With some sort of Elven curse followed by an order to my mother to watch over us, Eirlathion cast some sort of spell on himself before taking off after Tia. He simply ran straight through the thicket of bushes as though it wasn’t there. The bushes seemed to part on their own like they didn’t want to touch him. The power of his spell no doubt.

As for Tia, a part of me wondered if maybe she was up to some kind of petty revenge on our behalf. Considering the era she’s from, I highly doubt she would take as much issue with racism as we would. However, I have noticed that she is rather sensitive to our moods. I really wouldn’t put it past her to have been doing all of this just because she saw a sour look on mine and Levin’s faces.

Of course, it would help that she could get her meal of squirrel blood as well. That girl comes off as fairly childish most of the time, but I have learned not to discount the depth of her knowledge on several surprising topics if you know how to phrase your questions right. And if she really is doing this intentionally just to get under Eirlathion’s skin, then I definitely have to give her points for thinking on her feet as well.

If she keeps this up, I might just have to start questioning whether or not the childishness is just an act. If it is, she’s doing a better job than me, and I thought I was actually doing fairly good.

The four of us; me, Levin, Rolwen, and my mother, all stared off at the thicket Eirlathion just chased after Tia through. I suppose the best judge of whether or not my guess is right might be how long it takes them to get back. I have no doubt Tia can catch a squirrel pretty fast if that’s her primary aim. If she’s after that, she should be back pretty soon. If she’s trying to irritate Eirlathion though, she might just lead him around in a little game of tag for a while before finally settling on her prey.

[Ahh… well…] my mother was the first to break the silence. [Umm… Asaren? I think maybe we should start feeding the humans. What were the names?]

My ears definitely caught on to the way she said “the humans.” I saw a little bit of the way elves viewed humans from the children before, but this was the first time I had really seen an elven adult’s impression on humans. While the children seemed to treat the humans attached to them like personal servants they were on good terms with, they still were fairly friendly with them. From adults, while it’s not exactly negative, it is rather clear that elves view humans as some kind of lesser life form like one would view an animal.

I move my thumb and pinkie into the mudra of earth, the most mentally calming of the four elemental meditations, and take a deep breath. These racist views are going to be pretty deeply ingrained. If I were to make a big deal about it, it would accomplish nothing except to harm my relationship with them.

Racism is a challenge that took 6,000 years of human history, and who knows how much pre-history, before we even got to the starting line to begin even addressing the issue back on Earth. I would have to be a lunatic in order to make it my first cause to champion in this world. Probably best to let it go.

I won’t worry about the things I can’t do anything about. I will only worry about things I am able to change. Mending the relationship with my mother sounds like a great place to start.

[This is Levin and this is Rolwen.] I said.

***

Things from there were awkward. Neither one of us really knew what to say. After exchanging some uneasy glances with me, my mother decided to start helping Levin and Rolwen with opening the bundles they got from Nymph.

Ok, well… we had exchanged a few words. I don’t think there is any one right answer to how to bridge the gap between us. I guess for now just being near each other might help things along.

I let Tia guide her before because she complained about how I’d gotten to meet our mother by myself earlier and she wanted to spend time with her now. It seemed Tia was extremely attached to the idea of family. Maybe that had something to do with why I was feeling the way I do about her now. Before, I just thought it wasn’t good for us to have an estranged relationship with our mother, as understandable as it was considering the circumstances. Seeing Tia so enthusiastic though seems to have awoken some desire in myself as well. I remembered my mother from my previous life. It’s not like I wanted to be pampered by a mother in this life, but I did at least want to grow up to have the same kind of relationship as any other family.

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So, Levin and Rolwen were eating. My mother was watching. Eirlathion had said past life memories were normal, at least for the Fey. So, I could probably get away with practicing through the kata a few times. Just the motions, no magic. She might freak out if she saw me accidentally firing off wind bullets, freezing the air around me, blowing over all the bushes in front of me with an invisible force, or even cancelling gravity in the area around me.

No, it’s definitely not a good idea. In that case, I have to think of something else. Also, I didn’t really feel like just practicing some solo kata right now.

