Chapter: 105 – Practice

Tala sat on the wagon top as it trundled towards the trees. The caravan was underway, and Tala had a task before her.

Per Mistress Odera’s instructions, she was preparing to activate her active gravity manipulation for the first time. I really should have done this a week ago… But there had just been too much else to do. I still haven’t even started experimenting with spell-forms in my lungs, either… No. This took priority.

She placed her palms on her elbows, left arm going above right. She carefully positioned her fingers per Holly’s instructions, getting into the very awkward and specific position required for the initial activation. I know we didn’t want this to activate on accident, but this is a bit ridiculous.

Even so, she followed the instructions given, closed her eyes, and entered the required mental state.

Control.

Power whipped through her, filling the gold inscriptions in her left breast and radiating outward into the others linked to them. A few of the forms made subtle additions to her magesight as well, utilizing the base scripts to give her needed information.

The miniscule copper links placed to kick off this first activation burned away, leaving her with another active draw on her power.

It was a massive drain.

Tala’s eyes opened, widening in surprise as she felt her reserves begin to steadily, if slowly, empty. With quick, practiced technique, she forged one of her standard void-channels and connected it to her body and the inscriptions there.

The added flow was just enough to satisfy the much greater demand for power. Great… Any time she didn’t have an active void-channel, she would be losing power. I need to understand this spell-working better. That should increase the efficiency and reduce the draw.

She thought she could hold the single void-channel for most of a day. Even so, it wasn’t enough to refill what she’d lost. So, she quickly forged a second void-channel and dispersed it a few seconds later when her reserves were refilled.

That done, she opened her eyes, and had to blink back tears.

The entire world seemed to have a uniform, additional color layered overtop both her normal vision and that of her magesight. Not quite a color, more an added depth.

She felt her mind hitch at the additional facet of information.

Thankfully, given that the new portion of her sight was directly linked to her magesight, it functioned the same. Now that she had taken in the gravity of everything around her, it faded from her sight. Only differences will be highlighted.

She glanced down at her hands and was greeted by such a difference. The ‘light’ of gravity was deeper, coming from her body, the effect seeming to highlight the weight of difference. Tala huffed a chuckle at that. Well, that’s exactly what it is, so that’s probably why I perceive it that way.

Once she’d acclimated to that, her extra perception with regard to her own body faded as well. Only changes will manifest.

She’d picked up a small stone for practice and set it near her feet during the initial activation. As such, she picked it up to hold, focusing on it to bring back the ‘other light’ that indicated gravity’s effect.

She brought her left, middle finger down to press against her left thumb, her other fingers curling naturally into the position she’d had Holly lock the ability behind. I can’t make changes, unless I have this hand position, for now. It seemed a wise precaution.

Increase. She applied her will and felt a marked uptick in the power drain. She immediately created another void-channel. The ‘light’ increased minutely, but the increase in weight was much, much too little for her hand to register. All that, for this?

She thought for a long moment. What am I doing, exactly?

She was dumping power into an effect, without considering how it would be accomplished. She remembered her inefficiency with charging the cargo-slots, before she’d fully utilized a mental model. She recalled how horrible her skin’s defenses were before she understood the bio-chemistry behind inter- and intra-cellular bonds.

Yeah, that’s what’s happening, here. I haven’t bothered to really understand how this is doing what it’s supposed to do.

She thought for a moment.

It’s exactly like my crush. As soon as the thought entered her mind, solidifying into a mental construct, the new, added drain on her power greatly diminished. The stone got noticeably heavier, if still just minutely.

That’s right. Take that 10% extra weight and crack! She shook her head, a smile tugging at her lips. Hey, it’s a start.

She bent her will towards increasing it, and over the next hour was able to raise the stone’s weight by nearly 50%, then slowly return it to normal. It was a colossally glacial process, but Tala thought she could make it faster, in time.

Practice it is, then.

