Chương 9: Life

Two weeks into her captivity she had finally re-woven her entire hand up to the wrist. Every day she was subjected to another slice of Solas's terrible life and the Reel continued to fill, far more slowly than Solas wanted. The pain in her head after each session only got worse. After seven days he started to take her out every other day instead, spending the time in between fiddling with his reel, trying to increase the fórsa absorption, she assumed.

Miriam started working on her fórsa weaving during the day as well, whenever Solas was upstairs fidgeting with his crystal. Eoin had been suitably impressed at the speed and consistency she had displayed. He suddenly declared that it was time to try some fórsa manifestation. Miriam was confused.

"What's fórsa manifestation?" Eoin grinned.

"Magic!" The first trick he taught her was both the simplest and the most useful foundational thing anyone with water fórsa could do: create water itself. Miriam was reminded of the well back home which had never run dry - such a manifestation would have been a real boon to her drought-stricken neighbors. For this, instead of grabbing the fórsa in the loop of her body, she would fixate on only the fórsa which now made up the skin of her right hand.

He coaxed her to circulate it, let it move clockwise from finger to finger along the outer edge of her hand. Once it was moving fast enough - "movement, remember, water is always movement" - then she was to begin to spiral it towards the center of her palm, creating a swirl of rocketing fórsa that did not loop back into the rest of her body but instead terminated in the center of her palm. Finally, three days after beginning this instruction, a few drops of water pattered to the dusty table below her hand."

Fantastic!" Eoin shouted. They had determined that the ward Solas had made also silenced the room for any outside of it. It seemed Solas did not care to hear his victim's laments while he was trying to sleep.

"You're doing so well! I've never had any apprentices, but if I did you'd be the star!" Miriam looked in wonder at her slightly damp hand. It was both incredible and underwhelming. She had created water out of nothing but fórsa. It was, as Eoin said, fantastic. But at the same time…

"Eoin, I could have spit more water than this. How will this get me out in three more weeks?" Miriam couldn't help feeling dwarfed by the challenge in front of her. She did not doubt that Eoin could teach her to escape under her own power, but it felt as if she had so far to go that meeting his deadline was impossible. Eoin had only grinned.

"What sort of attitude is that from my star apprentice? Trust me - you're not nearly as far as you think you are." During the days Miriam was beginning to find the monotony of weaving new skin on her hands boring. She had pored over every rusted piece of junk and book in this dusty basement, but nothing made any sense to her. She found herself sitting on her cot, no longer dancing, simply swaying back and forth to a song she sang to herself. The weaving seemed no worse for her lack of dance, so she kept it up.

Come, lass, come to me! We'll meet under the willow tree. It cries for you, it cries for me, A lad to sleep and a lass to see. She didn't know why this song, of all the tunes she knew. It was a sad, widow's song that became popular during the war, nearly thirty years ago. Miriam had a grandson who had gone off to fight and had a gravestone under their own willow. There had been nothing to bury.

Suddenly she noticed that another part of her fórsa she hadn't been able to grab, at least another third looping around in her body, seemed more agitated than it had been. When she called for fórsa to weave, a second strand lurched towards her, and a third. It wanted to be woven now. It wanted to have structure too, and something in her singing was speaking to it. Miriam could hear Eoin in her head: Fascinating! He hadn't mentioned singing could be used as a form, but perhaps she was skipping ahead.

It didn't really matter though - she couldn't make the thread any denser. Perhaps she would be able to as her fórsa skills improved, but for now the single thin thread was all she could handle, and a bigger stream of fórsa would still overwhelm her. But… what if she had two hands? By now gathering and weaving fórsa was something she did in the back of her mind, while she'd daydreamed about the unclouded sun, open waves… and sometimes Eoin, if she was being honest with herself. Could she make two needles?

Two threads? This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it The first few times failed immediately and she had to stop weaving, dizzy with the mental load. But then she realized that the second thread had its own rhythm - an upbeat to Water's downbeat. It made it so much easier to do at the same time - it was almost the same task when she did it this way… gather GATHER… gather GATHER. However hard she tried, the second thread would not form into a needle.

She could get it into the shape for one heartbeat, but it would instantly dissolve. She thought for a while that the trick might be to share the needle, to jump the thread back and forth, but that didn't even come close to working - both threads splattered apart. Miriam gave up on it and went back to weaving normally for about ten seconds until the stubborn streak that had prevented her from giving up for eighty years - no matter how many empty coffins she had to bury - kicked in again. This was possible.

