“Is that important?” Lethelin asked, looking more bemused than worried now.

“She is searching for me. If she finds me, she will take me back to Kazig.”

Mitchell looked to Allora who understood the question on his face.

“Kazig is to the north of Iletish and northeast of Awenor.”

“It’s one of the few places the people of the other seven kingdoms won’t fight over,” Revos said, his voice carrying hints of an old grievance.

“It is very cold most of the time,” Allora explained. “But Cambions do not suffer much more in the cold than they do in the heat. When they first arrived on Tewadunn shortly after the fall of the dragon lords, it was uncontested.”

“My people were in no position to fight for better territory then and the continent was in chaos. So they settled where no one else really wanted to live and they reside there to this day,” Revos continued. “And Deaj Reaal is still one of the most magnificent cities on the continent.”

There was an unexpected note of pride in the cambion’s voice when he talked about what Mitchell assumed was the capital city.

“Soooo, why don’t you want to go back?” Mitchell asked.

“I was exiled,” Revos said after a long pause. “Forty-seven years ago.”

“So your cousin wants to take you back. Isn’t that a good thing?” Lethelin pressed. “Don’t you want to go home?”

Revos didn’t answer her and they rode on in silence for a while.

“I never found out what the gold on the horns meant,” Mitchell said to no one in particular.

“It marks one of the royal family,” Allora said.

Mitchell thought over the conversation in light of this new information. If the woman with the golden horns was in the royal family, then…

“Are you nobility, Revos?” Mitchell asked.

“Unfortunately,” he growled. “The woman you saw is named Savarik. Her father, Ekmir, sat at the head of the Hellfire Council. You could think of it like a king but that is a mortal term and doesn’t quite capture the position in our society, though it’s close enough.”

“And he’s the one who exiled you, I assume?” Allora asked.

“Yes. The sulfur-breathed old bastard finally died three years ago and, since then, they have been calling me back. I guess they got tired of me ignoring their messages.”

“Why were you exiled?” Lethelin asked.

The silence stretched so long that Mitchell was sure Revos had decided to stop talking. Finally he said, “I slept with Ekmir’s favorite wife. Savarik’s mother, as it happens.”

Mitchell, Allora, and Lethelin all looked at each other and almost as if on cue began to laugh in unison. Revos hunched his shoulders and acted like he didn’t hear them.

***

Allora said that they would reach the mountains in eight to ten days. She had acquired enough food and other supplies to see them all the way there. Once they arrived at whatever town awaited at the end of the road, they would sell the clorvol, which she said would fetch a better price there than in the wastes, and resupply for a trek across the mountains. That, she said, would take another week or two, assuming the weather was good.

Mitchell asked what they would do if Milandris found Awen before then, but she didn’t have any good answer. All they could do was keep going. Elementals were not helpless but a determined person would eventually discover the geode. It was best to act as if they didn’t have time to waste.

As far as Mitchell’s magic instruction went, that was especially true. If he thought his training routine was rough before, he discovered that was just the warm up.

Revos had picked up a book of spell runes from the Dragon Academy and Mitchell had a chance to see what he would need to memorize to use his new abilities. When Revos produced the book from his robes that first evening out of Besari, Allora had looked shocked and had given Revos a slight bow and touched her thumb to her forehead. Revos looked uncomfortable at the gesture for some reason but nothing else was said.

The runic script was both beautiful and maddening. In order to cast a spell, he would need to form these shapes in his mind, will his mana into the shape, and then direct the shaped mana to his sevith to release the spell into the world. He could cast it without using the sevith but it was much more mana intensive to do so. Before that, however, he had to learn to feel the different types of each mana so that, when the time came, he could summon only what he wanted.

This required long hours in the back of the wagon sending mana flows into his sevith trying to light up individual stones rather than all six at once. To Mitchell it felt like trying to tease out the notes of a musical chord and identify those making up the sound. Headaches and intense nausea were frequent and he puked more than once, heaving up whatever he’d had for breakfast, lunch, or dinner when it happened. Every time he did though, Allora was there with a cool cloth wiping the sweat off his face as he tried to get control of his stomach. She had acquired some tea in the city, perhaps anticipating this very thing. It helped settle his stomach and ease the pain in his head, if only a little. Magical healing was no help for this type of sickness.

