“What then is freedom? The power to live as one wishes.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Little did we know it, but our final days of freedom were already counting down. Wanda worked well with Des and Sinis gathering guano from Wester Isle’s cliffs and adding it to our burgeoning garden. We could hardly call it a garden now with plants working their way all the way around the inside of the cauldron caldera. The addition of an extra worker meant that we had to shift our timetable around a little so as to not completely give the game away. It was still probably obvious that some magical skill was being used regarding how my mana aided the plants' growth. On the other hand, we weren’t actively fishing or diving any longer so we were able to do our sailing practice in the daytime as opposed to at night now. It was nice to get up at a normal hour now rather than in the middle of the night. My quickly disappearing stamina meant that I still needed plenty of naps throughout the day but at least I was now getting a complete night’s sleep. Surely that had to help.
Our new day started with the dawn of the sun. But this time I was leaving the house at this point rather than returning to it. Father would pick me up and carry me out to the boat if I was still asleep and many a day I would wake up as the boat edged out onto the lagoon. We were no longer sailing slowly in a grid pattern across the lagoon attempting to discover all of its secrets but speeding across its surface in an attempt to get every extra inch of speed out of the wind that carried us. Father rowed religiously when the wind died sending us skidding along the surface of the water. Each skill he had he practised. Without fail. I had learned a lot of his skills over the last couple of weeks or at least their names if not the abilities themselves. He had me help out when I could amplify the wind with Gale to send us speeding ever quicker.
“Well done Cal!” Kaius cried. He had never managed to fully transition to calling me Callen and seemed to settle for a nickname between the two. Not quite Kai and not quite Callen. Cal was the name he ended up with and which my family seemed to be copying him on. I didn’t mind too much and would have responded to either. In fact, it made me feel just a little bit like superman. Who knew maybe one day I too would be flying through the sky rather than falling or gliding through it. But first I would have to master my mana and magic.
I drove the wind harder into his sails. My mastery of mana was still based on overwhelming strength rather than finesse but in terms of powering a sail that was not necessarily a bad thing. A finer stronger point of contact would be more likely to tear the sail than the broad torrent I provided. We were making a speed run to see how quickly we could get from one side o the lagoon to the other while skirting as close to our island as possible. My inner clock counting down. I had added a timer to my internal hud to see how quickly we could do it. Father trusted my judgement on the matter.
As we sailed by the island I once more thought about its slow transformation. Seeing as it was my island, I was still quite keen on renaming it. Ash island might have been appropriate when it was still a dull black centre to the lagoon but with the salt flats a brilliant white, the growing palace façade on the western face of our mountain and the secret garden growing within I felt like a new name for our new purpose would be most welcome. What that would be I wasn’t yet sure.
I was quickly drawn back to focus on the task at hand by the salty spray. I was showered with water flicking upwards from the edge of the boat as the sails were pulled tight against the wind. They started to pull us up out of the water and had us hiking out over the side of the boat as our hull slowly slid glistening in the morning light out of the water. We shot past one of the diver's daughter’s boats. We gave it a clear berth, the divers' mood despite being beneath the water made one wish to give them an even wider clearance. Their presence a sour note on our exhilarating morning race.
The ’ladies’ had never quite forgiven us for cutting into what they deemed their future profits. We had not touched any of the oysters since. Although we had noticed that they had taken great pains to mark up, even going as far as to number each and every one of them. Between the five of them and their efforts, it felt as if any and every oyster had now been marked as theirs. It didn’t seem to matter that we were not releasing the pearls on the open market but using them to pay for specific goods a vast distance away they were still unhappy with us. And it didn’t look like it their opinion was going to be changing anytime soon. I ignored the feeling and returned to focusing on the task at hand as we shot past their boat at anchor.
