Stunned, Wellynd let the waters race up around his legs. He’d done it.

Well, he’d done something.

Eyeing the opposite shore, he saw Klof talking excitedly while tracing a line in the air with his hands. Henry was laughing, and patting the boy hard on the back as they walked toward the shore, Henry pointing at something farther out into sea.

They hadn’t seen him.

Standing, Wellynd brushed the mud off his pants and walked back to the dry sand. He took a few steps before unbuckling and flicking his sandals to the side so that they landed a few paces apart.

The sand was hot against his feet and he quickly began to wiggle his toes, burying them beneath the sun’s glare so that he stood in cool, wet grains.

He let his stone drop to the sand and pulled the slightest amount of kose from the air.

Immediately, he was met with the familiar pain.

He knew it. Somehow, the stone was allowing him to pull freely.

Wellynd closed his eyes again and tried to see into the dark space beneath him, around him.

It was dark. The slosh of waves filled his ears as he probed the darkness with his mind, searching for a speck of silver light to latch onto. Something was there, but it was somehow unreachable. It was deep below him, of that much he was sure. Tentatively, he pulled, focusing on the source deep below him, but he felt unable to lock on to the silver speck. The pain blossomed in his chest and he stopped, releasing the kose.

Infuriated, he opened his eyes and kicked his feet free, picking up the stone and striding a few paces farther into shore.

He came to stand on a large sheet of buried shale and looked down at the strange artefact in his hands, wiping the sand off of it. While several of the rough edges have been smoothed out, the strange looking rock was maintained its general size.

If it continued to disintegrate at its current rate, it would take hundreds, if not thousands of uses before it completely disappeared.

He’d have to use this for now. Wellynd ignored the nagging question in the back of his head: What happens when I do use up the stone?

Hopefully, he’d figure out what was wrong with him by then.

Gripping the stone tightly, he refocused on the task at hand. His success felt hollow.

Was what he did really “convincing the wind”? It seemed more like he’d asked the wind for a favour and it had taken offence and taught him a lesson.

He needed more control. Maybe he could release the shaped kose more gently into the wind? Maybe. But to do that he’d have to find another one of those specks.

He began to slowly pull, attempting to limit the amount of pain while he searched out the light.

He let his mind delve beneath the ground, far below the rock he stood atop. It was as if he could almost see the darkness underneath him, feel the weight of the primordial stone above as he projected himself deeper into the earth.

Then, he saw it. Or felt it. He clutched his stone trinket, and the speck became clear. It sat there, a bright shard shining in his mind amid the sea of darkness.

This one was bigger than the sliver from before. Reaching out with his mind, he tried to pull it into him.

It resisted him this time. He grunted. It felt too far away. On instinct, he kneeled down and planted his hands against the shale.

The rock felt hot against his palms. The wind was cool against his skin.

A peculiar sense of familiarity creeped over his senses and then, as if from the ocean itself, coolness and relief washed over him as the speck of light became accessible to him. He greedily drank it in, syphoning the suspended sliver of light until it grew dark.

Unfettered from pain, he pulled in more kose from the air and began to form Henry’s shape. It took nearly a minute to mould, but once he was satisfied with it, he took another moment to think about his intentions.

Visions of Klof cheering flashed in his mind and Wellynd couldn’t help but smirk. He’d show both him and Henry what he could do.

A sudden gust whipped off the ocean and tousled his hair. He focused on reversing that gust, pushing back and making it flow out towards the sea.

Wellynd imagined the waves reversing course, the breakers toppling towards the sea, the wind whipping against his back. He superimposed the shape upon this thought, and, gently, diplomatically, tried to fuse the shape with his intention.

Without warning, the ground fell out beneath his feet, again, but this time he was rocketed forward as a scream of wind pummeled his back.

For a moment, he expected his feet to hit sand, but when he opened his eyes he was amazed and horrified to find himself still airborne, shooting forward rapidly. After what felt like an eternity of his stomach in his throat, Wellynd slammed into the water, and the waves began to violently crash around him.

While Wellynd was a strong swimmer, he couldn’t seem to buoy himself. It took a second for him to realise that the wind was still pelting him from the shore, throwing the waters into a maddening dance.

