The Weight of Magic, page 32
part #1 of Restriction Series
“I’m afraid, too,” Visthor said. “But stop talking. They can’t see us with that light. But they can hear us.”
Torian held onto the lantern beam pattern, focusing his hands upward and holding that power flowing through him. He had shoved the weight off to the side, and it allowed him to hold this third-tier pattern, which radiated incredible amounts of light energy, but how long could he hold onto it? Torian had never needed to hold a pattern for a long period of time. He had only attempted to create them, not hold them.
“Can we escape?” Torian asked.
“If you can hold light,” Visthor said.
“I’m trying,” Torian said.
“Good. We go.”
He started backing away, whistling softly, which sent wolves racing into the darkness. At first, Torian thought the wolves were abandoning them, which they might’ve been, but at the same time, the wolves could move more quickly. And if the strange shurrel decided to attack, hopefully the wolves could outrun them.
But would they be able to stay ahead of them?
As they backed deeper into the forest, Torian held onto the lantern beam pattern, feeling the power within him, hoping that he had enough to hold out.
Chapter 36
LANTERNS IN THE DARK
The light burned steadily around him. Torian managed to hold onto it for much longer than he would have thought himself possible of doing as he backed away from the shurrel, aware of the movement overhead and the possibility that the creatures would return to attack. He didn’t know how long he’d maintain his hold but was determined to keep the pattern intact as long as possible so that he could find a way to keep Visthor and Jakob safe.
“How are you doing?” Visthor asked. The large man sounded as if he were trying to keep his voice down but didn’t know how to speak softly.
“It’s not working that well,” Torian said. “There’s… something that seems to be making this more difficult than it needs to be. I don’t know what it is, only that I feel something working against me.”
“You fight. Strong enough to handle,” Visthor said.
Torian wasn’t sure if that was true. He didn’t feel strong enough to handle whatever it was that attempted to block him, but he appreciated that Visthor thought that he was.
They slipped back the way that they’d come.
Jakob remained quiet. When Torian turned to his friend, there was tension in his shoulders, which Torian wished that he could do something to help him with. There didn’t seem to be anything that he could say that would help, though. Jakob had always wanted adventure, and now that he had it… Torian suspected that his friend wished that they would have been able to have a very different kind of adventure.
“Careful,” Visthor said, pressing a hand to his back.
Torian stopped.
They were beneath several massive trees, with the branches arching down from high overhead. Torian turned so that he could extend his hands and see if there was anything moving in the trees, but there didn’t seem to be. From what he could tell, the shurrel had stopped chasing them. That should have been the reason that he could’ve lowered his lantern beam, but when the light started to sputter, Visthor shook his head.
“Not yet. Shurrel just part of something else. We need careful.”
“There’s something more?” Jakob asked.
“Probably. No worries. I have Blade.”
The way that he said it was likely supposed to reassure Jakob, and maybe even Torian, but it didn’t serve as a reassurance for him, though that was partly because he knew that a Blade of Wind wouldn’t be that useful against creatures in the trees.
“Are they with Rusav?” Torian asked.
“Not exactly,” Visthor said. “They follow power. Want to feed on it. This is why they here.”
“They’re feeding on him?” Jakob asked.
Now his voice was definitely too loud, which made Torian want to tell his friend to settle down, though he didn’t know if there was anything that he could do to convince him that he needed to do that.
“Not him. Others. Or had been. So maybe now they feed on him. They no like light. That why you no worry about them. You scare with light.”
“What if they start feeding on the light in a way that makes it too much for me to keep a hold of?” Torian asked.
That was the way that it had started to feel, though he wasn’t sure if that was what was really happening or whether it was just the time that he’d been holding onto this power. He had limits. Maybe they were different now than when he’d left his town after the attack, but there were limits nonetheless. Eventually, he would find that his strength would fade, and then he’d have to figure out how much he could actually hold out.
“They not that capable,” Visthor said.
The light sputtered again.
Save them.
As the resistance began to build, Torian knew that he wasn’t going to be able to hold it long enough to get them back. There had been the strange sound in the forest that had led them out here, and now that they were out here, Torian doubted that there was going to be enough time for him to hold the power that he needed to get them all back safely.
"Get him back to the wagons," Torian said to Visthor.
“Not safe. You not have control.”
“I have enough control.”
“We go together.”
Visthor sounded irritated, which Torian supposed he should be happy about. Visthor wasn’t going to leave him alone, but then Visthor wasn’t going to be able to protect them all from the shurrel. With the power inside him starting to fade, he didn’t think he would be able to hold out much longer, anyway.
“Get him back. You can run. I’ll head a different way to lead them away from you.”
“Stupid,” Visthor said. He said it with a bit of a smile, though, and Torian understood. “Just keep him safe.”
“You can’t be serious,” Jakob said. “You intend to stay here and go off on your own?”
