Chapter 24. Meditation

“Tell me, child. What do you know about meditation?”

I sat up straighter on the flagstones without thinking about it, folded my hands in my lap, and slid into the posture I had sat in for every theory lesson my instructors had ever given me.

Saoren noticed, I was fairly sure he noticed, but he did not comment.

“Meditation was the original method by which mages replenished their cores. In the old texts, it is described as the central daily practice of any serious practitioner.”

Saoren waited.

“Before meditation, the only known way for a mage to recover a depleted mana core was sleep. A full recovery through sleep alone could take several days, or in extreme cases weeks. Meditation sped the process up considerably. A disciplined mage could fully restore a depleted core in a few hours of focused practice.”

I paused, trying to remember if there was more on that section. Varren had drilled this material into me at twelve, and the answers were arriving in the order they had been arranged on the page.

“It was considered essential training for centuries.”

“Is that all?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I decided to just say everything I knew.

“Well, about a thousand years ago, a mage in one of the western provinces developed the first stable mana potion. The early ones were crude, and the mana they delivered was considered dirty compared to mana gathered through meditation, but the method improved quickly.”

Saoren did not interrupt, so I kept going.

“Within a few generations, the quality of mana potions had reached a point where a mage could recover a depleted core in the space of a single swallow, and the potions became cheaper as the techniques spread.”

My voice was settling into the cadence I used for theory recitations, which I had not used in front of anyone in months, and the familiarity of it was a small comfort.

“By the time my great grandfather was a young man, the potions were reliable, clean, and widely available at every reasonable price point, and meditation had already fallen out of the standard curriculum.”

I stopped to check whether he wanted me to keep going. He did not move, so I did.

“Today no mage in the kingdom seriously meditates. The old texts still reference the practice, and a few historical schools still keep it as a ceremonial thing, but nobody uses it for its original purpose, because there is no longer a reason to.”

“And do you believe, child, that the mages of the old days only meditated for the mana?”

“I… well, that is what is assumed now, yes? That was the primary application, according to every text I have read. The mana recovery. Other applications were… there might have been others, but they were secondary.”

Saoren did not move.

“The primary application was indeed mana restoration. On that, the modern texts are correct. What the modern texts forgot, or what the modern mages allowed themselves to forget once the potions made the first application redundant, is that meditation had a second benefit. A benefit that, if you had asked me in the years I still walked in your world, I would have told you surpassed the first. It is the benefit that your teachers stopped teaching the moment they stopped needing meditation for the mana, and it is the benefit that your entire current generation of mages will never know what it has cost them to lose.”

I leaned forward without deciding to.

“…What is it?”

“A still mind.”

I wanted very badly to say that is vague, but I held my tongue.

Saoren shifted one of his lower arms, curled his tail slightly around his feet, and went on.

“A still mind, child, is the most undervalued asset a mage of your world possesses. It is what separates a cast that holds its shape from a cast that collapses in the air. Between two mages of equal training, equal reserves, and equal talent, the one with the stiller mind will win every time.”

He paused.

“And beyond the craft, child, there is the standing. You were in a tree tonight, and a being much older than you looked at you, and you could not move your hands. You will be in other rooms in your life in which much older and much larger beings will look at you, and some of those rooms will not let you just fall when the looking becomes too much to bear. A still mind is what permits a man to stand in front of something that could unmake him, meet its eyes, and not flinch.”

I thought about the pressure of Saoren’s mana on me a few minutes ago, and the way I had felt. I was not in a hurry to feel it again.

I had spent my whole life being told I was the Axiom, the most valuable piece this house had produced in over a thousand years, a child around whom the world rearranged itself, and, to be honest, I had always been proud of that.

Yet, none of what I had been told about myself had mattered for half a second. Humbling was one word for it, humiliating was closer. I never wanted to feel fear again the way I did today.

“What I am proposing to teach you, child, is not to take the fear out of you.”

I startled. For a second I was worried he had been reading my thoughts directly, and then I decided it was the kind of thing a four-thousand-year-old spirit would not need to read thoughts to guess.

“You will still feel it. You will feel it exactly as you felt it tonight, but what a still mind gives you is simply a moment between feeling it and acting on it rationally. That is the whole of it. That is what I would teach you.”

“Yes.”

“Yes what, child?”

I took a breath and looked down at him then made my voice as steady as I could.

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“Please teach me.”

“Good, let us begin then.”

“…You mean, now?“

It was the middle of the night…

“Should I just leave?”

“I’ll do it! I’ll do it!”

***

Saoren watched the boy ease himself down into a cross-legged seat on the flagstones and then fuss over the angle of his back for longer than was necessary.