Despite who Spyder was and the eminence about her, the sense of awe she tended to inspire, Jenna laughed at that. That laugh was cut short when the tall, tall Urzani reached out and put her slender, four-fingered hands on each side of Jenna's head, on her temples. Tarrin didn't see anything, but he could clearly feel the Urzani pull the flows out of the strands with a surety and speed that made him nearly miss what she did. An unbelievably complicated spell formed between those hands, directly inside Jenna's mind, that had tendrils of the spell feeding back into Spyder's own. He felt a sudden surge of envy for his sister, for in that fleeting moment, the minds of Spyder and Jenna were linked as knowledge passed from one to the other. Jenna had had the privilege to share knowledge with the oldest, wisest, most learned living being on the face of the world. There could be no higher honor than that.
As quickly as it happened, it was over. Spyder removed her hands easily as Jenna staggered back a step or two and put a hand to her forehead. "Goddess!" she gasped. "How did you do that!"
She spoke in flawless Sha'Kar, even having the same accent as the Urzani. Of course, that was expected, seeing as how the Urzani's knowledge of the language was what was given to her.
"Easily, if you know how, young one," Spyder smiled down at her.
"I, I know, Tarrin!" she said in wonder, standing there and staring at her brother in surprise. "I know who we were, and what we used to be! She showed me what we were like in the past! And she showed me how we came down to where we are now!"
"I know, Jenna," he nodded. "I know."
"I, I can't believe it," she said in surprise, dropping her shoe. "How could it all have happened?"
"It's all there, young one," Spyder told her. "All of it. You will write that down, Jenna," she ordered. "You will pen it in your own hand, in your own way, and then share it with the others."
"I--yes, I will," she said, looking in his direction, but he could tell her eyes were distant. "It's sad, really. All that beauty, gone. Why didn't we see it coming?"
"Think, child."
"We were naive," she realized. "We believed everyone would think and act as we did. We thought everyone understood. But we were wrong."
"We were wrong," the Urzani mirrored in a wan tone.
"And now it's the three of us?"
"Yes and no," Spyder smiled. "I may be sui'kun, but I have other duties. Tarrin is sui'kun, but he exists outside the order of things. For now, there is only you. But in time, others will appear, and then you will help the katzh-dashi restore the order to its former glory. It will be as it once was, Jenna. But only if you work hard to realize it."
"What are you talking about?" Tarrin asked.
"There used to be seven Towers, Tarrin," Jenna said, closing her eyes to remember what Spyder showed her. "Every Tower had a sui'kun. At any one time, there are only seven sui'kun. One for each Tower. But if you and Tarrin don't count, won't that make nine?" she asked the Urzani.
"It won't matter," Spyder said dismissively.
"The power of magic may come from the Weave, but it's the Sorcerers that bring it out," Jenna said. "Every Sorcerer alive enriches the Weave, but every sui'kun that's alive restores a portion of the Weave to its original state. There are three of us--"
"Four. You forgot Jasana."
"You're right, four. That means that four-sevenths of the Weave's original power is back." Jenna's face screwed up a moment. "But if there are nine, won't that mess it up?"
"No," Spyder assured her. "Tarrin and myself may impact the Weave, but we are meant to exist outside the order of things. When the eighth and ninth and tenth are born, they will simply be linked with the aspects of magic we already represent. They will replace us."
"What will happen to us?" Tarrin asked curiously.
"We will simply no longer represent an aspect of magic," Spyder shrugged. "We won't lose our powers or be killed, if that's your worry. After what happened with the Breaking, the Elder Gods have decided to allow the Goddess to keep two or three sui'kun in reserve, to use a term, in case one of the others dies, or another such accident or dark plot occurs. If one of the other sui'kun were to die, their burden would fall upon us until a new sui'kun is born to take up the burden."
"Ten? Who is the tenth?"
"Jasana," Spyder replied. "You and her and I, we will represent the stability of the Weave. Our presence will ensure that another Breaking won't happen."
"Oh. I understand," Tarrin told her.
