Chapter 4 Cyrano De Bensen

Timothy smirked as the little ones dug through a list of nasty jobs, each with the normal, if fairly low, pay of a non-skilled position. Something like a single stone coin, or a stone pound as it was called. Not much considering, but each task shouldn’t take a full four-hour shift and it paid the same whether they finished it in four hours or two. Not that pulling it off at the lower end was likely. Not without working experience or a grasp of magic that they didn’t have.

It made for an interesting change to standard jobs. Timothy had always hated standard workdays. Do twice as much work as the guy next to you? You still got paid the same for the same amount of time. It rewarded laziness and milking the clock. He'd promised himself that wouldn't recure here.

Instead, most work was piece work, from norms up through the top guardians. Finish X task get paid Y. With a few exceptions, like guard duty, people didn’t get paid for their time. They got paid for the results, and they themselves had to decide how much time they wanted to dedicate to getting those results. That meant that if they were desperate for money, they could spend 16 hours a day and likely pull down some serious cash. Even without magic or much in the way of skill. It would be a miserably exhausting day and keeping it up probably wouldn’t be healthy, but it could be done. Of course, between classes and sleep that wasn’t happening for his students, but even this lesser form should help them to understand how the best of the norms and norms and low-end guardians lived.

That by itself was a valuable lesson. But not the only one, he was hoping to hit many birds with one stone here. Hopefully living through the drudgery would motivate them enough to find out better ways to do these same tasks. At first, those ways wouldn’t even be magic. There were enough old men around still who could attest to that. Working with your hands took skill just like anything else. What muscles to use or how to use your balance to shift heavier loads easier, maybe something as simple as asking for a sled instead of carrying one sack at a time. From the obvious to the subtle, there was a lot to learn. And those old men would be sitting around, Timothy had made sure of that, just waiting to be asked. Ready and hoping to tell stories that included a lifetime's worth of wisdom.

That was the attitude they needed. Be willing to ask when there were experts and never be willing to just accept that a task could only be completed one way. In time, when they could start creating their own magic, that attitude would set them up for success.

They would thank him then. He snickered watching a few faces contorted in absolute disgust as they flipped over a compost heap, one shovel full at a time. Even if they were cursing now.

A deep boom rang out from the front doors. Timothy quickly flipped the minor scrying pool to show the doorstep. The waters showed Parkour dropping the ‘knocker’, a large drumstick of wood attached beside the door on a tether. A doorbell by any other name. He briefly melded his mind with the outer security enchantment and with a slight expenditure of will, retracted 6 essence stone locking pins.

“Enter!” Timothy called out. Glancing up briefly to watch the man limp in, shutting the single open leaf of the large double doors as he did, then redirected the pool back to the massive compost pile.

“So, how do you think they took to The Maze?” Timothy offered, flicking the pool over to a row of outhouses and the youngsters currently scrubbing them down. A bit of incense would be lit later to purify them beyond what water and a scrub brush could do. Until then the smell was likely quite offputting.

“Like you weren’t watching.” Parkour grumbled as he, one working foot or no, lightly hopped onto the dais.

Timothy briefly gestured and the stone to his right bulged up before stretching out into a crude but comfortable chair. “Of course, I was watching. That doesn’t mean I saw the same things as you. If you need your ego scratched you came to the wrong place, Parkour.”

“Alright, alright. I think the sensory dep lake might be too much. Incentivising isn’t the same thing as giving them a complex.”

“It’s your course. “ Timothy allowed, only to glance up in surprise at an emphatic snort.

“Come off it. I may have designed it, even did most of the digging and such, but most of the enchantments are yours. As is the nifty little miniature model that should let me modify it. The problem is I can only modify the portions of it that I actually understand. That lake? Not a damn clue.”

Timothy thought about that. It wouldn’t do to ignore the man's worries. If he decided to leave then Timothy would be stuck with even more work. “It is your course. Keep that foremost in your mind. Like you said, you designed it and I only helped you pull that design off. You have to figure out what you want to change. I flat don’t have time. If you do need help once that’s done, then hit me up. In this case, Drop by tomorrow after classes with your ideas and I’ll run you through the theory behind that particular enchantment, and if it's more extreme than a bit of theory I'll help you make the changes.”

Parkour stared at him for a moment, searching his face. Whatever he was looking for he must have found because he nodded and leaned back in his chair. “Alright. I’ll take a second look and come back with a few options. ‘Might just tone it down slightly. It’s such a trippy effect as it is that it would be a shame to remove it entirely.”

Timothy grinned widely as he nodded. He was rather proud of that effect himself. Isolation was a terrifying concept when used to an extreme. But a smaller dose could provide focus and improve memory. A strong stress reaction based on declining sensory input elevated the mind, making both the moment and the ones immediately preceding it stand out in their memories. It also removed those extraneous inputs and helped people to focus internally to escape nothingness. A great tool for introspection.

