With such a revelation, and Beil finding her idea hilarious for some reason making her feel very much like a child, Nova sat on a rock near by and curled her hair around her fingers like she wished she could curl up her whole body. It was a habit she'd developed recently to cope with stress, but since she hadn't figured out how to turn back into a snake this was almost good enough.
Taking a deep breath of the mountain air and calming herself, she tried to feel for what he was talking about. She had to remind herself to look for where her spirit energy was being drained from, and since it was being used by the spell she had to find the source somehow. How do you stop a spell if it is happening subconsciously?
She tried track the draining, starting from the core and following the strings of energy to where they were going. She found three individual paths and chose the largest one. It was like she herself was walking down a road in a vast expanse of nothing, but the nothing felt oddly familiar, and so close she could almost touch it like the walls of a very dark room.
The path she followed was sparking like electrified metal, swimming like molten sapphires, and steady like arrow, or a wire since one end was connected to her core and the other... to wherever this road led.
Meanwhile, Beil had apparently fought a strenuous battle, for when he stopped laughing he was panting on the ground. Her incredibly innocent face when she had asked if she could stop a murderer with her mind. So sweet, so naive, still such a child. Her spell may have the potential for something close to that later, but the entire idea struck him silly. He tried not to slip but couldn't help the giggle from bouncing past his tongue, except this one was pained.
After all the battles he had fought, all the wars he had tried so desperately to stop, all the times he had to prevent disaster simply because reason and logic had been abandoned, the concept of just changing their mind was stupifyingly refreshing. The will of a steadfast sentient creature was just incredibly difficult to persuade let alone force to change. She was still so inexperienced that she had not realized this just yet.
He himself had been susceptible to her charm spell because of her near matching strength, especially when she was so young that the thoughts of not being good enough did not hold her back, and he hoped they never would; not only her strength, however, but his deep loneliness. Almost five-hundred years without any companions, and only two centuries of that time were by choice. He had felt that if he chose not to put the emotional effort into bonding with anyone, he could avoid becoming as hurt as he was again.
But that was a different story.
He noticed that as he started to dwell on the past Nova had been silent and he watched her quietly. She sat incredibly still, eyes closed, hands working on her hair like a village woman's basket weaving, and he almost worried that she would tangle it into an unmanageable knot like his hair did to him on its own accord sometimes, but her hair was nearly straight, very smooth and soft, and slid easily through her fingers.
He watched a little longer and noticed something that made him feel both proud and irked. She had already began her meditation training on her own. As a beginner he wondered how well her concentration was and tried calling out to her.
She didn't so much as budge. She was so deep within herself that she may have been on the path of energy tracing. Good for her, she was indeed a prodigy, but now he doubted much of anything could destract her so he tried a few things. First, he stood and walked around her in a few steady circles, than different shapes and speeds, and finally when none of that worked he grew concerned that she had fallen too deep and would not be able to detect danger, like a sleeping human.
He thought back to earlier for a moment. She was sending mixed messages, saying he was just fine to feel what he felt, but angrily chucking things at him. She was certainly flustered, her mind not a very stable ship on her sea of conflicting emotions. Had she never had any relationships back when she was a human? She was pretty lucky to have had a sheltered life, oh how he wish he could let her stay that way.
He picked up a light dirt clod and tossed it at her back, mimicking her previous action of the day to a lesser degree. He had expected her to get hit and snap out of her meditative state, but instead she simply bent at the waist and the clod of dirt missed her by a few inches.
He tried again, something a little heavier this time, and as he balanced on one tallon he aimed for her shoulder. If it did make impact he wanted to avoid causing real damage. She bent away again and it sailed past, missing by just an inch.
Back to Nova, who was getting frustrated with her environment. It had started as a clear-cut pathway, little to no variation to the point where she almost wondered if she was moving at all, but suddenly she heard walking all around her. The path shivered, like the edges were along the edge of a body of water, and stilled when the sound stopped.
Then out of nowhere she felt agitated and jumped out to the right to avoid what she had felt was a projectile, except she didn't see anything. She looked around carefully out into the darkness, even reaching around with her physical arms before she got the notion that she was missing something important. Before she had time to find out there was a slightly different feeling of a projectile, like a stronger threat but at slower speed.
She simply sidestepped this time and the threat passed by harmlessly, but the previously clear-cut blue path was now sloshing around and she felt that she needed to focus a lot more on it than the projectiles. They didn't feel that dangerous anyway, but this path of energy felt much more important at the moment. It took a moment of walking on it and feeling for its destination to restore its calm state, but she was annoyed now.
