Apprentice (ze_kraken x Peregrine)

[ze_kraken]

"What was that?" Eswild asked, bewildered as she stared at her own fingers, investigating her palm as if to see remnants of the light that had just faded. "Did I do that? Or was that you?"

The heat lingered about her fingertips even though the light had faded, a pleasant and familiar warmth that reminded her of working in the forge and handling still smoldering metals. She stretched them, tightening them into a fist before stretching them back outward. The air surrounding her neck and hand were still warmer as well, but this warmth dissipated in time as well, leaving Eswild with yet more questions.

She turned around and cast the stranger an inquisitive look, cocking her head to the side as she awaited an answer.

The stranger had a contemplative look on his face, but he smiled slightly upon noticing her gaze. "It was both," he replied eventually. He seemed to be choosing his words carefully. "I sent fire mana into your core, and stimulated it to take action. You were the one who then directed the spell to the tips of your fingers, applying a simple body enhancement."

Sitting back down in his chair, the man gestured back to the table in a manner Eswild took as inviting her to sit. "Although it is the most rudimentary application of mana, congratulations. You just cast your first spell."

"But I didn't do anything," Eswild protested, seating herself opposite the stranger. "At least, I didn't think I did. Is it supposed to feel like I'm doing something?"

She spared her fingers another glance, feeling a phantom flash of heat wash through them that clashed with the temperate air around her not too unlike the way a fever. Only, as quickly as she thought about it the sensation vanished.

"If I don't know how or when I'm using mana, then how do I do what you just helped me do on my own?"

The stranger laughed slightly. "That was just a… proof of concept, if you like. I'm not expecting you to suddenly be able to replicate the whole process." He tapped the back of his neck, near the point where Eswild remembered him touching only a few moments ago. "Do you remember the feeling? The flow of warmth from my finger, to your head, and then down your arm to your fingers?"

Eswild nodded, suppressing the urge to shiver as she recalled the uncomfortable trail the heat had left along her spine and arm before leaving its lasting impression in her fingers. It had been unlike anything she had ever done in the smithy with her Knack. Only, calling it "Knack" now felt as strange and foreign as had the stranger's fingers upon her neck.

Magic, she reminded herself. Call it by its name.

Not that its proper name changed her lack of understanding as to how or why she had been able to use magic in the forge, or how despite every sign pointing to it being a one-sided effort the stranger had claimed it was from both him and Eswild. Still, she was too curious to raise an objection - something told her the stranger was as indirect as he was mercurial.

"I remember it, but I don't know as I've ever thought about it when I was just messing with the temperature of the forge," she admitted. "None of it was ever conscious, just like it wasn't now."

"That's fine," the stranger replied, still seeming completely unconcerned with the fact that Eswild had just told him she had absolutely no idea what she was doing.

"But then how do I do any of it?" She interjected, curiosity becoming agitation. "If I can't replicate the whole process, then how do I start the damn thing?"

The stranger's expression momentarily stiffened. "Patience," he said, and despite the fact that the words were spoken as mildly as anything else he said, Eswild was intimately aware of the fact that he was scolding her. "You start, like all processes, with the first step. Even though you are incredibly talented, nothing will happen instantaneously."

The stranger went silent again, simply staring at her, and Eswild felt the urge to question him again suppressed under the heaviness of his gaze. Was this another test? Did he want her to somehow figure it out on her own? Or was he simply making sure she could be 'patient'?

After they'd both sat in silence for a few moments, Eswild having to resist the urge to fidget on the spot, he nodded slightly. "As long as you remember the feeling, you'll be able to start working on the first step. Before you can do anything intentionally, you need to get familiar with the feeling of drawing mana from the outside world into your mana core. It is the essential point for all magic, which allows your thoughts to interact with and influence mana.

"The reason I call you talented is because you have a great ability to direct mana with your unconscious desires and thoughts. Otherwise, you never would have been able to affect the outside world with the highly limited amount of fire mana from the forge that just happened to overlap with your core. But you'll never be able to independently do anything larger than getting heat to linger in an area until you can intentionally draw mana to your core. That is the first step."

