As we moved on after the fight, I considered the relative trouble we had with the fight against a clearly weaker group. Only one of them had crossed the first divide, compared to three of us, and while another was quite a bit higher leveled, I felt that we should have won a lot easier. The obvious reason we had problems was that our usual tactic heavily relied on our first strike, and without that, Adra had been rather useless, due to the fact that firing arrows into a chaotic melee was a gamble, each arrow potentiall hitting an ally. That had forced her to change her position and the time needed to run that distance was long in a fight that made seconds feel like hours. Even my own contribution had been limited, at least up to the point that I had gambled on my idea to use Mind Magic to cause an opening for Sigmir. At the same time, I needed to remember that we had won without loss or even serious injury, so it wasn’t too bad. Better positioning and tactics would have to be thought up for the future.

At night, in camp, I tried to make sense of the staff we had taken from the dryad. Adra was with me and just as interested as I was - as was Lenore, whose interest I could feel in my mind. A quick inspect gave us some useful information.

Earthen Staff Rarity Rare Base Damage 12 Damage Bludgeoning Strength Modifier High Special Effect Focus: Earth - Allows storage of Earth-Element Astral Power. Special Effect Magic Channel: Earth – Allows usage of stored Astral Power to strengthen Earth Magic. .

Visual inspection with our eyes yielded little, the staff itself seemed to be made from grey rock, it had a marble-like, smooth surface but was far too light to be solid rock. Part of me wanted to test if the staff could be broken - rock was brittle after all, and I had seen martial artists break rocks. But simply breaking it for the sake of breaking it seemed to be an incredibly waste, even if it was possible. Looking through Lenore’s vision showed that the glow was almost gone, only barely penetrating the rock from the core that was emitting it.

I explained to Adra what I saw and she posed that the staff itself had a core from a different material, most likely inscribed with runes, and the shell was used to channel power from the inside to the user and vice-versa. Curious, I tried to push some of my own power into it and there was a feedback. It felt as if I tried to lift a huge boulder and in Lenore’s vision, I saw that most of my power simply radiated off, unable to be stored. Even pushing a third of my power into the staff only changed the glow marginally, something Adra explained with my lack of affinity for earth magic. I had Astral Power and, in theory, could use Earth Magic and thus convert it into Earth-Element Astral Power, just that it was a lot harder for me, using more power, focus and effort, to the point that it became infeasible.

Handing the staff to Adra, I watched how she did, there was less waste when she tried it, but still a lot of waste. To compare, I held my hand up, creating a set of Ice Runes to channel power into, watching as I did and the difference was obvious. I had taken it for granted before, but now I consciously watched as the power streamed from my hand, siverly-blue with almost no waste radiating into the air. Mixing Darkness and Blood-Runes into the formation changed the perceived colour and slightly increased the waste, but I was still using almost all of it, maybe wasting five percent. Trying to use Earth Magic, I had wasted about ninety percent. Adra, in comparison, wasted maybe seventy percent with the staff.

Once Adra had charged the staff for a bit, I asked her to try it out, which she did. She managed to raise a molehill before the staff was empty and she was gasping for breath, spent. I had watched and once again, most of the earthen power was simply wasted, most likely due to lack of affinity and skill on Adra’s part. I wanted to test it for myself, but I could easily imagine how little I would be able to achieve, even if I used all my power and the fully charged staff.

“I doubt you could do much with it. But I have a different idea.” Lenore said in my head. The next moment, I felt her mind brush against mine, closing the small distance between our minds, allowing our minds to merge. We had done so before, but always in the heat of the moment, without me thinking about it, but now, I had time to observe and feel what happened. The feeling was strange; it became hard to tell where my identity ended and where Lenore began, and only the mental reference to our bodies allowed me to identify what subconscious streams belonged to whom - for example a reference to my feathers was clearly not mine, same with a thought about my wings.

But with our minds joined together, I knew what her idea was, she felt that our connection had strengthened to the point that we could consciously cast magic together, even closer than we had before. Before, we had mostly used our magic simultaneously, even through each other, but never in the way she felt we could do now.

I felt her reach out, feeling the wind around us and my mind was there with hers, tasting the air, feeling the changes and joining with them. At first, it felt alien to me, but thanks to Lenore’s mind, I was able to make sense of what i was feeling and we started to manipulate the air, using what I knew had to be Air Magic. It felt less rigid than Ice Magic and more whimsical and lighter compared to Darkness Magic. It was as if our minds were dancing together; in the beginning Lenore was leading, guiding me through the air around us, but soon, she let me try my figurative first steps, feeling the air and what it was touching on. I learned that there was so much in the air: vibrations that represented sound, small impurities that represented smells, changes in temperature, changes in density - all at the tip of my mental fingers. But also far too complex to interpret, at least for me. For someone with a higher skill, the air had to be the ultimate record, allowing them to track and trace, to gain incredible amounts of information, just by taking in what was around them.

After what felt like only moments, I felt the beginnings of a headache and pulled my mind back, slowly disentangling myself from Lenore, regaining my own ego. A quick check showed me that it had been maybe twenty minutes of merged minds, far longer than I had thought. In addition, the merge and the unfamiliar magic had used up an astonishing amount of Astral Power. During the merge, I had learned that the merge was possible, thanks to the advances in Mind Magic we had made together. When merged, we could use the other’s magic abilities with our own Astral Power, allowing us to cast magic in ways we could not do on our own. The obvious combinations would be Air combined with Ice magic on one hand and Death and Darkness magic on the other. It was similar to the things we had done before, using those skills alongside each other, but now we could merge them to achieve greater things.

With my focus back to my body, I was blinking the aftereffects of the merge away and looking at Adra who was still messing with the staff. Just when I thought that she had not realised what I had done, she spoke. “What did you try? I felt the air stir around us.”

“Just a little something with Lenore. What do you think about the staff?” I asked, trying to deflect her curiosity. I could hardly give her answers that I didn’t have myself.

“It’s useful for some, but useless to us. We should keep it and sell it somewhere with more people around.”

“Do you think we could take it apart and learn how it works? I would love to have something similar for my magic, it seems quite useful.”

“Even if we knew how it worked, I doubt that we could make one for you. There has to be some sort of special material within, something that can store the Astral Power. Stuff like that is rare,” Adra explained. But lack of material did not faze me, I was sure that we would find something fitting at some point. Or maybe I could create something - I had already used conjured Ice as spell-focus, so maybe I would be able to get somewhere with that as a base.

Just when I wanted to say so, she continued. “Another problem, just how would you like to take it apart? Simply breaking it would destroy the core material and most likely shatter the runes needed to make it work beyond recognition. You would need a competent Earth Mage to seperate the layers, it’s even harder to take apart than it was to create.”

Her argument brought me up short - I had not considered that. But when thinking about it, it became obvious: unless the core was a lot harder than the outer shell, it would be almost impossible to shatter the outer shell without destroying the core. I would have to try to get a bit of understanding by studying it with Lenore’s vision, both the charging and the discharging process - maybe then I could glean a bit of understanding, enough to give me an idea where to start making my own. And an idea what to look for in materials, something even harder.

But I had seen an awesome toy and I wanted one for myself.