“Hold it steady,” Father shouted as we grew closer and closer to tipping over. Despite the daylight, I was with him on the lagoon. My presence was explained away through the eccentricities of a father in love with both the open oceans and his son, a mother busy weaving the future, a sister spending time to make money and a grandfather who was deemed too scary to supervise me if unsupervised himself. We were using the assassin’s boat to train on now. We might have had it for a while but the only times I had been aware it had been used was outside the lagoon walls. The days of my freefalling before the crippling seemed such a long time ago. Grandfather and Father had spent a weekend carrying it up the cliffs somehow before bringing it back down into the caldera and starting from there. The benefits to a world with stats and family members who had more strength than sense, in more ways than one, made abundant once more.
Not to say that father did not need to train on it. Our short trips outside our island’s walls had shown me the merest shallows of the open ocean and the monsters that lived within it. From the tales, my father told Goblin sharks seemed to be the least of the leviathans out there and the least of his worries. The boat grew ever closer to tipping before father shouted, “Knife’s edge.” The boat seemed to lock upright on its side the tension of the sails pulling against his skill as he attempted to turn every ounce of pressure from the wind I was applying into an acceleration of the boat. He still had to lean out and hike as far as possible but the skill somehow stopped the boat from capsizing or turtling as we shot across the waves.
“I got that skill running away from something larger than I was.” He shouted laughing as he was splashed by the spray of the water. He was in his element and loving it. I was loving it too, strapped as I was to his chest. I got to enjoy the thrill of the sail without worrying about anything. I was along for the ride and felt safe and secure wrapped as I was. It had been decided that for training like this it would be safer for me to be strapped to him rather than scuttling around an oversized (for an infant) boat when it was travelling as fast as he could get it to go.
What was interesting though was the way in which father’s skill seemed to work though. While the rest of the family’s skills required their mana to work, I could actively see my mana ticking down when I used the skills. Father’s skills that were not purely physical seemed to rely on something unquantifiable. Sure, they took some stamina too but was that enough to account for or explain the magical fact that the boat, despite the speed it was travelling at and how tight the sails were held to the wind, did not simply tip over. It was as vexing as it was fascinating, but I looked forward to working it out one day.
“Ready, about!” he shouted carrying me across and below the boom. He did not necessarily need to shout it out seeing as I strapped to him, but it was good practice for when they would one day let me out of the bindings used in front of other people. It also prepared me to halt the gale for a moment as we tacked which would stop us from tipping over as we did it. I had learned that lesson the hard way. It did not matter how strong a skill knife’s edge was or how high levelled it was, an inappropriately applied gale either poorly aimed or timed could break whatever manner of system magic was holding the keel to the water’s surface if pushed hard enough in the wrong direction.
We landed on the other side, the sail pulled tight, I poured on the power with another gale, and we sprung forth in a slightly new direction leaving the divers daughters stationary boat far behind in our wake. Father and son time was simply the best when you both enjoyed the same activity and had the freedom to satisfy it to your heart’s desire.
Yes, we were training.
Yes, it was important
But right here, right now. The power to live as we wished was true freedom.
. . .
No matter my excitement or my enjoyment my falling stamina would still put me to sleep before long. At this point, Father would head for shore. Sailing far more sedately, or perhaps not, I was too unconscious to notice but I assumed that without my magic he would be unable to maintain the same speed. My skill at sailing had continued to level but some of his more specialised skills I had been unable to obtain. I assumed it was because I was unable to execute the actions on my own. I would awaken in the home at my mother’s feet once more.
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. . . .
“I think we are going about this the wrong way Kai.” My mother pondered. “Rather than focusing on the sound carrying your intention to make your mark on the stone let us rather treat it as you do your material manipulation simply flood it with your mana.”
“But I thought we were attempting to develop my intent and my finesse,” I argued back.
“Yes, we were but we have been at it for a while without a huge amount of success apart from a series of shattered stones.” She pointed at the rubble that was all that was left of the block we had been working on today. It would have been okay if it had been carefully carved down to its smaller constituent parts but it had generally shattered whenever I attempted to use sound and mana to shape it.