"But then how do I do that, intentionally?" She asked - her tone was less aggressive, having realized the stranger's patience did indeed have its limits, but there was a terseness to it that lingered. "It just felt like you were doing it all - I didn't even realize there was mana flowing through me, other than feeling the heat go through my arm like that."

"Concentration." If it wasn't for the fact that his face was still completely serious, Eswild would have sworn the stranger was laughing at her. "Practice. Trial and error. Combined with a suitable environment and occasional verbal direction. Mana cores are naturally attractive to mana, so I'm sure you'll figure it out in no time."

This time he smiled for real, before jerking his head towards the side of the room. "Go sit in front of the fireplace, close your eyes, and focus on remembering the feeling of mana flowing into your head. If you have any specific questions that you think would help you, ask. But you can keep anything as vague as 'what am I supposed to do' to yourself."

It was not the answer Eswild was hoping for, though she supposed that magic was not as easily explained as smithing. Melting and bending metal was simple enough to teach - it could be touched, it responded to external force, and all could tell iron from copper. But concentrate? Concentrate on what? Eswild's frustration was palpable, and made worse by the realization that the question 'concentrate on what' likely fell into the category of questions to keep to herself.

So it was, without another word, Eswild stood and trudged over to the fireplace. Where once she had seen it and seen a quaint, comfortable fireplace now it was just like any lump of metal to be shaped into a usable form. It was an object to be beaten into submission and bent to her will, not a fixture of the dwelling. Eswild sat cross-legged by the fireplace, staring at it intently. It flickered brightly, the sounds of crackling logs beneath its tendrils like the screech of steel upon steel to Eswild. The hair upon her arms bristled in agitation at the sound as she tried to drown it out, focusing on the way the stranger's touch had felt along her neck. That the fire was itself radiating heat made it difficult to tell when and if she was concentrating 'properly', but she had a feeling that she would know when at last it was working.

 

[Peregrine]

The strangers words about patience came true all too quickly. He intterupted Eswild's 'meditation' after only fifteen minutes had passed, telling her to go outside, take a quick walk, and come back with wood to feed the fire. When she came back, a light snack of sweet fruit was present on the table. He invited her to eat some, while he brought the wood she'd gathered over to the fire. Only when she seemed done with the fruit did he tell her to sit back down and feed it slowly, concentrating on putting in just enough wood that the top of the flame would lick at a dark band on the inside of the hearth that hadn't been there a few minutes ago.

They once again continued like that for fifteen minutes, or just over, until almost all the small pieces of wood Eswild had brought were consumed. He once again had her stand up, and told her to do whatever she wanted for a half hour.

And that was how they went on for three days. The stranger provided her with regular, high quality meals, made sure she got to sleep at a reasonable hour, and often let her sleep in far, far later than she ever would have been able to at the forge. When they were sitting in front of the fire, he seemed almost clinically precise with the time, sending her to do something else after somewhere between fifteen minutes to half an hour, when she started to get distracted and fidgity. Her ability to concentrate on the flame was clearly priority, but he also gave her hardly any true free time in the middle. Every time she came back, it would be with some other exercise.

Once he spoke to her, his words seeming oddly undirected. He talked about its color at times, before suddenly switching to the sound, the way it would snap suddenly when it found a pocket of sap, only to once again switch to the smell of smoke, which managed to drift into their room even as most of it flowed up the chimney.

Another time, he had her position herself in front of the fire, moving backwards and forward to keep it so that she could feel the heat of the flame on her skin with a certain level of intensity, even as the amount of flame dipped and rose under the stranger's control

And throughout it all, he showed no signs of impatience at Eswild's apparent lack of progress, even going so far as to call it "perfectly normal". As a matter of fact, he seemed quite comfortable with the whole situation, as though no time was passing at all. If it wasn't for the fact that it was possible to occasionally find him sitting somewhere else in the house other than the table, it might have seemed as though he never even moved, creating the illusion that time wasn't even passing around them anymore.

