When Francis realized it was first snow, he immediately rounded them up and told them to eat if they were hungry. The rules of the winter guard dictated that they were to leave immediately, unless it happened at night which meant they would leave first thing in the morning.

The grass had mostly healed everyone back to top shape by the time they had to set out, so Omia simply followed behind them as they marched back towards Darien. Francis even encouraged her to join the ranks, which she did easily enough. Years of watching and copying them made falling into step come naturally.

In a few minutes, they made it back to town, and she left the march to head towards the gates, waving behind her and saying goodbye to them.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jack walk into the city faster than she could react or say hello to him, so she shrugged and followed behind a few moments later at a more sedated pace. The guards waved her through, and she went home.

* * *

She found out shortly thereafter that her dad was, once again, free from winter duty. Unlike last time though, he was given another task from his guard Captain named “assisting a promising recruit.”

It involved taking Omia into the Death Eater fields as frequently as they could, and just letting her go wild on the grass, absorbing as much as possible. Francis wanted her strong enough to wield a training claymore by the time he got back, and that was the only way. This would also be a good test of whether she actually did get stronger from absorbing life energy, or if it simply healed her. Francis said it was likely a combination of both, but verifying would be a bonus.

After enjoying a few days of the time off, her dad said it was time to get started on her new “regiment,” and put on his leather armor. Now that she knew a bit more about the guard uniforms, she could understand much more than she did last time. The box on his hip was for potions, the stick on his thigh was a mini-torch that was always accessible, the buckler on his back was vital to fending off undead attacks, and even the slight fur flourish along the collar of his armor served to show off how the inside was padded with fur, where she thought it was just for looks before. She even noticed a metal tube that ran along the outer part of his lower left arm, and knew it was a long piece of flint to be used in emergencies by scraping the blade of your sword against it. There were some monsters that brought on darkness, and quick access to a lit torch was important.

After studying his uniform, she put on her own winter clothing, thick and hard to walk around in, before she set out with her dad.

Instead of going straight to the front gate, her dad took her down the street and collected Jacob and Torei, his old work friends from the first and only time she’d ever been to Wiltwood

On the way out, Torei matched the pace of her and her dad, walking alongside her. “So kid… I heard you’ve got a Glimpse of Undeath too. Wanna collaborate a bit? Share notes?”

She laughed. “Share notes? I eat grass.”

Jacob laughed hard at that one, but Torei talked over him, ever serious. “No, you absorb life energy, which is important. I want to know if you can help me figure out how to do that, what it feels like, and such. I also heard you can see undeath energy very easily, which is one of the things I struggle with. You see, I’m good at external mana manipulation, but I can't actually see what I’m working with all too well, which is a big problem.”

“Mana?” she asked.

“Yes, mana. Magical energy is called mana, it's the stuff that powers undead and the stuff that you eat from the grass.”

Omia had never heard that, but it was good to have a word for it.

“Sure, I can help you see the energy and maybe copy what I do to absorb it, you help me learn to control?”

Torei nodded excitedly. “That sounds like a good deal!” then held out his hand, and they shook on it, glove to mit.

He told her a bit more about mana and what he’d discovered, but not everything. He also said people with Glimpses tended to be stingy about their research, so he hadn’t found anyone who would help guide him through the process of manipulating it. For now though, they would focus on getting Omia as much life energy as possible. Torei said that it might be possible to learn how to pull it straight from the air a lot faster, if she got good at external manipulation.

Still, she hadn’t felt even the slightest ability to command the mana types, so she would struggle in that aspect. Manipulating the mana was her version of Torei’s mana blindness.

They put the subject away when she stepped out the gate, seeing the Death Eater fields under snow for the first time.

It looked very pretty to her. The thin layer of snow atop green stalks just paired well, and the grass completely ignored the frozen layer as it pushed itself up, its resilient nature showing. Even in this weather, it was a perfect green and waving in the chilly breeze.

They had to walk back to the guard camp before they were allowed to touch any of the grass, as it was illegal otherwise. They couldn’t actually go into the camp right now though, unless there was a sudden blizzard or it was an emergency, because apparently some people paid a premium for the private time in the winter.

Walking further and out, but still keeping the path close by, they got to work cutting some grass. The guards would cut handfuls of grass with knives, and hand them to her in bundles. She was glad it was winter, because all the bugs were gone right now, and she didn’t want to risk eating any.

Taking large handfuls, she’d put it on the corner of her mouth like she’d seen some people doing with dried hay, except she looked a lot less cool.

This repeated a couple times over the next few days. Her and Torei would talk about mana and shapes, she tried studying exactly what happened when she absorbed the mana and he tried teaching her how to manipulate it.

When there was a fair bit of snow, Omia would gather up a handful of it and sometimes pelt her dad when he wasn’t paying attention, getting the same treatment if she zoned out and wasn’t careful.

Her practice with Torei helped a lot, as he described exactly what he did when moving mana.

