[The Academy] Touch the Unseen [Closed]

[Seodai]

Date: 10 Winter, 511 AV OOCI was granted permission to self-mod this thread, including Oliver Camlach, by Legion. "How is your father?" Seodai bristled, but merely glanced down at the piece of straw he held between calloused fingers. He rolled it back and forth, watching the golden head twirl so quickly that the texture became blurred. "Fine." "That's good," Oliver said, as he moved about the somewhat small quarters. Seodai didn't pretend to understand what he was doing. It seemed nonsensical, picking a book up here only to replace it with another from there. He had lit incense, but Seodai had the distinct impression that Oliver had only done so to drive away the smell of fish. If it had a ritualistic purpose, the young farmer didn't understand it, even with Melchior and all of his knowledge of these things lurking in the back of his mind. "And Theo?" Seodai was not normally an impatient young man. Life on the farm had a slow, beautiful rhythm that was seldom rushed, and he translated that to much of life. It wasn't until Denval had been threatened, the gods had stepped in, and the knowledge of who he had once been had all flooded Seodai's mind that he had started to change. It was gradual, almost unnoticeable things. A shorter temper, a more restless spirit, a thread of ready anger he hadn't really possessed before. Right now it was his new impatience that came to the fore, and Seodai picked at the hay to maintain his composure, his quiet. "I thought that is who you meant," he replied, lifting his eyes to smile in half challenge. Oliver met his gaze, simply stared at him for a moment, and then shook his head, chuckling. "Kin is kin, Seodai. You'll have to come to terms with it someday." "I have all I need," Seo countered, tossing the small bit of hay to the floor as he sat up straighter. "I respect them. I help take care of them. Doesn't mean I have to love them. I have Theo, and I have Bala..." Oliver paused where well worn hands were busy with a small knife, passing it through the flame of a low burning lamp. He glanced towards his young visitor, with eyebrows lifted. "Your god magic isn't polluted?" Seodai dropped his head with a sigh, leaning forward to balance his elbows on his knees again. "Yes. Isn't everyone's?" Oliver gave a grunt, and went back to what he was doing. It was quiet for a moment, the calm of evening settling between them and the lazy crackle of the fire. "Tell me again why you're here, Seo." "I've already explained..." he complained, scratching idly at the back of his neck. Winter had fallen, and was crisp and uncomfortable just outside the door. It was cozy inside, though, and he was warm through and through. The silence with which Oliver responded was answer enough. The golden headed youth sighed. "At the festival, in the summer, Syna told me... well, they told us all that we needed to remember. And, as much as I'd rather not sometimes, I did. I do remember. I was someone... else entirely, so many lives ago. He was Alahean. He was a mage. A powerful one, I think." The knife Oliver had been heating was placed lightly atop a clean handkerchief, and then the older man was moving about the small room again, a wave of energy that lapped at Seo's toes as he sat so still. "You're telling me all about who he was," Oliver commented, almost as an aside. "But that doesn't answer the question. You are not him, Seodai of Denval. Why are you here?" Seodai pursed his lips. He felt an indignation in him that could only have belonged to Melchior, and a confusion that more aptly suited himself in this life. Why was he here? To prove something? If so, to whom? He could never been what he had once been, what Melchior had been. And what was the point? He was a beloved of Bala, now. A farmer. An incredibly simple man who only wanted peace in his home. I only wanted peace. The sentiment belonged wholly to a Melchior who no longer lived, but the