Mind Your Step, Draft 1, CH 04

“Why isn’t it doing anything?” she grumbled, and Tibs opened an eye. He’d been sensing her move her essence around, send it at the fire, at a bush, a tree.

“What are you trying to do?”

“Something, anything!” she said in exasperation.

“You aren’t at the point where you can just cause anything to happen,” he said, and she glared. “What I mean, is that until you can etch with your element, there are only a few things you’ll be able to do.”

“Fine. How to I etch it, then?”

“How is your reserve?”

More glaring. “Same as it was before.”

“Then you aren’t ready for that.”

If his goal had been to driver her to exasperation, the scream would have been nice. “How about you actually tell me how to my essence isn’t essence.”

“It is essence.”

“You said it wasn’t essence.”

“I said, you need to work out what it means to you for your essence not to be essence.” Glaring again. “It’ll make sense once you work it out. In the meantime. Tell me what you were actually trying to do with it.”

She looked about to scream at him, but closed her mouth. She made fists and opened her hands slowly for a while, the two slowing until. “I started trying to shove the branches of that tree. When nothing happened, I tried with that bush, since its branches are smaller. Then with loose leaves on the ground, and finally I just tried to get the flames to waiver.”

“That one wouldn’t work no matter how much essence you apply.”

“Force is about moving things,” she said with stubborn determination.

“Fire isn’t a ‘thing’, it’s an element. One element can affect another. But it takes more than their raw essence. It’s the way the etching changes what the essence is that makes the interactions possible, but even then, it’s not as simple as adding Kha to the etching. You need to think about….” Her eyes were glazing over. “It’s not easy.”

“How about the leaves on the ground, then? That’s a thing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but also—”

“Abyss, if you’re about to say but ‘also no,’ I’m breaking my promise and hitting you until you’re unconscious and dumping you in the first city for them to deal with you.”

He didn’t comment, taking the threat for the sign of exasperation it was. He picked up a leaf. “This is essence.” He waited until she stopped glaring. “It’s a thing to us, because of all the ways the essences it’s made of interact. Nothing I’ve read explains how that is. Or how it’s difference from weaving essence. I don’t think anyone knows why things around us feel like things, instead of just essence. But that’s important, because you are trying to use essence to affect essence. It’s possible, because things are made of all the elements, so your element has something it can interact with, but the more of it a thing has, the easier it is for yours to interact with it.”

She considered what he said. “So, the bigger something is, the easier it is for me to affect?”

He shook his head. “The more of your essence it has. That tree might be a lot bigger than this leaf. But that doesn’t mean it has significantly more Force essence in it. From what I read, Force isn’t something that’s in anything in significant quantity.”

“So you’re saying that no matter how hard I try, I’m never going to be able to do anything with it.”

“No. I’m saying it’s going to take more work. To start with, you’ll have to concentrate your essence on what you want to affect.”

“And how do I do that?”

He opened his mouth and realized he had a problem. “I don’t remember what the books said about it.” That gave him time to work on it. “And maybe you’ve worked it that enough for now. You’re easier to anger than usual,” he added. “That happens when you’re tired.”

The glare was replaced with suspicion.

“I’m a thief. Noticing details is part of how I survive everyone who wants to stop me.”

She sighed. “Fine. Wake me when it’s my turn at watch.”

Once she’d retired, Tibs moved away.

How had he focused more of his essence together, way back when? When was the last time he’d used raw essence? Raw essence that wasn’t fire. Fire was so hungry that even raw it caused damage.

He channeled water and called out some of the essence, and water formed before him. That hadn’t been what he’d wanted. Pulling the essence apart left him with mist. Pulling that apart with finer mist.

He tried with earth and held pebbles. Pulling that apart left him with smaller pebbles, then soil.

When had he stopped ‘using’ essence it its raw form? When had it become a reflex to make it into the thing he thought of it as? Even Fire, he realized, was the stuff that burned when he called it, instead of the essence of it.

He spent his watch splitting his attention between keeping animals at bay and ‘unlearning’ to make essence what it was.

*

“Tyrone?” someone said. “I feel….”