Of course, his grin faded, large doses weren’t so friendly. Without the input of the senses, humans wigged out. A very technical term, that. The conscious started running around like a chicken with its head cut off, smashing itself against the walls of the mind as it tried to reconnect to its absent senses. A self-repair feature perhaps? Timothy didn’t really understand why it happened. Just that it did, and the longer this state lasted the more fractured the mind became.

A fact Timothy knew intimately. So much so that he’d created a small mental illusion and memorized it. Not a physical enchantment but a temporary mental illusion that he could mentally recreate to provide a defense. A defense he hoped never to need. One such mistake was more than enough. The memory tried to rise up, reminding him of what the beginnings of a fractured mind could feel like.

He didn’t let it.

Still, suddenly he wasn’t in the mood to sit here and enjoy the outrage of his new students. Mentally he reached out through the linked defensive rune set and touched the sundial on the roof. It was a bit early but close enough. “Care for a bit of evening entertainment, Parkour?”

He narrowed his eyes, trying to divine what sort of trap this might be no doubt. “Am I going to regret saying yes?”

“Only if you run your mouth about it later. Loose lips, ships and all that.”

After a brief internal debate, barely visible on his face, curiosity won over caution. “Sure.”

Deftly adjusting the pool he activated the sympathetic connection to aim it back at its originator. The pool clouded over as usual, but the clouds did not clear, instead they began to storm, roiling and sparking in a way that gave premonitions of great danger. Timothy gestured, freezing Parkour in his seat as he, wisely perhaps given what he could feel, was already lunging away from the pool. He’d apologize after. The next bit was a bit fiddly and he didn’t need distractions. Activating a small rune he projected his intent into the storm, even though it was a storm that existed nowhere you could find by walking, and began to mold the lightning sparking through it. Some of it anyway. The lightning inside the clouds was malleable by design. The stuff outside was a weapon without a handle and one that would attempt to fry both him and this temporary pool if he didn’t disarm it quickly. He delicately drew the internal lighting into an elegantly complex rune. A rune he, ironically enough, had named privacy. As the rune formed the clouds retracted their lightnings and grudgingly separated. The sight of his original scrying room gave his flagging morale a boost all by itself.

The sight before him represented hundreds of hours of work. Thousands of small inlaid runes themselves in patterns that made up even larger runes, like ASCII pictures. All laid out in a series of expanding circles that covered the ceiling, floor and several pillars that connected the two. They surrounded and connected a crystal clear pool elevated on a cloudy quartz platform to 36 tables, each a detailed topographical map of a different section of the union, connected symbolically to that land by pieces of stone, vegetation samples and even vials of water imported from each location. Even those sympathetic connections were insufficient by themselves, but combined with the embedded linking runes, both the tiny versions carved into the tables and the massively scaled-up versions burned into cliff faces or large boulders, they created a network that permitted Timothy to both see most of the union and, albeit at an increased cost, cast spells in most of those places.

A simple, but comfortable pad sat beside it, already beginning to show the permanent imprint from his behind. A small matter perhaps, but a sign of how much time he'd spent pouring over that pool. It was his greatest feat of magic to date, and probably the most useful despite not being particularly showy. So much time, money and effort weren't simply for his amusement. Doing any magic at a distance was difficult. Most mages would find their spells at half power over distances as small as a hundred yards. As far as he knew, and he knew a great deal, it made him unique. At least in the known territories.

Most of which didn't particularly matter now. What did matter was this pool was a child of that greater one. The spiritual descendent that aped many of its features and functions. Even if on a much more minor scale. Its simple two-dimensional double ring of runes merely gave it enough reach to observe Paradise itself, but as a descendent, it was connected on a fundamental level to the original. And using that connection he could remotely use the tools of his main pool from this one. Albeit with significantly reduced capabilities and a noticeable delay between his commands and its actions. Still, he wasn’t going full hog this time, just a minor amount of fuckery. He wasn’t planning on getting into any mage duels. What he did need were the set of spells he'd already linked into the main pool. A bit of work adjusting the targeting and all he had to do was trigger them in order.

He mentally reached through the pool to do just that, then abruptly pulled back. With a sheepish grimace, he waved again and released Parkour. “Sorry about that. You really don’t want to distract me when I’m dealing with these security features.”

Suddenly able to move his aborted lunge from earlier competed itself in an ungainly and potentially painful way, a nosedive from the chair at full speed. Whatever acrobatics he had planned, and knowing the man it likely would have been impressive, weren’t in evidence now. Still, it was only ‘almost’. Timothy snapped a smaller motion absorbing field into existence above the floor and the man's large body slowed like he was moving through honey until he landed on the floor without so much as a thump.

He stood up carefully, checking himself for imagined damage. Even going so far as brushing some imaginary dust off his arms and backside. Timothy suppressed a snicker. He looked like a cat with its hair previously sticking out in all directions from his scare, only now beginning to lick its fur back into place. Dripping with offended dignity and trying to pretend that it hadn't really been scared. “You’re an asshole Rune Father. Do you know that?”

“You’re not the first to say so. A regrettable consequence of thinking so much faster than the rest of you that I sometimes forget that you can’t keep up. That or I skip some steps in the middle.”

