The Hammer Unfalls

1.12 Bucket List

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Before breakfast, Glim ran down the stairs into the labyrinthine basement of the fortress to hunt for Elderkin trinkets. He wanted to find more of the brass cylinders. After all, according to Master Willow, there should be thousands of them.

Glim had been in this maze of tunnels and chambers before, but as a general rule people stayed out of them. For one thing, the basement was unbearably hot in places and frigidly cold in others. For another, it was possible to get trapped. It had happened before. The man had been barely alive by the time he’d been found.

And that’s the real reason few people roamed these halls: fear. Fear that they’d break something, or get crushed by gears, or burned alive by the jets of flame that randomly appeared.

Glim had been warned many times not to wander the basement. But that was before he’d been appointed as Wohn-Grab’s official Elderkin scholar. It was part of his duty now to explore, and learn what he could. Glim pictured the townspeople applauding his latest discovery, chanting his name as soft white light filled the fortress.

Instead, he discovered a dusty room with workbenches and shelves that had been picked clean of any tools. Glim looked as far as his head could reach, but found nothing. But he had something few others did: tiny arms.

Glim lay on the floor and reached his hand under one of the shelves. It barely fit. He moved his hand from side to side, and bumped up against something. Cool metal, which he dragged out. Not a rune cylinder as he’d hoped. Just an empty brass sleeve, with a squiggly shape at the top that looked sort of like a fern leaf. Glim searched for more items, and eventually gave up. He headed to the dining hall.

After breakfast he walked out and could not see the sky, for cloud covered it. A pallid streak of light peeking over the ramparts suggested the sun existed up there somewhere. He battened his cloak tight around him as he walked the pathway to the mage’s tower. The wind whipped at him.

Glim the Silent, it sighed.

He took a few more steps.

The Unshattered One. The Eye of Certainty.

“What are you talking about?” Glim asked.

Your arcane name. All great mages have one. How about Glim the Putrescent?

“Shut it.”

What did I do? I’m just helping you brainstorm.

“You’re a storm with no brain.”

After all I do for you, this is the thanks I get, Glim the Raven Song?

“That one is not bad.”

“What in Æronthrall are you prattling on about?” Master Willow walked up behind him, holding a bucket of water.

“Just picking out my arcane name, Master.”

He snorted. “Getting a bit ahead of yourself, aren’t you? You’re a fair sight from that. Come with me.”

Master Willow led Glim through neatly trimmed brown shrubs to a garden alcove filled with twisted, black trees. He set the bucket onto the ground below them.

“Climb on up,” he said.

“Up where?”

Master Willow gestured to the trees.

Glim walked to the base of one and peered up. Gnarled, dark limbs rose into the gray sky. He leapt and grabbed onto the lowest branch, then pulled himself up.

“Higher,” his tutor said.

Glim started climbing. He yelped when a thorn caught his hand, tearing at his soft skin. Taking care, he tried to avoid more thorns, but without success. By the time he’d climbed higher, Glim had several cuts and bumps. The frigid air made him shiver.

“Higher!” Master Willow called out.

Glim shimmied up the branch, until it started to give beneath his weight. He feared it might snap, and send him careening into the ground, which now looked quite far away. He shivered so much his teeth started clacking inside his skull. The subtle aroma of sheep dung wafted to him on the wind.

My gift to you, it whispered, snickering.

“That’s far enough,” his tutor called up. “Now then, Glim: freeze this bucket.”

Glim looked down at him as if he were mad.

“How?”

“By plying algidon, you fool! What do you think you’re here for?”

“But I can’t!”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m stuck in a tree! This branch is about to fall. I have to hold on with both hands.”

“So?”

“I’m freezing! I have cuts all over! And it is too far away. Also, I don’t know how.”

“If I understand you correctly,” Master Willow said, “you’re telling me you lack the knowledge to freeze this bucket, you’re in no position to do so even if you did know, the water is too far away from you, you’re distracted by the cuts in your hand, and the cold is breaking your concentration?”