Tibs ignored the speaker in favor of maintaining the raw cloud of air around him—he kept pulling it into a breeze—while he walked. Who ever this Tyrone was they’d deal with the speaker.

Two days of this, and he hadn’t quite relearned how to pull raw essence without making it into what it was. It was why he worked with air. An errant breeze was easier to explain than water manifesting out of ‘nowhere.’ Once he had the breeze, he needed to untangle the essence, so he had its raw version. But that kept trying to reform. He was confident it was him doing it, since he remembered how difficult it had been to go from using raw essence to having it be what it was.

So long as Heather didn’t look in his direction before he noticed it, she wouldn’t see his eyes.

“Tyrone,” the voice said again, sounding more insistent, if not particularly stronger, “something’s not right.”

He let go of the essence and looked around for the threat. Only once he confirmed there was nothing that he realized the speaker had been the core, and that Tyrone was the name he’d give Heather. The only name the core would have heard him say.

Heather was a few pace behind him. Throwing essence at bushes without effect.

He spoke at a whisper. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” it replied. “I feel…. Something’s not right.”

It sounded oddly weak.

Focusing, the oddity of the core struck him. Where had all the essence gone? “Have you been using your essence?”

“On what?” It sounded like there should have been irritation, but the weakness just made it sound tired.

He focused more, even putting a hand in his pouch in case that let him sense more details, but the crystal containing the essence was intact. How had it lost so much essence if there were no cracks? Why wasn’t it pulling essence from around them, the way he did without even thinking about it.

Could the core be dying? If it couldn’t replenish its reserve, then it….

Where was its reserve? It had essence in its core, but wasn’t that more like the essence in Tibs’s body? It wasn’t something he could pull on to etch, or at least not without suffering for it.

When the Them had cracked Sto’s core and caused him to lose his essence, Sto had been dying until Tibs had given him a new shell in the form of Serba’s body. Well, Serba had pretty much ensured he did it.

He glanced in Heather’s direction and dismissed the thought. Serba had been dying herself. She’d seen it as her one chance to do something for someone else, finally. Heather was fine, and even if he explained things. He didn’t think she’d be interested. She had people she cared about.

Both had been dying. Together, Sto had survived. He sort of remembered there being something of Serba as well, but he hadn’t had time to speak with him. The guild had come for Tibs. Then he’d been in a cell, then drained, then he had escaped and had to leave Kragle Rock, never to return.

He needed to do something. He didn’t want the core to die. Fortunately, from what he sensed, he had time. “I’ll work on helping once we’ve made camp.”

The core didn’t reply.

*

“I’m going to see if I can hunt something,” he said after setting up the hide stretcher he’d made.

“Don’t we have enough wolf meat already?” Heather replied irritably. She’d cursed every little thing that had gone wrong while they made camp.

“I’m going to need more hide. The meat is just bonus loot.”

“And what am I supposed to do while you’re off having fun?”

“How about you rest?”

“I don’t need rest. I need you to—”

“You don’t need me until—”

“Just fucking tell me how to do it!”

“Even if I knew how to explain it in a way that would make sense to you, you are too tired to take it in. Rest Heather. Just enjoy the fire and some food and don’t try to get your essence to do anything. There isn’t a monster at the end of this trek you need to be ready to confront. You aren’t in a dungeon where you’ll die if you don’t immediately master your element. You have time.”

“I don’t fucking care! Do you have any idea how this is making me feel? This not being able to make it do anything?”

He took a chance. “Is it anything like not being able to do anything about all the people around you looking at you like something to use and throw away broken?” the memories weren’t fresh anymore, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t trying to prove anything more than she could be in a worse situation.

The shock on her face said it worked.

“Just rest, Heather. You’re allowed not to succeed immediately. You’ll be able to think about the problem better if you are rested. I’ll be back before full dark.” He didn’t wait for a reply.

“Do people do that?” the core asked, weakly. “Use you until you break, then throw you away?”

“Some.” It hadn’t happened as often as he’d seen it happen to others, and he liked to think no one had broken him. But having his work toward gathering scraps to eat being taken away had hurt more than the beating he’d received in the process of having it taken.

