Chapter 14 Alright?

Isaac sat his empty plate on the floor next to him. He was sitting cross legged while leaning against the side of the bed to eat his breakfast. Lenna was sitting in a chair finishing up her own a few feet away. “I’m tired. We got up way too early for that.” Isaac complained.

“It was your idea.” Lenna reminded him.

Isaac sighed. “Yeah… That doesn’t change the fact that it was too damn early.” He grumbled. Lenna shook her head while taking another bite. “Maybe I’ll take a nap.”

Lenna swallowed down her food and then countered that idea. “You won’t sleep tonight.” She told him. He squinted at her, annoyed that she was right. She thought for a moment and then had an idea. “I can teach you how to meditate.”

Isaac tilted his head to the side. “I thought only elves meditated instead of sleeping.” He questioned.

Lenna nodded. “Yes, we can enter a deeper state that, actually allows rest, while semiconscious.” She explained.

“But you think meditating will still help me feel less tired?” Isaac extrapolated. Lenna nodded in affirmation. “It’s worth a shot. Not like we had anything planned for the day anyway.”

Lenna finished her food and then sat down across from him matching his sitting position. “I’ll lead you through it.” She began.

Isaac nodded. “Alright.”

Lenna closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “Close your eyes.” He did so and also took a deep breath as she had. “Meditation works in three stages. Elves, once finished with the third stage, will naturally slip into the fourth.” She continued, making sure to take plenty of long and deep breaths. Isaac could hear her breathing and followed along at his own pace. He felt his body start to relax and his heartbeat slow.

After a long moment of silence Lenna continued again. “Continue to let your body go. Let it relax. Relinquish control.” She told him.

The last part was very difficult for Isaac. She could feel him despite the few feet between them and she could tell where he was at in her instruction. After an incredibly long length of time Isaac got it. He slowly relinquished more and more control over his body to his body. He had to tell himself that just because he wasn’t in control that that did not mean that someone else was. His body could simply exist on its own. That was what happened when he was asleep and he always woke up the next morning. He just had to let the same thing happen while he was awake.

Lenna smiled when she felt the tension finish releasing from Isaac. Her aura made her very in tune with other people on a soul deep level but with most people she didn’t know how to read the feelings she got from them. With Isaac it was an entirely different story. They had spent so long together that she could probably have a conversation with herself, extrapolating Isaac’s responses just from how he felt in her aura.

“Next is the mind. Be still. Think of nothing. Be nothing. As you release your grip on your own consciousness, you will start to feel one with your mana.” She explained and continued to wait patiently for Isaac to follow her instructions. This also took Isaac a very long time. Lenna knew instinctively how long it had been since they had returned and thus knew what time it was by the clocktower she had seen four and half hours prior on their trip back from Gio’s office. They had started meditating a little over three hours before her most recent direction.

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By the time Isaac had managed to let his mind be at peace it had been seven hours since they had started. He felt more than thought. Just as Lenna had said, he felt one with his mana. He knew where every mana pathway was and which way the mana preferred to flow. He discovered that like veins and arteries his mana had paths that it preferred to take to and from his core which was located in the exact same place as his heart. Two things existed in the same place. His heart, the center of his bloodstream, the focal point of life inside his body. And his core, the place of concentrated power that held all of his mana, the beginning of his power and the place where the power of the world, mana, poured in like a broken dam.

As he was then, his mana pool, which was more like an ocean compared to most people, was filled to the brim. It couldn’t hold any more mana so the mana of the world simply washed over it almost as if it wasn’t even there. He noticed something else during his introspection, the mana of the world actually washed over his mana pool. He could feel it going over, under, and around it like a smooth stone in a river. Where most people’s mana pool was like a cup that once full would spill out any extra that it absorbed into the surrounding area, Isaac’s mana pool just stopped taking any more in. Any wizard worth the name would have been frothing at the mouth if they had been given any of this information. Isaac simply looked at the information like another curiosity.

He was so deep into the third level of meditation that he didn’t even hear Lenna’s voice directing him towards its zenith. “Let your mana cycle, as new mana comes in, expel the old instead of letting it sit.” She told him.

Even without hearing her he was already on the path to doing just that. His curiosity was getting the better of him and he decided, without even having a proper thought, to relinquish his control over his own mana. Slowly but surely the mana began to flow. Down the arteries and back the veins. His body began drinking in the power as it flowed through him. He felt lighter and his fatigue melted away. He was so relaxed at that moment that he accidentally slipped into the very thing Lenna had told him to do.

The dam burst. It started slowly but soon became a torrent of power. Ten percent of Isaac’s reserves were leaving him per second and he was regenerating just as much. He began to feel energized but without the need to move. He felt as if he was existing on a different plane from his own body, that he could still feel like it was in a place not far nor near. A loud noise punched him back to reality like the feeling of falling while trying to fall asleep.

—

Celeste had been cleaning a mug from one of the patrons who had just left. It was that awkward time in between lunch and dinner where only the lonely, jobless, or guards with odd schedules were her customers. She was absently wondering why Isaac and Lenna had been locked in their room all day. A smirk came across her lips. ‘Maybe.’ She chuckled to herself.

She turned to place the now clean mug back in its resting place when it dropped from her hand. The wooden mug bounced and clanged against the old wooden floor. A few of her patrons shot to their feet. Chairs fell and silence reigned. Anyone with any amount of mana senses was hit with a feeling of incredible danger. The closest the feeling can be described with words is as one patron described it in a letter to the duke. ‘It felt as though a caged dragon was staring down at me as if I was the one who had put it there.’

They all looked to the ceiling, all eyes seeming to stare through to Isaac and Lenna’s bedroom. Celeste was the first to break free of her stupor and ran up the stairs towards the duo’s room. She didn’t bother knocking and simply threw the door open. The room was dark, as always because its primary residents didn’t need light to see, but what struck her was that once she had opened the door even the hallway was cast in darkness.

—

Lenna’s eyes flew open when she felt Isaac’s proverbial dam break. The power was far beyond anything she had ever felt from him. When he used his shadows the feeling she got from them was weird. It was, quite literally, a shadow of the feeling she got now. She could feel that he was using an incredible amount of power but she could not feel the power itself. It was like witnessing a volcanic eruption versus standing next to it. She swallowed hard. Her throat was dry. Even his death mana didn’t leave this kind of impression. His death mana and by extension his death flames made any who witnessed it keenly aware of their own mortality. Everyone who saw them knew instinctively that the power that they were seeing was the same power that the Reaper himself used. The black flames felt like they were just a nudge in just the wrong direction from burning away a person’s strand of fate that tied them to the mortal realm.

Lenna was locked in awe at the spectacle even if she could not see very clearly through the massive amount of dark mana that was being cycled out into the room. The mana was so dense that it became visible to the naked eye. ‘He looks so peaceful.’ She thought to herself as Isaac sat there, completely relaxed, inside a cyclone of dark mana. He looked as though he could have been asleep.

The door slammed open and Lenna’s head jerked from Isaac to the door where she saw Celeste standing, panting, with her eyes so wide they looked as though they would fall out of her head.

—

Isaac’s eyes flew open from the loud bang that reverberated off the hard wood and stone walls. He had to blink a few times to get his eyes to work properly and then he realized that the problem was all the black mana in the way. He flexed his will and directed all the mana back towards him. The area surrounding him got darker and darker until not even he could see through it so he moved it to the sides. Sitting on the floor on either side of him was a ball of dark mana about the size of his head. He didn’t feel the need to compress it as hard as he could as he was simply moving it out of the way.

His eyes took in Celeste’s mix of awe and horror and he tilted his head in question. “Celeste? Is everything alright?”