The forest around them stayed equally peaceful and quiet, unintruded upon. Let alone the dangerous beasts that had flooded through the area only a few days ago, there wasn't even a sign of normal predators, either because they simply weren't in the area, or perhaps because the stranger had done something to lead them away.

Of course, it didn't seem like he was paying that much attention to the outside world. Instead, most of the effort he spent was directed towards Eswild. His level of precision with her never varied, and he seemed to be devoting all of his concentration to coming up with other, unusual exercises to do that kept Eswild focusing on various aspects of the flame.

Perhaps ironically, considering the origin of her Knack, the only thing he didn't let her do was attempt to forge near the fire. She could feed it, study it, smother it, play with it. Anything but work with metal around it. The only explination he offered was that he needed to break her 'habit of passivity', whever exactly that meant.

And he was honest with his promise, giving answer to any of Eswild's questions that also weren't primarily vague in nature. Despite his seemingly purposeless pursiuts, he was not inclined towards idle chatter, unless Eswild herself engaged him in such a manner during her free time. Even then, he wouldn't talk about magic during those moments, instead only willing to remind Eswild that she was supposed to be taking a break.

If ever a crash course in magic existed, it would probably look just like this.

 

[ze_kraken]

Learning magic was unlike anything Eswild had imagined it to be. When she had heard stories of mages learning the art in their ivory towers in the cities, she had imagined what something much like the image of mages that had been burned into her mind walking about great libraries in robes and stroking their beards. She had imagined fireballs and arcs of lightning being flung about, and spirited discussion and lecture that would distract her sometimes from the dinging and clinging of the forges whenever a mage came through town. With the exception of the stranger's proclivity for flowing garments and full beard, there was little about his instruction that fit what Eswild had held to be true of learning magic.

And the process, despite being totally unlike anything the grand, romanticized image Eswild had conjured for herself, was utterly bizarre when compared to the only other training Eswild could use as reference. As she went about the motions of the stranger's instruction, taking breaks when instructed, eating when food was laid out, sleeping as late as he allowed, she was growing frustrated with a lack of visible progress. Even learning smithing had yielded concrete results faster than this - her first arrowhead had been an ugly thing, and would have struggled to piece even a tunic, but it was a physical record.

Each day Eswild would rise, and rise each she would meditate before the fire. She studied the way it moved, the types of shadows it left while it danced and flickered in the fireplace, the smell of smoke it trailed that clung in her nostrils. She watched how the larger logs would fracture when the heat was strong enough, and the ashes the fire left behind. She began cutting logs more consistently, so that the variations in burn time might even out. When called upon to smother the flame, she did so with sand, with water, and with an iron cookpot that would snuff the fire's fuel.

Eswild even dreamed of fire when at last she went to sleep - she imagined it in mighty braziers, burning cities, cooking food. When she woke, it was to thoughts of ash and smoke and bitter, biting orange tongues of flame. By the third day, smoke was all she smelled and even the food - the likes of which Eswild could have only imagined being able to afford just a week earlier - the stranger had prepared became tinged with a touch of ash.

Even when the stranger did speak and pull Eswild from her meditations and studies of the fireplace, it seemed the stranger's notion of supplementing her studies of fire was with yet more things to do with it. Not even when she was a blacksmith did Eswild spend so much time studying fire for its own sake. It was just a tool, one as important as the ones she had kept tucked in her leather apron. But now the tool had become not just a means to an end, but the end itself, it seemed.

So it was at the end of her third day of study as she and the stranger sat by the table, Eswild enjoying a meal comprised of bread, cheese, and meat, she finally stated her uncertainty and displeasure.

"So what is it I'm supposed to be learning by doing all this?" She asked, not unpolitely, as she wiped clean her chin with a length of cloth by her utensils, more questions bubbling over and following the first. "And is this how you learned? How long did it take you to start doing anything?"

 

[Peregrine]

"You are learning fire," the stranger responded, sounding as though he'd prepared an answer to this question a long time ago, and was vaguely surprised she was only asking it now. "It's nature, its character, its habits. If I had to summarize it to just one thing, you are trying to learn the true essence of fire."