* * *

Tala watched the false twilight landscape around their small caravan.

It had taken her nearly two hours to fully adjust to the dappled green light. Even still, she kept thinking that she saw movement out of the corners of her vision, but it was just the obscuring leaves and branches, high above, swaying in a wind she couldn’t see. Or, moving on their own…

Now that they were past the forest’s edge, the massive trees were actually spaced fairly far apart, with few exceptions.

Those exceptions seemed to be growing just too close together to get a wagon through, thus diverting them from their intended course. Whenever they came to such blockages, at least one of the trees was invariably one of the migratory variety. Tala’s magesight told her that the magics within were much more complex than the average specimen of tree. Even so, they lacked the level of complexity of an arcanous creature.

As things would have it, it was always easier to divert to the left, or east, around the barrier. When they tried to go right, or west, the terrain became more difficult, often with great tangles of roots slowing them down or just making the path impossible.

The tree trunks were colossal, as befitted their height. If Tala was estimating correctly, the larger trees, past the leading edge of the forest, were close to nine hundred feet tall, and approaching two hundred feet across. In general, the trees grew around that far apart, making it a very dense forest, relatively speaking, while still having a lot of clear ground for them to traverse.

Thus, any given diversion took them only around four hundred feet out of their way, but it was still quite inconvenient, as the arrangement of the trees made it difficult to tell where paths through were, until they drew close.

The whole scale of this place twists the mind. She assumed that the trees got as much of their needs from the magic, which they were drawing up from the earth, as from sunlight, and that made the closer crowding less of an issue.

The fact that any light reached them at all was a testament to the sparseness of the canopy. Those limbs are huge, though! It was mainly the leaves that were sparse, barely forming a single layer between them and the clouds, all told. She even caught some glimpses of those clouds, occasionally.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

It was cold enough under the trees that the ground was frost covered, but it didn’t seem like much snow got through to the forest floor, at least not here.

The guards had attached an interesting device to the front of the cargo-wagon’s shaft, between the two oxen. It extended out in front of the animals on a hinge. To Tala, it looked mostly like a weight, resting on a set of wheels that moved up and down to stay in heavy contact with the ground. It seemed incredibly complicated, since it could move and swivel, while not hindering the turns or movements of the oxen and wagon in the least.

To prevent the oxen from falling into a pit-trap?

That was probably a good idea. The oxen were pretty key to the whole venture.

Huh… what would happen if the oxen were slain? It was probably worth asking. If it were up to her, now that she thought about it, there would be scripts embedded in the wagon that could do the work of the oxen, in the case of an emergency, but they would also be too expensive for regular use.

That in mind, she took a moment away from her practice, and watching their surroundings, to examine the wagon more closely with her magesight.

There wasn’t active magic to stand out to her, but she thought she detected the intrinsic power of metal embedded, swirling through various parts of the vehicle.

I wonder who can activate it, and how? She was probably better off not knowing.

I can be trusted not to activate it. Tala decided to redirect her mind to other topics. Sometimes she felt like she was herding a toddler, while trying to direct her own mind.

Rude. She would get over it.

She felt a tickling from the edges of her magesight and looked up.

Something was moving through the canopy nearly directly overhead. As she opened her mouth to call out a warning, one of the guards on the chuckwagon beat her to it.

“Above!” He directed their attention to the one that Tala had seen, though she noticed some of the other guards pointedly looking elsewhere. To ensure it’s not a distraction?

The Cert clearly seemed to notice their attention, vaulting off the massive branch it had been charging across.

Tala immediately brought her middle finger back to her left thumb, focusing on the falling animal and dumping five void-channels’ worth of power through her mental construct, through the spell-form, and towards increasing the beast’s weight.

In the roughly six seconds before it impacted, beside the cargo-wagon, Tala was able to increase its weight by only about 10%, if she was understanding the new aspect of her sight properly. That barely increased the speed of impact, only increasing the energy of such by a bit.