The next day Sparrow woke late. His head felt groggy and his body was like a sweet orange that'd had all of the juices squeezed out of it.

With a bent back and sore shoulders, Sparrow knelt by the lake and scooped up water in his hands and washed his face with it. The slap of the water on his skin was refreshing and took his mind from the pain in his body - and his thoughts which were starting to wander back towards Zoe.

'Okay,' he said, stretching his arms, 'back to it.'

Sticks and logs were easy conductors, Sparrow decided, they pointed the way you wanted the flame to go and they fitted nicely into his hands.

A turtle shell was much harder, but even harder than that would be the very earth itself.

Sparrow wanted to test whether the same rules that applied to the turtle shell and sticks also applied to the earth - could he use the ground to channel his ability?

If he could master it, he'd be able to create fire from as far away as he liked, at least that was the theory.

Sparrow set up another pile of sticks. This time he added extra tinder to make the strain easier on his head.

His noggin felt like someone was hitting it with a sledgehammer every time he breathed.

He licked his lips, covered his feet in soil, dropped to a crouch and focused. He clenched his fists, his stomach muscles and even the veins on his head. He bit his tongue, dug his toes further into the ground and he squeezed all his muscles as tight as he could.

And then a large fart slipped out.

The gas explosion was loud and echoed into the air around him. Sparrow was so shocked by it that all his muscles lost their tension and his heart skipped a couple of beats. Sparrow glanced around, checking to see if anyone had heard it, but of course, there was no one around him. Although it was sometimes lonely there were some positives to training alone, Sparrow thought as he breathed a sigh of relief.

After that, Sparrow laughed. He laughed and laughed and he let himself roll back on the ground. His body was tense and tired and his eyes felt like they hadn't had a proper sleep in weeks.

'Okay,' Sparrow said, ' Okay, I hear you body. If you want another rest day, I'll give you a rest day.'

And so for the rest of the day he lay back in the sun, fished, and even did a couple of leaps off the tower.

But the next day it was back to business, he dug his feet into the ground, he balled up his fists, clenched his eyes and stood staring at the pile of sticks for an hour.

As his eyes grew tired a tiny blossom of smoke started to ripple from the pile of sticks. Sparrow grunted, he could feel the pathway the energy was flowing through and poured more and more energy into it.

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It was almost like a direct line linking him and the pile of sticks. Now he’d discovered it turning the smoking stack into a billowing flame was almost easy. Fire sprang up from the pile of sticks and consumed them.

Within a few hours, Sparrow was able to ditch the crouching, clenching routine entirely. Instead, he simply walked over the ground and with his bare feet, he was able to select areas that he wanted to set alight. All he had to do was select a target find a pathway through the earth and unleash his flame upon it.

Everything is a conductor, Sparrow decided, some things are just better conductors then others.

From his new ‘conduction’ discovery he also found that when he grabbed a branch, he could use conduction to send stone skin over the branch creating a stone weapon.

If he had another person who he was trying to protect Sparrow could send stone skin to cover them - at least that was the theory.

But still, there was one last hurdle to overcome with his fire ability and that was air conduction.

It was all well and good conducting fire through the ground, but what would happen if he was fighting in the air or had to move rapidly?

Sparrow hovered slightly above the ground, cross-legged facing his final target - a large pile of sticks without any tinder.

If he was going to do air conduction, he wanted to do it properly.

Sparrow closed his eyes and focused on the conductive pathway to the pile of sticks.

While earth had been hard, air was so much harder.

The pathway between him and the object he wanted to set alight was simply a chain from molecule to molecule.

In a stick the atoms and molecules were easily aligned as they all pointed in the same direction. In the ground they were much more disorientated, but at least they didn't move. In the air the molecules bounced around and around in an endless circuit of currents and pressure ranges. As Sparrow tried to draw his pathway through the air the atoms would shift and bounce leaving Sparrow huffing and puffing and the pile of sticks completely untouched by flame.

It took three days of hovering there in the air until Sparrow figured it out. His old slow method of carefully finding a path didn't work when the path was always shifting.

Instead he came up with a new method, sending 20 different weak paths towards his target once. He made the paths jump from molecule to molecule as fast as they could. Very quickly the pathways would fail or break and he'd send new pathways out in their place. And when one pathway found a collection of molecules that directly linked him to the large pile of sticks, he strengthened the pathway and poured all his fire and energy into it.

Moments later the bonfire was alight and Sparrow had a large blaze as he danced and sang and partied that night.

As the weeks piled up, so too did Sparrow’s abilities. Instead of 20 pathways to move fire through air, he'd send 100 and the distances between him and the object he was setting on fire grew larger and larger. Stone skin had become a reflex - one day while trying to perfect a one-armed handstand he fell from the top of the tower and landed in the water. Only, there was no sting on his skin.

He realized his body had automatically coated him in stone skin without him consciously needing to think about it.

Sparrow also started to undertake a few expeditions further and further onto the lake. He perfected a new flying technique that enabled him to sleep for up to an hour at a time while hovering above the clouds, it meant he was almost never rained on and the clouds and crisp air made a far softer cushion than the ground did.

On one of these expeditions, he'd spent two days flying across the lake and was just about to head back to his little campsite when he spotted a large circular shape moving through the water beneath him.