Mind Your Step, Draft 1, CH 06

“I don’t get it,” Heather said, lobbing the stone back to him. “Why does the Force essence change as we throw it?”

Tibs lobbed it back. “That’s because the essence is sticky.”

She caught it and rolled her eyes. “Really?”

“It’s how it’s described in most of the books, but you need to remember that just like you, the adventurers who speak with scholars have to approximate how they describe what they feel.”

“Alright, what do they mean then?”

“That the essence increases when an object moves.”

“That’s not an explanation. It’s just describing what’s there.”

“And that’s all most scholars can do. Adventurers aren’t keen on staying still to be experimented with. Sorcerers might, but they don’t interact with scholars. They don’t want them to learn their secrets.”

“So what? We have to guess?”

“It’s what they do. They make a guess and then try to test that guess. Because so few adventurers want to help, most of those guesses remain just that.”

“What’s their guesses for the essence vanishing when I catch it?”

“Essence doesn’t vanish. It just goes somewhere. When you stop the stone, Force needs to keep going. So the essence that stuck to it does just that. It’s why when you block a strike, you feel like moving back, or your arm pushed the way the strike hit. The essence slips from the sword and into yours, which then pushes against you as it slips past that. Can’t you sense it doing that when you catch it?”

She lobbed it at him, and he lobbed it back. She caught him and kept looking.

“Not really,” she finally said.

“Maybe they’re wrong. What do you sense?”

They exchanged it again.

“It just seems to vanish as the stone hits my hand. It doesn’t slip through, like you describe.”

“Maybe there isn’t enough of it. I can throw it harder if you want.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Sounds like you want to pummel me with it.”

“I wouldn’t throw it, and a club would work better. And it might be more effective. Force essence accumulates more at the end of something being swung, for some reason.”

“Maybe later. Once you’ve taught me enough, I can keep you from hitting me with it. Explain this, then.” She threw the stone ahead of them. “How come it falls if the essence just accumulates on it until something stops it?”

“That’s because of the Binding element.”

“Are you telling me there’s an element out there tying us?”

“Not the way you make it sound. Binding is the element that makes it so when you jump, you don’t just keep going up to hit the sky, or Claria, or Torus, if you aim right. It binds you to the ground, and as you jump, it acts to bring you back.”

“How?”

He chuckled. “No idea. Adventurers with Binding as their element are even rarer than those with yours. And since adventurers aren’t keen on talking with scholars. It’s only recently they realized Binding was an element.”

“Okay, so what does it do?”

“It binds us. That’s why they call it that. Everything has it, and unlike force, the larger something is, the more of that essence it contains. And the stronger our bond to it.”

“Bullshit. I can walk by a mountain without any problems.”

“And that’s one of the reasons it took so long to realize it’s its own element. And it’s all guesses, other than the element being real.”

“How do they know it’s real if they’re guessing about everything else?”

“Qu.”

“What does the Arcanus have to do with it?”

“Twenty Arcanus. And until then, nineteen known elements. They’d worked out there was a twentieth, but didn’t know what it would be until they had an adventurer with Binding and one with Force and they could test the differences.”

“So the Arcanus are based on the elements?”

“It’s the most common guess.”

“Then how were there twenty, if they only knew about nineteen?”

“Etching and weaving. The Arcanus are used in them. Qu is used mainly to affect how the whole responds to predetermined situations. The Arcanus have to interact. I haven’t read of any that only has one. You can have etchings with none, relying only on the shape to create the effect, but as soon as you add one Arcanus, you need others to balance them. It’s basically a completely different language than any you’ve learned, and its rules aren’t fixed.”

“How did they know to use twenty Arcanus in those?”

“That is a mystery. The oldest text scholars refer to when writing about them already listed the twenty, and they mention references to another book in there that seemed older.”

She picked up the stone as they reached it and lobbed it to herself. “How long ago was that?”

“They don’t know. Long enough, the scholars noted it was odd there was no mention of dungeons. But they also wrote about how a large part of book was ruined.”

“I thought dungeons have always been here.”

“They might have, but if new dungeons happen once in a while. It’s possible that there was a time before the first one appeared. But it’s all guesses. And all I’ve gotten from reading those books are headaches.”

