Owlsight

Especially at this moment, a moment of epiphanal breakthrough, when intense new experience overwhelmed every other consideration.

“There!” said Healer-Mage Firefrost in triumph. “Now you see it, you feel it, don’t you?”

Darian “stared” at the slow, smooth flow of energy that was literally all around him; it had taken days of coaching, but now, at last, he was able to do what Starfall had not been able to teach him - was in the over-world of energy, a world overlying the “real” world and a part of it, yet with its own separate life and rules. He used Mage-Sight at a deep enough level to actually watch the passage of life-energy from living creatures to the tiny feeder lines, and from there to the ley-lines, and on to the nodes. Every mage knew that energy flowed in that way; it was one of the first lessons in energy control - but only certain types of mages could actually see it happen at the level of individual blades of grass and insects no bigger than pinheads. Most mages couldn’t actually detect mage-energy until it had collected in the threadlike initial runnels, leaving them with the impression that the energy took the form of a web, rather than an all-pervasive flow. More than that, as Firefrost said, he felt it, a sensation entirely new to him and yet as familiar to him as his own heartbeat - exactly like the faint pressure of sunlight on his skin. Healers saw and felt the same thing according to Starfall; so did minor mages like earth-witches and hedge-wizards - these were the energies that they used, for they were unable to handle anything with more power than a small runnel. This energy was tedious to accumulate and granted them a relatively low level of power, but it was omnipresent. An earth-witch never had to search for a ley-line, and for a while after the mage-storms, hedge-wizards could accomplish more than Adepts, who had never been forced to learn all of the minor magics that needed only the merest whisper of power.

Experimentally, he moved to one of the little runnels collecting the flow - nowhere near large enough to be called a ley-line - and sensed the pressure increase when he interposed himself in the flow.

“It feels good, doesn’t it?” Firefrost said with satisfaction. “I always think it feels like bathing in sun-warmed silk.”

He nodded absently; it both felt and looked good, a warm amber glow the exact color of the light near sunset on a cloudless summer evening, and a sensation of being slowly revitalized.

“If you go somewhere that the energies are distorted or marred, you’ll feel that as well,” Firefrost told him. “It will make you sick, and you’ll learn to tell what’s wrong by how it affects you. Right now you need most to learn to snap in and out of Mage-Sight and Mage-Sense accurately and infallibly, so that if you ever do come across such a place, it won’t entrap you. Now that you have the trick of Seeing this level, your assignment will be to practice exactly that until I think you’re ready for the next step.”

“Can the good magic entrap you, too, with not wanting to leave that feeling?” he asked.

“Not if you’re mentally healthy - no more than you’re entrapped at the feast table,” she replied. “Once you’re ‘full,’ you’ll feel willing to leave.”

The mage did - something. Darian couldn’t quite tell what it was, but it felt a little like a static spark arcing from the mage to himself, more of a shock than pain, but enough to bring him back to the ordinary world with a startled gasp.

“This is why you need a Healing Adept to teach you properly,” Firefrost said, still sitting serenely where she’d been all along, cross-legged in the shade at the edge of the meadow where he and Kel had picnicked. “Starfall is a fine mage, experienced and full of wisdom, but he cannot see and sense the earth-energies in the way a Healer- Mage can, he cannot move about in the realm of pure energy the way we can, so he could not teach you how to access them. I am a Healer-Mage, but I can only take you so far - you have the potential to become a Healing Adept, and your teacher should also be at that level, if you are going to reach that potential.”

Darian nodded; he also sat where he had been all along; his “movement” in the overworld of energies had all been with something other than his physical body. “I think I know why you brought me here, too,” he said shrewdly. “Even though most of the mages have been teaching me in the safety of the Vale, if I’d made the breakthrough there, I’d probably have been blinded.”

Firefrost beamed at him, her young-old face suddenly wreathed in the wrinkles of her proper age - well over seventy. Smile-lines, mostly; Firefrost was a very cheerful person. “Very good! Yes, and I advise you to practice and learn to control this type of Sight in a safe place outside the Vale until you’ve gotten it well in hand. So many ley- lines come into the Heartstone in the Vale that you would be blinded if you can’t dim things down for yourself. And you’d have a headache for a week that would make you wish you were dead!”

Darian was still conscious of that faint pressure of energy; he realized that he always had been, he just hadn’t known what to call it. “So this is why some places in Valdemar made me sick until we cleaned them up!” he said wonderingly. “That’s why Snowfire and Starfall would watch me so closely - they couldn’t feel where things had gone wrong, and they used me to find the places for them!”

Firefrost nodded, and her approval warmed him clear through. “And you understand why they had to do that, don’t you? Or now are you feeling misused?”

That was the last thing on his mind. He shrugged. “They didn’t have much choice, did they? I mean, they did have a kind of choice, they could have used dowsing or some other way to find the bad places, but it was so much quicker to use me - and besides that, it didn’t cost them anything in magical energies of their own. They wouldn’t have risked me if they didn’t think that we could all do what we did without any harm to me.”

He couldn’t resent being “used”; not after the way he’d been vehemently angry with them over using up