She would figure it out. Did it have to be a needle? Eoin had said there were other visualizations that could work - maybe one of them would help. Unfortunately once she'd gotten the needle going he hadn't mentioned it again. She could wait to ask until night fell, but she was too interested and impatient for that. Miriam was sure she could figure it out. Why a needle anyway? What was it for? For piercing the skin. For creating a new skin. But, was that really necessary?

It was a visualization - there was no real needle. In fact, if what Eoin said was true, there wasn't really even real skin. Just fórsa. She just needed to make her body into denser fórsa with its own path of focus. Did it even need to be skin? Still swaying, and still singing, she tried something new. She gathered the first thread, gathered the second. The first stayed a needle - why fix what wasn't broken? But the second she flattened into a wide, thin strip and with deep breath, pushed inside of herself.

Somehow it felt like this fórsa didn't want to be skin anyway. It wanted deeper roots. So there, it met the bone of her distal phalange, and wrapped around, like a bandage instead of a thread. This she could do in rhythm together: gather, GATHER, thread, WRAP! It was working! It definitely took more concentration, but as she felt her bones accept the new fórsa Miriam could tell it was the same as when she wove her skin. Did she even need to do the needle?

The bandage seemed faster - she was already halfway up her index finger. When she tried to bandage the skin, however, the fórsa just sloughed off. Perhaps there was something to the nature of what skin was - a protection for the body. Shields needed to be pierced. Bones were supports for the body - they could be reinforced. Miriam chuckled to herself. She wondered what Eoin would think of her discovery. ✧✧✧"What have you done?"

Eoin nearly shouted, his three lenses appearing in front of his eye, staring deeply at her hand. Miriam was taken aback by his outburst - this was not the kudos she had been expecting.

"I found a way to weave more fórsa at the same time. I'm able to use twice as much as I was before."

"You don't understand," Eoin said, clearly stricken.

"You're…well. We don't have a word for it. You're… mixing paths."

"What? Like, using bones versus skin?"

"You've infused your bones with Life fórsa. Nature focus. How did you do this?" She described her process to him, starting with the singing and moving on to the simultaneous weaving method. He stared at her blankly, then sighed deeply. Miriam was becoming concerned. Has she done something wrong?

"Singing is the form for Life fórsa," he said.

"You've stumbled onto the weaving method for another path. But… I don't know of anyone else who has ever done what you have here. To do two at the same time is unheard of. It's only possible - I think - because you have such enormous reserves of fórsa, and because…well. Because you're damned brilliant."

"So why aren't you hopping around, saying ' Fantastic!'?" Eoin sighed.

"Create water again, please. Let's see if I'm right." Miriam did as he requested. This time the water that splashed to the table - now more like a small cup's worth - was dirty, polluted with sand and tiny specks of plant matter. She looked up at Eoin.

"What does that mean?"

"Your two fórsa natures are interfering. This is going to make things harder for you, at least in the short term. Water is strongest in purity, at least until you've mastered many more layers of water fórsa. When you can center yourself around sub-foci like Seawater, which is something that you could choose to do later on in your advancement, then a lack of purity is the point." Eoin frowned.

"I'm not saying there's no solution for this. I'm just saying I don't know it. There's also the risk that it could limit your choices as you improve." Miriam scowled.

"I wish you'd given me the whole primer before starting on the assignment."

"You didn't need it. At least, I didn't think so. As you improve your skills with fórsa, new paths open up for you. They don't exist here in the Outer Ring, but if you make your way to the next one, you'll find more options to fórsa natures you can weave. But, someone who chooses Blight will not be able to weave a layer of Cultivation. That fórsa nature is incompatible with their path.

Water is highly flexible and has a lot of choices, but what I don't know is if by also adding Life, you're limiting yourself not to the best possibility - that you could advance through either tree - but the worst one. That you'd only be able to advance to paths compatible with both Water and Life." Miriam rolled her eyes.

"I really don't care, Eoin. I just want to get out of this basement. I'm not some corrupted lab experiment for you to take data on. If that's all I am to you…"

"Of course not," Eoin said, but in a flash she realized she had wounded him somehow.

"I need to think on this. I… I will try to talk to someone who knows more. Just… keep weaving like I showed you. No more Life fórsa. I won't be back tomorrow night - I need to spend my power researching."

"Eoin, I'm - " He was gone in a blink. Miriam was alone.