You know, it’s sometimes nice to be told that people value you, that you have some kind of innate worth that makes you special in some way. It’s nice to know that you are the main character of your own story and that you are meaningful in some way.

But being told that people want to kill you and turn your soul into a capacitor is pretty dark. I also knew that this was supposed to be a serious moment, but I looked her in the eye and said “I know Kung Fu.”

She nodded, and then said, “Good. Some of the techniques from sorcery are useful, but so are some of the ones from cultivation. Knowing a martial art will help keep you alive while you are training, but you have to remember that you will never use magic as a sorcerer or techniques like a cultivator. Your gifts lie elsewhere.”

Yeah, I didn’t expect her to catch the reference. “So where exactly do my gifts lie, then? And where do we go from here if I am so broken?”

She smiled, “I am not a channeler. I am a druid, and I am very new at it. My gifts lie in healing and interpreting the world, and while I cannot train you in how to use your gifts, I am reasonably capable of telling you when you are going the wrong way. Your gifts, from what I understand, lie not in projecting magic nor in using it to exclusively enhance your abilities, but in creation. Have you tried creating anything yet?”

I nodded, “Yep, I made some armor and a few meals.” I shrugged, “And a few medicines. Not alchemy or anything, just some creams and teas.”

She nodded, “And have you noticed anything strange about them?”

I nodded, “Yes, they seem to provide some pretty decent enhancements, and the way I make them, they sort of ignore the level rules that the band system imposes.”

She nodded, “That’s exactly what I mean. Your magic lies in creation, construction, and invention. Yes, others can do it as well, especially sorcerers, but channelers have a special facility with magical innovation that others do not possess. Your skills can be enhanced magically to create new effects or take the existing effects to an entirely different level. If you were to craft armor, for example, you would not only be able to gain entirely new effects from the creation process and materials you use, but you could also instinctively build new enchantments into it that simply do not work the same way that sorcerers enchant objects.”

I coughed, turning a bit bluer. “Yes, that is… slightly older news. I started figuring out how to assign meaning to knots, and was able to make armor that I improved by knotting magic into it.” I held up the edge of the shirt where I had stitched knots into the edges.

She smiled a little, “That is exactly what I mean. From what I have seen, you have pools of aspect floating, separated from your core. Channelers do not separate their aspects and reinforce them, that is a mage trick that they use to build those aspects stronger. Instead, you merge those into your core and use them to reinforce and strengthen the whole. You can send aspect mana along your meridians, like a cultivator, but if you attempted to permanently create a path of, say, fire chi from your core to your meridian, like a cultivator does, you would succeed only in creating a fire effect between your core and your meridian. You wouldn’t be reinforcing your pathways, you’d be burning your arm off.”

I nodded, and then remembered the scroll I had received. “Would you excuse me while I meditate?” I asked, “I think you may have given me something important to think about.”

She nodded, and sat down on her bedroll, cross-legged, looking like she was ready to meditate herself.

I dived into my soul space and started looking around. Mnemosyne was not immediately visible, so I crossed the bridge into the manor.

She was sitting at what looked like a maple table, her head in her hands. “I am sorry.” she said, “I only know what I have been trained for. You didn’t have to take her oath. You didn’t DO anything. I had no idea that the evolution would affect you that way, I just thought that intellectual maturity would make it easier for you to concentrate on casting spells.”

I nodded, “I know I didn’t do anything, but I could have. In my mind, at some point, I had DECIDED to do something awful. Yes, it was a great thing that I was prevented from doing what I had decided to do, but I still need to address my decision. I may have been unstable, but I probably could have screamed for help or for someone to hold me down, instead, I took off running.”

I sighed and sat down at the table. “I tried to take off in a safe direction, which was a good thing, but I still have to do some work to make myself feel better. I cannot forgive myself for my decision until I pay for it somehow.”

She shook her head, “You do know that when Kalika was talking about you dishonoring her, she was not talking about you running at her like a rutting buck, right?”

I raised an eye ridge at her, “Umm… no? That seemed a pretty damned dishonorable thing to do.”

Mnemosyne sighed deeply. “No. you startled her enough that she discharged the scent glands at the base of her spine. It’s an emergency response to stress that creates a massive cloud of… stink, used for defense. The thing is, it gets on everything. You still kind of smell like it, but kobolds are extremely good at screening out odors that are irrelevant, and she dumped a potion on you and herself that cuts the smell enormously. For the next several weeks, though, if she goes anywhere near another swamp elf, they are going to smell it and know that she lost control.”