“That seems wasteful. Why not just absorb you?”

“People can’t do that.” He didn’t mention people eating people. Only the most desperate had resorted to that, and hadn’t lived long once others found out. Even on his Street, there had been things considered irredeemable.

“Oh.”

He pulled in his sense. He needed the precision to tell small animals apart from the rest of the forest. He suspected any animal would do; Serba had been much larger than Sto’s core, but he didn’t want to put this one into something that would be difficult to control once it learned how to use the body. Sto had managed it quickly.

He sensed foxes and cats, but they were too large and could be dangerous if the core decided to use them in an attempt to gain its freedom. He had no idea what the core’s essence would do to his ability to use Fever on it once it spread. Of if it spread. Sto’s core had been cracked and that might have been why his essence spread within Serba.

This might not work with the core intact.

He would deal with that, if that was the case.

He sensed a multitude of rodents, and the idea of putting the core in a rat amused him. Payback, of a sort of how terrifying rats had been to him at one time. But there were small. He figured he needed something much large than the core, while still being tractable.

The animal he settled on was a large squirrel, which he held in place through Fever.

“This is probably going to be strange,” he told the core, while cutting the animal’s chest open. “But it should help you. Something like this saved Sto’s life.” He wrapped his essence around the squirrel to keep its life essence from leaking out faster than he worked.

“What are you doing?” the core asked. Instead of an answer, Tibs put it inside the squirrel, then closed the hole he made.

One of his concern was immediately alleviated when the core’s essence pushed out of the shell, wrapping around that of the animal. It seemed slow to him, but it could be his memory, or the fact Sto’s core had been cracked.

While that happened, he worked on the tractable part of the situation. Making a cage out of wood was simple enough and barely required essence. Some to make sure the branches he used for bars remained attached to the base, the vines tying them in place being only for show.

Somewhere in the middle of making it, he heard the core’s protests against what was happening, even if he wasn’t touching it. It feeling like the body was taking its essence. A glance showed him the animal twitching, and sensing showed him the colors that had been contained within the core, spreading through the animal’s channels.

“What did you do to me?” the core demanded when he placed the still twitching body inside the cage. “What is this thing?”

“It’s a body. Your body, now.”

“But I can’t do anything with it!”

“That’s because your essence is still spreading. Once it’s done, you—”

“I don’t want it to spread. I want it back inside me.”

“It’s going to help you live.”

“How?” it asked, dubious.

“I don’t know. I just know that it will. Sto’s core was cracked when I put him in a body, and then he was better.”

“Really? How is he now?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in decades.”

“So he could be dead! Take me out of this thing.”

“Just wait, once you’re used to it you’ll—”

“Ohhhhh. What is this?” the core asked in awe. The body was no longer twitching. Its eyes were open, moving left and right.

“That would be the trees. Their branches, their leaves.”

“I want to jump around them,” it said excited it. “Wait. No, I don’t. What are those things? Why am I thinking about…. Oh, I think that tastes good. What would I want to do that with that? That’d disgusting. Is that really what you do?”

Tibs laughed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. But I think you are thinking things the squirrel thought about. When Sto was in Serba, he seemed to be both of them.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t like it. Make it stop. Oh, this could be fun. Never mind. No. No. That is…. Okay, maybe not that bad.” It grabbed at a bar and pulled itself to its feet. The long tail wrapped around its body. “Oh, that feels nice. Makes me warmer.” It looked around. “Why is there so much?”

“That’s the world. There is a lot more of it than what you see.”

“But why?”

“Because that’s how it was made.”

“By who?”

He laughed. “No one knows. But a lot of people claim they do, and force people to live the way they say.”

“People are strange.”

“Yes. We are.”

It reached through the bars and grabbed at a twig. “Why do I want to do this?” it asked while gnawing on it. “This is…n’t so bad. Do you do that a lot? I feel like I do. Like this thing did. This is confusing.”

“No, I don’t eat twigs. I don’t think squirrels do either, but I don’t know much about them?”

“Not in all those books you read?”

