Gifted

I waited patiently, staring into the old codger’s blue eyes. What would it be? A speech? Was he going to explain what his plan was for teaching me? Was the office a ruse, and we were going outside where I would continue straining my young body to eke out progression along my physically focused Paths?

“Can’t sense that then?” Cornelius mused as he watched me for a reaction.

“Sense what?” I asked in confusion.

What game are you playing, old man? I thought.

“Aether,” he stated succinctly and looked down, organising some notes on his desk. “Do you know what aether is, Bastian?”

“Magic!” My excitement in my statement came from a kneejerk reaction as my whole body reacted, veritably vibrating in my seat. Then the truth came crashing home, and I began to slump. My lacking capability feeling like an anchor around my feet, dragging me down into the dark abyss.

“That is true, in the simplest of senses,” Cornelius replied in a gentle tone, clearly sensing my deflating mood. “Aether is the energy behind spells. It is required to activate and power Skills, which you can think of as a drawing of a spell that you get access to. Like your Muffled Steps. It’s also required to activate and power enchantments.”

“What’s an enchantment?” I asked. I knew of course. Well, sort of. I had expected them to be self powering. Finding out that they only worked when you provided aether was news to me. Either way, I couldn’t appear too knowledgeable. My Path of Deception agreed, though for once tricking the old man didn’t make me feel good.

“Certain precious materials can… channel — like water between the banks of a river — our aether,” Cornelius explained, clearly struggling to find the words and imagery that would make sense to a three year old. “The process of channelling aether tends to destroy them over time, so the more resilient they are the better, and therefore the more they are valued. Silver and gold are the two weakest conductors with the lowest lifespans. You’ve seen those coins before?”

I nodded. “Shiny metal the traders use!”

“Exactly. So, using special techniques and specific des… drawings… enchanters can make items that do the same sort of things that spells and skills do.”

“Like Mummy’s frying pan!” I yelled excitedly. I wasn’t feigning it either. I had seen her use it many times without a fire going beneath it. I had always assumed she was using some sort of simple spell, but the frying pans handle had a small amount of silver metal passing through the wood. I had thought it was just… well, metal. Now though, it sounded like it was a simple enchanted item.

“Yes. It was a present I bought for her when we moved here. And… I suppose a gift for myself as well. Penny, your mum, makes a lovely breakfast. Since it’s not used a lot, it’s probably got another couple of years left before the aether warps the enchantments to the point where it doesn’t work anymore. That is beside the point though. To activate an enchantment, you need to be able to channel your aether. And to do that effectively, you need to be able to sense it. Now, I can’t help you sense your own aether, and trying to teach you how to do that is even harder than what I am going to teach you.”

He looked at me expectantly. I didn’t disappoint him.

“What’s that?”

“How to sense my aether. Every morning, we will spend two hours in my office while I work. You can bring things to play with, or look around my office, or ask me questions. But I want you to focus on the room around you and search for something, anything, that feels different. Then, when I ask, you’re going to point to where you think I am using aether.”

I kicked my legs as I thought. “How will we know if I got it right and didn’t just guess?”

Cornelius leaned back with a smile on his wrinkled face and amusement twinkling in his eyes. “Normally, at your age, we wouldn’t. But you can see your Status. When you get it right, you’ll get a message that you’ve unlocked the Path of Aethersensing. Working on that Path will improve your Aether Stat, which is a repre…shows how powerful your Aether is. Which is something you’ll need to use any Skills you get since you have a Minor Aether Core.”

I glanced at my Status. I had no open slots for a new Path, and nothing was close to completion except Path of Climbing, which was still months away! My worry must’ve been obvious as Cornelius leaned forward to peer over his desk at me.

“What’s wrong?”

“No room for another Path,” I mumbled.

Cornelius leaned back. “Oh, when you unlock the Path of Aethersensing, just tell your Status a Path that you don’t want to work on for the time being.”

You can do that?! What?! I thought.

“But then, I can’t complete that Path?”

Cornelius shook his head. “When you remove a Path from your active list, it loses all progression to the next Tier. Those are the numbers on the left, Bastian. But, you can always pick it back up later if you really want. There are thousands of Paths… do you know what thousands is?”

This book’s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Lots and lots and lots,” I answered.

“Close enough. There are lots and lots and lots of Paths in the world, Bastian. Not all of them are worth spending time on, even if you unlock them.”

I heard him mumble something after that, catching the words ‘maybe’ and ‘talented’ in his quiet grumblings before the old man focused back on me.

“So, where is it?”

I was confused for a moment before I realised that he’d been using aether around me the whole time. I swung my head around wildly, trying to look as much as feel a difference around me. There was nothing. Well, nothing that felt different. As for odd, well, the shelves along the walls had plenty of odd things. Despite all the weird little things around the office, I couldn’t feel anything weird. Finally, I looked back at Cornelius and shook my head.

“Keep trying. I’m going to work now, unless you have a question.”

I did. I had several. But I also had two hours every morning now with the old man. I needed to pace myself, and let him reveal some things on his own. Shaking my head, I began looking around the room, doing as he asked as I tried to feel something different. Searching for the magic that I had never been able to sense.