“That was why she was so upset. Losing control like that, for her, was worse than you losing control of your bladder from fear. Porous materials will keep that stink forever, which means most of her clothes and gear have to be discarded, and for the next couple of weeks, any NEW gear she gets will pick it up from her body, and the whiff will be discernable for at least a month. She doesn’t dare go near any Winnowrill settlements, because the only time it’s excusable to cut loose is when you are dying or in a major battle.”

“It’s called the war stink, and it’s not only unpleasant to her and others, but it will also cause concern… everyone will ask her what happened, and without a wound to show for it, She will have to admit that she lost control. Winnowrills are taught to control the war stink before they hit puberty and it ferments, so it will be like she is still a child. An unruly, undisciplined, uncontrolled child. If she could claim a dangerous kill, that would make it more acceptable, but you… are not a dangerous kill.”

I sighed, scratching my head. “I know how I can help, then. If I can get her some self-cleaning clothing, it should work out the smell on its own. But I already took the oath. At the very least, though, she seems to have a lot of good information that I do not have, and it won’t interfere with what I am doing, I think.”

Mnemosyne shook her head, “It won’t work right now. Perhaps in a week, but for now, it is too fresh. And as far as her information, I honestly know nothing about living channelers. I was trying to direct you like you were a mage because that is what I know, but I am well aware that it wasn’t working very well. By this point, you should have, at the very least, been able to create frost breath or some other spells based on your affinity, and the number of secondary affinities you seemed to have was amazing, but now I am not sure if those are affinities at all, or if separating them made them much weaker and harder to use.”

She looked at me piercingly. “The only thing close to a channeler is a dungeon core, and I am not the right kind of fairy to help a dungeon core. Lily’s fairy probably could have helped you far more than I could. I do need to tell you something though. Something about Flame.”

I looked at her curiously, “What about Flame?” I asked.

“Flame is a goddess. Gods very seldom care about mortals, what they care about is their goals. Flame didn’t assign me to you because her heart bled in sympathy, she assigned me because it suited her ends. She is considered a sympathetic god, but that is only because her followers can do things for her. You have the potential to create a new, unknown kind of magic, and break the lockdown on new magic that the Dracons have created, but it is every bit as likely that she supported the gnome who initially created the bands because he was doing new, unique things with old, useless spells that no one had done before. Her power, and her goal, are directly related to the expansion and growth of magic, in all of its forms. That is something you really need to know about gods. Mortal lives are nearly meaningless compared to their domains.”

I nodded at her words, and she continued, “Some gods care about their followers, but that is because their domains ARE their followers, such as the Drake. Dragons are very rare, thus every Dragon that pays their respects to him is of vital importance. Not because he loves them, but because they are his power base. Flame is sort of neutral, and her followers are of all sorts, from manipulative mind mages that are the ultimate narcissists to the holy avengers who worship the one God but consider her the patron saint of the magic they use to purify the unclean. My job is to help you, but more importantly, it is to get as many new magical concepts out of you as possible.”

She sighed and hung her head on her hands, staring down into the table while her wings flicked slightly. “If you would like, we can try to find you a new familiar, perhaps a spirit that can help you more or a dungeon fairy that survived the death of her dungeon?”

I was confused, “Why would I do that?”

She lifted her head, red hair spilling out of her hands, “Because they would know more about how channeling works. All I can do is help you with magic systems, that’s all I know. I mean, I might be able to give you helpful advice with your knots, but I translate draconic and the patterns I learned for casting are pretty much worthless.”

I nodded, spinning on my stool a little bit, “And can you learn more?” I asked.

She nodded, lifting both hands up in a slightly baffled gesture. “Of course, but I don’t have any experience with that kind of magic. I mean, sure, I can learn, but I would be learning at the same time as you.”

I leaned forward and tapped my finger on the table. “You have helped me a lot, and I trust you. I trust you, and I don’t give my trust easily. I’d rather have you than some genius that can help me unlock phenomenal cosmic power any day of the week.” I leaned back a little, tossing my hands. “Someone I can trust is worth far more to me than some expert that I know nothing about. So we learn about it together. You may not know channeling, but you know me, and I already cut a deal with a teacher who might know a little more about it.”

She smiled brightly and I realized that I was a little less immune to her charms now, dammit. Stop fantasizing. I pulled out the scroll and spread it out on the table, looking at the whirs and diagrams, and the indecipherable instructions, in a new light. “I think I may have figured out what part of this means,” I said, smiling and tracing the lines.

