His negotiating prowess had paid solid dividends. Taipan would do exactly as she wanted to do and there was nothing he could do about it. Additionally, she had revealed to him that she had a vial of some pinkish sludge that, when he'd voiced his suspicions, she confirmed proudly was the reagents necessary for her [Hunter's Mark] ritual to be able to locate him anywhere he ran.
*Cough* All of the reagents.
"Just keep that in your belt pouch then do you?" He'd questioned with some irritability.
"Yes. The other three identical vials I keep elsewhere Glade Chief. You will not find them. But I will find you wherever you go. I wish you to remember that, whenever idiot notions of leaving me behind roam through that worm eaten slush you keep inside your skull. Remember also what I will do to you when I catch you, Ulric." She'd threatened, smiling.
It was not a good smile. Not a friendly thing at all. More a baring of fangs, intended to let the prey know that its final destination was upon it. She was every inch her namesake when she smiled like that. Cold, calculating, vicious, and capable of immense harm without hesitation. Ulric had a feeling that smile was the last sight of many an enemy dying at her feet.
"Fine. Fine I said, you win. I'll find some way to convince you how awful an idea it is for you to accompany me." He gave ground.
"Maybe your parents will have some way to put you to rights." That last was muttered, a half thought.
"Mother Vedyr fetched Father Bald'rt from Prosper when he lost his mind and drug him back, paralyzed from the neck down by [Broad-leaf Yellow Star] poison. She did not allow him to move from his rooms for three months, until he swore he would never do so without her again, and only with the full strength of Iriel at his back. Who is it you think I take after more, Ulric, my powerful jester of a father or the Heartwood Spear of Iriel?" Taipan asked rhetorically.
He didn't bother answering, they both knew.
Back in the new apartment Taipan told him that Instructor Gother was ready to receive them at the normal time and place, if Ulric was up to it.
Ulric looked at her with surprise writ full across him, she must have gone out before he awoke to tell Gother Ulric hadn't exploded or gone elemental, the two most common fates of a failed awakening.
"Oh! Thanks, Taipan. Umm…okay, yeah, I've got questions. I know we haven't talked about what happened out there but I've still sort of not gotten my head all the way around it. Maybe the two of you will be able to tell me if I'm just off my rocker." Ulric said, his voice going distant as he thought about the events on the forest bluff.
"This 'rocker' of yours lies on the bottom of the deepest trench of the deepest Svirtalfin mine so long lost you will sooner find the heart of a dungeon than rumor of it." He was informed by his Shadow.
"[Harpy]." He libeled her in return.
"[Addled Drake]." She bantered.
He was certain she'd made that last thing up and so declared himself the winner. Not that it mattered. Certainly, it wouldn't be the case that he had a long running mental tally of the results of their verbal spars. A mental cross went across a set of four imagined chalk marks to indicate a fifth victory. He'd count the rest up later.
Anyway, he was stalling. Time to go talk to the old mage and see what he'd done to himself.
Easy silence followed them through the halls, pavilions, and walkways of Irielhos. The clangen and clamor of Elves were mere background noise now, barely registering to him. Truly, a guy can adapt to about anything given enough time.
Ulric held his questions, Taipan had previously demonstrated enough lack of interest or particular wisdom on the matter of magery to render herself immune to his questions. If he wanted to know how to set an ambush for Otherkin or how to deceive a pack of [Shadow wolves] into taking poison, Taipan was your one stop shop for volumes of knowledge. As soon as he veered away from that, however, he was swiftly buried in noncommittal shrugs and "I have heard it so's". Best to see a mage about magic.
In a few minutes, the twirling suns having crossed well past their zenith, Ulric found himself once more standing on the amphitheater floor with one Instructor Gother, eldest Aes'r of the Iriel'en.
The old elf stroked his beard as Ulric descended the stairs, murmuring who knows what Elf gobbeltygook.
As Ulric presented himself respectfully, awaiting the elder Elf to have first say, a courtesy of the Iriel'en he'd come to adopt in his months of training, the Archmage looked him over with sharp Gold and green flecked eyes, bushy brows drawn down in study.
"You are not a changeling. Nor an elemental. I can smell no sign that your core will undergo supercritical resonance and annihilate you where you stand, killing us all. Then it seems, against all odds, that you have lived. Good. I am always disappointed when a promising student scatters himself across the forest." Gother said, without inflection.