He lifted a hand in front of him, palm facing inwards. As though a phantasmal illusion, flames began to flicker in the gaps of his fingers. The stranger stared at it in an offhand manner, as though he was really looking at something else, and the fire on his hand simply happened to get in the way. "Unfortunately, a thing's essence has nothing to do with its outward characteristics. It's not a thing you can observe, a thing you can point to, or a thing you can explain. Equally unfortunately, we have no way to learn about the essence of a thing except to observe its outward characteristics, and continue to try until we simply stumble upon the truth, as though by chance or fate."

His hand dropped, both fingers and flames vanishing beneath the table. With an empty hand, he gestured around the room. The bookshelves that had been empty only moments ago were suddenly filled to the brim with books of all manner. Some thin, some thick, some bound heavily, some made of such delicate material that it looked as though they might fall apart at the faintest touch. Despite the fact that they numbered in the hundreds, or even thousands, there hardly seemed a common script between them.

"This is not how I was taught. I began my apprenticeship at the age of 8, when it was proved that I had some measure of magical talent. I succeeded in casting my first spell 7 years later, at the age of 15."

The stranger laughed slightly at the expression that crossed Eswild's face, his expression a mixture of sardonic humor and self-disdain. "It will not take you that long, no matter what method you use. For one, you have much more innate potential than I ever did. For another, you have access to one of the most skilled mages in existence to be your teacher." Despite the fact that the stranger's words should have been taken as a shameless boast, he said it in such a matter-of-fact manner that it transformed from a boast into pure statement-of-fact.

"However, my method is designed to raise the probability of a realization of essence. You may consider it the exact opposite of how I was trained; a method that favors practicality over theory."

For a moment, a smile cracked the stranger's austere expression. "Of course, if you'd prefer more classical training, I can find an appropriate book, and come back in two weeks to a month to see how well you've memorized the information."

 

[ze_kraken]

Eswild's cheeks flushed in pleasure at the compliment, even if she privately doubted her skill dwarfed the stranger's. The thought of going from a tingling warmth in her fingertips to conjuring houses from trees and food from...

From where? She thought, train of thought slipping from its route as she considered the platter of nearly-finished food before her. The question lingered for a moment, and the question had formed at the tip of her tongue before she thought better of it and stayed her question. It made no difference where the food came from: asking that now would be akin to asking Gillam how to melt bronze during a demonstration about working iron. Besides, left to her own devices with nothing but constant food and little to do besides sit and contemplate, she had begun to feel the harsh edges of her arms soften from lack of use. Perhaps learning to conjure food would be a talent best left unlearned for now.

"If I'm just learning about a fire's essence to control it," Eswild started, biting her lip in equal parts concentration on her words and confusion as to their implication, "then how is it you came to learn all that you did? Did you have to learn how a tree behaves? How stones behave? Where did you get the time to learn that all? "

"I did," the stranger agreed casually. It was impossible for Eswild to guess if he was ignoring her building anxiety, or truly oblivious to it. "There is no shortcut to controlling mana yourself, without comprehending its essence."

A moment later, and his expression softened slightly, gazing at her with something that she might have guessed was grandfatherly nostalgia, if it wasn't for the fact that he looked to be in his late twenties.

"The first step is always the hardest, Eswild."

Was this the first time he'd ever said her name? Had she ever even introduced herself to him?

"As soon as you get the feel for it, you'll progress quickly through the next stages. I promise."

Eswild nodded, almost absentmindedly as she pondered over his answer. Whether this man - if man he truly was one at all - was a god, or a character conjured straight from the pages of some story, or something else entirely she did not know. Did not care, even. Whatever the truth of the Stranger, she wanted little to do with it. Mystery and magic rarely made for a combination that led to a long life, Eswild wagered, and once she had learned what she needed to or gathered an idea of what to do next she would leave this tree.

And where would you go? She nagged herself as she finished her meal. What would you do? You are not a blacksmith proper, nor are you a mage.

