You impose them upon me. I cannot deny you, but I mark this as my protest. We shall not allow them to fester in our lands. If we are to bear them, they will need to be made servial. That is the concession that the lord’s round has arrived at.

  -An excerpt from correspondence to Emperor Corilaise II, penned by Drais, King of Gale

  The stone lifts easily into the air. I feel no strain as I move it around, turning it over this way and that as it floats inside of my soul presence. Corinth watches me, watches the stone, frowning.

  “I am not sure that I can do anything with this,” he says, taking a seat on the hill with me. “Then again, you did accomplish the task.”

  “I did,” I agree. I let the stone drop into the grass. At a thought, the black dust I suffused into the stone floats away, rejoining the ball of sand that hovers at my shoulder. Microscopic changes run through the ball, the dust integrating once more with the tiny bits of gold that I tore them away from to transfer to the stone.

  More and more I am coming closer to understanding the sand. Corinth’s understanding of it is superior, somehow he can see the particles with just his eye, but those particles are connected to me. My understanding grows through intuition. That will only take me so far, I know, but it is a start.

  He scratches his chin. “It isn’t that the sand is a crutch. A crutch helps you to reach the goal, it is a tool that assists you along the path, but I don’t think you are walking the way I wanted you to.”

  “Then, perhaps you should explain the purpose behind this exercise.” I sigh, taking a seat next to him in the grass.

  He puffs out his cheeks, blowing air. “You have been patient. Alright, by now you should have some ability to sense mana, yes?”

  “I have been able to see it for half a year,” I say, tapping the right side of my head, where my reptilian eye stares out from.

  “Right, you mentioned that eye. Well, that makes the issue all the more puzzling. A magician typically only gains a real sense of mana when they reach the second rank. Most start to be able to see it, but others experience it in other ways as well. What usually happens as a result, is that they make the connection between their new soul pressences and the mana they sense, they attempt to manipulate it, and they begin to find success.”

  “You’re saying that magicians can manipulate any mana they come across?” I ask.

  “In a way. It takes an immense amount of practice, and the mana that you find needs to be absent of intent. Most mana is, accumulations of will-bearance that carries only concept without any intent. That is what affixes are, in a way, mana attaching itself to a concept. The concepts that your soul resonates with allows an easier bridge between you and the mana. But, it merely makes the bridging easier, it is not required.”

  Corinth holds up his hand and suddenly it is as if the sunny hill around us comes to life with magic. Motes of green drift away from the grass, specs of brown soaring up from the earth, and even tiny lights are pulled out of the air, all swirling and forming three balls floating above his palm. I know the brown light to be earth mana immediately, its taste tickling the back of my throat, familiar. The other two are foreign, the green an almost medicinal taste cut with something near mint, the white sweet, almost fluffy.

  “I thought you only had one affix,” I say.

  “I do.” He waves his hand, and the balls of light vanish, disintegrating as they fly upward. “Fire is the only kind of mana I have any true connection with, but I can manipulate the others so long as I am not being opposed. I believe I said this before but will is a fundamental aspect of the universe. Particles bearing a connection to will suffuse every atom of the universe, every part of matter. This is where power comes from. This is where we draw it from.

  “These particles when congregated tend toward homogenization, they are influenced by concept, and thereby they take on affix. Without a thinking being to manipulate them, they act in accordance with the nature their adopted concept imparts, but we as living beings can claim them with our own will. You told me before that your fey spirit catalogs your mana for you and keeps track of it. What I am trying to tell you, is that count of your mana is a measure of the particles that you have either generated or attracted, the ones that bend to only your will and sit outside of conceptual influence.

  “Before you have baptized your body in affix and remade yourself in the transformation of the third rank, your mana is unaffixed inside your body. It requires conscious effort and intent to connect it to a concept, an affix, but after the third rank, it won’t. At least, for the ones that you integrate into your very being. Do you follow so far?”

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  “I think so,” I say, taking a moment to work it out. “You are answering a question I never knew that I needed to ask. I always considered mana to be something mystical, unknowable. You are telling me that these particles are responsible for it.” I chew on the thought a moment longer. “So, all of your mana is fire affixed.”

  “In it’s natural state,” he says. “I can remove the affix and make it into pure mana once more, but there isn’t much need to do so.”

  I nod. “This is all very enlightening. I don’t exactly see what it has to do with the stone though.”

  “It has everything to do with the stone, I’m afraid.” He stares off, looking at the morning sun for a minute. “You, I will predict, are going to hit a dead-end in your pursuit of becoming a magician.”

  “What? How can you know something like that?”