“Yes!”

“And how do you feel?”

“Cold!”

“I’m not asking for the temperature, you clod. How do you feel?”

“Bad!”

“Be more specific.”

“This seems ridiculous! How do you expect me to do this?”

“Ahh. So you are irritated, then?”

“Yes!”

“That’s a mild form of anger. Very good. You may climb down now.”

Glim took his time, watching for thorns, and carefully grasping limbs with his numb fingers. He finally hopped down what seemed like a short distance, although the fall thudded an ache into his chilled bones.

“Take that bucket with you,” the mage said, and walked back towards the tower. He led Glim past the antechamber and into the sitting room, where a cheerful fire warmed the room from a huge fireplace.

The bail of the bucket dug into Glim’s palm. Gratefully he set in down on the sitting room floor, and rubbed his clammy hands together. Stinging flecks of warmth stabbed his fingertips as he massaged the cold away.

“All warmed up?” Master Willow asked. Glim nodded. “Fine, fine. Now freeze that bucket.”

“I still don’t know how.”

“How do you feel?”

“Like it’s unfair of you to ask when I haven’t even been given a lesson yet!”

“You’ve been given several, but let’s ignore that for now. You still seem irritated.”

“I am!” Glim heard the whining tone in his own voice.

“Undoubtedly. I want you to think about this moment as we go through future lessons. Remember how you feel right now, and especially how you felt in the tree. You’re in no frame of mind to ply. Even if you had all the lore of centuries at your disposal. Your mind must be in a place of focus. You must be mindful of things such as cold. Pain. Distance. Posture. Location. Emotion. Hunger, or sickness. You always need to be mindful of your own mental state. Otherwise you will never be able to ply.”

He gestured to the couch. Glim sat, grumpily. Master Willow tossed him a warm, furry blanket. He left the room while Glim got comfortable and returned with tea. Glim sat up suddenly.

“It’s not hot. Merely warm. Have some.”

Glim took the pleasantly warm cup in his hands and sipped the tea.

“Do you feel better now?”

“Yes, Master Willow.”

“One of the hardest lessons all people have to learn is how to manage their emotions. Plyers need to do so even more. Algists most of all. Our emotions run far more deeply than most. Our sensitivity, our ability to percieve the tiny currents of emotion around us, creates a world of psychic pain few others could endure. If another inhabited your mind for even a few minutes, the tides of emotion would overwhelm them and rip their mind apart.”

Glim stared at him in surprise. Master Willow never struck him as particularly emotional.

“You’re going to become quite versed in emotional truth, Glim. By the time your training is done, you will know the name of every emotion. What they are trying to tell your body, or warn your mind of. How they help or hinder you. You’ll learn to redirect emotions as if you were pushing errant twigs out of your path.”

He took the tea mug from Glim and sat across from him. His silken robes billowed like storm clouds before settling into his seat.

“The reason you can’t freeze that bucket is threefold. One: you don’t know how. Two: even if you did, you’re a victim to emotion, which is driving your essentiæ into the wrong places. Three: your essentiæ have not coalesced enough for you to rely on them. Think of plying like laughing. If you are sick, tired, or angry, it’s more difficult to have a sense of humor. If you are terrified, you probably aren’t going to laugh. If you’re well fed, well rested, free from intense emotion, and comfortable in the moment, laughter comes easier.”

“You want me to laugh?”

“Not exactly. I want you to get into that same frame of mind. So I’m going to instruct you in regulating your emotions. Let us play a game. It’s like fox and the hare. We’re going to track down as many hares as we can.” Master Willow frowned at him. “For example, I expect you were frightened up there in that tree?”

For a moment, Glim’s pride rebelled. He briefly considered denying it. As if the captain’s son would be scared on a tree. But he had been afraid, and nodded.

“So, anger, and fear. Two fine examples of emotions that will block you from plying properly. Not the worst ones, though. We’ll get to that. Now why did you not tell me you were afraid?”