Eswild cast those lurking thoughts aside and excused herself from the table, bidding the Stranger good night. She tucked her chair in, a habit she had picked up after observing the Stranger's own insistence upon it, and went to the fire. It was often the case that, after their evening meal, she would spend a few more hours yet sussing out what she could from the flames. Only, this night was more unproductive to her understanding perhaps than ever.

Blankly she stared at the flickering flames, seeing nothing in them but orange and red and yellow tinged in smoke. Her mind ran with the understanding now that learning magic was a fundamentally droll undertaking, and in equal parts dreaded the labor yet eagerly awaited the payoff. If only that were soon in arriving, she thought bitterly. Though the Stranger's words had comforted her, she felt no closer to that same rush of magic she had felt days ago even after her meditations and went to bed frustrated, yearning for the day to arrive soon where she might conjure a feat even a tenth as mighty as the Stranger...

 

[Peregrine]

Day after day and night after night, time passed.

The stranger watched Eswild's frustration like one might watch the tide, rolling in and out with the gradual turning of the world. And, just like the tide, he seemed to treat it as a natural phenomenon, something to be observed and adjusted around, but never controlled or attempted to thwart. He soothed her when it was necessary, ignored her when it was necessary, and schooled her to task when it was necessary.

All for an elusive goal that Eswild seemed as incapable of reaching weeks in as she had that first morning she'd sat in front of the fire.

Yet the stranger seemed to consider that natural, too. One particular evening, when Eswild seemed prepared to storm out of their strange little tree-home and blow the whole thing off as a bad job or, even worse, as a bad joke, the stranger finally let slip that he could have forced the issue at any point after the first couple days. Although he did not state it so explicitly, Eswild was eventually able to interpret his vague language into the conclusion that he was capable of shaping something about her in the same way Gillam could shape a lump of iron, to make it so that the realization she was so desperately waiting for was pressed onto her, whether she was ready for it or not.

The stranger's expression made it clear that such an undertaking could not be treated as a light matter.

"The number of people who have realized this are few," he said. "But a person doesn't become a mage by the way they do things. A true mage is born from the way they look at things. From the way they perceive and understand the world.

"A master blacksmith becomes such when they are capable of shaping metal to their will, making things with metal that seem impossible. But a mage is not a true mage when they are able to bend fire or soil to their will in the same manner. You can only become a master mage when you are in connection with everything, and there is no separation between yourself and the essence of your surroundings."

Not that such a description did anything to help her now. Eswild didn't even qualify as an apprentice yet.

Despite the fact that he never pressured her, nor seemed to actually expect her to accomplish anything in any length of time, it gradually appeared that the stranger's expectations for Eswild were far higher than she'd ever presumed. He wasn't simply expecting her to learn how to control fire. He genuinely believed she would one day reach his level, and everything he was teaching her was in preparation for those later stages. Worse yet, other than his strange teaching methods, it hardly seemed that he was putting any effort into actively trying to make it happen. Instead, he waited, silent and still, as though her arrival at that point was somehow inevitable.

The second time Eswild almost walked out, the stranger did nothing to stop her. When she returned many hours later, he treated it as though she'd only gone for one of her short walks around the tree's clearing. It only made their relationship more confusing. Did he have expectations for her, or didn't he? Was he just going to let her walk away? Would he do anything to stop her if she truly tried to part ways? Why was he teaching her, if what he was doing could even really be called teaching? At the very least, it was clear that she wasn't going to be able to trick or tempt him into helping her out the way he'd once, briefly, described. If she wanted this, she'd have to earn it herself.

Sometimes it seemed impossible to keep track of time within the tree, or around the stranger. Despite Eswild's attempts to count how many times she'd gone to sleep, how many days she'd spent playing the stranger's games in front of the fire, somewhere in there she'd lost count. It had certainly been more than a couple dozen. Maybe even more than a month's worth. Surely not two. Surely not.

But the fire in front of her hadn't changed, and it was as though Eswild's dreams of smoke and flame had materialized in front of her, and she could no longer tell if she was awake or asleep. The fire had become impossibly vivid in front of her, but she was no longer focused on it. She could not.

