Aerien’s POV

 

Gaerien taught me how to split me and the old man apart so that we could each focus on different things. I was forced to wonder how it was that she knew how to do that, but she said that she had just heard about it over her years of cultivation and being a fallen goddess.

 

I really didn’t like this idea at first, I was actually pretty scared to not have my previous life mind there all the time to tell me about everything. However, he seemed to really like the idea. He said it would be good for me. It would allow me to start to develop myself outside of being more like him. Besides that, I should still be able to know all the same things he knows because of our subconscious link.

 

I still didn’t like it, but with Gaerien’s help I managed to wake up from my meditation as only me, without the old man. As soon as I was awake, Levin and Rolwen came rushing over to me and Gaerien. She was waking up too, since she was also done with her meditation stuff.

 

(Hey!) Levin said. (Your mommy was here earlier! She seems to keep coming up when you two are doing your meditation stuff. Sorry, we told her not to wake you up because you said it was important.)

 

What!? Mommy was here!?

 

(Alright, thank you.) Gaerien said, clearly not upset in the slightest at the missed opportunity. I could feel my heart sink a little at her words. The old man didn’t want for us to go downstairs while she was here, he said it was because she wasn’t ready and she might not like us if we went to her. We had to wait for her to come up to us. And, it sounds like we just missed her and it feels like I’m the only person who even cares!

 

(Also,) Levin continues, (Ether guy came back and he talked to your mommy. He said that he was going to be out of the house a lot more, but he also said your mommy would be living here now!)

 

What!? Ok, now THAT is really good news. Where will she be sleeping then? I hope it’s not upstairs with Ether guy. Maybe if she has a bed down here in our room she would HAVE to see us more! But then, that would make it a lot harder to do our training. That was important too. I’m pretty sure the old man would not like her being in this room. No, maybe he would think it’s a good thing? I don’t know!

 

As I am wondering about these things, I hear the sound of wood groaning, the sound I have learned to associate with the side of the tree opening up. However, something sounds different about it this time, it almost sounds like it’s louder and closer. I could only worry about the difference in sound for so long though, because a little while after that I hear a person groaning, and it’s mommy’s voice.

 

I begin eagerly tugging on Levin’s sleeve as I slide myself down off the bed. Normally, I slide off by turning over on my stomach and sliding down backward, but this time I slide off of it forward, and I jump onto Levin to help support myself.

 

“Woah!” He lets out a scream. He may be bigger than me, but he’s only 2 years old himself and he is not able to stay on his feet when he suddenly has a baby drop on top of him, so we both wind up tumbling to the ground.

 

(Aerien! What are you doing!?)

 

Gaerien laughs at us as she crawls over to the side of the bed herself. (Sorry, I probably should have warned you guys earlier.) She says. (You remember how Aerien asked before about if any of us felt like our current selves were different from our past selves, like we had two separate minds, well that was because she actually had managed to do something pretty tricky among cultivators completely on accident. She split her spirit, she actually DOES have two minds. I just taught them how to act independently from each other, so right now it’s only the younger Aerien who’s in control here.)

 

(Wait! Are you saying Aerien’s just a real baby now!?) Rolwen asks in shock, looking between me and Gaerien as I carefully get off of Levin so that he can get back up.

 

(I’m not just a baby!) I bark back at him. This just makes him look more confused.

 

(Well, yes, she’s right about that. Her mental form looks like a child a little bit older than the two of you. I think her previous life mind helped her form that image because that’s where her maturity level struck him as being.) Gaerien explained to them. Somehow, that made me even more upset with her. Maybe the old man thought I was like a 4 year old, but I was DEFINITELY smarter than a 4 year old!

 

(I’m not that either!) I yell. (I know everything the old man does!)

 

(Well, she definitely is acting different.) Levin says, having sat up and gotten himself situated with his back to the side of the bed.

 

(Yeah.) Rolwen agrees.

 

(You’re all mean!) I yell at them with tears starting to form in my eyes. (I wanna see mommy!) I sit stationary on the floor with my feet straight out in front of me as my eyes really start to tear up. I can feel I’m getting really close to crying. The old man normally gives up way too easily because he doesn’t feel embarrassed about letting himself cry when he looks like a baby, he just gives it up as being normal for a baby to have a hard time not crying, but I really really don’t want to cry in front of them like this! They all think I’m a baby already, so I can’t prove it by crying in front of them.

