“Sure.”
“Yes.” And there they were, fulminous and heavy, all around them but invisible to the eye unless he focused on his Heart first. “I see them. Why were they metallic grey in the skycrane yard, and a reddish-brown elsewhere? Does—?”
“Can you move the mana with your will?”
Scorio bit back his questions and nodded, still envisioning the Heart before him, the black clouds all around. “Yes. Slowly. I—ah—imagine I’m holding a huge wooden paddle and stir it around my heart till the clouds—the mana—begins to respond.”
“A huge wooden paddle,” she said, and for the first time, he heard something other than bitterness or annoyance in her voice. “That’s adorable. You’ll need to work on that technique, but for now, fine. Grab your paddle. But don’t just swirl the mana about your heart. Direct the mana into your heart.”
“Into it?” He blinked, lost sight of the Heart and black clouds both. “Like, as I did with the treasures?”
“It’s amazing that you managed to activate these.” She reached into her black, ragged robes and pulled out the bridge and steel bar.
“Not that hard. I worked the clouds till they were really moving, then poured them into the treasures, as if they were a funnel.”
Naomi studied him skeptically.
“What?” Scorio sat up straighter. “You don’t believe me?”
“Of course I believe you. It’s just… improbable, that you’d be able to do that before igniting your Heart. But yes. It’s a similar technique. But these treasures are inert, they’re not part of you. Your Heart is. And thus you can pull the mana into your Heart just as much as you can direct it with your huge wooden paddle.”
“All right, I didn’t mean that it was that big,” said Scorio. “Like, a normal-sized wooden paddle.” Naomi raised an eyebrow at him, and he flushed. “Fine. I’ll try that.”
Scorio summoned his Heart once more, focused on the heavy, sooty clouds, and began to stir them, to swing them about his Heart with great, laborious sweeps of his invisible… paddle. The clouds responded sluggishly as always but gradually picked up speed.
It was strange, working thus, while Naomi stared at him. Her gaze was direct, neutral, gauging him. He avoided her eyes and focused on the clouds. When they were moving at a good clip, he inhaled deeply and sought to guide them into his Heart.
And failed.
The clouds simply continued to swoop around it.
Scorio frowned. “It’s not working.”
“Are you pulling?”
“Pulling on what? The Heart’s just hanging there.”
“Release the mana.”
He did so, gratefully.
“Focus on your Heart. Get as close to it as you can.”
Scorio did so. He saw his Heart again, faceted and sharp-edged, hanging in nothingness. Brought himself closer to it, or it closer to him—he wasn’t sure which. Slowly it grew larger, and he saw with greater clarity its shape, studied how the edges ran and divided around the facets, how it was larger on the top and tapered down to a dull point below.
“Now visualize reaching for it, imagine your hand moving toward your Heart and sinking into it.”
Scorio bit his lower lip as he frowned, his focus intense. He did as she bid, tried to imagine his hand extending out, grasping for the black stone. Nothing appeared, no arm, no hand. If anything, the Heart seemed to retreat.
“I’m not sure I understand,” he said, after several long minutes.
“All right. Your huge paddle. You realize that you’re not actually summoning one, correct?”
“Right,” he said wryly.
“Your paddle is your will. You’re stirring the ambient mana with the strength of your being, of your mind and spirit and heart. That is what you need to use to connect with your Heart. Reach for it again, but this time imagine you’re using your paddle. Maybe that’ll be easier for you.”
Again he brought the Heart as close as he could, but this time he imagined himself grasping that large oar, its blade as long as his forearm, plain and sturdy and dependable. He directed its end toward the Heart and pushed.
He fully expected the paddle to knock the Heart away, but instead, he felt it slide smoothly into the great stone. And in that moment, an awareness blossomed within him, a connection to the Heart that hadn’t been there before, as it went from an opaque image to a tangible, heavy core within his being, still with its black, faceted aspect but now encapsulated by the same sense that told him even with his eyes shut where his limbs were, his hands, where his body began and ended.
“There!” He grinned, elated, only to see Naomi’s face register not a flicker of emotion, her gaze remaining as deadpan as before. “There. I, ah, did it.”
“Great. This would have been an agonizingly long week if you couldn’t do even that much.”
“Ah, yes,” said Scorio, smoothing away his smile. “So—bring the mana into my Heart?”
“Bring the mana into your Heart.”
This time it was fundamentally different. He swirled the black, turgid clouds about but for the first time felt the Heart as a part of him, a funnel in its own right. He felt the hunger within it, the ability to drink deep of those clouds just as the treasures had done.
Working mightily, he swirled the mana around and around, and then directed the black smoke towards the Heart while inhaling at the same time, pulling on the smoke from within the Heart as best he could.
The black mana sank into the stone and disappeared without a trace. But Scorio felt it within, felt it grow heavy and still, filling his Heart like water did a sponge.
“There!” He punched a fist into the air, not caring that Naomi’s only response was to arch an eyebrow. “I did it! What now? How do I ignite?”
“Ignite?” She laughed, leaning back on one outstretched arm. “Scorio, you’re decades away from igniting, entire lifetimes.”
“Wait, what?”
“All right, maybe not decades, but you’ve got a long way to go. Look. You ignite your inner flame when you apply sufficient tension to your Heart after saturating it with ambient mana. You just took a sip of the poorest mana in hell. I barely felt the reduction. You’re nowhere near saturated, and even if you were, you’d then have to learn to hold onto the mana while applying tension.”
“Hold up.” Scorio felt the mana he’d taken into his Heart begin to leak out, and with a wave of frustration allowed it all to slip free. “I don’t understand. Apply tension?”
“Yes. Tension. Though the fact that you’re out here, cheating your way to victory against me so as to learn this stuff bodes well for you. Because tension is the friction we all feel between the object of our desires and the reality of our shortcomings. The greater your ambitions, the greater your frustration at failing to achieve them, and the greater the turmoil that will roil your Igneous Heart.”
Scorio shook his head sharply. “I don’t understand. Frustration is what causes my Heart to catch fire?”
“It’s the fundamental driver of every Great Soul’s climb to power,” said Naomi. “It’s why most can’t make it past Dread Blaze while only one in a million makes it to Imperator. Power comes to those who truly desire it, by means of the frustration they feel at not yet having achieved it.”
“So… Great Souls who stop at Dread Blaze do so because they don’t want more power?”
Her smile was dark. “Precisely. No matter what they say out loud, they have grown content. They achieve what they really want—perhaps a little money, a little authority, some security—and stop striving for more. Because acquiring power takes work, Scorio. It takes pain and sacrifice and unyielding resolve. And once people attain as much power as they need to satisfy their inner ambitions, they stop growing.”
“Huh.” Scorio stared at her, nonplussed. “But… what if you don’t have ambition? Or goals? Does that mean you can’t grow?”
“You’re just a Char,” she said dismissively. “You don’t even know how the world works. How could you have real ambition? You’re all reincarnated with enough drive to fuel you to at least Emberling or the like. Great Souls are by their very nature ambitious. Once you learn more about the world, you’ll figure out whether you want to keep growing.”