Despite the distance between her body and the hearth, it was as though the flame was burning inside her. Burning her mind and body, consuming every trace of thought or presence, everything inside her that wasn't already fire.

And then fire was all that was left, while heat rushed into her head.

 

[ze_kraken]

Weeks passed in what Eswild could only call stewing discontent, for it lingered without a trace behind the shallowest traces of her mind with hardly a bubble to break upon its surface. But all the while it grew deeper as day after day was spent studying the fire. The list of substances to pour onto fire or set ablaze was running short, even with the aid of the Stranger who seemed capable of simply magicking anything into existence like he did their daily meals.

No, not our meals, my meals, Eswild reminded herself, for she had still never seen the Stranger take a bite of food.

There were days when the stewing became a simmer - such as when she thought she had been feeling the pull of magic, only to find that the heat between her fingers had been caused by drifting too close to the blaze. Other days her mind stood as blank as slate when presented with the flames, which would more often than not end in the Stranger tapping her on the shoulder and guiding her off to one of their many joint exercises. It became increasingly clear to Eswild that though her progress was as virtually nonexistent as the Stranger's appetite she had been unwittingly complicit in the growing weight of her own burdens.

How was she, an uneducated whelp from some backwater town raised in the back room of a blacksmith, ever to come remotely close to conjuring something from nothing when she had barely scraped the surface of the element from which her Knack had been born? On such occasions she expressed her dissatisfaction to the Stranger, he was as frustratingly understanding as he was demanding, insisting she simply try harder and trust the process to make true her own talent. On the other occasions when she simply left their dwelling, he made no move to stop her or call her back, acting as if nothing were amiss upon her return.

By the fourth week, as best to Eswild's count which had been wildly inconsistent and often drifted anywhere from fourteen to forty days, she was beginning to doubt the existence of any talent at all. She awoke, dressed herself, and took a one-sided breakfast with the Stranger after which she sat for her morning meditation in front of the fireplace. The sounds of crackling wood were as familiar as a parent's voice upon her ears, each snap a warm remark, each pop a well-worn jest. She closed her eyes and listened for a moment, hands outstretched to feel the warmth of the flames bring fresh life into her fingertips, tingling as rushing blood began to push back the stiff chill from the morning.

Only, the burning did not stop at her fingertips this morning. Frustrated, Eswild opened an eye to see how close she had planted herself to the flames only to find that she sat as she often did at roughly three paces from the fireplace. The sensation pulsed through her, incinerating all it came across, and try as she might Eswild could not cry out in pain, though the last lingering part of her mind doubted if there even was any to begin with. When her eyes adjusted to the sudden surge of energy they were teary at the corners, and as she examined her hands she saw not a trace of the fire she thought had consumed her.

"What..." She whispered, turning her hands over, a burning heat still lingering between her fingers and pulsing and crackling with the same chaotic pattern of the actual fire before her.

"I... I think I did something!" She exclaimed, voice laced in a reserved note of excitement. "I... I can feel the fire between my hands like... like I did the first time!"

 

[Peregrine]

The stranger was seated on the wooden chair at the table, in the exact same place where he was waiting every time Eswild came down from upstairs, or back from one of her walks. Despite the days or weeks that had passed, he never seemed to weary of that position, sitting casually with his legs spread in front of him, ankles crossed over each other.

Perhaps if he'd been sitting in one of the seats near the bookshelves, legs folded in meditation like a monk, it would have better preserved his image as a mysterious expert. But, if he paid any consideration to such things, it certainly never came through in the time he spent with Eswild.

At the sound of her words, the stranger stirred.

He moved quickly from his seat over to Eswild, who was still kneeling in front of the fireplace. A moment later, he was seated beside her, one hand taking hers, fingers probing the flesh of her hand. His other came to rest on her shoulder, halfway towards her neck.

A small smile flickered across his lips. "You did," he agreed, voice somehow sounding more indulgent than praising. Yet praise he did, at least for a moment.

"Well done. Keep that feeling in mind, don't let it just fly away. Concentrate on it. Call for it, and then hold it. That will draw the fire mana, and store it in your core."