Barely an hour later, Tercius found himself in front of the room that his mother gave to Mistress Kalina. A double knock echoed off the wooden door and he took a nervous step back. As he waited for Mistress Kalina to either come outside or call him inside, and to take his mind off of what was to come, Tercius thought about the current predicament— with a specific focus on the whole Well situation.
If he was right in his assumption and Rona was developing a Well, then he had to ask Mistress Kalina about the likelihood that his special Energy was the culprit for that. He had to find out what was the likelihood that others from his family could follow in Rona’s painful footsteps. And while he worried for Rona and her current state, she was out of his hands, and the situation would become far worse if everyone he gave Energy suddenly started going into that strange state of Well development.
Tercius knew that among mages, physically smaller people were more likely to develop a Well earlier and that placed the children at risk. Leo was the one he was particularly worried about. The little boy was barely three years of age and if he got his Well, with no mana skills to assist the speed of formation… He would be in for a year or two of constant pain.
Aurelia and Neiran were next, followed by Petra and Septimus, who were of almost equal height, but quite different body shapes, and finally came Ciron. The man was over two meters in height and built like a mountain. While the last year had made him lose a bit of body mass, his grandfather remained so imposing that even Mistress Kalina had given him a few strange looks— to say nothing of Seliana who had joked about finally realizing from where Tercius' height came or Penelope who had had trouble to stop staring at Ciron.
It seemed to him that the best first step to take right now was to ask Mistress Kalina about it and then if his assumption proved true, see if there was a way to prevent or postpone initial Well formation.
Tercius shook his head, as he realized that he had drifted away. He glanced at the door before him. Even if she had called for him, he would not have registered it.
“Mistress, it’s Tercius,” he said clearly. “I was wondering if we could talk for a moment?”
The door opened slowly. “Come in,” Mistress Kalina’s voice came, oddly distorted.
As he came in and turned left he saw a frowning Mistress Kalina hovering a meter above her bed, her legs folded under her and eyes firmly closed. The air around her shimmered and a brief glimpse with Mana Sight gave away large amounts of mana.
A small tendril of mana went past him and he heard the door close. Mistress Kalina’s eyes snapped open but they didn’t look at him. The woman grunted and then sniffed in frustration. “Tell me Tercius, have you ever heard or read of spirits?”
"Err… I know some folk tales if that's what you mean Mistress, but…" Tercius answered after a moment.
"A small lesson then. Spirits are classified as Energy anomalies that have gained a form of existence that is apart from their creator or creators," Mistress Kalina calmly explained. "As luck would have it, these beings cannot interact with the Physical World and gather their Energy in the same way we do. The only places where these beings survive are where others leave willing offerings of Energy— mostly around temples and shrines. But… that's not the only source of Energy from which they can feed," Mistress Kalina shared, looking him in the eyes for the first time since he came in. "A Well is another viable option,"
A chill went down his back from that look.
“Young spirits, those starved of Energy in particular, are dangerous to us because they need more Energy and they go to great lengths to get it,” Mistress Kalina explained. “Tell me, did you buy this house or build it?”
“… We tore down the old one to the last stone and built this one from the ground up, Mistress,” he answered slowly, as he kept wondering where she was going with this.
“I see. And is anyone in your family a… fervent believer in a particular deity?”
“… my grandmother, Mistress,”
Mistress Kalina nodded and used her head to indicate the corner above the door. “Come, use your Energy sensing skill there to observe,”
Tercius would have used it even without her telling him that. Energy Sight came to life and the green of his eyes turned a shade lighter. The whole room was drenched in a light Energy curtain and all of it moved around Mistress Kalina like a protective shell. Tendrils of Energy moved around the room and he turned to observe the spot where Mistress Kalina indicated. Thin Energy tendrils pooled there like a cocoon around… something. Tercius returned his Energy Sight to the original setting and darkness descended, considerably sharpening his vision. Even then he had trouble seeing what it was that Mistress Kalina was trying to entangle.