 

“Ummm…” Levin and Rolwen look at each other, after which Levin reaches a nervous hand over and starts rubbing my back. I pull away from him with my shoulder and turn my back on him.

 

(Oh geese, this is weird!) Rolwen comments. Meanwhile, I can hear Levin getting up and clunking with heavy toddling footsteps across the room. His walking is rough, but that’s mostly because he has the body of a 2 year old. If you take that into consideration and compare him to other 2 year olds, the fact that he’s able to walk straight toward his goal at a reasonably good pace puts him in the top of what is normal for a 2 year old to be able to do already.

 

I can see him out the corner of my eye. He went to the top of the stairs. Noticing what he was doing, I sniffled a little and began to curiously look after him to see what he was doing. After a quick look down the stairs, he came back over towards us with a strange expression on his face. (Hey, I think your mommy is crying.) He says.

 

“Huh?” I respond, and then pull myself up with the side of the bed as my hand-hold. He takes my hand, and the two of us start walking far more slowly than he just did on his own as I am heavily reliant on his support in order to stay upright.

 

Rolwen runs ahead of us and looks on his own. He quickly makes room though once me and Levin arrive. When we get there, I can see mommy sitting down on the floor with her back up against the wall and holding her knees to her chest. Rather than crying though, it looks more like she’s scared.

 

I stare down for a little while. She does not seem to be aware of us. She seems to be breathing harder than she should be just sitting down. I can smell something faint in the air, some what acidic, and.. and mixed in with a gentler but somehow also more repugnant version of the smell of bodily waste. I have not been exposed to that smell before, but from the old man’s memories I can tell what that is. He has smelled it plenty of times between his job and his family. It was the smell of concentrated bile absent the diluting sharper smells of bilirubin and fecal bacteria. In other words, bile that had not passed through the large intestine, but the esophagus instead.

 

The smell makes me hesitate for a little bit, but I know it means my mommy is suffering. So, I let go of Levin’s hand and begin going down the stairs. This time, I make sure to go backwards because I don’t want to make the same mistake as with Levin before, especially because I will probably die if I fall down the stairs.

 

I try to go down without mommy noticing me, even though she’s right there at the bottom of the stairs. Suddenly, I feel something, and it’s very similar to a feeling I’ve had before while going down these stairs. A moment later, I can feel the old man again. I can sense that he’s very curious about what I’m doing right now.

 

This is not a good time for a Eureka moment, but what we’ve just figured out is definitely helpful. Now I can remember where I’ve felt this feeling before. It’s the feeling of being watched. I felt it on these stairs before, and that was also when I was trying to be sneaky. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now it has occurred to me that I am not supposed to be able to feel that. The sense of being watched is another reaction to spirit energy, and the problem I was having with that “smart nut” thing before that is used to train magic was that I couldn’t feel its spirit energy.

 

When the old man just connected with me again, our minds synced in order for him to know what I was just doing. At the same time, I was able to know why it was that he suddenly wanted to connect with me. It seems the void power inside my spirit had just grown in power immensely while I was trying to be sneaky and not wanting mommy to notice me. It was strong enough that it ate up the majority of the stray beams of light coming from my meditation.

 

It made sense. It was that falmarin thing I felt watching me. She was probably always watching me, but I could only feel it when I was trying to be sneaky. Well, now is not the time to dwell on this. Now that the old man was with me again, I felt his approval of going down to my mommy. In fact, he even felt like he should be in control just in case mommy didn’t like seeing me and reacted badly.

 

That thought was scary, and I felt scared without the old man anyway, so that sounded like a good idea. I looked up to Levin and Rolwen who seemed to be giving me some strange looks. Levin was stepping forward to come along with me, but I held up my hand and gently shook my head. This would be best if it was just me.

 

I decided to put my new theory to the test at the same time as I was approaching my mother more closely. It felt like a very insensitive thing to do, but this was a circumstance where I felt it would be best to avoid being noticed after all, at least not too soon, and if I was going to be doing it anyway I might as well pay attention to whether or not that feeling of being watched by the falmarin, nymph or dryad or whatever falmarin means, comes back again. Sure enough, I could feel it all over. Well, there’s that question answered.

 

About the time I was on the last few steps, I heard a light gasp. I did not feel a second gaze on me, but that definitely sounded like I had been noticed. I turned back to look, and sure enough, my mother’s eyes were looking straight at me like she was seeing a spider.

