.
I wanted to return to the experiment that had sidetracked me while I was in the river gorge. The mystery tricks that the ball of condensed blood, or what the angels had been calling a ‘core’, had been playing when I wasn’t looking were bugging me and I had to study them. But I had already come close to drilling a hole in a rock face once, so I wasn’t going to do it while flying.
But if I started playing around with the mana I was circulating, I might lose control of it, so I needed to be easily able to recover what I lost.
Besides, although I wasn’t really pressed to find a place to bathe yet, it also made sense to not let myself get too depleted, now that I felt like I was somewhere too difficult for a pursuer to easily find.
With all this in mind, I began looking for a suitable place to land and rest.
I decided against bodies of water with possible owners. I was paranoid after my experiences when I met Grandmother and Great-Grandfather. I would use my Water mana coating method instead.
A little village nestled in the hills passed under my wings. I wanted to keep some distance from people, so I fixed its location in my fairy sense as it receded behind me. Once I lost track of it, I paid attention to the landscape that was slowly rising, not quite become mountainous, until I came to a verdant mountain meadow with a stream running through it and wildflowers everywhere. It showed no sign whatsoever of mortal occupation. It was a perfect location.
A few boulders were sticking up out of the grasses. One of them sat near a long riffle in the stream separating two peaceful pools. I landed and perched there to rest.
I started by dispersing my wings, then began unwinding the Aether in my circulating supply and carefully guiding it into the ball. It took a little time, but in the end the ball had soaked in the entire amount.
It took a bit to figure out how to reverse the flow, but I pulled it back out, into circulation, with just as little effort. It returned to circulation surprisingly fast.
My imagination was beginning to dream up ways to use this, but I need to understand more about it. I tried the Fire mana next. Again it was relatively easy, although I didn’t have as much to work with. I had used so much up when I hit Feraen with it, and hadn’t tried to replenish it to the same levels again.
Intrigued, I went for more, pushing Earth in as quickly as I could. I wanted to know what kind of endurance this storage had. And how many types of mana it could store. Did it have some kind of ‘cool-down time’ or some other limitation?
The Earth I had on hand was a greater amount than the Fire I had pushed into it, but it all went in, after a little time. I tried to draw more Earth– an easy thing to do when I’m sitting on a big rock– and I found I could flow it straight in, easier than the effort it took to start it circulating. It was like it was skipping my body’s mana flows entirely, just tunneling straight through to the ‘core’. The mana was still flowing easily, and then…
It suddenly stopped, like it had hit a wall. I tried drawing and circulating more Earth. My body could hold it as it circulated, but when I tried to guide it into the core, the mana just skittered off it, refusing to go.
So there was a storage limit?
When I circulate mana in the magic pathways of my body, there seems to be a certain limit per element. They differ according to my competence with that element. For example, I can circulate massive amounts of Healing, my strongest element (although you would think my strongest element would be Water?) and a bit less of Wind and Darkness. Water and Earth come next, with Aether and Fire last.
So, I expected the blood ball… or maybe this was the ‘core’ the angels had described?… would follow the same rules, but when I tried to guide Healing into it, it wouldn’t go.
Similarly, I tried Darkness, Fire, Wind… nothing happened. The core was full. Why didn’t it follow the same rules as the rest of my body?
Well, I had no idea what those rules actually were, though. I just had an empirical understanding of the mana flows in my body. My magic tutors had never reached the level of instruction that would have given me the theory behind it, since they had spent the entire time just trying to get me to manage the simplest first-level spells. We had never moved beyond attempting to master the absolute basics.
It left me regretting the loss of that magic theory class at the academy. That theory would have been the sort of thing I would have learned there. It left me once again bitter for all the opportunities that had been briefly within reach before they were stolen from me.
Pushing the negative emotions out of my head with a huff, I forced my focus back to my investigation.
I guided some of the Earth mana back out, and put it back into circulation in my body, then tried to guide Healing in. Sure enough, now that there was room, it began flowing, until it, too, hit that brick wall.
It was confirmed. The mana circulating in my body could stack, such that I had absolute limits for how much I could hold of each mana type, and they didn’t have an effect on each other, but the ‘core’ had just a simple limit on the total it could store, regardless of element.
Well, I had more to learn, so I drew more of the Earth out, and some of the Fire and the Aether. Once I figured I had enough room, I guided in Wind, then switched to Darkness.
I now had seven kinds in there, six elements plus Healing. I was circulating six of those kinds as well, that newly acquired capacity I had discovered by accident during my flight.
It made me wonder whether six was my limit now, or if, just maybe…
Bracing for the disaster that would happen if I lost control of everything I had in circulation, I gingerly began to circulate Light.
For one instant, I felt something like the beginnings of a loss of control, but then that mysterious core added itself to the Light mana circulation as well, and it had the effect of smoothing things out. The next thing I knew, I had seven mana types all circulating steadily.
Just a week or so previous to this, I had been struggling to manage five. It became easier in time, but six had continued to be impossible, until now.
I carefully formed a [Fairy Light], perfectly useless in the middle of the day but useful for practice. I was still fully prepared to lose control of all the mana I had, but I successfully guided the Light mana into the spell.
Did I dare try it? I was currently one short of circulating all types. I cautiously drew Water from the surroundings… again, I felt that near loss of control, then the core suddenly connect up, then… I had all seven elements and Healing.
I sat there, more than a little gob-smacked at it. I had separately circulated them before, but suddenly it stopped feeling difficult. The addition of that core had made it feel as if I should have been able to do this all along.
For a while, I simply sat there playing around with it, moving different mana types between circulation and core, getting a firm hold on how to keep them in each location. It helped that I had already learned a lot about moving mana from one part of my body to the other. It really wasn’t any different, now that the core was becoming fully integrated into my awareness.
Finally, I unwound everything I had circulating, letting my pathways relax. I wanted to see if I could keep the stored mana in the core without mana in circulation.
While I waited for the result of that experiment, I drew Water mana from the soil around me and the nearby stream, coating it directly onto my body the way I had done before I learned from Ceria the proper way to circulate it in my body. Slowly, I built up the head-to-toe coverage necessary to force it to soak in and replenish the magic component of my flesh.
I hadn’t been particularly paying attention to my surroundings all this time, outside of keeping my fairy sense primed to pick up presences.
But something pinged that fairy sense now, only moments after I completed my coating. As I stared in amazement, a cloud of mana-rich entities rose up out of the forest in the distance.
Have you ever seen pictures of an approaching dust storm or locust swarm? It looked like that. For a moment, I honestly thought that I was about to be hit by such a swarm. But as it approached, it suddenly exhibited a very odd behavior. It circled me. I was pretty sure locusts wouldn’t do that.
As a precaution, I unwound my water coat, drawing a portion of it off to circulate before dispersing the rest. As I worked, I slipped off the rock, watching this phenomenon uncertainly. Should I take off, run, try blasting it with magic…?
As the circle thickened, I began seeing hints of color, an amazing palette of bright, attractive blues, greens and golds. It was a technicolor cyclone that was gradually tightening around me.
“Durandal, got any idea what it is?”
They seem to be butterflies, My Lady.
“Butterflies?” I retorted, a bit incredulous. I mean, butterflies just don’t act this way, to my knowledge.
But, they weren’t loaded with enough manifested mana to convince me they were actually magical creatures.
They suddenly covered the air above me, turning from a cyclone to a rotating dome.
“O…kay…?” I muttered to myself.
A very loud version of the ‘secret voice transmission’ art I had been encountering a lot lately suddenly hit my mind.
MONSTER, FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY, DO NOT RESIST!
