move together, if you startle the one in front by throwing a rock ahead of them or something, and then you can get the whole herd going in the right direction with less work. And without talking to them, obviously:
Her book is mostly about the founding itself and the first five years afterward. The initial attempts at recruitment are recounted at length; this includes a few more tidbits about the preexisting worship of the Eternal Flame, since the founding cohort of priests and priestesses pursued those leads first.
It sounds like the past practices were of a similar general tone - prayers to the Eternal Flame were focused on requests for forgiveness, or for luck in moving on from past traumas - but mostly this happened in an informal way, with some families adding in a prayer to the Eternal Flame along with their usual worship.
(The book, unfortunately, does not give any hints about how those practices originated.)
It's weirdly hard to talk about, still, the concepts only half formed in his mind. Ma'ar frowns, kicks at a pebble.
"Hmm - in terms of concrete things, it seems like they do a lot of vocational training for convicted criminals, so they can have other ways to earn a living, and I think Predain could use that. And...I don't know, just, in general they seem to - have hope? That the world can be better if we work together to make it that way? And - I think Predain could use that sort of hope."
"Wear fancy mage-artifacts really conspicuously? ....I'm not sure if that would work, though, since people need to know what artifacts look like. We could just carry swords, maybe - I know how to fight with with one, and it doesn't actually matter if you don't, you've got Mindhealing set-commands and the point is just to look scary so you don't have to do anything..."
And they fall back into their usual routine. Ma'ar nods to her as usual at their next class, and glances over when the teacher asks them to partner up, but another student grabs him first (both of them are popular potential partners, nowadays, since they're usually head to head at the top of the class) and he shrugs apologetically at her.
When Azabel writes to the various contacts provided by the woman at the temple to Bestet, she eventually receives back a trickle of answers, the last of them arriving just before the end of their current session. One of them has stories about a differently-styled order worshipping Bestet, among some different nomadic clanspeople living in the mountain foothills southwest of Tantara's borders; here the men participate alongside the women, though the entire culture is matriarchal. Another letter has a few more stories of possessions; the letter-writer was herself possessed on three separate occasions, twice to fight off attacks while traveling as a mercenary with a merchant caravan in the Ceej, a third time, after she settled down to be a town elder, in order to viciously lecture the town mayor for letting some visiting highborn boys get away with harassing local women. She claims to remember all of them somewhat, but the last the most clearly, since she was still 'partially in control' and felt more 'empowered' by her Goddess than fully pushed aside by Her presence.
"- I don't, uh, know the city that well." He looks embarrassed. "I didn't really go downtown, I'd've stood out too much, I didn't look rich enough to be there and the guard would've kicked me out. And, uh. I didn't know how to read so I have no idea what a lot of the places are. But I've got a few things on a list and we can ask around once we're there."
He gives her a vaguely unhappy look. "I wish I knew more about– oh, I don't know, just how to dress and talk so we blend in. I think it'll probably just be obvious that we're foreigners? And...hopefully that's fine and as long as we're armed-looking foreigners the stupid Guard and all the pickpockets will leave us alone."
"I think we should be fine even if they have a go at us? I know all the official law, I got a book out of the library on it, so they can't get me by pretending something is illegal. And I'll bring a bit of money for small bribes, just because that's less complicated. And at worst we can Gate out and what are they supposed to do." He smiles crookedly at her. "We're better trained than any of the mages working for the King's Guard, and you can do set-commands."
Ma'ar takes a breath, lets it out. Grits his teeth for a moment.
"Aza, listen. I - think it'll be fine - the Guards who're bad are just bullies, they like hassling easy targets and we're not. But...look, if you're going to come with me, I really really really don't want you to get hurt because you didn't feel like you could use all the weapons you had to defend yourself and then get out. So - you can test it on me, all right? If it'd make you feel more comfortable doing it in an emergency. If it's a real emergency you won't have a lot of time to think about it so it'd be better if there's no reason to hesitate, right."
