The next class was worse than Advanced Arms.
With a name like ”‘The Self and the Other,” Reg had no clue what to expect, but when he walked into the classroom and caught a grin from the enthusiastic Instructor Mossgate, he started to look forward to the material. The instructor was bustling around the large classroom, moving all of the desks and benches to rest against the walls. Reg and Val had arrived early together, and they jumped in to help the instructor move the last few benches.
The classroom itself was large, easily able to fit the full cohort of recruits that trickled in one by one after lunch. The center of the classroom was clear of everything except for a huge blackwood chest, a table with about forty stoppered potions and Instructor Mossgate’s staff, and a large pile of small towels.
When the horn sounded the hour, Instructor Mossgate clapped twice to get the class’s attention. He seemed full of nervous excitement as he introduced himself and went through a quick refresher of everyone’s names. After that, he stared blankly at the class for some long seconds before pulling out a scroll and starting to read from it in his low melodic voice, “‘The sapling that knows its roots can grow to any light.’ These words are inscribed over the entrance to the Heart’s Grove Druid Circle. Does anyone know what those words mean?” He paused, waiting for a response from the class.
Reg saw Val’s hand shoot up quickly, but it was completely invisible to the Instructor, standing as she was in the middle of the crowd, and her hand not reaching above Reg’s chin.
Instructor Mossgate instead called on Belladona, who happily answered, “It means that power comes from knowing yourself.”
Instructor Mossgate nodded, “that’s a good description. I like to think that understanding oneself helps you make choices that are congruent with the person you’re trying to be. Self-knowledge helps you walk down the right branch.” He looked back down at his scroll, pausing for a second as he found his place, “Now, have any of your read the Archdruid Syclan’s memoirs?”
Most of the classroom looked blank, but Reg saw two elves nodding. The instructor continued, “Oh, it’s such a shame that most of you haven’t read them.The modern translation by Hurgon is good, but you should try to find an unexpurgated copy written in the old elven. His prose is deep and rich once you’re used to the language, and he had some truly profound things to say about life and how to find one’s own branch. Despite being written a millennium and a half ago, his reflections still feel relevant to modern life.
“Now, the reason I bring him up is that he had some incredibly practical ideas about how you can come to know oneself. It’s all well and good to say, ‘the sapling that knows its roots can grow to any light,’ but as the sapling, what concrete steps can we take to gain that self-knowledge?”
As the instructor spoke, his green eyes sparkled with excitement and he looked down less and less at his notes. “For Archdruid Syclan, the best self-knowledge came from living as the other, from sharing the senses of squirrels, of experiencing parenthood as a mother egret, of sharing a web with other phase spiders, of fleeing through the branches as a deer with a griffon in pursuit. To Syclan, the visceral experience of these other lives helped him reflect on what he valued about the life that he was living and helped him understand his place in society’s web.
“Most of us aren’t druids, so we don’t have the knack that lets us experience life so easily through another’s eyes, but Sycan’s general insight is that you can start to understand yourself by exploring extremes and seeing what you learn from the experience. You can know yourself by pushing your boundaries and seeing the things you aren’t.
“I’m sure some of you are wondering: why do we care? Self-actualization and the work of the Achivian Guard don’t seem to come from the same stem. Why would pursuing knowledge of the self be particularly valuable to us?” Instructor Mossgate looked hopefully around the room, but hands stayed down so he continued, “As you know, it is the mandate of the Achivian Guard to venture down into the mists to hunt twists, harvest crystals, and maintain the defensive enchantments that help keep our Tree safe. I know none of the people in this room have experienced the effects of the mist.” Instructor Mossgate stated the last confidently, but Reg noticed that he wasn’t the only lower-branch non-elf shifting uncomfortably at that; Yeva looked quietly furious. He’d felt the effects during the last mist storm, and he knew being caught in a storm wasn’t particularly rare. It was strange to think that the elves who made up the Achivian Guard had lived such sheltered lives on the upper branches that there was no question whether they’d ever been touched by a storm.
“The mist,” Instructor Mossgate continued, “tears at the minds of the unprepared. It sups on memory, twists desire, beguiles the senses, and invades the soul. Even with the apotropaics we bear,” gesturing at the mask of a bearded cat at his hip, “prolonged exposure to the mist can warp us into monstrosities. When venturing into the mist, we need to prepare ourselves to fight off its attacks.
“Thus, we have an answer to our question: self-knowledge can bolster our mental defenses against the deleterious effects of the mist. By familiarizing yourself with the leaves and offshoots of your mind, you can recognize and fight against the effects of the world below.
“Captain Merrin has given me leave to design a course steeped in the practical rather than in emotional and mental theory. It is our belief that through practical exercises, you shall be better prepared for your first trip down below. For the first moon of our course, we shall be exploring fear in all its flavors. Today, we shall be focusing on terror. Later in the moon, we shall branch out into panic, horror, and dread. Now, everyone please come up and grab one of the potions on the table and then find a place on the floor where you’ll have space to lie down.”
There were murmurs throughout the classroom as recruits hesitantly crowded towards the table to grab a potion and find a patch of floor. Val’s piping voice came from Reg’s elbow, “I have a bad feeling about this. Do you think he’d let me do this exploration the druid way?”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Reg nodded at her, “Same. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I’d rather have a course that focused on theory.” Reg noticed that Bartholomew had hidden himself in his nest of dreadlocks: smart squirrel.
With small stoppered bottles in hand, both found space on the floor to sit down. When the class was spread out on the empty floor, Instructor Mossgate walked over to the large dark chest that sat on the floor next to the now-empty table and continued his explanation, “The bottle you hold in your hand is an alchemical potion designed to lower your natural defenses. Please, drink the bottle.”