“Riiight. Faster thinking. Good excuse for a lack of common sense!”

“It's all about the name. Trash collector sounds so much worse than sanitation engineer. Anyway, enough of all that, now pay attention or you’ll miss out.”

Parkour had a right to be a bit annoyed, a simple warning would've worked. Either before Timothy started or before he released him. Having failed to think of either option Timothy deserved the bit of razz coming his way. So he simply smiled and let Parkour get some of it out of his system. That didn’t mean he had unlimited tolerance. As much as he tried to leash the ego beast, it was still alive and obnoxious when provoked.

With a bit of effort, cursing at the delays, he redirected the main pool to an underground chapel of sorts. It was a decently sized space for the underground. For the Runehold underground at least and that made it positively palatial compared to most places. Ya, he had his ego leashed alright, he sighed derisively. With 16-foot vaulted ceilings and about 20 feet by 40 feet, it was large enough that the ceiling wasn’t safe as a single expanse. Instead, there was a double line of pillars on either side of a central walkway. A walkway that neatly directed the attention to the focus of the room, a 9-foot-tall statue of Bensen in all his adonis style pretty boyness.

No pews graced the rest of the space, that would prevent the sheeple who followed the wackjob from kneeling and touching their foreheads to the ground. There were mats though. Nothing expensive, just loosely woven leaf fronds. This wasn’t a reflection on Bensen. Much like the tatami mats of east Asia, the damn things were ubiquitous. Da and Ma used the same thing on the floor of their home. They were just too convenient not to use. The really good version, woven with a very tight mesh and multiple layers thick, could take half a workday to weave but the looser single-ply version used in most public areas was maybe a half hour’s work. For that seemingly small investment, that didn’t take a great deal of skill, you could have a fairly comfortable carpet to soften the stone floors of the undercity rooms. Considering most went barefoot unless they were headed out? Well worth it. And if they got dirty? Throw them away and make a new one.

The walls followed that trend. The involved beautiful inlay work that graced the halls nearly throughout the hold were missing here. Instead, they’d been painted in various depictions of Bensen. A series of ‘miraculous’ scenes, like stepping on a hog in his giant form or forcing a horde to split and flow around his hold with a simple outstretched hand.

They were true enough if a bit exaggerated. Asshole he was, but a powerful asshole. At least in some ways. It was still much less impressive painted than carved. Even with talented painters. There was just something truly impressive about the three-dimensional nature of inlays. Still, he couldn’t blame them too much for going with the cheaper option.

He was responsible for it after all.

And he was about to demonstrate why once again. With a touch that was feeling more and more artistic with the numerous repetitions, Timothy quickly put a giant nose on the murals. Complete with Groucho glasses, giant eyebrows and bushy molester stache. There was something oddly destressing in vandalizing the little chapel. Each of his changes was large and obvious. A childish prank that drew the eye with no attempt at subtlety.

And it was childish. Timothy wasn’t ashamed of that. Sometimes kids had it right. After a hard day's work, there was nothing better to do than to channel that inner child. He ignored the judgmental gaze Parkour was sending his way as he continued to ‘improve’ each image, one after the other.

Besides, the utter childishness of the gesture could hide so much. He glanced sideways for a brief moment, suppressing an even larger grin. Having an audience made this so much better. Especially when even standing there directly watching, Parkour couldn’t tell what he was really up to. Sure the funky glasses and hair made Bensen look ridiculous and that would affect the audience, no matter how they tried to ignore it and in turn reduced the amount of faith he could collect. Sure it annoyed the pain in the ass, and that was worth his time all of its own. But both things were secondary, an easy bonus that provided cover as he slightly deepened the crow's feet at the corners of Bensen's eyes. Of slightly emphasizing the veins on the back of his exposed hands and wrinkles at the corners of his ever frowning mouth.

Personal images were a powerful tool, but that tool could be used for you, or against you. It provided a two-way link after all. Oh, very little of his work would actually stick. The images were the children in the linkage, and the parent was much more powerful. So long as the image wasn’t changed so much as to break the link, all he had to do was connect to it, and the images would force their way back to reflecting the individual, albeit at a cost in mana and will. But very little wasn’t none. Each time they played this game, some of what he did reflected back on Bensen. All it took was discipline and time.

Both things that Timothy had.

“Why do you bother? You’ve been doing this for, what a year now? And he’s still got plenty of followers.”

“Of course he does. He’s more drug dealer than prophet. But that's not a bad thing for keeping a following. Faith in the unseen is difficult, faith in how the drug will make you feel? After the first free shot, that's easy.”

“...You are comparing his dream worlds to Heroin?”

“Why not? Both can help you to skip out on the current shit that is messing with your life. Hell, living in a rose-colored view of the past is tempting even for many guardians. It’s no surprise the man's a hit. Give me your tired, your poor… and I’ll let them dream they were energetic and rich. All for the low, low cost of twice-daily services and some bootlicking.”

