The night had passed, Ard working with the acorns even after I had tried to go to sleep. Sleeping while experiencing elemental exhaustion was a peculiar feeling, something I hadn't experienced before, as if the exhaustion got terrible enough I would pass before I could consciously sleep. She was set on completing the task of preparing the acorns for me, something I wasn't entirely sure I knew what I felt about. The sincerity of the act was welcome, but constantly being attended by such a small creature regardless of how old that creature really was, was embarrassing. But still, it was welcome.

Sleeping through the night, no nightmares took me. It was as if I had opened my eyes to morning, instantly time traveling from one moment to the next. Everything felt more or less the same, but I could also feel that I had more control over my body. More feeling would be more accurate, both my sense of hearing and my sense of sight had returned to me in its vividness. And my fingers, on my left hand I could clench and feel my own flesh on my fingertips. I've gotten some feeling back.

I guess I had been asleep. Getting my back off of the hard forest floor, I made a quick look over my situation. Ard was near, sitting next to the fire. The pot wasn't next to the fire, and a basket of acorns was next to her as well. I refuse to believe she doesn't know I had woken up. Getting up, I walked over to the basket and sat next to it. Next to the fire, and near Ard.

Ard didn't have anything in her hands. No green package, no strangely oversized leaves. I guess I'll eat the work that she had suffered the night to complete. Eating from the basket felt more wrong than eating the venison she'd been giving me each morning. Perhaps it was arrogant of me to assume I was above being given charity, I have to swallow my pride and accept the things given to me. She told me that she wanted to do it because she felt it was right, and although I disagree with her reasoning I'm not going to turn it away just for that.

Still, I didn't take from the basket. Not before she told me to, herself.

Ard looked over to me, eying me strangely. Her face betrayed no emotion, like always. She breathed in a deep breath and exhaled slowly, blowing air out of her mouth and into the fire, exciting it.

"Not going to eat?" she gave, finally speaking and breaking the silence. I waited a moment, her eye still on me, and nodded. Moving my left hand towards the basket, which was on my right, I picked up a broken piece of nut and placed it into my mouth. Bitter, if it had been soaked the bitterness most likely would've left. But I can't complain. I had expected it to have come out a bit bitter, this wasn't a problem of Ard's preparation.

I ate in silence, until I decided I had eaten enough. I couldn't preserve these, there was no method that could be relied on. I couldn't dry them out, and I had no where to place them even if I did. I need to eat these, and I shouldn't pay attention to rationing them out either. Looking over at Ard, she no longer was looking at me. Instead to the fire, her arms hugging her knees, chin resting on top of it all.

I picked up a nut and offered it to her. She glanced at it, then back to the fire. Extending her left hand to grab it, she chewed at it without paying much attention to me. I continued to eat in silence, Ard not going for any more nuts. I wonder how well she chews these things? Are all her teeth sharp like the front? I hope not, it'd be painful to chew these acorns if I only had canines. But in the same way, the ease with each she cut through the nut might prove you don't need molars to grind things down.

Couldn't ask, however. And it was a bit gross anyway.

"You'll be out of things for one or two days more. In the meantime, I'll keep you company. I want to teach you some things about magic, and it'd be best to do it while you have nothing else to do anyway." Ard's voice was matter of fact, and she only turned to me during the second half of her speech. I nodded, and waited for her words to come, no longer chewing nuts beyond the amount I'd prefer to eat.

"I'll start with the absolute basics, in the way I had been taught by my Aoibheann Mórán, the oldest of my people. Well, the oldest of my kin group. There's only three of us, so she's roughly fifteen decades old now. Sixty years older than the other Mórán, who is sixty years older than me. But that's irrelevant.

"The first element is light, the beginning, the original structure, the simplest but also the most complex. From its essence each other form of magic is created, the permutation coming in the form of fire. Fire is the first movement, the first attempt at forming matter. It's shapeless, but it needs fuel to burn in order to live. The second permutation is wind, air, it can form itself into terrible winds. But it can be terribly calm, and can't be seen. Only felt, and that can't form the basis of life, of physical matter. The third permutation is water. It can be stronger than the winds, and more importantly it can be felt and seen. But it isn't stable, and shapes itself to whatever contains it. It's getting close, but life can't be formed from this. The fourth, and the one we exist within, is earth. Hard, stable, but can't move. It is the basis of our life within this plane, and although it can provide for life it itself can't move.

