Mercedes Lackey - Owlknight

Why now? Why not give me some time to work up to this? he asked himself, anticipation setting his nerves afire. He had no idea just what was going to be expected of him -

And it was too late for second thoughts. Firesong had reached the bottom of the staircase, palming something from one of the dozen narrow shelves of ornaments and oddities, and held open the door to the workroom for Darian. His scarred face showing nothing except pleasant anticipation, quite as if this were just another, perfectly ordinary lesson. Darian entered the door into the windowless room, lit from above by a blue-tinted skylight, and Firesong closed the door behind them both. He dropped a latch that all but seamlessly blended into the interlaced trim that ran around the room.

With the closing of the door, the shields sprang up and into place all around them, creating a kind of hum in the back of his head and a tingle along his skin. Firesong leaned casually against the doorframe, folded his arms across his chest, and nodded. “The usual,” was all he said laconically.

So Darian began with “the usual,” the building of his own shields, spreading them outward to encompass the room, then integrating them with Firesong’s shields that were already in place, leaving some layers fragile so they could collapse back in case of a surge. He could have done this much in his sleep; it took scarcely a thought to shape his own energy to his will now. It hadn’t always been that way.

But next came an addition to his shields, a shunt to drain off excessive heat. He had never actually needed this shunt before, but unused mage-energy, if not properly grounded and sent back to its source, or energy that came in to the mage at a rate greater than he could handle, manifested in waste heat. At the level a Journeyman worked, this was a trivial concern; the worst that happened was that the area got a bit too warm for comfort - or the occasional flash, like the earlier accidents. In fact, if working in the dead of winter and there was energy to spare, some Journeymen deliberately eliminated the shunt so as to warm the area they worked in. This ability to deliberately create heat made mages very popular in cold climes and seasons, and some weather-work was based directly on that effect.

But at the level a Master worked, improperly handled energy could be deadly; the shunt was a necessity - as Firesong’s own scars testified. At the end of the Mage Storms, when trying to avert magical catastrophe, Firesong and his allies had done everything right, but the energies they had dealt with had been greater than any mage before or since had ever faced - even Adepts working in concert with Avatars of the Star-Eyed Goddess of the Shin’a’in had not been able to prevent all the damage such an overwhelming force could conjure.

“Now locate all the Heartstones of all the Clans,” his mentor told him. Darian nodded, and unfocused his eyes to better invoke Oversight and see into the plane of mage-energy, searching out each active Stone and tracing the intricate web of ley-lines that surrounded them. First, his own - k’Valdemar was a lesser Stone by any estimation, but it was growing, its power increasing daily. He was rather proud of that, for some of the energies invested in the Stone were of his harvesting. Each bit of power he had added over the past two years had made the Stone stronger and more stable, so that now it was possible to turn this into a real Vale by all Tayledras standards.

Then - the Heartstone under the Palace at Haven. This one was a bit peculiar; very old, very powerful, but quiescent. The shields had held through the last of the mage-storms, making it just about the only magical artifact outside of a Vale that had survived complete and untouched. There wasn’t much pull on it at the moment, for there were not that many Herald-Mages about who could use it. Someday, perhaps, Haven would be the Valdemar version of a Vale - but for now, the Stone slumbered. Like a war horse asleep in its stall, it wouldn’t take much to rouse it to fury, but the proper hands could control it with a mere touch of the reins or a whisper in its ear.

However, his were not those hands; that power was there for the service of the Heralds. It was theirs, and theirs alone. They were sealed to it by their very nature, and by the bonds they had with their Companions. It helped to maintain a different sort of web of power, one that linked all Heralds and Companions together.

Next, k’Vala Vale, the nearest to k’Valdemar. Its Stone was old, too, though not nearly as ancient as the Palace Stone, and unlike that Stone, this one was fully awake and active, with much power flowing out as well as into it. There were plenty of demands on the k’Vala Stone, and it responded to those demands as smoothly as a masterful juggler kept an impossible number of toys in the air. It wasn’t quite alive, not quite sentient, yet there was a quality of “life” and “personality” to it that was the hallmark of every Heartstone. That wasn’t surprising, considering how closely linked to the life of a Vale the Heartstone was.

Darian found and identified all of the stones, holding them all balanced within his mind, shining points of brilliant light in the web of life-energy. Firesong followed his work closely, and nodded when Darian found and touched the last of the lot, and the farthest, the Stone of k’Treva Vale.

“Good.” Firesong seemed satisfied that Darian had done the job with a minimal expenditure of his own energies. As a Journeyman, that was all he could really draw on for sustained and heavy use; the energies he himself produced or stored. He could recharge himself with the little trickles of power produced by all the living things around him, but that was akin to filling a cup with the dew collected on leaves. He could also make use of the tiny rivulets of energy as the living power collected in trickles and flowed toward the ley-lines. But not until he reached Master could he use the lines themselves - or the Heartstone.

Most schools of mage-craft built and maintained pools of power available to their Masters, but none except the Tayledras invested the energies not only of their own members but actually ran ley-lines into their power-pools and terminated them there. That was perhaps because only the Tayledras knew how to construct the Heartstones, to keep energy flowing out so that it never overloaded; of all of those outsiders who had tried, only one had succeeded - and that one was the legendary Herald-Mage Vanyel, Adept, and Tayledras-trained. Hundreds of years ago, Vanyel had invested the energies in the web that linked his Heralds, and a spell that had kept (or, more truthfully, irritated) “foreign” mages out of Valdemar, providing that steady drain; the Vales invested the excess in weather-control, shielding, and luxuries like the hot pools. When anyone else tried, the focus of power quickly destabilized in a manner quite destructive and usually fatal to all concerned.

“Now,” Firesong continued, unperturbed, “without disturbing the ley-lines in any way, link yourself to the ones feeding our Stone.”

He knew how to do that. He’d “watched” Firesong do it a thousand times - he’d practiced everything short of touching the lines themselves - and now was the moment of truth. He would either be able to call this hawk he’d trained back to his gloved fist, or fail - and feel its talons sink into his flesh, or watch it soar away out of reach forever.

He noticed that Firesong had no personal shields up whatsoever in case of failure. Knowing Firesong, that might be just another way to increase Darian’s confidence, but it was a trust that touched him deeply.

Except for a brief stab of something sharp, a mingling of fear and excitement, he didn’t let himself think or feel. He just acted.