When Webs Are Woven

by **Fallan Windchaser** on October 10th, 2013, 11:22 am

13 Summer 503, Grasslands near Syrila Border

Much had changed for the boy since his father had opened his mind to the web which connected all things Drykas. It should not have changed anything for he had been told many things and seen others regarding the web and yet they were words which had failed to reach that inner understanding of his mind. It was harder to avoid the evidence of his own eyes, especially when he caught seemingly random glimpses of the web to remind him that all was not as it had seemed.

Now he dismounted at the same cairn as before having ridden there with his father. This time the herd were not there and he had no duties to perform.

"How well do you see the lines?" his father quizzed him as they sat in the grass. Fallan answered honestly, "Not very well, sometimes I see them and sometimes I don't. Rarely I see a glimpse but then I have to concentrate to see it again." His father nodded at this news. "That is as it should be and not to be concerned about. But, it is now time for you to move on and to learn to use the web."

Fallan nodded at this, a bare movement of his head as he was intent on the words, for this was not in itself news but expected. His father continued, "to create a web you must first make a strand and you can only do that by using your own djed. Once you have that strand then you can use the djed from other things to make it larger." He smiled, "but of course first you must make that first strand."

Before he made an explanation though, his father held up a finger. "You must remember that is very important to use the djed from the other things to make your web. Your djed is the needle, the djed from other things is the thread and you will sew the web from the thread, not from the needle. You must remember this, for your djed is like a small canteen of water in the desert. If you drink deeply then you will empty it and soon you will become thirsty, then delirious, then if you continue, you will die. It is called overgiving, and we will speak of it another time, but heed the early symptoms and be frugal with your djed."

With the warning given, Surdar returned to the lesson. "You tell me that you have seen flashes of the web. What you are seeing is the djed that makes up the web. You can see it because you are a part of it and because you have been immersed in it."

"With practice it becomes easier to see djed. Once you can see it then you need to be able to manipulate it. Manipulation is like a child learning to ride a horse. You can put them on the horse, but they must learn how to balance and to react to the movements of the horse. You can tell them how to direct it with their weight, but they must learn by practice just how it works for them."

He smiled, "But enough of that, we take one step at a time. First you must learn to see it clearly. For this you must learn to concentrate, to put aside the distractions of your mind and the world so that you can place all of your attention on the djed."

"You may find that distractions are your biggest enemy, but in this you will be wrong. Distractions are a part of life and if we attempt to block them then we fight them and we will always lose. I personally dislike blocking out everything around me. I need to be able to web at all times, regardless of whether the sun is shining or the snarlwings are attacking. Closing my eyes when galloping and shutting out everything around me seems a silly idea." Surdar grinned at the idea that anyone would think it a good way of working.

"Rather than fight the distractions, we accept them, nod our head to them and allow them to pass us by without reaction. So we start here, where the web is strong and easily visible. Make yourself comfortable, relax and pay attention to the world around you. Listen to the wind, to the sound of your breath. Feel your chest move and the breeze on your cheek. See the grass move in the wind and the clouds pass by. Learn to be present in the moment, not remembering the past or planning the future."

"When you realise that you are thinking, then accept the fact and allow the thought to fade. If it is important then it will come back to you later. Return your attention to the world. Now, try it."

by **Fallan Windchaser** on October 30th, 2013, 3:50 pm

Fallan was interested that his fathers advice was not the same as Fallan had heard elsewhere. Advice that was for meditation, a practice that some of his childhood friends from other families and clans had been taught. He had never quite understood the context for the teaching but now it became obvious. The Drykas did not hold themselves out to be mages, not in the way that some peoples did, or at least so he had heard, where there were powerful mages and peoples that they subjugated.

But he realised that he had allowed his mind to wander in exactly the way that his father had predicted. He pulled his focus in so that he concentrated mainly on his breathing, but not shutting out the world around him, allowing it to pass him by in the same way that the wind did.

