You stay behind after lessons end that day so you can ask Elder Minaro a question. “What does ‘Mero Dudla’ mean?”
Elder Minaro glares at you for wasting his time. “Nothing. It sounds like complete gibberish, child. Where did you hear it? You better not have just made it up to waste my time, little butterfly.”
You glare right back at the Elder. “I did not make it up! It’s what Sonadoro’s dreams sounded like. I kept hearing your voice saying it over and over again.”
Elder Minaro’s glare softens and he hums in thought. After a few moments, he snorts and turns his back to you and coughs into his hand. When he turns back to face you his face is solemn and stern but he’s not glaring anymore. “You don’t have any idea?”
You look at him suspiciously. “No. That’s why I asked you. What does ‘Mero Dudla’ mean?”
Instead of answering you, Elder Minaro point at Genialida, his always sleeping silver bear spirit companion. "What do Genialida’s dreams sound like?"
You listen for a few moments and then tell him the truth. “It sounds like constantly shifting gibberish. Kind of like your voice but more feminine.”
Elder Minaro covers his face with his hands and makes more coughing noises. "Curious. I’ve been told that Genialida does sound like me, but I don’t hear it myself. As far as I know, you’ve never heard her speak before. Follow me."
Without waiting or further explaining Elder Minaro strides swiftly out of the room and you have to jog to keep up with his longer strides.
A loud yawn causes you to glance behind. Genialida is following you, blinking her black eyes sleepily.
Elder Minaro leads you on a long walk, headed steadily downwards for so long you are starting to get tired from jogging to keep up. You follow him for a long time. Suddenly and without warning you, he swerves into an opening off of the tunnel you are in and leads you into a small cave where a woman and her silver bear spirit brother are sleeping.
The woman and the silver bear both have their own pile of furs under them to cushion their sleeping bodies from the cold hard cave floor. You guess some people aren’t as close as you and Wotjeo. Your bear brother and you sleep on the same pile of furs. Especially during winter when the cold winds howl in through the open cave mouth, you are grateful for his warmth.
Your teacher points at the sleepers "What do their dreams sound like?"
You tell him, “Both of their dreams sound like constantly shifting gibberish.”
He frowns at you. “Can you tell the difference between their dreams?”
You listen closely and realize that you can tell them apart. You tell him “The woman’s gibberish sounds feminine and the silver bear spirit companion’s gibberish is much deeper and more masculine.”
Elder Minaro graces you with a rare smile. “Very good. What does that tell you?”
You don’t know but Elder Minaro is clearly getting impatient so you try to guess. “I’m hearing their voices?”
Elder Minaro nods approvingly “Yes, and?”
You think about it as hard as you can, but you don’t know. You look up at your teacher and shrug. “I don’t know. Please tell me.”
Elder Minaro scowls at you. “Bah, you’re as slow-witted as your father. For all her faults, at least your mother isn’t a fool. Try harder and follow me.”
Your grumpy and denigrating teacher leads you out of the cave. You follow him into the next cave down the tunnel. The new cave is so small that it feels crowded by Elder Minaro and the woman inside along with three silver bears.
In the center of the floor of the new cave is a large thick sheet of flat-black metal. There's a handle near one edge that you could grab onto and try to drag it with. When you step on it, it sounds hollow, like there's a hole under it.
The woman snatches you off it and tells you “Don’t stand on the hatch. It’s dangerous. The things that live down there could try to get out at any time.”
Heavy chains of the same metal criss-cross the flat-black metal plate covering the hole. The chains are melted into the floor on one side. On the other side the chains wrap around robust arcs of metal melted into the floor and thick metal bars pass through both the links on the chain and the arc of metal melted into the ground so that the plate can't be lifted without moving the chains and the chains can't be moved without first pulling out the metal bars. If your world had bombs and you’d ever seen a bomb shelter, you might think the hatch looks like a thick trap-door leading down to a bomb-shelter except that it is held down with way too many chains.
The woman in the cave is wearing lots of dull gray armor. Her feet are encased in dull gray metal boots. Her legs are mostly covered by a skirt of strips of dull gray metal. Her chest is similarly covered in a shirt made of overlapping strips of dull gray metal. Her wrists and part of her arms are protected by bands of dull gray metal arm-bands. The only parts of her not covered in metal are her face and hands.
She clanks when she moves to greet Elder Minaro. Surprise and respect tinged with concern is clear in her tone: "Elder! There have been no changes here since the last report. You should arm yourself if you want to enter the deep tunnels."
