Chapter Ninety-eight

Krissintha Arlonet Dar Ghelain was fuming. She slammed her empty plate down, remaining crumbs of her breakfast scattering, and she trudged over to the railing at the edge of the deck. She took a deep breath, planning to unleash her exasperation in the form of a scream — or at least a growl or a grunt — but she didn’t want to draw the attention of the sailors performing their duties or rangers still having their breakfasts. So, she breathed out slowly, then repeated the process a few more times until she felt calm enough to think things through.

Even so, thinking things through proved to be difficult without fully understanding a spirit’s power, or Mana, as Kevin liked to call it — a word even Tilry had adopted. And how could she understand it when her own familiar, who provided it to her, didn’t understand it either, apparently. She shook her head, sighing again, looking up at the morning sky, hoping some answers would fall down from the dull, dark clouds that were gathering. Her eyes lingered on the clouds. Maybe it would rain soon? Maybe a storm was coming? It sure looked liked the sailors were expecting rough waters, tying crates and equipment down. She turned around and watched them for a while, letting the ongoings distract her from the problem she was failing to find a solution for.

She almost managed to force her mind to get back to working on the problem of Mana, when Kiwa clambered to her feet and walked over to her.

‘Time for exercise, boss,’ she said, her voice weak, her expression suitably dour for someone with a hangover.

‘Are you sure you’re up for it?’ Krissintha inquired, not at all convinced the elf was in any shape to do anything even resembling exercise.

‘Yeah, I’m sure,’ she groaned, then tapped the sword at her hip. ‘We’ll do some drills, but … first we’ll focus on … meditation, I think.’

‘As you wish.’ Krissintha nodded, secretly hoping Kiwa’s grueling sword drills would be forgotten for today — those were designed for elves by elves, and she was sure she wouldn’t be able to keep up for long without using Mana. Then again, if she could believe Kiwa and Toven, being able to hold her own against elven rangers without her familiar’s power, even for a minute or two, meant she could consider herself to be among the better, if not the best human swordsmen. Maybe it was true, but it sure didn’t feel like it to her.

‘Alright, let’s get started,’ Kiwa said, then burped discreetly, hiding her mouth with her hand, her face reddening.

‘Lead the way, boss!’ Krissintha smiled.

‘I’m not the boss, boss.’

***

Meditation exercises didn’t attract nearly as much attention as the sword, dagger or the occasional spear drills Kiwa had been gently forcing her to do throughout the voyage. As such, no-one even glanced their way as they sat cross-legged on top of two tied-down barrels.

Krissintha shut her eyes and let the visionless space envelope her. Instead of the sounds, smells and sensations of the ship, the crew and the sea, she focused only on the sound of her own breathing. Slowly but surely, she fell deeper into a calm darkness — her favourite part of this kind of exercise — where she knew she wasn’t asleep, but she wasn’t sure if she was completely awake either. It was from this place she could start looking deeper not only into herself, but into the bridge or tether that existed between her and her familiar. Putting it into words was difficult; the most accurate comparison she had ever come up with was childhood memories of laying in her bed, the room dark, her mother sitting on a chair, and even though she couldn’t see or hear her, she knew and felt she was there in the room with her. Kevin’s presence was something like that. A presence. Going deeper from there, Kevin’s so-called Mana-pool was something more tangible — if that was the right word — a small, dim glow in the darkness. Whether it was real or just her mind’s interpretation of it, she didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. It was there, and from there she could draw the mysterious, powerful substance his familiar called Mana. It was slightly bigger than it had been before; Kevin’s growth was real, and it had effects even she could see and use.

Normally, she would use the exercise to practice her control over Mana; willing it to move, willing it to gather in her body, or on her blade, or to do anything she could think of and envision. The more comfortable she got doing it during meditation, the easier, faster and more precise she could do it outside of it. This time she was wary of drawing any of the spirit’s power. Although the discomfort she felt had subsided a little since she had began the exercise, it was still there, reminding her that Kevin hadn’t been joking about the adverse effects of using too much Mana. Would she have overused it had she been warned? Drawing and using Mana during a fight wasn’t as calm and controlled a process as it was while meditating. She could easily imagine taking more of it than necessary in the heat of battle, even knowing the downsides of doing so. Considering this, maybe she had been too harsh on Kevin and his weird brother. Or maybe not. She still would have wanted to know in advance.