It proved a lot harder than he had expected, for everything around him pulled at his attention, from tickles in his nose, through the sound of the striders moving close by through to the shape of the clouds that ran through the sky above. No sooner had he pulled his attention back to his breathing did he realise that it had wandered again.

He became aware too of a smile on Surdars face and he returned it even before he realised that perhaps he should not have. The thought must have been mirrored on his face for it caused an eyebrow to raise on his fathers face. Fallan felt the colour raise on his face and he broke the eye contact to try again.

"Relax," his fathers words were softly spoken. "Focus on your breathing, allow the world to pass you by. See it, nod your head in greeting and allow it to pass by without stopping to talk."

"Create a still place in your mind and become aware not only of your breathing but of your djed as it flows through you and through all things. As you become aware of the djed let loose your focus on your breathing and allow that to pass you by."

The words again were easier said than done, but now he had a path in his mind and not simply that of concentrating on his breathing he made some progress.

by **Fallan Windchaser** on November 1st, 2013, 12:03 pm

With the additional reassurance and guidance of his father, now Fallan tried again, slipping his concentration free from distraction, being aware of his surroundings but accepting them as they were. Like the wind, he told himself, feel it, accept it, allow it to blow past. The wind was also his breath so he liked the connection as he made it in his mind, expanding out the idea to encompass more.

He managed to keep the concentration for long enough to feel calm, but before he lost it and started to follow the butterflies of distraction, he changed his focus away from his breath and opened that inner eye upon the djed which was him. He had heard the theory that everything was made of djed, himself as much as anything else, though he didn't really understand that. He also accepted that he didn't need to understand how and why, so long as he understood the fact and could work with it.

There was a moment of transition while the world around him greyed out and he lost connection with it but then it came back, this time with a different view. Now the djed was at least partially visible, and he could see his own and then the main line of the web nearby. That was hard to miss for it shimmered and glinted in this view while the world was a pale shadow. There was a moment of panic when he realised this, when the worry that he might lose connection with it forever surfaced but then he relaxed and forced it away, more concerned that he might lose this focus than he might be stuck in it.

by **Fallan Windchaser** on November 2nd, 2013, 5:50 pm

Fallan felt a moment of pleasure that he had managed to make this degree of progress but he didn't allow it to run away as he was sure that the immediate result of that would be for him to lose the moment and resurface in the world once more.

He took a deep breath and prepared for the next step, carefully rehearsing in his mind the next step, recalling the instructions that his father had drilled into him. He ignored the web that ran past him and concentrated on his own djed. Slowly he concentrated on a small part of it, reshaping it, drawing it out into a strand that he then separated from his own djed.

He hesitated then for the next step was the critical one, the one that would make the difference for it was the connection to the web. He moved on, not allowing the moment of hesitation to drag out for fear that he would find this harder for every moment that passed.

The shifted the thread in his mind, pushing out the end, aware too of the link which already connected him to the family web, a strange almost ghost like spiders web which had a slightly different level of conciousness, and hooked it into the main web which ran past him, slipping into and out of the ground.

As it touched so he felt the connection and a wave of random thoughts and feelings made themselves known to him. He spent a moment attempting to sort through the thoughts and make sense of them before realising that they were too finely blended to make sense, much like the murmurs that could be heard inside the pavilion where snatches of words could be made out but never enough to quite make sense before a new voice drowned it out.

But he did not need to simply listen, he was no longer in his body, a fact whose risks had also been hammered into him by his father. He knew too that his father watched in his own way by monitoring that connection with the family web. It was a safety backup for this trip, but he could not expect his father to put all of the family business aside every time that Fallan made connection with the web.

by **Fallan Windchaser** on November 4th, 2013, 12:21 pm

Fallan spent some time merely touching the fringes of the web that his father had put him next to, attempting to glean what information he could from it. Once the initial moment of panic had left him he became aware that the web line was smaller than he had at first thought. The second realisation he made was that some of the thoughts he could feel were familiar and with this came the realisation that this web was one that his own family maintained rather than being one of the major webs which ran right across Cyphrus, webs which he wouldn’t want to attempt just yet. There would be a connection to those webs, that he guessed as much as knew for it would make sense.

