After talking with Wotjeo, and Papa, and Mama you think long and hard about what lesson would benefit Wotjeo and you the most. You want to be able to take good care of Wotjeo and get him lots of vital essence, which makes the various lessons on cultivating and gathering Elder Minaro told you about very tempting.

While you slept, you heard Mama’s words over and over again. “He likes to hear how strong he is.” When you wake up, you know exactly what to do. You are so eager to talk to Elder Minaro, you have a hard time focusing during morning meditation, even though you know that it is an important opportunity to gather the dream vital-essence that is strongest around sleeping people, or those who have just woken up.

Afterwards, you make you jog to Elder Minaro’s lesson cave the long way to avoid Bato. He still tries to ambush you every morning. He must be really mad about not getting private lessons with the Elder. Or maybe he’s upset about that time you knocked him out by hitting him in the head with a bag of hard-skinned pomegranates. You think that was his fault though, you only hit him because he was trying to take your lunch! He also seems to be mad that Mama is a Crystal Butterfly. You guess he thinks he has lots of reasons to hurt you. You try not to think about it too much. It makes you sad and worried that someone can hate you that much.

You jog into Elder Minaro’s lesson cave and set Wotjeo down. Both of you bow humbly before the unpleasant man and stay bent over as you speak. “Revered honorable Elder Minaro of the Silver Bear tribe. You know more than I could learn in two lifetimes. You know so much, but I do not even know what I do not know. Only you are wise enough to know what is best for me to learn. This one humbly requests her revered honorable Elder to teach her something that only so wise and powerful an Elder as you could.”

Elder Minaro’s voice is less grating than it usually is as he replies. “Just so. It’s about time one of you ignorant little cubs realized it. Something only I can teach, you say. Hmmm. For today, Genialda will continue Wotjeo’s lessons. I will give you my answer tomorrow. Decisions should not be made in haste.”

The next day you see something strange as you turn the corner into the lesson cave. There, sitting against the back wall is you! You are meditating under one of the tin crevices, and Elder Minaro is meditating beside you with Wotjeo curled up in your lap. But you haven’t even entered the cave yet! You look down at Wotjeo in your arms then back up at Wotjeo sitting in your lap in the lesson cave. What’s going on here?

You hear Elder Minaro laughing, and the image of you in the cave shatters revealing the lesson cave, empty except for Elder Minaro and Genialida. “You should have seen the expression on your face girl. What you just saw is a fantasy drawn forth from your mind and made visible by the Dream Mirror technique.”

Elder Minaro hands you the potion goblet today as he continues speaking. “Drink half today, then give the other half to your brother. The rest of our lessons will be for both of you. The secret behind the Dream Mirror is that people dream even while they are awake, but the dreams are quiet and often drowned out by their waking thoughts. In these waking dreams they envision what they hope will happen, what they fear will happen, or they obsess over past events. Judging from what the Dream Mirror showed you, you were dreaming of learning how to cultivate better so you could take care of your bear brother. Touching, but not what you need right now. What you need is a weapon, something to allow you to defend yourself even though the other cubs who joined the clan with you have been learning how to fight and you have not.”

Elder Minaro gestures for you to carry the empty goblet and put it out of the way against the cave wall when Wotjeo finishes licking it clean. He waits for you to return and focus your attention on him before continuing. “Fortunately for you, Dreamkeepers developed a technique for exactly the purpose, as they too rarely spend much time preparing to fight. One that allows them to confuse and confound our enemies long enough for help to arrive or even win if their opponent is foolish enough to get lost in it. The Dream Mirror technique uses metal and dream madra to create a mirror that catches your opponent’s waking dream and reflects it back, so they see it instead of whatever is behind the dream. It has several weaknesses, the most important of which you just experienced. We don’t control what the person we use the technique on sees. If they fear you, or fear being caught, they see their fear coming true. If they obsess over the past, they relive the event as they wished it had gone. If they dream of defeating you, they see you beaten. A powerful but unreliable technique. You should not count on it confusing an experienced opponent for more than a few seconds, but for many winters yet you will be facing children who will not be able to defend against it.”

