We greatly underestimated how difficult it would be to hike up a mountain.

It started off easy… for the first two miles. We took a curved path, one that took us towards a side of the mountain that faced away from Absarokee. It made the trip not as difficult since the incline was more gradual, but we weren't in the best of shape. We spent most afternoons sipping beer and watching whatever game happened to be on that night, standard college stuff. That didn’t really help us in our current predicament.

We guessed, judging by how far we’d come, that we’d be able to reach a spot that broke out out of the trees with about an hour to spare before sunset. It gave us a little room to breathe, which we really needed considering I was slowing everyone down.

With no trail to follow we were forced to push through shrubbery and undergrowth, able to keep ourselves oriented towards our goal by brief glimpses of our destination through the canopy and the knowledge that we just had to go ‘up’. I would’ve been able to enjoy the hike had my body not burned from exertion the entire time, coupled with the added threat of encountering a rock-bear or some other form of mutated horror.

Randy, who led our line through the woods, caught glimpses of what appeared to be small animals darting around us from cover to cover. This forced us to stop and wait from time to time just to see if we needed to prepare to fend for our lives, fortunately they wanted to avoid us just as much as we did them.

I kept my mind busy during the hike by seeing if I could keep our makeshift form of meditation active whilst we were moving, incorporating James’ technique of re-absorbing the mana at the end, forming it into a sort of cycle. Randy and James also did the same, though we never vocalized it, all of us excited by James’ revelations.

He seemed to take to it the best out of the three of us, probably due to having the most practice, able to complete an entire cycle in about twenty seconds. I was close behind him at roughly twenty-five, while it took Randy thirty. After roughly ten of those ‘cycles’ I felt some mental strain start to develop, so I left it alone after that, resolving myself to attempt to form fire once it subsided.

As we travelled I kept my eye out for any plants that seemed edible. I’m no seasoned woodsman but there were a handful of things I remembered from hiking through the woods with my grandfather, who was, when I was a child. Stopping at a tall pine, I gathered up a handful of unopened pine cones. I took off my now mostly tattered shirt wrapping them up and tying it to a stick into a makeshift bindle. I was especially careful not to touch anything with my blisters, which had now scabbed over and weren’t quite as raw as they had been. I noticed that the blisters, along with the cuts on my arms and torso, seemed to be healing faster than they would’ve a few days ago.

I couldn’t decide if it was due to the change our bodies seemed to have undergone, or if it was because of the cycling of mana we’d been practicing. I glanced back at James, giving him an encouraging smile, and noticed that the wounds he sustained a day before were also healing rather nicely. I brought this up to my companions, wanting to get their opinions, three minds were better than one after all.

Randy scratched his beard, looking thoughtful, “I mean, it has to be one or the other. It could also be both together… It’s kind of hard to tell, it’s not like that's been something we’ve been paying attention to. I don’t really feel like making a cut on my arm to test it either. If I had to guess i’d say it’s both.”

“Well, mine are mostly healed, and I've been cycling mana more than you have, Ken.” James interjected.

“Yeah but you also got yours a day earlier.” I countered, “I feel like Randy is correct here, though. It’s probably a mixture of both. What I really want to know is: What really changed with our bodies, and what separates us from the people that didn’t survive?”

It was safe to assume that there was actually something that differentiated survivors and Husks before the event, but with a whopping sample size of five, we couldn't narrow it down. We tossed ideas around as we walked, none of them leading to specific conclusions, and really only creating more questions.

Did the wave of what we can assume to be mana, dense enough for people without sight to see, turn a portion of the population into flesh-eating monsters; or did it just kill them, affecting the way we as a species die?

Is it the same process that seemed to mutate the wildlife, both plants and animals, granting them the natural ability to manipulate mana?

And the biggest of all: What is mana? It seemed to be a form of energy, but we witnessed it with our own eyes create matter: something that normal forms of energy can’t do as easily as the mana did.