weight of his longing echoed through time and across the ages to make Seodai's heart constrict. He averted his gaze towards the fire. "I'm not sure what threatens Denval, Oliver. But I don't like it. I don't have a lot to offer, but I feel as if... as if this is something I might be good at. I might be able to help with." Oliver, having spent the moments past preparing a small cot on the other side of the room, moved to sit aside the young man he had known from infancy. Seodai was withdrawn, guarded, and awkward. He was still Denvali, and the Denvali knew their own. "Seodai, magic is something to be treated very carefully. We have to respect it. It is dangerous," Oliver said, and for the briefest moment Seodai's mind was filled with memories not his own. It was a terrible flash of faces and lives lost in the most gruesome ways to magic. "I know," he answered somberly. Oliver took a moment to appraise him, and then nodded at last. "Does Theo know you're here?" Seodai shook his head. "No." "Does anyone?" "No." The young farmer expected a complaint, or argument, from that admission. Instead Oliver only nodded once more, and then turned away. He picked up the knife, and gestured towards Seodai with the blade. "You'll need to be patched up when we're finished, since you've got stubborn blood. I reckon you can head to the clinic for that?" Seodai nodded mutely. Caelum, or Noc, would fix him up. He was typically very wary of these sorts of things. How many days had it been since he'd fled the offer of a well meaning Symenestra, willing to risk the curse of polluted gnosis to ferret out information from his thoughts, just because he didn't want to bleed? "Kneel down," Oliver said, with a flick of his wrist in gesture. Seodai obeyed without hesitation. "This won't be pleasant," Oliver promised with a small measure of empathy, or was it pity?, in his tone. "Let me see your hands." Seodai lifted his hands, palms turned up, in offering. It almost seemed like a supplication, kneeling as he was before the older, more skilled man. Oliver, thankfully, was a good man, who was not unnecessarily rough as he brought the blade down to slice open not one, but both of Seodai's palms. The sight of the blood that rushed to the surface and eagerly began to pool in his palms made Seodai feel queasy in an instant, so he focused on the attentive face of his teacher, even as Oliver calmly placed the knife aside on the table and began to focus on what was next. Res, to Seodai, looked like the heat of the sun dancing off a too hot stone on Summer's hottest day. He watched with avid fascination and a foreign familiarity as Oliver's hands filled with it. And then, without another word of preparation, he no longer saw it with his eyes. He felt it as it pressed through the wounds on his hands, danced in swirls around his head before filling nostril and throat, filling him with a gasp. There was a single thud of his heart, silence, the blink of his big blue eyes in wonder up at Oliver. And then life was set in motion again, and Seodai crumpled to the floor with a great groan. His limbs felt as if they did not belong to him anymore, even as they twitched and jerked of their own volition. It felt as if another entity altogether had crawled into his body, and was animating him against his own will. And oh, how it hurt. Seodai groaned helplessly as his body, so very out of control, suffered. After several long moments, it ended as abruptly as it had begun. It was as if the horrible, invasive presence had escaped him in a breath, and gone back to nestle in that hypnotic blur of Oliver's palms. Seodai felt exhausted and weak, the dull echoes of the pain bouncing around inside his trembling frame. Oliver did not seem surprised. He calmly knelt and began to bandage Seo's hands. "I will make you some tea, Seodai. Then I want you to go to the clinic. Have them stop your bleeding. When you feel yourself again, return, and we'll begin in earnest."