My eyes turned to the thicket Tia and Eirlathion had run through. The image of the bushes all shifting to the side to allow Eirlathion through was still fresh in my mind. I couldn’t help but think that looked very similar to when Nymph shifted around parts of her body. The only thing different was the fact that Eirlathion had just cast a spell on himself. But, Nymph also controlled all the local plants in the area through the connection among the roots of the various plants in the grove. Perhaps there was some kind of similar principle.

I wandered over to the thicket of bushes and stared at it. If I remember right, Nymph talked about how she did this by passing my energy along to the spirits of those other plants along with some instructions on how to use that energy. When it came to that night fighting the dark elves though, it was really me who gave the timing and the exact actions that needed to be done. Nymph was just a relay for my orders.

Would it be possible for me to do something with these bushes without Nymph’s help? I couldn’t instruct them from the roots, but maybe if I were to go up and touch the plant itself?

I walked over to the thicket and reached out to touch a bush. I grabbed a fresh green twig on one of it’s branches, and tried to think about what I wanted it to do. I guess, maybe grow just this branch a little longer so I can hold onto it better?

The branch grew, just as I wanted it to. I stepped back a little and walked around the newly grown branch that had just enough grow out of the rest of the bush for me to get a good hand on. Something felt just a little off about the response though. It seemed like something was missing. Perhaps there was some kind of metaphysical feedback when I gave energy to Nymph or something. Could it be because the spirit in this bush is just weaker than Nymph is?

I really didn’t understand this magic stuff. While it might be cool to dive into this and start manipulating plants with this ability here, I would rather understand it better first.

I pictured the image of a flame in my mind. A flame fed by oxygen. I had talked to Tia a little bit about how she was able to tell so much about people from the “taste” of spirit energy, and if maybe I should start learning to take in spirit energy to learn the same things. We had worked on it for a while, and eventually we discovered that the means by which she ate spirit energy was very similar to the sort 6th sense my style developed. This 6th sense worked on reading very subtle things about another person to nearly read their thoughts, and the process by which we learned it was attached to the fire kata.

The flame burns and consumes. It sucks in the “oxygen” that is spirit energy, and as the spirit energy is “burned” I am able to process the thoughts that were attached to it.

I was looking for the energy of this plant, trying to catch any sign of a spirit inhabiting it. Of course, I wasn’t expecting it to be as pronounced as Nymph. It was probably going to be a small thing of some sort.

I continued “tasting” the energy in the air around me. Just as Tia had mentioned before, the “flavor” of Levin and Rolwen was absolutely overpowering. Those two drowned out almost everything like someone had poured way too much soy sauce over a bowl of rice. It made subtlety very difficult to detect. Surprisingly though, I noticed that there was another rather powerful energy source in the area and realized it was coming from my mother.

This was crazy. I had used this method to get a feel of Eirlathion’s energy before. Up until now, he had been the strongest elf I had sensed in the village. However, he still wasn’t even in the same ball park as Levin and Rolwen. My mother though… she was still a level below them, but she really was playing in the same league as they were. It was so much more than Eirlathion that the two couldn’t even be compared. She was orders of magnitude more powerful than he was. And yet, she was the apprentice.

Yes, I do remember him saying something about how her body was going to be more powerful than his. He had also said something about this being the first time she got to test her body’s capabilities since the “fall.” I did not think he was talking about her falling and injuring herself. So, that meant he was probably talking about that heaven fall thing he’d mentioned to us before.

I remember he said something about our mother being the closest person to the place where the fall hit who survived the experience. We were also conceived just prior to the fall. He thought the energy that strengthened us enough to remember our past lives came from that experience. So, it would only stand to reason that our mother would have absorbed a lot of the fall’s energy as well. That would be what lead him to his conclusion in the first place.

Of course, that conclusion is wrong in our case if Tia’s information can be trusted. According to her, our incredible energy is because our souls are from Earth. It has nothing to do with the exposure to the heaven fall. But, it seems that’s not the case for our mother. In her case, this absorbing of energy has got to be exactly what happened to her. Carrying a divine beast and a former Earth human in her womb for “8 seasons” probably helped as well. I bet we gave her a fair amount of extra supplemental energy during our gestation.