“See, it was the coils that were throwing me off. The diagrams look NOTHING like what my soul space looks like because it has no space for the coiled aspects. It also doesn’t look anything like what a cultivator would use, because there are no connections for aspects into the meridians. It looks a lot more like, instead of feeding the power from the meridians, the first step is to set up some kind of patterns around the meridians, and then draw energy FROM them.”

She nodded, looking closely at the diagrams, “Yes, and if you think of each set of diagrams as a discrete step, it gets a lot simpler. These,” she brushed a finger along the meridian marks, “almost look like you were supposed to extend the quintessence into your meridians, like what we did for the cultivation, but it looks like you are supposed to draw quintessence out, in strands, and set them spinning, sort of like your core spins.”

She looked very thoughtful. “They seem to extend past your aura. Can you do that?”

I shrugged, “I haven’t been able to do it yet unless I had something to extend them into, but maybe that’s the point of the spinning? Sort of a centripetal force that holds the quintessence strands away from me? I don’t understand it, and it will only work if we try to get rid of the aspects. Because it looks like the meridians brush the essence directly off to my core, which is doing much the same thing. If the aspects are still orbiting, they will brush right through the quintessence strands, and maybe disrupt them?”

I hated the idea of losing those strands of aspects. I was really, truly almost to the point where I could use [altered] cold aspect to heat a pan enough to cook without a fire, and I had been looking forward to simulating an oven. Then again, Mnemosyne’s space had an oven, and I might be able to use it to bake what I wanted.

“Thank you Mnemosyne, I think I have what I need for right now. I am going to ask Kalika what she thinks and then see if I can do this.”

At her nod, I smiled and moved back into the real world with the scroll. I could still envision my soul space and the strands of essence threaded throughout, and I guessed I would need both it and my real body to do this.

I opened the scroll as I came out of my space, and Kalika’s eyes opened. She looked at the scroll and almost recoiled in shock, “Where did you get this?” she asked loudly.

I shrugged, “It was a reward from a dungeon. I have sorta started decoding it, but it didn’t fit with the magic Mnemosyne was trying to teach me or the cultivation patterns I thought I needed, so until now I wasn’t able to make much sense of it.”

Kalika's ears flickered interestedly, “It looks like one of our druidic scrolls. The patterns are similar, but the ones we have are for establishing energy patterns in forests and natural flows, but for an individual like this one is. It doesn’t match my understanding, even though it looks very similar, are you able to comprehend it?”

I pointed at the first of the diagrams. “This one I think I can. The other ones… well, they look somewhat similar but are way more complex, and I don’t even know where to begin. But this one will work, I hope?”

She nodded, “These are like our diagrams, but they are also very much like a cultivator’s energy manual. It does not look like they are designed around separate aspects, though. Channelers do not draw on aspects, they draw FROM them, and then create them. I can help you get started, but you are going to have to break these down yourself. Do you understand the aspects you have to draw on?”

I thought about it for a moment.

Mnemosyne, we have been breaking down draconic verbs. Do we have the nouns for these aspects? Or for other aspects?”

Oh yes, you have a decent knowledge of many, many draconic nouns. Draconic nouns are very easy since once you understand a concept, the noun is nowhere nearly as dramatic an effect on your mind as trying to comprehend a new verb. You might not have even noticed, but your character sheet is IN draconic.

I looked closely at my sheet. Holy moly, she was utterly right! Each of the words was in my ‘knot’ version of draconic, which, feeding energy into each skill, I hadn’t even realized involved threading that knot. The funny thing is, Draconic did NOT have a written form, apparently I had created each knot without even thinking about it, or noticing that the labels were not in English. I KNEW my survival skills, and how they worked, and each aspect, and how it worked, so using the term for it, or at least my knot for the term, hadn’t hurt in the slightest.

A lot of the knots didn’t even correspond with a word in draconic, for concepts that just made no sense to an ancient dragon. ‘creating a fire’, while important to survival, was trivial or irrelevant to a dragon, so process nouns were more or less made up by me corresponding to my understanding of the process.

“As far as I can tell, yes. The aspects are not even that complicated once you know how they work. Is that important?”

She nodded, and then said, “Let’s try something simple. Something any dungeon core can do. Bear in mind, dungeon cores have a huge advantage over you, because they can arrange their memories for substances as individual memories and learn anything they can absorb, and they can be gifted certain bits of knowledge without even having to be exposed to them.”

I nodded, looking at my circling essence rings.

“Ignore the aspects. Think about, say. Sand. Do you understand how sand is constructed? What it is made of?”