“You say it's tempting, but he has almost no followers anywhere but the norms. Guardians no better than to let him get his hooks in. It’s annoying but it’s not like his followers were terribly useful members of society anyway. At least living in dreams they don't cause trouble. Why do you bother? Why do you keep screwing with him?”

“Ah, Bensen, the opiate of the masses. No thanks. I do it because his way is a dead end. More than that it’s an attractive nuisance. He’s the only one in his hold growing in strength and it's a hollow kind of strength. More saved up power but not much improvement in how that power is used. For now, with my interference, he is steadily gaining power, but not by much. He has to use up most of what he takes in every day. Mostly on defense, but also all the little things that make life worth living. Blessings for the fishing fleet to keep his sheep fed, cleaning spells. Healing.

Still, despite it being a small increase each day, it's still an increase. At some point, there is likely to be a tipping point. Where his power to make the beasts flee will be outweighed by the attraction that stored up power presents. that or it will be enough to temp down a sky-king.” One didn't causally say dragon.

“In the meantime,” Parkour interjected, “it's a great hunting ground. He baits the beasts in and that makes it even easier for the rest of us to find prey.”

“Bullshit. Finding prey is never a problem anywhere. The density of prey in that area is dangerously high already. It's far too easy to try to pick off one pack and get mousetrapped by another.”

“Sure it's dangerous. But you undervalue the benefits, Runefather. Sail up that away, barely head inland with a secured escape route in the boat behind you. Snag a couple kills, maybe even a tier 2 if you get lucky, then hightail it back. Little fuss and no bother.”

“And you help out an asshole by doing it, leaving the wildlife surrounding your own hold dangerously unthinned. No, no.” He waved down Parkour’s protest. “That's not an accusation. Just an observation. Either way, the materials you guys provide are absolutely needed and more materials are beneficial.”

“If you don’t like us hunting around Templeton, then why don’t you build us some beast attractors closer to home? That way we can do the same in our own backyards.”

“That's…” Timothy started, his voice rising in annoyance. But his intuition suddenly socked him one and froze. Taking half a minute or so thinking it over. “Actually, that's not a terrible idea. Not an easy one, mind you. Any source of concentrated mana will bait them in, but then they just eat it and suddenly they’re more dangerous. I’ll have to think about it.”

“I was half-joking, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. You-”

“Shhh.” Timothy abruptly shushed him. “It's time!” In the pool, a double column of people were streaming into the chapel in a slow, respectful march. It gave a solemnness to the occasion, as most good pomp and circumstance did. Even if they had to show up early and line up in the hallways outside to pull it off. It also gave Timothy that much more opportunity to screw with them. One time he added a plant with a soporific scent to the hallway, and they all fell asleep before making it to service. Another time a bit of oil on a stone… Those were not this time though.

They filled the place up from the front back. Each making a mild genuflection to the statue before kneeling on their individual mats. All with silence, decorum and dignity. Right up until the first person glanced sideways and snickered.

Dignity and solemnity took a quick backseat to outrage and hidden humor. Either worked from Timothy’s perspective as the chaos rolled on. Chaos that was quickly noticed. Timothy quickly cut the feed as faith swirled in increasingly powerful streamers around the statue. Timothy wasn’t interested in a direct confrontation. But a smile nearly linked his ears together as the slowed reaction of the pool let him hear a scream of linked rage and frustration.

“And he just lets you get away with this? You prank him like a middle schooler and he just screams?” Parkour managed, disbelief written on his honest seeming features.

“Of course not. He fires back all the time. Once he had his minions stand below my tower and serenade me with one of his god-awful hymns. Complete with magical amplification. They kept it up in shifts for 24 hours a day till I managed to finagle a sound ward. Another time he slipped a mild sort of curse through my wards. Everything I ate tasted like turnips for two weeks. Yes, turnips! It was terrible! My wards were keyed to damaging effects. Since it was just an annoyance it slipped right through beneath them. A loophole you had better believe I have since fixed. And quickly fixed too.”

“That's a shame. I'd have enjoyed making you eat fish oil myself.”

“Ha. Quit dreaming, you don’t have his power nor an overabundance of time needed to figure out such a spell on your own.”

“Says the guy who pulls pranks several times a week?”

“Exactly. Also, it wasn’t quite as innocent as it sounds. Ever heard of a binary poison? Neither component is dangerous on its own. But add them together and it becomes deadly. A couple of ‘harmless’ curses could very well link up into something not harmless at all. That's the kind of chink in a warding schema that could get a man killed.” And that he loved to use against other people. It really sucked getting a taste of his own medicine.

“There is a thought. Why haven’t you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why haven't you killed him? Or him you. You’ve both been playing these games for long enough for tempers to boil over. Why haven’t they?”

“A reasonable question. I can’t say I haven't thought about it. Let me ask you. Have you ever killed a human?”

He stared at Timothy for a moment. Satisfied with whatever he saw he nodded. “I was military before the change. So yes. Yes, I have. Have you?”

“Yes. Haris Thompson.”

Parkour leaned back in his chair in recognition. “The rapist. You didn’t kill him, he was exiled.”