“I’m not going off on my own. I’m heading back, but I’m doing it in a different way. If what Visthor has said was right, and these creatures are drawn by sahir, then I need to draw them off so that you can get back to the others safely. Just go.”
Jakob looked as if he wanted to argue but then nodded.
Visthor clasped Torian’s arm, squeezing it tightly for a moment before nodding to him. “Move quickly. Do not linger. Shurrel dangerous.”
“I know,” he said.
“Good luck.”
Visthor gave Jakob a shove, and the two of them started off, heading into the trees, into the darkness, and away from Torian.
It left him alone in the dark of the forest. He continued to hold onto the third-tier lantern beam pattern, trying to maintain that power as much as he could, but as time passed, the energy started to shift. The weight inside of him that he had moved off to the side changed, seemingly rolling back into place. Torian couldn’t hold onto this power for much longer.
That left him with only a few options if he wanted to draw the creatures away, but only one that permitted him to hold some of his power in reserve. He had to shift to one of the other tiers of patterns, a lower-tier pattern, to draw less of the power out of himself.
The shurrel were drawn to magic, and if that were the case, then what kind of magic had been out here that had drawn them in the first place?
Not the wolves.
The wolves didn’t have magic, from what he knew. Which meant that there was something else out here that the shurrel had chased. The smart move would be to ignore it and head back to the wagons as he had told Visthor, but Torian couldn’t shake the feeling that something else had been out here, and that he needed to try to make sense of what it was.
Cursing to himself, he turned and headed deeper into the forest, back the way that they had come.
No wolves howled at this point. He didn’t know if the wolves were still out there, as Visthor had sent them away, or if there had even been anything out here that had drawn their attention in the first place. Maybe the wolves had howled because they had sensed the shurrel and had wanted to warn them.
Torian turned, following the trees until he picked up on a trail that they had taken. It seemed almost as if there was a path through the forest itself that wanted to guide him, though that was difficult for him to believe. He managed to hold on to the first-tier pattern, letting the crack of power flow through him as he looked up into the trees.
The pressure on him had persisted.
Every so often, Torian could feel more of that pressure, typically when he slowed or stopped altogether. It was almost as if the shurrel were using those breaks to feed on the power he used. It was dangerous to slow too much. Still, Torian shifted from the first-tier lantern beam pattern into the stacked stone pattern, using that to follow where he had gone. He traced his path backwards, bouncing between the patterns as quickly as he thought he could do safely. He didn’t want to release the lantern beam for too long, as he needed the light available to him so that he could keep the shurrel at bay.
Then he felt something else.
It came from not far from him. Torian wasn’t sure what it was, only that a pressure worked against him. It wasn’t the pressure of the shurrel on his power but something different altogether. Torian thought that it might be what had drawn the shurrel out here in the first place.
He strode forward, holding onto the lantern beam pattern, and shifting from the first tier into the second tier, augmenting the light with a burst of strength so that it would radiate out from his fingertips. As it did, shadows scattered. The sound of creatures in the trees came to him, and Torian held his hands out, trying to push even more of the pattern power out from him. The weight inside of him started to tremble.
Torian tried to use the lessons that he had learned in school. The problem that he had was that the lessons he had learned had not been fully effective for him. No one else had understood what it was like for him to shift the weight that he had inside him.
“I don’t have any weight I have to push against,” Oro had told him when he had first come to the school and started working with him. He was an early instructor for him and had been kind to Torian when he was first trying to learn. He’d stayed until Willa had sent him on to the university with one of the other potentials. “What do you mean you have to push a weight?”
They had been inside of the classroom, and Oro had held Torian after, as he had not managed to accomplish one of the first-tier patterns that he typically could reach, and the frustration had been too much for him. He had snapped at his sister—again—and Oro had wanted to keep him afterward to talk to him about his temper and his temperament.
“It just feels like anytime that I want to use my connection, I have to push harder than others. It’s there, but I feel like I’m lifting a boulder to get to it.”
Oro had regarded him with a strange expression that Torian had not been able to read at that time and still didn’t know how to read. “It should be there for you. You have seen what your sister can do. That is natural. What you must be fighting against is your capacity. Unfortunately, not all have the same capacity to use this ability, Torian. I suspect that is your problem. You have found your limit.” He scratched at his chin. “It is a strange one, though. Most who have limits find it is consistent. Either they are unable to even form the primary patterns, which isn’t your problem, or they manage to find consistency at a singular level. There are times when you are limited to the primary patterns, but there are other times when I feel like you are on the verge of having the capacity to reach a third tier.”
Torian had never considered that possible, but he had also understood that consistency was the key to the kind of power that he wanted to have. He had been studying for several years at that point and had never managed consistency the way that Gaspel wanted. Gaspel had been the first of his instructors to take an interest in trying to help him overcome those natural limitations, though. Willa had certainly never done it. Then again, Willa had probably known right away that Torian did not have the necessary strength to amount to much. She had been the one who had objected the longest to his sustained presence in school.
