by Frank Morin
That was fascinating, and the explanation did sort of make sense. Most people Connor knew liked to end up in a neutral state too. Preferably gorged on a big meal, sitting on a comfortable chair in front of a warm fire. He could stay in a neutral state like that for hours. But when they were motivated to get active and get together they could really get a good charge started.
Fire said, “So one of the easiest ways that you can access the power of strum is to generate friction.”
Connor frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t understand how to do that.” He imagined luring the queen onto a giant carpet to zap her, but sensed that wasn’t what Fire was talking about.
Water said, “You can reach out with your senses and sweep them across the nearby area. People, buildings, the air itself, and even the earth. They all can be swept for tiny bits of strum energy. Collecting those together builds what we call a positive charge. Then you can release that built-up charge toward a target. Ideally you’ve pulled charges away from it, leaving it short of strum, in a state of negative charge. That increases the attraction between your charge and your target.”
That seemed to make sense, but Connor wasn’t sure he really understood. Fire recognized his expression and said, “Think of it this way. If you are in a great hall eating breakfast with all of your friends and you took one bite of each of their meals, you could collect a great deal of food without affecting everyone else very much. Everyone that you took pieces of food from are now missing a tiny bit. They now have a slightly empty plate, or in terms of what we’re discussing, a slightly negative charge.”
Water added, “And just as you can concentrate small charges of strum together, there are ways to strip more energy from your target, making their negative greater. The greater the buildup in charges, and the greater the difference between the positive and the negative, the more powerful the release of energy will become, and the more impact it will have.”
Finally things started to make sense. If he collected enough bacon from everyone in an entire feasting hall, the resulting pile of bacon would hold tremendous potential. If he could also strip all the food off of someone else’s plate, the difference between their breakfasts would be overwhelming. It sounded like deep arcane powers understood breakfast balancing better than he had ever imagined. If he threw an entire overflowing plate of bacon at someone whose plate was empty, the impact would definitely have a lot more effect than if they already had tons of food to begin with.
“How do I practice it?” he asked eagerly.
“Focus on the world around you, seek the charges, and draw them to you. Then release them,” Water said, as if that was the simplest thing in the world.
“But don’t give yourself the negative charge, or you’ll end up hitting yourself,” Fire added quickly.
“Why would you caution him against something so dumb?” Water asked with a frown.
“Because he’s human,” Fire said simply.
Connor was glad for the warning. He didn’t want to accidentally hit himself with lightning.
Water said, “You can draw more power from the movement of the air and clouds, particularly during storms.”
“Movement of air, transfer of heat, and the friction of great clouds generates lots of strum. That’s where lightning comes from,” Fire added with a grin. “The queen has mastered the art of calling forth lightning when needed, and you’ll need to be able to do so too, as well as sense when she’s preparing to unleash such a blast against you.”
“Can I stop lightning?” Connor asked, thrilled by the idea.
“Deflecting it more likely,” Fire said. “By mastering magnis.”
Water said, “When we showed you the Merry Dancers, those lights are the result of many strum charges flowing around a giant worldwide field of magnis.”
Connor gaped. “Our entire planet is a huge lodestone?”
“At its core, yes. It generates a vast but rather weak field of magnis. You can see its effects in the properties of lodestones.”
Connor thought about the directional compass that Hamish had started installing in all the flying vehicles. They had learned the trick from the Tabnit mariners. The key was a tiny piece of lodestone in each one that pointed north.
“Why do lodestones affect iron, but not much else?” Connor asked.
Water smiled. “Good question. Iron naturally reacts to magnis because of how the strum contained within it is structured.”
Fire said, “But most things don’t have a structure that react as well to weak magnis fields. More important for today’s lesson is the relationship between strum and magnis.”
“So magnis can move strum?” Connor asked, starting to feel like he was getting a sense of why magnis might be important.
“Yes, although the relationship works both ways. The movement of strum generates temporary magnis fields too.”
Connor was intrigued, but starting to get a headache. He bet Jean would love the lesson. He usually just liked to tap his affinities and see what he could break with them, but he needed to understand, so he forced himself to resist the urge to just try to create lightning.
Instead he imagined a piece of iron and a lodestone into his hands. The iron instantly stuck fast to the lodestone, drawn by the invisible magnis. He gestured with the items and asked, “Show me.”
Fire showed him how by moving the lodestone along the iron, it generated a tiny flow of charged energy. “Remember that magnis affects nearby strum, and if the magnis field is moving, it affects it more. The opposite is true.”
“So if the queen tries to hit me with lightning, I could create a magnis field like this lodestone to move it away?” Connor asked.
“Indeed. That is the first step to mastering these forces of nature,” Water said.
He couldn’t wait to practice with them.
Water added, “But you are not limited to moving energy through tangible objects. Most things allow charges to move, even water when it has impurities in it, although pure water does not transmit charges easily, and air also insulates against moving charges most of the time.”
“Then how does lightning happen?” Connor asked with a frown.