*

The next few days continued uneventfully. Tibs and Heather lobbed the stone. When they made camp, he walked around, letting Ruppert sniff and guide him to things of interest, which he got for it. He caught it testing the bars a few times, which was why he still refused to allow it out of the cage. During his turn on watch, he worked on his own training. Applying what he’d worked out with Air, for raw essence to the others to figure out differences and if there was enough in common, he’d be able to help Heather reliably. He also worked in etchings, attempting to make one that would let him heal in controlled ways.

Then, Heather caught the stone with an “oh.” Followed by a confused “oh.” Then a string of curses.

She glared at him. “That’s it?” She threw the stone at him, and he dodged. “That’s fucking it? Why didn’t you tell me it was so fucking simple?”

Tibs smiled. “You worked it out.”

“Of course I worked it out, you abyss-filled asshole. Do you have any idea how long ago I could have managed it if you’d just told me that I was the essence?”

“You what?”

“I’m the essence. That’s the vaunted secret of my reserve. Once I stopped treating it like something else pushing and pulling at me, once I understood it was part of me, that I was it and it was me, it settled and became….”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” He rubbed his temple. “You can’t be the essence. You have all of them.” No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t work out how her believing that had led to turning what she thought her essence was into what it was.

“What do you mean, it makes no sense? That’s how it is…. Isn’t it?”

He shook his head. “What I read had the realization be that essence is and isn’t.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Nothing can be it and not it at the same time.”

He nodded. “It’s accepting that contradiction that led to the realization the scholar wrote about. But you make my earlier point that it’s different for everyone.”

“I still think you did it this way just to piss me off.”

He shrugged. “But now that you’ve reached that point, we can proceed. Use your essence on the stone until you can raise it off your palm. While we walk.”

The sun reached its zenith before she let out a cry of frustration and threw the stone away.

“How much essence do you have left?”

“How the fuck should I — Oh. About half?”

“That’s the big gain of your realization. With your essence now being essence, you have a sense of how much you’re using. The first thing is not to let it go empty. No scholar’s been able to confirm their guesses on it, for obvious reason, but many of them think some of the adventurers death aren’t because of weapons, but because they used all their essence, and there was nothing to keep them alive.”

“Really?”

He shrugged. “Like I said. It’s all guessing.” But with how an adventurer became tinted by their element’s color, Tibs suspected there might be a point where they could pull on that to power their etchings, and it might pull the life essence along. Too much, and there would be nothing to sustain them.

She kicked a stone. “I doubt I’d manage anything even if I used it all.”

“Grab a stone.”

She glared at him.

“It’s not the same exercise.”

With a sigh, she picked one up.

“I want you to wrap your essence around it and try to raise it, but,” he added as she glared. “I want you to concentrate on not losing your essence. Once you decide to stop, I want you to pull the essence back within your reserve, instead of letting it go.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“It’s easy, just….” Mindset affected effect. It meant that how he went about it might not work for her. At least not until she understood what she did. “You said the essence is you. So what do you do when you want to touch your reserve? When you pull the essence out?”

“I just….” She frowned. “I just make it happen. Is this like me realizing I’m the essence? Is this something that’s going to come as a revelation and I’m going to be pissed it took me so long to realize it?”

“It’s more about gaining an understanding of how you do it. Some aspects of handling raw essence seem to be something anyone with an element knows without having to be told, like you pulling it out. But to work with the essence, you need to understand how that happens. What part of you it is, and how you move it. It’s like moving your hand. You don’t have to think about it, but when you’re learning to do something new with it. You need to think about how it’s going to move through those exercises.”

“And you learned all that in books?” she asked, dismayed.

He shrugged. “There is a lot of knowledge in them.” Of course, he had to hope she wouldn’t become so curious about them enough to go look for that knowledge herself, since she’d find out how little there was about how essence worked in them. “Just use a little essence until you work that out.”

*

On the following day, she didn’t have enough essence to continue, and her frustration mounted with each day she didn’t have enough.

Heather wasn’t pleasant to be around when she was frustrated.

*

“Finally!” she snarled, and Tibs glanced in her direction, sense on the group of people ahead.

He had tuned out her constant complaining days before. Even Ruppert had stopped commenting on her behavior, no longer amused by it.