"Every sui'kun is linked to a major Conduit," Jenna explained to him. "Our being alive makes it appear, and it remains until we die. We're like the living extensions of the Goddess."
"In our own way, we are Avatars," Spyder told Tarrin, using a word he understood. "We are blessed by the Goddess and the other Elder Gods. When the power of magic was formed, the Elder Gods decreed that its power be limited in some manner, so it was decided that it would be tied to mortals. Sorcerers. Every Sorcerer alive makes magic--all magic--just a tiny bit stronger. But the realms of magical ability are restricted by us. When your daughter was born, Tarrin, it restored a portion of magical ability back to the world. Wizards regained the power to conjure Demons, though it took them a great deal of time to rediscover the spells for doing so. Priests regained the power to commune directly with their gods. Sorcerers and Druids gained no new powers, but the enrichment of the Weave strengthens our powers unilaterally. When the next sui'kun is born, Wizards and Priests will regain another realm of their lost powers, and Sorcerers and Druids will gain more power. And it will continue until there are once again seven. When that happens, all the old powers will be restored, and magic will return to its former power. At that stage, even the mundanes will have enough magical ability to cast minor Wizard cantrips without any deep study." She glanced about. "I think that is enough debate. I am here to teach you Sorcery, not teach you history. You can debate things on your own time."
"Yes!" Jenna said emphatically.
"Come," Spyder told them, motioning towards herself. "Sit. Sit and listen."
They obeyed her quickly, coming to sit before her. She sedately did the same, facing them with her stormy blue eyes and the deep mysteries contained within them. "You two, both of you, you are clumsy," she told them bluntly. "You are slow, ungainly, wasteful, and inefficient. The time it takes you to weave your spells is absolutely inexcusable," she said in a hard tone. "That is where we are going to begin. You will watch me, watch and feel and learn. By the end of this session, I expect both of you to be able to pull the flows from the strands as quickly as I can."
Jenna swallowed, but Tarrin, who wasn't as intimidated as his sister, fixed the Urzani with a disapproving look. "I didn't come up here for insults," he warned her.
"Until you impress me, it is all you will receive," she replied in a diffident tone. "You are both children. Until you show me that you deserve it, you will receive no respect from me." When Tarrin's eyes narrowed, the woman simply stared at him. "What I offer is not something you cannot live without," she warned in a dangerous tone. "Anger me, and you'll be receiving your lessons from Jenna."
That quelled any kind of objection he may have had. Despite her abrasive manner, he found he could endure it for the chance to learn from her.
"Very well. We begin," she announced.
Despite his annoyance, he was quickly caught up in the utterly fascinating realms of true Sorcery. Spyder demonstrated how she commanded the Weave, and both of them absorbed her every word intensely, watching her like hawks eyeing a mouse. She showed them how slow and clumsy they truly were, accessing her power with an ease that made them both look like Novices again. But as she demonstrated, she taught. She showed them how to get around the resistance the Weave offered to them, a newfound resistance that came with being a sui'kun. They both had learned Weavespinner ways on their own, and they both had discovered how inefficient their way really was as they watched a true master of the art perform. "You are not weaving spells. You are bringing the magic of the Weave to life. It is not a p
rofession, or a skill, or a craft. It is an art, and you must feel that art in your soul. The more you feel it within you, the more responsive the magic becomes to you. When you and the Weave are one, it will respond to you as quickly as it does for me. Some of the resistance you encounter is because you don't put your soul into your spells. Sorcery is a thing of beauty, every spell a work of art. You must breathe life into your creations, and when you do, the magic will come to you as easily as it did once before."
"Why is it that the Weave resists us now, when it didn't before?" Jenna asked curiously after Spyder finished demonstrating a rather complicated weave that caused a swirling nexus of energy to appear over her head.
"Because of what you are," she replied immediately. "The immunity from the fire the power of the Weave can spawn also causes us to resist magic. Magic is like water, it will always follow the path of least resistance," she explained when she was confronted with two blank looks. "Before, you were downhill from the magic. Now, you are uphill. Magic is but a form of energy, as is heat, which is fire. Our resistance to the heat the Weave can generate in us also makes us resistant to the magic we try to draw in."
