If Aeronwyn was pleased with Keri's initial progress, Keri was astounded. Her arm that had hung uselessly at her side was mobile although Keri had to relearn how to use it. Everything that muscle memory would have aided her with, from simple moving the arm as she willed to holding an object was being relearned after years of neglect. Her leg was another story. She had always been using her leg muscles. It was her hip bones that the accident had destroyed. Keri had compensated by learning to use her leg as a support but now the hip was mostly healed by Aeronwyn's magic. As a result, Keri's progress in learning to walk without a limp and even to run (Oh! What a glorious feeling that had been the first time she tried.) was accelerated.
It was the swimming that had Keri in weeping for joy. Aeronwyn had suggested that good way to learn muscle co-ordination again was to learn how to swim. In the water, Keri found that the strength she had gained from compensating for her injuries magnified in the weightlessness of the medium. Keri swam, dove, frolicked and played as she had not dared for almost ten years. It was here that she first felt truly free!
Aeronwyn had used the mage light test to confirm that Keri had the talent. She had discovered early on that even an untrained mage talent could manipulate a mage light, so she created one and encouraged Keri to make it move. Keri had done so effortlessly and with such assurance that Aeronwyn was impressed. Since then, they had daily lessons on mage craft. It was during one of these times. when Aeronwyn was speaking of the patterns that mages saw in all things that Keri asked about the tunnel.
"So what did you do to close the tunnel. I mean, I think I understand that you sought the patterns of the rock and manipulated them, but can you show me?" Keri indicated a nearby stone bench. "What about that?"
"I think so. Everything has a kind of life. Some things like stone and denser materials like iron and steel have so little life that a mage has to put a great deal of themselves into shaping it. The life we can pull from them is hard and finite. Cold. To force these kinds of materials into obedience, we must energize the cold life and make it, well, I think the best word is faster. The base building blocks that we sense need more energy to move faster and then with that energy you can control and manage the results. Does that make sense?"
"Is that why you could do healing in me and it didn't take it out of you the way the rock did? I have more life?"
"Partly. It is also because I wasn't trying to manipulate your life into something new but back into what your body knew was right. Healing is, partly, a reshaping to wholeness. With rocks, there are a couple ways to force them to take on shapes that are not natural. An artist will do it with chisel and hammer. A stone smith with use similar tools to shape. A mage uses the natural power of the stone and the strength of their talent." Aeronwyn nodded slowly as she spoke, seeing the understanding in Keri's face.
"So why didn't you want to use your magic on my face?" Keri asked quietly.
"I am the strongest of the mages, as far as I can tell. My greatest gifts seem to be destruction gifts, like with fire and shaping gifts like with stone," Aeronwyn explained. "Moiril seems to have a greater affinity for the patterns of water and weather. But it is Cadeyrn whose talents lend themselves best to the healing of bodies. I could try but I know that Cadeyrn will be able to coax your body into greater healing than I can. When we are done, Keri, I hope that your face will be perfect, the way it was intended to be!"
Keri smiled ruefully. "I would settle for ordinary and not scary! Still, it doesn't pain me, I have almost complete use of the rest of my body so waiting doesn't seem so hard. "
"Good. Now, follow me as show you what I did with the stone." Aeronwyn waited until she felt Keri reach out with her new found talent, then went into the stone of the nearby bench. Their senses flowed deep into the stone, sensing and flowing into the patterns that were there. Slowly, Aeronwyn pushed a few of the patterns, manipulating them and shaping them away from the nearby stone. Keri followed what Aeronwyn did with amazement.
"I can see it! You are making the patterns do the work and just touching them here," Keri touched one of the flowing patterns Aeronwyn had moved, "and here! Is it always like this? Is it always this easy?"
Aeronwyn withdrew from the stone. She pointed at the place where the bench had developed micro-fissures along the surface. "Not easy. What I did was encourage the stone to shape but in doing so I weakened the bench. When I did the tunnel, I manipulated the stone to move into the tunnel but truthfully that section of cavern wall is less dense than its neighbors. A pick ax would find it easier to tear that down than before."
"So it is easy to harm?" Keri asked.
"And much harder to build up! That is why I can easily teach you to create a fireball that can be used as a weapon but can't show you how to take burned wood and make it whole. The patterns in the wood have been so damaged that most of the life is gone but fire and ice are elemental. They exist everywhere in nature. In fact, I suspect that fire is so elemental that some form of it is what brings us energy from the food we eat!" Aeronwyn wasn't sure how but in her healing of Keri she felt like she had touched on fire at some level.
"Here is an exercise for you. Try and discover the patterns in air and in water. See if you can find a way to coax them to your desire. When you feel like you are ready to show me what you can do, we will move on to the next step and I will teach you things like fireballs and ice." Aeronwyn wasn't sure yet where Keri's talent was strongest so what she discovered would be as telling to Aeronwyn as to Keri. Meanwhile, Aeronwyn wanted to check on the former tunnel entrance. By now they should have found it and she wasn't sure if they would try and tunnel through or, hopefully, give up the chase.