If Ulric thought he had a dry sense of humor, Gother was the unmatched Atacama of wits. At no point had Ulric conclusively determined that the wizend Elf had made a joke, but some of his statements were a little too on the nose to be accidental. Soldiering on, Ulric had to accept that all of those listed possibilities were real events, not contrived for the sake of entertainment.
Damn. They had completely undersold the whole awakening event. Ulric figured now was the time to just go in feet first.
"I don't want to alarm anybody but I think I met god. One of them anyway." He blurted.
Two pairs of fine, Elven eyebrows rose, though none spoke.
"I went through the process, as Shor explained it to me and as Bathe and Vedyr instructed, cycling my mana, attuning the my core as purely to the lightning mana as I could, as wholly Ceraun as I was able, and then began to infuse my flesh, purging the unaspected energies. As this progressed, more or less as described, I began to build my isolation shell of Ceraun. At that point, some real fucked up stuff started to occur around me." Ulric recounted.
"First of all, the unaspected mana inside my body snapped into attunement with the rest, in a way that's never happened. I always had to sort of force it along, massage it into the right wavelength. Not then. As soon as the shell started to come to completion, boom, the internalized wild mana phased in with the mana I was holding in my core." He continued, noting an appearance of concern on Gother's features and confusion on Taipans.
So. That part was atypical after all. Neither said anything though so Ulric moved on to the spooky bit.
"As the shell solidified, so did all the purged mana, and I was sitting in a pool of pure Ceraun. Sometime in there a storm gathered out of nothing, in frigid winter, and lightning started firing between clouds and falling to the ground around me. Something with sentience reached out of that chaos and grabbed me. I felt or saw or imagined, something, a massive bolt of lightning carry me into the sky, beyond the sky, and there, I saw a massive being of pure mana sitting in space."
Gother was now in shock and Taipan seemed convinced that Ulric had been hitting the Morphinator again. Nothing for it now, he had to finish.
"We called them sprites on my world, manifestations of the solar wind colliding with the electromagnetic field of our planet. It looked similar, but that thing was aware. It tried to connect with me, some part of it wanted to, I dunno, save me or help me or something, only it didn't know how. All it wanted was to…connect everyone to everything to everywhere. It was, I don't know, as if it didn't want anyone to be alone. I almost went with it but held to myself and it let go. When I gained awareness of myself again, the entire area was a lightning ravaged waste land and my shell was totally gone. My core was also awakened and I swear to you now, I can still feel that whatever the fuck it was up there, waiting. I…think it's Ceraun. You know. Like. All of it." Ulric said, losing his concern for being potentially insane.
At this point, he just needed to know what he'd seen up there. If it was a delusion born of temporary nuttiness he was totally okay with that. If it wasn't, he had to reorganize how he thought of the upper limits of what he considered possible. His quote of Shakespeare to Taipan so long ago rang ironically in his head. More in Heaven and Earth indeed.
It was Gother who eventually broke the spell. He was as severe and serious as Ulric had ever seen him.
"What you have just told me, you should never tell another soul as long as you live, Ulric. No one. Ever. There are debates thousands of years old on the natures of the elements, of the gods and their forms. If some of the orders and cults that occupy Aesvartalfheim hear what you have described they would kill you. Either for blasphemy or to raise you as a saint of their order. There are writings a bare handful of the most ancient and learned Aes'r and Svartalfin, myself included, can read. They describe the existence of Prime Elementals, gods, who are the desires and will of the elements made whole." The wizard said, grimly.
"Few there are who ever make contact with them, not and remain whole. I believe your contact with the Eternal Gaze put a sort of safety net around you, a buffer of its own will, else you'd have been consumed. None who awaken experience this thing though, this is a matter for archmages." He continued, still not quite believing.
"It is that freakish thing inside you, that godtouched core. Never should you have had so much raw mana sitting around inside you. When you awakened it, you pulled so greatly on its energies that you called Ceraun, the prime, you held its attention for a moment. Catkin are said to have a dozen lives but you have burned through a score of them to be here now." Finished Gother in a stunned whisper.
That was enough to properly scare a former professional geek into submission. Meeting a god went right into his Tell No One box with a nice fat padlock to see it buried in his subconscious.
"Then I'm not crazy?" Ulric checked.
"Oh, you're crazier than nine [Berserkir Hornets] in a jar of [Evernight sap].” Gother the Wise told him in the first break of that Elf's composure that Ulric had witnessed.
“But you aren't delusional and, that is better than you are allowed to ask for Glade Chief." Concluded the Wizard more calmly.