Ma'ar stares at the floor. "I'm...not sure that you really get it. How much Predain is....gods, how do I even describe it... No one expects cooperation? The default is hostility? I saw so many people get stupidly hurt because they were too - trusting, thought that rules were real and meant something and it wasn't just about who was strong enough to hurt you if they felt like it...?"
He turns away, again, folding his arms. "Just. I - think Predain really, really isn't like here. And I feel like maybe you don't get that. I don't...think it would work. If you tried to go to the Guard-house and tell them you were here to fix the person you set-commanded. I - don't even know exactly what would go wrong - maybe if you were lucky everyone would figure they'd personally come out best if they went along with it and wouldn't get in trouble - but I wouldn't want to bet on that."
Shrug. "- Let's talk about it after class tomorrow? I....can think about it and - try to put numbers on the actual risk, of going to Predain. I do think it'd be really helpful to go with you! But - maybe we should go after next session. Once we've had more time to think about it."
That did not go how he was hoping or intending at all.
Ma'ar eventually makes his own way back to his room, to another note from Aala who's apparently having a sleepover in her friend's room tonight.
He sits on the bed and stares at nothing in particular, and tries to think.
It is sort of hard not to feel like she is being somehow judged for not having constructed herself as a person around being ruthless such that she is willing to cripple a random stranger for life because he hypothetically sets off Ma'ar's danger sense, but Ma'ar probably did not mean that. Maybe she should suggest bringing her dad, who does know what to do with a sword and wouldn't look kind of preposterous carrying one around. Maybe this suggestion should wait till after he and Ma'ar have met though.
She shows up to class as normal.
Ma'ar gestures vaguely in the direction of the courtyard, and starts walking, his expression very preoccupied.
:...I - think it's really unlikely anything actually-that-bad would happen: he says finally. :If we went to Predain. I tried to sit down and think it through properly. But...just, I guess I'm scared. And when I'm scared I - don't know how to feel less scared except by being as paranoid as I possibly can:
Ma'ar is silent for a bit, pacing and chewing his lip.
:- I think sometimes I've - been tempted to judge people for not being paranoid: he sends, after a long pause. :Because it - felt like they were trying to feel safe by not looking at the world and noticing the danger, rather than by being prepared for it. But...I think maybe there's something wrong with that frame, and it doesn't actually make sense for me to feel that way:
:It did feel sort of judgmental! It wouldn't make sense in the environment I grew up in to be paranoid like that and willing to cripple people for spooking me and not even go back for them later. If that means it's not wise for me to go to Predain, I guess it means that, but...:
:...I was thinking about that too. I think that - hmm, so when I was fourteen, practically the only thing I had was being paranoid. I didn't have resources or skills or anything, just - being vigilant all the time and ruthless about doing whatever I had to to survive. And I still almost died a few times:
Shrug. :But - maybe that means I'm miscalibrated now. Since now it'd be two of us, not one, and we could maybe bring Skan too, and we do have money and resources and a lot of skills, and I can read...:
They both do very well on their exams, as per usual.
Ma'ar checks if Aala wants to come. (She doesn't; she has break plans. She also announces that she wants to ask the hertasi to move out of their shared room and into a dorm with her best friend.)
He packs fairly lightly as well, more because he doesn't have that many possessions than because Azabel's dad does. By count if not by weight or volume, most of what's in his travel bag is magic artifacts. He also has the booklet of classes available next session at their level, to peruse and pick his choices while they're on the trip.
He joins Azabel for the Gate, looking a bit nervous but also curious and excited.
It's a small, unremarkable village, with houses and gardens and a tavern and a little Guard office; the house looks out on the forking river in question at a distance of some tens of meters, and there's a bridge over a narrow bit, and more houses over on that side. A boat squeezes under the bridge and stops off at a pier to collect vegetables from somebody who comes out to meet it.