“Bullshit. You know as well as I do that exile is a death sentence.”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. There is a slim thread of hope. Besides, you were hardly the only one standing in judgment.”

“Nope. The full council sat. Doesn’t matter. We all chose to kill that man. I thought then, and think now that it was both justified and necessary. He broke Jasmine’s jaw, bruises over most of her body besides the rape-induced trauma. He definitely had it coming. Not to mention we had to send a strong message. Norms are people too. Guardian on Norm violence is a crime as much as Guardian on Guardian or Norm on Norm. And while that knowledge helps, it doesn’t change the fact that I killed a man. A human.”

“We had shrinks and classes for that sort of thing. I am neither. But I’ll give it a shot. You did what you needed to do. And you did it by the book and with the support of the community. That has to be enough.”

“It did need doing, everything you said is true. But I still killed a man. Not something I ever thought I would have to do. And… Never mind. Believe it or not, I’m doing alright with that shrink BS. It did need doing…” Timothy let the words die out, briefly dropping back into his own head to make sure those words wrang true. It was his mind. And he was in control. That didn’t mean he didn’t have feelings like guilt or worry. Merely that he didn’t let them control his actions. Shaking his head he took up again where he’d left off. “Let’s move beyond all that for a moment on to some practical results. Truth fields in this case. Right now I can walk into the baths, stand on the stage and freely tell everyone that the only human I’ve killed was duly convicted of a heinous crime. Just as a matter of trust, that sort of thing has value. What would I say if I killed Bensen?”

“He’s also a rapist. Besides, I bet you can run laps around the truth spell.”

Timothy snorted. “It's somewhat obvious when you beat around the truth that way. Something like ‘I’ve only killed people who deserve it’ quickly gets people wondering who else you think deserves it. Also, he’s only a suspected rapist. That bit about duly convicted matters. If not to me then to many others and that man is far too clever and powerful for a conviction.

If you haven't had the pleasure, the man's a piece of work. I braced him on the subject once. He's slicker than a used car salesman. The women he’s had? They ‘chose’ his bed. Now you and I will say that they didn’t have much of a choice. He’s the only thing keeping them alive and perhaps even the only way to get food. But he’ll disagree and he's a far better talker than I am. Probably a lawyer in the old world, damn him. Even if we held some kind of trial, a joke considering we have neither jurisdiction nor access to any of the victims, we likely wouldn’t get any kind of conviction. And despite any holdover values about equality, the man is a Pathfinder. If I killed a pathfinder without severe provocation it's going to make a number of other hold leaders worry. It's not like we only have good people in charge you know. We have more than our fair share of dirtbags in charge. No, that kind of a loss of trust could destabilize all that Regi’s been working to build.”

“So you just push the problem down the road? Not really solving it?”

“You could think of it that way. I don’t. Look around you and what do you see?” Timothy didn’t wait for him to answer. “A school. A group of young minds ready to grow into new powers and they aren't the only ones. We are constantly growing. Both as holds and as individuals. I am far more dangerous today than I was when the Tutorial let out. Even just a year later I am constantly learning from the world around me. Even with the limp, you are too. From studying the innate magic of beasts to the new materials or just eating. Our entire little world is growing at a ridiculous rate.”

“He isn’t. All he has is a bigger and bigger pool of faith to pull from to cast the same old spells. He very rarely fights, merely using his power to force beasts away. He doesn’t spend the time we do to understand our enemies and their weaknesses. He doesn’t provide high-tier beast meat to his guardians or people. He merely hunts enough to fill his own plate, with maybe a few scraps for his most trusted aides.”

“No, I’m not just pushing the same thing down the road. I’m pushing a weaker and weaker problem down the road. The longer we wait the more irrelevant he becomes. Even without our help.” Help Timothy wasn’t about to admit to.

“I’m not sure I agree, but let's assume that's the case. If time is in your favor why doesn’t he try to kill you then?”

“Ever think back to the cold war? Both sides preached, and I think believed, that their ideology would eventually win out. It's almost a requirement of beliefs. No one wants to think that their ideas won’t win out in the end. Bensen in particular. He would have to admit to himself that I am winning our little version of a cold war, grandiose as that may sound, something his ego isn’t going to allow."

"Besides, killing me is easier said than done. My defenses are rather robust and while I can reach out and cast spells at a distance that's a fairly rare skill. Most spells fall off in potency the farther they get from their caster. If I was dumb enough to show up in front of him he could, and probably would squish me like a bug. But from a distance? Not likely.”

“Then how did he curse you?” Parkour interrupted him before he could continue.

“Point to you, but probably not in the way you think. He left the spell as a defensive measure on his statue. If I didn’t reach out to screw with him, it never would have worked. Likewise, the hymns incident was caused by having his worshippers actually come up and sing at my tower. They couldn't get inside, but he could and did amplify their voices. I assure you I’ve learned from both of those experiences. That's the real advantage I have. I am constantly improving, learning from my mistakes. He can’t admit to himself that he ever makes any. Sure he occasionally comes up with something new, like that curse, but it's not enough. Only by acknowledging mistakes can you really grow with any speed.”