Ulric rubbed his temples at that judgment. Whatever happened to his dreams of living in a shack in the woods? How did this turn into some kind of…trip down the Odyssey? It hadn't worked out so very damned well for Ulysses and Ulric wasn't geared for this kind of godshit. Terrestrial nonsense was already doing a number on him.
Focus Einar. What of this can you use?
"Alright, alright, before my Shadow explodes from holding herself in," Ulric began, directing a pointed stare at the ever so slightly shaking form of his beautiful Huntress bodyguard, "What does this mean for the awakening process? Did it work? Is the crisis over now?" He asked, stressing that last part.
He dearly needed to check off some crisis boxes.
The bearded Elf nodded simply at that, giving Ulric some good news, at last. "The awakening is complete, you will not kill yourself from mana resonance now. Later, it is within the realm of possibility that you are disintegrated by Ceraun's direct touch, but such is the eventual fate of all Archmages. I myself cannot draw on my reserves too greatly or Deyndro will make a statue of me, or perhaps, a sapling of the [Heartwood], if I am worthy."
"Does that happen to everyone? This…elementalization?" Ulric asked.
A definitive cutting motion of the wide sleeved arm killed that notion.
"Absolutely not. Most mages never come close to the root of their powers. Even Weavers, masters of their art, are mostly too distant from the truth of things to find the attention of the Primes. It is possible that those classes that are ultimately refined may come close to it but I have not witnessed it or been handed evidence sufficient to convince me that it has happened. Those classed so are all too grounded in reality to properly lose themselves to the substrate of existence. Finding a Root Anchor in your classes is virtually the only way to imprint oneself into the world in such a way as to prevent your eventual annihilation." Explained Gother, as if that clarified anything.
He'd lost Ulric about half way through that but Ulric had firmly decided not to probe any more into it. Every time the old Elf spoke, he added existential horror to Ulric's life.
"Allllrriiiighty then. Sorry I asked, a bit. What's changed, for me? How does this process, impending doom aside, alter how I use magic or manipulate my core?" Ulric asked, trying to get this conversation onto a useful track.
"Finally, a pertinent question." Commented his Shadow from the side.
You know what Taipan? Ulric bit back a retort. Focus. She's decided to fuck with you now. Probably comeuppance for the plan to leave her behind. Deal with her later.
Even Gother glanced at her, a not so subtle suggestion for her to butt out if she wasn't going to contribute.
Ulric resisted the absolutely inane urge to offer the skeletal Archmage a high five.
"Let us find out directly Ulric." Suggested Gother, raising his hand and a three meter tall pillar of solid wood from the floor that fairly radiated strength.
"Now that your core is attuned, to Ceraun I am assuming, that is the native form of your mana. This does NOT mean that you are limited only to this one mana form, a failing of many Adepts. Just because you are now stronger and swifter in the use of this mana you should not neglect the use of others. You mentioned that Shor taught you to oscillate through mana forms. This is a good thing. Let me first show you a practice methodology for relearning how to do so. Now that your mana is naturally attuned you will need to go through the process of unattuning it, reverting it back into the raw waveform, to be shaped anew to whatever purpose you need." Lectured Gother, back in his element.
"Attend."
Damnit. Things always got difficult when they said that.
True to form, a gaseous sphere of greenish brown mana solidified into what appeared to be a billiard ball of oak. The ball dissolved to become an enormous water droplet. And again to form a shard of ice. A ball of blue flame. A globe of lightning. Gother transmuted the mana from one form to the others. Seven elemental forms and not a drop of sweat on his brow. From there, the old Archmage displayed, instead of something merely incredibly difficult, an act that was nearly impossible. The globe of mana became seven smaller globes each spinning in a large circle. As they crossed before the golden irises, flecks of emerald catching the light, they became one of each of the previous elemental forms, until he had all seven orbiting in a circle before him.
"The first exercise you will begin immediately. Refining your mana to unaspected and then reattuning it, so smoothly that the reversion to raw form is without pause. It is critical that you learn to do this quickly or you will struggle to use most of your powers in an actual combat and become one of those failed Adepts, cripples who will never become Weavers, let alone Archmages." Spoke Gother with a deep contempt of any who would not seek to master this basic manipulation of their own mana.
"And the second?" Ulric prompted, perhaps unnecessarily. He could tell the Old Boy was having him on a bit now.
"You'll pick it up in a century or two." Answered the Elf drily.