Aza takes the gate down and turns to open the door and is greeted by her father, who hugs her tight.
It's nice. It feels...peaceful. Not dangerous. Ma'ar isn't sure if he trusts this impression, but he is noticing it.
...It still feels a bit weird and awkward, watching people be physically affectionate with their family members. He stands back, smiling politely, and waits for Azabel to take the lead in introducing him.
Ma'ar continues standing and holding his travel-bag, waiting for an indication from Aza of where he should put it; he does have the tentifact packed, along with many other artifacts, but it feels presumptuous to just march out to the backyard and set up.
With his best manners, he praises the wall colour choice. "How long have you lived here?"
Ma'ar, who has shared an outdoor sleeping-area with chickens more than once before in his life, glances around and then sets out his tentifact and puts his bags inside the barrier.
:- Should be set for now. I, er, feel like maybe I should've asked for advice before on - how to make a good impression with your dad...?:
:...I'm not actually sure, I've known him my entire life and am his daughter. He's very quiet, you don't actually have to say much and he won't either now that the introductions are out of the way. I guess unless he intends to ask you if we're having sex, which I have told him we're not but it's possible he'd want it corroborated:
....That seems like a moderately uncomfortable question, but if Charl does ask then Ma'ar can just give the true answer which is 'no.'
:Do you think I actually need to make a good impression in order for him to agree to come to Predain with us? Or will he say yes just because you're his daughter?:
Ma'ar has some amount of experience with donkeys, from the times he accompanied caravans on the road. He nods, makes eye contact with the donkey and makes a soothing sound, and then gently pins her tail with his hand (and mostly with an invisible net of mage-energies, but he's not trying to show off unduly, here.)
"Oh, thank you! I'll, uh, go have a look."
And Ma'ar nods and smiles at the man again, and then extracts himself in what he hopes is a minimally social graceful fashion. He's thinking that probably he should debrief all this with Azabel later and see if she agrees with that assessment.
"Hey! I talked to one of your neighbours. ...Umm, I didn't get his name, I introduced myself but he didn't back, he was with a donkey and he looked like -" and Ma'ar gives a brief description. "I...think it went fine? He didn't make faces like he thought I was weird, or anything."
She asks Charl how his life is going and he answers, terse but warm, about keeping troublemakers away from trading-boats and landgoing traders, about keeping the chickens out of trouble, about patching up his fence and fishing. In exchange she summarizes for him her last term at school, prompting Ma'ar occasionally for his angle on classes and teachers.
Ma'ar's answers are also terse, at first, but he gradually relaxes and starts offering longer asides and even asking Charl a few questions about life in the town.
:- Did you have a plan for what to do this afternoon?: he asks Azabel privately, as they're wrapping up lunch.
:No, there isn't actually much to do. It's kind of a boring town, that's why Ranara moved away. Often I spend a lot of time hanging out in the same room as Charl while I read a book and he whittles or washes dishes or something and we don't even say anything. Sometimes if I'm up early enough I go fishing with him, it's interesting enough with magic:
:- Well, I wouldn't mind going fishing with him, getting up early is fine. And I can sit with you two this afternoon and catch up on the books I brought to read, and then I guess maybe go for a walk and talk to more people?: He kind of wants a quiet break first, though.
Once lunch is tidied up, Ma'ar retrieves a book from his backyard tentifact setup and joins Charl and Azabel to sit quietly and not talk for the afternoon, until it's time to go look for the dancing; he plans to leave when it looks like there are around two candlemarks of daylight left, to make sure he has time to find the bridge and cross it.
The bridge is clearly visible from the same door Aza opened the Gate on. It's painted blue, though it's pretty chipped in places. On the other side there's more village set around a reasonably sized square; dancers have not yet gathered, though some people are hanging out nearby doing laundry in the river.
That's so many people! And they're expecting him to do a complicated thing right!