Timothy waited a moment, giving him time to respond. He just waved Timothy onward. “On top of all that there is Regi. I assure you if that ass hat managed to off me, Regi could and most definitely would, bury him. Having Brotherhood members in most of the 27 Holds of the union gives him a truly massive power base. I hope even Bensen is wise enough not to screw with that.”

“For that matter, a number of other pathfinders might deal with him as well. Individually or as a group. Public trust goes both ways. No one has yet dealt with him because he hasn’t stepped enough over any lines. like you said, his recruits weren't useful even before he rots their brains and he keeps them quiet. If he is harming anyone, it's so far only the people in his own hold and they aren’t complaining."

"Frankly they have many reasons not to. He's not Atila the hun. He's bad but it's a slimy subtle sort of evil. Not chewing on the furniture randomly killing subordinates like some kind of Bond villain. It might be a small price to pay for being alive. After all, so many holds aren’t. Just from what we've seen something like 2 in 5 died. Compared to that, what is a little humiliation and possibly coercion? They aren’t complaining. And without that, there is no smoking gun. Not even a small one we could use as an excuse. But killing me? That would definitely fit the bill.”

“Detente then?”

“Perhaps. But then again, perhaps not.”

Stop please. Timothy directed and the child to his left relaxed. Letting the floating cotton wisp float slowly to the floor. The child, a short, slightly chubby thatch haired girl of around 14, fell back on her pad gasping slightly. A state that was shared by the other 10 children sitting adjacent to her.

Timothy gave her what he hoped was an approving smile. “Pay attention to the feeling you have right now. If you feel this way again, then it's time to stop.”

“Will it really kill us if we don’t?” A boy asked. Brown-haired and already starting to hit his growth spurt, Timothy had informally tagged him as Weasel for the way he held himself. Upright but twitching around a bit. Not that he would say anything of the sort out loud. He wasn’t that much of an asshole.

Not quite.

“It could. Let's go with an example. Let's say your willpower is water in a pool. If the pool completely empties, then you die. But how full the pool is, isn’t something we can clearly see. With training, you can recognize some signs that indicate you are getting close. By watching your aura I can notice the signs of mental stress.”

“Unfortunately, the truth is that when I notice that reaction it could be a few drops from empty, or still at a quarter tank. It's different for everybody.” Timothy paused, making eye contact. “Anyone want to assume that they are the quarter left type?”

Thankfully no one raised their hands. “Good! Get used to this. It might not always be cottonwood seeds. We might mess with water drops on a surface or a chip of wood floating in a bowl. But all of these methods will have at least two things in common. They are both simple and possibly boring. I’ll do what I can to keep it interesting, but even if I fail, I need you to pay close attention. Why do you suppose that is?”

He gestured to the quickly raised hand to his left. The small black-haired child leaped up, his tan round face visibly excited. “It’s mind weight lifting. We can build our mental muscles.”

Timothy nodded, hiding the disappointment he felt as the rest of the hands came down. “That’s true. What else is it?”

He let the silence linger for a bit, then, with a sigh, spoke again. “Do you think I will always be here to point out when you should stop?”

“Ohh!” Timothy nodded sadly as several youngsters let out the exclamation. “Exactly. When I tell you to stop, what does it feel like? What did you notice? The reactions can be very different between people but everyone I’ve asked can feel something.”

“It kinda felt like-” An older girl on his left began. Only to stop as Timothy quickly raised his hand palm up.

“No. This one isn’t a class project. It’s personal. Or at least it’s hard to describe. The feelings might be similar between some people, but how they describe it? Different for everyone. As always, if they are only looking for what you told them, they might miss the real warning. Enough of that for now. You’ll all have many, many more opportunities to find your own tells. In the meantime, let's talk about something else while you recover.”

“Let's talk about meaning.”

He grinned briefly at their vacant gazes. “No need to guess yet. Let me sketch a picture for you. As always, this is one way to look at the world. I have no doubt there are other, possibly, better ways to see it.”

He gathered his thoughts and continued. “Let's assume the world is filled with free-floating mana. It's everywhere and comprises everything. But it's not pure. Never pure. It's constantly affected by the things around it. Or perhaps it affects and creates the material world by being impure in the first place. I can’t tell you and it's a bit of the chicken and the egg situation. Either way, mana is always tainted by other things. I call them aspects. Mana in a tree might have the wood aspect, or the pine aspect, or something as simple as life. But it will have an aspect. Water is the same way. It might be river, stream, trickle, rain or the ever simple option of just water. For that matter, the distinctions between those types might be my imagination. Who knows.”

“Now as you know we all use mana to fuel spells. But have you ever thought about what kind of mana we use?” He smiled out, waiting. Then quickly gestured at the hesitantly raised hand to the right.

“Fire aspect for a fireball? Water for water spells?”

“True statements. The type of mana we use is dependent on the type of spell we cast. So do you think someone who can cast multiple elemental spells has pouches of different mana hanging around?”

