If the mana had been dense outside the temple, inside it was suffocating. Mason felt dizzy as he walked through the entryway and past surprisingly ornate curtains into a room even more crowded with mana, and equally filled with stuff. Mason took deep breaths to quench the unease he felt at being in such a mana-dense area, and strongly suspected that his pre-Trials self would have died or fainted almost immediately in the face of it.

Worse, still, was that though the room he was led into was large, it was packed with low tables scattered with herbs and powders, blankets and cushions of high quality, and material devices that he couldn’t even begin to guess the function of. If he had to define the room, it would be somewhere between a laboratory and a pleasure palace, but the busyness of it made his already light-head swim.

Why was it so damned warm and humid in there? Mason cast a look at Faynel to make sure he wasn’t the only one overwhelmed, but she was standing perfectly at attention staring at the middle of the room.

Mason followed her glance and couldn’t quite figure out what she was looking at. Then he realized- one of the piles of cushions harbored a person. She was soft and round and absolutely ancient looking, but familiar sharp eyes darted back and forth in her face, and Mason knew instantly where Faynel got her ferocity.

Meeting her stare was like looking into the eyes of a monster. And people called his scrawny self a Demon?

And somehow once he was looking at her, he began to realize that the energy in the room- those thick waves of mana and… something else- weren’t a result of the location. They came from her. Even without mana sight, Mason knew she was a lighthouse to the other Marran’s LED bulbs.

He didn’t even have a chance to use Focus to steady himself. Mason’s knees went weak and he almost collapsed where he stood, but with the last bit of sense he had he caught himself and managed to pull himself onto a cushion.

A laugh somehow both tinkling in its mirth and deep in its volume resounded from the old woman as she watched. “Yes, I am forever thankful for this well-cushioned room for just that reason. A few centuries of building power and people can’t even stand to be in your presence.”

The old woman’s eyes met Faynel’s, and the younger woman smiled meekly at the joke.

“Yes, yes, it was not one of my finer jokes. Please dear, sit. Comfort your human. And tell me- did you disobey me? I told you that only with a regular dosage of the tea and your full activation of the salve would he be able to tolerate my aura. But, no. You clearly mingled, I can see the traces of your energy in his own. Did you simply grow distracted? I understand, for someone so pink he is quite handsome.” The old woman rambled from her throne of cushions, and though her voice was prominent, she hardly moved.

“Grandmother, please,” Faynel said, exasperation dripping from her voice. “Didn’t we talk about respect?”

“Pah!” the old woman shouted, and though she still didn’t seem to move, the room reverberated with its force, sending a wave of nausea through Mason as he tried to steady himself. “Your generation is so prudish. I’ve performed the mana binding ritual with hundreds of people. I don’t know why you people treat it like mating.”

“Because I saw him, Grandmother! I could feel his own sense of self. How do you share that so casually?”

The wave of force grew more intense, and Mason was sure he was going to puke, or pass out.

“Who said anything about casual? You told me you saw great potential in this human in both principle and power. Were you casual with your assessment?”

Fay looked down, “No, Grandmother.”

“Did you administer the treatment as I specified? He looks as if he’s going to die.”

If the old woman sounded like she didn’t care, Faynel expressed enough concern for the both of them as her face contorted in worry. “Pull in your aura, Grandmother! I did as you asked, but this is too much even still. He’ll need more time.”

“No, wait!” Mason coughed, pushing himself up into a sitting position. “Give me a minute. I’ll be okay.”

He wasn’t sure of that. If he were honest, he felt terrible. But he had felt terrible plenty of times before from mana sickness, and he walked away each time. And he could tell by the carelessness in the old woman’s voice, by the sheer power that was pouring out of her, that she was not the type of person he should be expecting favors from. She needed to be impressed.

So he forced himself to a sitting position, and dug at the small trickle of mana inside of him that had begun to regenerate since the salve depleted his stores. How had Faynel activated it? She had moved the mana through it like…

Suddenly he felt the thin, oily residue of the salve on his skin begin to warm. He could feel the mana that had bound to it, and the way that it was feeding into his skin, changing his cells. But he couldn’t produce enough mana to activate it enough to ward off this wave of force.

But why produce mana when there was so much around him? He tried to picture it flowing into his pores, tried to imagine himself grabbing it with his own mana. Neither worked. So instead, he spread his own mana thinly across his entire body, and tried to activate the salve lightly, using it’s effects to pull the mana toward his body.

He grew warmer, and felt electric. As the salve activated, it began to shield him from the excess energy in the air, forming a barrier that controlled the flow, absorbing what it needed and rejecting the rest.

“I… I’m okay,” Mason said weakly, looking up at the bundle of blankets and pillows. “I appreciate you taking time to see me. I know Faynel has put a lot of work into preparing me for this.”

For several long moments the old woman looked like she was looking right into Mason. “I see, Faynel. You weren’t entirely wrong about him. Of course, I heard you speak before the council, too. That sort of fiery spirit has become rare among our people. Even here, where fire is the only thing that can warm the dark night.”

