“Can my problem with the water essence cause me to hear things,” Tibs asked as he followed Alistair. When he’d met him at the training tent, Alistair had told him they were going to a different location and hadn’t elaborated.

Tibs had hoped to head into the guild house; he wanted a sense of the building now that he was trying to plan something. He could enter whenever he wanted, but he didn’t want to attract any attention doing it. Instead they headed away from it.

“What are you hearing?” the older rogue asked.

“Sort of like scratching. At first, I thought it was rats because I heard it in the boulder room, but I hear it in the trap room too, and I know there’s nothing there. I thought it might be the traps resetting, but I played with the ones we train with, and nothing sounds like it. The teacher said that the dungeon only resets the traps when we’re outside, but he couldn’t tell me why. And…” he trailed off, “now I’m not sure what I heard.”

“Do you hear it all the time?” Alistair asked, but he didn’t sound worried.

Tibs thought about it. He hadn’t considered that before. “Just in the dungeon.”

“Then it may be related to your essence, but not how you fear,” he added as Tibs began to worry. “The dungeon is the only place you have to strain yourself to use your water essence because your life depends on it. It’s a strain that has been known to cause people to hear, see or think something unusual was happening. You don’t need to worry about it, as you gain experience, and you catch up with where you should be with your essence, the noises will go away.”

Tibs saw the platform, with the long line of people waiting to step on it; and like before, Alistair stepped up, ignoring everyone who came before him. He stopped before the circle on the platform since a family, along with one of the attendants in the golden robe, were already within it. Tibs studied the woman as she gestured, noting her eyes matched the gold of her robe. If he understood what she did, and could recreate it, he’d be able to leave if he needed to.

“Watching won’t help,” Alistair said as they disappeared in a glow of multiple colors. “She doesn’t need to do the motions. They just act as a mnemonic system to create the right mindset. It’s like the exercise of drawing your knife as you channel the essence through it. Once you’re skilled enough, you no longer have to do it that way, you can simply hold the knife and create the right mindset.”

Alistair stepped on and a different attendant joined them, standing next to the rogue. “If you watch, you’ll see I don’t use the same motions.” As he said, his motions were different, and then they were in the cavern with the falling water in the distance and the heavy humidity.

“I don’t know what that Mnem word means.” Tibs turned once they were off the platform and the attendant simply vanished in a glow of color. He hadn’t made any motions, only smiled at Tibs as if he was making a point.

“It’s just another word for remembering.” Alistair had kept going down the large hall and Tibs caught up with him.

“Am I getting another audience?” he asked hopefully. If he could speak with water again, maybe she could explain how to contact the other essences.

Alistair shook his head. “As I said. You only get one audience. We’re trying something different today.”

“But what if water wants to talk to me?”

Alistair looked at Tibs. “The elements aren’t like us. They don’t want to do, with us or anything else. They simply are what they represent. So water doesn’t want to see you now that he’s accepted you.”

“Why do you say he?”

“Water sounded like a man to me. Like my father, actually. I can’t tell you why. But you’re sidetracking us with your curiosity.” Alistair chuckled. “I’m going to teach you something you wouldn’t normally learn until Rho, but I think that it’s going to help you compensate for your lack of a reserve.” He turned into an opening that had been closed before, but it was a hall instead of a room. Tibs noticed most of the rooms were open this time, maybe they only closed them when someone used it for an audience, and every runner had their essence now? Then why were a few of them still closed?

The sound of falling water became louder as they walked, as did the humidity, and in the distance, he saw mist. Before reaching the end, Alistair entered a room with even more humidity than the hall. A wall of water rose to close it once Tibs was inside, and once it turned to ice, the sound of the falling water became a low and distant rumble.

His teacher sat in the middle of the room, crossing his legs and Tibs followed suit, but as flexible as his armor had gotten over the weeks, the hardened leather and softer one in the joints weren’t flexible enough to let him fully cross his legs.

“Do you know what essence is?” Alistair asked.

“It’s what I manipulate,”

“Correct, but what is it?”

Tibs shrugged.

“Essence is the force that binds our world together. Each one is connected to something fundamental; water, fire, earth, air, light, purity, darkness, and corruption are considered to be the strongest of them, the most vital.”

“Corruption is vital?” Tibs asked, doubtfully.

“Yes, but this isn’t the corruption we think of when we think of a corrupt guard or king.”

Or guild, Tibs thought.

“That kind, the world could do without. Here it refers to the breaking down of things, or of their essence.”

“Is that why corruption is also called a breaking down of morality?” the question earned him a stare. “I overheard some older thugs trying to work out what morality was once.”

Alistair chuckled. “Your street is rather interesting. It’s unfortunate Tirania doesn’t know where you’re from, I would love to visit it. But I suppose that’s possible. A Historian or a linguist would be in a better position to answer. If you want I can see about putting you in contact with one.”

Tibs shook his head. His teacher might be well-intentioned, but he didn’t want to give the guild more excuses to charge him yet more gold coins.

“Then, to continue with my lesson. What the average person tends to forget, if they knew at all, is that essence isn’t this.” He patted the stone ground, “or this.” He moved his hand through the air. “Or even this.” He formed a ball of water. “It isn’t any of those things. Essence is what those things are made from. Do you understand?”

Tibs shook his head.

Alistair chuckled. “It took me some time too. Take this ball of water. What did I do? Not the obvious,” Alistair said sternly as Tibs rolled his eyes. “Let me rephrase it. How did I form the ball?”

“You use your essence.”

“But what does that mean?”

Tibs extended his hand, coated it in water, and tried to figure out what he’d done, how he’d done it; but he just had. “I don’t know.”