...But it's not that complicated, Ma'ar reminds himself, and he just learned all the details, and he just needs to keep reminding himself not to hold himself in a stance appropriate for fighting rather than dancing.
And he does the right moves along with the other villagers, and occasionally glances over at his friend and smiles.
Ma'ar is definitely not going to be able to manage this dance without fumbling and inconveniencing his neighbours a lot! He steps back, making apologetic faces at the people on either side of him in the line, and watches closely to see if he can pick up the moves for the new dance fast enough to rejoin.
Then he can dance!
It's starting to feel like a lot happening at once, and Ma'ar finds himself needing to exert more effort not to keep falling back into a fighting stance and scanning his surroundings for danger, but for the most part he manages to stay relaxed. And it's...actually pretty fun?
"I haven't gotten into any scrapes since that stupid fight years ago! I don't even spend much time actually sparring, and I guess I don't practice fighting without magic really at all, I just... I think the instincts go back further than that." Shrug. "And I don't have any practice at, hmm, at moving my body just to have fun and look pretty."
"Well, she was pretty friendly to me. She wanted to teach me, but her mother said she had to do her laundry first, so I helped. She teased me a bit about looking like I was going to punch her, and made a joke about how I was doing well because I hadn't fallen in the river while trying to practice - I didn't realize it was a joke, at first, but I don't think she minded..."
Ma'ar recounts a bit more about their interactions. "- I think she thought I was nice and not weird and scary?"
Ma'ar eats for a little while in silence, mulling on whether there's anything to be done - well, anything that makes sense for him personally to do - on the problem of fellow villagers possibly making mean implicitly-about-Azabel comments.
"- Is there anything you think I could've done better?" he asks, eventually.
Ma'ar washes his plate, and smiles at Azabel, and then heads out to the backyard to sleep.
In the morning he politely follows whatever routine is prompted. He's not up that early but he does mention to Charl that he would be interested in joining on a fishing trip at some point during his stay. He's content to read quietly through the afternoon, again, and then go see if dancing is happening tonight.
"At least that keeps you occupied." Ma'ar is thinking that it doesn't actually matter that much if he integrates into the social life in Riverfork, since he's just visiting and doesn't intend to move here or anything, but he doesn't say this and goes back to finishing his supper.
The next morning Ma'ar can come fishing with Charl - Aza comes too, and scoops dinner out of the water with magic.
Eliana stays after the next dance, too, and asks Ma'ar if he'll walk her home, she heard somebody's dog got loose and might be running around and could be bitey.
:So, Eliana asked me if I could walk home with her because she was scared of a dog, it seemed sort of weird since I don't think I told her I was a mage...: He briefly describes the rest of the interaction. :...Oh, and come to think of it, she sort of hung around after dancing the other night too, but I guess I wasn't paying enough attention. I can't tell if she, I don't know, actually wanted something other than what she said...?:
:Just thinking:
Ma'ar glances away, almost self-consciously. Paces back and forth for a few moments.
:...I don't think I have a crush on her: he admits finally. :I have no idea what her virtues are, I guess other than being friendly and decent at dancing. Uh, is there a thing I'm supposed to - do - if I think someone might have a crush on me and I don't have one on them?:
:...I think it's still not a kind of practice I want to do. It - feels like it wouldn't even be practicing the right thing, if I don't like her that way? ...I guess it's hard to tell for sure if I would mind her kissing me, since I have no idea what kissing is like: Ma'ar is looking thoughtfully at Azabel again.
...Well, Ma'ar isn't absolutely sure that he doesn't or wouldn't have a crush on her, so maybe he'll linger a bit as well, and - see if he can learn more about her virtues? It feels like a lot of the problem is that he doesn't know her at all.
He asks her, somewhat haltingly, what life in the village is normally like for her.
