Chapter 47:

To say that the Shaman’s words had been a slap to the face would have been an understatement.

If she forced herself, Dorea could vaguely remember seeing others enter the records room, but she hadn’t paid enough attention to know what they were doing.

In her defense, she had simply taken the task set before her as seriously as possible.

Still, that didn’t justify her utterly ignoring other people’s presence.

Voggo hadn’t seen anything too wrong with it, simply telling her to pay more attention to her surroundings herself and not rely on her mystical senses too much.

There might be something to that. I’ve been using magic only for a few months, but I already couldn’t live without it. Just because I can tell someone is close to me doesn’t mean I shouldn’t acknowledge them anyway.

It made her wonder if she had offended anyone. She hadn’t meant to, and people could probably tell she was just engrossed in her studies, but it still sucked.

It also made her rethink her social interactions in the past few months. Had she really been that self-centered? Could Beth have a point that she pushed Jonah to be more like her?

She ended up having to stop her work for the day, since she just wasn’t in the right state of mind for finicky, detail-oriented practice.

I’m done with the theory anyways; now it’s just a matter of attempting a prototype and, if that works, scaling it up.

Thus, she took the afternoon off. She’d need to check in for a patrol in a couple of days, but the influx of refugees they had received, and the accompanying mages, meant that the rosters were pretty full.

Usually, in a moment such as this, she’d go into the forest to look for a beast to fight, get a little bit stronger, and feel better about herself. She was starting to realize, however, that it might not have been the best way to go about things.

First of all, she needed to face her problem head-on rather than avoid it.

Of course, growing stronger is important. I’m one of the main pillars of Whitecliff’s defense, and the more time passes, the closer we get to the next Mondean attack. But I can’t just use it as an excuse to avoid self-reflection.

Dorea walked determinedly towards the cliffs. It was the place she felt the most at peace at, and the fresh sea breeze would help her concentrate.

As she went, she made a point to say hello to anyone she met on the path, and given their surprise, she realized that the problem might have been worse than she had thought.

Everyone seemed happy to see her, which warmed her heart, but she knew their happiness came from gratitude for her efforts, not just because they enjoyed her presence.

The final nail in the coffin was that the electric trio that came with Noele looked amazed that she had stopped to chat with them.

After a few minutes, she excused herself, but swore she’d occasionally make the time to chat with her fellow mages.

I’m supposed to be their representative in the council! What am I representing if I don’t know anything about them?

Finally, she reached the cliffs. Dorea breathed a sigh of relief, glad to find them deserted, even though she had expected them to be, since everyone had taken to avoiding the spot where the Trial had been held.

No matter how the days passed, the loss of so many young people would forever hurt, and no one wanted to be reminded of it.

Therefore, Dorea had the place all to herself. She plopped down at the edge, her feet swinging into the air.

Once, even she would have been too cautious about getting that close, since sometimes strong winds could draw one in towards the sea, and according to her parents, it had led to several deaths.

Nowadays, such a problem didn’t touch her. Not only could she tell when the air shifted, and thus would be made aware of it before it could happen, but even without that, she’d simply lift herself up in the air with her magic if she were to fall.

So much power makes you lose sight of an average person’s problems. I thought I had avoided the arrogance I can see in some gifted, but it seems like I was wrong.

Hers was not the smug kind of superiority she despised in others, but she had evidently left behind things that would have been common sense to her months before.

That tied in with the problems she had been having. Not only had she been so deep in her mind to ignore other people’s presence, but even their troubles sometimes seemed worthless.

That wasn’t even to start on the bouts of rage she felt whenever challenged. She was well aware that it wasn’t normal, but Voggo hadn’t found anything specific during his check-ups on her condition, and she was afraid he’d tell her to stop deliberately growing stronger if she pushed for more.

Again, she was self-aware enough to know that such thoughts only brought her more grief. The more she isolated herself, the more she’d suffer from said isolation.

And playing the happy family whenever I remember that I have one is not a long-term solution. I’m glad my parents support me, but they cannot protect me from this.

The way her father had talked about his own mother had told her everything she needed to know. He spoke as if Doressa was an almost divine entity, which he simply couldn’t comprehend. And his interest in her was limited to the few times she’d give him attention.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

She didn’t want to end up isolated from the people she cared about, but it might just be inevitable.