I nodded, “Yes, the simplest sort of sand is made out of very tiny pellets of silicon, calcium, and gypsum, silicon is simply Si, or atomic 14, and gypsum is calcium sulfate dihydrate or sulfur and calcium linked to 2h2o.”

She shrugged almost imperceptably, “I don’t know. I know what it feels like, but whatever language you are speaking is confusing. But whatever, I want you to extend essence into the palm of your hand, and think about sand, to the best of your understanding.

I nodded, and put my hand in front of me. I carefully started extending a thread of essence outwards from my core, and then split it, adding a knot for each of the most common elements of sand.

The coil of earth flashed along the bond as it formed, and with a cry, I felt the most horrible sensation of the skin and flesh of my palm altering and crumbling away as sand. I cut off the energy flow instantly and cradled my hand, where blood was pulsing to the surface of my peeled palm.

She pursed her lips and shook her head. “That is why you cannot have the aspects floating uncontrolled in your energy pattern.” she took my hand, and whispered something, and I felt a cooling, soothing sensation as the flesh of my hand quickly healed, building up new layers of muscles and skin, It was amazing to watch, and I almost forgot about the pain. After a few moments, the new flesh sort of ached, but it was tolerable. I was still covered in blood, but I would survive.

“You cut off your energy quickly. Regrowing your hand would have been much more difficult. I don’t know how to tell you to do this, but you need to use the essence in your core to absorb those spirals you have created. You convert them into a higher form of essence, rather than using them as a mage does. Magic users do not create new kinds of aspects, they convert them based on their affinity, and enhance them. This can make them extraordinarily powerful since it is much easier to modify what already exists than it is to build anew, but it is not your gift.”

I sighed. “This going to hurt, isn’t it?”

She nodded, “I did warn you. For right now, though, we are both tired and need to eat and rest. Controlling energy requires you to use energy, and for that, you need to remain healthy. Do not concern yourself overmuch with night security, I have spoken with the trees and they will warn us if something approaches. Do you have food?”

I sighed and fished out some still-steaming kabobs from earlier that I had stashed in my nullspace. And offered some to her, she took it, and then carefully bit some of the meat and vegetables off of the twigs, smiling as she tasted it. Muahaha! The real power of channelers like me is the ability to conjure a smile!

I had no idea how to continue feeding my aspected mana to the utilities inside my soul space, but I figured that I would work it out when the time came. I turned in wondering exactly what the hell I was doing.

It turned out, replacing the aspected mana was fairly simple. I had to use raw essence, and then tie a knot corresponding to the noun, which was much easier than I expected. The next day, however, I had to extend essence to each of my aspects, and then use it to start shredding threads off of each of the spirals, and drawing it into my core. It felt more than a little like getting a third-degree sunburn, chasing it with a nice saltwater bath, and then having a brief rubdown on a sandy beach, just to make it stick.

“Is there a REASON we are staying here?” I gasped, as the shredding sensation eased slightly around noon the next day, my earth mana coil finally vanishing into the surface of my core. I did notice that as each coil got eaten, my core pulsed and grew. I could feel the power building, but not like when I had an overabundance of quintessence, it felt more like I had eaten a particularly large turkey dinner and needed a little time to digest it. It felt a little like I needed to vomit, but the sensation was not physical… if I could have spewed I probably would have.

“Yes, we are waiting for your friends. I have gotten three messages already that they are cutting their way through the Winnowrill, although, fortunately, they are being very careful not to assault any of the scouts. The cat, in particular, seems to be able to spy on our scouts no matter how well concealed they are. They should be here tonight.”

“I didn’t mean to inconvenience you,” I stated flatly and she shrugged. “Meaning or not, you did. But then, it was my fault as well, I lost control as much as you did. After they arrive, I will be going with you to direct you to a dungeon. This is not a friendly dungeon, it is a killer dungeon that has been stewing for two generations. The only reason it still is permitted to exist is that it is directly on the fastest path between here and Sindaenaway. When the city’s animals start digging too deep into the Winnowrill, we allow it to start spawning drakes, pseudodragon, and wyverns before we shut it down again.”

Well, that would certainly explain where all those darned drakes came from. “And why are we going there?” I asked wincing as the last of the temporal node was destroyed. I could still feel it, within my zone, but I had to wonder if that node connected to my zone was the main reason I started building traits in the first place. It was kind of like having a bad fighting habit from dealing with bullies, such as chest-bumping, and then carrying that habit into the dojo when you started learning how to fight for real. Getting into someone’s face might help you force your average teenaged punk to back down, but against a real fighter that just gives him a free shot at your most vulnerable spots.

