12 - 2 [Magus] Enlightenment Sown, Of Ken and Crone The Lone Sparrow - 1st of Evening Star, Year 1125 A.E.

Barry helped Emilia carry the eats to the table, his spirit shouldering more burden than his flesh. Those shadow limbs of his strained easily, taking considerable effort from him to maintain their shape while under duress.

A single wayward spill of his focus and his conjured limbs went out in a puff of mana-smoke, unguarded candle’s flame snuffed by the winds of the Invisible Tide that they were.

Strange that his arms were acting so meek and weak after having cracked inches-thick steel. Perhaps that bit that Emilia talked about—those healing magicks o’ hers—were to “blame” as she herself had suggested.

Not that Barry really thought it so. Better a cripple than a dead man, afterall.

Elsewise he would’ve let himself be dragged by the currents of the Pale River into the sleep-last-taken twice times over.

After setting down the large pewter platter, Barry helped himself to the various foods atop it. A thick rag lay above the tray, plates of clay further separating the breads and cheeses from the metal below.

Odd that, but he gave it not much thought, nibbling on a nice loaf of bread less than a day old with dried fruits mixed throughout.

Barry let out a moan of delight at the taste, his winter-long sentence of road rations no longer such. No more weevils nor maggots for him if he could do anything about it.

Gods Above, Below, and In-Between my arse cheeks, this stuff is good!

Barry had not any hunger before, but now? He was a starved man, no longer taking bites, but instead gulps of whatever he could get his mitts on.

Preserved strips of meat, tender and not bone-dry like jerky; soft and chewy chunks of cheese Florenii; anything and everything atop that platter was scarfed with abandon, ignorant of would-be asfixia.

The sellsword opened his mouth, as if to scream a summons for the Seven Themselves, but only a gurgle escaped, strangled and sick.

Or, as Emilia heard it:

“EEEECCH AAAACHH”

Quickly, the Priestess gave the man a cup of water for him to wash down whatever stuck in his throat. It helped not, him hacking the enlodged and mangled bit of food out with a cough.

It fell to the floor as the Priestess scolded him, now that she saw he was no longer in mortal peril.

“After all that work me and mine had to keep ye alive and away from the Pale, you go on and almost choke yourself back to the brink of Its cold waters.”

Emilia let out a string of barely audible curses and swears; Barry was glad that she had not called upon her holiness to make those words into truths.

“Sounded like Black Crow Himself cawed from within your gullet. Don’t be a fool, pace yourself. The food will not grow legs and run away, it isn’t a sorcerer like you.”

To have survived an encounter with bloody monsters and a warlock but then to die by his own mouth? That would’ve been irony fit for a child’s tale.

Barry shot the woman a look equal parts apologetic and thankful—she had given him the cup of water, afterall—before he continued on a more measured pace. It was not at all because she had threatened to call upon aerendghasts from On High to “turn him inside out so he wouldn’t ever choke again.”

Definitely not, the Lone Sparrow consoled his pride.

Barry’s measured pace lasted more than a blink but less than a breath ‘fore he started stuffing his cheeks like a chipmunk preparing for long winter.

At least the water helped with any sort of further congestion. Though, like guards ushering a slow caravan off the highway near town lest it burden traffic, it was a lesson in futility.

To usher the caravan off the road made the traffic all the lot worse, nevertheless. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t and all that.

After the Lone Sparrow filled his belly enough to have to untighten the cord of his breeches, Emilia beckoned him to follow.

Bends of stoneworked halls thereafter, they were back at the door to the archives or libraria, as Emilia had called them.

Strange sothron speech, he thought.

As Barry had followed the Priestess from the eatery hall to the steelbound door, he could not help himself but to feel the world with his spirit. He had suppressed the impulse at first, not letting his aura rein free and misbehave.

The sellsword knew well enough that to tread upon another’s turf was unwise.

And yet, to be confined for far too long in fear of would-be retribution weighed excessively heavy against his sensibilities. Barry had, afterall, left the hamlet for that very same reason.

The Maiden of the Crone would not begrudge him a little spiritual stretching, would she? The woman had shown him that she beheld a right and proper head upon her shoulders, what with her treatment of the other wise women beneath the Temple’s roof.

She was no “tyrant” as she herself had said. Whatever actual meaning that word held, Barry cared not, having understood fairly well what Emilia attempted to convey.

She was not like his pa and that was enough.

Slowly, like a spring bloom unfurling itself tentatively from winter slumber, his aura spread from the confines of his flesh and spirit both. Though, he did not expand it to encompass too much of his surroundings, lest he become inundated in a sea of stimulus—like his time inside the cave just after the Slaughter or when in the realm of his soul after he alighted upon Berrowden proper.

How’s it that I know that word? Stimulus… I’ve never ‘eard afore, that I’m sure of. More sorcerous shenanigans, gotta be.

Who’da thunk sorcery would be good for givin’ one fancy words?

Barry’s lips, cracked by the cold of winter, came apart in a middling smile as he observed the Realm of Spirit in all of its glory. He would not have even known of the grin’s appearance had it not caused him tender pain.

Yet no matter how wrong it felt to have even a glint of joy, the Lone Sparrow did not banish the feeling. He had grieved afore and with Stregor’s mentoring, had learnt that it was best not to throw away all that gave one hope and light.

Without either, men were wont to walk dark paths; roads that led to monstrosity of either killing for the kick of it or of apathy to all but carnal desire.

