-Understood. Let me think: an anchor...

Tommy went mentally through a list of all things surrounding them and decided to be literal: he chose a rather gigantic rock and with some help made it roll into the tree, where he sat down hugging it tightly.

-Alright I'm set. What do I do when I get in contact with the mana around here?

Simone smiled a little at the scene, but the determined face of the blond, short haired man demanded respect; she felt whatever he wasn't telling them, gave him all the motivations he needed.

She only hoped for it not to backfire onto him somehow.

-Your body should try to automatically absorb the mana and get tuned to it. Mana will flow into your body through the blood and major organs so, later, letting it out from, say... Your fingertips, shouldn't be too hard. Remember, Life's favorite mana channels are the breath and taste for letting it flow in and out, so try and concentrate on those at the beginning.

-Is that all?

-For now, yes. Good luck, Tommy.

Ethan, had found a spot under the same tree, in the middle of its trunk's shadow and thought it appropriate, but before sitting down he asked. No matter where he looked at though, he didn't feel any connection. The only “thing” was... Her.

-Simone, would you mind being my anchor?

He asked

-Sure I could, but why?

-You said I needed a strong feeling to make me stick here, so on the top of my head, I thought that if I held your hand, it would be hard for me to get lost.

-Alright then. For feeling the shadow, you should try using your skin and eyes at the same time, so I suggest you look intently at it while barefooted.

Without losing time, Ethan took off his shoes and planted his feet to the ground.

When he was all set, Simone gave him her hands: she was tall, so her hands were proportionally big, but soft and smooth, airless, with nails just slightly arching over her fingertips. A safe hand. Ethan held them without squeezing too much, not wanting to hurt her.

He cleared his mind a little and started staring at the shadow in between his feet, unblinkingly, at fist, but without really understanding what he was meant to do. When he finally gave up on that silly attempt, he shifted a little, relaxed his shoulders and felt a little encouraging squeeze coming from Simone. He controlled his breath and really started focusing on the shadow in front of him, thinking of it as a living organism, trying to keep in his mind the picture of a river and a rock.

He could feel a little prickly sensation under his feet, not sure of what it was meant to be.

Still controlling his breath, he let go of Simone with his left hand and touched the floor, no, the shadow he was sitting in.

The sensation was on his hand too, real and a little unsettling. Still he knew it wasn't enough, he didn't feel any strong energy try to seep into his body. Simone had said that the energy was indeed meant to start flowing into him, but how was that to happen if he was the rock in the river? Maybe if he was some kind of sponge, instead of a rock... A fish maybe, something or someone who would naturally live and interact with that environment...

He was going against what she had told him, but still he tried to shift his mental image, thinking of himself as a big black-green fish. Keeping on caressing the shadow, he really sunk in his new self image, he was swimming upstream, breathing the water, feeling it, needing it. Gradually, his feeling for the shadow started shifting, now it was less of an itch and more of an oily caress.

As that was happening, he heard a whispering sound buzzing in his ears, quiet and distant. A persistent, annoying little thing he couldn't get a grasp upon.

Redoubling his focus on his element, trying to push the noise aside, he realized the shadow he was looking at had changed color, being more sepia now; it was warmer too and more welcoming. Ethan kept on swimming, in his head, gulping it in, concentrating on how that had to make a fish feel: probably normal, as breathing would to him and yet different, refreshing, life-giving... And he felt instinctively grateful.

When that happened, looking around, he could see that everything was getting higher, which in a far corner of his brain, translated “no, you are getting lower”, but he didn't really pay it any attention: he was a joyful inhabitant of the shadow river, and it was just normal for him to be inside of it... Lower... Deeper... Right?

Simone at first had thought nothing of it: she didn't know enough of shadows to react either way, but when Ethan had sunk in it up to his waist and had grown weaker on his hold, she tried pulling him back.

She could have benched his weight three times, dead weight, but for some reason, he was there, smiling like an idiot and going down in spite of her efforts: she had told them about “drowning” into their mental river and losing themselves but this was ridiculous. There he was, knees still up to his chest, neck deep into the oily shadows, his hand being held up by Simone, which tried to pull him up with all she had, apparently to no avail.