Aaaaaaaaah! Decisions on the spot! (Ma'ar tries very hard and manages to keep almost all of the aaaa off his face.) On the one hand that was a very boring answer? On the other hand he's...not not enjoying this interaction, and maybe Azabel has a point that this is worth practicing and also that Eliana's expectations are based on him leaving town in a few days.
"Sure, I could do that."
(Ma'ar glances at it, and then vaguely waves the corncob around while making eye contact with the child, until Eliana is back.)
"Wow! Thank you." He holds out his hand to take the cheese round, looking intently into her eyes.
(While trying to imagine kissing her, however "kissing" works, and figure out whether he would like it or at least find it tolerable.)
"Mmm, that makes sense."
Ma'ar can't ask questions about Azabel's Mindhealing patients, obviously, but he tries hard for a few minutes to come up with some tactful subject to talk about instead, planning to plead tiredness and flee to the backyard tentifact if he can't succeed at this task.
“Uh, cow’s milk and - good on brown bread, I think that’s all she said, I’m not a cheese expert...” Ma’ar draws it out of his pocket and holds it up. “I don’t mind if you cut it open, though, I - don’t really feel like carrying it for the next few days in my pocket...”
It’s a pretty good dinner! Ma’ar sits back and is mostly quiet, again, while they eat it.
For the rest of the trip, he offers to help Azabel with magic for the locals, spends the rest of the time reading the books he brought in companionable silence with her and Charl, and continues to go dancing in the evenings but declines and makes his most polite excuses if Eliana asks for a walk home again.
And they need to pick their classes for the next session! They can take intermediate-level weather magic, introducing concert work for very large scale urgent weather needs, or they can select their pick from a range of half a dozen specialized artifact-work classes; at this level, it makes sense to decide if one wants to focus on detection wards versus defensive shields versus communication and surveillance versus building maintenance, etc etc. There are several more combat courses. There's advanced illusion-magic in two versions, one aimed mostly at artistic performances, and one for 'practical purposes', which is widely known to be code for 'combat and/or spying'.
Ma'ar signs up for the intermediate weather magic - it seems likely to be especially important in Predain, and he wants to know it well enough to teach it someday - and for both the detection wards and building maintenance courses. The latter is still separate from the 'day to day artifacts' class that Azabel wants to take, so they aren't going to have any classes in common this session.
Aala has officially gotten everything set up to move to the same regular girls' dorm as her new best friend, or possibly friends plural at this point.
"I don't know if I should try to keep an eye on her still?" Ma'ar frets to Azabel, when they're comparing their class schedules the day before the new session. "I mean, she seems to be doing really well here, just...she's still a kid..."
"Mmm." Ma'ar makes an unhappy face. "I really do feel like I'm - sort of responsible for her? Since she doesn't have parents here. ...I guess probably a lot of people don't tell their parents everything about their lives either."
Sigh. "Anyway, I'll remind her she can always come to me for advice if she needs it," he smiles crookedly, "she still thinks I'm wise or something just because I'm older and got here first. And if she asks something and I don't know what to say, I might need you to rescue me."
Aza updates Lionwind on her work in Riverfork. Considers also signing up for the intermediate weather class since neither illusions nor artificing are all that high power (or at least not all the time; artificing can be but they spend a lot of time on design). Decides in favor.
Over the next couple of weeks, Skan continues to be very excited and eager to tell Azabel about Elassi's many positive qualities, and impressive flying maneuvers she showed off recently, and jokes he made that he thinks/hopes she found clever. Mostly he just seems eager to find any excuse to talk about her as much as possible.
:Mmm, that makes sense:
And they're distracted by the teacher's arrival.
...
A few days later, Ma'ar is headed to meet with his sparring practice group when - something, he isn't sure what at first - yanks at his attention.
There's...some sort of odd vibration in the ground, and something like a shriek just too high-pitched to be audible...
- a shout for help, nearby -
Ma'ar still isn't totally sure, but the hissing not-quite-audible scream is suddenly all too audible.
