The next few days were a whirlwind of planning and talking. Mirian mapped out a curriculum on glyph magic. “Xipuatl might be able to assist, given he’s seen both the Baracueli and Tlaxhuacan schools of magic,” she mentioned.
Within the hour, her former classmate was in the room with her, only looking a little haggard. As he entered, Xipuatl gave a deep bow. “Prophet Mirian,” he said.
“You don’t have to bow,” she said.
He cleared his throat, blushing. “They told me I should. It’s… so weird. You’re still… I mean, you look like… a student.”
“Yes, it becomes annoying, actually. I look too young to be taken seriously. Except for the eyes,” she said, smiling.
Xipuatl shivered.
“Here’s what I have to get them started,” she said, laying out sheafs of papers where she’d neatly written out lessons and practice sessions. “Any changes you’d make?”
Mirian was pleased to see that, within his area of expertise, Xipuatl was still sharp and eloquent—the person she’d seen in the Bainrose Library study sessions so long ago. He went over several changes he’d make, and had good reasons for all of them. Nagual wouldn’t need any practice using a catalyst—the catalysts were incorporated into the battlestaffs—but they would need specific instruction on how using a catalyst and glyphs separately would work, as well as practice with fine control using glyph pathways.
After a few days of planning, Mirian began to spend two hours each day lecturing Xecatl and a room full of nagual on Baracueli magic. Each of the nagual had been chosen because of their ability to commune with Ceiba Yan. Little of what they learned or remembered would make its way into the sacred tree’s soul and memories; after all, trees remembered things differently than animals of any kind. However, the sum total of it would slowly work its way into the great tree. In turn, the tree could more easily impart a skill to someone communing with it. Only Xecatl would receive the full benefit. By now, the nagual had made the practice of this sort of ‘tree learning’ technique into a blend of art and science. Like teaching, it could be no other way.
Observing it all, Mirian began to contemplate how the communing techniques could be used in the time loop. Memory transfer like what the temporal anchors did was far beyond them. But communing…
There were ideas she wanted to play around with.
Meanwhile, Mirian began to take her instruction directly from Xecatl.
Her first lessons were on soul communion, but those lasted only two days before the older woman realized Mirian had already mastered the basics.
“I picked up some tricks from the Elder creatures. What Viridian is doing in Torrviol is similar, as well.”
“You’ve mentioned this, ‘Viridian’ before,” Xecatl said.
“I’ll bring him next time when I bring the reference books. I think I’ll just use an Akanan airship to get here next time.” That made her pause. “Have any Akanan airships attempted to reach the island?”
“Yes. Scebur’s proxy was on the first one. We started shooting them down after that.”
Mirian raised an eyebrow. “That reminds me. I’d love to learn more about Tlaxhuacan armor and weapons. It takes two to avoid a war, and as much as I’d like this to all go peacefully… it might not. And we should be prepared for that.”
“Yes. I will see to it. First, though, we move onto spirits.”
The term ‘spirit’ wasn’t the best translation, but there was no equivalent to the Tlaxa word in Friian, Cuelsin, Eskinar, or Adamic.
They first started by looking at basic spirits.
“This will be easier to learn since your soul-sight is already extremely developed,” Xecatl said as they reached the Training Gardens.
“Do you construct the spirits directly?” Mirian asked.
“Attempting to construct a spirit is like trying to scoop air up with your hands and push it down into your lungs to breathe. No, we create the conditions where it should form, and let it develop. You provide water and sunlight to a plant and it grows on its own. You don’t pry it out of its seed.”
That was a simple enough concept. “What are the boundaries of the spirit?”
“That is harder to answer. There aren’t boundaries like a walled city, it’s more of a continuum. Like a forest gradually petering out. Like the waves of the ocean moving back and forth across the beach, both with each wave, and with the tides.”
“Like auric mana.”
Xecatl hesitated before replying. “Perhaps. But auras are malleable and manipulatable with a single thought. A spirit isn’t like that.”
They stopped walking in front of a single plant in a single pot. It was some sort of broad-leafed myrvite bush she didn’t recognize. Most things in the garden were growing together, but this bush was isolated specifically for training purposes.
“A spirit is a thing of connections. Foremost is the connection of souls. Sense the souls before you in this pot.”
