"Yes!" Jenna said emphatically.
"Come," Spyder told them, motioning towards herself. "Sit. Sit and listen."
They obeyed her quickly, coming to sit before her. She sedately did the same, facing them with her stormy blue eyes and the deep mysteries contained within them. "You two, both of you, you are clumsy," she told them bluntly. "You are slow, ungainly, wasteful, and inefficient. The time it takes you to weave your spells is absolutely inexcusable," she said in a hard tone. "That is where we are going to begin. You will watch me, watch and feel and learn. By the end of this session, I expect both of you to be able to pull the flows from the strands as quickly as I can."
Jenna swallowed, but Tarrin, who wasn't as intimidated as his sister, fixed the Urzani with a disapproving look. "I didn't come up here for insults," he warned her.
"Until you impress me, it is all you will receive," she replied in a diffident tone. "You are both children. Until you show me that you deserve it, you will receive no respect from me." When Tarrin's eyes narrowed, the woman simply stared at him. "What I offer is not something you cannot live without," she warned in a dangerous tone. "Anger me, and you'll be receiving your lessons from Jenna."
That quelled any kind of objection he may have had. Despite her abrasive manner, he found he could endure it for the chance to learn from her.
"Very well. We begin," she announced.
Despite his annoyance, he was quickly caught up in the utterly fascinating realms of true Sorcery. Spyder demonstrated how she commanded the Weave, and both of them absorbed her every word intensely, watching her like hawks eyeing a mouse. She showed them how slow and clumsy they truly were, accessing her power with an ease that made them both look like Novices again. But as she demonstrated, she taught. She showed them how to get around the resistance the Weave offered to them, a newfound resistance that came with being a sui'kun . They both had learned Weavespinner ways on their own, and they both had discovered how inefficient their way really was as they watched a true master of the art perform. "You are not weaving spells. You are bringing the magic of the Weave to life. It is not a profession, or a skill, or a craft. It is an art, and you must feel that art in your soul. The more you feel it within you, the more responsive the magic becomes to you. When you and the Weave are one, it will respond to you as quickly as it does for me. Some of the resistance you encounter is because you don't put your soul into your spells. Sorcery is a thing of beauty, every spell a work of art. You must breathe life into your creations, and when you do, the magic will come to you as easily as it did once before."
"Why is it that the Weave resists us now, when it didn't before?" Jenna asked curiously after Spyder finished demonstrating a rather complicated weave that caused a swirling nexus of energy to appear over her head.
"Because of what you are," she replied immediately. "The immunity from the fire the power of the Weave can spawn also causes us to resist magic. Magic is like water, it will always follow the path of least resistance," she explained when she was confronted with two blank looks. "Before, you were downhill from the magic. Now, you are uphill. Magic is but a form of energy, as is heat, which is fire. Our resistance to the heat the Weave can generate in us also makes us resistant to the magic we try to draw in."
"I guess that makes sense," Tarrin said after a moment of mulling it over. "You said magic. You didn't just say Sorcery," he realized.
"Correct. Should some Wizard or Priest actually manage to blindside you with a spell, your body will actively resist its power. Depending on the power of the spell and the skill of the caster, it will either fizzle out, be cancelled, have its power reduced, or affect you as it would any other person. But that is a moot point, young one. No Wizard or Priest should ever be able to manage to finish a spell against you. If he does, it will be because you allow it."
"Nobody's ever taught me how to do that," he told her. "Block magic."
"Truly? Do they teach the new Sorcerers anything at all?" Spyder asked in exasperation.
"Actually, they do, but I was never really trained," he said contritely. "What I do, I kind of learned by myself."
"Ah. Then you truly are as sensitive to the Weave as I hoped," she said with a nod. "What you do comes to you through the Weave, as it whispers its secrets to you. Some are very sensitive to it, and can hear things that others can't. You seem to be one of those who are very sensitive, since the Weave whispers spells to you. That takes great sensitivity, for it's something that requires a great deal of information to come to you. As you know, the whispers of the Weave are very faint, very subtle, and often they aren't complete."
He knew that to be true. The sense of things he got from the Weave had been fragmented, jumbled, just bits and pieces here and there. A piece of a sentence, a short image that was often fuzzy or indistinct. What little of it he remembered, or knew to be coming from it. If the instructions of how to weave spells were coming to him from the echoes of memory within the Weave, then he must be able to hear much more than he first thought.
"It's also why you could hear me whispering from so far away," she smiled. "That first time. I didn't expect you to hear it from such a distance."
" That's how you do it!" he realized immediately, when she called it whispering. "You're speaking right into the Weave!"
"Is it so hard to understand?" she asked with a very disarming smile. "It's not even something that requires a spell. You can join with the Weave. If you can do that, then you can send words into it without actively joining with it."
"And since only sui'kun can sense the Weave like that, then we're the only ones who can hear it," Jenna concluded.
"Not precisely, child. Any who have crossed over can hear it. You forget that the vast majority of what you'd call Weavespinners are da'shar, the Enlightened. Any who can join with the Weave can hear a whisper. But just as there is more than one way to speak, there is more than one way to whisper. You can send your voice to a specific person, if you're familiar with them. Or a group, if you know each of them. But we digress. Back to your lessons!"
Tarrin felt a bit ecstatic that he managed to solve that nagging mystery more or less on his own, and that gave him a bit of added interest as the Urzani continued to show them how to go about drawing the magic out. He was still impressed and awed at the speed and skill with which she worked her magic. "Remember, young ones, it is not a spell. It is a work of art. You are not workers or magicians, you are artists. You must give of yourself when you form the weaves, you must be willing to put into the weave what the Goddess does on your behalf. When you can give of yourself, the Weave will respond. After all, no relationship can work if it only has one side. In order to take, you must give."
"That doesn't make sense," Jenna complained. "How can you give and take at the same time?"