Chapter 14: Chapter 14

I was shaken awake by Syl in the late hours of the morning, and groggily pulled myself out of the blissful thing known as sleep. I definitely hadn’t gotten the recommended seven to nine hours.

When I had tried to fall asleep last night, I was assaulted by all the magical energy around us. While during the day, I was mostly able to ignore it and focus on my other senses, letting it become more of a minor annoyance than anything else. Now, with my eyes closed and my mind relaxed, it was practically screaming for my attention. I could concentrate on ignoring it, but then I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. In turn, if I just let it grab my attention, I also wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. I struggled with this for hours, falling asleep well past midnight. I really needed to get used to this.

Me and Syl made our way down to the creek for our morning wash, and scrubbed down. I could have probably skipped it, I did spend the entirety of yesterday reading a book, but it was nice to get clean, and I liked having some semblance of order in my life. Walking down to the creak and rinsing off every day was probably one of the only things we could count on right now. Everything was changing, and we were in the middle of it.

When we finished, we headed back to the rock, and began to look around for somewhere to put up a structure. We had no way of knowing where we were in this world, and the whole ‘eradication of all things magic’ movement didn’t exactly bode well for me.

Eventually, maybe half a mile downstream from our rock, we found a decent patch of ground. It was slightly elevated above the rest of the ground around it, so if the river ever flooded, our hut would probably be fine. It was also relatively clear, and the plant life on it was manageable. Think bushes and ferns, instead of trees.

We decided it was the one, and I made to start clearing it, but got another lecture from Syl. “Let me do it, I can manage it,” she said. I stood my ground that I wasn’t going to leave all the work for her, but she pointed out that without magic, we didn’t have much of a way of getting wood for this. If I could solve that, it would easily come out ten times better. 

Relenting, I made my way back to the rock, and picked up the book again. I skimmed through the practice options from the first chapter, and picked one at random. It was about converting pure magic into elemental magic. I skimmed through it, then got started.

It said to look for a mental lens of sorts, and push the magic through it. You would burn up the magic, and create matter of your choice. You could then, theoretically at  least, treat it as an extension of your body, and tell it what to do, using your magic to control it. It should all be instinctual. You could wrap it into a rope, you could explode it outward in a big blast, the limit was truly your imagination. I was eager to get this figured out. 

It was deceptively easy. After my failure yesterday, I had a general idea of what to look for. I found the lens almost instantly, and tried pushing some magic through it. It took some figuring out, but before long, there was a bang, and a bunch of heat exploded out of my hand, throwing me back in the process. 

“Well, they do say practice makes perfect, but this is going to take a lot of practice” I mumbled to myself.

Dusting myself off, I made my way over to the book, and flipped to the section about controlling elemental magic. This had a lot of potential, but if I got myself killed learning how to use it, all that potential would become rather useless. 

The book was rather unhelpful, basically saying that you could already control it, you just had to take action. It sounded stupid, but the book hadn’t been wrong yet, so I was willing to give it a try. 

When I grabbed a portion of my magic, I made to push it through a lens, but this time, I chose a safer one. I could instinctually tell what each lens was, and so it was relatively easy to choose to push it out of me as wind instead of heat. This time, I used my sixth sense for magic, and as soon as I saw it start changing into wind, I mentally grabbed hold of it, and forced it to go off in one direction. It shot off that way, fast as a bullet, pressing against the mental barriers I was imposing on it. It wanted free, and my concentration slipped, letting it spill out of the stream of air I had created, and disperse into the environment.

It was exhausting. I wasn’t physically tired, I had plenty of energy for my magic, instead it was mental. The act of trying to mentally hold hundreds of pounds of air into a small tube, and keep that pressure going where you wanted was taxing. I felt like I hadn’t slept in a week.

Over the rest of the day, I practiced. I quickly learned to restrain the magic as it was flowing through the lens, which proved to be extremely helpful. I was able to practice with smaller amounts of energy, and test my mental strength, seeing how long I could hold it in place or how fast I could move it. Things like wind and electricity zipped around easily, while things like ice were hard to move. On the flip side, elements like ice were easy to maintain, and required very little mental effort. Given a few weeks, I might even be able to ingrain the maintenance of it into my subconscious thought, and keep it going indefinitely. Electricity was nearly impossible to hold in place, and completely stopping it was impossible. The best I could do was force it into a ball and clamp down on that to keep it contained for a few seconds. 

In addition, I found I could also use magic to make physical things, and then let them decay naturally. I could make an ice sword, and let it melt, instead of pumping more and more magic into it to keep replenishing what was lost. Theoretically, I could keep important things made out of ice, and if they ever fell into the wrong hands, I would be able to simply stop maintaining them, and they would melt.

When Syl eventually made har way back to our camp, it was getting late. I resolved to finish practicing magic tonight, and made my way up to the rock with her. We talked about random things for a bit, but we were both tired, and before long, we were laying down to sleep. Blessedly, when I closed my eyes, my sense for magic was manageable. It was still there, but this time, I was able to ignore it, and I fell asleep without too much effort.

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