“It’s like commanding a tiny army that doesn’t really like you. You have to be stern with it, or it’ll just ignore your orders. The more mana you command, the more likely it is to rebel, and the sterner you have to be.”

At first she didn’t have any mana to practice on, but then tried to “find” life mana. She said she could only see Undeath mana, but Torei told her that didn’t really match up. He could control any kind of mana he ran into at least slightly, though he worked best with undeath, so she should be able to see any kind she ran into, at least a little.

She found that when she broke open a stalk of grass, there would be a flash of green that disappeared almost instantly, and she realized the Life Grass was healing over its own wounds so quickly that little mana escaped. What did escape, dissipated almost instantly.

Her practice on manipulating mana involved trying to force that life mana to not dissipate, staying exactly where it was until she could poke it from the air, absorbing it through her skin.

To help Torei see the mana in turn, she described its different properties.

“Undeath mana is like… a liquid that flows out from the undead themselves, and occasionally up from the forest floor. It's very dense, like smoke, but it doesn’t go up to the sky, it goes down. It's like heavy smoke. Life energy is very thick, but it can’t really exist outside of living creatures, and disappears instantly if you let it.”

Torei wrote down all her words in a little notepad and pencil he kept in his backpack, asking and clarifying certain things. He claimed that it helped him visualize what he was feeling better, which she thought was good.

She was able to keep absorbing grass for around two weeks, but then the weather got too harsh, so they had to go back inside. It wasn’t all hopeless though, as the four of them were able to harvest Life Grass faster than she could absorb it, so they would take big empty potato sacks to fill up with the extra. By the end of the two weeks, they were sitting on something of a stockpile, which she started going through. She had to dedicate practically all her time to absorbing the life ener- mana, the life mana, because it was slowly dissipating from the grass. A month after they stopped harvesting it from outside the walls, she was finally out of Death Grass, and they weren’t even halfway through winter.

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She wasn’t bored though. Before absorbing all the grass, they had tested her physical limits in order to get a baseline. Afterwards, they did more testing to discover she had drastically improved her strength. Two years of passively absorbing life mana didn’t compare to a month and a half of all-you-can eat. They estimated she was around ten percent stronger.

Her dad and his friends briefly discussed buying things called “Life Potions” for her, which were packed with life energy, but threw the idea out. They were insanely expensive because there was an actual chance of gaining a Glimpse of Life if you drank enough of them quickly and in certain situations, so there was a high demand and they were hard to make. A single one would bite deeply into their pockets, if they pooled their money together.

They decided it just wasn’t worth it. Much cheaper to get it directly from the source of life mana, an option which people- who weren’t Omia- didn’t have.

When her father informed the Captain that his duty was over and the results, the Captain gave him a wooden practice claymore left by Francis, just in case Omia’s experiments were successful. He was told to instruct her to practice with it frequently, as it would be the tool she used during spars and sword practice when he got back in the spring.

Omia didn’t waste any time. She was incredibly excited by the gift, and wielding a sword taller than she was with ease filled her with pride. It wasn’t as heavy as an actual claymore would be, but it did still have a metal core to give it heft.

The sword forms her father had drilled into her using a longsword didn’t exactly apply anymore with the extra reach and lack of shield, but she began the steps to creating new movements and swings based on her previous training. It was slow going, but not impossible, and only time would tell.

She did still take off days to go around town and talk to her friends, but she didn’t see Jack much anymore, and he avoided her when possible. She knew he was too jealous to even look at her, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that. He’d always wanted to be a guard, and now she was a better guard than him in every possible way, despite them being the same age.

Except for Jack, the winter months were near-perfect. She worked on her claymore skills and, when she got tired, Went to Torei’s house to practice controlling mana. He always insisted they go right back over to her own house to practice, which was odd but she didn’t mind.

She found that almost everything produced mana, but not much produced it visibly. It was easy to miss, and she had missed it for most of her life. The only reason she spotted it now, was because Torei insisted he was able to grab the area around him a lot. He said he was able to feel the Fire mana, but she couldn’t see it. In the water was water mana, yet again, it evaded her focus. It was only when she started describing what she saw, that they realized Omia had simply not realized what she was looking at.

To her, water was slightly blue. To her mother, it was clear. She’d never even questioned that, but she understood it now. Mana was tied to a particular material, and she had to be near that object to see it. She could even see fire mana- the issue was that it overlapped perfectly with fire. Only when Torei brought a small set of petri dishes and vials, mixing some ingredients together and lighting it on fire, was she able to spot the tiny motes of mana in the fire. He achieved this by creating an invisible flame, and letting her finally see the little red specks clearly.

That being said, mana and its material were functionally inseparable from one another. Torei said that he was sure there must be a way, but he still hadn’t properly visualized the different mana types well enough to do so.

When Omia brought up that undeath mana was easily separable, to the point that it just fell out of the undead, Torei simply started muttering to himself about different things, pulling his notebook out and trying to figure out why.

