Page 38 of The Mage on the Hill
“You want… oh. Right.” Tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth, Toby dug out his phone. “Text away.”
We’re going to attempt to connect you with your Major channel. The Minor will become evident once you’re properly channeled. Normally, we’d start with a meditative state. Then I would ask you to reach, to locate that path from yourself to your Arcanum.
He turned the phone for Toby to read. “Doesn’t sound bad. But there’s anormallyin there. What are we doing instead?”
I think I need to help guide you. You did well with the last wild magic incident when we were working in tandem.
“Yeah, ’cause you shoved my arms underground. Don’t get me wrong. That was so much better than every other explosion I’ve had. I just don’t see how it was us working together.”
A lot of the redirection and dispersal was you. I stayed with you longer than I probably should have to monitor that dispersal, which was why I ended up taking a short flight when the remainder of the explosion occurred.
“Still with the jokes. You’re in a good mood today.”
Darius leaned in to press their foreheads together, telling himself sternly that he was not to think about Kara. The last thing Toby needed was for his teacher to lose his nerve. This was not then. Everything was different, including himself. He sat back to type again.Today’s the day. I feel it. We’re going to make sure you survive. Animus isn’t where my strength is, but it’s adjacent. I can find it.
“But whatisit? I mean, you get taught that it’s the soul of things, right? I don’t know what that means. How do I reach for something that I don’t really get?”
Life magic is the spark. The electric current that powers living things so they can grow, feed, and multiply. Animus is the consciousness that comes with Life. An awareness, no matter how limited or how different from ours, that drives a living being to be that sort of being. Genetic structural, mitochondrial, chemical, communicating, reasoning consciousness. How a larva knows to become a bee. How the trees send information to each other. How animals reason.
Toby shook his head as he read. “Well, crap. Where were you when I was learning all this stuff from my family?”
“Being a grumpy… hermit.”
“Oh, right. Forgot all about that part.”
Darius allowed a soft snort for Toby’s all-too-serious expression.This will sound deceptively simple, but you’ll be doing the work. You take my hands and breathe with me. When I judge that you’ve reached a less, shall we say, excitable state, I’ll give you a nudge. You may feel it, you may not, but I’ll tell you. Then you concentrate on your magic—the tingling in your hands you’ve so often described—and you reach out to the living beings around you.
“Uh-huh. So I just think at the magic and it goes poof.”
The sarcastic deadpan had Darius laughing. He put the phone down. “At first. Don’t just… think. Concentrate.”
Toby nodded, then surprised Darius by reaching out and running a thumb over his jaw. “Thanks. For not tossing me out when I came. For putting up with my yakking. For believing in me. Even if this doesn’t work—”
“It will,” Darius growled. “Hands.”
“Bossy. I like it.” Toby most likely meant his grin to hide his nervousness. His trembling hands betrayed those nerves, though, when he set his in Darius’s.
Darius declined to comment on it. “Good. Eyes closed. Breathe in.” He took an audible deep breath along with Toby’s. “Out.”
Gradually, perhaps even slow enough that Toby wasn’t aware, Darius tapered off their synched breaths, deeper, slower still, until Toby’s desperate grip eased into something less painful and his shoulders didn’t appear to be crawling up toward his ears. Better. Darius let him just breathe for another five minutes, letting the sounds of the clearing sink deeply into Toby’s consciousness. This early in spring, there were few insect sounds beyond the occasional bee, but the birds were active—cardinal, finch, chickadee, mourning dove. Toby might even have been identifying them on his own by now. The trees whispered and creaked. The ferns rustled their soft songs.
Hyperaware of the abundance of life around them, Darius reached out to the denizens of the glade, fastening on to the sedate, wide-reaching animus of the ancient white pine at Toby’s back. The pine’s magic moved in a slow river under his, buoying him, cradling him. It was tempting to float there, untroubled. If he’d been alone, he might have. Instead, he caressed a bit of the pine’s animus, urging it to turn toward Toby, nudging gently until it touched the magic reaching, yearning from him.
Toby twitched and gasped. His eyes flew open wide. The connection broke and skittered like a bad antennae signal.
“It’s reaching.” Darius pulled their joined hands to his chest and whispered in Toby’s ear. “You’re okay. Reach back.”
Jaw locked, a sound of frustration escaped Toby. He leaned his head against Darius’s shoulder, breathing hard. His magic still trickled at a sustainable level, though. Darius urged him on silently, unwilling to interfere yet and praying to the goddesses of Earth that he wouldn’t have to.Let it go, Toby. You hold on so tight like you’re afraid you’ll fly apart. Let it go.
A second pine joined the first in its questing. They reached forTobynow in a show of willful autonomy that Darius had never seen from trees. A fern by Toby’s calf joined them, all casting out toward him. An unnatural silence hung over the clearing. The birds had gone silent. Watching. Waiting.
Toby shuddered so hard, Darius wrapped both arms tight around him, pulling him close. “Tobias. Let them… touch.”
The wild magic stayed dammed behind Toby’s subconscious control. When it neared critical mass, Darius would have no time to consider a course of action. If Toby couldn’t fight his way through this time, Darius’s only choice would be to contain and let the wild magic explode as he had the first time on his lawn back home. This could be the one that killed Toby, and if he survived, it would set him back, possibly for weeks if the explosion was powerful enough.
“So many,” Toby whispered against Darius’s throat. “Too many. So loud. I can’t breathe.”
While those disconnected sentences might seem nonsensical together, Animus magic could be overwhelming and cause sensory wires to cross.