“Sometimes it is worth trying something different. What works for me might not necessarily always work for you.” She continued before saying, “Add the mana.”
I focused on adding the mana to one of the smaller chunks of basalt we had been working with and it was not long before it was a slowly melting puddle of molten rock which let off the occasional pop as some part of it either heated irregularly or a pocket of air or some other fault in the rock was discovered.
“Well done. But not quite what I was asking you to do.” Mother praised before adding to her instructions. “I would like you to flood the rock with your mana but take care not to use the mana to add heat or to freeze. I would like the stone to be full of your mana but leave the mana blank without your intent.”
She stopped me halfway through adding the next set of mana as I had indeed been doing exactly that adding mana but working on cooling it. I tended to think of mana as energy. Something that could be added to a system to heat it up or removed from a system to cool it down. I was not strictly sure how that worked to cool something when I was still seemingly adding energy to a system but it worked for me and I was not going to complain about the magical abilities I had as limited as they were. One day, one day they would be powerful and amazing but for now. . . . Dash it all my magical powers were still amazing we were just trying to refine them further.
“Yes, you add mana to heat and add mana to then remove it and cool the stone. But stop trying to control what your manna does as it enters the stone. Simply let it fill the area.” She proposed.
I worked hard at slowly infusing the remaining rubble with my mana taking care not to heat it further and return it to its molten state but also taking care not to freeze it and speed up its cracking process. Mother watched silently as I worked at attempting to follow her instructions. Until finally they were completed.
“Fantastic work Cal. Now maintain the level of mana within the rock but here I would like you to calmly add your intent to the mana within the mineral through the medium of sound.” I stared at her confused.
“Sing the stone into shape Cal. The mana is there waiting to do your bidding. Give it form through song, tone or note. Make it follow your intention.” She explained.
I sat there somewhat confused with rocks in front of me filled with mana. I had added my intention with the mana that was how I had got the skills ignite, freeze, boil, and melt. Had my understanding of the laws of thermodynamics coloured my perception and abilities to work with mana? Was mana more than just another form of energy I could magically control?
“What do you think I am doing when I am sitting here spinning, sewing and weaving away?” She asked her absent son refocusing me once more on the task at hand.
“The material is flooded with my mana and I weave with it just as much as I do with my hands. The mana moves the material in the manner I wish it to without setting it on fire, freezing it or melting it. You do the same with your robe. You flood the material with your mana then move it with your magic.”
“That’s different it’s a different skill, a skill the system gave me more for surviving my fall than for my success in using my mana.” I try to put into words my thoughts on the matter.
“Yes and no. Thread is a material, cloth is a material, sand is a material, and stone is a material. Manipulate it. Sing the stone.” She urged me and I sang a tone both pure and clear. Holding the mana in my mind, I imbued the tone with my intention and the rocks merged together without heating. Merging without melting they flattened forming a flat level square in front of us.
“Finally.” Mother sighed. “You can work on floors now.” She smiled.
I had been banned from working on the floors within the mountain mansion we were building. My magic had been deemed good enough for the salt flats. But the occasional pocking of the rock as it heated and cooled, and the occasional explosion when the mana heated the rock unevenly, meant that I had been banned from working on the internal hall. But now by thinking about my magic and mana differently it looked like I would be able to help Mother out a lot more by making a smooth and polished entryway and hall.
“Beautifully done.” Mother praised looking closer at the square slab of stone I had made. Although it was perfectly flat there were some interesting patterns formed with the stone. “Did you intend to make the patterns?” she quizzed.
“Not exactly,” I muttered in response. I wondered at the patterns myself. I had intended to meld and merge the rock together to form a flat polished stone. That was my intent but had my knowledge of Chladni plates and their patterns affected the outcome? Judging from the patterns revealed in the stone it looked like it. Mana was the method, intent clarified the purpose but it looked like the outcome was still coloured or patterned by the knowledge I held from a world where science had become its own religion. As Tesla said, “If you want to find the secrets of the universe think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” Maybe it was the same for magic. Either way, the tone had made a pretty pattern that mother looked keen for me to repeat on the smooth stone flooring.