Mirian noted her use of the plural, even though there was a single plant in front of her. The heretic priest, Lecne, would have told her souls were, by their nature, separate. They could touch, but never join. Only when scoured of uniqueness by the proper bindings could foreign soul energy be merged with a soul. Already, she knew that explanation was wrong. And Mirian was here to learn. If there was a contradiction, she would resolve it. She closed her eyes, bringing her hand close to the plant. Sensing its soul through her focus was easy. Plant souls weren’t especially bright, but her sight was good. It was easy to see the definition of it. Harder to see its ever-so-faint aura.
Souls, she thought. She began to search. There was a small insect crawling on the underside of a leaf. No, four insects, spread across the plant. She focused in. A worm, crawling about the soil. Some other small detritivores. She wasn’t a fool. She knew from Viridian’s instruction such creatures were invaluable in creating the soil the plants would thrive in. The insects attempting to eat its leaves, perhaps a net harm. And yet, the plant would respond, toughing its leaves, changing itself to be less palatable.
A spider came by as one of the insects tried to chew on the edge of a new leaf. Quickly ambushed the offending insect and sat there, mandibles and legs tapping as it devoured its prey. Another obvious connection. Another soul. But is it part of the spirit?
She looked closer, straining to see more. There must be more to it. She reached out to touch the plant. Commune with it.
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The plant whispered of the sun beating down on its leaves. Whispered of the little insects that had tried to gnaw on it. The spider was now chasing around a second one. How does one define a spirit if the souls are in motion? The spider and the insects are here now, but they won’t be soon. It’s a thing in flux.
She thought on that. As she did, she noticed something deeper in the soil. Clinging to the bush’s roots were tiny bits of fungus. Thin hyphae, snaking through the dirt. When she touched the plant’s roots, she could sense what she interpreted as satisfaction from the plant. It was a type of satisfaction that had to do with being given the right nutrients. Viridian would approve. This plant is quite happy. Except…
Except, it was thirsty. As the hot sun beat down, it would let out bits of water from its leaves to cool itself, but those roots straining at the soil were thirsty. The morning dew might help nourish it. Rain might come, or it might not. For all these possibilities, it prepared itself by some primitive instinct.
That’s the plant, though. How can a spirit be defined if nothing about its constituent parts is static?
The plant, she knew, was unconcerned by this problem. It needs to define nothing. It needs to name nothing. To it, the world is in flux, and that is simply life. She thought of Professor Endresen, always trying to nail down definitions for arcane physics. But that was a human thing. But the problem wasn’t concept or understanding. She could understand the relationships here. Insects, spiders, detritivores, fungi, plant; soil, sun, water, air. The problem was language. By necessity, language was limiting.
A chair was easy to spot, but difficult to define. Once, when Mirian was little, she’d proclaimed that all chairs had four legs, and then her mother had shown her a chair with three legs in her workshop. When she’d changed her definition, her father had shown her a children’s book with a stone throne in it; very clearly a chair, but it had no legs at all. Mirian had thought this was all very unfair at the time, but now, she valued the lesson. At some point, it became less important to bicker about the definition that it did to understand what everyone meant when they said ‘chair.’
But a chair wasn’t quite the right thing to compare to.
She thought of Zayd. She missed him. At some point in this cycle, he’d be running around a park in Florin City, playing tag with children he would have only just met.
A spirit must be like a game of tag, she decided. The game only existed through the moments and interactions. By definition, it couldn’t be static—someone had to chase someone else, or it wasn’t tag at all!
So what was—?
“Mirian?” came Xecatl’s voice.
“Hmm?” she wiped away a bit of sweat. It was hot, beneath the sun.
“Your first task was to find the souls. Have you found them?”
“Oh, yes. There’s the plant, the insects on it, the spider that arrived, the detritivores beneath the soil, and the fungi on the roots. Did I miss anything?”
“Yes. The soil-soul. Tiny things too small to see. Look for it.”
That’s right, Mirian remembered. There were souls of creatures, unobservable even to a magnifying lens spell, that couldn’t be sensed as individuals, but as groups. They were faint, so faint they were nearly invisible, but atop the glaciers of the Endelice, she’d noticed them missing. One of the wizards in Torrviol was on a quest to find them, but couldn’t quite get the lensing spells right. That wizard had called them ‘bacteria.’ “I feel them,” she said after a moment. “So the spirit must be a thing in flux. Something not easily defined.”