Krissintha tried to remember if she had ever heard her father’s retainers talking or complaining about similar problems, but she couldn’t. She had never been interested in their affairs, and she had to admit that even if they had mentioned it in her presence, she wouldn’t have had paid attention to it. Oh, what a spoiled child she had been; a fact she had come to regret.

Her focus lingered on the dim light that represented Kevin’s Mana Pool; she felt the contents of it calling to her. “Use me! Use me!” Sometimes it felt like Mana had a small will of its own, or at least some sort of need to be used. She wasn’t sure why that was, but she was sure Kevin wasn’t sure either, so that was fine for the moment.

Drawing Mana from Kevin wasn’t an option this time, so she turned her attention to herself. If all that residual Mana was in her body and soul, then she might as well look for it and see if there was anything that could be done about it.

She knew she had to venture deeper into the dark but comfortable world the exercise created; sometimes, after reaching a certain depth, she’d get momentary glimpses into her own soul. Now, she wanted to have a proper look.

She had been told that human spiritualists used meditation to improve their skills in using their familiars’ power, but their techniques were not refined enough to allow them access to their own souls. That wasn’t the case with the techniques the elves had developed and been using to this day in Fayr-Sitan. While Kitala Iwani wasn’t a particularly talented or patient teacher, she was able to teach her more than just the basics of it. So, Krissintha delved deeper.

At first, as the world around her darkened even more, she began to get the glimpses she was already used to. Unlike the dim light of the Mana Pool, one she could almost see, what she called glimpses were a strong, well defined but momentary sense of her soul. It was like being her own twin. It both did and didn’t make sense; Kevin had tried to explain to her what little he knew about souls in his often undecipherable way, but based on it, she was almost certain that a soul was an invisible copy of the person, complete with a mind of its own, identical to that of the body. Hm. Existing as two beings, one tangible, one invisible, but identical in all other regards. A weird idea for sure, but the glimpses told her it was true.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Krissintha focused on her breathing, the movements of her chest, imagining an invisible copy of her moving in unison with her body. She kept that image in her mind, shutting everything else out. The world became pitch black. No, not pitch black. “Pitch black” was something. It became nothing. This was new. Then a question popped into her mind, unbidden and unexpected: “where do I want to be?”

She didn’t understand the question, even though it was her asking it. Why was she asking it? And what did she mean by “where”? But then she realised the emphasis wasn’t just on the “where” but on the “I” as well. “Where do I want to be?”

Ah! Of course. This must have been what Kevin liked to call consciousness, and what Kevin claimed could move between places. In his case, between some sort of body he had in Hell — or the Spirit World or whatever he liked to call it — and his other body that was hovering around her with all his tentacles coiling and flailing — which was, luckily, invisible most of the times. In her case, it seemed, she had arrived at a place in her meditation where she could take her consciousness from its usual place in the body, and have it occupy her soul instead. Again, a weird, unnatural idea, but all her instincts, all that she had learned and all that she was experiencing right now, told her was precisely the case.

Well, she thought, if there was some problematic Mana building up in her soul, then it stood to reason that having a look through her soul would be of some use. So, she answered the question she had posed to herself.

The nothing surrounding her became something, and at the same time, she lost all feelings, including the sensation of breathing. It was worrying at first, but she didn’t feel like she was in danger of suffocating, and she calmed herself, and began to observe her surroundings.

The problem was that she had no surroundings. It wasn’t nothing, of this she was sure, but she failed to understand what kind of space she was in, if it was any kind of space at all. She couldn’t tell if she was grounded, sitting or standing on something, or if she was floating, or if she even had weight. Was she really in her own soul now? She tried to look around, but that didn’t work the way she would have expected it to work. An unsettling mixture of seeing and feeling that was both and neither was all she had, but it turned out to be enough, and she became aware of her own soul.

