Chapter 16

“Temper your expectations,” said Naomi, sitting cross-legged on the floor of Scorio’s chamber.

It was the following night cycle. She’d left him the moment the chalk’s barriers had fallen, promising to return, but clearly needing to collect herself before imparting any wisdom.

So he’d spent the remaining day pacing, collecting gruel, alternating between bouts of exhilaration and fear that she’d break her promise and murder him.

Second Rust had faded into Second Clay, and as the sun-wire had dulled to a burnished wire that did nothing to illuminate the city and sheets of spiraling rain had fallen across the ruins, Scorio had settled down to wait, staring out of the sole large window in his room over the ruins and the fiery glow that emanated from their depths here and there.

To sit and wait, willing the Nightmare Lady to return, or Naomi, as she’d reluctantly introduced herself before quitting his trapped corridor. Seeking through sheer determination to overwhelm any reservations she might harbor and compel her to appear.

When finally she appeared in his window, having scaled the massive blocks of stone that formed a natural staircase from the street below, she was still in her human form, a dark silhouette against the night’s velvety darkness.

And seeing her there, almost shockingly short after her gaunt monstrous form, her wet, dark hair framing her pale face, Scorio felt a sweet thrill of affirmation. She was going to uphold her end of the bargain.

“Given that I fully expected to die just this morning, I’d say they’re pretty damn tempered,” said Scorio, forcing himself to not smile.

Naomi frowned, her expression somewhere north of sullen anger and west of petulant resentment, then sighed and gathered her thick hair in both hands, twisting it into a wet rope and thrusting it back over a shoulder.

“I know very little.” Her tone was creeping toward defensive. “I’m not some illustrious trainer from the Academy, with a wealth of elixirs and pills and treasures at my disposal. I can reveal the basics as I understand them, and then you’re on your own.”

“Which will be infinitely more than I know now,” said Scorio, rubbing his palms on his knees, moving to sit cross-legged before her.

“The path you want to walk is a brutal one,” she said, glaring at him. “You’re asking for a lifetime of pain and frustration, with no guarantees that you’ll make it far.”

“Sure,” said Scorio, tone easy, accepting. “That much has been made abundantly clear to me. But I’m ready to work. To learn.”

She frowned as if disappointed that he’d not immediately given up, then sighed. “Fine. A deal is a deal. You can see your Heart?”

Scorio narrowed his eyes as he stared into the middle distance and summoned the glittering hunk of black stone.

“Yes. It’s about the size of my fist and hangs in darkness. It’s made of a black stone, maybe obsidian?”

“That’s right. Can you sense the mana in the air?”

“The mana.” He ran his tongue over his dry bottom lip. “You mean the black clouds?”

“Sure.”

“Yes.” And there they were, fulminous and heavy, all around them but invisible to the eye unless he focused on his Heart first. “I see them. Why were they metallic grey in the skycrane yard, and a reddish-brown elsewhere? Does—?”

“Can you move the mana with your will?”

Scorio bit back his questions and nodded, still envisioning the Heart before him, the black clouds all around. “Yes. Slowly. I—ah—imagine I’m holding a huge wooden paddle and stir it around my heart till the clouds—the mana—begins to respond.”

“A huge wooden paddle,” she said, and for the first time, he heard something other than bitterness or annoyance in her voice. “That’s adorable. You’ll need to work on that technique, but for now, fine. Grab your paddle. But don’t just swirl the mana about your heart. Direct the mana into your heart.”

“Into it?” He blinked, lost sight of the Heart and black clouds both. “Like, as I did with the treasures?”

“It’s amazing that you managed to activate these.” She reached into her black, ragged robes and pulled out the bridge and steel bar.

“Not that hard. I worked the clouds till they were really moving, then poured them into the treasures, as if they were a funnel.”

Naomi studied him skeptically.

“What?” Scorio sat up straighter. “You don’t believe me?”

“Of course I believe you. It’s just… improbable, that you’d be able to do that before igniting your Heart. But yes. It’s a similar technique. But these treasures are inert, they’re not part of you. Your Heart is. And thus you can pull the mana into your Heart just as much as you can direct it with your huge wooden paddle.”

“All right, I didn’t mean that it was that big,” said Scorio. “Like, a normal-sized wooden paddle.” Naomi raised an eyebrow at him, and he flushed. “Fine. I’ll try that.”

Scorio summoned his Heart once more, focused on the heavy, sooty clouds, and began to stir them, to swing them about his Heart with great, laborious sweeps of his invisible… paddle. The clouds responded sluggishly as always but gradually picked up speed.

It was strange, working thus, while Naomi stared at him. Her gaze was direct, neutral, gauging him. He avoided her eyes and focused on the clouds. When they were moving at a good clip, he inhaled deeply and sought to guide them into his Heart.

And failed.

The clouds simply continued to swoop around it.

Scorio frowned. “It’s not working.”

“Are you pulling?”

“Pulling on what? The Heart’s just hanging there.”

“Release the mana.”

He did so, gratefully.

“Focus on your Heart. Get as close to it as you can.”