Flailing his arms, Wellynd tried to call out, but was hit by a wave, briney water filling his mouth and lungs. Coughing, he managed a weak breath before he was submerged once more. It felt like he was stuck in the middle of a whirlpool, the waters tumbling him down towards the seabed. Struggling to orient himself, he managed to break the surface and grab another breath, before he was sent spinning by another breaker.

A flash of orange came into view above the water, and Wellynd felt a calloused hand grip his arm and pull him out of the churning whirlpool.

Henry tugged Wellynd onto the small platform of the handsail and gripped him upright in one of his arms, the wind suddenly changing direction and shooting the tiny vessel across the water toward the beach.

When they reached the shore, Klof came running up and helped Wellynd onto dry land, sitting him down in the hot sand. He coughed up a bit more water, before looking at his rescuers, and despite the grave countenance of their faces, couldn’t help but chuckle.

“I think I did it.”

~

Several things happened after the incident at the bay. The first was that, despite Wellynd’s close brush with death, both he and Klof returned there to practise constantly for the next three weeks. Henry wanted them to train as much as possible before the storms, which now raged almost every night, started intruding on the day and made the beach inaccessible.

The second thing to happen, or rather, that didn’t happen, was Wellynd never repeated his initial success, if that near-death experience could be called such. Upon reflection, Wellynd guessed it had at least half to do with the lingering fear of once again being cast out to sea. He also wasn’t sure that he wanted to use up the strange stone by something as mundane as making the wind reverse course for no reason.

He had figured that he could still continue to practise moulding the shape without the aid of his artefact.

Despite this resolution, he’d still bring the stone with him every time he trained. And, occasionally, he still found himself searching for another one of those silver slivers beneath the earth, but even when he did find one, he would only briefly pull from it, just enough to make the pain subside.

Not once did he pull enough to feel that sense of power and confidence that had propelled him violently from the beach before.

The most troubling development, however, was that despite his best efforts, he didn’t seem to be getting any better at moulding Henry’s shape. This wouldn’t have been a massive concern if it was not for Klof’s own rapid development in the same process.

By the time the three weeks had elapsed, Klof had learned to both mould the shape and produce a, albeit weak and fleeting, gust within moments of pulling. While this was still nearly useless on a ship, Henry suggested that at this rate, Klof would be able to properly gust before the next season of storms hit.

Wellynd, however, saw no such development. When he did manage to get the shape to match, it took him almost ten times the amount of time and effort to do so. He did find that manifesting the shape into the world was easier the more he did it, but he always found himself so frustrated with the shaping part that his gusts would just fall flat, huffing only a short burst of wind or blowing in the wrong direction.

He was bad at this.

Something about the whole process just felt off.

One day, after another morning of failing to improve, and watching Klof jump for joy at his continued success, Wellynd told Henry that he was feeling under the weather and headed home to Briarberry cottage early.

Locking himself in his attic room, Wellynd walked over to the small bed in the corner and pulled out the book he’d lodged in between the mattress and the frame.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

He wasn’t worried that Laine would find the book, but he still felt a bit odd about taking it from the Observatory. The days in the bay training with Henry had been exhausting and every time he pulled it out at night he’d always found his eyes growing heavy within minutes.

Not today.

He’d already managed to get through the opening pages, and while there was still much that was confusing to him, he was able to glean some basic information about kose.

Most observers theorised that kose came from the Eikons. It also seemed that kose from each Eikon was somehow different.

It had also occurred to him that kose was the root word of the terms “Kosun” and “Koshai”; he’d felt a little stupid not making the connection earlier when he finally figured it out.

He flicked through a few more pages laden with heavy blocks of text until he found what he’d been looking for.

Letting the book fall open on the floor, he studied five diagrams etched across the two open pages. Each diagram depicted a different spherical object, surrounded by varying rings or structures. Wellynd’s eyes immediately focused in on the second object from the left. It was Arthus. Or at least a hastily sketched rendering of it.

Around the diagram there were a series of notes, pointing to different parts of the Eikon, as well as several longer notes discussing things like “the properties of kosal density” and “domains of influence”.

Much of what was being said was far beyond Wellynd’s vocabulary. He sighed, trying not to get discouraged. He didn’t expect that the book was going to solve his problems with shaping, but he did have the smallest hope that some piece of information would help him better understand more about kose in general. Maybe something that would tell him why it seemed to be so much more difficult for him than everyone else.

