Chapter 483: The Flow of Mana
…3 days before the new moon… 3 days before the siege of Hollow Shade…
The pale moon was only a silver in the night sky, its fading light illuminating little of Vulture Woods. The scarlet canopy ate up most of the moonlight, leaving the forest floor dark. Yet Stryg’s lilac eyes had no difficulty following Lunae in the dark. The goddess had shapeshifted into a young woman. Her long hair trailed behind her, somehow catching the moonlight, giving it a silver glow.
The goddess led him away from the small clearing he had been meditating in and to a nearby stream. Even in the dark, the water was clear and Stryg could make out the pale rocks at the bottom. The river bank was covered in tall grass that brushed past his legs. The sound of the running stream echoed in his ears.
Lunae glanced around and nodded to herself. “This will do.” She patted Stryg’s shoulder, “Strip down to your undergarments.”
His head shot up in surprise. “Pardon?” he squeaked.
“Come on now, no need to be shy, hurry up.”
“Oh, uh, o-okay,” he blushed and nodded weakly.
His people were comfortable with showing their bodies to one another, communal river showers were common. And yet, standing half-naked in front of a bonafide goddess made him feel exposed.
Lunae stood next to him as he took off his jacket and shirt. There was no interest in her silver eyes, only a hint of impatience to get this over with. “Child, I’ve known you since you were a babe, there is nothing I haven’t seen before.”
“R-Right…” Stryg mumbled. He wondered what she meant by her words. She had told him she had her eye on him for a long time, but he hadn’t quite realized for how long. He knew his mother was one of Lunae’s favored, so perhaps that was why.
After he finished stripping down to his underwear he slipped out of his boots and took off his socks. The grass tickled his feet and the ground felt moist underneath his bare toes.
“Good, now go into the river,” she said.
“Huh?” Was he taking a bath? Did she think he smelled? He resisted the urge to sniff his armpits.
“Little one, this will take a lot less time if you don’t question my every word.”
“Oh, um, sorry.” He dipped his head and hurried into the river. The water was icy cold to the touch and his skin prickled at the sensation. The cold didn’t bother much, but his poor swimming abilities were always at the forefront of his mind whenever he waded into deep bodies of water.
Fortunately, his feet touch the stream’s bottom almost immediately. He gripped the smooth stones on the stream bed and waded deeper in until he was at the center of the running stream. The water reached a little below his waist. He breathed a quiet sigh of relief.
“Now sit down,” Lunae said.
This time, Stryg didn’t hesitate. He lowered his body into the stream and sat on the smooth stones. The icy water reached his neck.
“Your tense. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath and relax your muscles,” she added.
Stryg closed his eyes and the world became dark. The sound of water running right by his ears sounded ever so clearer. He could feel the current pushing past him, trying to push him along.
“Very good, little one. Now, I want you to steady your breathing like when you're meditating. Forget the world around you and look inward. Let yourself feel the chromatic mana beating within your heart.”
“We’re practicing flow meditation?” Stryg asked hesitantly. If that was the goal, then why did he have to sit in the water?
As if reading his mind, Lunae answered, “The river is the element of water. Blue mana has always been drawn to the water element. For a prime mage, learning how to control and steady one’s mana flow can take years, and perfection can take a whole lifetime. Our goal tonight is not such mastery. No, what I want you to do is something more precise.”
Lunae sat down at the riverbed and let her legs sink into the water. “Instead of trying to control all the chromatic colors at once, I want you to isolate just a single color, Blue. All prime mages struggle with stabilizing their mana flow, but by isolating one color at a time you can make the task much easier. If you can do that, then you are on your way to learning the storm spell-form.”
“A steady flow is required for storm magic,” Stryg recalled Professor Isemene’s words.
“Yes. Luckily for you, storm magic only needs a steady Blue flow. The river will help you find and isolate the color from the rest of the chromatic colors flowing within you.”
“Okay, I’m ready.” Stryg took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and relaxed his muscles. If it wasn’t for his heavy weight the river might have carried him away.
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He pushed away thoughts of the looming war and his worries for his friends and family back at Hollow Shade. The forest’s noises faded away, leaving only the sound of the river. He slowly leaned back and shifted his focus within.
His heartbeat thrummed in his ears in a quiet steady beat.
Ever so slightly, he coaxed the chromatic Blue mana from his heart and let it flow through his body as if he were going to cast a spell. The Blue mana responded and gradually seeped into his veins. At first, Stryg thought he had succeeded, but on closer inspection, he noticed there were traces of Green and Purple. The longer he concentrated on the mana, the more he noticed there were specks of each chromatic color within the Blue.
This was what his mentors had referred to when they said prime mages struggled with mana flow more than any other mage. The colors were so interspersed within each other it was practically impossible to separate them.
“Take your time, I don’t expect you to succeed on your first try. It’s okay to fail,” Lunae said with a gentle tone.
Her kindness was like a dagger in his chest. She didn’t think he could do this. He had always been underestimated throughout his life, but somehow hearing it from her pained him more than the rest.
