I don’t know what I expected melting or being burned up by lava would feel like, but it wasn’t this.

There was no pain, no sensation that I could say was familiar to being burned. The heat I was surrounded by wasn’t unbearable in the slightest. It was welcoming, much like the warm bath at the rest house. And that bath was already a new enough experience.

More aware of myself, I was a bit unsure if I was necessarily holding my breath. My chest didn’t necessarily feel full; however, I didn’t try to take a breath. I simply swam in what I hoped was the direction of the surface. I luckily picked the right direction and broke the surface.

I heard a screech and before I went to wipe my eyes, I felt my arm grabbed and I was pulled from the warm liquid I had been in.

I felt the wind blow the heavy warm liquid away from my skin and the heat dissipating before my feet felt the ground and the rest of my body was put down.

I took this chance to wipe my eyes and saw that there was a glowing orange substance on my hands. I had fallen in the magma, like I had thought, but I came out completely fine. Even touching the stuff now and aware of it didn’t make me suddenly notice any sensation I would expect to be feeling. It was as if it was water, only heavier and warmer.

Infront of me was Awmezhyok in human form. Their eyes were wide, and they were frantically saying things I couldn’t completely understand.

“I’m alright, I know it was an accident” I signed but didn’t know if they could understand me.

Before I could confirm any ounce of comprehension from them, I was hit with the full force of someone.

I didn’t feel any scales, so it must have been Mezu.

I smiled softly and managed to lift him off me a little bit so that I could see him.

He was beaming, though his eyes were a bit red as if he had cried a little.

It was nice that Mezu seemed concerned about me.

“I’m fine, see?” I signed, “did you like the fight?”

He nodded eagerly beaming still. I smiled back at him, and he hugged me one more time before climbing off me.

I sat up and saw him run towards the other two before shouting at them.

The two of them sat on their knees in human form and hung their heads.

The image in front of me reminded me of Kahzhaw scolding me and Shezhyo. I chuckled softly.

While the scene continued, I tried to figure out what happened.

I looked down at my body and other than the wound I had gotten from the coughed-up fire, there wasn’t any burn that I could see. My body felt a lot warmer and there was a new sensation within me that felt a lot different than before. I thought I had acknowledged that I was in the magma but seeing a mostly injury free body, it still didn’t make any sense. The only change was that warm feeling within.

Previously my mana just felt like a slow-moving weighted force within me. With training that eventually sped up making it useable, but it was still held a very weighted feeling inside me. The only thing I could describe it by was its weight. Shezhyo didn’t describe her aura much, just that it was like an extension of herself. But she didn’t think there was a weight to it.

Over time I had gotten used to that weight, but now the familiar type of weight was absent from my body. In its place there was a warm radiating heat. The air around me felt cool in comparison, but not in the way that my body felt with a fever. There was a weight that seemed to fill me up more and yet sit much deeper within me.

When I focused in on it that warmth felt like a large vast pool or river that filled me. When I ignored it that warmth remained, but I was sure that even the weight I felt was something completely different.

What happened? Did I somehow awaken fire mana? Could mana act like aura when it came to life or death situations?

I thought back to my first ever mana lesson from that church.

What was it the teacher had said?

Back then, when I was in our village, every now and then the priests would take the children from the orphanage for a day to teach us to read. There weren’t many of us, and so we were gathered in a small room towards the back of the church and away from the other classroom that was for the villager’s kids.

The room itself wasn’t an overly small size, but it was clear that the seats and table that we were using was brought here for us. There were a few shelves with books, but they weren’t overflowing.

We had just finished our reading practice and the priest began discussing basic mana theory. He was explaining that because we were orphans it would be a bit more difficult.

“Children usually learn mana manipulation from their parents. Watching it from a young age the feeling gets imprinted on them, and they manage to do their first manipulation on their own. For you though, it will be a bit different. You’ll have to try each of them and see which comes more naturally.”

Her voice was soft, and she smiled at us.

The others around me looked at her eagerly, they were much more interested in this than their reading lesson that had just finished.

“The best thing for you to do is try to create a clean picture in your head. I use earth mana, and when I think about it, I try to form a picture of a stone in my head. Imagine how it feels in my hand if I were to shift it around. Father Elmir uses water mana, and he says that he did his best to picture a clear pristine lake. Using one from his memory helped him the most.

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“An adventurer who used fire said the dancing of the flame in a lantern and the spark when you would light a candle with flint are the images he uses. For air like sister Lara, she focused on blowing air out of her mouth but directing it to her fingers.”

The kids around me tilted their heads confused.

She laughed, “I know I know it sounds ridiculous but that’s just how she explained it to me. Now I’m sure you all want to get started, so let's try it out!

An image, a spark or the dancing of fire itself. I tried my best to imagine it and move my mana with it, but nothing happened. I tried a few more times but the result was the same.

Maybe it wasn’t fire mana. But what would’ve protected me from the magma?

If it was water, I’d imagine that it’d feel cool, and it would feel light. Not like this weight my mana seems to have to it. Maybe earth?

I picked up some rubble next to me and used it to remind my fingers of what a stone felt like.

Maybe having a fresher image would help.

I put my other hand on the ground and imagined picking up a stone the same size as the one in my right hand. But my mana didn’t react.

I opened my eyes after a few more attempts.