"I guess that makes sense," Tarrin said after a moment of mulling it over. "You said magic. You didn't just say Sorcery," he realized.
"Correct. Should some Wizard or Priest actually manage to blindside you with a spell, your body will actively resist its power. Depending on the power of the spell and the skill of the caster, it will either fizzle out, be cancelled, have its power reduced, or affect you as it would any other person. But that is a moot point, young one. No Wizard or Priest should ever be able to manage to finish a spell against you. If he does, it will be because you allow it."
"Nobody's ever taught me how to do that," he told her. "Block magic."
"Truly? Do they teach the new Sorcerers anything at all?" Spyder asked in exasperation.
"Actually, they do, but I was never really trained," he said contritely. "What I do, I kind of learned by myself."
"Ah. Then you truly are as sensitive to the Weave as I hoped," she said with a nod. "What you do comes to you through the Weave, as it whispers its secrets to you. Some are very sensitive to it, and can hear things that others can't. You seem to be one of those who are very sensitive, since the Weave whispers spells to you. That takes great sensitivity, for it's something that requires a great deal of information to come to you. As you know, the whispers of the Weave are very faint, very subtle, and often they aren't complete."
He knew that to be true. The sense of things he got from the Weave had been fragmented, jumbled, just bits and pieces here and there. A piece of a sentence, a short image that was often fuzzy or indistinct. What little of it he remembered, or knew to be coming from it. If the instructions of how to weave spells were coming to him from the echoes of memory within the Weave, then he must be able to hear much more than he first thought.
"It's also why you could hear me whispering from so far away," she smiled. "That first time. I didn't expect you to hear it from such a distance."
"That's how you do it!" he realized immediately, when she called it whispering. "You're speaking right into the Weave!"
"Is it so hard to understand?" she asked with a very disarming smile. "It's not even something that requires a spell. You can join with the Weave. If you can do that, then you can send words into it without actively joining with it."
"And since only sui'kun can sense the Weave like that, then we're the only ones who can hear it," Jenna concluded.
"Not precisely, child. Any who have crossed over can hear it. You forget that the vast majority of what you'd call Weavespinners are da'shar, the Enlightened. Any who can join with the Weave can hear a whisper. But just as there is more than one way to speak, there is more than one way to whisper. You can send your voice to a specific person, if you're familiar with them. Or a group, if you know each of them. But we digress. Back to your lessons!"
Tarrin felt a bit ecstatic that he managed to solve that nagging mystery more or less on his own, and that gave him a bit of added interest as the Urzani continued to show them how to go about drawing the magic out. He was still impressed and awed at the speed and skill with which she worked her magic. "Remember, young ones, it is not a spell. It is a work of art. You are not workers or magicians, you are artists. You must give of yourself when you form the weaves, you must be willing to put into the weave what the Goddess does on your behalf. When you can give of yourself, the Weave will respond. After all, no relationship can work if it only has one side. In order to take, you must give."
"That doesn't make sense," Jenna complained. "How can you give and take at the same time?"
"That is the dilemma," Spyder smiled. "It is nothing that I can easily answer. You remember what it was like the very first time you touched the Weave? How it seemed impossible, and yet there it was, responding to you?" They both nodded. "This is much the same. Any da'shar or sui'kun can weave spells by force, as you two do, but a true Weavespinner knows that the secret to gaining the power is to give back to the Goddess. What you give back is what you must learn. When you understand, it will come to you as easily as breathing."
Tarrin didn't find that to be a very straightforward answer. He looked at the ground and mulled it over. Give back. Give back what? He couldn't expend power into the Weave, since that's where he drew it in the first place. One couldn't give back more than what was taken; it was one of the fundamental rules of magic. But if he didn't give back energy or power, what did he have to surrender to the Goddess in order to secure the unmitigated cooperation of the Weave?