She could feel Xecatl’s wry amusement. “You’re trying to skip ahead.”
Mirian laughed. “A habit, now. I’ve needed to teach myself a lot of things.”
“And a good one. But you might as well listen, not try to derive it all from first principles.”
She laughed again. “Fair enough.”
This time, Mirian listened as Xecatl walked her through the steps of sensing the connections among the souls. “It’s not just when the auras touch, it’s when they repel, too. When the insects start gnawing at the leaves, the bush’s aura reacts to try to push at the insects’ aura. As the bush is gathering nutrients with its roots, its aura will synchronize with the symbiotic fungi at its roots. A crude analogy is the interaction of magnetic fields; both the attraction and repulsion are equally important in understanding a system of magnets. Unlike magnets, the systems are not so easily predictable or consistent—but there is a kind of consistency.”
She had Mirian look for examples of synchronized auras, then repelling auras. The hardest part was even detecting auras. Wryly, she thought of her lessons in Torrviol, where she’d been taught such things were impossible. How many impossible things will I have learned to do before this is all over? she thought as she watched the aura of two leaf-cutter ants intermingle.
“These interactions are the basis for a spirit,” Xectal instructed as they moved to a different part of the garden. “These simple systems are everywhere. I would have a novice nagual study them in more depth, but even if we have all the time in the world, there’s no sense wasting it.”
They moved through a garden of myrvite orchids. The strange looking flowers were everywhere, brightening the garden with shimmering colors. Dozens of equally bright insects were fluttering around. Mirian liked the butterfly with blue and white swirls on its wings. Whenever it landed, its wings turned green, resembling one of the leaves. “Orchid spirits are too complex to start with,” the nagual said as they passed them, “but those are used in most of our staffs, so you’ll learn about them soon enough.”
They continued on, passing gardeners and researchers who were as busy as the butterflies. There was a part of the garden where dozens of trees provided shade. Below them were whole new varieties of plants. She sniffed the air. Most of the smells were pleasant and sweet, but there was something else that smelled like rotten fruit.
Xecatl stopped beneath the branches of a mango tree. The mangoes were all green. The woman sighed. “It’s my favorite mango variety, but they won’t be in season until Spring. Anyways, we’re not here for the fruit. These myrvites are annoyingly picky about where they grow. There’s some trees they simply won’t play ball with.”
“Play ball?”
“You don’t have that expression? Hmm. Have you seen a game of Tlaxhuacan hoop-ball?”
“No.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “We’ll have to fix that. Though I must admit, the games are much more interesting when you don’t know the outcome. I spent a few cycles trying to change one of the games and finally gave up. That team is hopeless.”
Mirian smiled. It was nice to have a conversation with another Prophet—or Prophet-equivalent—and not feel like she was walking on knives.
Xecatl cleared her throat. “This is about as simple a spirit as you can get and still have a noticeable effect. First, we’ll start with the effect, and then work backwards. Do you feel the calming effect?”
“I do.” She studied the myrvite plants before them. “But it’s not a single plant using a natural spell?”
“Natural spell?”
“That’s what we’d call a myrvite casting something in Baracuel.”
“I see. It’s not achieved by a single plant though. This ‘spell,’ is a result of the spirit, and can only work when all three of these plants are in proximity.”
A calming effect. How nice. “A good place to meditate, then?”
Xecatl snorted. “The calming effect gets more insects to land inside that pitcher plant, which is that rotten scent you’re smelling. In turn, the dissolved nutrients eventually seem to make it to the other plants through some sort of root contact.”
They spent some time under the shade of the mango tree as Mirian tried to piece together all the connections. It was difficult, because everything was in flux.
“Look for the repeating patterns,” Xecatl advised.
The other difficulty was disentangling the ‘calm’ feeling from the spirit-spell with the calming feeling of the garden. Eventually, she found it in the faint movements of the auras, in the silent murmurs of the soil, in the faint heartbeat of the breeze.
“How many ‘natural spells’ are actually the product of multiple myrvites working together?” Mirian wondered aloud. “That would explain why scholars kept failing to produce them.”
Xecatl watched as Mirian continued to explore the spirit before them. Eventually, she asked, “Do you need a break?”
“Absolutely not. Where’s the next one?”
The old nagual smiled. “Then let’s continue.”