Chapter 144 — The Other Half

Chapter 144: Chapter 144 — The Other Half

He found the flyer the day after the reunion, pinned to a modest board near the training wing that Talia’s counter had directed him to when he’d first asked about formal Mana instruction — Private Instruction Available: Elemental Fundamentals, Mana Theory, Cantrip Formation. Inquire with Neris Calloway, Room 4, Instruction Wing.

He found her waiting in a modest, sparsely furnished room, sunlight filtering through a high window onto a desk cluttered with half-finished notes. She looked up at his knock with the mild, unhurried curiosity of someone who fielded a great many new students and had long since stopped being surprised by any of them.

"You’ll be the Dual-Affinity transfer," she said, gesturing him toward a chair. "I take it the Aura side’s settled properly, given you’re here for the other one."

"Confirmed Novice, about a week back."

"Good. Means we’re not starting from nothing on that front." She studied him a moment. "Before we begin anything, understand this isn’t free instruction. Spells have to be purchased before I’ll teach them — same principle as any Aura technique, though Mana runs steeper across the board. Costs more to properly instill, costs more to teach properly, if that makes sense to you."

"It does. What am I looking at?"

"For the two I’d start anyone on — Mana Light and Mana Sense, both foundational, neither one especially advanced — three gold each. Cheap by Mana standards, though I won’t pretend that’s a small sum for someone still settling accounts after a long transfer."

Arlen counted out six gold without much hesitation, the sum manageable against a year and more of steady earnings now compounded by the capital’s pay scale. "And the instruction itself?"

"Included, once you’ve paid for the spell proper. I don’t sell knowledge I won’t also teach you to actually use." Neris tucked the coin away and studied him again, more carefully this time. "Now. Tell me honestly — how much formal Mana instruction have you actually had?"

"None," Arlen admitted. "I’ve managed a few things on instinct over the years. Nothing anyone properly taught me."

"None at all, and yet you’re not entirely unfamiliar with the feel of it either, are you." She said it as observation rather than question, watching him closely. "I can see it in how you’re sitting there — not the blank confusion I usually get from a true first-timer. Something’s brushed up against it before."

"I’ve done a few things that felt similar, I think. Small things. Never properly understood what they actually were."

"That tracks well enough with a genuine Dual-Affinity profile — the two sides bleed into each other more than people expect, even before either one’s been formally trained." Neris seemed satisfied with the explanation, not curious enough to press further. "Doesn’t change where we’re actually starting, mind you. Feeling Mana in passing and building a proper Core to hold it are two entirely different accomplishments. Your Aura Heart’s complete — settled fully, from what you’ve described of your breakthrough. Your Mana Core hasn’t been attempted at all. Not begun, not partial. Simply not there yet."

"So we start from the very beginning."

"Exactly that." She rose, clearing a space on the floor between them. "Sit. Close your eyes. Most beginners spend their first session simply learning that Mana even exists to be felt at all — it isn’t like Aura, which comes from inside you, your own body and will. Mana’s borrowed from the world around you, drifting through the air the same way heat drifts off a fire whether or not anyone bothers reaching for it. Every room, every street, every open field carries some faint trace of it — thinner in some places, considerably richer in others, though you won’t have any way to judge the difference until you’ve learned to notice the baseline first. You have to learn to feel something that was never yours to begin with before you can ask it to become yours."

Arlen settled onto the floor across from her, and closed his eyes, and found himself, for a moment, simply breathing — the same patient stillness he’d once practiced watching adventurers pass through Greyhaven’s gate, except turned inward now instead of outward.

"Don’t reach for anything specific," Neris said, her voice low and unhurried. "Reaching too hard is the most common mistake I see. You’re not summoning a fire or calling a gust of wind. You’re simply noticing something that’s already there, the way you’d notice a draft under a door you’d otherwise have walked straight past."

He sat with it, and reached, gently, for the same strange, half-remembered sensation he associated with Water Affinity’s quiet current beneath a river’s surface, and Ember Touch’s controlled warmth gathering at his palm — not trying to summon either ability directly, simply following the general shape of what they’d always felt like beneath his more familiar Aura, the way a person might recognize a smell without being able to properly name it.

"There," Neris said, after a long, quiet stretch. "Something shifted in you just now. Small, but real. Most true beginners take three or four sessions just to manage that much."

"I think I felt it. Barely."

"Barely’s exactly where this starts for everyone, familiarity or not." She opened her own eyes, studying him with fresh interest. "Describe it to me, if you can. Doesn’t have to be precise. I find most students understand their own experience better once they’ve tried putting words to it."

Arlen considered the sensation carefully. "Like standing very still in a room and noticing, for the first time, that the air’s actually moving. Not wind, exactly. Just... present. Everywhere, and nowhere in particular."

"That’s about as good a description as I’ve heard from a first attempt." Neris seemed genuinely pleased. "That presence you’re noticing — that’s the raw current itself. Ambient, unclaimed, belonging to the world rather than to you. Everything that comes after this is learning to draw a thread of it toward yourself deliberately, rather than simply noticing it pass you by."

They spent the remainder of that first session purely on sensing and drawing — small, careful attempts to pull a trickle of ambient Mana toward himself, each one dissolving before he could properly hold it, though Neris noted, twice, a faint answering pressure gathering somewhere low in his stomach before it slipped away again.

"That’s your Core trying to respond," she said, the second time it happened. "Doesn’t hold yet. Won’t, for a while. But it’s responding, which is more than nothing."

"Come back tomorrow," Neris said finally, as the light through the high window began fading toward evening. "Same time. This isn’t the kind of thing you build in scattered visits — you’ll want daily practice, if you’re serious about it, same as you’d want daily drilling for a new sword form. A Core doesn’t form from good intentions spread thin across a month. It forms from repetition, the same dull, patient repetition as everything else worth actually mastering."

"I have the time," Arlen said. "More of it than I expected, this month."

"Good. Then I’ll see you tomorrow, and the day after, until something finally holds in that palm of yours rather than simply flickering out the moment you reach for it."

Arlen left the instruction wing that evening with nothing to show for the session beyond a faint, lingering awareness low in his stomach — not yet a Core, not yet anything with proper shape, simply the honest, unglamorous beginning of something he intended to build with the same patient, deliberate care he’d given every other piece of the adventurer he’d spent well over a year becoming.