Oddly enough, Lethelin was assisting much more than she normally did. If Mitchell hadn’t been so dazed by the strain of his new tasks, he would have thought they were competing somehow to see who could best take care of him. But that was stupid, he decided.

Mitchell supposed that the only good thing about his magical training was that if he pushed himself into near unconsciousness during the time in the back of the wagon, Allora didn’t make him practice with the sword when they stopped. Usually, he collapsed into his bedroll before he’d even had a chance to eat only to be coaxed awake by Lethelin or Allora who would spoon feed him whatever they’d cooked for dinner. Then he would pass out again until they awoke him in the morning. By the second day, he was barely aware of having eaten at all.

Time became a blur. Waking and sleeping began to blend together until Mitchell felt he was existing in some sort of murky netherworld. He found that thinking of the mana types as colors helped to sort them out and he started imagining his energy like a multi-hued river of light flowing through his body with all the hues coming together in a harmony of technicolor brilliance. But extracting one from the rest still eluded him and after a while the colors all faded to white.

Once that happened, he would try to recenter himself and start again. No matter what he did though, he couldn’t separate the colors any more than he could pluck them from a rainbow. But he kept at it. The hours stretched into days. He barely ate anymore because he would just sick it up a little while later, and he awoke each morning feeling like he’d hardly slept at all. Slowly, Mitchell felt himself fading from the world completely.

On the fourth night, he thought he dreamed of Allora, Lethelin, and Revos talking about him.

“You’re killing him!” he heard Lethelin hiss. He wasn’t sure if she was talking to Revos or Allora. “He won’t be any good to us if you melt his brain!”

“We do not have a choice,” Allora said, sounding guilty. “There is no time.”

“I don’t know anything about magic but I know what you’re doing isn’t right! Let him take a break. All he does is sit in the back of the wagon and stare at his sevith. His eyes barely open anymore and he’s puking up anything he eats. He looks like a cloud addict!”

“If he can’t dissect the mana flows, he can’t cast the spells. Once he learns it will be easier,” Revos said.

“And if he can’t talk? What good will he be then? I asked him this morning if he thought he was any closer and he stared at me so long, I don’t think he even saw me. His eyes were out of focus and he was mumbling something to himself in his own language!”

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“He’s getting closer,” was all Revos said.

“How do you know?” demanded Lethelin.

“Because if he takes much longer the strain on his body will kill him,” Revos replied flatly.

“How long do students usually need to separate these mana flow things?” Lethelin demanded.

There was a long silence followed by Allora’s voice.

“Practicing an hour or two a day, a quick student can do it in a month or two. Slower students usually need three to four months.”

“An hour or two a day?” Lethelin asked incredulously. “He is practicing six to seven hours a day and throwing up the rest of the time! If he doesn’t make it…” Lethelin’s voice trailed off.

“What is the matter, thief?” Allora snapped. “Are you afraid you will not get your payment?”

Even in his semi-conscious half-dreaming state Mitchell could hear the disgust in Allora’s voice.

“It’s not about that!” she replied.

“Then what?”

“I care–”

“Enough!” Revos’s voice cracked out like a whispering lash, cutting off whatever Lethelin was about to say. “You’ll wake him up and he needs to rest. He’ll have it soon. Once he can separate the flows it will be easier. I promise, Lethelin.”

Mitchell heard the sound of small feet stomping off and he finally fell into a dreamless sleep.

***

Mitchell was lost in the mana flows. They had become his whole world. He had gotten to where he could feel the mana filling his reservoir even as he pulled it out to try and separate the flows. He could pull it out faster than it could fill up but he couldn’t get a good sense of time passing when he was this deep into meditation so he didn’t know how long it was taking to refill.

