Chương 24: Meditation

"Tell me, child. What do you know about meditation?" I sat up straighter on the flagstones without thinking about it, folded my hands in my lap, and slid into the posture I had sat in for every theory lesson my instructors had ever given me. Saoren noticed, I was fairly sure he noticed, but he did not comment.

"Meditation was the original method by which mages replenished their cores. In the old texts, it is described as the central daily practice of any serious practitioner." Saoren waited.

"Before meditation, the only known way for a mage to recover a depleted mana core was sleep. A full recovery through sleep alone could take several days, or in extreme cases weeks. Meditation sped the process up considerably. A disciplined mage could fully restore a depleted core in a few hours of focused practice." I paused, trying to remember if there was more on that section. Varren had drilled this material into me at twelve, and the answers were arriving in the order they had been arranged on the page.

"It was considered essential training for centuries."

"Is that all?" I wasn't sure what he meant, so I decided to just say everything I knew.

"Well, about a thousand years ago, a mage in one of the western provinces developed the first stable mana potion. The early ones were crude, and the mana they delivered was considered dirty compared to mana gathered through meditation, but the method improved quickly." Saoren did not interrupt, so I kept going.

"Within a few generations, the quality of mana potions had reached a point where a mage could recover a depleted core in the space of a single swallow, and the potions became cheaper as the techniques spread." My voice was settling into the cadence I used for theory recitations, which I had not used in front of anyone in months, and the familiarity of it was a small comfort.

"By the time my great grandfather was a young man, the potions were reliable, clean, and widely available at every reasonable price point, and meditation had already fallen out of the standard curriculum." I stopped to check whether he wanted me to keep going. He did not move, so I did.

"Today no mage in the kingdom seriously meditates. The old texts still reference the practice, and a few historical schools still keep it as a ceremonial thing, but nobody uses it for its original purpose, because there is no longer a reason to."

"And do you believe, child, that the mages of the old days only meditated for the mana?"

"I… well, that is what is assumed now, yes? That was the primary application, according to every text I have read. The mana recovery. Other applications were… there might have been others, but they were secondary." Saoren did not move.

"The primary application was indeed mana restoration. On that, the modern texts are correct. What the modern texts forgot, or what the modern mages allowed themselves to forget once the potions made the first application redundant, is that meditation had a second benefit. A benefit that, if you had asked me in the years I still walked in your world, I would have told you surpassed the first.

It is the benefit that your teachers stopped teaching the moment they stopped needing meditation for the mana, and it is the benefit that your entire current generation of mages will never know what it has cost them to lose." I leaned forward without deciding to.

"... What is it?"

"A still mind." I wanted very badly to say that is vague, but I held my tongue. Saoren shifted one of his lower arms, curled his tail slightly around his feet, and went on.

"A still mind, child, is the most undervalued asset a mage of your world possesses. It is what separates a cast that holds its shape from a cast that collapses in the air. Between two mages of equal training, equal reserves, and equal talent, the one with the stiller mind will win every time." He paused.

"And beyond the craft, child, there is the standing. You were in a tree tonight, and a being much older than you looked at you, and you could not move your hands. You will be in other rooms in your life in which much older and much larger beings will look at you, and some of those rooms will not let you just fall when the looking becomes too much to bear. A still mind is what permits a man to stand in front of something that could unmake him, meet its eyes, and not flinch."

I thought about the pressure of Saoren's mana on me a few minutes ago, and the way I had felt. I was not in a hurry to feel it again. I had spent my whole life being told I was the Axiom, the most valuable piece this house had produced in over a thousand years, a child around whom the world rearranged itself, and, to be honest, I had always been proud of that. Yet, none of what I had been told about myself had mattered for half a second. Humbling was one word for it, humiliating was closer.

I never wanted to feel fear again the way I did today.

"What I am proposing to teach you, child, is not to take the fear out of you." I startled. For a second I was worried he had been reading my thoughts directly, and then I decided it was the kind of thing a four-thousand-year-old spirit would not need to read thoughts to guess.

"You will still feel it. You will feel it exactly as you felt it tonight, but what a still mind gives you is simply a moment between feeling it and acting on it rationally. That is the whole of it. That is what I would teach you."

"Yes."

"Yes what, child?" I took a breath and looked down at him then made my voice as steady as I could. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

"Please teach me."

"Good, let us begin then."

"... You mean, now?" It was the middle of the night…

"Should I just leave?"

"I'll do it! I'll do it!"

Saoren watched the boy ease himself down into a cross-legged seat on the flagstones and then fuss over the angle of his back for longer than was necessary.

"Lower the shoulders, child. You are not presenting a report."

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Be lower. There. The spine is a column. It should hold itself up without your help. If you are working to keep it straight, the working will distract you, and the distraction will cost you the stillness before we have even begun." The boy adjusted, his shoulders dropped, and his hands came to rest on his knees.

"Comfortable?"

"Yes, Master Saoren."

"Not too comfortable. If you slump, your mind follows the slump, and then you are meditating on a dream about dinner, and an hour is gone and nothing is restored. The body should be as relaxed as it can be without forgetting it is awake. Find the edge between the two and stay on it." Another small adjustment. Saoren nodded once and moved on.