His negotiating prowess had paid solid dividends. Taipan would do exactly as she wanted to do and there was nothing he could do about it. Additionally, she had revealed to him that she had a vial of some pinkish sludge that, when he'd voiced his suspicions, she confirmed proudly was the reagents necessary for her [Hunter's Mark] ritual to be able to locate him anywhere he ran.
*Cough* All of the reagents.
"Just keep that in your belt pouch then do you?" He'd questioned with some irritability.
"Yes. The other three identical vials I keep elsewhere Glade Chief. You will not find them. But I will find you wherever you go. I wish you to remember that, whenever idiot notions of leaving me behind roam through that worm eaten slush you keep inside your skull. Remember also what I will do to you when I catch you, Ulric." She'd threatened, smiling.
It was not a good smile. Not a friendly thing at all. More a baring of fangs, intended to let the prey know that its final destination was upon it. She was every inch her namesake when she smiled like that. Cold, calculating, vicious, and capable of immense harm without hesitation. Ulric had a feeling that smile was the last sight of many an enemy dying at her feet.
"Fine. Fine I said, you win. I'll find some way to convince you how awful an idea it is for you to accompany me." He gave ground.
"Maybe your parents will have some way to put you to rights." That last was muttered, a half thought.
"Mother Vedyr fetched Father Bald'rt from Prosper when he lost his mind and drug him back, paralyzed from the neck down by [Broad-leaf Yellow Star] poison. She did not allow him to move from his rooms for three months, until he swore he would never do so without her again, and only with the full strength of Iriel at his back. Who is it you think I take after more, Ulric, my powerful jester of a father or the Heartwood Spear of Iriel?" Taipan asked rhetorically.
He didn't bother answering, they both knew.
Back in the new apartment Taipan told him that Instructor Gother was ready to receive them at the normal time and place, if Ulric was up to it.
Ulric looked at her with surprise writ full across him, she must have gone out before he awoke to tell Gother Ulric hadn't exploded or gone elemental, the two most common fates of a failed awakening.
"Oh! Thanks, Taipan. Umm…okay, yeah, I've got questions. I know we haven't talked about what happened out there but I've still sort of not gotten my head all the way around it. Maybe the two of you will be able to tell me if I'm just off my rocker." Ulric said, his voice going distant as he thought about the events on the forest bluff.
"This 'rocker' of yours lies on the bottom of the deepest trench of the deepest Svirtalfin mine so long lost you will sooner find the heart of a dungeon than rumor of it." He was informed by his Shadow.
"[Harpy]." He libeled her in return.
"[Addled Drake]." She bantered.
He was certain she'd made that last thing up and so declared himself the winner. Not that it mattered. Certainly, it wouldn't be the case that he had a long running mental tally of the results of their verbal spars. A mental cross went across a set of four imagined chalk marks to indicate a fifth victory. He'd count the rest up later.
Anyway, he was stalling. Time to go talk to the old mage and see what he'd done to himself.
Easy silence followed them through the halls, pavilions, and walkways of Irielhos. The clangen and clamor of Elves were mere background noise now, barely registering to him. Truly, a guy can adapt to about anything given enough time.
Ulric held his questions, Taipan had previously demonstrated enough lack of interest or particular wisdom on the matter of magery to render herself immune to his questions. If he wanted to know how to set an ambush for Otherkin or how to deceive a pack of [Shadow wolves] into taking poison, Taipan was your one stop shop for volumes of knowledge. As soon as he veered away from that, however, he was swiftly buried in noncommittal shrugs and "I have heard it so's". Best to see a mage about magic.
In a few minutes, the twirling suns having crossed well past their zenith, Ulric found himself once more standing on the amphitheater floor with one Instructor Gother, eldest Aes'r of the Iriel'en.
The old elf stroked his beard as Ulric descended the stairs, murmuring who knows what Elf gobbeltygook.
As Ulric presented himself respectfully, awaiting the elder Elf to have first say, a courtesy of the Iriel'en he'd come to adopt in his months of training, the Archmage looked him over with sharp Gold and green flecked eyes, bushy brows drawn down in study.
"You are not a changeling. Nor an elemental. I can smell no sign that your core will undergo supercritical resonance and annihilate you where you stand, killing us all. Then it seems, against all odds, that you have lived. Good. I am always disappointed when a promising student scatters himself across the forest." Gother said, without inflection.
