Instead of going inside the cave, I decide to do something a little different this time. So far, I’ve always tried to make a connection with a fire which is already established: I don’t let the fire in my hearth go out completely if I can at all avoid it.

But what if watching fire catch light and grow is a good way of learning how to connect with it?

It’s worth finding out, I think. To that end, I gather a small pile of items in my fire pit – dried leaves and small twigs from the forest’s edge, larger branches and a couple of logs from my firewood store. Not having used my fire pit for a while, it’s already starting to grow some greenery, the ashes left behind by my pottery-making good fertiliser.

In a couple of months’ time, it will be like I was never even here, I tell myself, not sure how I feel about that. With how I’m living, the only remnants of my existence in years to come will be the pottery shards and, perhaps, metal weapons that I leave behind.

With a sense of thoughtfulness and a tenuous connection to the generations of my ancestors who lived much like I am now, I pull out my fire-starter and begin striking sparks off it and onto the little pile of material in front of me.

Something I’ve considered in the last few days has been Meditation as a Skill. It’s powerful, but limited by the fact that I can only use it when unmoving and disconnected from the world around me in terms of my usual senses. I’m very vulnerable while I’m meditating; the deeper into it I go, the more vulnerable I become.

This may be inevitable: a Skill which offers a bonus to my Energy consumption as Meditation does is always going to come with drawbacks. But I would really, really like it if I can use Meditation while doing other activities, even if I don’t get the full benefits.

Even if it doesn’t apply to combat situations, if I could have even fifty percent more Energy absorption per hour and still be able to accomplish everything I need to, it would make a big difference. My Energy absorption rate per hour would jump from thirty-five to over fifty units per hour. That, in turn, would speed up how quickly I can gain levels or pay off my debt; while I still have two hundred and fifty-five days until D-day, I don’t want to risk missing it.

Meditation is at Initiate nine. That means I’m due for some sort of change to the Skill as I hit Journeyman. Obviously, a greater bonus to my Energy absorption would be nice; being able to use it in more contexts would be even nicer. I’m therefore trying to nudge the Skill towards that.

I’ve long been aware that my Skill evolutions depend largely on how I’ve used the Skill between the last rank up and the next. So, to help my dreams along, I’ve been trying to use Meditation while moving – as long as it seems to be a safe enough situation to do that, anyway.

Making my tanning basin has been one of the activities I’ve tried to do both together. Not particularly successfully, but I like to think that I’ve managed to stay a little time in Meditation while moving to carve the tree trunk. At least it’s an activity which doesn’t matter if I’m half-distracted while doing it.

Trying to start the fire seems to be another perfect opportunity. Striking the fire-starter, I drop into my external view of the connections and watch the spark. Its faint, nascent tendrils grasp at the air, and then at the dry materials, failing to latch onto them before it fades.

Watching the spark wink out through my mental eyes is interesting. And…a little sad. Like something was born but never allowed to grow. When the same thing happens again and again, I find my sadness growing. So many sparks of life failing before they’d ever really had a chance.

The next time, I find myself actually reaching out to the fire, not physically, but somehow mentally. It’s…a very odd feeling, and the sheer unfamiliarity with it makes me falter and draw back to myself.

I realise that I’ve closed my physical eyes and open them, staring thoughtfully at the pile of dry material just waiting for a spark to take light. Why do I close my eyes all the time? I wonder a little inanely. Am I incapable of processing two sets of data? Perhaps that’s part of my issue in moving at the same time as meditating – I can’t reconcile the physical with the non-physical.

That’s not what I want to think about now, though. I remember back to the moment when part of me reached out. Some instinct tells me that I’m on the right track here, but I want to try and work out exactly what’s happening – maybe knowing will help me somehow.

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I try to recreate the motion, remembering more how strange it had felt than the actual action involved. It was like I was reaching out with fingers that I had never known I had, fingers emerging from a limb which is at the same time intimately familiar and terribly alien.

Trying to once more reach out doesn’t seem to work. My face turns hot with the effort, and I have a strong suspicion it’s going red. I probably look rather constipated too. And all for nothing – I don’t even sense where the limb is, let alone the fingers to move.