Stryg clenched his jaw and tried again. He wasn’t going to fail Lunae, not now, not ever. He willed his mana to retreat back into his heart and called forth Blue once more. As soon as it trickled into his veins he could feel traces of the others. He cursed silently and tried again. Again. And again.
Each time felt slower than the last, the manipulation of his flow growing harder with every breath. His body’s core began to warm up due to the energy manipulation and spread out to his extremities. He was suddenly glad to be in the icy water, though it did little to cool down his core.
Lunae noticed his frustrated expression. “Stryg,” she called out softly. “You place too much importance on success. Failure is—”
“—Failure is okay, I know.” But it’s not. Not really.
Several of his mentors had told him failure was okay, it was even to be expected, but that didn’t make him feel any better. There were others who had succeeded before him, more quickly and efficiently.
Lunae kicked her leg up and splashed water onto his face.
He coughed and sat up with a jerk.
“I was going to say failure is necessary.” Lunae rested her elbow on her thigh and placed her hand on her chin. “You see someone walking and you immediately try to run even though you can’t even crawl yet. You’ve always been like that. Stop comparing yourself to others. There is no one else here. Only you and me. If you want to learn how to do this you are going to have to fail, it is the path we all must walk.”
Stryg stared at her uncertainly then nodded, “...Okay… I’ll try.”
“Good. Now close your eyes and start over.”
He did as she commanded and called forth Blue once more. Like every previous time, there were traces of other colors, though maybe it was a tad less, he wasn’t certain.
Perhaps the issue lay in the quantity?
He tried again, this time with more mana. With it came more impurities. He tried summoning forth less mana with no significant difference in the ratio of colors.
Disappointment began to settle within him, but instead of letting himself feel like a failure, he let the failure wash over him like the river and focused on the task at hand.
Test after test, he tried all sorts of flow techniques to try and isolate the mana, but there was little success. Frustration bubbled at the pit of his stomach and rose with every attempt.
He called Blue out once more, shouting in his mind with bouts of anger. The mana burst forth into his veins, but the color was different, no, not a color, something else. This was cold and it chilled the rising heat in his body’s core. If the chromatics’s flow was a quiet stream, then this was a violent roaring river. It surged through him and filled him with a strange feeling of— power?
Stryg recalled the feeling. He had felt it several times before; when he had fought Marek on Widow’s Crag, when he helped lift the tree off Freya at the academy’s grove, when he had defeated Sylvie at Undergrowth’s coliseum. The feeling was strongest when he had collapsed on Shadow Lake.
Holo’s words that day echoed in his mind.
Chaos mana.
The one elemental mana that did not bind itself with any of the chromatic colors. In fact, Chaos did not bind itself with any element either. It was alone, always.
So why do I feel it now?
As the thought crossed his mind, he noticed the other chromatic colors were flowing through his body. The stream of colors was being pushed aside by the Chaos, its domineering force flowing within him without restraint. He tried to control it to no avail. He attempted to cut off the flow from its source, but the elemental energy did not come from his heart like the chromatic energies, no, this came from somewhere else, from the right side of his chest.
…My second heart…
The thought seemed odd, but as he focused on his body, he could hear it, a second heartbeat interlaced with the first. He had always thought of them as one, but now he realized it was always two.
The elemental flow slowed down and became a strange unpredictable pulsating force. It wasn’t steady per se, but it wasn’t causing havoc either. It was simply there. It had always been there, Stryg realized. Small, minute, flashes of Chaos throughout his entire body. It was a part of him. He had thought the elemental mana was going out of control, but it was only reacting to him, his frustration, his anger.
Chaos wasn’t uncontrollable, it was incredibly sensitive to him; his body, his thoughts, his will… He opened his eyes and stared at his hand underneath the water. He wasn’t a True Blue, he couldn’t see the Chaos mana, but he knew it was there, flowing underneath his skin. The thought was somehow calming. The Chaos mana was like a quiet ambient sound, always there, never noticed, until the world had fallen silent.
Ever since Shadow Lake it had grown stronger, more prevalent. Something within him had awakened that day. Vulture Woods had somehow reignited what had begun that day, as if the Chaos mana was helping him find a part of himself he hadn’t noticed.
The Chaos mana was louder now, louder than it had been most of the time. He knew it would eventually retreat back into his heart, but he didn’t want to let it go, he didn’t want to forget what it felt like, a fluctuating aura all around him, like a cold breeze hugging him close.
“That isn’t blue mana,” Lunae noted.
Stryg glanced up at her. He had forgotten she was there. “Do you know what it is?” he asked tentatively.
“...Yes and it is not what we came here to learn tonight.”
“...Right,” he bowed apologetically.
She sighed. “In time, when you are ready and if you are still interested, I will teach you about the secrets of Chaos.”
“Really!?”
“Yes,” she said dryly. “Now, enough with elemental energies. Focus on Blue and nothing else.”
“Of course!” he said and closed his eyes.