“I expect there are books on squirrels. I just never read any, and didn’t bother paying attention to any mention of them when they were mentioned in the books I read. Squirrels aren’t that important.”

“Hey, I am important. No. I’m not a squirrel. I’m a dungeon. So I don’t care if you didn’t read about them.” It put a hand on its face in a very people gesture, then stared at it. “Why did I do that? Never mind. This is all very confusing.”

“Do you still feel weak?” by the forcefulness of its tone, Tibs figured it was better.

“Of course I’m still weak. Did you think that just because you put me in this thing I would….”

“Yes?” Tibs asked, standing.

“I have more essence. Not all of them, but where did that come from? Hey, what are you doing?” it demanded when Tibs picked up the cage. “Stop shaking that about. It’s making it hard to stand.”

“Then you should sit. I can’t do much about the shaking while walking.”

It did. “Where is all this essence from?”

“The body, I’m guessing. Yours seems to have spread everywhere, made it all yours.” It was interesting how, as far as his sense told him, the squirrel wasn’t a living animal the way the others were. The Fever was now mixed with the rest of the other essences, although there was more of that one than the others.

He wondered what it meant for what the core could do with the body.

“Oh. I have an influence! Not much of one, but I can sense what’s in it!” it reached for nothing and pulled that to itself. “Get in here! Why isn’t it doing what I tell it to?”

“It’s not your essence.”

“It’s in my influence.”

“Then it doesn’t work the same way for us. Those of us with a body, instead of a dungeon.”

“I don’t know if I like it.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

It snorted. “What was that?”

Tibs realized the sound came from the body. “We call it a snort.”

“Why did it make it?”

“You made it—”

“I didn’t.”

“—because you were dismissive of what I said.”

“Okay. I was.”

“You were probably going to say something derisive about me, or what I said.”

“I was going to demand to know how you, someone who’s never been a dungeon, can imagine I would ever get used to this tiny thing you stuck me in.”

“You expressed that with a snort.”

“But I didn’t do anything.”

“Bodies sometimes do things for us without us thinking about it.”

“Why, and how do you stand it?”

“The why is debated too many books for me to bother reading all of them. As for standing it?” Tibs smiled. “You get used to it.”

It snorted. “I didn’t tell it to do that!”

The rest of the walk was a mix of it looking around and asking questions, and Tibs answering them, getting snorted at. The core, getting frustrated at the act, and returning to looking around. Tibs stopped answering when he approached the camp.

“I asked you why everything’s getting dark,” the core asked, and Tibs remained silent. “Really? Why am I getting the silent treatment all of a sudden?” It kicked at a bar, then stared at its feet. “Stop moving without me telling you to.”

“That doesn’t look like a wolf’s body.” Heather said snidely when she saw Tibs.

“Couldn’t find one.”

“So you decided to settle with…. Is that a squirrel?”

“No,” the core said, while its body chittered. “I’m a dungeon. Don’t you…. How can I hear that?” It looked around. “Is that what spoke?”

“That’s Heather,” Tibs said.

“Oh. Please tell me you didn’t get yourself a pet,” she said.

“He didn’t get anything,” the core said, chittering.

“Is it chittering at me?” she asked.

“It’s not a pet. It was injured, and felt bad leaving it in the forest.”

“Hey, you hurt me. I mean it. I mean….” The scream in Tibs’s head was accompanied by the squirrel snarling and going to the opposite side of the small cage.

“That thing’s acting weird,” Heather said. “Might be best if you set it free.”

“It’s best if I don’t. Not yet, anyway.”

She stared at him. “Are you going to gather a lot of injured animals on our trek?” she asked mockingly.

“No, it’s the only one.”

She rolled her eyes. “And what makes it so special?”

“I’m a dungeon,” the core replied, and the way the squirrel looked at her, Tibs figured it was aiming for a glare. “That’s what makes me so special, you….person. Tell it.”

“No.”

“No, it isn’t special?” Heather asked.

“And why not?”

Tibs looked from her to the squirrel, and the difficulty he’d caused himself settled in. “I should have thought this through a little better.”