***

By the end of the month, you’ve mastered the basics of the technique and can create a mirror large enough to completely fill a tunnel. Elder Minaro showed you several places you can cycle slightly differently while preparing the technique to give you good control over the shape and size of the Dream Mirror you make. If you make it just tall enough to hide you can stretch the width to cover a few paces more to either side.

It is a very madra intensive technique though, completely draining Wotjeo of madra with each use. You spent as much time gathering so Wotjeo could cultivate vital-essence into madra as you did doing anything else. Elder Minaro grumbles that your progress has been “barely adequate,” but his heart doesn’t seem to be in complaining. Your frequent and shamelessly lavish flattery the past month has made the irritable man much less unpleasant.

***

At the beginning of lessons one day, Elder Minaro beckons you over to where he’s sitting beside Genialda. When Elder Minaro started teaching you the Dream Mirror technique, she went back to sleeping through your lessons. Today she isn’t sleeping. Instead, her huge bear head fills the Elder’s lap, and he’s petting her back. Her growls of contentment fill the lesson cave. Elder Minaro gathers a fuzz of bronze underfur on his fingers as he pets her. Both her and Wotjeo have been shedding their underfur as summer’s heat pushes out winter’s chill.

Elder Minaro holds up the fluffy mess of bronze wire Genialida shed and instructs you: “Watch.”

Without any further gestures from the Elder, his fluffy cloud of bronze wire fur collapses into itself forming a smooth sphere about the size of the Elder’s eye.

The sphere flattens into a thin platter like a small plate.

The plate separates into three needles, complete with tiny ‘eyes’ to put thread through.

The needles merge back together into the sphere.

Elder Minaro made no special gestures, only moving to pet his silver bear sister throughout the show. He says “You asked to learn something no one else could teach you. I dare say no other Silver Bear has devoted as much time to unifying our techniques as I have. The metal guiding technique the Hunters use is only a small piece of a much more fundamental ability.”

The sphere floats up from his palm and starts circling your head. Trying to keep track of it is making you dizzy and you try to avoid looking at it as Elder Minaro starts talking again. “At its core, The Hunter’s most famous technique is just the ability to move metal in accordance with their dreams. It is the same principle they use to sharpen the edges of their weapons, although they are hardly aware of it.”

The sphere reshapes itself into a menacingly sharp-edged arrow and clips off a piece of your hair. It is so sharp you didn’t feel any tug as it parted the strand of hair. “The Guard’s technique to dull the edges of weapons is also part of the same technique.”

The arrowhead reforms into a thick wedge and this time when it impacts your hair it pushes the hair out of its path instead of cutting it. “Finally, our smiths use yet another part of it to create our uniquely strong armor and blades by compressing the metal far more than mere muscle power would allow.”

The wedge reforms into a much smaller sphere than before. Where before it was the size of an eyeball, now it is the size of a pupil. “All parts of the same technique, and, when properly mastered, well suited to more decorative uses.”

The bronze sphere momentarily forms into an earring, then a ring, and then a very thin bracelet. “More detailed designs are possible as well.”

The bracelet reforms into a miniature bear made out of bronze; then drops into your hands. You hold it up and squeal with delight. It’s a perfect copy of Genialda in every respect, down to the tiniest detail, but no bigger than a human eye.

When you’ve calmed down and stopped gushing about how cute the bronze miniature bear is; Elder Minaro shows you two fist-sized lumps of tin. The first lump bubbles and then reforms into a perfect duplicate of Wotjeo. He tosses the second one to you. It’s screaming with tin vital essence so loudly that you flinch back and have to virtually shut down your hearing to be able to stand to hold it.

Elder Minaro waits for you to stop examining the lump and look back at him before continuing. “That lump started as a rare piece of wildly rich tin vital-essence. Working with our Smiths, I further had it specially treated to be extra responsive to our metal manipulation techniques to assist with your training. Try to shape it the same way you do when you are gathering vital-essence, but without drawing the vital essence out.”

You follow his instructions and try to shape it into a sphere, but nothing happens.

As soon as you stop trying Elder Minaro resumes lecturing: “Nothing is happening because you cannot make any changes in the world without using madra. Madra powers all of our techniques and humans are incapable of making madra. Only spirits are capable of converting vital essence into madra, so you must first take madra from your brother.”

