Makiya

12. How magic works

"Calm down. You're not a monster." Dea'n'ha replied, trying to start explaining.

"Do you know what could have happened if this black creature were set free?!" Andrey, still in shock, spilled out his worries.

"I have another bet on this. Sit down and let us think this through." she said with her calming voice, which as if was a spell to Andrey's mind.

"Okay, you are right. Let me try to listen." he said as he realized the blades were in his hands.

He tried letting them go, but he couldn't. His hands were so stiff that he just couldn't release the blades.

"You saw that I could hear the blades speak too, right?" she began explaining her idea as Andrey nodded to confirm he was following her.

"I think that the blades and that being inside you are connected. It is no wonder that you are attached to the blades, that you can NOT be hurt by the blades and at the same time those hands and the blades seemed to talk to each other. They were craving for each other. They NEEDED each other." Dea'n'ha explained, as Andrey was now starting to get the whole idea.

"So they are one and the same. Inside my vision, the blades are what saved me. What seemed was that they saved me from myself." Andrey touched his spine with hands "Because those arms I could feel like my own, but I could not control. It would appear that this thing inside me needs the blades to exist or it will kill me as a punishment for splitting apart the hands from the swords." a few moments later Andrey continued.

"You are right, Dea'n'ha. They indeed NEED each other!" he confirmed her idea.

"So I think you should never split ways with those blades. You had been without them for how long?" the sorceress asked, as she looked at his confused face.

"A few hours I guess." he replied with a noticeable hesitation.

"Why so unsure?"

"Truth is, I don't really manage to follow track of the time without a clock. I'm pretty insecure about this."

"Aahahahha!" Dea'n'ha laughed in a really beautiful voice.

"Don't laugh at me, come on! That's not like you to be rude!" he laughed back scratching the back of his head.

"Ahh, sorry, I just didn't expect you to have such a problem. I will teach you how to make a constant clock. It's important for a mage to be on time." she replied, recovering from her laugh.

"What do you mean teach me how to make a constant clock? I don't feel like starting wood carving now, too..." Andrey replied in a disappointed voice.

"No, silly, I will teach you how to use your, uhh, what was it called... mana. Yeah. I'll teach you to use your mana to make a clock." she explained as she kind of stumbled on using Andrey's words for things.

"Wow! Something like a biological clock?"

"Well, it's not exactly biological as it is not a plant, neither is it filled with blood, but it is sort of alive." she replied in a slight confusion.

"Okay, but won't I run out of mana, eventually? It needs to feed on it in order to work, right?"

"It is indeed hard to run out of mana from something so small, though it is possible." Dea'n'ha wondered and continued "Have you read anything from the books I had given to you?"

"Don't blame me, but I hardly had time. I just sniffed a few sentences from a few pages out of curiosity. No serious reading, though." he said as he was expecting her disappointment.

"So what did you learn from those sentences you read?"

"That food replenishes mana... and I believe that's it."

"So you didn't read a few sentences, you read just one?" she laughed a bit

"It was a long composite sentence, okay? " he replied as he felt she was toying with him. But it was okay, it was in a friendly manner. He was sure that if there's somebody with a pure heart and soul, it would be her. Nobody with impurity would let his or her memories be seen and relived directly from someone else.

"Okay, so there are multiple ways to go about magic. There are ready recipes, but there's also the more adventurous way to go about it. The second way is, of course, the more creative one. You can use mana in almost anything you can think of. It is energy and energy can go through things. For example..." she said as she pointed at the fork.

"You can use mana to push things by creating a force behind them. So I will send out mana towards the fork and give it the entity of wind and this way I would push the fork." she said as she pushed the fork slightly.

"Now that's the outside way to interact with objects. You can also interact with them on the inside, by inserting mana inside the object and then manipulating that mana."

"Like a puppeteer?"

"Exactly." she confirmed as she made the fork bend into different shapes without even breaking it. "It is important to have control over what you do, because you could easily break the fork. But then again, you could also fix it if you break it. It all takes the right sensation to do right." she further tutored.

"Wow. This is amazing!" Andrey replied looking forward to more information. "Teach me more!"

"Well, for starters eat this fish I prepared for you so you replenish your mana. You must be exhausted."

"I am not, though. I just feel a bit of pain in the chest and my muscles feel kind of stiff."

"That's rather odd. Where did all this energy come from then, if not you?"

"This means that this black being inside me has its own source of power?" Andrey suggested with eyes opening in surprise.

"It appears so. This means that there's a good and a bad Andrey." she laughed.

"Will this affect my mana control?"

"I don't know. We'll find out. Now eat!"

Andrey ate the fish and was stunned by how tasty it was even though he didn't like fish. Maybe Nyadzel was a bad cook? Back in his days he didn't eat much fish either, though.

"This tastes delicious! And I don't even like fish!" he congratulated Dea'n'ha about her awesome cooking.

"Do you wanna know how I prepared it?" she asked playfully.

"Sure! It might be the only way for me to start eating fish. I always got scolded I don't eat healthy back in my world." the boy replied enthusiastically while grabbing another bite of the awesome dish.

Dea'n'ha closed in on him and whispered in his ear "With magic." and she sat back down.

He stopped eating for a second and began thinking. Was it a joke? Was it true? A few moments later she entertained herself with his confused face and laughed at him again.

"Stop bullying me!" he laughed back.

"Oh, I'm not even trying, but it is so much fun." she couldn't hide her desire to continue messing with him.

"Okay, tell me, is it really magic or not?"

"How could it possibly be magic? Why would someone cook with magic?"

"Yeah, you're right. Now that I think about it, using mana in order to replenish that mana back kind of loses its point." Andrey thought out loud.

"Well you do have a solid statement there, now I don't even think I can convince you otherwise." she put a finger on her chin.

"What? Ahh you're messing with me again!"

"Okay, okay, believe me, but this is really cooked with magic. Truth is, that when you cook with magic you just have to balance the amount of mana so you don't put in too much. Then it won't have a point. But either way, mana is just energy you transform into something else. So when I cook the fish I put my spiritual energy in it or outside of it so it would be affected in different ways. In this case, this fish will provide more energy than it took to make it."

"Okay, so you're a cook, too!" Andrey replied amazed by how much things magic can help you do.

"What else can I do with magic?" the boy asked impatiently thriving for more ways he could learn to use his power.

"Pretty much anything you like, though there are boundaries. If you haven't got good quality and good amount you could end up just getting tired. Basically, your imagination is your limits. In your case, when you were at Mage-Mountain you breathed in, ate, felt, walked, upon our elder spirits' energy, therefore your body got enhanced with mana. Your mana pool is probably very big. I could feel it even when you were sleeping last night."

"So I am with pretty big capabilities? Sounds good, but... I know there must be a risk to it. What is it?"

"There can be multiple risks. You can overburn yourself if you use too much of it. If you empty yourself out you can just fall unconscious until you recover your mana."

"If I am unconscious how would I recover mana? I can't eat. It needs to be injected into me in some way?" Andrey asked as he took another bite.

Dea'n'ha poured some water and gave it to him as he hadn't been drinking water since he started eating and continued. "Good point. You can recover it in multiple ways - one would be by breathing in spiritual energy, I mean - mana. The other would be if it were injected to you like I did a few minutes back. Before you woke up I concentrated mana into my arm and injected it to you and spread it throughout your whole body. This is why you woke up so fast."

She stopped talking for a few seconds.

"What happened?" Andrey asked as he could see that she didn't stop because her lecture is over, but because something came to her mind.

"If you didn't use up your mana then why were you so dead asleep?"