Reg resolutely opened the bottle and drank the potion in a large swig. It was frigid, clear, and had a slight sulfurous aftertaste. Far better testing than the potion he’d chugged after the morning’s training at arms.
Instructor Mossgate then opened up the chest he was standing in front of, squatted down, and with some strain lifted a huge curved bone out of the chest and thunked it down on the table. It looked like a huge half-jawbone with dagger-sized teeth set into one side. The jawbone was carved with curving shapes and patterns. It reminded Reg of the scrimshaw that some herders worked on during the long moons away from the ranch.
“This,” Instructor Mossgate said with some pride, “is a young dragon’s jawbone. A dragon inspires fear and awe in all who see it, and its jaw therefore is the perfect tool to help you explore fear. As the emotion passes through you, concentrate on your body’s reaction to the fear. What is your skin doing? Your gut? Your heart? Your mind? What do your thoughts dwell on? Your homework will be to write down detailed notes from everything you can remember from this experience.”
With that, Instructor Mossgate cut his left hand by sliding the outside it down one of the teeth, and then took both hands and gripped the jawbone from underneath. The teeth started to glow with a scarlet light. The classroom filled with screams.
The fear struck Reg like a blow. His heart started thumping madly in his chest like it was an animal trying to escape through the prison of his ribs. All of his muscles tensed up and he tasted blood in his mouth as he bit down on his tongue, trying not to join the screaming throughout the class. At some point, he’d fallen onto his back and was staring up at the ceiling: the whorls and curves in the arched ceiling were full of menace and dreadful intent. An ineffable terror had him firmly in its grasp.
His mind raced, trying to make sense of the emotion. He knew the fear wasn’t real, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t stop him from thinking of dreadful explanations for the fear that coursed through him: Instructor Mossgate was casting a ritual to kill them all; the dragon was reanimating from its jawbone and going to consume them; the Tree was falling, the rot consuming it and this was fear was the feeling of the mist swallowing them whole; his family, back at the ranch, was being slaughtered one by one, and he was somehow sensing their emotion; or maybe these were Ankie’s emotions, his bond with her strong enough to share in her death. Scenario after awful scenario played through his mind as he desperately tried to tell himself that the fear wasn’t real.
Time felt horribly slow. His mantra, that the fear wasn’t real, didn’t do anything to help lessen the fear’s grasp on him. He slowly started to change his mantra: the fear was real, so he needed to get up to help. Fear meant someone he cared about was in trouble. The fear was good, he could handle the fear as long as he could act. First, he needed to look around: if he could look around, he could figure out the next step. With infinitesimal slowness, he felt the muscles in his neck relax as he concentrated on figuring out how to help.
Suddenly, the fear vanished as if it had never been. Reg’s body took some long seconds to realize what had happened: the jawbone was gone, the huge blackwood chest was closed, and Instructor Mossgate was walking around the classroom whispering reassurances.
He smelled vomit and urine. He wasn’t sure if the urine was his or from elsewhere in the room and didn’t really care. Many of the students in the classroom were weeping. Reg felt his own face: it was wet from tears. He was standing up, looking for a danger that didn’t exist, sling in hand. A few other recruits were standing: Yeva was holding a handful of sparks, tears streaming down her face; a tall elf whose name was Leaf-something had his hands balled into fists and looked frantic; Dun had grabbed Instructor Mossgate’s staff from where it had rested on top of the table and was brandishing it; and a few other elves were rising to their feet and looking around the room.
To Reg’s left, Val was curled up in a ball. Thorny vines had sprouted out of the ground and protectively wrapped around her small frame. Her body was heaving with sobs. Reg stepped over to her and reached through the thorny vines to grasp her shoulder. The thorns left thin bleeding furrows in the flesh of his arm that he ignored as he murmured reassurances to Val.
Instructor Mossgate’s smile was broad as he looked over the classroom. It turned Reg’s stomach: how could he possibly look happy when there were this many people in pain? It might be necessary for them to go into the mist, but it shouldn’t be possible to feel glee when looking at the emotionally devastated students.
As minutes passed, the recruits slowly recovered. There were some venomous glares towards the instructor, which he seemed oblivious to. When enough of the class recovered, Instructor Mossgate announced, “For homework tonight, please write a scroll describing your observations with this fear. You don’t need to follow the format for a standard argumentative essay: the goal with this writing is to give you all a chance to reflect on the experience you just went through. Once you’ve completed that, please read Chapter 3 of The Heart: from Root to Leaf. It will inform our next class’s discussion and help you create strategies to deal with strong emotions.
“You should have a good chunk of time before your next classes. I recommend cleaning up and then jotting down notes before you forget anything.”
The recruits filtered out of the classroom slowly. People’s gazes were jerky and everyone kept glancing to the sides and behind themselves to find threats.
Reg lingered a bit to walk up the stairs with Val. Once they were a bit away from the classroom, Reg turned to her, “That was miserable. Felt like he just threw us off a branch and hoped we’d figure out how to spin a web and catch on to something. There had to have been a better way to build up to something like that.”
Val nodded, “I know. That feeling was too….” She trailed off, not finishing the sentence, but Reg nodded anyway. That feeling had been ‘too’ everything.
They took the rest of the stairs in silence, splitting off to wash up, and at least in Reg’s case, change his clothes. The Self and the Other class had been much shorter than it was scheduled for. Reg knew he should start his homework, but he was physically and emotionally exhausted. He just sat in his room, staring off into space, waiting for the next horn to sound and summon him to evocation. At the start of the day, he’d dreaded that class the most, but now an hour where he could sit there and fail to channel an iota of magic sounded just fine.