That was not Barry’s way. For all their despicable qualities and deficiencies, his ma and pa had taught him better.

He knew better than to look too deeply into the dark, no matter that his very soul was steeped in the Black.

Of darkness-that-stared-back.

With a shake of his head, the Lone Sparrow focused his attention on the now and on the Spiritual before him.

The Invisible Tide, the ebb and flow of mana, was both wondrous and nauseating. Barry felt like he was atop a boat in high sea, unmoored to the earth as he focused upon the Realm of Spirit.

Oh, now that’s far too much. Don’t got my sea legs yet for this kind of thing; gotta reign it in.

He pulled back his spiritual senses until they were once more manageable. His mind simply could not handle the new sensations, not unlike a man coming out of a darkened room and finding himself blind in the noonday sun—too much, too fast, too soon.

At a more sedate pace, Barry scoured his surroundings with his aura. He felt at the Spiritual with invisible fingers, brushing against the mana tucked between the folds of the waking world.

It was oddly… fleshy; with the natural creases and grooves and striations found within game-meat freshly skinned, gutted, and butchered. Going further and farther through the skeinen threshold of the Spiritual, Barry found worthwhile quarry.

Like rendering a carcass, beneath the hide was the juicy muscle found.

Streamers of solid and congealed substance insubstantial flitted and twisted like sinuous serpents among the general sea that was the Tide of Spirit.

Those solid agglomerations of mana upon the Tide were tantalizing, the very base of his incorporeal body rumbling with a pang of hunger and craving.

“How easy would it be to catch them eels, break their spines, and suck them dry?” Whispered his Center, its wants voiced by way of wandering, wayward thought.

Barry found himself scolding his own nine-damned spirit. He did not know what would happen should he feed upon those streamers of mana in front of the Priestess.

Would she think it nothing much? Or would she find something shiny that she would want for herself or any of her lordling cronies?

She had already proven herself cunning once as Barry let slip his magicking. To do so twice, the shame would be upon him.

You see anyone with cloth too fine or too much silver on their fingers, go the other way, the White Wolf warned.

Too late, Streggie, the Lone Sparrow responded. This woman’s got both the cloth and the riches. Just look at those rocks on her staff; could buy half a town with those and the silver that binds ‘em to each other.

As Barry chewed on the temperment of the Priestess in front of him, said woman fiddled with a loop packed with keys of all shapes and sizes.

“Ah, finally. There’s the right one. Not even a scholar sworn to the Crone Herself can remember all these different keys.”

Emilia touched a longish rod of bronze with various protuberances to the side of the steel-wrought door.

A misshapen key that would fit no lock and a door that had no hole with which to hold key, wrought entirely of steel plates and bound by rivets.

Strange, Barry thought. Strange inde-

The Lone Sparrow’s eyes widened in shock and awe.

The strangeness that was the lack of lockhole or the misshapen key itself were gone. For stranger still was the magicking evident in front of him.

At the Priestess’ touch, light—blue as summer afternoon sky—burned in angular lines and script along the lockless door and bronzen key both.

Sigils flashed into being upon the metal, forming a grander whole like scrollwork wrought of otherworldly fire. The light died down in waves, ebbing no different than water down a Dyeus canal come monsoon, as the door swung open with a baleful creak and atonal hum.

No—such was wrong. It was not the door that hummed, but instead its spirit.

Through the skin of Barry’s Inner Shadow, he felt the vibrations upon the Tide. They were like a call from the Heavens Themselves, a pluck in the tapestry of existence like it were not intangible cloth but instead simple harp to be played and strummed as one wished.

How in the Nine these priests of Mahna gave a door a fucking spirit was anyone’s guess. But what Barry did know was that, now that he looked around himself with his aura, everything had a sort of essence—not just the door.

He had ignored the feeling before or perhaps just not seen it amidst the scintillating sea of movement that was the Tide; needle of pine amidst straw that it was.

But now, he felt the barest hint of it all.

Everything possessed mana, the stuff of souls and spirits. From the stones of the walls to the very fabrics that hung upon the halls, all had a shadow of their likeness that was wrought of substance insubstantial.

The difference was that the door’s essence was more complex; a living and breathing thing. The mana of the quarried stone and mortar was unliving; like, well, stone and mortar.

The spirits of objects were static things, but simple echoes of their physical forms; distorted like sound rebounding off cavern walls, yet otherwise representative of the host matter—what Emilia had called the substance of physical reality.

Like barnacles stuck to ships traveling the Qyranian Sea Roads, were the spirits of the unliving. Those of Emilia and Barry, on the other hand, were like fishes through the strange waters of the Tide.

The lockless door was somewhere in between. Not alive, yet not entirely unliving either.

Interesting, thought the sellsword as he followed the woman into the dark and dry air beyond the now dimming, lockless door.

From all that he had heard from passing verse or witnessing a Dominidas preaching a half winter ago east along the Ydden, only Man had a soul or spirit. Both words were used interchangeably not unlike ship or vessel or boat. Yet, in the marrow of his bones and core of his core, Barry knew it was not so.

Spirit was a distillation of physical form; flesh made simple, as he had called it. Soul was something baser, more primal and older and other; eld. It was Eternity Between Blinks.

It was alien where spirit was familiar. One a simplification and the other… well, even Barry could not entirely say. Words did no justice for such a thing, it just couldn’t be bound to the breath.

Barry pondered the meaning of the soul and spirit as he went down the recessing stonework behind and in lockstep with the Priestess, spiralling into the depths of the earth.