Fire grinned. “When the charge is great enough, you can break some of the rules. Lightning carries so much energy that it actually punches a hole through air and transforms the air in the path it travels into a different state called plasma.”
“We’ll practice with it some time,” Water promised before Connor could ask. “Think of plasma like making a hole in the air for lightning to slide through, like soup sliding down your throat is easier than a big chunk of meat.”
Connor had never heard of plasma, but it sounded fun. He decided he needed a lot of soup.
“This is a lot to take in.” He envisioned a piece of Althing chocolate cake into his hands. He consumed it instantly, followed by a couple of enormous cookies that were the specialty of one of the bakers on Jean’s staff. The imaginary influx of sweets and sugar helped settle his mind.
“These are the fuel to elevate your mind to a higher state,” Fire said as the landscape around them changed back to the gray expanse of his own mindscape. He definitely needed to practice with both strum and magnis. He hadn’t yet truly grasped the potential in them. Fire had suggested that the queen hadn’t either.
Fire saluted and faded out of his mind. Water remained, her expression serious. “Study hard, Connor, but I must caution you against sharing our visits with anyone else, especially with your close friends and with Evander or Kilian.”
“Why? You’ve already visited Verena, and Jean just told me you’ve been speaking with Nicklaus. I wanted to ask you about that.”
“The Builders offer another avenue of hope for us, but you remain our primary focus. Your friends are not ready to attempt crossing additional bridges, but knowing that you have done so and by following the guideposts of your words, they may feel obliged to make the attempt. In so doing, they would most likely destroy themselves.”
&nbs
p; Connor grimaced. He hated that knowledge-can-kill-you-sometimes aspect of higher level affinities. If it was so dangerous, why was she reaching out to them, though? Something seemed missing from her argument, but he couldn’t risk offending her again.
So he said, “Thanks for the warning. I’m looking for ways to help, not new ways to kill people.”
She gave him a benevolent smile. “Train hard, Connor, and you will become our champion.”
68
If You Could Blow Yourself to the Moon, Wouldn’t You Try It, Too?
Water faded from Connor’s mind before he could ask her about that cryptic ‘champion’ thing again. He definitely needed to understand that. At the moment, he had plenty to think about, though. He blinked his eyes open and found himself lying in the grasses of the plain north of New Schwinkendorf.
He sat up, feeling mentally exhausted, but also energized. He’d learned that he could now access strum and magnis by walking with Water and Fire together. The potential for wielding lightning excited him, and he suspected he could probably use those forces to do even more. In their training session, he’d sensed things about strum and magnis, the movement of tiny charges and how to manipulate them that were hard to explain. It was as if knowledge had poured into his subconscious, and he needed time to let it settle and congeal, like a fresh pudding.
In the meantime, he couldn’t wait to try tapping all of his primary affinities together. Connor jumped to his feet and tapped a little basalt. Sometimes it was easier to act than to think.
As he resumed jogging across the new green springtime grasses of the Schwinkendorf valley, he felt his head clear. He had small supplies of all of his primary affinities in tiny pouches secured to his belt. He decided to absorb a little of each of them and prove Fire was right. He was already tapping the wild freedom of basalt, and in seconds the itchy-crawly feel of granite skittered up his arm, followed by the bubbly feel of pumice.
He added a tiny bit of porphyry, and loved the fact that it no longer felt like getting bitten by a thousand tiny monsters as it absorbed into his skin. Obsidian came next with its acceleration of mind and body and the sound of Verena’s laughter. That sound bolstered his confidence, and he absorbed a bit of diorite. It rippled through him, like living strum, filling him with exhilaration and a hint of danger.
With a growing sense of excitement, he tapped a little blind coal and swallowed the snake, applying the blind coal slippery protection to his bones. After making sure he felt a strong connection to sandstone, just in case this was one of those things Fire didn’t understand about humans, Connor tapped all of his primary affinities.
He expected to feel his muscles strengthened by granite, maybe a bit of additional grace and control through obsidian, perhaps a hint of the beast of porphyry flexing in his heart, and pumice helping blind coal protect him from an eruption of diorite.
What he got was so much more.
As soon as Connor’s primary affinities all activated, they melded together into a whirlwind of energy that eclipsed any individual power. Each affinity seemed to snap into place with his already-activated basalt, magnifying and reinforcing it. Granite strengthened his muscles and made it easier to run. He’d experienced that when he’d double tapped before.
Obsidian linked into the mix and his movements became more fluid and graceful, his mind expanding so he could anticipate his movements. He laughed with the thrill of it. He bet he could win any running battle now. No regular Striders would stand a chance, and he might even hold his own against Kilian for once.
Pumice snapped into place and he felt the well of his affinity powers seem to deepen, but the drain on his power stones eased until he barely needed any powder to maintain a full, max-tapped connection to his affinities. Awesome!
Then porphyry activated and the beast in his heart roared with the desire to hunt. That need filled him and he felt his senses expand, similar to when he tapped quartzite, but with a much more predatory feel. He sniffed scents on the breeze and noted tiny animals cowering in the thick grasses nearby, their tiny hearts thundering loud in his ears while the sound of their blood pumping tempted him to snatch up one of them and consume it.