If Ulric thought he had a dry sense of humor, Gother was the unmatched Atacama of wits. At no point had Ulric conclusively determined that the wizend Elf had made a joke, but some of his statements were a little too on the nose to be accidental. Soldiering on, Ulric had to accept that all of those listed possibilities were real events, not contrived for the sake of entertainment.
Damn. They had completely undersold the whole awakening event. Ulric figured now was the time to just go in feet first.
"I don't want to alarm anybody but I think I met god. One of them anyway." He blurted.
Two pairs of fine, Elven eyebrows rose, though none spoke.
"I went through the process, as Shor explained it to me and as Bathe and Vedyr instructed, cycling my mana, attuning the my core as purely to the lightning mana as I could, as wholly Ceraun as I was able, and then began to infuse my flesh, purging the unaspected energies. As this progressed, more or less as described, I began to build my isolation shell of Ceraun. At that point, some real fucked up stuff started to occur around me." Ulric recounted.
"First of all, the unaspected mana inside my body snapped into attunement with the rest, in a way that's never happened. I always had to sort of force it along, massage it into the right wavelength. Not then. As soon as the shell started to come to completion, boom, the internalized wild mana phased in with the mana I was holding in my core." He continued, noting an appearance of concern on Gother's features and confusion on Taipans.
So. That part was atypical after all. Neither said anything though so Ulric moved on to the spooky bit.
"As the shell solidified, so did all the purged mana, and I was sitting in a pool of pure Ceraun. Sometime in there a storm gathered out of nothing, in frigid winter, and lightning started firing between clouds and falling to the ground around me. Something with sentience reached out of that chaos and grabbed me. I felt or saw or imagined, something, a massive bolt of lightning carry me into the sky, beyond the sky, and there, I saw a massive being of pure mana sitting in space."
Gother was now in shock and Taipan seemed convinced that Ulric had been hitting the Morphinator again. Nothing for it now, he had to finish.
"We called them sprites on my world, manifestations of the solar wind colliding with the electromagnetic field of our planet. It looked similar, but that thing was aware. It tried to connect with me, some part of it wanted to, I dunno, save me or help me or something, only it didn't know how. All it wanted was to…connect everyone to everything to everywhere. It was, I don't know, as if it didn't want anyone to be alone. I almost went with it but held to myself and it let go. When I gained awareness of myself again, the entire area was a lightning ravaged waste land and my shell was totally gone. My core was also awakened and I swear to you now, I can still feel that whatever the fuck it was up there, waiting. I…think it's Ceraun. You know. Like. All of it." Ulric said, losing his concern for being potentially insane.
At this point, he just needed to know what he'd seen up there. If it was a delusion born of temporary nuttiness he was totally okay with that. If it wasn't, he had to reorganize how he thought of the upper limits of what he considered possible. His quote of Shakespeare to Taipan so long ago rang ironically in his head. More in Heaven and Earth indeed.
It was Gother who eventually broke the spell. He was as severe and serious as Ulric had ever seen him.
"What you have just told me, you should never tell another soul as long as you live, Ulric. No one. Ever. There are debates thousands of years old on the natures of the elements, of the gods and their forms. If some of the orders and cults that occupy Aesvartalfheim hear what you have described they would kill you. Either for blasphemy or to raise you as a saint of their order. There are writings a bare handful of the most ancient and learned Aes'r and Svartalfin, myself included, can read. They describe the existence of Prime Elementals, gods, who are the desires and will of the elements made whole." The wizard said, grimly.
"Few there are who ever make contact with them, not and remain whole. I believe your contact with the Eternal Gaze put a sort of safety net around you, a buffer of its own will, else you'd have been consumed. None who awaken experience this thing though, this is a matter for archmages." He continued, still not quite believing.
"It is that freakish thing inside you, that godtouched core. Never should you have had so much raw mana sitting around inside you. When you awakened it, you pulled so greatly on its energies that you called Ceraun, the prime, you held its attention for a moment. Catkin are said to have a dozen lives but you have burned through a score of them to be here now." Finished Gother in a stunned whisper.
That was enough to properly scare a former professional geek into submission. Meeting a god went right into his Tell No One box with a nice fat padlock to see it buried in his subconscious.
"Then I'm not crazy?" Ulric checked.
"Oh, you're crazier than nine [Berserkir Hornets] in a jar of [Evernight sap].” Gother the Wise told him in the first break of that Elf's composure that Ulric had witnessed.
“But you aren't delusional and, that is better than you are allowed to ask for Glade Chief." Concluded the Wizard more calmly.