"Now the breath. In through the nose. Slowly. Count four on the way in. Hold for two. Out through the mouth, slower than the in. Count six. Do not force the count. If six is too long, use five. If five is too long, use four. The counts are a shape for the breath to learn. Once the breath has the shape, the counts are no longer needed." The boy tried it. The first few breaths were shallow and a little jagged.

The fourth was better and by the seventh, something had eased in the line of his back that Saoren had not needed to correct.

"Good. Keep the breath, and do not think about it. It is a thing you are letting happen to you, not a thing you are performing. The moment you begin performing it, it stiffens, so let it be a little boring."

"... Yes, Master Saoren."

"Now. The mana. Do not pull it. Do not push it. Find it where it already is, in the core, and notice it. That is all. Notice it sitting there. Let the breath move past it in its own time. After a few breaths you will feel it begin to move with the breath on its own. When it begins to move, do not help. Let it find its own path through your channels. The core knows the shape of you better than you do. Your only job is to not get in the way." The boy's brow furrowed.

Saoren resisted the small amused sound that wanted to come up out of his throat.

"Stop thinking, child. Close your eyes." The boy closed them.

"Keep them closed. Breathe and circulate. That is all there is to do for the next hour." The breath settled into something slower. The small frown on the boy's forehead eased and did not come back. The hands on the knees unclenched a fraction Saoren suspected the boy had not known were clenched and after a few more breaths, the body went quiet as Saoren watched. He had not seen this boy since he was three years old. Three and a half, to be precise.

Saoren had been there at the birth, as he had been there at the birth of every Axiom of the line since he and the first one had built this shrine together on top of a mountain four thousand years ago. He had held to his side of the old promise, and he had watched the small thing come out of its mother, then stayed in the estate for the first three years of the boy's life, moving through the wings, looking in on the crib, the nursery and the early training sessions and after the third year, he had left.

The child had grown into something very fine. Tall for his age in the shoulders. Steady-handed. A good mouth for a boy who had been taught, from before he could speak, to keep his face still. Saoren knew all Axioms of the Aridis line. He had been present, in some capacity, at the childhood of every single one, and he had his quiet opinions on each, but this one was different. There was a… softness in him the previous few had not carried, a readiness to be surprised. It was childishness, he supposed.

Sixteen was still young, and the softness would perhaps firm up into something else by the time the boy was twenty-five. But the childishness had a quality to it that Saoren suspected he was going to find difficult to stay angry at, furthermore, he was quite interested in him. His thoughts drifted to the other thing the boy had mentioned: A System. Saoren had listened to the description very carefully. Quests with objectives and rewards. Skills with levels and proficiency. Stat increases.

A golden text that nobody else could see. A status screen the boy could call up at will. But despite how alien it seemed, Saoren realized, while listening to the boy, that this system was in fact, not a blessing from the heavens. The System was the boy. Saoren had understood it the moment the boy had said the words quests and rewards and level up. It was a framework.

An internal framework the boy had built inside his own head, almost certainly without ever realising he was building it, assembled from the bits of his own experience the way a child assembles a nest from whatever he has been given to carry around. The books the old servant had smuggled to him. The adventure novels. The stories of heroes who grew from weak to strong climbing after each battle…

It seemed the boy had taken all of it, all of the material his small mind had been fed across sixteen years, and he had built a machine out of it, and the machine had become the thing he thought was guiding him. What a remarkable piece of work. Saoren, who had watched minds assemble themselves for millenia, had rarely seen one put itself together with this much structure and this much discipline, and certainly not a mind that had done it entirely by accident and in secret.

He uncrossed his legs and walked a few steps across the flagstones toward the low wall at the edge of the garden, so that the soft sound of his feet would not disturb the boy's breath. From the wall, Saoren could see a long way. The mountain fell away below him in terraced darkness, and beyond the terraces, in the valley, the estate of House Aridis sat in the late-night dark with a few lanterns still burning along its walls.

The gryphon on the main gate was not visible at this distance, but Saoren knew where it was. He knew where everything was, and so he found the northern wing without having to look for it. It was still in the state the boy had left it in. The stone had not been rebuilt. The gardens around it had not been replanted. A long silver line in the earth where the outer wall had once stood, and beyond the line, an open scar that still carried the shape of what had happened there. Perhaps as a memorial, Saoren suspected.

Two hundred and seventeen people had died in the northern wing on that afternoon, including the nursemaid who had been kneeling in front of the boy at the moment the tantrum had escalated. Howl did not seem to remember even now. But it made sense. One thing that Saoren always found fascinating with the human mind was that when it encounters a memory it cannot survive intact, it puts said memory in a…

room, and it closes the door to the room, then builds a small house of ordinary days around the door so the door is no longer visible. Saoren looked at the scar in the earth for a long moment, then he turned back toward Howl on the flagstones. The boy had locked himself out of his own power, then immediately and without his own conscious awareness, begun to construct a mechanism for letting the powers back in, one small fraction at a time. How curious. Perhaps he wanted to justify his powers through such a method?

Saoren supposed it was logical, and quite amusing, how he also seemed to be using his innate gift of foresight to determine the rewards he would get out of the… quests. This one, Saoren thought, looking at him, is an interesting case.