Scorio did so. He saw his Heart again, faceted and sharp-edged, hanging in nothingness. Brought himself closer to it, or it closer to him—he wasn’t sure which. Slowly it grew larger, and he saw with greater clarity its shape, studied how the edges ran and divided around the facets, how it was larger on the top and tapered down to a dull point below.

“Now visualize reaching for it, imagine your hand moving toward your Heart and sinking into it.”

Scorio bit his lower lip as he frowned, his focus intense. He did as she bid, tried to imagine his hand extending out, grasping for the black stone. Nothing appeared, no arm, no hand. If anything, the Heart seemed to retreat.

“I’m not sure I understand,” he said, after several long minutes.

“All right. Your huge paddle. You realize that you’re not actually summoning one, correct?”

“Right,” he said wryly.

“Your paddle is your will. You’re stirring the ambient mana with the strength of your being, of your mind and spirit and heart. That is what you need to use to connect with your Heart. Reach for it again, but this time imagine you’re using your paddle. Maybe that’ll be easier for you.”

Again he brought the Heart as close as he could, but this time he imagined himself grasping that large oar, its blade as long as his forearm, plain and sturdy and dependable. He directed its end toward the Heart and pushed.

He fully expected the paddle to knock the Heart away, but instead, he felt it slide smoothly into the great stone. And in that moment, an awareness blossomed within him, a connection to the Heart that hadn’t been there before, as it went from an opaque image to a tangible, heavy core within his being, still with its black, faceted aspect but now encapsulated by the same sense that told him even with his eyes shut where his limbs were, his hands, where his body began and ended.

“There!” He grinned, elated, only to see Naomi’s face register not a flicker of emotion, her gaze remaining as deadpan as before. “There. I, ah, did it.”

“Great. This would have been an agonizingly long week if you couldn’t do even that much.”

“Ah, yes,” said Scorio, smoothing away his smile. “So—bring the mana into my Heart?”

“Bring the mana into your Heart.”

This time it was fundamentally different. He swirled the black, turgid clouds about but for the first time felt the Heart as a part of him, a funnel in its own right. He felt the hunger within it, the ability to drink deep of those clouds just as the treasures had done.

Working mightily, he swirled the mana around and around, and then directed the black smoke towards the Heart while inhaling at the same time, pulling on the smoke from within the Heart as best he could.

The black mana sank into the stone and disappeared without a trace. But Scorio felt it within, felt it grow heavy and still, filling his Heart like water did a sponge.

“There!” He punched a fist into the air, not caring that Naomi’s only response was to arch an eyebrow. “I did it! What now? How do I ignite?”

“Ignite?” She laughed, leaning back on one outstretched arm. “Scorio, you’re decades away from igniting, entire lifetimes.”

“Wait, what?”

“All right, maybe not decades, but you’ve got a long way to go. Look. You ignite your inner flame when you apply sufficient tension to your Heart after saturating it with ambient mana. You just took a sip of the poorest mana in hell. I barely felt the reduction. You’re nowhere near saturated, and even if you were, you’d then have to learn to hold onto the mana while applying tension.”

“Hold up.” Scorio felt the mana he’d taken into his Heart begin to leak out, and with a wave of frustration allowed it all to slip free. “I don’t understand. Apply tension?”

“Yes. Tension. Though the fact that you’re out here, cheating your way to victory against me so as to learn this stuff bodes well for you. Because tension is the friction we all feel between the object of our desires and the reality of our shortcomings. The greater your ambitions, the greater your frustration at failing to achieve them, and the greater the turmoil that will roil your Igneous Heart.”

Scorio shook his head sharply. “I don’t understand. Frustration is what causes my Heart to catch fire?”

“It’s the fundamental driver of every Great Soul’s climb to power,” said Naomi. “It’s why most can’t make it past Dread Blaze while only one in a million makes it to Imperator. Power comes to those who truly desire it, by means of the frustration they feel at not yet having achieved it.”

“So… Great Souls who stop at Dread Blaze do so because they don’t want more power?”

Her smile was dark. “Precisely. No matter what they say out loud, they have grown content. They achieve what they really want—perhaps a little money, a little authority, some security—and stop striving for more. Because acquiring power takes work, Scorio. It takes pain and sacrifice and unyielding resolve. And once people attain as much power as they need to satisfy their inner ambitions, they stop growing.”

“Huh.” Scorio stared at her, nonplussed. “But… what if you don’t have ambition? Or goals? Does that mean you can’t grow?”

“You’re just a Char,” she said dismissively. “You don’t even know how the world works. How could you have real ambition? You’re all reincarnated with enough drive to fuel you to at least Emberling or the like. Great Souls are by their very nature ambitious. Once you learn more about the world, you’ll figure out whether you want to keep growing.”

“I see. And you? You’re happy as an Emberling?”

Her thick brows drew together. “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about your first baby steps. First, you need to focus on saturating your Heart. That’s easier at the Academy, which is built over a massive trap of Iron mana, the best you can get here in Bastion. Further, there they give you all manner of help in the form of treasures which help you Ignite at much lower levels of saturation. But here?”