We had already had breakfast, a tossed mushroom omelet using more of those special mushrooms I had found, some greens, a hint of salt and pepper, and slivered crispy fatty meat from the dire bear that had given us a resistance, movement, and experience buff for the day.

“Four reasons,” she outlined, “The first reason is that I cannot go home for quite some time. The second is because the dungeon is spawning and needs to be pruned before it grows out of control and must be destroyed, and the third is that a group of adventurers from Sindaenaway ruthlessly murdered the group of young adults that I was supposed to meet there to help gain essence and experience with. So now I am going in with my brand new acolyte, and his team that my people have NOT killed for trespassing in the swamps yet.”

She scowled for a moment, “The last reason is that you need to compress your core. The best place to do that is in a mana-rich environment like a dungeon. Your core is expanding, but right now it’s like a sponge that is entirely soaked with water. If your technique works, you will absorb essence far more efficiently, and you could rupture your core.”

“Compress my core?” I asked her curiously.

She rubbed the back of her neck, “Yes. I had to do the same thing. Most mana users have to do so. Of course, banded magic users don’t, their mana gets compressed at level 10 by their bands, so they generally have no idea what is happening, but for those who do NOT use the bands, we must make more room in our soul for improved storage of mana, unless we are happy with our current power level and want to spend the rest of our lives hovering around the same magical strength. Each stage of core compression is more difficult than the last, and most mages and druids eventually reach a plateau where they just cannot compress it any more, but I assume you are not ready to give up now?”

I shook my head and started doing stretch-katas. I didn’t want to move while I was consuming my rings, but ironically, once I started getting a good workout in, the burning sensation seemed to ease quite a bit. At my new size, I was a bit heavier than before, and that allowed me to start doing pushups again. After about two hundred of them, I felt something on my back.

I peered over my shoulder and noticed that Kalika had sat down on my upper back. Up close, I could tell what Mnemosyne had meant, her clothing, despite getting doused last night with whatever she used to cut down the scent, still faintly reeked. She waited for a moment until I had caught my balance and then tugged her legs up to sit zen-style once again, and I started doing pushups again. It was much better, having some real weight to work against since after connecting my quintessence to my meridians, my body weight wasn’t close to enough to make my muscles work.

I wanted to ask her about Aen, but she didn’t seem to like me, which I could understand, and asking someone questions about their religion seemed a bit like violating their privacy. Also, if I said something that she deemed as flip or disrespectful, I would probably find her weight replaced very quickly by a spear. In my experience, if a girl doesn’t like you, it’s best just to be friendly and competent for a while until they decide that you are not a creep. Trying to force friendliness just seemed to turn things unpleasant quickly, and while she seemed attractive enough, in my sober state she was about as appealing as flapjacks without any syrup.

After another fifty pushups, I was feeling a lot more stable and watched as the last traces of my frost aspect were absorbed into my core. “Alright,” I stated, lowering myself to the ground while she stood up. “I am now officially aspect free.”

She tilted her head slightly, “You are actually in a pretty good state. It looks like you have already trained in physical fitness and breathing, although your meditation is kind of bad. You use it as a method of accessing your core and have absolutely no essence draw whatsoever, but until you compress your core, the only thing we can do is teach you to use some of your essence. That method your scroll describes might be a useful way to draw in energy once you have room for it, but until then you need to learn to spend your essence efficiently.

I was considering offering to replace her buckskins, I had enough soft leather to do so, but I figured I should get to know her better first before I had to put my hands all over her for measurements. “The best way I have found to drain my energy is to create something, but making breakfast this morning didn’t exactly tap me.”

She nodded, “That’s why we are going to make sand again.” I winced, not looking forward to it.

“Try it again. This time, remember that you are not trying to push anything out. You are creating sand, not converting something else to sand. You don’t need any fancy magical commands, just run out your essence with the symbol for sand, and your mind is filled with the concept of sand, its feeling, its grit, its weight, its taste, and its smell. Every aspect, from the itchiness, when it gets caught between your clothing and your scales to the way it gives against your feet while you try to run through it.”

I nodded and closed my eyes. She had said ‘meditating’ instead of concentrating, which was an entirely different concept. I let the understanding of sand’s various components run through my mind, the way it would feel in my hands, flow over my fingers as it passed through them to the ground, and then extended a small bit of essence, barely an awareness of the strand of energy, extend to my hand. I winced a little, expecting the pain again, but then let the concept of pain roll past me and hide under my mind like so many other things.

In a moment I opened my eyes to see a handful of mixed grey basalt, silica, and calcium sand sliding through the fingers of both of my hands.