Mezu was now play wrestling with the two dragons. It seemed nice that he had someone his size to play with. And it would keep him distracted long enough for me to figure this out.

I laid down and focused on the mana itself and tried circulating it.

When it came to augmentation mana it was manipulated differently. It was a force that filled the body, and you simply shifted the mass of it around, where you wanted to be enhanced.

What I had read up about circulation, was that the mana flowed in a certain path within the body. It felt like it moved in lines, and it wasn’t all at once but more like water flowing down a stream, or ink on a paper when writing.

I had seen a diagram to represent the image of the pathway and tried to mimic that. The starting point being a part in the center of my chest and then moving it across to my shoulder down to my hand and back up then back to the center down to my waist, out to my hip down my leg and to my toes. Back up from my toes, over and down my other leg. From my toes I went back up and then followed a route next to the previous route down my torso, but this time up and towards my other arm.

Returning from my hand I moved the mana to my head and then back down to my original starting point. I did this again and again until it felt less like I had to think about every step and felt more like I was shooting the mana through the path all at once. The smoother and smoother it felt the more force seemed to be behind the movement of the mana.

The warmth and weight were no longer all-encompassing but were focused on those lines I had traced over and over again. Each time I completed the path, it felt as if I had left some behind at the center starting point. Despite having the mana move around my body there was still a warmth in that center part. Maybe this is what they call a mana core.

I feel like I did the steps a bit out of order. Manifesting some form of the mana in the real world seemed the first step in all the reading I had done and then learning and using manipulation was next. The books seemed to assume that most people couldn’t feel the mana within them until they actually used it. But as I still didn’t know what type of mana, I had in the first place; I was unable to properly form a manifestation of it. I was also probably able to do it differently since I had used mana in the past, though the method was vastly different.

As I had tried fire and earth, and the feeling of my mana didn’t give me the image of water I wasn’t sure what it could be. Air wouldn’t have this weight to it, though it might have some warmth to it. And how could’ve air protected me from the magma?

The magma had sat on my skin without burning it and I wiped it away as if it were water. But there’s no way that I was manipulating the magma itself. I had never seen someone manipulate mana like that before.

I opened my eyes and stared up at the opening of the volcano in the distance.

It probably wouldn’t hurt to try it right? I mean, if nothing happened it would simply be just like my other failed attempts with the other elements.

But what image to picture?

Maybe a floating ball of it was the easiest thing to do.

I sat up, closed my eyes and held out my hand imagining I was holding a warm ball of lava that was maintaining its shape in my grip.

My mana surged down the path to my arm, and I felt the comfortable warmth fill my fingertips. I creeped one eye open ever so slightly. And with the small glimpse of the warm glow that reached through the small opening I shot both of my eyes open.

I lost my focus though and I watched the lava ball crumble till I was holding the remnants of it and the rest was dripping between my fingers and onto the ground. It rolled for a few seconds lighting the dust on fire before disappearing all together. Both from my hand and the ground.

I stared at the spot it had been. Unbelievable. How was I manipulating lava of all things?

If anything, it seemed like something only the elemental kin could possibly do. As I had heard that they had a mastery of elemental manipulation above any other race. And that’s only if it’s even possible for them. They were all specified to one element, so maybe the fire elemental-kin or the earth elemental-kin were able to manipulate lava? Or was there a subset of elemental-kin that could only manipulate lava?

How had I managed to do it then? For aura life or death situations could lead to a full awakening. In both Shezhyo and Quartz’s cases, they had been on the brink of death when their aura completely awakened. We didn’t know much about aura, all we had heard about it was from Yophkazh, and she didn’t know too many details.

What she did know was that it was very different from mana. She described it as the lifeforce within Goliaths, that she hadn’t met another race who had it, but physical manipulation mana was a truly poor imitation of it. So, from her information there was no real way to know the differences between them.

I tried to find books on our travels to look into it more, but I could only find things about mana. And when it came to awakening mana, I hadn’t come across anything that suggested it could occur in that same way.

One’s element seemed to come from an instinct more than anything, and I had read some old texts that seemed to suggest that physical augmentation mana wasn’t simply no element, but all of them put together. The scholar had theorized that since the mage was unable to separate the elements into distinct images, they were only able to use it in one method, augmentation their own physical abilities.

Considering it that way it made sense that as people with only one element progressed in their abilities, they were able to use multiple elements. If the element wasn’t in them in the first place, how would they be able to learn how to manipulate it.

Still, even with this understanding, if I’m right, it didn’t make sense that I could only feel that warm weight. I tried to do my physical augmentation manipulation again, but the familiar feeling didn’t come. My arm just seemed to cover itself in a layer of warm lava.

If one was able to theoretically eventually use all elements, then they must have all of them inside them, and as you separate them you should be able to feel them each as different entities so that you can use the right one when you want to. I only felt the one feeling, and there wasn’t anything left in my body to feel as separate from it.

I would have to talk to Dot and Kahzhaw, but if they could feel a difference between the mana, they were able to manipulate and the mana they couldn’t, then that would back up my theory. My mana was no longer a mix of them all, it was only lava. I couldn’t feel the expected separation of rock and fire.

My thoughts were interrupted by a woosh. I felt new cool air blowing from above and saw a shadow come over me. I looked up to see two large dragons gliding down from the sky.