"Finally, the one we láchs are spiritually born from, is darkness. The last form of light, the most unstable. We must rely on the structure of the world itself to exist, within the gaps where light itself can no longer maintain itself, for its structure had permeated itself into something formless. Neither light or darkness you have to concern yourself with, as not even the Móráns are able to manipulate them. Especially not darkness, its essence can be argued to not even exist."

"But, none of the permutations, as it turnd out, could serve as the real basis of life. Instead, each one must be combined, with what combination or basic shell not even our kind understand. I've been told the first form of life was an ancient, primordial mother tree, the beginning of the eternal cycle started with her."

Right. I've heard of the middle four elements, fire, wind, air, and earth, but I've never heard of an order of permutation. Neither have I heard of light or darkness as elements to themselves. And isn't darkness the lack of light, rather than an actual element to itself? Why would you claim you were the spiritually born from the lack of something? This doesn't make sense. And I had been taught that there never was a beginning in our cycle, and there never will be an end. There's no point in wondering when it started, or what started it. But, being unable to articulate these words, I kept silent and waited for Ard to continue.

"You fathachs look to be structured in a different way than us. You, for example, are spiritually born from light. And your master, and the little one that had looked like her, were as we were, formed from darkness. I don't know much about what sort of things your spirit would be able to do, so forgive me if some things don't apply." Ard wiped some hair out of her eyes and continued, never looking at me throughout the entirety of her explanation. Only at the fire.

"Now spells themselves. There are three forms of control that we are aware of, external, internal, and script. External is, as it says, controlling magic that is not originally within you. The magic of the world, there is always much more outside than there ever could be within. This is preferable for everything but healing, and reinforcing materials, like flesh. Internal is controlling the magic within, we can't do much with it outside of what was already mentioned, the healing and reinforcements. Scripts are magics enforced into materials. Not precisely external or internal, it relies on the formation of a spell passively being maintained by both the structure of the material and the structure of the script.

"If the material isn't strong enough, it might break, or worse. Exploding isn't out of the equation. If the script is too complex, then the magic won't form properly, or the material might break. Theoretically, as I've been told, it could be infinitely complex given an infinitely perfect material. But it would require an infinitely perfect understanding of how the spell works. All the part of the scripts hasn't been expressed to me in this way, I've never bothered learning any, so I've never been taught much.

"Although, Aoibheann tells me the reason it fails at higher complexity is due to improper understanding of how the spells work. She tells me, 'the stronger the magic, the more the mundane details matter,' which she is right about, I guess. Casting a small fire is easy. Creating a bigger one is magnitudes harder, and the bigger its made the harder it gets. Almost paradoxically, the same goes if you want to make a smaller fire. From experience, big things are made from smaller things fundamentally. The same logic goes with magic, but keeping track of all the small things becomes exponentially more difficult."

"Understand?" I nodded. Well, no, not really. But sure. "Don't worry if you don't get it right now. It'll become more obvious the more you learn. For now that'll be all I'll teach, tomorrow when you've gotten a bit more magic back in you I'll teach you some basic spells. I really should've taught you those from the beginning."

Hopefully they'll be safer than the ones she taught me the day before yesterday. Although the fault of my failure should be entirely blamed on me, rather than on Ard. What's a script, anyway?

"And, fathach, have I been underfeeding you? You've been munching on those acorns for a while now, you've eaten at least five times as much as I would've expected. I've been foolishly thinking your ability to efficiently digest food was on par with my own kind's, was I wrong?" Ard was staring at me for this, her eyes dead set on mine. Was she? She was feeding me, and that was enough. I shook my head. She hummed and looked away. I don't think she believed me.

We stayed like this for the majority of the day, although Ard would occasionally do something with the dirt. Like with too many things, something magical, considering she was floating what looked to be a perfect sphere of dirt around herself. She's keep making more and more, picking up a clump of dirt and slowly making it as round as the original dirt clump. I wonder if that was what she meant by 'some basic spells.'

Whenever I tried to move beyond any necessity, like relieving myself, she'd tell me to stop, telling me that 'moving is a waste of magic.' I need to move, though, or else I'll bore myself to death. I'd rather not get trapped by my own mind, and having no way to escape myself I wanted to do something. Anything, but I couldn't speak or start a conversation. And once Ard had decided her lesson was over, there was no new information to take in. Neither did I have enough of my own vision back to meditate properly, so I truly was dying from boredom.

Nonetheless, the day passed and I slept in the same spot I had woken up on. Ard had strangely stayed with me the entire day, never leaving beyond where I couldn't see her. Does she have nothing else to do? Or is it that she's intentionally taking a break in consideration of me? Either way, her company was odd, and almost unwelcome considering she didn't allow me to move much.