[Seodai]

"It's not working," Seodai hissed in a frustrated whisper, curling his fingers into his palms in frustration. "It won't, until you concentrate." Seodai groaned and flopped back onto the cot Oliver had prepared so many hours before. He had spent a good while recovering upon it, sipping tea and bleeding into his makeshift bandages. Eventually he'd felt as if he possessed strength enough to heave his tired body up from its rest and trudge the short distance to the clinic. Caelum, who was becoming all the more familiar to Seodai, was the spark of hope burning there upon his arrival. He'd tsked and fixed the farmer with a serious expression when he had spied not one, but two bleeding hands. As Seo quietly explained himself, though, that subdued scold became something altogether different, and the Denvali felt encouraged by the time he left the clinic with hands that had been packed and manipulated until the stubborn cuts were no longer oozing. Caelum got it, and that meant something to Seo, who felt confused more often than not these days. Oliver was finishing his meal when Seo returned, a hearty stew his wife had brought for him. The child of Bala felt a bit guilty as he realized that he was keeping the older man from his family, but upon voicing that aloud, Oliver muttered something about dark times and insisted that Seodai share in the meal. For strength, he'd said. Strength Seodai would need. Obediently, Seodai consumed his gifted dinner, and pushed the bowl aside when he'd scraped it clean. "Can't hold another bite," he said hopefully, swinging willowy legs away from the table. Oliver shot him a wry smile. "You may as well slow down now, Seodai. These things take time. You won't get nothin' done in a big hurry. Come over here, sit by the fire." Seo hastened to do just that, and by the light of the fire Oliver emitted and manipulated res as if it were as simple as breathing. The young pupil was fixated, the fume-like vapors scarcely visible and yet so very tangible to the attentive. "You try." "How?" "Focus." Seodai had stared at empty palms for a few long moments, bringing him to the present, when he'd muttered in frustration. "It's not working." "Focus." Even as Oliver instructed him, so abstractly the farmer thought, the older Denvali reached for his hand. The palm still ached where it had been cut, but at least the bleeding had been thwarted. Oliver turned his hand over so that it hovered above Seo's open palm, mere inches between them. That gaseous substance that had fascinated Seodai congealed and became more tangible, something Seo could feel against his skin. "Res is a thing, Seo. It isn't like... prayers. Like faith, or hope. It exists inside of you. It is a part of you, of your essence. Using res is a bit like whistling. When you were a child, could you whistle?" Seo shook his head. "And yet, on the day you learned how, it is not as if anything changed. Your lips were still the same. The breath in your body was still the same. It is just a skill that you finally, after years of practice, managed to cultivate. Reimancy is similar. It may take a very long time," Oliver warned gently, "but only by practicing do you have any chance of success." Oliver removed his hand and with it the res he had produced, which soon became airy again and dissipated. Seodai stared at his injured palms, waiting for something to happen. As he sat in the silence, he began to think of Melchior. Magic had been like breathing for that man, so many lifetimes ago. Difficult magic. And now, in this life, Seo was struggling with the possession of his own res. Lhex had a cruel sense of humor. It was thinking of Melchior, however, that proved the most beneficial to Seodai. Because once he clawed past images of Kova and all of the hurt and horror, he could think of what it had felt like to be Melchior. Of what it had felt like to control such powerful magic, of what res had felt like in his palms, of the very sensation of producing it. So focused was he on the memory that Seodai didn't realize he had actually been successful, until Oliver spoke with a tone of mild surprise. "Very good, Seodai." The substance in Seo's hands was neither as graceful as the crystalline, gel-like product Oliver had smeared across his palm, nor as pretty as the flickering gas Oliver seemed to more naturally create. It was something in between, a substance attempting to be both and failing altogether. It made Seodai want to laugh, because even his res seemed a misfit in comparison with others. Oliver seemed properly impressed, however, and the moment was laced with a somber sort of awe and so Seodai kept his twisted humor to himself. He simply stared for a moment, then breathed in a whisper. "Now what?"

[Seodai]

"Now we do it again." And do it again they did, until Seodai felt inexplicably sleepy and though he insisted he could continue on Oliver asserted his strength of will and made the young Denvali rest. Now, then, he understood the purpose of the small cot in the room. Seodai slept in dreams of fire, Melchior's memories coalescing with his own until the world he dreamed was too strange to be true and too fantastic to let go of. He still felt tired when he awoke, but much better. Oliver was waiting. "No more today." "But..." "No. If you overgive, Seodai, all is lost before you've ever really begun. You've already accomplished more in a night than most people might in weeks of practice. Go home. Spend time with those you love, enjoy the outdoors. Don't let it consume you. Magic is dangerous in all scenarios, even more so if we become obsessed with it." Seodai was like a disappointed child, but he obeyed. He might have been distracted for the two days that passed before Oliver would see him again, but he did try to live as he always had, to not recall those beautiful flames in his hands, the feeling of power he'd know. It was that power that stirred Melchior, that insisted he do more, that spurred him on to practice alone. But as much as Melchior might have been Alahean, Seodai was Denvali and he knew nothing else if not discipline. He would wait, as he had been instructed.

[Mirage]

The Truth Within the Reality Seodai : XP Awarded Reimancy: 3 Rhetoric: 2 Meditation: 1 Lores Awarded Memories that Guide Summoning Res The Truth Hidden by a Mirage : Oh great start. I can't wait to see where this all takes Seodai . PM me with any concerns