"Could you please not do that," she asked the air and put her hands up in a gesture more to ease her own tension than for whatever was messing with her.
She decided this was getting to be too much of a hassle and turned around only to find that it didn't take her even a moment to end up where she started even after all this walking. It was like for every hundred steps she had taken she had made only the slightest bit of progress forward, fighting against heavy wind or thick oil only to make a tiny bit of progress, but going backwards was a breeze.
She cursed herself suddenly when she got an idea for not thinking of it sooner. Why use these hands? Why use these feet? They were not real in the first place, she was in her core energy after all. She looked at the nothingness and came to realize that this was the border of her physical self. Her core was just a speck compared to her body. She had a very long way to go to fill out this place with spirit energy. How long exactly? She had no idea how to measure with nothing to compare it with.
She looked at her core again, this swirling blue sphere, and had the undeniable urge to expand it, to build it up like a house, room by room... but how could she do that if it was dissipated by the charm spell?
So which of the three choices was it? If she wanted to waste maybe days or weeks at a time, she could walk the path again, but that was far too slow. What if she made a tendril herself, instead of following the ones her subconscious had built?
She shrugged and gave it a shot, pulling out a handfull of energy from the core. It was a bit like pulling out a thread from a ball of yarn, if the thread was electrified and the ball of yarn was like a lake of blue hot fire, meaning it was painful to hold onto, but she gripped it lightly and urged it to move forward on its own because forcing it made her feel almost nauseated.
With a bit of coaxing she shifted it along, but this time its progress was much faster than walking, and rather quickly it made it to the edge of the nothingness. Her body. The tendril of spirit energy, which she controlled, was about to pass through her body. This was exciting!
After the second throw, Beil was frozen after he heard Nova quietly ask him to stop. He wasn't just pleasantly surprised, he was stunned. Unless she had pulled herself from her mind just to speak and went back into meditation, which just wasn't the case seeing as her energy signature was still missing even with her sitting right next to him, she had figured out how to respond to external interactions from the inside.
At this point he was more confused that he was still surprised.
Nova yanked her hand back from beyond the edge of the nothingness body border, woozy when she realized she could suddenly only feel her hand and nothing else about her body. Could that mean that if she wanted to wake up from this strange state that she would have to walk past the edge? Well that wasn't what she wanted at the moment, nope.
The tendril had been steadily traveling outside of herself for a minute now and curiosity lead her to follow, but she wasn't doing that yet. Her energy could leave, but not herself. Could she somehow feel the energy outside? See what it could see? Her body really needed a window, for convenience.
Without warning an almost overwhelming amount of different energies humming around her like a bustling city. Her little tendril must have broken free of her body or something. She could now see and feelevery detail of the energy around her, like a Van Gogh panting, swirling and breathing and existing on a whole other spectrum. Some of the energies were soft, delicate, fragile, and glowing like a speck of dust in sunlight. Others were steadfast and sturdy enough to touch without worry that they'd crumble under her tendril, like the muscles of a steed or the grain of a rock wall. Some hurt to brush against, others felt welcoming and warm.
Beil yanked himself back when he felt her energy signature, but instead of the gently wafting aura he was used to he felt the bold, sharp, strong entanglement of an energy pathway wrapping around hid. It felt curious, thrilled, and relentlessly adventurous. He could clearly feel her emotions at this point and he realized she had not only connected her mind to this tendril of spirit energy, she was able to sense his as well.
In fact when she recognized what he was the tendril flinched away, zipped back into herself and she jolted awake, gasping like she had just broken the surface of the water after a very deep dive. It had probably felt just like that, too.
He stepped slowly back around her as she stood up like an old woman, all sore and unsteady, holding her head in her hands to ease the backlash she no doubt felt after being forced back into reality far too suddenly. With no proper training she had left herself as vulnerable as a fish in a barrel and she was lucky it was only his signature she had been handling.
"Did you have fun? It sure felt like you were at ease until you recognized that it was me."
"I am so sorry!"
"For what, child?" Oh he knew exactly what, she saw it in his eyes. He was baiting her to say something embarrassing, she just knew it, especially since she had felt the vast difference between her subconscious self and his.
She had felt his shock, his urge to fight her, and his recognition. She had been confused why his energy felt so complex and strong compared to the rest until she felt a feeling of musement that was not her own, realized the shape of the energy and where her tendril was exploring, and in an intense wave of embarrassment, shame, regret, disgust, and a bit if anger with herself she flung her mind back down the path of the tendril to get back to her body as quickly as she could. It hurt when she landed back as fast as she did, but this was better than being all handsy with a seven hundred year old... what was it... Itsumade, right. She was so flustered her face was turning red.