Morning once again came, sleeping through the cold night the sensations of the world once again was strong enough for me realize the sort of condition I was sleeping in. Several times I woke up from the cold, winds running against me as I huddled as close to the fire as was safe. It wasn't the best of sleeps, but I was alive and ready to participate, and not just listen to, the lessons of Ard.

I could stand and walk, and Ard allowed me to do as I pleased, but she wanted me to attend to her lessons and pay attention. Not worrying about foraging for more food, as she had brought more venison, again wrapped in the same massive green leaf. This time it tasted smoked, so I guess the issue of continued freshness was finally addressed. I wonder if I'm ever going to meet the rest of Ard's tribe, or rather her group. There was only three of them, Ard included.

"The basic lessons will be about manifesting the essential magic into this material plane. You're adept enough to know how to cast spells, and you've already experienced the consequence of overusing your magic. This lesson will just be about control of the internal aspect, no external manifestation will happen yet. I want you to form the shell of the spell internally so that you don't have to expend too much magic and again require my nursing.

"The easiest one to practice with is earth magic, not because earth magic is easy but because you can maintain your work throughout the days or weeks. It won't crumble the moment you stop attending to it. The idea is simple, create simple geometric shapes out of them. If you don't know what shapes are, well, just copy what I'm doing. I don't like the theory and prefer the practical myself, if you want to figure out the why, then do it yourself. I want you to make a sphere, a round object. The rounder it is, the better."

Ard repeated what she had been doing yesterday, grabbing a clump of dirt in her hand and slowly shaping it on top of her palm. Not with her hands, but magically moving it as if the earth itself was alive. Gradually it started to develop a shape, first from a roughly circle object, clumpy and obviously dirty, into smoother clumps, absorbing and spreading itself across the surface until finally it looked like a sphere. But she wasn't done then, the surface continued to slowly shift and move. When she was finally done, the ball of dirt was shiny, almost rock like in appearance.

She placed it in my hand, and I rolled it on my palm. It was hard, but I was too afraid of putting too much pressure on to it, so I couldn't tell how hard.

"Squeeze it."

Oh, she wanted me to crush it, then. I placed it between my thumb and my index finger and squeezed, the ball felt way too hard for that to be enough. I tried scratching it with my nails, but that didn't scratch it either. Finally I tried to tap it against a nearby rock, but that didn't leave any dents either. Only loud taps, this clump of dirt really was as hard as a rock. But it wasn't much larger than a pebble.

"I've been training for decades, and it took me decades to reach that point. The Mórán can make ones even harder than mine, in different shapes as well. It probably takes more magic than your body contains to make what I just did yourself, and it's pretty exhaustive even for me. Neither is it good for tool making, other material are simply better and easier to work with than the thousands of grains of dirt."

Ard took out her knife, one with a single, curved edge, a long white strip of chert for a blade, attached to oak that extends itself to a handle. She handed it to me, and started to describe its composition.

"The stone had been found and molded into the shape of the blade, hardened and strengthened with magic, if I wanted to I could hit it across a rock with all my strength and it would, at worst, chip. But that is with all my strength, which would require magical input. If I used only my physical body, the blade wouldn't chip at all. The rest of the knife, the oak, is similarly sharpened. The wood itself could be strengthened enough to form a blade itself, but it'd never compare to what the rock can offer."

Various engravings ran across the wooden surface, strange knots and lines. The handle was smooth, and looked ergonomically carved to fit a hand. A hand that was much, much smaller than my own. I handed the knife back to her, careful not to touch the blade itself. It wouldn't cut me, most likely, but I didn't want to risk it. She grabbed it and stuffed it back into her sheath.

"You saw what I did with the dirt. I don't want you to mimic it, instead I want you to sit and feel the dirt in your hand. That's all, imagine the feeling, the taste, the idea, the concept of dirt. Feel each grain, what composed it, where did it come from, what can it be and what can't it be. This is the basics of all our magic, the idea of what things can permutate to, and what it can't." Ard seemed prideful of her system of magic. This is much more convoluted than what my master had taught me before. But oddly, I could feel myself turn giddy at the thought of the potential.

Ard left me then, not entirely but simply let me sit still and meditate with the dirt. External meditation is something I've trained a lot in, especially considering I had very little ability to see externally, so it wasn't all that difficult to change my sights from the entirety of nature to only a specific part. I've gotten enough elementals back in my body to be able to meditate, so I spent the rest of that day doing that, until night came, and I once again fell asleep, dirt on my mind.