Wolf Who Rules

"There are finger games you can play to get them to do this fluidly." He patiently corrected small mistakes in her hands. "In the base spells, correct positioning is not as vital, but later, a finger out of place will totally change the effect of your spell."

"This does get easier?"

"Yes, with practice."

"To calls winds and cast the spells, you need to hold your hand before your mouth." He raised his hand to his mouth and demonstrated the desired distance and then dropped his hand to continue speaking. "Don't touch your face with your hand, but you should feel as if you're almost touching your nose. Also if you were to breathe out, like you blowing out a candle, the center point of your breath would hit this center joint of your fingers."

"Okay." She held up her hand and found it was harder to not touch her nose than she thought.

"When I was little, my brothers and I would practice fighting with each other and in the heat of battle, sometimes we ended up punching ourselves in the nose."

Tinker laughed.

"Now, listen to the command to call the winds, and then to cancel." He raised his right hand to his mouth. "Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaae."

Tinker felt the tremor in the air around Windwolf, like a pulse of a bass amplifier, first against her magic sense, and then against her skin.

Mentally, she knew that his body was taking the place of a written spell; his voice started the resonance that would establish a link between him and the spell stones, over three hundred miles away. Despite everything she knew, his summoning of power out of thin air somehow seemed more magical than any act she ever witnessed.

He dismissed the power with another gesture and spoken command.

"Now, you try it."

She felt the magic resonance deep in her bones, and then it bloomed around her, enveloping her. Carefully she dismissed it.

"Very good. Once you tap the stones, you are connected to them. That means you need to immediately use the power, or dismiss it. Casting a spell that you hold, like a shield, keeps the connection open until you end the spell. Casting a spell like a force strike breaks the link immediately."

She nodded her understanding, trusting that when he taught her the various spells, he would tell which category they fell into.

"The shielding spell I'm going to teach you is the most basic of all the spells, but it is very powerful. With the power that the spell stones tap, it is nearly impenetrable."

"Nearly?"

"I do not know anything that could breach it - but I am afraid that you might find something - so I put in a cautionary note."

She stuck at her tongue at him. "You make me sound like a trouble maker."

"You do not make trouble - it finds you. And it is always sorry when it does."

She laughed. "Flattery will get you everywhere."

He kissed her then, making her melt against his body. They spent a few pleasant minutes kissing, and then he set her firmly down.

"You need to learn this, my love. You need to be able to protect yourself and your beholden."

"Yeah, I know. Teach away. I'm all ears."

"You summon the power and then shape it." He called forth the power, paused deliberately, and the changed the position of his hand and spoke a new command. The magic pulsing with potential changed, distorting the air around them so they stood inside a transparent sphere.

He held his stance. "Nothing can get in unless you allow it. It will last as long as you desire - but you must be careful with your movements." He moved slowly around to demonstrate the range of motion desired to maintain the shield. "Notice you must keep you hand in the correct position. If you shift your fingers or move your hand too quickly, you lose the connection for the shield."

He flapped his hands loosely and the shields vanished.

"Ugh!" Tinker cried. "It seems dangerously easy to lose your shield when you least want to."

"There are weaker shields that don't require you to hold your position. The sekasha spell for example allows them to continue fighting without disrupting their shield. The difference in strength is -" he paused to consider a comparison. "-an inch of steel versus a foot."

"Oooh. I see." That messed with her head. She had assumed that sekasha provided protection to the domana during battle - keeping them safe as they called down lightening and such. It seemed that the truth was that the domana were heavy tanks during fighting. They were able to take massive damage as well as deal it. It seemed that the sekasha must be for day to day life, allowing the domana to sleep and eat without fear.

Windwolf called up the shield again and this time showed her how to properly cancel the shield. "It is best for you to get into the habit to intentionally drop the shield than just to relax your position."

It seemed easy enough, once you got past bending your fingers into pretzels. Tinker managed to initialize the resonance conduit, trigger the shield spell, hold it for a minute, and then cancelled the shield spell.

"What about air? If you keep up the shield, do you run out of air?"