One peculiarity that he did notice was that, while most of the book was written in one uniform hand, apparently Scribe Tautsmith’s, many of the notes around the diagrams were written in several different hands. This book must have been shared or looked at by several Koshai.

He examined other diagrams and found their names scrawled just below the objects. The object on the far left was Mael, on the other side of Arthus, straddling the two pages, was Deakon, then Gwyn, and finally Val Kan.

These were the patron Eikons of each of the nations of Estioch. While Arthus hung above Arta, Deakon hung above Verta, Gwyn above Melyar, Mael above Shadkara, and Val Kan above Rel.

He’d seen the faint glint of Deakon on clear nights from atop the mountain and lighthouse, but he’d never seen, or heard anyone outside of the classroom even discuss the other three.

It was always strange to think that something other than the moon and Arthus hovered in the sky. It was such a permanent fixture.

Maybe one day he’d be able to see the others.

He turned the page. The verso of the previous page was blank, except for a messily scribbled block of text near the bottom:

Oh Heaven’s skies hold five in all

Which carve the lands and bring us strength

Who built such saints whose light will never fall?

Through what engines? At what length?

When did the one who fostered Mael,

Divine his broodish aura true?

When His people, noble, stark, and pale

In spite of twisted forests grew?

When Arthus with his heavy hand

Did build a continent alone

Did he not wonder if his land,

Would bear a coupl’d sovereign throne?

Deakon, a match to none and all

Usurped half her other half owe’d.

Was she design’d to reign or fall,

Or make us walk some middle road?

Did Gwyn, imbued with life and death

Ask for the widest of domains?

Or was it greater being’s breath

Who annexed vast those crimson plains.

How did Val Kan know when to show

Young Erdus shapes of power’s fate,

Mocking godless Vellen as his foe,

From learned mountain fortress great?

Despite these questions grand,

That make me deign to comprehend,

What I want most to understand:

When will this awful lecture end!

* V.M.

Wellynd coughed out a laugh as he read the final line. He wondered how old “V.M.” must be now.

A knock at the door downstairs interrupted his train of thought, and he hid the book under the cover of his bed.

Running downstairs he opened the door to find Ursa standing in the doorframe, illumined by the afternoon sun, a slight grin stretched across her pointy face.

She held a netted bag in her right hand.

“Henry tells me you’re sick. I thought I’d stop in and make sure you’re eating.” she said, gesturing with the bag.

“Oh. Well, I’m not really. Uh, yeah. Sure thanks” he muttered before stepping back and welcoming her in.

She strolled past him, casting him a furtive glance before continuing on to the kitchen.

She placed the bag on the table as Wellynd followed in after her. Rolling up the sleeves of her cloak, she pulled out a covered bowl, a spoon, and a loaf of seeded bread and placed them in front of the other chair.

“Sit.” she instructed. Wellynd sat down and stared at the bowl, he was still half thinking about the poem. “Godless Vellen as his foe”: was the poet talking about the desert?

Ursa sighed and took the lid off the soup, handing Wellynd the spoon. She sat down across the table.

“Eat. You’re obviously not sick. You still need to eat.” she ordered.

Wellynd took a spoonful of the hot broth. It was salty with a slight hint of mint to it. It was good.

She watched him for a few moments as he ate the soup, a knowing smile plastered to her face.

“So why are you saying you’re sick when you’re not?”

Wellynd raised an eyebrow before sipping the last of the soup straight from the bowl. He wiped his arm across his mouth.

“Uh. It’s complicated. Things aren’t going well I guess.”

Ursa nodded her head. “I thought you might be thinking that. Henry came in to have his finger mended the other day and couldn’t help but talk about what’s been going on…well…you know Henry.”

Wellynd flashed a smile before biting his thumbnail.

“I dunno. It’s just not happening. Klof is getting on well, but maybe I’m just not cut out for gusting. Speaking of which...”

Ursa held up her hand. “That’s also why I came here today.”

Wellynd turned his head.