:Explosion. Here: He sends a sense of his location, a flash of the nearest statue-landmark he just passed. :- People injured -: he's kind of guessing about that but there are definitely screams of pain, :- I think - steam or something - this is the artificers' building -:
He's just reached the door - and it'll take him an entire minute or two to set up to scry the other side of it and check if it's safe, damn it there isn't time - he reaches out with Thoughtsensing, not quite open enough to read surface thoughts, just enough to sense minds and whether those minds are panicked or injured -
...Better not to risk opening it before he has a better shield up. He spins on his heels. Fixes his eyes on one of the many pretty decorative archways, festooned with flowering vines, and carefully opens his senses to Azabel without letting any of his other shields slip. :Here:
He's spent the last fifteen seconds trying to establish a Mindspeech link with someone inside; none of them are Gifted, it seems, and they're all (unsurprisingly) panicking, he's gotten a few snippets but nothing that useful.
"Some sort of - steam mechanism to power things? Part of it exploded - I'm doing shields so I can open the door, can you try to talk to someone inside, you're more practiced at Mindspeech I think–"
This senior student is so panicked! Five different things are happening at once and they're trying to find the ruptured pipe and the source of that EXTREMELY ALARMING hiss of escaping steam and whether they can prevent the rest from blowing and also there are injured younger students crying out in pain and they can't see because everything is full of scalding steam -
:Experiment, pipe burst - pressure too high - trying to seal the rest....:
:This weld is under strain: the senior student manages, with a vague gesture at it. :Here too - and - main boiler, fire, need to - put it out - I can't get in there...:
And he jars himself into motion. The semiconscious student is successfully dragged out.
There's one more student, unconscious in a heap in the opposite corner of the hall.
It would be a LOT easier to deal with this if he could go in and get a closer look, however, Ma'ar isn't stupid. He shifts his angle by the door, uses another wind-spell to blow a bit more steam out of the way, and clamps a force-net around the welded pipe seal. It's not hard to locate, since it's the one with fresh steam hissing and screeching out. Meanwhile he's still trying to hold some hasty shielding over the fleeing students, and the unconscious one as Azabel drags him or her...
Boiler. Fire. Where is it... He can't see much, it must be buried in the tangle of welded pipes that make up the mechanism.
If he were better at casting complex spells on the fly, maybe he could use the freezing-refrigeration one, but he can only do that one fast with an artifact, which he doesn't have on him, and even if he did he's not sure how he would adapt it to do this... He could do a clumsy version just on the entire room, maybe, that would only take him a minute or so to cast, but he's not sure he's powerful enough to pull heat out of that much volume...
- however fires need air -
Making an impermeable-to-air shield is a lot faster, and he doesn't need to know exactly where the air intake is.
- now that he's force-netted the one weld, a different one is hissing dangerously -
Ma'ar drops the shielding over the students, since they're all out now. :Azabel can you shield the door now - need to concentrate...:
None of the kids are bleeding to a life-threatening extent, though the one she dragged out is bleeding somewhat from a scalp wound. All of them have scalds and burns of varying seriousness. The unconscious one she dragged out presumably has a head injury, possibly an injured spine as well. He's breathing but not that well. The other semiconscious student has a broken arm; the bone isn't quite poking through the skin but is definitely poking up against it.
He's narrowing down the area that he thinks the air-intake is in, paying very very close attention to whether this is resulting in more or less pressure on the several areas of force-net that he's holding over strained welds.
...the hissing is definitely getting quieter...
"I Gated over - I can't run and I was way up in the Tower - and I'm okay at Mindspeaking people who don't have the Gift, so I got the story from one of the people inside, determined it was safe to open the door, did that, dragged out somebody who couldn't move by magic, and then summoned Healers and shielded the door while Ma'ar put out the fire."