Elder Minaro shakes his head dismissively, "I’m not going in today. My student just needed to examine someone who woke up recently and most of the rest of the tribe has been awake for too long now."
Your teacher points at the woman and her silver bear spirit companion. "Can you hear their dreams?"
You can, and you tell him what you hear as best you can describe it. “Their dreams are… fading? Is that the right word? The dream vital essence sounds even more like gibberish. Some of the gibberish is just noise now instead of sounding like words I don’t know.”
Elder Minaro thanks the woman and then leads you back towards the lesson cave, walking less swiftly now. As he walks, he asks you “What do you think you’re hearing now?”
You don’t really know, but you know now that saying that is not what he wants to hear so you take a wild guess. “I’m hearing their dreams.”
Elder Minaro shakes his head no vigorously, his long, untamed hair flying wildly around him. “No. No. Obviously not. If you were hearing their dreams you wouldn’t have heard anything from the two who were awake, but you did. I’ll give you one more chance, though you’ll likely disappoint me and waste it too.”
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You think hard while you jog to keep up with his long legs. Finally, you tentatively risk another guess. “I’m hearing memories of their dreams?”
Elder Minaro stops and turns to glare at you. After a minute he groans and says “You’re just guessing now. Only a half-bear, half-butterfly like you could possibly be so wrong after so many hints. I can’t tell if I’m more astonished that you’re getting closer or that you’re still so very, very stupid despite my best efforts to teach you better.”
He resumes walking and lectures you while he does so. "Everyone sees vital-essence and madra slightly differently. We're not really seeing anything with our eyes but rather with our spirits. Our minds do everything they can to convert those spiritual perceptions into the senses we're more familiar with but for most people its a crude approximation at best. Your vital-essence sense is further complicated by being hearing instead of sight or smell, which I have more experience with. Fortunately, you can learn to better understand vital-essence perception with practice and my guidance. I'd planned to have you work on that during our lessons anyways but now I think I will make that a higher priority.”
It’s a long walk back to the surface and he lectures you for most of it. “As the Dreamkeepers are well aware, people don’t dream coherently, and only rarely in words. I think the gibberish you’re hearing is the imprint of key words from their dreams, but all jumbled up because dreams are intrinsically incoherent. The Dreamkeepers have several madra arts to help clarify and stabilize dreams. That’s just my guess. The guess of an incredibly smart, talented, handsome, and wise teacher. So as guesses go, it’s a pretty good one. Sadly, it’s still just a guess and I have no more time to devote to this foolishness. If you want to know for sure what, if any, meaning what you hear near dream vital-essence is you will have to think on it further on your own time. I can no more solve this mystery for you with certainty than I can hear with your ears or teach you how to see vital-essence now that your troublesome Butterfly brain has decided to convert vital-essence perception into sound instead of sight. If you ever figure out what ‘mero dudla’ means let me know and I will reward you appropriately."
Just before you get back to the lesson cave you ask Elder Minaro “What are the deep tunnels?”
Elder Minaro waves his hands dismissively, "Nothing you should concern yourself with unless you become a Guard or Miner, and then not for many years yet."
***
The rest of your group lessons with Elder Minaro seem to pass all too slowly. He is constantly, rude, insulting, and demeaning. You are treated to the cruel side of his tongue by far the most frequently, but none of the children are spared his verbal abuse. Even so, the end of your lessons with him is approaching faster than you want. Every day you struggle to learn everything you can while doing your best to ignore his verbal abuse.
As best you can judge, Felero is only a tiny bit behind you in your lessons. Not even a full day behind sometimes, but behind you think. The other boys slowly but surely fall further behind as Minaro teaches you and Felero how to sense not just vital essence but also madra, like that in the blindfolds the boys were wearing when you returned from being isolated. The blindfold bandannas were imbued with light madra by the Butterfly tribe to block vital-essence sight as a training aid. Vital essence sight is so common that the Silver Bear tribe always buys several during the septennial spiritual arts competition called the Luchamadra.
***
At the start of the last day of classes Elder Minaro makes an announcement. “Felero, your progress has been impressive. Please convey my compliments to your mother. Bato, your progress is...”
Elder Minaro sneers “adequate. You may tell your father, Aracato, I said so. As for you,”
Elder Minaro glares at red-haired Decavo, “If you don’t learn to control your temper and start listening to your elders you’re going to get yourself killed. The death of an ill-tempered fool like you is not much of a loss, but you’ll take your spirit sister with you, and that I object to. I’ll be keeping an eye on you when it is my turn to lead the morning meditation gatherings.”