She continued “Henry also told me about what happened during your first lesson at the bay. It sounds like you’re having trouble with control. Not that it’s a bad thing. I don’t know what that means, but you just haven’t quite figured out why you’re different. That’s okay. But when it comes to what I do, one has to have an immeasurable amount of control. What I do can go very awry, very quickly.”

She walked over to the sink and grabbed a flower stem that Laine had left after gardening. She came back and leaned both of her elbows on the table, the stem held between her open hands.

As she closed her eyes, her shoulders relaxed. A moment later, the stem of the flower began to grow. Wellynd gaped as a sunflower began to bloom, its head turning towards the sun spilling in through the window.

Suddenly, Ursa opened her eyes and stared at Wellynd.

“Flowers are easy. Most plants, at least the ones I know, are simple.”

She closed her eyes again, the sunflower head began to grow even bigger. The seeds started to spill out and the centre of the head started to grow over the petals, before becoming a gnarled knob, twisting and contorting before turning black.

Letting the dead flower drop to the table, Ursa stared at Wellynd again.

“If I lose control at any point, that’s what can happen. Imagine what would happen if I lost control when I was treating a human, who are much, much more complicated.”

Wellynd paused before responding, not wanting to sound too curious. He understood her point. “Uh...would the same thing happen to a person?”

Ursa shrugged her shoulders “I don’t know. I vowed to never try with a person. Or even an animal for that matter. I don’t think plants mind.” she added with a smile before furrowing her brow and frowning.

“I’m not sure what Henry has told you but, once you start learning something too much, it’s harder to learn anything else. Eventually, you can’t learn anything else.”

She stood up and walked over, putting her hand on Wellynd’s shoulder. “To be honest I’m being selfish. I don’t want you to learn your craft from me and then be stuck with something that you might be afraid to use. I imagine that would be a horrible life; I imagine you would resent me for it. Neither Neera or myself would want that”

“Fair enough” Wellynd replied, deflated “I get it. Doesn’t look like I’m going to figure out what I’m going to do anytime soon. Can I ask you something?”

“Of course”

“Have you ever tried doing...your craft...somewhere other than Arta? Like in Verta or Melyar?” He couldn’t help but think of the diagram he’d just been looking at.

Ursa sat back down and gave him a warm smile “Welly, I’ve hardly left the island my whole life. Someone once told me it feels...different when you’re away from Arta, but I have no idea.”

Wellynd nodded “Sorry, I know everyone’s pretty secretive when it comes to their own craft. I was just curious.”

“Your father was like that. I think that’s why he started to sail. Didn’t know what else to do. Just liked to meander about. Learn about the world. Even after he married your mother, he spent so much time skirting coasts. Your mother used to tell me about all the things he brought back for her. Not that she minded him gone, though! She always knew what she wanted.”

“Yeah.” said Wellynd flatly.

Ursa raised her eyebrows and stared out the window “I don’t know why she left. I miss her. I imagine what happened to your father must have broken her.” she wiped her eyes.

“Anyway, there’s no use in us thinking anymore about it. Those days are over. You’ll figure it out. I can still teach you about herbs or anything you’d like. And I’m always happy to offer help when I can. Oh! and I think Neera is coming home for the Prelude festival. We got a letter yesterday.”

Wellynd nodded “that’s great. I can’t wait to see her.”

The door creaked open and they both looked up to see Laine walking in. The ageing captain must have only noticed Wellynd, as he started.

“Time to get your sea legs on, Welly, we’re going to Velle…..Oh Urse. Ursa. What’re ye doing here?”

His face reddened.

Ursa grabbed her bowl and put it back in the bag, eying Laine disapprovingly, though Wellynd couldn’t help but notice a slight smirk.

“I was just checking in on Welly here. Heard he was feeling storm-weathered. We’ve got him all patched up though. Should be fine to sail soon enough.” she added.

She gave Wellynd a wink before walking past Laine and out the door.

“Oh. uh. Good. See ya, uh, Urse” Laine stammered, before puffing out his cheeks and ruffling his hair until she was gone.

“Hope you’re feelin’ better, Welly. No more lazin’ about. We’ll try teaching ya something else when we get back. We’ve got a window to run for skald.”

Wellynd sighed and nodded “Okay. When are we going?”

Laine gave his nephew a devious smile, his unlit cigar held by his teeth at the corner of his mouth.

“Tonight.”