Page 12 of Dry as a Fish
"Hey!" I said. "You're hurting the trees!"
He paused, halfway through carving a rune. "Trees don't feel pain?"
"They can get infections and things like that if you cut into them like that," I said. "It's not about pain, it's about bacteria and fungi."
"I can heal them afterwards," he said. "So they are protected. I just wanted to get the return portal set up in advance so it is easy for me to go back and forth."
I let out a sigh.
"Is that unacceptable to you?" he asked, still not moving his knife.
"No, it isn't that, healing them is fine," I said. "I just... it doesn't matter."
"Your feelings matter," he said. "Tell me."
Those words surprised me in the fact that I wasn't sure I'd ever heard them before.
"I was just wishing that I knew how to heal trees," I said. Not just trees. I liked trees because there weren't enough of them, and they were the absolute best way to get clean air, but when it came to healing, that would just be useful. Being able to heal a horse suffering from colic or a calf that was struggling to thrive with a spell would have saved me a lot of anguish in my life. The fact that the school made it pretty clear early on that we were there to be glorified batteries and a service workforce made everything so much worse.
"Want to learn?" Delphon said with a grin. "Come over here."
I stepped off the gravel driveway and walked back over the mowed grass that separated the driveway from the line of trees running up its half-mile length. The edge of the electric fence was just past them, the metal stakes that had the flimsy-looking fencing tied to them, the grass growing up around it on the edges. My parents had managed to get enough land that we could rotate the cows through it, pasture raising them for the most part. Though a few years ago, my dad got tired of moving them around and just mowed the grass and fed it to them while keeping them standing in a small pen around the barn. Still called them grassfed even though they stood in mud. The fence was still there, unpowered, sitting unmoved from where we last put it before my dad decided we were done shuffling the cows around.
"This rune I'm carving is the same one you would use in a healing spell," he said. "It takes some practice to get the circleright, so you'll want to practice for a while with a string to make sure you're getting the curves." He drew a circle, then another, intersecting them just a little bit into each other so that they overlapped, creating a petal on the edges. He did it over and over again, until the circle was surrounded.
"Why is it used in both spells?" I asked.
"This shape is a way to anchor Chaos magic to structure," he said. "If you learn Order magic, they use runes that have specific meanings that form sentences for the magic to follow, like a formula. For Chaos magic, you just have to set the intention and draw what you will. Each spell can be unique, but this particular shape helps anchor that uniqueness into the geometric mathematical principles that shape all magic."
"Math?" I asked. "What does math have to do with magic?"
"Science and math are just ways of explaining the magic of reality in a different language," Delphon said as he returned to carving runes down the sides of the two trees. "I've seen it described in mundane media, so I know you guys know about it in some sense. For example, you have these gatherings where everyone goes once a week and focuses on their love for a deity. You're all told to think about that love and focus on it all the time, you're told to send it out to that deity. You know what that is like?"
It dawned on me what he was talking about. "It's like in my cultivation class where Reileen was teaching us to send out our energy and she just kind of sucked it up."
"Yes, she fed on you," Delphon said. "Some mundanes are already primed to be drained easily. You're already taught some of the basics of being fed upon in your religions."
"You're saying love is magic?" I asked.
"Attention and intention," Delphon said as he finished carving. "They form the basics of all magic. You sent yourintention, and you directed your attention to fulfill it. Now, you shouldn't try to power this rune as the magic in the mundane is weak right now, but let me show you how I cast my healing spell. I use song."
He closed his eyes and put one hand over his heart.
"I quiet my thoughts and I focus on the feeling of love, of health, of wholeness," he said. "I focus on it, breathing into it, until it is the only thing I can feel. Then I send it out."
He took several deep breaths, and I stood there, watching him.
He opened his mouth and began to sing.
There were no words to express the sound that came out of his mouth, or the way it made me feel when I listened to him. It was unearthly, the sound of angels singing in the background of my heart, the place where all aches faded, and the body was filled with a joyous light. It was the sound of tears pricking at the eyes from the surge of sudden joy, the sound of flowers reaching up to the sun and crying out their thanks, the sound of fresh berries being stuffed into the mouths of chittering birds.
When he finished, the runes he had carved into the tree had fresh bark in their place, a different hue that still held the shape of the spell, without the damage.
Delphon crouched down and plucked a yellow dandelion from the lush sprout of life that surrounded the base of the trees, life that had been shorn short just moments ago by the regular passing of a lawnmower.
He held out the flower to me.
I took it from him, staring at the soft, resilient petals.