It was usually on flame that she practiced commanding mana. She couldn’t make it flare or dim, but she could push it in a certain direction if she focused hard, like a breeze flowing over it. Even doing so for a few seconds was absolutely exhausting though, and Torei said that fire was one of the easiest to guide- because it was already moving around constantly. It was so easy to guide towards something, and so hard to reign in. Using the “army” metaphor again, he described fire as bloodthirsty soldiers looking for anything to kill: once you set them on something, there was little you could do to stop them.

Omia found it utterly taxing to command fire mana, but she was getting visible results quickly. Torei said that she would have a lot easier of a time with undeath mana, as that was where her Glimpse was, but practicing on something more difficult first would help. He also told her that she was able to produce undeath mana herself because of her Glimpse, but it would draw from her own strength, and to do so sparingly.

Still, she learned how to do so. She didn’t know when she would need undeath mana, but it might be useful to have.

The very first time she managed to draw the smallest wisp of white smokey undeath into her palm, she felt herself weaken beyond belief.

‘Oh, he meant that I literally draw from my strength, and become physically weaker. I thought that was a metaphor.’

When she asked later though, Torei laughed. It was supposed to be a metaphor, but her Glimpse involved her strength. By drawing undeath mana from the Glimpse, it harmed it slightly, reducing the benefits. He assured her that her strength was only temporarily gone though, and that it would return with rest. Oddly, she could not put the Undeath mana back into her body to return the strength faster.

“How do you draw on your undeath mana?” she asked him. Surely it was complicated if he couldn’t just give up direct physical strength.

“Same as you I imagine, though I have to be careful. Because my Glimpse is about controlling mana, I lose control the more I draw out. Still, the more you practice producing your mana type, the more mana you’ll be able to create. Here, I’ve been doing this for about… two years now? I got my Glimpse four years ago, but I didn’t figure out I could do this for a long time. Tell me what you see.”

He then held his hand out, palm up, and grabbed the area above it with his other, pulling up a rope of mana.

By the time he was done, it looked like a three foot long whip.

“A whip?” she said, and Torei nodded.

“Now describe this to me,” he said, then tried to snap it forward in a jerking motion. The issue with the undeath whip, though, was that undeath mana was like fog, it had followed behind his hand, and didn’t really make a sharp angle at the crest of its movement. Instead, it kind of just flopped forward then down.

“Are you using me to help with an experiment?” she asked.

“Well yes, that’s the whole point of our cooperation.”

She laughed, then said “The mana isn’t hard enough to do that. It just gets caught in the air and ends up behind your hand. It’s like trying to whip… I don't know, a string? It just doesn’t work. At least not with that motion. You’d have to account for its flexibility.”

Torei slung the whip over his shoulder then wrote down everything. She noticed that he wasn’t letting his dissipate into the air, and realized she should have done the same. It could be dangerous to let undeath mana loose in the house.

“How do you get rid of your undeath mana?” she asked, and he recognized her question as a safe way to remove it.

“I don’t actually think it’s dangerous to let it dissipate, but I cant be sure either. If I have access to the fields, then I feed it to the Death Eater grass. If I don't, I tend to just force it back into my body, then let it dissipate normally. I don't regain any of my strength, but I think it’s better than letting it run loose.”

“How do you get it into your body? Mine wouldn’t go past the skin…”

Omia watched him compact the smoke into a little ball, open his mouth, deposit it in, and swallow it whole.

“And that doesnt… hurt?”

“No, not at all. It’s a little cold, but I haven't noticed anything bad about it. Again, most likely because of the Glimpse. Do not do that kind of thing with other mana types if given the chance, and don't do that to other people either.”

“Have you tried it on other people?”

“It was a consensual and legally officiated experiment!” he exclaimed defensively.

“Ok Torei, I just want to know what happened.”

“Oh… they threw up and were sick for a few minutes. I only put a little bit of mana though, so a larger amount would have hurt a lot more.”

Omia shrugged her shoulders, then they got back into guiding one another. Torei had several different “spells” he’d tried to create, but most of them were duds for obvious flaws in them when Omia studied them. In return, he shared a lot of little tricks he’d learned in how to command the different mana types and how to get herself into the mindset easily.

By the end of winter, she wasn’t good at commanding mana, but she was a lot better. And she could pull twice as much undead mana from herself than before. Torei said that this was also how he strengthened his own Glimpse, by drawing mana from himself and letting it reheal, that it would slowly give him more control long-term.

He believed that if she did that, she would be able to absorb Life mana faster, but she had to wait until the winter guard returned before she could test that.

With the last melt, Omia took stock of all her winter improvements. Skills with a claymore? Good, mana commanding? Not even passable, but getting better. Physical strength? She’d have to wait for the class to start and a good spar to test it out.

Two weeks after the break was done, as the second year of guard apprenticeship began, she was ready.