His consciousness was adrift in the sea of swirling colors. This far into flows, the vibrations were so strong he thought they would shake him apart, but rather than trying to stay on the surface, he immersed himself in it. Usually, Mitchell just let himself float in the stream, thinking that if he simply existed in the swirls of power he would find what he needed to peel the individual colors off from the main flow. The color theory wasn’t working when it came to separating the flows, but it had been the easiest way to visualize the different types of mana so he hadn’t abandoned the idea. He did switch tactics, though.

Today he imagined himself swimming in the river of multi-colored light instead of just floating in it. He couldn’t think of why it would help but at least it was a new tactic. Mitchell was so caught up in it that it took him a while to feel that something was different. Did it take a minute? A day? Mitchell had no idea. But as his consciousness moved through the stream, he felt a different vibration at different parts of the flow. He paused to consider this. Instead of swimming at random he began to move through this mental dimension with purpose.

He slid first to the left and noted where he felt the vibration shift in frequency. He slid further left until the new vibration was all he could feel. Then, he moved back until he felt the original.

“This was something,” Mitchell thought to himself.

He tried it again, only this time he moved to the right. And sure enough, there was a different vibrational frequency there, too. Something Revos had said weeks before came to Mitchell’s mind. He had asked why a magic user couldn’t heal themselves. Revos had said it had to do with vibrational frequencies. Plural. Not frequency, but frequencies. And there were most definitely different frequencies of vibrations inside the mana flow but Mitchell had been so caught up in viewing his mana as a flowing rainbow that he had not thought to examine each one individually. To see each one as a separate thing. Is that what he had to do? Maybe thinking of it as a rainbow had limited him somehow. Maybe instead of a rainbow they were really like strings of a guitar.

The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense. He had access to six types of mana and a guitar had six strings. And while they were all bound to the guitar, they never actually touched each other. The strings, when played properly, all worked together in harmony, yet they were all very distinct notes. E-A-D-G-B-E. They all had their own frequency. He then recalled his first impression that finding the individual colors had been like teasing out the individual notes of a musical chord. For some reason, though, he’d become enamored with the color idea and hadn’t thought about the musical analogy again. But as he began to get a feel for the different frequencies at play, he knew that he was right.

Mitchell began move back and forth, mapping each of the six different frequencies he found and began to try and get a feeling for each one individually. Some were almost violent in how they felt while others were calmer. Once he thought he had a good idea of where the different mana types bordered each other, he began to see if he could summon only the ones he wanted. He recalled the resonance of each one in his mind and tried to pull it to himself. Then he imagined plucking each one like a guitar string. It was music to his ears.

***

Allora sat in the back of the wagon, facing Mitchell and watching him closely. Lethelin was up front with Revos and, while before there had always been some friendly banter between them, Revos seemed angry with her for some reason. Revos had been angry a lot since they left Besari six days ago, though. He barely spoke to either of them at all unless the conversation was about Mitchell. Lethelin also seemed disinclined to speak with him but Allora didn’t know if that was her responding to his foul mood or if something had gone on that she didn’t know about. She couldn’t spare any attention for his tantrums, though. She had enough to deal with without trying to assuage the cambion’s temper.

Lethelin, for her part, was angry at the both of them. But more than that she seemed genuinely concerned for Mitchell’s health, which admittedly was not good. With his hardly being able to keep food down, his cheeks had taken on a sunken appearance and his half-lidded eyes had dark circles underneath them. His body was slumped and they had been forced to place some sacks of provisions on either side of him, lest he fall over as the wagon rocked back and forth. He really did look like a cloud addict and Allora’s guts twisted at the sight of him.

Not for the first time, she begged Vish for aid in helping him find what he needed to find. It had taken her nearly three months to separate her flows and it had been grueling, exhausting work. She would have solved the problem much faster, she was sure, if she’d been a better student but she was always slacking off with the magical portion of her training. Weapons training was simply more satisfying. They did not have two or three months, though. Once they crossed over the mountains they would be under threat from every direction. Mitchell had to be casting spells by then for his own safety. Even rudimentary first circle spells would aid him in a fight. So, Allora pushed him. She pushed him and he went.