Like I say, more questions than answers. But you can’t get answers without questions, so we weren’t too concerned, we felt like most of them could be answered with time and observation.

We switched to the topic of our manipulations of mana after a while, frustrated at the endlessly arising questions, eager to talk about something we could actually test without having to injure ourselves or be within arms-length of mutant animals or Husks.

“There has to be a limit to how often, and how much we can manipulate mana.” James stated.

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“You guys said that you felt tired after doing it repeatedly, right? I know you passed out after summoning that fire, Ken. How did you feel after making that rock, James?” Randy asked.

“Kinda tired, not really in a physical way, like I'd just finished the ACT and needed to relax for a while. I could tell that if I tried to do it a few more times that I’d probably not be able to concentrate enough to do it again.”

“So that’s the limit then. When we stop for the night after we reach that overlook, we can try it some more. You think you’ll be able to make fire, Ken?”

A good question. In my mind's eye I tried to isolate that ‘image’ of fire that I perceived before melting the Husk. I held out a finger in front of me as we walked, deciding to see what I could do. I gathered the blank mana on my hand, concentrating it into a space an inch above my index finger. Once I saw I had a dense enough ball of mana, I applied the image of fire in my mind to it. Nothing happened. Damn it.

I held the mana there, almost losing it when I stumbled on a root, the mana begging to dissipate before I wrangled my control of it again. I thought about James’ manifestation of the rock, and the process he used. He passed mana through an existing rock to gather a specific type of mana, using that aspected mana to manifest a stone he envisioned. How did I do that with the fire, when I had none to gather mana from? Then I remembered something I said when explaining how it felt to do it to my friends, my intent was the catalyst, the thing that shifted the mana. Mana has to enter the ‘catalyst’ to actually shift, so I tried ‘injecting’ blank mana into the image I perceived in my mind. Doing so increased not only the mental load, but the amount of blank mana I felt draining from my body.

I watched as the ball of mana above my finger shifted almost instantaneously from clear to a deep red, the shock of it almost made me lose it but I kept my cool. I then imagined that red mana becoming a flame, like my finger was a candle. Fire flickered into existence as I saw mana leave my body to keep it sustained, the flame that existed perpetuating itself with mana from my body. I let out a cheer, causing my fellow hikers to turn towards me, the both of them looking astonished, and then excited.

“Fuck yeah, Ken!” James shouted, momentarily forgetting the need for silence in his excitement.

Randy shushed him, giving me a grin, "Good work Ken, I knew you'd be able to figure it out. care to enlighten us? Maybe we'll be able to do it ourselves."

"I'm not sure I can actually explain it, Randy. It's not just words in my head, its raw emotion tied to an image I can only see in my minds eye. The process was a lot like what James did with the rock, only instead of using a physical material I substituted that for my 'image' of fire."

We discussed the process instead, my ability to actually see the shifts and changes in mana made it a lot easier. James had tried to do it before, but he and Randy had to go by feel. We didn't quite know what we were doing enough to be able to explain that side of it. It's like how you can describe a taste or a texture, but the other person can't truly get it until they experience it for themselves.

It was that same problem I had, only not as difficult. Something you can physically sense is easier to explain because it's isolated. What I was trying to explain was like a physical sense, tied to a personal emotion , mixed with a picture that constantly changed and shifted. Our language just didn't seem capable of capturing the whole picture.

This didn't really deter us, considering we figured we'd find something they could use to make fire using the other method. Since we had nothing better to do, we decided to come up with names for what we were doing; we felt it would simplify things in the long run.

Starting with my method of making fire: we called that Shaping, since it seemed like a person used their own ability to shift mana between states. James' method he used on the rock we referred to as Aspecting, because we were using a material that already had a cemented mana aspect. We also assumed materials could give off multiple types of mana depending on what it was, we hadn't seen that firsthand yet but it was a logical conclusion. Mana 'types' were simply called aspects because it was a part of the material that seemed ingrained into it, plus we'd generally been using that term for it already.

