By the time the sun began setting and Vanya finally ordered him to stop, he was mentally exhausted. They had only stopped twice the entire day for bathroom breaks and to take tiny meals. It hadn't been nearly enough. His mouth watered as he pulled out some dried meat and vegetables and handed some to Nora who devoured it greedily.
Jason wasn't entirely certain of where they were going. They had not taken a straight path towards the mountains like he had expected, instead curving ever so slightly to the north. Despite that, the mountains were noticeably closer than they had been. In fact, at this pace they would likely reach them some time tomorrow.
Jason offered some food to Vanya who refused it, taking some from her own pack instead. She had made no effort to avoid him per say, but she hadn't made it easy to start a conversation. Nora was caught up in eating and playing with the sparrow, and despite Vanya's obvious desire to be left alone, Jason couldn't help himself.
"You seem to know this area pretty well," he said, trying to start a conversation.
"In a way," she said, not deigning him with any more.
That had been stupid. The least he could have done was start with a question for her to answer. "How do you know it so well?" he said, amending his former statement.
The demon gave him a glance that made him second think his efforts to talk to her, but he couldn't back down. He needed information more than anything else, and it didn't look like he would be getting too much more out of the sparrow.
"You should get some rest, we'll have an early morning."
"Shouldn't we be setting a guard or something? We aren't that far from the nearest farm," Jason replied. She had completely brushed him aside, but that didn't mean he had given up.
"I'll take care of it," she said gruffly.
"You'll stay up all night? Are you going to do that every night? You may be strong, but I doubt even you could do that." He might be pushing his luck, but from a single day of interaction with her, it didn't seem like she would react to anything less.
"We'll see about that," she said, still not rising to his bait.
"What are you even doing here? Didn't you say that the only reason you aren't killing me is because I'm your last hope? If you have as little faith in me as it seems, then perhaps you should just kill me and be done, but if you're not going to do that then why not help me?"
The more he spoke the more confident he became. This demon wasn't going to kill him, she had never intended to. She had had plenty of chances to, and even after her disappointment this morning, she had still led him across the plains.
All of that could only mean one thing and he was embarrassed that he had missed it before. "You're desperate," he said softly. She obviously thought he was hopeless, but she stuck with him anyway. That could only mean that whatever the bigger situation was, she saw it as even more hopeless than he was. He wasn't sure how he felt about that, but he would use that information.
"You don't have a chance without me," he continued. "Every step you take, takes you farther behind enemy lines, but you still go anyway, and why? Because I told you to." Vanya refused to look at him, but her fist was clinched. Just a little more, he thought.
"You never considered that I might have been lying to you or had ulterior motives," he paused briefly. "Actually you did, didn't you. You considered, and realized that it didn't matter if I did or not. You…"
"How long are you going to keep talking?" she interjected. "If you fought half as well as you talked then we would have no issues."
Jason smiled inwardly, but getting her to talk was only the first step. "Fair enough," he said. "So maybe you could help me become a better fighter?"
"We don't have time for that now, you should get some rest or…"
"Maybe you could tell me more about using mana?"
She glanced at him, then back at Nora who was already done eating. She had her back to Jason and Vanya and was staring out into the night, sitting just far enough away to seem inconspicuous. She was obviously listening to them.
"You get over here, girl," she commanded, and Nora dashed over, not even bothering to look embarrassed.
"How much do you know about mana?" she asked Nora.
"Not much," she responded politely. "My dad could use basic reinforcement magic, but he never taught me."
"Not even the basic drills?"
Nora shook her head slowly, looking down a little.
"You don't have much anyway," Vanya said casually, bringing a look of dismay to the girl's eyes. "If you want to amount to anything at all, you'll have to work twice as hard." Nora nodded her head quickly.
"You on the other hand," she said to Jason, "have so much that you should be having the opposite problem. I know kids who were born with perhaps a hundredth of what you have who had difficulty learning to keep their mana contained."
She looked Jason up and down. "I don't have any experience with summoned heroes, but there's a chance that you have more inherent control, but that doesn't explain your inability to use magic. You used fairly advanced illusion magic before, why can't you do it now?"
"It isn't that I can't," he said, showing her the fruits of his efforts today. His hands disappeared into the darkness, and then reappeared a moment later colored a bright red. "I practiced while we were running, but couldn't get much past this."
Vanya put a hand on her head looking unimpressed. "That required less mana than running did. Close your eyes."
He did as he was told and heard her stand and walk towards him. "The mana inside of me is like a gentle river. I have cultivated it my entire life, growing it and sculpting it into a usable form." She took a seat behind him.
"When I was young, I might have described it as a trickling brook. It was smaller, with pebbles and debris floating in it. It was smaller and unwieldy, but I could still feel it."
"Girl, what do you feel?"
Jason kept his eyes closed, but heard Nora beside him. "It's like the water dripping off the roof after a rain," she said.
Jason strained to try and feel something, but nothing he felt could compare to what the others were saying. "And you?" Vanya asked. Jason could tell she was speaking to him now.
"I think I can feel a little something. It's like a mist inside me that can leak through from time to time if I try hard enough."
There was a silence that Jason used to try and feel more, but that really was all there was. It was definitely there, but it was insubstantial. Difficult to shape and impossible to grasp.
"You can open your eyes," Vanya said absent mindedly. "I can hardly fathom that much mana inside me, but I can only imagine that it must be a raging typhoon of near incomprehensible energy," she said with a sigh. "If that is what you feel then I don't think there is anything I can do to help you. You'll have to figure it out on your own somehow."
Vanya gave Jason and Nora some basic exercises designed to increase their mana capacity and breadth of control, but she didn't give anything else even when Jason pressed further.
He smoothed a patch of grass to give himself a small cushion while he slept, but he couldn't stop thinking about what she had said. He should have a storm raging inside him, leaking out, but instead he could barely manage the tiniest things. It was beyond frustrating, but there had to be some kind of reason, right? He laid awake far into the night desperate for a solution, but none came before he finally drifted to sleep.