Ulric rubbed his temples at that judgment. Whatever happened to his dreams of living in a shack in the woods? How did this turn into some kind of…trip down the Odyssey? It hadn't worked out so very damned well for Ulysses and Ulric wasn't geared for this kind of godshit. Terrestrial nonsense was already doing a number on him.
Focus Einar. What of this can you use?
"Alright, alright, before my Shadow explodes from holding herself in," Ulric began, directing a pointed stare at the ever so slightly shaking form of his beautiful Huntress bodyguard, "What does this mean for the awakening process? Did it work? Is the crisis over now?" He asked, stressing that last part.
He dearly needed to check off some crisis boxes.
The bearded Elf nodded simply at that, giving Ulric some good news, at last. "The awakening is complete, you will not kill yourself from mana resonance now. Later, it is within the realm of possibility that you are disintegrated by Ceraun's direct touch, but such is the eventual fate of all Archmages. I myself cannot draw on my reserves too greatly or Deyndro will make a statue of me, or perhaps, a sapling of the [Heartwood], if I am worthy."
"Does that happen to everyone? This…elementalization?" Ulric asked.
A definitive cutting motion of the wide sleeved arm killed that notion.
"Absolutely not. Most mages never come close to the root of their powers. Even Weavers, masters of their art, are mostly too distant from the truth of things to find the attention of the Primes. It is possible that those classes that are ultimately refined may come close to it but I have not witnessed it or been handed evidence sufficient to convince me that it has happened. Those classed so are all too grounded in reality to properly lose themselves to the substrate of existence. Finding a Root Anchor in your classes is virtually the only way to imprint oneself into the world in such a way as to prevent your eventual annihilation." Explained Gother, as if that clarified anything.
He'd lost Ulric about half way through that but Ulric had firmly decided not to probe any more into it. Every time the old Elf spoke, he added existential horror to Ulric's life.
"Allllrriiiighty then. Sorry I asked, a bit. What's changed, for me? How does this process, impending doom aside, alter how I use magic or manipulate my core?" Ulric asked, trying to get this conversation onto a useful track.
"Finally, a pertinent question." Commented his Shadow from the side.
You know what Taipan? Ulric bit back a retort. Focus. She's decided to fuck with you now. Probably comeuppance for the plan to leave her behind. Deal with her later.
Even Gother glanced at her, a not so subtle suggestion for her to butt out if she wasn't going to contribute.
Ulric resisted the absolutely inane urge to offer the skeletal Archmage a high five.
"Let us find out directly Ulric." Suggested Gother, raising his hand and a three meter tall pillar of solid wood from the floor that fairly radiated strength.
"Now that your core is attuned, to Ceraun I am assuming, that is the native form of your mana. This does NOT mean that you are limited only to this one mana form, a failing of many Adepts. Just because you are now stronger and swifter in the use of this mana you should not neglect the use of others. You mentioned that Shor taught you to oscillate through mana forms. This is a good thing. Let me first show you a practice methodology for relearning how to do so. Now that your mana is naturally attuned you will need to go through the process of unattuning it, reverting it back into the raw waveform, to be shaped anew to whatever purpose you need." Lectured Gother, back in his element.
"Attend."
Damnit. Things always got difficult when they said that.
True to form, a gaseous sphere of greenish brown mana solidified into what appeared to be a billiard ball of oak. The ball dissolved to become an enormous water droplet. And again to form a shard of ice. A ball of blue flame. A globe of lightning. Gother transmuted the mana from one form to the others. Seven elemental forms and not a drop of sweat on his brow. From there, the old Archmage displayed, instead of something merely incredibly difficult, an act that was nearly impossible. The globe of mana became seven smaller globes each spinning in a large circle. As they crossed before the golden irises, flecks of emerald catching the light, they became one of each of the previous elemental forms, until he had all seven orbiting in a circle before him.
"The first exercise you will begin immediately. Refining your mana to unaspected and then reattuning it, so smoothly that the reversion to raw form is without pause. It is critical that you learn to do this quickly or you will struggle to use most of your powers in an actual combat and become one of those failed Adepts, cripples who will never become Weavers, let alone Archmages." Spoke Gother with a deep contempt of any who would not seek to master this basic manipulation of their own mana.
"And the second?" Ulric prompted, perhaps unnecessarily. He could tell the Old Boy was having him on a bit now.
"You'll pick it up in a century or two." Answered the Elf drily.