“Because I was upset.”

“You were irritated. That is a form of anger. You need to be quite specific. Let’s clearly spell it out. Follow me.”

Master Willow led him upstairs to the library, where he’d read The Neophyte’s Guide to Long-Term Mastery as an Essentiæl Buffer. This time, the mage asked him to sit, then brought over another tome titled Emotional Geography.

“What is ‘geo-graffy?’” Glim asked.

“Maps. This is a book about how to map emotions, so you can follow them to their warrens like a fox tracks a hare. Look at this page here.”

Glim unfolded the two central pages of the book. It flopped over to reveal an illustration that spanned two pages. The center had ten words, which radiated out from the center:

“What are all these little words?” Glim asked, tracing the page with his fingertip.

“Try not to touch the pages. Those are guises. Each emotion we feel is a guise of one of the ten. For example, you just said ‘upset’ a moment ago. That word is on this page. Which emotion is it a guise of?”

Glim stared at all of the tiny words, overwhelmed by the wall of text. How could he read all of those tiny words? You clod, he thought to himself. You already know which emotion it is. He scanned the page and, just left of the top, he found ‘upset’ next to the word ANGER.

“Just so. Anger makes us want to hit things, or scream. It rallies us to take action when we need motivation. It prepares us to fight, and gives us temporary relief from fear. But at the expense of wisdom. So anger masks other emotions. For example, when you were clinging on for dear life up in that tree, you were afraid. But your anger masked that fear. Right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Let’s try an even tougher one. There is a third hare just within your reach. When I asked if you were afraid, you didn’t answer right away. Why not?”

Glim thought back. He hadn’t wanted to admit his fear to Master Willow. As if admitting the captain’s son would be scared on a tree was an insult to his honor.

“I didn’t want to admit to you I was afraid.”

“Why not? It’s perfectly natural.”

“Well, I’m going to be a guard when I grow up. I shouldn’t be afraid of something as simple as climbing a tree.”

“So you were trying to hide something you thought I might ridicule you for. That’s a particularly nasty emotion to track down. It’s on the page though. Which one do you think you were experiencing?”

Glim looked over the illustration for a long time. Finally he settled between two of the choices: guilt and shame. How did they differ? Then the words ‘embarrassment’ and ‘humiliation’ caught his eye.

“Shame?” he asked.

“Indeed. A particularly nasty one. Shame is the hardest to tolerate of them all. Aside from love, of course.”

Master Willow flipped through the pages, showing Glim several headache-inducing diagrams. “These explain all about secondary emotions, how feeling one thing is like a link in a chain that leads to another. Your emotions are always trying to distract you. You’ll learn to predict those chains, and ignore secondary emotions, so you can always deal with the root distraction.”

Master Willow leaned forward and caught Glim’s gaze with his own. He peered at Glim intently.

“This is how you will regulate your own mind. Take control, rather than be its victim. For now, I want you to look at one guise on this page in particular.”

Master Willow opened the emotion map again and pointed to a phrase: ‘self-conscious.’ “Do you know what that term means?”

“No. Master Willow.”

“Self-conscious means to be shy. Nervous that people are noticing things about you. Things your mind tells you will make them not like you, or reject you. Self-consciousness is a guise of shame. It is very hard to confront.”

“Why have you pointed this out to me?”

He handed Glim a rare treasure: a hand mirror. Mirrors were hard to come by in Wohn-Grab. Glim looked at himself. One dark eye and one silver eye stared back. He blinked, unaccustomed to seeing his own face with such clarity. Glim self-consciously draped his hair over his silver eye to mask it, out of long habit.

“I’ve pointed this out because I believe you have something about yourself that you feel self-conscious of? You must learn to overcome it if you ever wish to ply.”

Master Willow brushed the lock of hair aside, revealing Glim’s silver eye once more. It bored back into his own gaze with the same intensity that unnerved others.

How was Glim supposed to overcome this?