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Interlude II: Tedious Rigor
🕑 Added 2025-08-01 14:52:49 +0000 UTCThe Peilker Scale rated affinities from 0 to 12, and to the fourth decimal of each value. Passive augmentations were a magical phenomenon that only applied to individuals with ratings of 1 and above. The overwhelming majority of children didn't have any ratings below 1 and thus enjoyed a slew of passive augmentations.
Blood-healing, for instance, presented as vigor, faster regeneration from small injuries, and all-around bodily wellness, amongst other things.
Caen's first potency results rated his affinities at 0.2500 across the board. Which explained why he was always so ill and sickly as a child. Roughhousing with his mates always resulted in terrible injuries and wounds. He healed slowly, caught infections easily, and had much less energy than was expected of a child his age. His grandparents, both of whom were practiced healers, had needed to live in the same house with Caen for most of his childhood just so they could continually keep him in good health.
Affinities could rise over time, but only through the rigorous practice of magic. And of course, this mostly entailed having the bare minimum of affinity ratings in the first place.
If Caen could raise his affinities in the core arts—disciplines of magic directly concerned with the self—then he would eventually gain the passive augmentations needed to function in society. And also, he would be able to practice magic more easily.
It was straightforward for him.
Proficiency at spellcasting required a strong ability to focus on one thing or a group of things; a good memory; vivid and detailed mental imagery; a keen sense for and familiarity with one's own spirit; ambidexterity; agile fingers; a high level of bodily coordination; excellent breath control; a vast vocal range; fluid and precise articulation.
Passive augmentations granted all these freely to everyone.
Everyone but Caen. So he worked compulsively to bridge the gap.
He came out into Drenlin every morning to mindfully meditate with the acolytes at the Edict Temple. He learned to reapply his attention again and again, to focus on the same task with kindness and persistence. He soon no longer needed to practice with the acolytes and was spending hours at home meditating by himself.
He took mnemonic lessons with his mother daily, and learned everything she knew on memory mastery before he was nine years old. Then he bothered Uncle Vai to teach him even more complex memory techniques.
Caen learned to split his attention in two. Everyone could do this from the moment their spirits awakened. Caen was not everyone. After bothering Uncle Vai for months, the man finally admitted with great reluctance that some advanced magical exercises and procedures might eventually allow Caen to split his mind in a manner inferior to what Passive augmentations granted. Under Vai's supervision, Caen practiced the incredibly painful exercises over the course of many months. It would not have been possible without Vai's help and assistance.
In time, Caen could engage in two conversations at the same time. He would speak in Thermish with Zeris while having yet another far more stilted conversation with her using their spirit tendrils alone. He would write two different notes on two different pages using his left and right hands simultaneously, though his eyes had to flit between the pages. He practiced using various senses at the same time, engaged with opposing tasks that required high attention to detail, and practiced so frequently to the point that he could follow two separate trains of thought at the same time. He'd cried on the night he finally managed this.
Being able to hold clear and vivid mental images in the mind’s eye was at the heart of spellcasting. Without the augmentations Dream-guarding granted, Caen did not have an instinctive knack for magical visualizations. He learned to sketch images from memory, and, using a few tricks Uncle Vai had taught him, he learned to reconstruct objects and events in his mind's eye. He focused on replicating emotional details, shapes of varying complexity, colors, tones of light, sounds, tactile sensations, and scents. He would mentally combine these, take them apart, and then recombine them.
As a young child, his father gave him lessons often on how best to sense his own spirit. Caen would focus on his spirit each evening amidst his father's spirit probes. He included careful and mindful spirit movements in his meditative practices. Long hours spent thoughtfully stirring his own spirit in different ways and paying attention to how that felt. He learned to treat every laborious movement of his spirit as an opportunity to pay closer attention to this core part of himself.
Due to his bloated mana reserves—a result of his abjection—Caen’s spirit could not regulate itself. It never stopped drawing in mana even when at full capacity, and his mana control was utterly atrocious. He performed mana exercises several times a day and expelled a portion of his mana every night, both to improve his control and put a stop to the bloating of his reserves, respectively. Larger-than-usual reserves were incredibly useful to a person whose spell constructs collapsed all the time. So he worked on his efficiency, learning to use the smallest amount of mana each spell required. Doing this doubled his already-long casting time, but Caen persisted all the same.
He trained his left hand to be as proficient as his right. He would go some weeks without even using his right hand a single time. He formulated and practiced increasingly disturbing exercises that turned his parents' fond amusement into concern. And in time, he could write as cleanly with his left hand as he could with his right. Either hand was as useful to him as the other.
Finger dexterity required him to pick up all sorts of interesting skills like needlework, card shuffling, and paper folding. He learned to play several stringed instruments. He mastered the use of complex eating utensils like the ones used in Leuce. He learned to tie complex rope knots in seconds as well as use his fingers to make intricate and symmetrical shapes with strings and elastic bands.
He learned to dance from visiting troupes and from his older cousin, who eventually left the commune with one of these. They taught him how to keep his body flexible and nimble. He participated in choreographies in Drenlin, mastering difficult sequences through laborious repetition and memorization, while others did so with relative ease.
Aunt Vensha, too, taught him as many combat forms as he was willing to learn, which is to say, all the ones she knew. Sometimes, the gesture components of a spell required more than mere finger movements. And if a person was in motion, it was usually much harder to perform these. So Caen mastered his body.
When he was old enough, he started lifting weights to build muscle. Most people wrongfully associated muscle mass with high affinities in Body-enhancement. By building muscle, Caen had more to work with in fights. He improved his endurance by running long distances almost every day while wearing weighted vests. All his coats were padded with weights to make them heavier. He also worked on his flexibility, meditatively executing static and dynamic stretches daily.
Breath control was best learned in the safety of his room. He learned to hold his breath for many long minutes. He mastered various breathing sequences and respiratory rhythms. Focusing his attention for hours on nothing but his breath also helped him secure a better handle on it.
Vocal range was a vital component in spell casting. Many an incantation required words to be spoken at a specific pitch or in a precise singsong fashion. So Caen learned how to sing. He had older cousins who raved about music and wrote some themselves. Reluctantly, they taught him how to strengthen his vocal chords, how to read music notations, how to pick out notes, and how to reproduce them in musical instruments.
He trained his speech patterns in three different languages. Standard Thermish, Olden Vishic—as spoken by his mother's people—and then base-Ortrilian, which was a creole of two Ortrilian languages. He learned to properly enunciate his words, polished his diction, trained his tongue and the surrounding mouth muscles.
Caen poured his heart into all these as though he were learning magic itself. And in a way, he actually was learning magic, or at least lesser components of it.
A sound knowledge of music theory was a good foundation for Vibration magic. Fine motor control and passable skills in drawing calligraphy were useful to a Scriptor, even if not utterly necessary for the magical practice itself. Blood-healing was greatly improved by an understanding of anatomy and a solid grasp of mundane healing. Dream-guarding placed a great demand on one's mental faculties. Body-enhancement was best utilized by people who had a good understanding of and mastery over their bodies. A significant portion of Divination magic hinged on the sensory faculties and how attuned to them a person was.
It was a long shot, but Caen held on to the hope that training these might help him understand his abjection better and maybe one day rise above it.