Elder Minaro walks you through the same process to get madra from the connection between you and Wotjeo that your father did, only instead of letting it diffuse into your body he has you cycle it until it is all gathered in your hands.

Elder Minaro tells you, “Now that you have some madra, try again, and this time, use your madra wrapped hands to shape the tin. Initially, it is easier to focus the technique on your hands. I’ll tell you how to shape it with your mind too, but we don’t have time for you to develop that skill.”

When you touch the tin with your hands, it feels tacky, and your fingers sink into it like mud. You open your eyes to see if that really happened but when you do you lose control of your madra and the tin pushes your fingers away as it resumes its original shape.

Elder Minaro snaps at you. “Focus, girl! Focus! Try again.”

You spend the rest of the day seemingly futily trying to do something that Elder Minaro did effortlessly. No matter what you do, the tin quickly pushes your fingers away and snaps back to its original shape.

Completely disregarding that he’s kept you so late today that you’ve already missed dinner, he tells you, “practice what we’ve covered so far today in your spare time. We’ll pick up where we left off in the morning. Take the bear miniatures with you. If you can duplicate the statuette of Wotjeo, you’ll have earned additional lessons from me.”

In the following days, unlike with your previous lessons with him, Elder Minaro mostly makes you repeat his lectures back to him and only rarely lets you even attempt one of the techniques he tells you about. It feels like he’s trying to cram as much knowledge into you as possible.

On the few occasions he does allow you to attempt a technique, you fail to do anything more than deform the lump, and it immediately reverts back to its default shape when you stop focusing on it. It is so much harder to do than it looked when he did it. Compared to the two bear miniatures which, somehow, still hold their shape hours later, you’ve got a looooong way to go. Elder Minaro doesn’t grumble more than usual; so you guess he’s not disappointed with your slow pace of progress.

Not ever having had any formal education in mathematics or even basic numeracy you’re unable to count above three, and you’re still fuzzy on how many three is. You know it is the number of fingers on your hand pointing up when you have one or two fingers pointing down, but you’re not sure if it is one or two fingers down. Your grasp on any amount of time between a day and an entire season is equally fuzzy. Papa doesn’t seem to be much better with numbers than you are, so it is Mama who first notices that your lessons with the Elder should be over by now.

When she does, she asks you how much longer you are going to be taking lessons for and you shrug: “When he tells me? More lessons are more better, right? I’m not planning on bringing it up to him. He might stop teaching me!”

As it turns out, your lessons last less than a handful more days before Elder Minaro dismisses you. “Remember to practice the metal manipulation technique when you can, but don’t make it your first priority. It will develop your madra control, but it won’t keep you fed for many decades yet. In the unlikely case you ever do master it, you’ll have earned some more lessons from me. Personally, I doubt you’ll ever rise high enough for us to interact again. Off you go girl, if you remember what I taught you, you may just surprise me yet.”

He takes the protective ring he gave you at the start of lessons back but gives you a small leather sack just large enough to hold your lump of tin. When you put the tin in, you can’t hear the vital essence anymore. Elder Minaro tells you, “keep your practice lump in there, so the noise from it doesn’t prevent you from hearing other vital essences.”

***

Your lessons with Elder Minaro spanned just over two seasons. There were a handful of makeup days from when Bato or you were too injured to attend lessons, and your flattery wheedled more extra lessons from the Elder, although your understanding of both counting and time is too poor for you to have a clear picture of how many extra lessons you got. Enough that Mama noticed at least. In that time, you learned a great deal from the unpleasant man, but far from everything, you will need to learn to make your way in the world. What you have learned so far is merely a foundation on which to build.

You will have to build quickly. The largest gathering of tribes in the valley is the septennial Luchamadra festival. It begins on the winter solstice, a little less than two seasons from now, and the first event of the festival is a grand tournament of all ore-tier members from all five tribes in Aestia valley.

You know you need to make a good showing at the festival. How you perform in the tournament reflects not only on your family but also on the whole Silver Bear clan. Many trade deals and territory agreements will be negotiated during the festival, and the tribe seen to have the strongest warriors and most promising young talents will have the upper hand in all of their negotiations.

Part of you wonders if you do well enough in the tournament if you can earn the right to access vital-essence nodes of your own.