Breathe in. Breathe out.

Everybody says you have to regulate your breathing to calm your mind. Take a deep breath, let your lungs fill up and mimic the way your breathing slows when you’re asleep. It also gives you something to focus on. You don’t have to worry about dinner or your next assignment or the ultimate battle you were about to jump into; just breathe in and breathe out. That’s all you need to do.

Except, it isn’t. You can only focus on your breathing for so long. You can only stop your mind from wandering for so long. At least, that was true for me. It wasn’t just anxiety or restlessness, a feeling that I was wasting my time and needed to be more productive. Once breathing exercises made me empty my mind, I’d find that other thoughts would creep their way back in there, forcing me to focus on emptying my mind again, which of course, meant that my mind wasn’t empty anymore. A bit of a catch-22 but hey, it is what it is.

Writing helped. It really did. As long as I focused only on the words I was writing, and not on the words that came before or the words that would come after. There had to be no planning, no thought put into the continuity of the words. I wrote in a style that was popularized by writers like Virginia Woolf, a style known as a ‘stream of consciousness.’ Ignoring the fact most authors who popularized that style actually edited their words fastidiously, I let my words flow and did not edit or brood on anything. I was working with crappy red paint and flaky, uneven leaves, but I didn’t mind. I was churning out barely legible words on a small pile of leaves, and ended up with words that I did not care to reread or share with anybody else.

I exercised, too. I ran all over the mountains, climbing cliff-sides, and scaling peaks. I lifted rocks and did push-ups, and other exercises that had to make up for the fact that gyms had not been invented in this world. The exercise wasn’t all that tough, but just like writing, it gave me something to focus on, helping me empty my mind and isolate singular emotions.

Food became another source of pleasure. From my first unseasoned skewers of meat, I had long since progressed to baking in clay pots and trying out different wild herbs as condiments. I’d found a cave full of rock salt and mined a little bit to season my food, but the thing that had really upped my game was a fish sauce that I’d played around with for a few days. Styled after the ancient Roman ‘garum,’ my little fish sauce had a strange salty, umami flavor that made me very happy after dinner. I had to make it far away from my cave though, because it made everything around it smell like oily fish. I usually jumped into the river to wash away the scent after I was done making some.

The days began to roll by and my mind was as blank and unconcerned as it would ever get. Once, every night, I would sit by the edge of my cave, staring into the darkness below. I would empty my mind, gather my energy, and think about something.

Something painful, like when my mom died.

Something joyful, like the time I got into the college of my dreams.

Something special, like my first kiss.

And something mundane, like tying my shoelaces or walking outside on a rainy day.

With every thought, I used my magic to isolate the emotion, trying to understand the way it worked inside my head. Sometimes, I would try to flare it up, and sometimes, I would try to tone it down. It was tough, since I couldn’t tell if my emotions were going up or down because I wanted them to, or because my magic was making them do that, but eventually, I realized it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if my emotions were being manipulated by my mind or by my magic, all that mattered was that I could control them.

Being able to control my emotions was essential for the success of my grand project. I had to be sure, or at least as sure as one could be, that both my thoughts and my emotions were mine and mine alone.

It took a while. I savored a lot of memories, some sweet, some bitter, and the only reason I still knew how many days it had been, was because of the tally I was keeping on the wall of my cave. I didn’t have much time. I had to rendezvous with the others soon. They would be amassing on the borders of the territory of the Singing Horde, and it would be terrible if I wasn’t there to meet them. There was also a nagging worry in my head. What if Madness took the fight to the others while I was away? Maybe Noel would attack the Izlandi Kingdom like she had attacked the Lux Republic? Perhaps the Evil Eye would make trouble in the Kingdom, even though I had thrown out all of his priests?

I shut my worrying off. Not by trusting my friends and hoping things would go according to plan, but by turning off the emotion itself. I did not allow myself to feel worry, and the feeling vanished. It was replaced by an emptiness that was quickly filled by other emotions, but that was enough. My first magic was ready. I could turn off any emotions that might be flaring up too much. I also practiced flaring up emotions that might be subdued, just in case the Simurgh tried to eliminate my caution or something to get me to be reckless on its behalf.

Now, I was ready. Now, I could be sure that my next step would be carried out under the orders of my rational mind. I took a deep breath. I was sitting inside my cave on a dark, lonely night. I’d covered up the entrance with a little curtain of leaves and vines, and the only light inside was a little smoldering campfire over which I had cooked my dinner.

It was time to shift gears. I jumped up, stretched my arms and legs, and warmed up with a little exercise. I put out a hand and cast my first spell in many days. A flame appeared over my hand. The flame was large and blazed a mighty shade of crimson. I stared at the flame in my hand and focused. The flame grew smaller and smaller, and became brighter at the same time. The color of the flame changed until it was an intense shade of blue.

And then the tiny blue flame became tinier and bluer still. So blue, in fact, that it began to change color again. No, the color of the flame was not changing, the flame was changing in its entirety. It was dying, consuming a ton of my energy in the process.

Beads of sweat trickled off the tip of my nose and a strange ache spread out across my body. My outstretched arm grew taut and strained. My eyes began to swim and soon, I couldn’t see my arms or the surrounding cave. The only thing I could see was the light coming from my spell and the phantoms it was impressing into my eyes.

I blinked.

The spell was a bright, unadulterated white. The smoldering campfire had long since died out, but the cave was awash in light. I let out the breath I had been unconsciously holding, and my muscles relaxed. My outstretched hand fell to my sides as the light was held in place by the intensity of my gaze and the energy draining out of my body at an unbelievable rate.

A white light hung in the air in front of me. I passed a hand through it, but it was truly incorporeal light. It didn’t even give off any heat, and passing my hands in front of it cast long shadows all over the cave. The light looked like a little orb hanging in the air like a legendary, ignis fatuus or giddy flame, sometimes called a will-o’-wisp.

This was the second spell I made in the mountains, but its importance did not lie in the spell itself. Its importance lay in the way that it was created. I smiled and let the light blink out of existence. The cave fell into darkness and an eerie breeze whistled through it. I chuckled and whistled loudly in reply.

I had a feeling my whistle had carried far into the mountains.