"From what I saw earlier, it had plenty of opportunities to enter your Well and it didn't take it even once. Not that it would have succeeded if it did try. While it is perfectly content to ignore the Well in your chest, a behavior that indicates some kind of a connection between you two, my Well is a great source of temptation for this spirit,"
A brief flash happened at the center of that mass and Mistress Kalina’s threads collapsed inwards. He heard the woman hiss behind him. “Clever little spirit…” Mistress Kalina murmured and the threads jumped across the room. Just before the bright threads caught up with their fleeing target, Tercius managed to catch a partial glimpse of this… spirit.
His first impression was that it was a cloud of tiny stars bound by Energy.
But as he looked more closely, Tercius was able to spot appendages that the spirit used to run on the ceiling, but the moment had been so brief that even with Visualization he had trouble counting them all. The image that he had clearly showed three long graceful appendages, but he spotted at least two more and whether they were legs or something else entirely, he had no clue. There was a head, of which Tercius only spotted a round outline and that was through the cloudy body itself…
“The whole time we conversed downstairs, it positioned itself between me and you and your family members. And as soon as I was in here alone, it came to feed. Hmm… It smells like a cat to me,” Tercius heard Mistress Kalina say, even as he continued to track the Energy movement around the room.
A cat. The animal that Rona’s religion considered sacred was a cat.
“Mistress, how sure are you that it won’t attack us… or my Well?”
“Fairly sure,” Mistress Kalina answered and Tercius relaxed. “If I’m right about its nature, that is,”
Tercius frowned. He had expected something along the lines of… completely sure or maybe even a hundred percent sure.
"It's difficult to tell with these beings until they reach a certain age, but it seems to me that the primary instinct in this spirit is protection, simply based on its behavior. Spirits, in general, take time to form, anywhere from a single decade and upwards— mostly based on the size of the group that calls them into being. An interesting fact is that among spirits that form, protection spirits are particularly common. The rare spirit that reaches maturity and gains the ability to interact with the world can protect the ones they were created to protect, but… everyone else is either ignored or attacked," Mistress Kalina stated. "And as you can see, this one is quite hungry and I am the only food source in the vicinity,"
His grandmother was probably the last who fed this being, close to five months ago. But how did she feed it? An offering? Something was very strange here. Other than the spectral cat that haunted the house, that is. For a few minutes, Tercius just stood and observed the interaction between the spirit and Mistress Kalina’s Energy threads.
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“Mistress, how does this… offering business work exactly? My grandmother can’t manipulate Energy, as we can. Few can, for that matter,”
“How do you create a skill?” Mistress Kalina asked back. “You don’t. It creates itself. People pray and then leave a physical offering along with a very small amount of Energy. A smidgen, really. Go to any temple and see for yourself. It’s fascinating to observe, let me tell you,”
Another implosion occurred. The being disappeared and in a brief flash, it appeared inside the floor, it's head the only thing visible above the carpet. It was a cat. It flickered and its outline was a bit fluid, moving like a cloud of gas, but the general shape of the head was of one of the cats that his grandmother used to have back in their village. The glowing head was wide and the starry ears quite large for what Tercius was used to, but not overly so. It was just around the border of what he took as the norm for feline looks.
Mistress Kalina frowned while sniffing the air, and the Energy threads came down onto the spirit. "It's not every day that you find a spirit like this. A structure-bound spirit with the ability to rapidly use spatial phases as a means of movement while inside the confines of its bonded structure is… a rare being, let me tell you. I would like to take some time to study it, but…" Mistress Kalina said. " Tercius. I can't sleep here tonight. The journey here has drained me greatly, and with this being present here, I need to find an inn in the vicinity to rest. If you could explain that, somehow, to your… persistent mother, I would be most grateful."
After a moment, Tercius nodded. “You can consider that settled Mistress,”
Suddenly the room felt that much hotter, but considering what he was about to say he supposed that that was to be expected… “I came here because I need to confess something to you, Mistress…”
Tercius finally told her that he had shared information about Energy and Energy itself with some members of his family. At that moment, when he waited for her reaction to his revelation, Tercius's mind ran through all of the dozens of different scenarios that he had come up with in the past six months. In one scenario she arrested him and he was sent to a trial, where colleagues of those three Magistrates put him to work for a decade. In another, he was stripped of his mana channels, and never again able to use his skills. A couple of scenarios where he was contractually bound to give out Energy, then a few where he had been experimented on… If a few of those, members of his family were included with him.