Elder Minaro sighs. “Chuno, your progress is also adequate, but only just barely. If you are still set on pursuing your dreams, you’ll have to work harder in the future, or you’ll never make it.”
Elder Minaro turns to you with a depressed frown on plastered on his face. “Which just leaves you, girl. It pains me to say it, but you’ve made the most progress. So I’ll be stuck with you for another season. What a travesty, I’m not looking forward to having to teach someone so slow-witted until the height of summer. If the spirits are kind next year’s cubs will be better. Well, what are you lot waiting for? Get out of my sight already. Felero, girl, stay a moment.”
Elder Minaro glares at Bato and his cronies until they’ve left the room. He turns to address the only boy left in the room first “Felero, I’ve discussed your situation with the Matriarch. The tribe can always use more Dreamkeepers. We’ve agreed that you can use this room to practice in until the tournament as long as I'm not using it. As I will be using it for most of the next season, you can practice in the hallway during that time as long as you don’t distract me. Run along now.”
Felero hurriedly waves goodbye to you and dashes out of the room.
Elder Minaro glowers at you. “Wait here.”
He leaves the lesson cave and comes back a few minutes later carrying a metal goblet that looks very similar to the one he had you drink from when he abandoned you in the old mining tunnels. He hands the goblet to you with extreme care, not letting go until he’s sure you have hold of it. It is full to the brim with a weird-looking orange liquid. “Drink this.”
You look at it suspiciously. He isn’t going to abandon you again, is he?
Wotjeo tells you, “Even if he does, we know the way home from here. Drink, sister.”
You take a sip. It tastes terrible, and you try to hand the goblet back.
Elder Minaro glares at you. “Drink all of it. Yes, it tastes terrible. It’ll also expand your mind and help you make progress in your lessons. I brewed it myself, it’s not as effective as the morning dew the Corazon Chamois make, but the ingredients are much easier for me to gather. The whole tribe together couldn’t afford enough goblets of morning dew to last through your training. From now on, you’ll be drinking one of these every day or some other potion I’ve prepared. An advantage many in the tribe would be willing to cut their own arm off to have. You may thank me later, although most of my students don’t do so until they’re adults for some reason.”
You glare at Elder Minaro for insulting you, but force yourself to drink all of the liquid. You gag several times while swallowing it. It tastes a lot like mud. Orange mud.
Yuck!
Elder Minaro snatches the goblet out of your hands when you’ve nearly finished it. He sets it down in front of Wotjeo and tells him: “Drink the rest and then lick it clean. Every drop counts. Sorry, I don’t have enough for both of you, but it’ll be your turn to get first taste soon enough.”
Elder Minaro turns back to you and hands you a ring. It practically screams with dream and metal madra. If Elder Minaro hadn’t put so much focus on teaching you to turn down the volume on your madra senses you wouldn’t be able to bear being close to it.
Your teacher impatiently tells you “Stop looking at it and put it on; then stand still.”
Elder Minaro paces a few steps away and then throws a rock at you. Frantically you dive out of the way.
“Disobedient girl!” Elder Minaro roars. “Stand still! This won’t hurt.”
Reluctantly you stand back up and stay put. This time you close your eyes when he winds up to throw the rock at you. When nothing hits you, you peek out of one eye. The rock lies a pace in front of you. What happened?
Elder Minaro growls at “Stand still and keep your eyes open.”
Curious now, you follow his instructions and this time when the rock comes hurtling towards you, you see a bronze wall roughly as tall and wide as you are flash into existence just long enough to block the rock and then fade away.
Elder Minaro says reprovingly, “I’ve noticed the animosity you’ve managed to engender in your classmates.”
You open your mouth to object that they wouldn’t hate you so much if he hadn’t constantly been putting you down for who your mother.
Before you can get two words out, Elder Minaro starts talking again, paying no attention to what you are saying. “I can’t very well teach you if you spend the entire time recovering from your injuries. This will help improve your odds of making it to my lessons intact, but it alone isn’t enough to let you beat all three of them at once. Take the rest of the day, and the advantage of clearer thought than your muddled butterfly brain usually permits, to figure out how to shift the odds in your favor. Don’t take this as a sign of special favor. I loan that ring to my best student every year, and you’ll return it at the end of your lessons. Which start tomorrow. There will be no more half measures. From now on, you’ll spend all your time with me from the end of morning meditation until dinner, and you will do your miserable best to learn what I learned through much hardship.”