Alistair nodded. “At this stage of your training, you’re told what to do to make it work. I had you visualize getting your essence to flow out of your hand to form the water that coats it, and you practiced that until you could. You learned what to do by rote, without knowing why it works. It works, that's all you care about, right?”

Tibs looked at his teacher. “You push me too much for me to think you want me to say yes.”

Alistair smiled. “Your situation is different. And you’re more inquisitive than most of the rookies I’ve trained over the years. What changes once you reach Rho, is that you’ll be expected to learn how and why doing something with your essence produces a specific result, and that means understanding essence itself.”

“You want me to learn that now. Can I? If it’s normally taught at Rho, doesn’t that mean I need to be at that level first?”

“You’re going to find out the guild, like many large organizations in the world, does things the way it does simply because it’s how it’s always been done.”

“By rote,” Tibs said, and Alistair chuckled.

“Or because that way is to their advantage. By rote means they don’t understand why they do it a certain way. The guild usually knows why. Training you, the leveling system, it’s a bit of both, I suspect. It’s been around for so long that we don’t know entirely why that’s how it’s done, but also, the guild benefits by ensuring you move at a steady rate instead of letting you do things however you want.”

“They can charge me more gold,” Tibs said bitterly.

Alistair didn’t reply immediately. “And they can make sure you don’t kill yourself, Tibs. Working with essence unsupervised is dangerous. Maybe you could progress much faster on your own, but imagine accidentally having an audience not knowing anything about what it entails?”

“You didn’t tell me anything about it.”

“I told you to be careful, that it was dangerous, to respect the being you’d be speaking with. Imagine coming across water and knowing nothing.”

Tibs could. He’d already been scared he was drowning. It would have been more frightening to notice something there with him and not knowing what it was. He would have lashed out.

“The guild benefits by ensuring you survive now that you can manipulate essence, so they want to make sure you take things at a safe pace.”

“The dungeon isn’t safe.”

Alistair tried to speak and finally rubbed his face. “Tibs, you’re going to have to take me at my word when I say the world isn’t simple, and that sometimes the safest way to do something is still dangerous.”

Tibs nodded. His teacher was trying to help him. He wasn’t gaining anything out of exasperating him.

“We start teaching you by rote so you can see you can do something. Once we start teaching you the how, and the why, you already know what you’re aiming for, that it is possible instead of floundering in the dark. And waiting until a certain point also ensures you have a level of physical fortitude we can test, but the exercises themselves don’t require it.”

“So essence doesn’t come from inside me? It pulls the water out of the air?” He took a chance, hoping that this would show he was back on track with the lesson.

Alistair smiled. “It looks that way, doesn’t it?” He moved his hand through the air, collecting water. “Only, what happens if you’re in an arid place. Or what about if someone manipulating fire essence tries it here? If the essence let us pull out of the air, or out of any something, how much of it is around you would limit what you can do, no matter how powerful you are. Essence is water, but, in its purest form, like it’s the idea of what water is.”

Tibs rubbed his temple. “This is going to be like learning the numbers.”

Alistair chuckled. “We can stick with visualizing things the way we’ve been, I just need you to remember that’s all it is. A way to visualize, it’s not the truth of what the essence is. Now, close your eyes, and focus on your reserve. It’s going to feel like it’s somewhere inside you. Philosophers like to refer to that as our core, because of it. Don’t worry if it takes time, some people take months or years too—”

“Got it,” Tibs said, deciding that was good enough a place to interrupt his teacher. He’d been able to feel his reserve from the start because of how stark of a difference the thin surface was to the vast void under it.

“Alright,” Alistair said, sounding surprised, but he didn’t contradict him. “I expect that when you feel it, it feels like water.”

“Yes.” Water coating the surface of an orange, sticking to it, except the orange was nothing. He was already giving himself a headache.

“You need to let go of that idea. It isn’t water. Essence isn’t a thing, it’s the idea of that thing, like something that’s broken up until you can’t feel it anymore.”

“That doesn’t make sense.” Tibs stared at his teacher, the man’s blue eyes fixed on him. “If it’s broken, then it isn’t what it was any more it’s… something else.” A shiver ran down Tibs spine.

“Exactly.”

Water wasn’t water. Fire wasn’t fire. They were made of what they were. Tibs closed his eyes. That made no sense, but the world didn’t always make sense, sometimes he had to find a different way to think about something so it would make sense, and once he did that in his mind, he usually found that it also made sense in the world.

It was easy. In his mind, water didn’t have to be water.

It was really easy. In his mind, it could be little bits of something else that wasn’t water, but that also was.

It was the simplest thing in the world. All he needed to do was see his reserve as that thing that was both water and not.

“Why can’t I do this,” Tibs asked in exasperation.

He cracked an eye open. Alistair’s eyes were closed.

He imagined himself floating on a lake. He didn’t question how he could, it just was. Like water was and wasn’t water. Below the surface was the void. He bobbed back and forth to the currents and waves. He dipped under and held his breath until he resurfaced. Above him was the sky. Only he couldn’t see it. When he tried, he thought he saw faint white lightning, except it was below him, not above, so he stopped trying. Right now the sky didn’t matter.

He bobbed under another time, but now he forced himself not to hold his breath. When his mind told him he couldn’t do that, that if he breathed water, he’d drown. He told himself that in his mind it didn’t matter. In his mind, water didn’t have to drown him. In fact, it didn’t have to drown him in the world either. He’d been underwater once, and he’d been able to breathe.

During his audience, he’d been underwater, and yet he’d breathed normally.

He no longer floated under the water. He took a breath of something that was and wasn’t. That could be, eventually, but not right now. This could be water if he and water decided it wanted to be.

This was essence.