“Telekinesis,” she said slowly, testing the word. “That just means throwing magic?”
“Basically, yes,” I laughed. “It just means controlling objects at a distance.”
Lia rubbed her eyes and let out a heavy sigh. “I guess that also applies to earth magic, too. All I really wanted was to throw rocks and move dirt around.”
“No, this is good! It isn’t what we originally thought, but now, if we figure out telekinesis, we figure out all of those old ideas at the same time,” I said excitedly. I added a small question mark next to our entries for water and earth, unwilling to cross them out and discount the topics entirely. “Now, do you think this idea applies to anything else on our board?”
“Light and Dark seem to be in their own category, but...ice, maybe?”
I nodded and moved to write a question mark beside the entry, but my hand froze before the quill could make it’s mark. “No,” I murmured, suddenly consumed by a new idea, “ice is different.” I ran into the kitchen and grabbed Hana’s empty stewpot without an explanation to Lia, then burst out of the front door and made my way into the trees. The door opened a moment later as she followed me on my mad dash, laughing to herself as we went. When we reached the stream, I knelt down and filled the pot half full with water.
“Fire magic was the first type of magic I used that wasn’t combat enhancements. I chose it because it was a natural process that was easy to visualize and understand; fire is just heat energy and fuel, right?” I asked aloud, mostly speaking for my own benefit. “Ice should just be the opposite of that. Instead of using mana to add energy to something, I’ll just use it to take energy away.” Mana rushed down my arms to the metal pot and suffused into the water as if I meant to boil it. Concentrating on my intentions, I confidently gave the command. “Freeze.”
I felt a brief wave of heat pass by my hands as the energy rushed away from the pot, and a series of sharp cracks reverberated up at me as the water expanded and froze in an instant. The metal in my hands began to sting, and I hopped away from the frozen pot with a huge grin. “You did it!” Lia shouted. “I know I shouldn’t be surprised at this point, but it worked immediately!”
“Don’t expect all of our tests to go so smoothly,” I chuckled. “This one is exciting, though; it’s our first success!” I put an arm around her shoulder and turned us back towards the house, leaving the pot to thaw out in the sun. “Now that we know it’s possible, we can start discussing all the potential uses for ice magic.”
“Ice skating!” she answered immediately. “Ice skating whenever we want!” We both laughed as we walked back through the trees, discussing where our new ice rink would fit in with the other planned expansions to our homestead. When we entered the house, Lia rushed to our noteboard and stole an empty sheet from the front, pinning it to the empty backside. She wrote “Ice Magic” in large letters, then set the quill down with a satisfied look. “So, what’s next?”
Our advancements came in rapid succession after our initial breakthrough. Lia was as successful with her attempt at using light magic as I had been with ice magic; after a long discussion of what light magic would actually do, she chose to experiment with Solette’s diamond orb as her implement. With only a brief moment to meditate over the crystal, she produced a white light so powerful that I could see it even as I shut my eyes against the glare. When our vision finally recovered from the unexpected nova, we spent the remainder of the morning fine-tuning the new power to a more usable state.
The new control of light magic provided us the skills necessary to make inroads into dark magic. Initially, the concept of controlling darkness had stumped us when we talked through its implementation; darkness, being just the absence of light, didn’t seem to be an entity one could control at all, magically or not. Once I had the knowledge of how it felt to create light, though, it seemed an almost trivial matter to do the opposite. When the revelation came to me, I dashed to the window and placed a hand against the glass to suffuse it with mana. As soon as I incanted the word, the pane of glass faded to an impossibly dark matte black that was disorienting to view; with no reflection along its surface, the window seemed like a gap in space that had simply failed to exist.
Our forays into storing mana yielded similarly speedy successes. Overwhelming evidence told us that it was not only possible to do so, but a common occurrence in the Unity Church, and it was simply a matter of attempting the skill to realize how easy it truly was. The sensation of instantaneously losing connection with our extended mana was unsettling and slightly nauseating at larger quantities, but the practice itself was trivial to master. After taking a moment to celebrate, we gathered a collection of items and began to work through my list of curiosities under the umbrella of mana manipulation.
Most of my questions were answered in a single, explosive test. While Lia focused on channeling as much mana as possible into the diamond orb, I cut a large branch from a nearby tree and attempted the same experiment. There was an immediate resistance to my influx of energy that felt as if I were trying to push the mana through a drinking straw instead of the usual open floodgates. The force of the resistance increased as I continued to struggle against it until the fight ended with an abrupt crack; the branch violently exploded in a flash of blue light, leaving
