The World Which Is

The next Treen or so days of travel aren’t worth talking about. I mean, the scenery was amazing. In places, the grass went on as far as I could see. In others, the forest was so dense there were times it felt like the trunks formed wall. And the animals…. I knew there were more than what was around Court even before getting on Chuck’s caravan and seeing new ones, but I still had a sense of what an animal was. That they were normal.

Those glowing owls shifted what I thought of as normal. As did the slithering thing that was almost as much dog as it was snake. Then those two legged… Brandon assured me they were animals and not monsters, and they all kept their distances. Enough, I couldn’t get the system to tell me what they were.

There weren’t any monsters.

We ended each day with plenty of sun left, and I hunted. When we were low on meat, I brought back an animal, otherwise it was just about tracking them and getting as close as I could before they scattered.

Then I did an hour of archery practice and two of close combat training with Brandon.

For someone who doesn’t bother dodging or blocking all that much, he’s good enough at it that I had to put in work to touch him with my sword. His sword play is basic at most, but he’s fast, so that kept me on my toe if I didn’t want the sting of the flat of his blade.

By then, the sun would be setting and we moved on to eating the stew Brandon had gotten started as soon as we stopped. It was good, but man can I not wait to be in Detroit so I can have something other than meat and whatever foliage Brandon found during the day. That’s one aspect no stories ever touched on. How boring the food is after a while.

After that Helen taught me the basic of Aether which, I kid you not, amounts to sitting and feeling for the magic.

*

“Are you kidding me?” I tell her. “Feel for the magic?”

“You need to know what you have to work with.”

I point to my Aether bar, which isn’t visible at the moment since I’m not—can not—be drawing on it yet. “It’s right there.” It isn’t like she can see it, but she knows what I mean.

“That’s the visualization of the pool,” she replies. “Not your sense for it.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Well…” she struggles for an answer. “Okay. Your pool tells you how much you can use, but not ‘how’ to you it.”

“But that’s what you’re here for, right? To teach me how?”

“And me teaching you to sit there and feel the magic is how it starts?”

“But why?”

“This is why I told mother I didn’t want to teach,” she mutters, then smiles. “Okay, pull on your magic.”

“I can’t. I don’t have spells yet.”

She shakes her head. “If the only way to touch Aether was to use spell, there would be no way to train those interested in studying it ahead of time. Aether is a force within you, the same way your health is. When you get hurt, it doesn’t just cause your health bar to drop. You get an injury, sometimes debuffs. You bleed. Your bar represents what happened to the pool. The injury shows you what happened to you. It’s more abstract with Aether, but it’s the same principle.”

“So I just sit here and…”

“Feel for the magic.”

*

Around a treen of evenings spent doing that, and I still don’t have one clue what she meant. Still, she’s the one who knows what she’s talking about, so I sit there every evening for an hour or so and feel for it.

After the second evening, Silver joined me, patting my leg and sitting next to me, and we’ve been doing it together since.

I don’t think it’s doing anything to make me figure it out any faster, but I don’t feel like an idiot anymore when I do it.

By the time we reach the water, my archery’s gone up a level, quick-nocking two, tracking one, sword-play and shield one, and meteorology two. Aether training is still at zero.

Of course, that isn’t really what I’m thinking of as I look out over the never ending water. “What is that?” I know there’s an ocean on each side of the country. But I also know there’s no way we’ve reached that. Court is closer to the Atlantic, the ocean on the east, and it’s months to get there. The Pacific, on the west side, is a hell of a lot further.

“Lake Detroit,” Brandon says.

“That isn’t a lake. A lake is… a lot smaller than that.”

He laughs. “I’d forgotten that. The utter disbelief something I couldn’t see the other side of could be the same thing as what I’d gone swimming in as a kid.” He looks at Helen. “Remember when Mom and Dad took us to Lake Simcoe?”

She chuckles. “I don’t think you believed them by the time we were moving on. You were still adamant we’re reach the end of the world.”

“I was a very ignorant twelve,” he tells me, in his defense. “But yeah, lakes comes in all shapes and sizes.”

I look over the water and … I … feel … small.

I know the world is big. Base told me about the trek he and Grandpa Louis took. How long it took to travel north from Houston to Calgary and then east to Toronto, and then Court. I’ve known that walking for nearly two treens now was only a small step on the trek to wherever The Nox is.

But I hadn’t felt it.

Until now.

This is a lake, just a lake, and I can’t see the other side.

“Easy there.” Brandon lowers me to the ground.

Just how long is it going to take until I’m back home?

“You okay?” he asks in a gentle tone, and all I can do is shake my head. “It isn’t going to feel like that all the time. There’s going to be a day when you’re going to look at a lake like this and you’re going to ask yourself. ‘How could I ever have been overwhelmed by something so small?’”

The snort of disbelief I let out as I look at him pulls me out of my funk. There’s wistfulness on his face.

He looks at me and smiles. “Do me a favor. Try to hang on to this feeling for as long as you can. Once the wonder about this amazing world of our goes away, it gets just a little tougher to get going on your next adventure.”

I want to tell him that there isn’t going to be another adventure for me after this, but he’s looking over the lake and I swear I can see him searching for something over the water until he shakes his head and smirks.

“Come on. There’s still a lot of daylight and we are not in Detroit yet. We’re going to have to walk around the lake to reach it.”

“Wait,” I stand. “I thought you knew where it was. That we were heading right for it.”

“We are.” He points over the water. “Detroit is right there. On the other side of the lake. But I suck at swimming, so I’d rather take the long way around.”

I look over the water, squint, trying to make out something, a hint that there’s a city there; but all I see is water. Not even smoke to show that somewhere on the other side, there are people there.