 

She did not seem to be making any quick motions to move, so I went back to descending the last couple steps and then held myself up against the wall. “[You Ok] ata?” I couldn’t quite pronounce the Elven word for mother, but ‘ata’ was probably close enough from a baby’s mouth that she would know what I meant.

 

[ummm…] my mother stared at me for a while. I could see dozens of thoughts running through her mind by the disrupted and slightly panicked look on her face, but eventually the words [no, I’m fine!] come out of her mouth. It’s plainly obvious she’s not fine, but I’m not conversational enough in Elven to stress the point and even if I was I don’t think I’m in much of a position in any sense to have the back and forth that would need to happen with her.

 

She eventually manages to pull herself to her feet. I can still see some faint traces of clear vomit on the back of her wrist which she probably used to wipe it off from her chin or something. She reaches out and grabs me under my arms, wrapping one hand each around either side of me as she picks me up like an unpleasant bag of garbage, holding me at arm’s length from herself. [Y…you shouldn’t be down here.] She says, practically holding her breath as she carries me up the stairs. [Hey, get back away from the stairs!] She yells at the boys as she approaches the top. [Go on, you shouldn’t be over here!]

 

She starts shooing them away with her foot as she actually gets up there, and they respond by clunking over to the center of the room. My mother then puts me down along side them, and then quickly turns and runs back down the stairs. As soon as she is down, the sound of the wood of the tree groaning fills the room, along with the sound of wood sliding across wood, as the opening down the stairway is sealed.

 

Well, that certainly could have gone better, but it could also have gone much worse too. I suppose I had best just be grateful it went as well as it did. My gains with my mother were subtle in this encounter, but I think overall there was more good than harm in what I just did.

 

Well, she was going to definitely be a difficult case. Maybe my best option here now is to just put it all out of my mind and start focusing on the implications of what I just learned from sneaking around and being able to feel that falmarin thing’s gaze on me.

 

-

 

Eirlathion’s POV

 

Eirlathion looked over his apprentices. Not counting Túeth, there were three apprentices he had trained in this village. Of the three, they had all already abandoned their training. Jedon, the young, or rather middle aged now, man who Calanor had named as his successor was likely the most advanced in his cultivation among the three. Perhaps the sight that the years had on Calanor had scared him into working a little harder. However, he was still shy of breaking through to being able to prepare and cast 4th rank spells.

 

Aside from Jedon and Calanor, the next of the three apprentices gathered was Ceren, the village’s spell singer. She was not really as closely associated with him as the elder and the elder’s successor. The spell singer only really needs to learn meditation techniques and what rudimentary levels of the green word need to be learned before they begin on their own path. However, the spell singer learns her true path from an older spell singer. Ceren’s master had already left the village some time ago. As such, Ceren was now the senior spell singer of the village.

 

And.. there was one more person here. “Ceren, why did you bring Laeril along?” This additional person was Ceren’s apprentice. A young elf girl of about 35 years of age, a mere child still in every sense of the word. She had only just begun to learn the earliest phases of cultivation. She was ahead of his newest apprentice Túeth, but she was still only just able to use apprentice level spells.

 

“I’m sorry master, but she insisted that she wanted to help. She is not very strong yet, but her skills are already above that of a normal elf. She would not take no for an answer.” Ceren responded with a slight bow of her head, her young apprentice shaking with her determination. Eirlathion could tell she wanted to make her case, but Ceren would have trained her to show the proper level of respect to a master magus, so the child merely swallowed her objection and was looking at Eirlathion’s feet.

 

“Very well,” Eirlathion conceded. It would likely be easier to allow the kid to help than to fight with her. There was an excited gasp that came from the child as she looked up with a practically glowing face. “You can gather some ivy starts and plant them where we tell you, that ought to be within your ability.”

 

“Ok master!” Lareil beamed at him, excitedly running off to the nearest ivy, covered tree where she started convincing the tree to which it was attached to give up a branch to use as a wooden digging tool she could dig the ivy. She certainly is enthusiastic, she didn’t even wait to know where they were going to be working at. Well, that’s what the rest of them were going to be discussing anyway.

 

“Well then, Calanor, I suppose we will be following your lead in terms of where we should be working.” He said to his oldest friend and apprentice. It was rather fortunate the mages of the village included the elder and the elder’s successor, there was nobody in the entire village who knew the layout better than these two and how best to allocate their efforts.

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