Faynel was glancing worriedly between the two. The worst was over, possibly. But her grandmother was known for her power, not her kindness. Insisting that Mason be accepted into the Roving Band, asking Faynel to personally prepare him to present himself before her- these reflected a degree of personal interest that her grandma hadn’t shown anyone save herself in as long as she knew.

“I’ve been told your name is Mason, yes? But clearly you’re not of our family names. Let us be quick to the point. What do you know of magic?”

Mason felt a sharp twinge in his chest as the old woman talked to him. He knew intrinsically that she was probing him. He wondered if she could see deep enough to feel Mowrytal and Geralt within him.

“Yes, my full name is Mason Nevels. I share the last name with my parents, but the first was assigned to me.”

“But The Trials call you differently.”

“That- yes.” Mason took a deep breath, both to allow himself time to figure out how to answer, and to resist another wave of weakness. Even with the salve warming him and protecting him, he felt weak in her presence. “When I first took Mowrytal’s soul from his bones, I was asked whether or not I would reject or accept the changes. I wanted to move forward, to grow stronger, so I accepted them.”

“Are you aware it calls you a Darkest Night? This is the same name the Corrosi have given us. Are you not proud of being human?”

“That’s not it,” Mason said sharply. He saw Faynel wince at the obstinance in his tone. “But I felt different. I saw mana in me then, and I think Mowry had his own part to play. He said he shaped my soul.”

“That he did. And he taught you a rune. The Force rune. I repeat my earlier question. What do you know of magic?”

Mason looked at Faynel- she had explained most of it to him. “There are sigils, embellishments, and runes. Sigils are flat carvings, and when you fill them with mana to form embellishments, you can move the two through the air forming…”

“Stop, I don’t want to hear that nonsense. Those were techniques that, though effective, were poorly thought out. No better than these so called spell runes. What use is there to learning an entire rune for a single spell? That’s not how nature taught us and that’s not how I taught you, Faynel.” The old woman sounded angry, and her voice curled around the word Faynel as if she were grossly disappointed.

“I’m sorry, Grandmother. I was merely trying to explain to him how enchantments and spells were connected.”

The old woman sighed loudly, “Yes, and you were raised on that foolishness. If I hadn’t returned from the Nior Mountains when I did you would likely be a lost cause of a Marran too.” She addressed Mason then, “Tell me. If you saw a centuries old woman who could pour a lake like a glass of water, wouldn’t you assume her magic was at least a little better than a bunch of short-lived spell casters that have to wave their hands about just to start a small fire?”

“Don’t answer her,” Faynel whispered quickly to Mason.

“Of course he shouldn’t answer me! it’s obvious! Spell runes,” her voice dripped with disdain for the term, “They’re the safe way out. Sure, it may sound grizzly to carve a sigil into your body every time you wanted to cast a spell, and it was, I won’t deny that, but it’s still a purely boring way to waste good magic.

“Let me explain to you, so that you don’t fall into the trap so many of these fools have. A spell rune only activates when it is properly empowered. It’s a fully formed, cohesive way to trigger one specific effect and no other. It just takes ten times as long to produce a fraction of the effect of real magic.

“It also makes for an extremely unskilled, lazy caster. You lose the ability to work with real magic as soon as you begin binding all of your mana into runes. It’s like the guillotine. You know what a guillotine is, right? Sure, it does a great job of removing a head, but you have to do all that maneuvering to get the head in just the right place before it’s worth a damn!

“But a sword- oh you can swing that around any way you’d like. Sure, you may stab yourself with it from time to time, but there’s costs to great power, and risks. Do you know what it takes to develop real magic?”

“No I-”

“Well we once called it Source Magic. A Source user would commune with one of the great points of magic in the world, and learn as many of its secrets as their mind could learn. Oftentimes that would be a fundamental Rune, but no source caster would be foolish enough to distill it down into some measly spell rune.”

Her voice grew louder and louder as she spoke, as if the remembering itself were making her more powerful, “Just stepping foot in one of those places would improve your might as a caster. You could enter frail and ragged, but if you walked out of there you would be mighty. I mean, look at me!”

Mason caught himself with his hands, feeling his consciousness flicker under the waves of energy emanating from the frail looking woman. Faynel put a hand to his back compassionately, but never took her eyes off her grandmother.

“But my rune, the force rune. Does that mean I can’t learn your magic, since I’ve already learned that?” Both the women looked sharply at Mason from the determined sound of his voice. He looked like death but he sounded ready for a fight.

The old woman laughed, “You really did well bringing him, Faynel. He’s stronger than he seems, and he asks just the right questions. I brought you here to prevent those fools from filling your head with foolish spell runes. Mowrytal himself can tell you about the consequences of trying to wield real magic after you’ve learned those.

“No, you wield my Force rune. I brought it to our people, long before it was watered down by those too weak to handle it. And if you are to learn how to truly use it, you should know how I did that.”