I start by sending a request down the connection like I would one of my Bonds. Holding a twig near the fire, but not close enough to catch light by itself, I ask the fire to move to the twig.
There’s no reaction. Hmm. Maybe the fire can’t leap across the gap?
I move the stick so it is touching an area of dry material which hasn’t yet caught light. Once more asking the fire to move to the stick, I frown as it doesn’t respond in the slightest.
Maybe I need to give it mana? Dropping into my lightest level of Meditation, I carefully send a little bit of mana down the connection from my Core.
The moment it hits the end of my thread, I feel it sucked away from my ‘grasp’, the force stronger than I’d thought. The flame burns white again, even a hint of blue visible for a split-second at its centre.
And then it dies back down. I’m suddenly glad that I only brought out a few units of mana – I’d hate to know of the conflagration I could have caused with ten or more units, let alone fifty or something.
I try to direct the fire once more to move, but it doesn’t listen.
So just ‘paying’ it is no good. Sitting back on my heels from where I’ve been leaning forwards, I consider the situation thoughtfully. Already this is quite different from Flesh-Shaping – though they both seem to use connections, the way these connections happen is not at all the same.
Although, thinking about it…so far, all my healing has been done by touching my target and sending my mana straight into their body by pushing it through my skin. The only distance healing I’ve done has been with the lingering connection and the mana I’d left in their bodies.
Perhaps my solutions to Flesh-Shaping and Fire-Shaping are in fact different sides of the same coin. I’ve succeeded in creating a connection to the fire, but I’m not succeeding in affecting it beyond making it burn more brightly and hotly. On the other side, with Flesh-Shaping, I’m able to affect the flesh through control of my mana, but I haven’t worked out how to create a connection.
Maybe I can kill two birds with one stone – learn how to create the connections for distance healing at the same time as learning how to control fire.
Well, I can dream.
I feel more inspired now. I don’t want to touch the fire at this moment, and indeed am not sure it’s necessary since I already have the connection, but I do wonder if my solution to Fire-Shaping is in better mana control.
When I’m using Flesh-Shaping, I stay in control of my mana even when it’s in the body of one of my Bound. Experimentation in the last few days has told me that the mana that I just dump in my Bound’s bodies sticks around for a bit but is slowly absorbed by them over a number of hours.
I actually took some time three days ago to test this, filling Bastet’s body as full of mana as I could. I was hoping that she might be able to be a mobile battery or, at least, that the mana could then be used for healing.
The answer I learned is that both are true, but only for a limited amount of time. Bastet took my whole mana pool twice and then a little more – which in itself was interesting. Although over a thousand units of mana could be stored in her flesh, it was a lot less than what I’d had to pack the paranax carcass with before it was saturated. I’d wondered a while about why this was the case – repeated with my other Bound too – but ultimately concluded that it must be because the body is already in use.
My Bound all have their own mana pools which may take up space. Not to mention the Energy which must be suffusing their bodies. The paranax wouldn’t have had any of that – it was dead and had been in my Inventory which had cleared any remnants of Energy out of its body.
Immediately after saturating Bastet’s body, I’d pulled the mana back out of her, just to check if I could. As it turned out, I could withdraw almost all the mana, only about fifty units refusing to respond. I learned something else at that moment – that when my mana pool was filled up, I could still continue to absorb mana but that it didn’t show on my status screen. My mana pool is limited to five hundred and forty mana units, but it must have gone somewhere. Where?
I still want to explore that question – I didn’t at the time because I was focussed on other discoveries, just as I am now. I do know one thing, though – I was unable to reuse mana absorbed beyond my storage capacity since I couldn’t work out where it had gone.
So, the conclusion was that as an immediate-use battery, Bastet was much more efficient than the paranax’s carcass that only yielded a single mana back for every ten units ‘spent’. However, that didn’t continue. The mana in Bastet disappeared quickly as multiple experiments demonstrated.
After saturating her at the beginning of the day, I was only able to withdraw just over five hundred units of mana by the time the sun went down. Repeating the experiment a third time once the sun had set, by midday the next day, I was only able to withdraw around twenty units from her. In my final experiment, I waited a day and a half before attempting to withdraw the mana – without success for even a single unit. I discovered by accident that I could pull her own mana out through touch, but it was painful for her, much as it had been for River near the salamander’s corpse. Maybe even more so.
While Bastet had mana in her body, using it for healing purposes was simple. Frankly, it was like I’d just fed the mana into her for the objective of healing rather than it having been in her for half a day – I just needed to reconnect with it by touching her.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
So, as a conclusion, I’ve decided that if I have enough forewarning and time to fill my Bound with mana, I will. If each of my Bound is full or almost so of mana, even significant injuries will be made easier to deal with. If Bastet and River had been full of mana when we faced the salamander, she wouldn’t have almost died.
Of course, that does require quite a lot of preparation. Bastet holds the most mana out of my Bound at over a thousand points with Fenrir holding the least at around two hundred and fifty. The two kiinas were next at a thousand units each, and River was just behind them at nine hundred and seventy. Sirocco was second-last, holding just under five hundred units, so clearly size isn’t important. Or, at least, it’s not the only factor.