“I pulled it in,” she said, her triumph filled with anger.

The smugglers were almost a day away. “How about we stop early so you can—”

“If you say I need to rest, I’m making you eat this stone. I did this; now you explain what comes next.”

“Then it’s going to be easier if you’re not walking. And you do need rest. You aren’t going to be able to focus as angry as you are.”

He wanted them to be deeper into the forest, in case the smugglers didn’t also make camp, but he’d stopped insisting they do that weeks before.

He forced her to eat before he continued with his instructions, which meant she hadn’t shed as much of her anger as he’d hoped.

“Pay attention to how much essence you have right now. Be as precise as you can.”

“It’s easy to pay attention to hardly anything.”

“But you have to know how much that hardly-anything is for this to be effective.”

With a sigh, she closed her eyes, and a few heartbeats later. “Okay, I know it as well as I can.”

He put a large stone in her hand. “Same as before, but use as much of your essence as you can, bring as low as leaving you only a sliver, and try for as long as you can to raise the stone with your essence.”

“This is heavier. I’m not—”

“Heather, please stop questioning the person who knows more than you do about this.”

She glared at him, then closed her eyes.

He couldn’t sense what she did, since he didn’t have Force, but he could sense essence move about the stone. He hoped the larger stone would help, since Force wasn’t an element with a lot of essence floating around according to the little scholar had written about it. He also hoped that having little essence in her reserve meant whatever difference was there when she finished would be noticeable.

She stuck with it longer than Tibs expected as the frustration mounted on her face. When she stopped, it was with a glare that promised murder. “There, nothing.”

“You absorbed your essence?”

“Of course, what do you—”

“How much do you have? Pay close attention.”

He saw the effort it took her not to speak. She closed her eyes, and he waited. If this hadn’t worked, he was in for a rough time.

She frowned, and he smiled.

He was grinning by the time she opened her eyes.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

“That’s essence work.”

“I’m utterly exhausted from that, so how the fuck do I have more essence than when I started?”

“Leeching.”

She narrowed her eyes.

“You need to decide if you’re in a state to listen, or if you need to rest and I’ll explain things tomorrow.”

“Too early to sleep.”

“Exhaustion can help with that.”

She sighed. “You better have a really good explanation tomorrow.”

“As good as the books provided.”

She retired to her tent, and he waited until her breathing steadied. He considered leaving the cage at the camp, but if his focus became split while away, Ruppert might get out.

“Oh, are you getting me more nuts? I would love some from that tree with the needles.”

“I’ll get you some on the way back.”

“Back from where?”

“From making sure we won’t have troubles tomorrow.” Etchings of air under his feet, along with Fever in his legs, and knowing where the trees were around him let him reach where the smugglers had stopped quickly. The sun would be close to zenith by the time they met the next day.

“What are they?”

Tibs nearly snapped at the squirrel for speaking so loudly, but its chittering was no louder than any of the other forest sounds.

He replied in a whisper. “People transporting things they shouldn’t.”

“They’re breaking rules?”

“Yes.”

“Can I eat them?”

Tibs stared at Ruppert.

“Breaking rules is bad, isn’t it? You did this to me because I broke rules. What are you going to do to them for it?”

Beyond addressing the idea of killing them just because they broke rules, Tibs wasn’t letting the core get all the essence.

“I’ll explain on the way back.”

Some of the crates had weapons. Other items he thought were fabrics, by the Wood and Fever essence. There was food in a few crates, but that could be for the trip. There was a sense of camaraderie as the group prepared food and set up tents. It didn’t tell him how they’d react when they met, but made him hopeful they’d be reasonable.

He walked away.

“You didn’t do anything to them.”

And now, he needed to explain things. “I wouldn’t have killed you because you broke rules. I would have done it because you gleefully killed people.”

“And they didn’t?”

“I don’t know if they have.”

“So I can break rules, so long as I don’t kill people?”

“When you’re a dungeon, I’m not going to care if you break rules that don’t lead to killing people. But I don’t know what the Them will feel about that.”

“Right.”

“There’s something else I have to keep in mind when dealing with people. People don’t always make rules that are just.”

“And that matters?”

“To me, it does.”

“How can a rule unjust? Isn’t a rule just a rule?”