No one was quite brave enough to guess at that one, so he continued. “Mostly no. There are a few elemental-based paths out there, and they do store their mana as partially aspected, but even they don’t store multiple different types of mana. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it isn’t common. So for the rest of us non-elemental casters, how do we store our mana?”

“Human aspect? Or John aspect?” One boy guessed, speaking before he started to raise his hand, not that Timothy cared when he wasn’t speaking over anyone else.

“Very nice! Very good guess. But try not to give away your old name, hmm? There are reasons for it. Even if I don’t want to explain them yet. Try to find a nickname that both fits you and that you don’t mind. That applies to all of you. The earlier you set up something on your own, the less likely you will get tagged with something you object to.”

“Moving back to mana. Yes. Each of us has our own particular blend of mana that might as well be labeled as so-and-so’s mana. Now the next question. Where does that mana come from?”

He didn’t have to wait on this one, all 11 hands went up in the air like fireworks. He gestured to the middle to a very short pudgy redheaded boy. “I heard people from home talking about refining natural mana.”

“Good. Now what does that mean?” he gestured back to ‘John’ as the child raised his hand again.

“Purify the mana into something you can use?” A young lady to the right chimed in.

“Sure, but that doesn’t really tell you anything, does it? I guess you don’t know enough yet to guess. It goes back to what I started this conversation with. Meaning. Aspects are meaning. Mana with some residual meaning that describes how a tree should grow is wood aspected. But we can overwrite that meaning. Flood it with your own meaning backed by your willpower, what I call intent, and you can transform it.”

“Think of it like yarn. What is out there is an absolutely chaotic mix of colors. How can you weave it into anything pretty? So first we dye it, by pushing our own meaning onto it, into something consistent. It takes quite a bit of effort to do this. After all, a bright orange thread dipped in blue dye might just look purple, while an already light blue thread might become dark blue after only a single coat. Yes Dear?”

He gestured to his left at a short blonde girl. “So if blue is water aspected mana, and my mana is elementally aligned, could I refine my mana over the river where there’s more water mana? That way I don’t have to spend as much time dying it?”

“But be careful with the dye analogy. It works for a quick early visualization, but it's not really what is happening. Still, you are correct. For the elementally aligned casters, if they stay in an environment close to their alignment they will be able to refill their mana much quicker. But it’s not just the same elemental alignment that can take advantage of this. At the risk of committing the same mistake I just warned you about, let's push the dye analogy a bit farther. Let's say I want my mana to be a shade of green. I could just take any old colored yarn and repeatedly dye it the color I want. Or I could go to a river and ‘dye’ the mostly blue water with a yellow as a first pass. Yellow and blue together give green. It’s not quite that simple, but any place that has a majority of mana of one type is much easier to work with than the usual chaotic mess. Notice I said majority, even on the river, the mana isn’t all water mana. There is always a mix.”

“Is that why beast meat is so good for us?”

“No…You know what? Maybe. It’s not the main reason but it might be a useful secondary. The main push from beast meat, at least the higher-tiered variety, is the leftover intent. Meaning is everywhere in our world, but intent requires an intelligent mind. What degree of intelligence is always up for debate, but the mind part is not. There is only one exception.”

He paused for a moment, then barked out “Death!” They jumped as he intended, but he felt a bit ridiculous going out of his way to scare children.

“Intent lingers after the death of a living, intelligent being. The more intelligent the longer it seems to linger. With a Mid-tier 1 beast, it might linger a week. The last intent of a guardian who fell in the defense of this very town is still lingering on to this day. For tiered beasts, that lingering intent can be directed and channeled to improve the eater. Eat the muscles and direct the strengthening intent to improve your own. Human muscles are nowhere near as effective as a boar's so this kind of intent is superior to what most have.”

“It's not just the muscles. Boars grow in intelligence with power, so a tier 2 beast is much smarter than a tier 1. That means that there is rapid growth in that department as well. Even though the boars aren’t as smart as a human, the desire to grow is something we can make use of.”

“Of course, at every step, you have to carefully control the intent. In the case of a hog, it wants to grow hog muscles and hog intelligence. That has killed unwary humans. And they died with porcine snouts growing on their faces or grunting as they could no longer speak. It was gruesome. The intent has to be cleansed and only the useful bits and pieces carefully adapted to improve the eater. This must be done by the eater, but that's only at the last step."

"Before that, a great deal of the wildness and inhumanity has to be removed with external help. Otherwise only the very strongest of guardians could manage it, and they might have to spend weeks purifying their aura after every meal. Instead, we apply herbs, spices, dilutions and whatever else we can come up with to guide the intent into a more useful form. Our cooks are constantly experimenting and finding out new ways to do this. But remember, no matter how good they are, the final step of adapting the intent to your own body, will always be up to you.”

“Now after all that, back to your question. You are correct in one way. The mana we hold in auras is mostly uniform, but what’s in the body isn’t. Despite that, if you eat a pound of muscle the mana spread through it will be fairly consistent. Its meaning will reflect the purpose of those muscles. As will the mana in marrow, or in specific bones. A skull and a tail will have different mana aspects but each individual bone should be fairly consistent. Organs can be a bit trickier. Still, that mana load, while present, isn't that large.”