When I total up the mana I could store within my Bound, it adds up to more than four thousand, five hundred units. Even with my faster mana regeneration when meditating, that’s almost an hour and a half purely dedicated to emptying and refilling my mana pool. When they then lose half of that over the daylight hours, it seems like a bit of a waste to do it on a daily basis, especially when I’m staying at home for that day.
I do resolve to do it when we go out into the forest together, and especially when we set out on the quest. As past experience has shown, we never know what’s likely to hit us as we head down into the valley.
But returning to the topic at hand – fire. The point is that when I feed my mana into Bastet, or any of my Bound, for the purpose of Flesh-Shaping, I have to control it. When I don’t control it, it disappears over time. Perhaps their bodies are using it in a much slower version of what the fire is doing here.
All of which is a very roundabout way of deciding that what I need to improve here is my control. The fire ripped the mana away from my grasp and did what it wanted with it, not heeding me in the slightest afterwards. Perhaps if I can maintain control of the mana, I will gain control of the fire in return. It’s worth a shot – or, most likely, several.
My prediction turns out to be true. I feed the mana down the connection to the fire only to have it wrested from my grip once more. I refuse to give up, feeling like I’m on the right track here, and keep trying.
Each time, the mana is pulled from my control by a force that feels inevitable. But inevitability isn’t the domain of fire – that’s more earth. Fire is stubborn and ever-hungry, but it’s not inevitable. It can be smothered, or redirected, or starved of fuel. Though on that note, I do have to add more fuel to make sure that it doesn’t accidentally burn out in between my attempts to gain some sort of control.
Staring into the flames as I watch them lick at the new additions, I wonder whether I’m going at this erroneously. But then, what other options are there?
I can control fire physically. I can pull the materials that it feeds off apart, starving the fire of fuel in time. I can cover it with earth and starve it of oxygen. I created it in the first place with the spark from my firestarter. But I’m not sure whether any of those help me when it comes to controlling it magically.
Sighing, I return back into the lightest level of Meditation, my vision switching to seeing connections. Maybe I’ll pursue madness for a little longer – trying the same thing and expecting a different result.
Pulling my mana out of my Core, I focus this time on the mental ‘grip’ I have on it. In fact, considering it, I let it return to the little ball of light which it naturally wants to make. I’ve been automatically making it into the oblong which worked so well when repairing my internal matrix, but maybe this is a time to go back to basics.
Not needing to focus on keeping the mana in an oblong shape, I find that it’s much easier to control. I remember back to when even manipulating a ball of mana was difficult – I’ve come a long way since then.
As I move the ball down the connection to the fire, I stay with it in a way I haven’t until now. It requires going deeper into meditation, but I know that my Bound are all around – I’m unlikely to be in danger. Perhaps being more ‘present’ with the mana will help me maintain control.
I approach the end of the connection. Looking at it this way, the fire appears immense. The little blaze which I had set light to and nurtured is now an inferno that fills my full vision. Its flames are not themselves visible, but the tendrils which wave in the air and burrow into the fuel below are reminiscent enough of the physical appearance of fire that it makes little difference.
I see my connection disappearing into the heart of the fire. Following it with my mind, I’m almost surprised when I don’t actually get burnt. In this state, the fire is not hot, but there are other dangers. One of the tendrils passes through my presence and I abruptly feel a sense of suction.
Instinctively rejecting the sensation, the tendril falls away – but not before another has come to try to investigate. I move hastily on, a little unnerved despite myself.
Into the heart of the fire I go, and there I find the end of the connection. It doesn’t end abruptly, instead breaking into multiple threads which surround a single ball of light – the fire’s heart, I guess.
It’s odd to think about from a scientific perspective. I wasn’t aware that fires have hearts, though I suppose they have areas of particular heat. But these change as the conditions do – the fuel which previously had offered plenty of burning potential is used up and so the fire moves. That’s what a forest fire does, after all – sweeps through a forest, constantly burning new material as the old is consumed and left behind as ash.
But then maybe this fire heart isn’t actually physical. As I observe what’s happening, I notice the heart shifting about, jumping from place to place. At one point, another heart develops, my connection sending new strands to weave in with that one too. Then it flickers out and my connection returns to this one.
It’s a fascinating view, and I could honestly watch it for hours, but I have a task here.
Holding the ball of mana a little way back in the connection channel has been easy enough, requiring very little focus. Fortunate, considering my distraction. I pull it forwards and approach where my connection splits into multiple strands.
As it hits that point, I suddenly feel the strong suction again. It’s like each of the smaller strands is a waterfall and my ball of mana, a boat. No, not a boat – a pool of oil floating on the river.
I see the ball of mana waver in shape, trying to go down each of the strands equally, and thereby be separated into tiny fractions of itself. Paying more attention to what the whole environment looks like, I don’t focus on the ball of mana quickly enough and it is pulled away as inexorably as my previous attempts.
With a ringside seat this time, I see how the mana is broken into pieces and fed to the fire’s heart. I try to maintain control over it, but from the moment it becomes split into fractions of units, it becomes too slippery to grasp.
The bright light of the fire’s heart increases in intensity until it would be hard to look at if my mental eyes had the same limits as my physical ones. As it is, I’m able to see how the tendrils of fire expand in size and intensify as well, the mana I gave it being used to temporarily increase the fire’s reach.
And then it returns back to the way it was, the few units I had fed it consumed. Right, time to try again.