That was a bit freaky, but then diorite activated and lightning-like energy erupted through him. He could have held it in, ridden the wave on the cusp of destruction for a few delicious seconds, but that wouldn’t be nearly enough fun.
Connor released it.
Since basalt was the first primary affinity he’d tapped, the explosion blasted through him and out his feet. Grass vaporized, along with a huge chunk of earth, forming a deep crater over fifty yards across. Connor barely noticed. He was too busy whooping as the blast catapulted him into the air like a meteor falling upward.
He’d ascended quickly with air or by using the force of fire, but they paled against the raw power of explosive diorite. Connor hurtled over a thousand feet into the air, a tail of smoke sucked into the air after him. The force of the blast would have crushed his spine if not for the reinforcing protection of his other affinities. He tapped air enough to keep from suffocating from the incredible speed, or having the wind rip off his clothes and scour off his skin.
At the apex of his ascent, he hung in the air for a second, completely untethered, looking out over the valley and the city to the south. He spotted a Longseer on a windrider not far away and waved. The woman, who had been staring at him in obvious astonishment waved weakly in reply.
As Connor began to fall, he released his primary affinities and tapped fire, forming crimson wings to help him glide back toward the city. He could have simply tapped air, but sometimes gliding was more fun. He still couldn’t explain why fire could act as a tangible substance when he tapped it, but he loved that it could.
He couldn’t wait to try combining his primaries in different sequences. If he activated different stones first, would the combined effect produce different results?
He hoped so.
Connor aimed his approach to land at the northern edge of the city. As he touched down he noticed a babble of voices. At first he thought he had tapped chert and was hearing the thoughts of the multitudes, but when he double checked, he confirmed that he had not. He had maintained a slight connection with all of the elements, though. Ever since his ascension, connecting with the elements was as easy as breathing, and he had to really focus to remove that connection completely. It did not feel like that light touch even consumed any of his power stones.
With a start, Connor realized the babble of distant voices was reaching him through his connection with quartzite. He had not actively tapped it to his ears, but now did so. The usual flood of sounds burst into his ears. He let it pour through without trying to understand it, just leaving himself open to pick up any conversations that might be of interest.
Hamish’s voice drew his attention. “No, I haven’t seen Connor this morning. I’m going to go look for him in all the dining halls.”
Connor was surprised to hear Verena respond. “Don’t get distracted, Hamish. It’s late enough that I’m sure you had at least one or two breakfasts already.”
“Third breakfast never hurt anyone.”
“Well, when you find him have him contact me. Shona is going crazy clamoring for his return so we can test loaning Petralist powers.”
“Will do. We should be able to head back by tomorrow.”
Connor stopped to stare at nothing in particular, completely startled by the realization of what he was hearing. He was listening to Hamish speaking with Verena, but she was still in Merkland?
He was eavesdropping on their speakstone conversation.
That was not something he’d expected, hadn’t even thought it might be possible. He resumed jogging slowly, puzzling over the astounding realization. Other conversations drew his attention. He picked up on words from people that sounded like they were in different parts of the city, and even a few conversations between residents of New Schwinkendorf and coworkers in Faulenrost.
Somehow he could hear the words being cast between paired speakstones. It was wondrous, but his good humor vanished under the full ramifications of the discovery. He tapped basalt and rushed through town as quick as he could without running over anyone. He found Hamish in one of the dining halls, carrying a tray heaped with food. Hamish waved and set the tray on an empty table.
“Connor, I figured you’d come to your senses and meet me here.”
Connor ignored the food, although it did look really good. “Were you just speaking with Verena via speakstone?”
“Yeah. How did you know that?” Hamish asked, with a ham-and-cheese filled croissant halfway to his mouth.
Connor snatched the pastry out of his hands and pointed at him. “Because I heard you.”
He consumed the pastry in two bites, barely tasting the excellent blend of smoked ham and smooth, tangy cheese.
Hamish started to protest the theft of the pastry, but then frowned. “If you were close enough to hear us, why did you wait so long to come find me? We could’ve grabbed two trays from the food line.”
“I was halfway across the city.”
Connor dropped into one of the chairs and pulled the tray closer. He began to eat rapidly as he considered the ramifications of the discovery.
Hamish actually just watched, frowning. “How can you hear a speakstone conversation from across town? You don’t have a speakstone linked to mine that I forgot about, do you?”
Connor shook his head. “I was tapping quartzite.”
“That would mean—” Hamish’s draw dropped open.
Connor nodded and grimaced. “Yeah. It means I can eavesdrop on speakstones. I bet the queen can too. Does Ailsa ever use them?”
Hamish paled at the thought, but thankfully shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“We’ll have to get word to her not to use one ever.”
“And we need to tell everyone else. If we have anyone going anywhere near the queen, we can’t communicate through speakstones or she’ll hear every word.”