"You could describe it like that! Somebody was working on something with steam under pressure, I'm not sure what it was or why. It caught fire somewhere it wasn't meant to and exploded, and injured a bunch of people - I don't think it killed anyone outright, though I'm not sure how good the head injury's prognosis is at Healers'. Ma'ar noticed and alerted me, and I got his location by Mindspeech while telling Lionwind Ma'ar needed help and I had to go, and I Gated down to where he was. Ma'ar's not good at Mindspeaking unGifted people and I am so I talked to the people inside about what the problem was and determined it was safe to open the door and let some steam and the people out, and I helped them out, and contacted Healers', and shielded the door against further possible explosions, while Ma'ar patched up the weak spots in the pressurized bits and put out the fire."
:I, ummm...: A brief pause. :I - think I might have feelings about you -? But, uh, if you definitely don't have feelings about me, then - you should tell me now, all right? And I'll - decide to stop having the feelings, and we won't have to worry about it ever again...?:
:....I'm suddenly a lot more confused about how - emotions - work, but, uh...: Ma'ar takes a deep breath. :What sort of information do you need upfront from me so you can decide what your emotions are and tell me– uh, I mean, you don't have to tell me, but, you know -:
Ma'ar trails off, intently avoiding Azabel's eyes.
:I'll let you know if I think of anything. Um.
I have thought at all about how I seem to be geared, uh, crushwise, and -
- you know how in stories people sometimes, like, pine after people who don't like them back, I don't think I can do that, I think I can so little do that that I also probably can't like people who are only kind of into me or into me for a dumb reason? So like, if you have - only just achieved a relevant developmental stage and in the process noticed that I have eyelashes, or something like that, on top of being generally tolerant of my company, that doesn't really do it for me. The fact that I can't confidently identify you as very much more enthusiastic than 'generally tolerant of my company' is not helping you here and neither is the thing where the one time I hugged you we wound up having a weird stupid fight:
:....Hmm:
(He wants to say that he agrees pining is usually stupid, but it's not clear if this helps his cause at all, so he holds back. Self-control is important, after all, and not less important than honesty.)
:....I'm - pretty sure that if I do like you that way, it's - not an ambivalent thing? And, er, it's definitely not about your eyelashes. I'm - still just starting to figure out what this whole 'liking' thing even means, and maybe I don't feel that way at all, but - you're the person I trust most in this entire city. And the person I think is the most competent and most virtuous. And - if I died tomorrow - and for some reason before I died I had a chance to lay bets on who would accomplish the most things I cared about over the next century - I'd bet on you:
Ma'ar falls silent, gaze fixed on the floor.
:Those... would be good reasons if you were sure they caused you to like-like me as opposed to just - approve of me, but -
- they don't exactly indicate that you'd be partial. And I think we can be friends even if you aren't partial but I do not think I can date you if you are not partial:
:...If there was a - fire, or something, and a lot of people I could save and you were one of them - I'd probably want to save you first? I, er, I feel like smiling at you more than I feel like smiling at most people? I care a lot about being your ally and keeping your good regard, a lot more than I care with most people - I don't know if that's the thing....:
:I tried to think about it a lot and - I guess you have good eyelashes too? And, er, good - skin - and things...? If I had to kiss anyone on the Tower grounds I think I'd prefer it be you even if I have no idea what kissing is like? Just - I - that feels like not the real point, it's not about your - fundamental soul - your you - the thing that actually matters here....:
:It's not inconveniencing me! It, uh - just feels objectively correct? Because you're - really good in a lot of ways? ...I don't know if thinking that is the same thing as wanting to date you, though, I - don't really know what dating is in practice. I don't have a particular urge to invite you on a walk in the flower gardens:
:I want to ask you to help me fix Predain, because you're the most competent person I know? ...Uh, that's probably not the thing, is it. I - want you to be around me and talk to me and want to talk to me and, I don't know, maybe I want - more than that - but the wanting-feeling is being really unhelpful at indicating what it's for:
:Oh! I - would you want to go stargazing, I think I would like that a lot? ...I think I might want to hold hands but I haven't, er, done that before. In this context:
Ma'ar squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, visibly thinking. :It would make me happy, I think? I - guess it's quick to test. If that were all right with you:
Ma'ar holds very still for a moment, and then his breath sighs out, and he reaches across his lap with his other hand to replace the first hand and its accompanying arm, which he slips - very slowly and tentatively and waiting to see if she'll object - around her shoulders.