“A rule is just something someone forces you to do because they have the strength to force you.”

“Like you killing me if I break the rules.”

“Yes. Some of those people make rules to help as many as they can. Others make rules to help only themselves.”

“And what kind of rules are those people breaking?”

“I don’t know. They are carrying weapons, and that breaks rules of pretty much every kingdom, but not always for the same reasons. The smuggler’s trail we’re on splits, about a week back. The bear’s trail goes sunsetward, while the wolf’s trail heads nadir. I don’t know which cities are on the bear trail, but I know a city on the wolf one where the rules aren’t good. And the people there could use weapons to protect themselves. They also have cloth, food and possibly medicines. But those two could be for themselves.”

“Then how do you know what you should do?”

“I’m going to wait to see how they behave when we cross paths tomorrow, and I’m going to have to keep in mind their numbers, and the fact I have to be careful not to reveal I have elements to Heather. So, unless they attack us. I’ll probably do nothing.”

“If they do, can I eat one of the dead ones?”

“No,” he said, having come up with a reasonable explanation. “Heather would have too many questions if I fed you a person.”

Ruppert didn’t question that, and Tibs stopped by each tree with nuts on his way back to camp.

*

“Explanation. Now,” Heather said, as soon as Tibs opened an eye.

He considered closing them and returning to sleep, but, in the distance, the smugglers were already on the trail.

He helped himself to the broth he’d set over the coals the previous night and sat facing her.

“Essence comes in two flavors, which is another approximation.”

She nodded.

“Those are your essence, and essence that isn’t yours. I don’t know why. Scholars don’t know why. It’s just something they’ve noticed. Anytime you use your essence, you make some of the essence around it yours. It happens without you having to do anything about it.”

“Does that mean I can make it happen on purpose? My reserve refills really slowly.”

“Yes, but first, you need to learn to sense the Force essence around you. That’s what I want you to work on while we travel.”

She didn’t protest, and they finished eating, taking down the camp, and covering its existence, and returned to the road.

*

The encounter with the smuggler was tense, at least on Tibs and Heather’s side. The smugglers had numbers, and unlike the previous group he’d encountered, they weren’t injured. The two of them stepped off the trail, and hands remained on hilts and crossbows until the two groups were well away from each other.

Later that day, Heather told him she could sense Force essence around them, being annoyed at how little there was, and he explained the process of pulling that essence to her by ‘tilting the table.’

She didn’t roll her eyes. But he could tell she had trouble taking it seriously.

Still, when they stepped off the trail and onto a main road, six days later, her reserve was full, and Tibs moved on to explaining how to pull her essence into a denser cloud so it would have more effect when she used it.

That way, she managed to keep a stone suspended over her hand, and he moved on to etchings.

*

“It’s all about tracing lines,” he said, moving the knife, “and leaving your essence behind the point.”

“Like drawing. Like the etching of a drawing,” she said.

“A diagram is what books refer them as, but the important thing is that you have something you understand. The lines by themselves won’t do much. They need to be connected to each other, and your will needs to be applied as well. Once Arcanus is used, these two rules change.”

“And you’re not teaching me those right now.”

“I can, if you think you’ll understand them without understanding the basics of etching.” All she gave him was a roll of the eyes. “The most basic etching I know is a set of crossed lines. But I haven’t read about it in relation to Force essence. The books talked about it in relation to Water essence. And the same etching won’t do the same thing with another element. It might not even work. So, I want you to focus on that. Make the cross, keep it there for a few heartbeats, then absorb the essence.”

When they stopped that evening, he had her complete his version of the ‘x’ attack. Warning her about the pull to her essence. To his surprise, it worked, and she managed to keep it to a small attack instead of being drained by it.

The effect was minimal. Some of the bark flew off the trunk, but she saw it as a victory. Over the next days, she worked with her essence, raw and etched, having Tibs lob stones for her to bat out of the way with compacted essence, then throw stones in the air for her to target with her Force attack.

He kept his annoyance at how easily she learned to hit moving targets to himself. It wasn’t her fault he was so bad at throwing stuff.

He sensed the fields, and then the village, and the sun touched the trees when the village’s wall came into view.

And Tibs already sensed something wasn’t right here.