“We will have visitors soon enough. We need to make a good first impression.” She rationalised her reasoning for me reworking some of the areas she had already covered.
“What about my practice with weaving?” I asked as I was diverted away from my normal routine.
“I think stone is the material for you.” She smiled and I was left wondering whether it was a smile of pride in my ability or relief that I would be working on something else other than weaving. Leaving my mother to work on her tapestries alone. “Don’t worry I will come to the hall to help direct you.”
Or maybe not.
. . . .
Mother had stayed long enough to ensure I was improving her flooring rather than destroying it. Then she had left to prepare the midday meal. I stood up to admire my work, before murmuring,
“I stand,
On a sea of sound
ensouled through song
in stone.
The shape . . .”
I paused as I mused searching for the next set of words. I looked along the newly patterned hallway I had been working on that led to the opening into our mountain refuge waiting for inspiration.
“The shape of sibilance . . .
The susurrous of silence . . .
Frozen for all to see . . .
Stretched . . .
Meh, I’d get it later.
“Very poetic, Cal. But you’re late.” Aleera interrupted. I jumped. I would have heard her coming if I had been listening with my senses. But I had spent the late morning working to music. Music, I had made myself and recreated from memory but music my parallel process could play to me while I sang tones and patterns into the floor below my feet. I’d like to say I was not surprised indeed I should have been as I had the mental HUD up and running but like anything in life if you don’t pay attention to it, it will have the opportunity to catch you unaware and I had been fully focused on filling the stone with my mana, before shaping it with my intent and song. The ethereal tones ringing in my head were a counterpoint to the pure tones I shaped the stone with.
“Is it that time already?” I asked attempting to cover my surprise although I knew I was fooling no one. I would get her back later. When she wasn’t expecting it. When the refuge of an adult was a short dash away.
“Yes.” She replied. “It’s lunchtime.”
“Race you!” I shouted as I took off. My little legs had to move four or more steps to every step of hers but I believed in my dexterity. The attribute of celerity helped me to sprint faster and faster. The skill levels in running raised my racing and streamlined my steps to keep them surefooted. But my sister was hot on my heels. Despite my belief in myself I was left wondering whether I was faster or not. Was I winning through skills and stats or was my vessel still letting me down. It was hard to tell. But I should not be surprised that a vessel nearly 5 times younger than hers, at least in this world, was unable to beat her. Even though the mind and soul living and breathing with it remained at least 5 times her age. I smiled at the mirror of the mathematics in the relationships between us. She would be 10 soon enough.
We raced through the tunnels now corridors that rant through the mountain connecting our façade of a mountain palace with our more humble hidden abode on the other side of the mountain. It was fun to be young.
. . .
“The divers’ daughters are still disgruntled.” Grumbled Grandfather. He started the family conversation as we sat down to lunch. Aleera and I had raced into the home neck and neck only to be told to promptly go and wash our hands before lunch. Des and Sinis weren’t with us for our midday meal as they had been busy collecting guano and Wanda before making their way up to the caldron caldera. Aleera was going to carry me up there after lunch and my midday siesta.
“Let them grumble we have stopped gathering them but can still grow our own.” Aleera waved off his concerns. “What else are we supposed to do?”
“Aleera we are a close community here.” Father intervened between them. “Asking for names with Grandpa Smit was a good decision. Improving those relationships was something that had to be done.”
“And if they are still complaining?” Aleera asked.
“Well, you can’t catch them all.” Father shrugged.
I hoped that the measure that we had put into place would work out well for all those concerned. Wanda seemed happy at least and the Fishersons contented. I only prayed that my father would be equally successful out on the open ocean and that the daughters' complaints never became more than vocal.
. . .