I cannot surrender so easily. Obviously, I live a very different life than most of everyone else. Even compared to some of the mages. I need to actively try and keep some kind of link to them.

Dorea nodded determinedly. She’d need to change some things about how she operated, but she’d always been social and saw no need for that to stop being the case.

The other problem she had, which she had been avoiding thinking about so far, was that she was slowly but surely becoming angrier and more irritable.

She hadn’t worried at first since she had had a temper even as a little kid, but whatever was going on was more than that.

It was no stretch to connect the dots and arrive at the unique condition that allowed her to grow stronger by killing magical beings.

She was trying not to think about it, but that had stopped working a while ago, and she feared it would become more and more of a problem.

I was ready to rip that guy’s face off when he wouldn’t let me talk to Samos. He was annoying, but not enough to warrant such a response.

There were more moments where she felt close to the brink of doing something she’d regret, and the last example of her talk with Beth could have led to terrible consequences.

That she had been forced to run away recklessly to avoid hurting one of her best friends, even if she had been excessively accusing, meant that the situation was officially out of control.

Her pendant had somehow allowed her to survive coming into contact with Old Titan at that time, but she couldn’t count on it to always save her skin at the last moment.

She needed to do something, but Voggo hadn’t been able to notice anything wrong with her, which told her it was either a problem so complex that the Shaman couldn’t even see it, or it wasn’t anything to do with her mana system.

She wasn’t likely to do any better than her mentor if it was the first. He had decades of experience with healing all sorts of ailments, and even if he wasn’t used to tackling magical problems anymore since the last earth mage died years before, he was still the best expert in all the Loisosian coast, bar none.

If it was the second, she might have a chance to do something about it. Thus, Dorea went through the options.

It started when I began killing beasts, so it has to be connected to it. Any other external cause would have been noticed by Voggo. No way I’m being poisoned or anything of the sort since most of my meals nowadays are simple rations we get in bulk, and everyone else eats them too.

She scooted back from the cliff’s end, trying to get into a more comfortable position. Dorea had never been a fan of meditation - even though the Shaman had told them that to do so could allow one greater control over their mana - but she’d do anything to get a grip on the issue.

Since that had never been a problem for her, she hadn’t felt the need to do it. She could feel within herself easily with her passive mystical senses, but this time, she believed she’d need to go further.

She took a deep breath, pulled her hair up in a messy bun so that it stopped swaying with the wind, and dove in.

Five minutes of silence passed before she let herself lay down with her back to the grass, annoyed that she hadn’t managed to feel anything more than she usually did.

Dorea had never minded dedicating herself to a specific task for extended amounts of time, as she had demonstrated when she obsessively worked to be the first to cast a spell, but if she didn’t see any meaningful progress, she’d quickly lose interest.

So far, she had managed to get by thanks to the sheer wonder she felt whenever she experimented with magic. It had allowed her to spend an entire week trawling through old records and ancient journals to see what a functional ward might have looked like.

But meditation? She had attempted it several times, but never with meaningful results.

However, this time she had decided she’d do it, and Dorea wasn’t one to go back on her word, even if it was just to herself.

Thus, she attempted it again, this time not bothering with the uncomfortable position.

Reaching within her core was simple. Mana flowed smoothly in that weird way it always did, not fully there but still tangible to her senses.

That was the easy part. She could stay hours there, observing how it moved through a system that wasn’t necessarily as grounded in reality as the rest of her was. Dorea had often asked herself questions about the true nature of mana, but beyond its uses, it seemed like people had simply decided to deem it as a gift from the gods.

There were several interpretations in the records, but they all boiled down to the same thing. Mana was too ethereal to be part of the mortal world; therefore, it had to be from the godly realm.

Whether the specific mage thought of it as a gift from above or the blood of a dead god that sacrificed themselves to save humanity, it didn’t particularly matter. None dared think of it as something inherent to the world.

This was weird because Dorea was pretty sure Mother Nature was more than just a powerful person controlling a few types of magic. The Goddess was supposed to be the true incarnation of the World. She wasn’t a being that became something else.

The Mother was the World itself, drawing breath.

Or that was how Voggo had taught them. But she liked that explanation much more than imagining a plump woman waving her hands around and making flowers bloom.

That was a mage, not a god. And for all their powers, mages were not gods.

And she had lost focus again.

That it was easier to be drawn into metaphysical debates within herself rather than meditating properly demonstrated the sheer lack of interest Dorea had in the practice.