He paused for a minute letting them chew on that, then continued. “Going back to mana and meaning, starting from a consistent mana source is a requirement for most spells. If your own personal mana is wood aligned, let's say green to pursue our analogy, then shifting it to earth (brown) might require a simple application of fire (red). Makes you wonder if there might be something to the Chinese idea that certain elements engender each other. That's a topic I don’t want to get into today though. It's enough to realize that it's much easier to transform your mana into other aspects if it starts as one consistent mana type. Now let’s talk about purity.”

“But you said-” John chimed in.

“I know I said purity wasn’t a thing. Just go with it for a minute. I don’t always have the right words to explain magic. I’m constantly forced to use analogies or words that are only partially correct. In this case, the word ‘purity’ is a problem. As an experiment, I once isolated a clump of mana and spent most of two weeks ‘purifying’ it. Removing anything I could think of that counted as an aspect. I failed miserably at making it some kind of primal uncontaminated mana. I want to say ‘you can’t’ but maybe one of you will succeed where I failed. For me, following our earlier analogy, dye is meaning. I change the colors of magic by repeatedly applying my own meaning to them. I can’t change the color without applying something else. I succeeded in making something useful, if impractically difficult, but it's not mana without meaning. In my head I thought of pure mana as this blank slate, just waiting for meaning to be applied to transform into whatever was offered. And since that was what I thought, that was the meaning I managed to apply, after way too much effort, to the mana.”

Timothy slowly reached down and pulled out a massively thick runed glass block, fully six inches per side, with only a few small drops of milky white fluid trapped in the center.

“I call it the Tabula Rasa Aspect. The term comes from Latin, something like ‘blank slate’ or ‘erased tablet,’ and has acquired a considerable amount of baggage between the old Latin speakers and the present. Something like the state of childhood before any lessons are taught. Where each child has the potential to be anything, but what is applied after that will determine what they will actually become. Something like that anyway. There are entire sections of philosophy dedicated to it. I can explain it later if any of you are interested. For now, you can think of it as a nearly perfect mana potion. As a blank slate forced out all the colors, leaving white yarn behind ready and willing to become any color you desire at the drop of a hat.”

“Wow!” Many small eyes suddenly sharpened into something like avarice. He smiled, struggling to tamp down the pride he felt. He reminded himself that they were just children after all, and easily impressed. Still, it did feel good. He looked down at the block fondly. The few liquid drops were mana given form, something that took incredible concentration, and even such a tiny amount could refill all but the strongest casters' mana pool in seconds, rather than the half a day it usually took. That was enough to make it exceedingly valuable. Or at least it would if he could manage a more convenient container. It was hard to isolate it as it was, allowing in only a single type of mana, the would-be users, was a nightmare.

“Now, the reason I’m showing this to you is simple. Eventually, you need to make some choices about what your personal mana will look like. The more ‘pure’ you make it, the easier and faster you can transform it into all kinds of different spell effects. But it will also take you a lot longer to refill. On the other hand, if you were to go with elemental mana, then you can rapidly cast the spells aligned with your element, but you’ll have some difficulty and delays using non elementally aligned spells. You will also be able to regenerate more quickly than most. At least as long as you have access to the correct kind of environment.”

“So what’s the best choice?” A taller slim boy from the farthest right disappointingly chimed in. God, he hoped they worked out nicknames soon. It was going to be a bit difficult to keep them straight in the meantime.

“There isn’t one. Only the choice that is best for you.” Timothy struggled to keep his tone light and helpful.

“Can we skip that step and just command the natural mana?” John chimed in.

“I really look forward to seeing you try. I wish you the best of luck.” Timothy replied, suddenly in a much better mood. If the kid could pull it off he would love to learn how.

“Is it that bad of an idea?” John positively drooped.

“No! It’s not a bad idea at all. It could even be a great one. I was being serious. I hope you can figure out such a path. I think it could be incredibly powerful.” Honesty compelled him to continue, while he would love to see the results, that didn’t mean he could use the kid as a test dummy. “But it will likely not be easy. That chaotic mess of threads out there is rather difficult to work with. The extra step we take to purify mana is to give us a clean source. You might be able to paint something within the chaos, but it might not compare to what someone with a clean palette of colors can manage. Then again, those clean colors will be in limited quantities, while your chaotic mix will not.”

“Now, I don’t want anyone to set anything in stone now. As I keep repeating, you aren't ready to do anything with these lessons yet. Stay in control and don’t practice magic anywhere but in front of me. Not because I don’t trust you, but because until you learn your own tells, you might kill yourselves. But think about what you want out of your magic. Think about what your path will look like and what you might need from your mana to accomplish that. Neither I nor any of the other pathfinders, know everything and what we do know might not suit you. I hope one of you will find a better way of refining natural energy and you will be the one to give this lesson to future generations. This is your choice and your path. Make it as awesome as you can.”

“Now run along to the Maze. And don’t just solve it. Think about what how you solve it says about you.”