Bear stopped just outside a beatdown, deadend, sun and dust worn motel just inside the city limits of Sedona, dropping his travelsack and guitar case to the pavement sidewalk as he stepped up to the motel’s porch railing to scratch a simple little eye shaped symbol on a convenient post before turning back to open his guitar case and pull out the wad of cash he had stuffed into the velvet lining.

He went in and rented a room for five nights, spending almost half his cash, and hurried out and across the cracked parking lot pavement.

He felt an almost desperate need to begin his search, but the dust and sweat of the road called for a freshening up first.

A shower, a change of clothes, a shave and a quick trim would get him back into a respectable appearance, but it would take longer than that for his mind to settle down and let go of the jittery, build up anxiety that had formed over the last few weeks.

Power demanded sacrifice, and his mind had long ago begun to wear down under the pressure of the New World magics. The broken, jagged chips of his psyche, torn and scattered through his mind, betrayed the trail of insights, knowledge, and trauma that had given birth to his otherworldly powers. He had only a faint grip on rationality, but he was confident that he wasn’t yet truly insane.

He only had to hold on a little longer, he promised himself, fumbling as he tried to fit the plastic key-card into its slot.

Only a little longer yet.

More would find the path to his power, more would follow in the footsteps of his advancements.

He had found one apprentice, he would find more. He had to find someone to carry on his knowledge. He had to find someone to entrust. If not, if he failed…

All the pain. All the suffering. All the tragedy. Would be wasted.

He had to keep pushing forward.

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Once he had cleaned up, shaved, and dressed in a set of clean clothes, he set himself up on the motel’s worn brown bedding, working his legs into the pretzel shape his father had shown him so long ago, and sank down into his grandfather’s breathing meditation, letting his mind collapse into his Sight, his access to the Chords of the World.

The calm set in slowly, soft waves of dissonant sensations and impressions washing in and out against the borders of his being.

It was an odd sensory feedback, not exactly seen, and not heard either, but half-way both and yet in truth, like neither.

He thought of it like the way an orca or a bat or other something-or-other must visualize the world through echolocation.

Soft whirls of oil-paint-esq pseudo-color, smeared through the air of the apartment around him. Deep browns and greys and reds drifting in and out of the wall in small surfacing breaches before sliding smoothly back in. Lighter, more complex whorls of color followed the footsteps of previous tenants through the room, drawing the bed, the phone, the door, the bathroom, and the space between them in more colorful displays. Through the dust coated windows, a whole ecosystem of faded, faint color could be seen. This, this weird world of unknowable colors and movements, was what he called The Chords of the World, the New World’s energies, the Fairy Magic.

It was a malignant oil slick, coating across the world in a thin veneer of foreign, corrosive potential.

It sent shivers of terror and excitement down his spine, just to look.

This was his Magic, this was the legacy of his father. It was almost all he had left of the old man.

He called it Sight.

He reached a tentative finger of attention out towards the strange, thrumming fabric of the Chords of the World, picking and plucking clumsily at the world, pushing his attention slowly out across the room, through the thin motel door, out across the almost empty parking lot, and pushed clumsily at the symbol he had scratched in the wooden post outside the front office.

If anyone else in this dead-end town had had Sight such as Bear had, they would have seen the unnatural, structured tendril of power reaching out from his room and pushing into the runnels of his symbol, then the brief flash and glow as the symbol had activated.

He let his attention break, the weird world of energy his Sight revealed shattering away, and fell back, temporarily exhausted.

After a while he pushed himself up and let himself out.

A brief whistle as he passed the wilted hedgerow outside brought Ash bounding and bouncing up to his side and with intermittent, momentary pings of his attention out into the world of the Fairy Magic the duo set out in search of whatever disturbance was calling at his Being’s awareness.