  “You seem to have no affinity for manipulating outside mana,” he says, gesturing at the stone. “I might not have been outside during the night, but I checked in on occasion. I saw your struggle, was baffled by it. A part of me thought you might be completely talentless, which would have been a shock, considering how much you have done already. No, I think I have just realized how you are broken. You have no ability to influence unclaimed mana. Zero. I am willing to bet, that if it wasn’t for that eye you received before integrating your essentia, you wouldn’t be able to see it despite reaching the second rank.”

  All I can do is stare at him. “That isn’t true,” I say. “Ever since breaking the second threshold for magic, I have been able to kind of, taste it. I am not certain, but it is a new ability to sense mana. You are wrong.”

  His eyebrows rise at my mention of breaking the second threshold, but he lets it go. “Can you do that with your eyes closed?” He raises his hand again, conjuring a ball of fire in his palm. Immediately, I taste the cinnamon of fire affixed mana as I stare at it. “Taste is not that unusual of a sense for burgeoning mana sense to hijack. Prove me wrong, taste it with your eyes closed.”

  Fear wells in my heart. I have never done what he asks before, never even thought to try. Taking a breath, I close my eyes, and immediately the results are obvious. As soon as I can no longer see the ball of fire he holds, the taste of it vanishes. He could be holding it up to my face, but I know I wouldn’t even have the barest inkling of it.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “That is what I thought.” When I open my eyes, it is a different ball of magic he holds, the green one again that tastes like mint. Corinth closes his hand, dismissing the magic. “Just when I thought that you might be the only one of us not broken.”

  I stare at my hand. “So, I’m ruined. I’ll never be able to do this thing. I’ll be stunted.”

  “Not at all,” he says.

  He is smiling when I look up. “What?”

  “I’ve shown you my infirmity already,” he says. When I glance at his missing arm, he rolls his eyes. “I only have the single affix,” he says. “It is, frankly, embarrassing for someone in the fifth rank to only really be able to work with a single concept. I made it here regardless. Did it mean that I had to work harder, that I had to be lucky, that I had to chart a path around challenges that others simply walked through, sure. But at the end of the day, all of those losers kiss the boots of people I talk with as equals.

  “You would have hit a dead-end. It would have been incredibly painful, you would have grown from figuring out your path around it or you would have crashed and burned. Good thing you have your big brother here to let you skip all of that.”

  “Is it really that important?” I ask. “Being able to use mana that comes from outside myself seems like a useful trick, but not vital.”

  “You don’t exactly understand, perhaps that is my fault. I told you before that these will particles suffuse everything. When I asked you to work with your magic, everything seemed to work fine, but when I asked you to connect to mana that didn’t originate in your body, you are incapable, and I think that is the reason.” He points up at the ball of black sand.

  “You said before that the black sand was different.”

  “Exactly,” he agrees. “I don’t need to explain the difference again, but let me at least say that it is different. The will particles in your black sand do not operate the same as the standard ones that you will find everywhere. I believe that your connection with those has closed off your opportunity to influence the natural world with your intent.

  “Let me demonstrate the issue.” Corinth holds up his hand once more, and the stone flies out of the grass to hover over his palm. “Typically, we as mages are the ones that focus on the manipulation of mana. It is a skill that anyone worth their salt eventually picks up as they walk down the path of magic, but we are meant to focus on it, to get a head start in that direction. What I meant for this exercise with the rock to teach you is to sense and influence the mana that is already located inside the stone. Some will do this by connecting with it, mana strings are a common tactic, the expected crutch. Eventually, you would be able to do away with the strings, imposing your intent directly on the undirected mana already inside the stone, conquering it with your will.”

  The stone begins to heat, the surface turning a dull orange and smoking. Suddenly, it burst into fire, melting, the remnants of the stone vaporizing as it is consumed by fire. “The next step of the training would then be to teach how to seize the mana for your own. Once the mana in the stone is yours, truly yours, you will understand that you can manipulate it. There would be no difference from changing the mana in the stone into dragonfire and conjuring it in your hand.” With a flick of his wrist, the tiny ball of fire soars into the sky.

  “Then, I would attempt to have you do the same with the air. By definition, the air is less dense than a stone, and the mana it contains is more spread out and diluted. Once, you were capable of seizing the mana in the very air, we could finally move on to the real objective.”

  “Which is?”

  He smiles. High overhead, a mountainous explosion thunders through the air. A second sun plums in the sky overhead, the shockwave rolling down sending a wave of pressure over the land around the farm. In the barn, the ponies whiny at the sound. I look up, feeling my ears pop, and seeing a second sun hovering in the air high overhead.

  “Finally,” he says, a smile lighting his face. “We would arrive at the true discipline of the mage, spellwork.”

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