She looked down at herself — which she knew wasn’t really what she was doing — but for all intents and purposes, it was looking. She saw herself; just as Kevin had claimed on numerous occasions, she saw a teal-coloured mass in the vague shape of her body, sitting cross-legged on nothing. Her soul. This was her soul, and seeing it for the first time — well, sort of seeing it — was an experience she knew she’d never forget. She looked up again, and saw a blue, spherical object in an undetermined distance, from which numerous, long tentacles sprung forth in every direction. Kevin. That was Kevin, hovering there, his appendages undulating gently, but not doing much else. One of those tentacles reached from the orb to her, penetrating her soul, then separating into small, thread-like things, spreading inside like branches of a tree. She knew what it was; Kevin had made no secret of how he was able to talk to her or provide Mana. It was incredible. Was this how spirits saw the world? She wasn’t sure. Her soul’s vision wasn’t exactly clear; everything was vague, almost as if she was looking at painted images moving. She turned her head, or rather, her soul’s head, and saw a bronze-coloured figure sitting cross-legged next to her, and a blue figure — albeit a lighter shade of blue than Kevin — sporting four, long arms. Kitala Iwani and Tilry, she was sure of it. Beyond the familiars, many splodges of bronze were moving up and down, their shapes lost to the distance. Those must have been all the elven sailors and crew on the ship.

Her mind, or her consciousness, was throwing words at her: disturbing, beautiful, scary, wonderful, dangerous, profound. Being here was all those things, but soon the words became empty and redundant; they weren’t really attempting to describe what she was seeing, it was her mind trying to simplify the experience.

She wanted to just linger in this space, to exist here for a while, to absorb this new plane of her life, to explore it, to try to see it clearer. But she hadn’t forgotten the reason she wanted to be here in the first place.

She turned her attention back to herself, and observed her own, spiritual body. It didn’t take much time or effort to notice the sparkling, icy-blue substance swirling around in her soul. She instantly recognised it as Mana. The way it moved was as if water was pretending to be smoke, flowing and billowing at a snail’s pace, following a path that she was sure corresponded to the bones in her material body. Well, so that’s where the sensation of her bones trying to jump out of her body was coming from. Krissintha almost laughed at the discovery. And she knew there was nothing she could do about it. Unlike the Mana in Kevin’s pools, unused and begging to be used, this Mana, stuck in her soul, was half-spent already; not inert yet, but not responding to will either. Instead, it would ever so slowly, drop by drop, find its own way out of her soul. She just had to wait and then be careful not to draw more than she would use.

As much as she wanted to stay in her soul, she was getting a feeling that it was time to leave and go back to her body. She wasn’t sure where that feeling was coming from or why, but she thought it would be wise to listen to it. She did her best to shut off the senses her soul had in place of sight or hearing or smell, and asked herself: “where do I want to be?”

***

Krissintha opened her eyes; the sudden brightness of the day stung her eyes, and the sounds and smells of the world crushed down on her with a force she had never experienced before when ending a meditation exercise. The shouting and yelling of sailors and marines felt like an assault, and the cool wind on her skin felt like ice. She nearly fell off the barrel she was on, but Kitala Iwani moved fast to catch her even with a hangover.

‘What was that about, boss?’ she croaked while helping her stand properly. ‘You were taking forever.’

‘Uh … I was … in my soul,’ Krissintha croaked back, shivering as pins and needles began to creep up her legs.

She looked up and realised the sun was much higher in the sky now, indicating it was almost midday already. That was strange; she could have sworn she’d spent less than an hour in meditation, and now it turned out it was almost half of the day? No wonder her legs were all numb and shaky. Another thing she noticed as she turned her head to look around, was the three other Solace Navy ships right next to the Furious Fist, side by side and secured with ropes and planks so crew could walk over from one ship to another.

‘Oh? You went there? Not recommended,’ Kiwa said, shaking her head. ‘Those who ever did say it’s a weird place.’

‘Well, it was interesting. I saw the Mana causing the problem. And I saw Kevin and Tilry.’

You have to be careful, Lady Krissintha. Tilry’s thought-voice came, sounding worried. Elves handle this sort of meditation-trips better than humans, and they don’t do it often. My first host was human, and she never even attempted it.

‘True.’ Kiwa nodded.

Krissintha felt something from Kevin; he was about to say something, probably out of legitimate concern.

‘I’m not talking to you,’ she said to him, shutting him down anyway. ‘Just keep thinking about what you have or haven’t done.’

Kevin remained quiet.

‘Krissintha, Master Fenar and the captain want to see you,’ a familiar voice called her from behind.

She turned her head to find Tovaron Ento standing behind the barrels they’d been sitting on, smiling like an idiot. ‘That is, if you’re done with whatever spirit-fuckery you were getting involved in.’

‘Just a trip to my soul.’ she smiled back at him. ‘What do they want?’

‘We’ll reach the ork clan’s shores sometime tonight, and they want to set up that communication thing your familiar does.’

‘Alright.’ Krissintha sighed. ‘Spirit-fuckery on the way.’