She could see the struggle and how much he wanted to quit. As she held him while his body heaved, he would look up at her and his face would go still for a moment. He would say something in his own language that she didn’t understand, usually right before passing out, as if uttering those final words had taken his last remaining strength. Last night, she had anticipated it and quietly cast the language spell.

“Sorry. I’ll try again tomorrow. You’ll be proud of me. Just you watch.” he said, his lips cracked and his voice a raspy whisper. Then his eyes rolled back and he fell into the sleep of the dead. Allora doubted he even knew what he was saying but his words haunted her. Did he think she wasn’t proud of him? That thought was like a blade slicing up her insides.

Usually, Mitchell was so exhausted he would rouse in the same position as when he fell asleep. They would help him stand, he would go through the morning routine mechanically, barely speaking, take a few bites of food that she knew he would throw up later, and crawl into the back of the wagon to begin again. She had seen zombies with more life in them.

Unfortunately, she could not help him, nor could Revos. Explaining it didn’t work. A student had to find it themselves and come to understand it fully. Otherwise, they would never master the ability. All they could do was guide him to the flow of mana within himself and wait for him to discover a way. The realization was always different because each person brought their own understanding to it. One person trying to explain it to another was no better than trying to explain why one person found a scent enticing while another found it revolting. It was simply the nature of the process that a person had to form their own path to help them separate the mana types.

“Please, Lady Vish. Help him find the path,” she pleaded quietly.

She watched his face closely, looking for a sign he would be sick again. For the first few days Mitchell wouldn’t be sick until after he stopped, but occasionally he would become ill while still in his trance. It had been happening more and more as his body got weaker.

She was watching his face so closely for signs that he was about to vomit that she didn’t notice the blinking of his sevith. Startled, she looked down at where his left hand lay limply in his lap and saw that a glow was passing from one stone to the next at random. Or not at random! It was a sequence! Before, they would all fill with the light of mana at the same time as he directed the undissected flow into his sevith. But not now. He was controlling the flows! He had done it!

“Revos!” she exclaimed.

The big creature whipped his head around and saw where Allora was looking. He watched as the light continued to move through the same sequence, holding on each stone for a three count before jumping to the next one. Lethelin peered over the back and her eyes went wide.

“Stollar’s swinging cock!” Revos exclaimed excitedly. “The boy actually did it!”

His black lips split into a wide grin with a lot of teeth then he suddenly remembered his audience and got control of himself.

Allora got up to her knees and reached across to try and shake Mitchell from his trance. With one hand on his shoulder and another cupping the side of his face, she called his name gently.

“Mitchell? Mitchell, wake up. You did it!”

It took a few shakes before his eyes blinked and started to clear. If she didn’t know better, she would say he was drunk. A small amount of drool leaked from the corner of his mouth.

“I think,” he said, his voice weak and his eyes struggling to focus on her. “I think I got it.”

“You did!” she said, fighting the urge to hug him. “You separated the flows!”

She hesitated, but only for a moment. “I am so proud of you, Mitchell.”

“It wasn’t so hard,” Mitchell said. His words were slurred and his eyes were droopping but a weak smile formed on his. “Wanna hear me play a song?”

“A song?” Allora asked, not comprehending.

“He’s delirious,” Revos said.

“How about some Stairway to Heaven?” he asked her, the words all smashed together.

She had no idea what he was talking about.

“No, Mitchell. You can stop now. You can rest,” Allora told him, trying to maneuver him into a lying position.

His face scrunched up and he said, “No Stairway? Denied!”

“Mitchell–” Allora began, trying to calm him down. Instead, he leaned forward and grabbed her by the arms.

“It’s all…” His body shuddered and he struggled to keep his eyes open. “It’s all about the… the… vibra– vibration– tional freq–”

And then he puked up his lunch all over Allora and passed out.

All things considered, she supposed she deserved that.