He was dragging her down and she really couldn't touch the shadow either, afraid of following him wherever he was digging himself into. All she had left to grasp on, out of the shadow pool, was his hand, but soon, against her own will, she had to let it go too: apparently the shadows, to whom she didn't belong, acted like an acid or poison, and she was feeling her skin burn.

Once he disappeared, she mended her hand as fast as she could from the burnt, but the shadow that she had on was still spreading on her skin, sinking into her, forcing her to badly burn her own arm in order to cleanse it and then restart the healing technique on a blackened, almost charred limb.

It barely took a minute for her to be fine: looking at the shadows where Ethan had disappeared, she couldn't see trace of the sepia liquid, it was just a normal, plain shadow of a big tree. She decided she would have taken care of it somehow, but before that, she had the feeling she needed to check on Tommy. She circled back around the tree, still searching for signs of “something” Ethan related, soon able to see the other man, in his hole, surrounded by very small twigs that were sending greenish spheres through his mouth and nose, while he kept on breathing them in.

She would have waited for him, under normal circumstances, but decided not to and coughed; when that didn't really give the desired result, she called his name, several times, with increasing impatience in her tone. The fourth time, he finally came back. He was, for what she could tell, alright.

-How did I do?

He asked without daring standing up due to his head spinning like he had been in a centrifuge instead of a “river”.

-Well, I think. We will see about how well later, Tommy. Right now we have a big, ugly problem with Ethan.

-What did he do now?

He slowly got up, steadying himself with the tree.

-He was focusing on feeling the shadow's natural energy and he lost balance, he got in too deep for his first time and overdid it: long story short, the shadow reacted to him and swallowed him.

He stood slack jawed for a moment before asking

-What kind of risk could he be in?

-A person lost inside an element could get overwhelmed, and if not in control of the energy fluxes, get turned into a mana husk, an unstable and usually deformed monstrosity, so we gotta be fast and get him out of there.

-What the hell? That could have happened to me as well?

-No, not really... I mean, for it to happen on a first exposition would be as rare as being struck by a lightning on a clear day: no newbie normally has that strong a pull towards the elements in the beginning. The only mana husks I know of, are people that actually decided they wanted to become such creatures.

-Okay, first awakened Rokian: he couldn't be any further from what you would call normal.

-You can blame me later young man, right now I need to try and pull him back out of there and I need your help.

-At least you have a plan: what do we do?

-Come with me.

She went for Tommy, thinking of helping him walk, but he abruptly declined. Realizing he had overdone it he said.

-Thanks, I think I can manage now, really. I feel like the mana I absorbed has taken the pain away, somehow.

They moved towards the place where she had lost Ethan and Madame Boule sat down.

-Go and find a long branch: it needs to be still green and possibly clean of prickly bits.

As he started to move, Simone traced a flaming rune in the air and begun charging it. Tommy didn't need looking too hard to find the kind of branch Simone had asked for, still attached to its tree: they were in a forest after all. He took care not to damage the trunk too much and pulled it away, cleaning it from leaves and twigs as fast as possible.

-What now?

He asked carrying the branch in front of himself feeling nervous.

-This I am preparing is a magical rune that is normally employed for a spell called “Trill Trap” a lure for mana sensitive beasts. As soon as ready, I will apply it to the branch and you will swing it on top of the shadow. At the same time I will send energy inside the shadow, trying to destabilize it one more time so that Ethan will be able to see the lure from the inside.

-This will really drain me, since I don't belong to the shadow element.

-While all this happens, I will not be able to move, so you have to be the one to pull him out using the branch like if you were using a fishing pole. The Trill Trap should become the hook Ethan will latch to... pull horizontally in order not to break this magic line.

She recommended, attaching a fiery string to the branch.

-And before you could object in any way, at the moment, this is our best bet for getting him out of there fast.

-I didn't say a thing!

He reassured her, secretly putting to rest all of his buts and ifs

-Let's fish ourselves a frogman!

Tommy sighed seriously worried for his friend.