Master Cedric cleared his throat. “As all of you now have your cloth, I’d like you to place it over your eyes and form a blindfold. Today’s exercise is going to expose the problem with the majority of your performances yesterday. Of course, some of you already have an understanding for what today’s task is about to explicate, but I feel it is my duty to educate the rest of the masses.”
As I tied the rag across my eyes, I wondered briefly what it was we were about to learn. Considering yesterday’s experience, I was prepared for something equally offsetting. I felt silly standing there, unable to see anything, hands clutching the staff that Piers had insisted we bring back.
“Now that you are all lined up and ready, please assume the traditional stance with the person on the left defending while the right leads the assault.”
Really? Staff fighting while blindfolded? This was only going to make me a million times worse.
Grudgingly, I began the engage with the gangly girl who had been standing across from me. As the attacker, it was much more difficult than I had imagined. My sense of orientation was completely thrown off from blindness. The echo of a hundred wooden staffs clashing was deafening.
I spent most of my time swiping the wind or accidentally knocking my staff into the person on my right’s shoulder.
“Change positions!”
I had thought blindly hitting someone was hard, but it was much worse when I was trying to guess where my offender was coming from. My shoulders ached from being continuously whacked. I concentrated hard on trying to hear the slight whistle of rushing air when the staff was coming down, but I couldn’t hear anything above the clamor. My best bet was to try and focus on the crunching of the grass whenever my partner shifted stance, or the stink of sweat when he raised his arm.
After a couple more five-minute drills, I was sore but better off than when I had started. I had been able to defend myself about half of the time, and I was a little more secure in my footing after I had grown accustomed to the darkness.
“You may now take a seat and remove your blindfolds,” Master Cedric announced.
Relieved, I tossed the sweat-stained rag aside and took a place beside my latest staffing partner. We both looked to Cedric for the speech we knew was coming, the reason we had just spent thirty minutes hitting sticks blindly.
“Forgot about the other senses before today, didn’t you?” Piers asked us wickedly.
Master Cedric expanded: “The reason I had you blindfolded was so that each of you could properly identify the other senses that are so often forgotten in one’s general conduct. You’ve spent two days drilling with staffs, but it has been my observation that most of you have only been using sight to tell you where to block, where to strike, how to proceed.
“The truth is that every action requires more than vision for a performance to be completely vested. The best soldiers and mages alike embrace their senses. Just now, all of you were forced to recognize other ways of predicting an opponent’s actions when you couldn’t use your sight to answer the question for you. Heightened listening, body heat, smell, and an increased understanding to the different points of pressure in a blow should have all helped contribute to your knowledge of staff fighting.
“If you were to engage in a casting, these types of observations would increase the potency of your magic. Your spells are derivatives of the information, experience, and desire you put forth. I’m sure all of you have desire—it’s why you are here—but the amount of information and experience you put into your castings will be important indicators as well. You may want more than anything to produce an effective sleeping draught, but if you can’t build up the proper projection within your mind, it will not be very effective. You need to consider all aspects, not just the image or obvious sense of the action or thing you are trying to create.”
I strained to listen, but the pounding in my head was so much that his words were coming out as an endless drone.
“The irony of your training here at the Academy is that while we require you to ignore your physical senses in meditation and acute focus, we ask you to embrace them in your mental casting. You are not allowed to feel what is physically going on around you during the moment of your spell, but you are expected to cast an image evocative of all those physical senses in your mind. I admit that the practice of these two things is not easy. It is not something you can master in a day, or even years. All I can advise is that the more you practice, the more you dedicate yourself to exploring these two states, the better your chances will be at succeeding within your own magical faction.”
The end of Master Cedric’s lecture was spent in silence. Most of us were still trying to take in everything as we followed him out to the field to continue yesterday’s meditative exercise. I hoped it would make sense after a long night’s rest.