Her smile was dark, her gaze turned predatory, her amusement at his expense. “Out here in the ruins, you’ll be working with Coal mana, the worst of the worst. You’ll have no help, no elixirs, no pills. You’ll have to do it all by yourself, and odds are you’ll do such a poor job of it your Heart will be pathetically weak even if you do manage to ignite.”

“Wait, weak?” Scorio felt his pulse begin to race. “Why? I’m willing to do the work. Is it the Coal mana that will limit me?”

“Indirectly, yes.” She lowered her chin so that her black hair pressed close about each cheek. “The Coal mana is crude, hard to work. You might even grow stronger by limiting yourself to it, but your control will be abysmal. In the Academy, they artificially help their students pack their Hearts with astounding amounts of pure, high-density mana. They can saturate themselves to the point of stupidity, and ignite at absurdly high levels, setting the baseline of the Hearts miles ahead of where they might otherwise get. You? You’ll be sipping Coal for years, exhausting the local supplies too quickly to build up a deep reservoir.”

Scorio stared at her blankly.

“What?” She inclined her head to one side, a lopsided smile curving her lips. “You asked me to teach you for a week. Not to lie to you and make you feel better.”

Scorio tongued the inside of his cheek then leaped to his feet to pace, unable to remain still. “So the more you can saturate your Heart before igniting, the more powerful you’ll be in the long term?”

“That’s right.”

“And the Academy makes that easy for its students?”

She nodded.

“But out here, I’ll burn through the Coal mana too quickly to build up a high saturation point, so that… I mean, will I even be able to ignite?”

“There are three parts to the equation. Mana is just one element. The purer, the denser, and the quicker it regenerates, the better. But you can compensate for terrible mana with quality training or the natural quality of your Igneous Heart.”

“Natural quality of my Heart?” He stopped pacing and turned to face her. “How so?”

“Not all Hearts are created equal, though in the long run, these differences don’t matter much. All Hearts vary in depth and reactivity. The deeper your Heart, the more mana it can hold, the longer you can sustain your techniques and powers, but the harder it is at first to ignite. On the other hand, the more reactive your Heart, the more it responds to training, and the less mana and training it requires to burn.”

He dropped to a crouch before her. “So if I had a highly reactive Heart…?”

Naomi shrugged one shoulder, indifferent. “Sure, you’d manage to ignite, even on Coal. But you’d have a very shallow heart due to a lack of saturation.”

“But what if I had a very reactive heart and a very deep one?”

She moved her head from side to side. “Deep hearts are good. They give you stamina. But they make it exponentially harder to ignite. I suppose this could be offset by an especially reactive Heart, but even so… on Coal? You’d be in trouble.”

Scorio rubbed at his jawline, trying to keep his frustration at bay. “What about the blue vials? That’s better mana, right?”

Naomi’s tone grew chilly. “It is. But they’re mine. Not. Yours.”

Scorio stared at her, but she held his glare with indifferent ease, and finally, he stood once more to resume pacing. “What if I train in areas of better mana? Like where there’s that reddish-brown kind, or find hidden pockets of Iron mana?”

“Hidden pockets of Iron mana?” She grinned. “Why don’t you snatch up piles of forgotten elixirs while you’re at it?”

“Fine, but the reddish-brown mana—”

“Copper.”

“Copper mana, whatever. What if I train where there’s Copper mana? Would that make enough of a difference?”

“First, those locations are hard to find and carefully protected. But sure. Say you find a way to train where there’s Copper. You’d still have to take into account its regeneration rate, as you’d need a lot to saturate your Heart, and would quickly use up a single location’s reserves. But yes. It would help.”

“Great. Then that’s what I’ll do.”

“Still won’t be enough to give you more than an average to weak Heart,” said Naomi, eyes glittering. “The baseline for every Great Soul is enhanced Iron from the Academy. You’ll be locking yourself in at weak Copper. You’ll be at a disadvantage for the rest of your life.”

Scorio stood still, glaring at Naomi, but tore away his gaze when he realized that none of this was her fault.

“This world’s not fair,” she said. “The sooner you accept that the Houses hold all the cards and never, ever plan to relinquish them, the better it’ll go for you. Think of it this way: why does the Academy have a monopoly on Great Souls?”

Scorio scrunched his face up in confusion. “A monopoly on Great Souls? What do you mean?”

“Never mind. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Look. I didn’t take you on for this week because I intended you to get nowhere.” She rose smoothly to her feet and dusted off her palms on her hips. “Practice drawing Coal mana into your Heart. You’ve already made decent progress for an ignorant Char. Once you can drain this whole room of its mana, you’ll be ready for the next step.”

“Next step?” He fought hard to hide his disappointment. “What’s that going to be?”

She eyed him over one shoulder as she stepped back out onto the windowsill. “Training. Learning to apply pressure to your Heart. And in that department, at least, you’re in luck.”

“Oh yeah? And why’s that?”

Her smile was just shy of sadistic. “Because I’m exceptionally good at making people realize the reality of their shortcomings.”

And with that, she stepped off the ledge and dropped out of sight.