Our contemplations as we walked made the time fly. We’d stopped a handful of times to gather some easily identifiable forage, mostly more pine nuts, a handful of bulbs of wild onion, as well as a good amount of dandelions. It wouldn’t be considered an amazing meal by any stretch of the imagination, but by that point we were pretty hungry and calories are calories. The plants themselves, aside from the pinecones that had already fallen off of the tree, didn’t really look the same. They were still pretty unique looking so we were able to figure out what they were pretty quickly. And since they weren’t toxic before, we assumed they still wouldn’t be.

Our estimation for how long it would take us to get to our destination was off, but in a good way. Using our hands as a gauge we figured we had roughly two hours until night fell, which lifted our spirits more than you would expect. The overlook itself was situated on the North-Northwestern side of the mountain, getting on top of it wasn’t actually difficult at all. It gave us a view of roughly fifty miles in that direction, some parts of the view obscured by neighboring hills, and another mountain that was situated to the north. At the far edge of our vision we saw a grey blotch, which we prayed was a city, or atleast a village, hoping that we'd see lights and/or campfires out in that direction. It felt like a long shot at this point, but our hopes were all we had. That, and magic of course.

I convinced Randy to leave me the tire-iron, having a few ideas of some things I could accomplish with it and feeling silly that I hadn’t thought of this before, while he and James went to gather firewood. I sat down with the tool in my hands after they left and began to inject it with blank mana, gathering a good amount of the dark grey aspected mana in roughly ten minutes. It was difficult to keep focus for that long, but my practice through the previous days gave me noticeable improvement. Once I had a rough sphere of visibly solid mana about twelve inches across I began to shape it into a blade. I didn’t have anything remotely resembling a mathematical formula for the volume of a knife, but I didn’t think I needed one. It’d make it less of a strain, allowing me to make it both faster and more efficiently, but I had time to kill and I felt up for the task. It was easily one of the hardest things I had ever done, believe it or not, even with following our process of inject, condense, gather, and manipulate.

I had never worked with mana in this amount before, usually stopping with something the size of my hand. My head was pounding but I was determined to accomplish this, it could easily be the difference between life and death. After another twenty minutes of painstakingly altering the form of my dark gray phantasmal knife I was satisfied with what I had formed. I held it firm, not wishing for it to waver in the slightest and risk having to spend more time adjusting it or even worse; having to start over.

The final product before actuating was a fourteen inch long, four inch wide, and one inch thick double bladed dagger with an additional eight inches of tang and a slight pommel at the bottom, which I assumed - much like James’ rock, would shink about halfway in size. It seemed that the rigidness of the metal-aspected mana was more conducive to forming it like this, it was as smooth as a mirror and its edges looked razor sharp. Before I could continue admiring it, I felt a trickle of liquid come out of my nose and drip off my lip making me realize my nose had begun to bleed, I had to remember to add that to our list of symptoms. I finalized my intent and willed the blade into being. A surge of blank mana left my body, causing me to go very lightheaded as my vision dimmed, making me feel like I was going to pass out.

I looked down as soon as I heard a clatter of metal hit the stone beneath me. The blade was exactly as I imagined it, and actually only 2/3rds the size of my envisioned product, which took me by surprise, it seemed different materials were better at being created than others. Definitely worth looking into. I picked it up, testing the edge with my thumb, pleased to see that while it was not razor sharp, it was still sharp and definitely usable as a knife.

I used the blade to cut off one of my pant’s legs at the knee and cut it in a sort of spiral shape to give me one long piece that wrapped around the tang to form a soft handle, tying it at the bottom. I felt a bit silly with no shirt and three quarters of a pair of pants, but looking at the finished product made it all worth it, and so I sat back against a log to recuperate and wait for my friends to return with wood for a fire, accidentally falling asleep in the process, cradling my blade against my chest like a baby.