“Any tricks you might have would be helpful.”
“There is no trick. You are either a sahir, or you are not. You have managed to reach the primary patterns, so you can call yourself a sahir, but I don’t know that you will ever find anything more than that.”
Torian had asked other instructors, both those who stayed to train at the school along with those who had traveled through, and none of them had really understood what to make of his predicament. Everyone said the same thing as Oro, in that his connection was erratic, which they all agreed was strange. There shouldn’t be such difficulty.
After Heshian had arrived at the school and Torian had asked him the same question, Willa had approached and pulled him aside. Torian remembered the irritation she had with him, though even now, he wasn’t entirely sure why she should have been so irritated with him. He had been just trying to get better. Wasn’t that what they wanted of him, after all?
“You need to stop this,” she said.
They were outside in the yard, where Torian had just caught Heshian before he’d gone off to work in the school workshop. Torian had hoped that his new instructor would offer him some great advice, but much like everybody else, he had said the same thing. Of course, he had. They all trained in the same places, and they all had the same understanding of power. There was no reason that one instructor would have some new outlook on how he could command his power.
“I’m sorry, Willa.”
“You have heard the same response how many times?”
“At least a dozen,” he admitted.
“And have any of them given you any reason to believe that you will find a way past this limitation of yours?”
He shook his head.
“We have offered our instruction openly, but your persistence does not mean that you will eventually succeed. The creator has made each of us the way that we are, and some are granted gifts, whereas others are not. I cannot say what your gifts will be, nor can I say what the creator has in mind for you, only that you must stop pushing against it.”
She had locked eyes with him, and though he couldn’t be certain, Torian had the distinct sense that she was holding on to one of the patterns. Possibly many of them, given that this was Willa, and she had demonstrated considerable power to him. He hadn’t know what to say and so had nodded. In hindsight, he should have known that was the beginning of his departure from school.
Somehow, none of his instructors had ever taught him how to slide the weight out of the way the way that both Aldrich and Sylvia had taught. None of them had ever come to believe that Torian could be anything more than a primary pattern sahir. And none of them would ever have thought that he had the potential to be an valsahir.
So what other lessons that they taught him had been incomplete? Those were the thoughts that lingered in his mind as he headed toward the strange energy that he detected.
Only to find nothing.
Something here had to have been drawing the shurrel—but what was it?
As his power surged through him, he noticed a darkened stain on the ground that he suspected was blood. Whatever the shurrel had chased had been caught and devoured. If they were to catch up to him…
Torian tried not to think about that.
He looked around, sweeping his hands out from him. It was time to head back to the wagons if he could find his way. He had to hope that he had dragged enough of the shurrel with him for him to get to safety.
When he turned, though, the pressure upon him started to build even more.
And then the connection that he had to his patterns sputtered and burned out.
Chapter 37
TRACKING IN THE DARK
Torian stood in the darkness, his heart hammering wildly. The crack he had formed when facing the soul sucker persisted, but it seemed as if his pathways had darkened so that he could no longer push power out through them.
The sound of movement in the branches forced his gaze up.
There was not nearly enough light to see anything. But he could hear, and it was what he heard that worried him.
He started running.
The shurrel chased, scratching and clawing along the branches, like some terrifying squirrel. The pressure inside of his pathways remained, darkening them.
What if he somehow managed to burst power through them?
He’d managed to release power in an uncontrolled fashion before. Twice, in fact. If he were to do that now, he didn’t know whether he could control it, but it might prevent the shurrel from reaching him.
The weight didn’t budge.
The soul sucker had been relatively easy compared to this. This power pressed down on him in a way that made everything within him feel as if it were collapsing and constricting. It wasn’t even a matter of trying to find power, as he knew that the weight had shifted so that he could reach it, but he couldn’t use it as it was not flowing through him the way that it needed to.
Torian ran forward until shadows jumped toward him. He rolled off to the side, trying to move away from the shurrel. He couldn’t use the patterns, but what about the Blade of Wind?
He withdrew it, twisting the end as quickly as he could, extending the strange blade. Visthor had worked with him on the various Blade patterns, attempting to train him to make him something of a soldier, even though Torian had not mastered any of them. Still, he used the lessons that Visthor had taught, his feet sliding out to either side of him into the initial position, one that reminded him of the primary patterns, as he held the Blade upright.
Then he started to twist.
All he needed was to get the Blade to whistle, and it might scare the creatures.
Torian twisted. The Blade whistled.
When it did, some part of his pathways seemed to react to it.
That was new.
It was almost as if the movements freed some of his pathways so that he could push more power out through himself. He had never tried using the Blade as a focus, but maybe that was what he needed to do now.