"I don't really know what I like in - relationships, yet. People... kiss, and go on dates, and plan stuff around each other, but I don't have all the detail from first principles. I think in good relationships people form really good models of each other so they can do stuff for each other without all the friction of asking which I guess I might be feeling the lack of right now but probably it can't be rushed."
He's VERY happy. This is obvious even though Azabel isn't an Empath and isn't using Thoughtsensing, just from the surface alignment of his gears. He's intently focused on her, and plausibly anxious, though this comes across differently in his mind than in most people's.
His self-stabilizing metaphorical gyroscope is - being pulled off balance? It seems to be related to how he's trying to pay close attention to her - maybe to the snuggling specifically - and, unlike most people, his mind isn't especially set up to do this, at least not in a way that's reassuring and steadying rather than stressful.
"Mmm." Ma'ar tries this.
He does end up noticeably more physically relaxed, and it helps with the surface signs of nervousness and hypervigilance in his gears. It...seems to mostly do the opposite of help with the gyroscope-pulled-off-balance, but he's not visibly distressed about this.
"Oh. Hmm." Ma'ar falls silent, mulling it over for a minute. "I guess that - being partial to people - isn't something I'd usually encourage myself to feel, even if I do feel it sometimes anyway. So that's odd for me." A shiver. "...Feels sort of dangerous, too. And like it might be unfair to you. I think probably that feeling isn't calibrated, though. Urtho's Tower is really safe, and it seems like you like it when I'm partial to you."
"- I'm not sure why I keep feeling that way! I guess maybe because it - feels like asking for something from you? If I want you to feel a certain way, and - maybe I'll want other things from you, which might be inconvenient, and if you didn't want that it'd be unfair?" Ma'ar shakes his head. "I don't know, it sounds dumb when I say it out loud."
"It... doesn't sound that dumb as a default for strangers but kind of weird for friends and definitely weird for if we're going to date. Um, it's my job to tell you if I don't want - things -" there is one very obvious thing but she's not going to say it "if you should happen to want them first, so presuming partial doesn't mean entitled I don't see how it would be a very big deal if you did want them..."
Eventually he gives up and switches to Mindspeech. :I'm - scared of - something bad happening to you. I...damn it, I know it's stupid, me caring about you that doesn't make that more likely, but...it feels like...: He shivers, curls up more tightly against her shoulder.
"Huh, that's a good question. I have... mental habits I reach for if people interrupt me, because I don't like that but don't want to be super prickly about it. I have scripts for with patients when I'm not sure what to say that usually last me until I prompt something that gives me a better idea. I have reflexes not to waste time - Ranara can let entire days escape, if she gets distracted and I don't."
And they can spend the remaining time until supper studying together. Ma'ar is mostly quiet, reading through his notes and occasionally practicing bits and pieces of spells with his eyes closed, but he sits close to Azabel and occasionally pets her hair or leans briefly against her.
On the object level Ma'ar is pleased about this, and squeezes her hand back. He's also pretty sure it has...some sort...of social significance, and is slightly tempted to read the minds of the students they pass in the hall to figure out what they are. Only very slightly tempted, though. It's hardly life-or-death. He pays attention to their expressions and body language instead.
Ma'ar hesitates for a long moment, pausing where he is in the middle of the aisle between dining-hall tables.
:- Do you think I should, uh, try to - learn how to display my intentions the way most people do? It's...on my list but low priority, right now, I - thought it'd be less relevant strategically than other things: