“I’ve had it with sleeping on the ground!” I said.

“It isn’t that bad,” said Noel. “You get used to it once you stop being able to feel your back.”

“We used earth elemental magic to smooth out the ground, I even added in some water to make the ground softer, but it was still horrible,” I said. “And there are no living plants anywhere. Do you know how crazy that is? How can there be no plants here? Even deserts have oases, why are those dried husks, those withered fossils, the only things we can find here?”

“I don’t know,” said Noel. “Listen, if you hate it so much, why don’t you take off your clothes and put them under your body or something.”

“Well, first, this,” I said as I pinched up the front of my tunic, “is full of holes, really uncomfortable, and really thin. I might as well be sleeping on the ground with this underneath me. No, we need grass. Or leaves. Or—”

“Or you can stop complaining and walk faster,” said Noel. “We can ask the tribesmen for some bedding.”

“Fine,” I said, laying to rest another useless conversation. We’d been having a bunch, recently, since there wasn’t much else to do. The only other preoccupation we had was working on our magic, but we couldn’t do that for too long because it sapped all of our energy.

Walking through the emptiness day in and day out was taking a toll on my mind. The view was monotonous, the sound of my feet clicked like a metronome, and the highlands were still too far away. On the bright side, we finally saw what looked like cliffs on the tip of the horizon, although we were still many days away.

“You know, if it wouldn’t drain all my energy, I’d make a hammock out of motion magic and sleep on that,” I said.

“Give it a rest already,” said Noel. “Besides, if we didn’t have to worry about draining our energy why wouldn’t we run all the way to the highlands?”

I grumbled. If energy wasn’t a factor, we’d probably be flying right now. “I’ve been thinking about energy recently,” I said. “Do you think the energy we use for magic is a special kind of energy or is it like the energy we use to walk and talk and do everyday stuff like that?”

“It’s all the same thing, isn’t it?” she said. “We use too much energy for magic and we feel tired and hungry. We run too much or play too much, and we feel the same way.”

“Right,” I said, “and that’s the part I don’t understand. How does magic use energy?”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Like, look at this,” I said as I picked up a rock. “My body uses energy to move. Energy fuels my muscles and helps me pick this rock up from the ground and bring it to a greater height.” I dropped the rock. “But if I pick it up with invisible hands from motion magic.” I picked up the rock with motion magic. “My body isn’t involved and neither are my muscles. Yet, I feel tired, as if I had picked up the rock with my own hands.”

“But it uses more energy than picking up the rock with your own hands,” said Noel.

“Right, and isn’t that even stranger? Wherever this energy is coming from and however it is being used, it’s using up more energy than my body or muscles would,” I said. “How does that make sense?”

Noel shrugged. “It’s magic. I don’t think it needs to make sense.”

“I agree,” I said, “or at least, I would agree if it wasn’t for the way magic works. If knowledge and wisdom are the foundations of magic, why doesn’t any thought, any knowledge, any amount of wisdom and experience simply manifest as energy. We even know that ‘knowledge’ doesn’t have to be completely true in order for it to create magic! If that is true, why doesn’t every thought, no matter how wrong or absurd, cast some form of magic? It doesn’t have to be powerful magic, but shouldn’t something happen?”

“I don’t know,” said Noel, “but you’re right, now that I think about it. Now that the two of us know how magic works, shouldn’t we be able to cast some sort of ridiculously powerful magic if we used all of our energy? If inaccurate knowledge and insufficient wisdom doesn’t completely stop us from being able to cast magic, shouldn’t we be able to put all our magic into a spell and force it to happen?”

I nodded. “And that’s why I think magic might be kind of like a fire.”

“Fire?” said Noel.

“Yes, see, we’ve talked about combustion before, right?” I said.

“Combustion is the ‘something’ that creates fire, right? I remember creating my own version of fire magic without knowing what combustion was, just by assuming what it did,” she said.

“I remember that,” I said. “I don’t remember if I mentioned it before, but fire doesn’t just start when you add fuel and oxygen together. Combustion only begins when you provide energy, usually in the form of heat.”

“Like magic,” she said. “Are you saying magic needs energy to get going, and not only to sustain it?”

I nodded. “We call that energy we provide to cause combustion, ‘activation energy.’ And I think magic has a sort of activation energy too. And this activation energy is usually higher than the energy needed to sustain the spell, just like the activation energy of combustion.”

“So the reason our thoughts don’t become spells and the reason we can’t use insanely powerful spells right now, even by sacrificing all of our energy, is because the activation energy for magic is really high,” she said.

“Yes, but, if that’s true, why can we use any magic at all? Shouldn’t the activation magic for fire magic be really high?” I said.

“Right, and it has to be really high or else anyone could use fire magic. The only thing that could explain why we can use magic while other people can’t, is the fact we know the fundamentals of magic,” she said.

“Knowledge and wisdom, exactly. Specifically, I think knowledge reduces the activation energy of magic,” I said.

“Because increasing wisdom makes our spells more powerful, but doesn’t necessarily stop us from using the magic in the first place,” said Noel.

“Yes, and this is where magic is different from combustion. After combustion is activated, it can sustain itself with the heat it generates. So as long as fuel and oxygen are present, a fire may never go out. But magic doesn’t seem to generate its own energy, it only consumes it. So wisdom is really important because it makes our spells stronger and more efficient,” I said.

“So we need knowledge to reduce the activation energy of magic, which makes magic possible, and we need wisdom to make magic efficient, which allows us to use more magic,” said Noel. “But wait, doesn’t that mean that if we had enough energy, we could cast magic without any knowledge or wisdom?”

“I think so,” I said. “I also think that our natural energy is what is limiting our ability to use insanely powerful types of magic. I mean, knowledge would help us lower the amount of energy we needed to do something like say, fly, but if we had a lot of energy lying around, we could probably shoot up into the sky right now.”

Noel thought for a little bit. “So you’re saying there’s two ways for us to use new types of magic. We could use ‘knowledge’ to decrease the amount of energy needed to activate magic or we could increase the amount of energy that we can use and spend more energy to cast bigger spells.”

“And since magic seems to use the same kind of energy that we use for walking or picking up rocks, we could increase our energy the same way we do whenever we’re tired from long walks or heavy lifting,” I said.

“Are you saying eating and sleeping will make our magic stronger?” she said.

“I’m saying eating and sleeping well will make our magic stronger,” I said. “But I think there could be other solutions as well. If we can figure out how to store energy outside our bodies or increase the amount of energy we store inside our bodies, we could make our magic more powerful.”

“We could also figure out exactly where and in what form this energy is stored and try to increase that space,” she said.

I frowned. Did that mean we had to bulk up or store fat like a bear before hibernation? “I think magical energy might be different from the energy we store in our bodies.”

“Why do you think so?” said Noel.

“Didn’t you feel it in any of our battles so far? We would run out of magical energy before we ran out of the energy to run and hide or to move our bodies in different ways,” I said.

“Now that you mention it, I do remember that,” she said.

“I think our body’s energy can be converted into magical energy, but magical energy itself is different from our body’s energy,” I said.

“Which means we could increase our magical energy without needing to increase our body’s energy,” she said. “The only question is, how do we do that?”

“I’m not sure, but I figured it might be something to work on until we get to the highlands,” I said.

“That makes sense,” Noel said. “Just thinking about a way to increase our energy won’t tire us out like practicing magic would. And if we figure out a way to increase our energy—”

“We could fly to that darned cliff,” I said pointing to the horizon. I sighed. “Until then, I think I need to make a new pair of shoes.”