Finally he took the plunge and immersed himself in the web. Almost immediately he found himself floundering out of control as his undisciplined thoughts attached themselves to information stored in the web. In a moment he was back at the campsite, a familiar pattern of thoughts and feelings revealing that to him. Yet even as he started to make some sense of that and to relate the real world that he knew to this strange webbed version than he lost that and instead found himself with the herd. He made no attempt to follow any of the web strands to the horses, but instead sat at the nexus of where they came together.

This was less distracting than the camp had been, though it was nearly as complex a junction. The lines however seemed somehow calmer and less complicated. He settled down and relaxed a little his mind on the connections and found that he stayed there without jumping to some new and seemingly random place. A sense of peace permeated as some of his anxiety ebbed and he started to look more closely at the web, curios as to what he could understand about it.

With a calmer mind some of the details became easier to read. As there was his thread connecting him to the web, so it seemed that he could find similar threads to each of the horses which must be grazing here. It occurred to him that there should be other threads for the striders and members of the family who were with the herd, just as there should be a connection from him to the family web. The more he considered it, the more questions came to mind that he could not answer, not as yet anyway and some of them perhaps his father could answer for him.

He realised that some of the things that he had thought he knew about the web had to be wrong, at least in some detail. He now realised that he didn’t really understand how things were connected to the web. The physical structure of the web seemed obvious with its anchors set into the ground, but what of mobile things that were connected to the web?

by **Fallan Windchaser** on November 5th, 2013, 4:14 pm

He decided that perhaps the question of mobile things was best left to his father for he felt unsure at this stage in attempting to do more than be able to see the threads which tracked the individual members of the herd, however it was that it was done.

Despite his uncertainty over much of what he was seeing, Fallan was however pleased with the discovery. He began too to understand the attractions of the web and the dangers that it posed. He wasn’t sure how much time he had already spent exploring. Though he was sure that it was just moments, he had little to compare to and didn’t really understand much of what he was seeing and feeling.

He floated in the web whilst these thoughts ran through his mind, aware that he had moved away from the herd but back towards the pavilion, which he also realised could not be fixed upon the web. He began to wonder if the problem might be in his assumptions, grounded as they were in what he could see, feel, hear, touch and taste. These things had always allowed him to put a hand on something and know it was there. The web was quite unlike that now he was immersed in it for though some things seemed to be tangible, those were things which were attached to the web rather than being the web itself.

His thoughts turned to his father and the process by which Fallan himself had been joined to the web. He could feel a connection to the web, but now he wasn’t sure of his previous assumption. He’d assumed that it was the thread which he’d created that he could feel, but what if it wasn’t? What if that had merely brought him into awareness of the web and then he’d become aware of his own connection? Perhaps in fact all he’d needed to do was to tap his thread into his own connection to the web? Perhaps all he had done was to create a secondary connection, one which… There were too many questions and not enough answers.

He pulled his mind back from the internal dialogue and thought once more of his father and found himself travelling along the web. There was a flicker and then he found himself drawn to what seemed to be the same anchor as he’d first experienced when he’d been introduced to the web. On reflection he couldn’t be sure it was the same, only that it looked the same. This time though he looked a little closer at it, trying to decipher it and to understand what had drawn him here. Fragments of information became visible once he concentrated, and he suddenly realised that his father had been involved in the anchor. Perhaps he had set it, that seemed the most likely guess that Fallan was able to make, but if he hadn’t then it seemed that he had reinforced it in some way, and that too made sense for Fallan had been told that the webs needed constant renewing and how better to do that than via the anchors?

With that Fallan decided that he had seen enough and the nagging worry about how long he had spent became too much. He turned his attention back to the link that connected him to the web but this time turning it round and following it through to his body and there he surfaced once more into the normal reality.

by **Taylani** on November 12th, 2013, 2:43 am

Fallan Windchaser

Skills :

Lores :

Notes :