But it had to be done. He couldn't allow Leo or Aurelia or Neiran to go through Well formation with no appropriate preparations.
When he finished his admission, solemnly waiting for Mistress Kalina’s judgment, he stared at the floor.
Then he heard a laugh rise in front of him. She was laughing in his face.
"Child… I didn't think that you had kept quiet to your family in the first place. Not for a moment. And while what you did is indeed a clear violation of the law… this is a completely new situation for me. The record holder for the youngest Energy manipulator, before you came along, was held by the famous Grand-Mistress Aya for… just over a millennium, I think. She became an active Energy user at the age of thirty-three. She was a fully grown woman. If she had told her family, I could have held her accountable. You? You became one of us at what? Eight? Nine? Ten? While some of your unwitting actions will indeed bar you from using the Repository for some time, time is something you have. Something you will have in spades. But do try to keep the ban within a half-century limit, we wouldn't want any permanent black marks,"
Tercius laughed weakly. For him, a year was a long time. He still had a decade before he hit the half a century mark, mentally. Relief flooded through him. This wasn’t that bad. Not bad, at all. “Famous Grand-Mistress Aya, Mistress? I’ve never heard of her… For that matter, Grand-Master Tergaron is the only Grand I know of…”
“Oh, she’s quite famous amongst a small, but select group of people,” Mistress Kalina said with a wink and waved a hand at the persistent spectral cat. “‘Grand’ is not a title, per se. Once you celebrate your first millennium, you can either use it or not. Most do, however,”
"What?!" Tercius snapped. "First millennium?"
“Yes, that’s what I said,”
“A thousand annual cycles? A thousand rotations of this planet—” he pointed downwards. “—around the sun?”
“Yes…”
Tercius didn’t know what to say. To live for a thousand years… It seemed impossible, somehow. And yet…
Tercius observed the spectral cat jump at Mistress Kalina, only to be tossed away by a large tendril of Energy. “Mistress… You aren’t secretly another of these Grands, are you?”
The woman gave him a small smile as she shrugged. Maybe I am, maybe I'm not, her shrug seemed to say. Tercius prepared another question, only to think better of asking. He closed his open mouth, and let it be.
“Wise,” Mistress Kalina nodded as she used the Energy threads to tug on the tail of the spirit.
“Mistress, can I feed this spirit with my Energy?”
Mistress Kalina nodded.
“And will it stop bothering you, Mistress?”
Mistress Kalina pondered on his question. "Perhaps… It won't come after me out of hunger like it is now, but it will still probably persist because I am the only intruder in his home on whom it can cast an influence. But ultimately, there's only one way to know for sure…"
"I see," Tercius nodded. "If you don't mind, Mistress, give me a moment to feed it, and then I…"
“Yes, neophyte?”
“I have some more questions…”
“Of course you do.”
Mistress Kalina gave him some basic information about spirits, especially young ones, and from her tale, he figured out that mages generally steered clear of these beings. Two of the abilities all young spirits possessed was the ability to literally eat any Energy outside of a body— he gathered that this included Energy spells— and their ability to invade a Well in their search for more Energy was also something most mages with a Well liked to steer clear of.
Once Tercius fed Energy to the spirit, it retreated into something that Mistress Kalina called 'a pocket phase of space'. It was an ability that some spirits were known to have, and more than frightened by the spirit's apparent ability to 'jump' through space, Tercius was intrigued. Was this the ability that gave rise to the space where the Pyramid was?
Mistress Kalina, of course, couldn't confirm or deny that claim, but he felt that he was at least partially right.
They spoke about spirits in general and their connection to priests and faith, only for Tercius to learn that the priests of today hail from a long-abandoned branch of mages who used these spirits through their Wells to great effect.