After the two hours were up, my number of successes amounted to exactly zero. Cornelius didn’t seem to mind though as he escorted me out to the common room. Mother was there waiting with some rough brown paper, a quill, and a few books. Henrietta was nearby, playing on the rug by one of the fires with her grandmother sitting in the chair and warming herself. The woolen pants and shirt she wore were of an unusually good quality and dyed black which made her blue eyes and shoulder-length, dark, brown hair stand out.

“Hey, Bastian!” squeaked the four year old girl as she stood and rushed over to join me. I tried not to let my annoyance show on my face. I must’ve been successful as Path of Deception ticked upwards.

It wasn’t that I disliked Henrietta. She seemed nice enough, for a four year old. The problem was me. I was a three year old boy in body, with the biological development to match, but memories and thoughts of someone who had gone through puberty. The result was I felt more at ease talking with adults than I did with those my own age, like I was constantly forced to put on an act when Henrietta was around — which thinking about it wasn’t that different from talking with Mum and Gramps.

Anyway, it was made all the worse because it was clear she just wanted a friend. I could see why. Being out here in this small community situated in the middle of the ass-end of nowhere was probably incredibly lonely. Between those thoughts and my mother’s encouraging smile I decided I could live with it. Being kind cost me little.

“Hey, Etta,” I replied, using her shortened name like she had done with me.

“Wanna play hide and seek after our lessons?”

It had been the game I often suggested when she first started coming by for lessons. A way to work on my Paths of Hiding and Sneaking. That was no longer something I needed since I had completed them both. So I opted for a new game.

“How about we play… escape the monster?”

“What’s that?”

“One of us is the monster, and the other one has to get away from them. We can play out on the road after the lessons. The monster has to try and catch the other one and they escape if they get through the doors.”

It was a simple and stupid game, but at least the running and exercise should work on a number of my Paths. As Henrietta agreed, I was struck with a simple question. I’d never really considered it before, but every other individual or family in our community had a reason for being here.

Magatha was clearly some sort of witch type, which probably didn’t fit in well around most people. Griselda and Martin were here to avoid the stigma for Griselda’s Orcish heritage. I’d gathered that from eavesdropping in the past.

The Warden and his family were here because it was his job to be here to keep an eye out for Rifts appearing in this stretch of the Horndale Mountains and to report them. Hurin was…just a loner. Maybe he was hiding from something, but since I never saw him, I couldn’t say. Even the new family that had moved in and opened a sort of waystation were apparently trying to turn a profit by transforming our pass into a more palatable merchant route. So their goal was clearly wealth, or at least something resembling comfort.

But the one time I had visited Henrietta’s home, it had seemed like her parents were tanners or leatherworkers. They had a lot to lose and little to gain by being here as opposed to a larger settlement or city. The question gnawed at me until our lesson started, before it was promptly forgotten in a deluge of reading and writing.

Once the lesson was over, I stayed true to my word, playing with Henrietta outside for a couple of hours before the sun started to dip. Like clockwork, her father, George, showed up to escort her home along with Grandma Lucille, a name the surprisingly spry old woman had told me to call her. Watching the old woman walk down the poor excuse for a road without issue, despite being in her fifties or sixties, reminded me once more that the nature of this world was different to my old one. With improved Stats, even as your body started to weaken with a lifetime of injuries and age induced problems, you could still be self-sufficient.

With the distractions finally gone, I settled inside near the fire, absentmindedly playing with a wooden toy while I considered what I had learned. The information about aether, enchantments, and spells was interesting, but not where my mind continually went. My focus was on the ability to remove Paths from actively being worked on. Loss of progress would sting, but if I managed to unlock the Path of Aethersensing sooner rather than later, I needed to have a plan for which Path I would drop.

Path of Exceptionalism, Completionist, Stealth, and Soulstealing were all excluded from my list of potential Paths to remove. The first three were harder to progress and gave better rewards. Losing progress on them would be devastating. Soulstealing should have been a consideration, since it had gone nowhere in three years with not a single point of progression. But, that was because I hadn’t figured out how to progress it. If I didn’t have the Path active, I’d likely never work out the trick to gaining steps in it. Unless I managed to learn about it from a book or something of course. I wasn’t about to mention it to my mother or grandfather.

Some of my other Paths were options though. Deception of course, since I had never really liked lying to my family, even if I did it more than I was comfortable with. Running was close to the next Tier and could likely be put on hold for a time and replaced with Aethersensing. The same was true of Balance and Coordination. Body Strengthening was at least a month off the next tier and would’ve been the one I dropped if I unlocked Aethersensing now. But based on my performance today I wasn’t unlocking it any time soon. Then there was Climbing which was approaching the final hurdle. I needed to complete it, both to progress my Completionist and Exceptionalism Paths, as well as for the bonus Stats to put towards Talented.

With a plan in place, I went happily to dinner with my family. Tomorrow I would do it all over again, pitting my body against my Paths as I tried to improve myself with the goal of one day adventuring across this new world.