Unfortunately, she had decided she’d do it, and by the Goddess, she’d spend the entire day trying if she had to.

She turned her focus back inward, this time determined not to be distracted by anything. She’d simply bask in the mana and let her mind be free of thoughts.

I had never noticed how uniformly my mana is mixed together. I can call upon it in three distinct elemental types, but I can’t really feel a specific one when it's resting. The presence of all three is evident, but there are no separations. It’s almost homogenous.

She wasn’t sure she could find any reference to something like this. Every mage had their own specific flavor of mana, and the way it was aspected changed from one to the other, but the basic theme of an element remained constant.

However, she had a mix of three elements, which had never happened in her tribe.

According to Voggo, it was a very rare condition even in the outside world, and the few people who had it didn’t make their findings known.

Nonetheless, she was fascinated by the implications of what she was seeing. She had never thought of it much, but to be able to fully use her reserves on one singular element, meant her mana could convert itself fully to that specific one.

That meant that her magic was in a constant state where it was available in all three elements at the same time!

Dorea focused harder on the energy flowing inside her, now curious to see if she might discover anything else.

There was a kind of resistance at first, as if she was using a muscle she had barely ever moved, but she kept at it and slowly started to make out the details.

Mana was generated in several different manners, this much she knew from Voggo’s lessons. First and least important was what the physical body naturally produced by eating. Most of that energy went to essential functions, but some ended up becoming mana.

Secondly, there was what a mage absorbed through breathing and osmosis from the ambient. Natural currents couldn’t be directly used to power a spell, but they left behind something with their passage.

These two methods generally accounted only for about five to ten percent of a Journeyman’s reserves, according to Voggo.

He had, apparently, run several different tests using himself as a subject to figure this much out.

The last and vastly more important way was what sprung forth from one’s soul as it touched the material world.

It was the most complicated to understand, as a soul was less a singular object and more the metaphysical weight of one’s entire being.

That weight, in turn, pressing upon the fabric of reality, spawned mana. In the same way that pushing hard against something generated force, if one believed the Shaman.

Dorea wasn’t sure she fully understood the implications, but the gist of it was that as long as one existed in the material world, they’d produce mana.

What she was observing mostly matched those explanations. She could tell she was getting a bit more than she should have from her surroundings, but it was such a small amount that it was difficult to be sure.

Beyond that, nothing stood out. Which was weird since her situation was strange enough that something should have happened.

Instead, everything seemed to run smoothly. The weird mixed mana moved effortlessly through her system, and she felt perfectly fine.

That reminded her that she had been looking for a cause for her temper, and she barely managed to maintain the correct state of mind, frustrated at being sidetracked again.

Something has to be going on. It’s impossible for me to feel like this all the time and not be caused by anything.

Dorea spent several hours there, flush against the grass, with her eyes closed as she desperately tried to find something wrong within herself.

Unfortunately, she got nothing. No matter how carefully she mapped out her own system, how she examined the composition of the power going through her, nothing at all explained her condition.

In the end, she decided that continuing when she was that frustrated was not a good idea. She’d try again once she had calmed herself down, and in the meantime, she’d pay more attention to her feelings to prevent any outbursts.

Only as she was disentangling herself from the depths she had fallen into did a glimpse of something reveal itself.

There, at the edge of her metaphysical sight, something looked too dark to be right.

She would have ignored it easily had she not just spent hours watching her mana flow. She had memorized the eddies and currents of it enough that she was sure she’d dream about them.

Immediately, she turned her whole attention to whatever it was, and found something she felt she should have known about, but somehow didn’t.

Her entire system looked frayed at the edges, like someone had taken a leather sharpener to it.

Minuscule amounts of her mana were leaking into the atmosphere before being reabsorbed. Nothing seemed to be happening beyond this weird cycle, but she knew it shouldn’t be like that.

I have no idea what that might mean, but I’ve finally found something.

“Hem, Hem!”

Jolting back into the real world, Dorea felt vaguely thankful that whoever it was had at least waited long enough for her to find something, but still annoyed at being interrupted. She sat up, looking towards where she sensed a presence.

“I didn’t want to wake you up, but I’ve waited almost half an hour and wanted to talk before it gets dark.”

Much to her dismay, the speaker was Mark, the farmer’s son. The boy she had rejected months before and had subsequently saved from captivity, but who she had cost a hand to.