The spirit did come back to harass her, and it continued to do so despite his protests.
“I’m afraid that won’t work. The only one who can… steer the spirit, let's say, is your grandmother. By your own words, she was the one who invoked the being. By herself, strange as that is," Mistress Kalina shook her head. "Your Energy might be at fault here. I've never read of a single person calling forth a spirit. This being knows what your grandmother imprinted on him. I'm making a guess here, but the most likely case is that you and your family are meant to be protected from the others, invaders like me and probably everyone else, and it will act accordingly. Nothing you say or do will make it any different. Without some true effort from your grandmother to tame the spirit and teach it, the best course of action is to let it be forgotten before it matures and becomes a menace. The real question here is who falls into what group? Does all of your family, as you are now? Or the members your family had when the spirit came to be?"
“The baby?” Tercius whispered, catching onto the meaning.
"As I said before, it's difficult to tell with these beings and I am by no means an expert in these things. Few mages are, for that matter. I know only the general warnings that were written down for posterity and I've had a few unpleasant experiences with some free spirits whom I've had to exorcise…"
Tercius didn’t know how to answer that. Was she giving him a hint that that should be something that he should do?
“How long until it matures?”
“Oh, decades. Maybe even centuries. Without help, that is,”
With a sigh of relief, Tercius realized that this could wait for Rona to come back and decide.
Tercius finally turned to the subject he came for initially. He was right in his assumption, Mistress Kalina confirmed. His year-long Energy experiments on his grandmother were likely a big factor that ultimately resulted in Rona’s Well development. With his blessing, Mistress Kalina and he went and checked on the sleeping Leo and Aurelia.
“The boy won’t develop a Well anytime soon, don’t worry. His physical mana channels are quite advanced for his age, but there’s still some room to grow and that will not change any time soon. The girl is in the same situation,”
During lunch Mistress Kalina took stock of his grandfather and his mother.
“Your grandfather isn’t anywhere near the limit, but at his age the growth of mana channels is extremely slow, so he’s unlikely to manage to do it. Without outside help, that is. Your mother, on the other hand, is quite near the threshold and she is still young. A year or two of natural growth and her Well will come into being,” she informed him after lunch, as the spectral cat harassed her.
Tercius tossed a small Energy construct the size of a ping pong ball and the strange creature darted after it, leaving them in peace to talk.
“I presume that when you say natural growth, Mistress, you refer to spending mana with skills?”
“Since she is a non-mage, that is her only recourse, yes. In cases like these, I would recommend immediate training for Mana Manipulation to start, neophyte,”
“Right. I was thinking, Mistress, maybe if I used my Energy to accelerate the speed of Well development…”
He went on to explain his thoughts on the matter. It was a sound theory, as far as he could tell. Since Energy was mana and he knew that properly applied mana could accelerate the development of the Well, then he could in theory use his special Energy to accelerate the speed of initial Well development— and going further down that line, possibly use Energy to expand a Well. If he could create a Well within a week or less…
Mistress Kalina gave his idea some thought. “Don’t try to expand your Well with no supervision, for one. Your strange Energy… well it might work, but who knows… It could also easily cripple your Well. It’s still quite small. All of this is uncharted territory, Tercius, remember that. As for increasing the speed of Well formation… It could work, but it might also halt the process entirely. The question is, will the pain go away with the development or will it stay and torment the poor soul? Give me some time to think about this…”
When Mistress Kalina left for the inn Tercius recommended, despite his mother’s vehement protests, Tercius debated on telling the household members of the fourth cat in the household, counting his grandmother’s two fat cats and Amber— the spectral cat that could be lingering around their heads at all times of every day. It's a relief that it’s shaped like a cat. If it was a spider and it settled on my head… he thought with a full-body shudder.
As he looked at the ranting Petra, still angry at him for allowing a guest to go to an inn when there was so much room at their home— a grave loss of face for Petra, as she kept repeating over and over again— Tercius strongly leaned towards telling.
If he told her about the spirit it might just be enough to take her off of his back…