She called it an art. When artists made something--true artists, anyway, like how his father made bows and arrows--they poured themselves into their creation. The best of them could breathe that spark into them that made those items and objects truly remarkable. That breath, that spark, came from the artist, a piece of their inspiration and vision that was transferred into the object upon which they labored to transform into that special work. Maybe it was a piece of themselves, maybe it was the inspiration or the touch, but something definitely passed from the artist to the object of his creation during that process.
But Weaves weren't works of art. They were patterns of energy, arranged so that when they were released to interact with the physical world, their arrangement and cascading effect and counter-effect with the physical world and with one another produced a repeatable, consistent effect. Weaves couldn't be seen or sensed except by other Sorcerers, and when the spell was released, the weave literally destroyed itself. How could that be art? And how did giving something back raise simple weaving into art?
What to give back? What did he have? He had only himself. He had his strength, his motivation, his devotion, his sense of duty, his love for--
Love. That was what he had to give. The Weave was the Goddess, and the Goddess was the Weave. Working Sorcery was a demonstration of his connection to the Goddess, the granted ability with which he was blessed when he was born. Sorcerers were the priests of the Goddess, and she had once told him that they praised her with every spell they wove. When he was touching the Weave, he was touching the Goddess. When he was weaving spells, he was beseeching his Goddess to grant him her power. She had once told him that the love and devotion of a mortal made a god stronger, even the Elder Gods. Weavespinners had to be filled with power when they entered the Heart and looked into her eyes, and when that happened, the love the Sorcerer held for the Goddess was unbound, and bound him to her heart and soul.
Artists loved their work. Part of what they gave to their creations was that love of art, that love of creation, that spark that made the object truly remarkable. If he was to be an artist of the Weave, he had to give his love to the Weave every time he touched it.
He closed his eyes and aligned his mind to wrap it around that idea, and then he pushed his will against the Weave, with the intent to weave together a simple two-flow spell that would cause a small bluish light to appear before him. As h
e made his connection to the Weave, he brought his love for the Goddess into the forefront of his mind, and then he offered it to her in a silent surrendering to his deity, knowing he was leaving himself open to her utterly. What he got in response was an absolute torrent of power, pulling from the strands with such shocking speed that it startled him, and behind it he could feel the Goddess herself, her presence loving, almost whimsical, and he could almost hear her voice as she chided him. Long ago I told you that the relationship between us was give and take. Give me your love, and my power is yours to command, my sweet kitten. The sense of her, the closeness he felt to her was very nearly what he felt of her when he was in the Heart, and he had to remind himself to stop revelling in it and attend to the task at hand. He was so caught up in the sense of it that he forgot that the flows weren't going to actively weave themselves together by themselves. He took hold of the flows in a gentle touch, and then urged them into the proper weave--to force them or exert will against them seemed...churlish. He was taking hold of the power of the Goddess herself, and that required reverence and respect. Once it was in place, the weave released on its own, without any urging from him, and the blue ball of light appeared just in front of him and over his head.
"Was that so hard?" Spyder asked with that same disarming smile. "Did you see how he did that, Jenna?"
"I think so," she replied immediately.
"It was...beautiful," he said reverently. "I never understood before. Not like that." He wiped at a single tear forming in the corner of his eye, fully aware he had just experienced a religious revelation.
"Our Mistress is a gentle one, brother," Spyder told him with a nod. "All she asks of us is our love. Give her that, and what she returns to you is tenfold."
Tarrin watched as Jenna seemed to pick up the trick of it. He could sense her push her will against the strand, and then he felt her offer of herself the same way that Tarrin had done, giving her love to the Goddess, surrendering to her Mistress in an act of faith and supplication. Flows of Air, Water, and Divine power pulled from the strand, and then Jenna deftly wove them together and released it as an Illusion with only a sound component, that sound being a rolling crescendo of triumphantly blaring trumpets. Spyder actually laughed at Jenna's choice of weaves, a sound that Tarrin found to be very appealing. She seemed hard and aloof, but he was warming to the ancient Urzani woman. "You're right, Tarrin, it's like the Goddess is holding you when you--it's just wonderful!" she said, with a bright smile and arms hugging herself.
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