Alright. If actively trying to recreate the sensation isn’t working, I need to recreate the situation instead.

Once more striking the fire-starter, I drop immediately into my meditation, my physical eyes closing as my mental ones open.

I don’t manage with that spark or the next, but by the third, I’ve returned into the mindset of admiring the way the spark grasps at life eagerly and completely unreservedly. When it starts fading, that strange part of myself once more reaches out.

Expecting it this time, I don’t instinctively recoil from the odd sensation. It’s a little discomforting, but I nonetheless try to suppress my instinctive desire to pull back in order to see where this might go.

I reach out with those ephemeral fingers and touch the dying spark. For a brief moment, I make a connection.

And then the spark dies completely and the connection is sundered. It leaves me with a sense of loss that lingers and then vanishes too as if it had never been.

I open my eyes once more and stare unseeingly in front of me. This is something that has never happened before. Is this because of the points I’ve put into Wisdom? Or is it because I’m focussing on the very beginnings of a fire? It’s worth a test, but I’d like to see where this will take me first.

So, I am able to make a connection, but a connection isn’t enough – the spark still died. The logical continuation, I figure, is to offer it some mana. After all, looked at scientifically, the sparks I create are incandescent particles of whatever material my firestarter is made of. When the energy that goes into heating the particles is used up, the spark needs to have found a new source of fuel if it wishes to continue burning.

If I want to be able to control fire, I figure that offering it its new source of fuel will have to be the first move I make. I’ve already tried to do that with the fire in my hearth, but with no luck. Maybe I’ll have a better chance here at the very beginning of the fire’s existence.

Once more calming my mind and opening my mental eyes after striking my firestarter, I try to reach out to the spark that’s flying through the air and landing on the pile of material. In this other view, I don’t really see the physical objects, but the connections they have with everything around.

One thing I note absently is that the items I took out of my Inventory have far fewer connections in comparison to the objects I sourced directly from the forest’s edge. But I push that observation to the side – I’ll have more time to check that out later. Right now, the focus is on the spark.

Getting into the right mindset is quicker this time – practice clearly makes perfect. Before the spark fades much, I’m already reaching out to connect with it. Not wasting any time, I quickly pull some mana out of my Core and feed it down towards the connection.

I’m moving more by ‘touch’ than by ‘sight’ – when I’m using this external view, I’m unable to see my internal matrix. But I’ve done enough work on it that that doesn’t matter: I have a sense of my internal channels whenever I’m in Meditation, whether or not I’m looking at the golden weave.

My gamble appears to pay off: I’d guessed that the connection I’m making to the fire is somehow linked to my internal matrix, and it seems to be so. At least, the mana is easily guided down from my Core to the spark.

I’m glad that, even if the time dilation of my perception seems to be less in this view than when I’m fully in my Core space, it is still slower than reality. Nonetheless, I don’t succeed in getting the mana to the spark before it flickers out of existence.

A bit disappointed, I remind myself to have patience. Already, I’ve made a step forward in being able to connect to the spark at all. Like with everything else, I just need practice.

I must look a bit strange to an observer. Most people, when they’re trying to light a fire, will strike the firestarter quickly, sending a shower of sparks onto the dry material in the hope that this will increase the chances of one of them catching light. I, however, am striking it in a way that generates only a single spark, or at most two, and then leaving a pause in between each attempt. But then, we have different aims.

It takes more than a few tries, but eventually I get quick enough both at connecting to the spark and sending my mana through the channels that I finally succeed in my endeavour.

The spark devours my mana greedily, burning white-hot as it latches onto its new fuel. The tenuous tendrils it had been sending out now strengthen and lengthen, the fire swiftly catching hold of the dry material on which it sits.

My mana running out, the fire continues, though dims significantly. Like before when I’ve observed my hearth fire, it sends tendrils into the leaves and twigs, eagerly consuming the new fuel.

However, my connection is still there. It’s weaker now it’s not actively being drawn on, but it hasn’t fallen away, consumed by the fire itself in lieu of the mana I was feeding it before.

I absently sense a grin pulling my lips apart, exhilaration running through me.

Success!

Time to see what this connection allows me to do.