“Now apply this level of awareness to another part of your body,” he instructed. “Not a muscle this time.”
She chose the bones in her hand. It was easier and faster the second time, as her senses were already attuned to this level of awareness. It still took headache-inducing concentration, but was growing easier. She slowly realised that she was using magic to sense instead of affect. Once she grasped this she discovered that, by using magic this way, she could gather information about locations outside of herself, too. She could judge that the temperature at a point in the room was slightly warmer than a point within the rock wall. She could find hollows in the rock beyond the wall. She could hear water trickling somewhere to the left of the door. The room was growing less boring.
But if you can’t sense and affect at the same time, how can you heal? she’d wondered.
The answer, Dahli taught her next, was that you could. It took even greater concentration. And like everything that required concentration, it got easier with practice.
He set her the task of changing her hair colour. It was safer than altering living tissue, he said. Since her hair hung well past her shoulders, Dahli had visited several times before she had changed the entire length of every strand.
“Blonde doesn’t suit you,” he told her. “Change it back.”
When it was all black again he brought a knife and told her to make a small cut to her arm, then repair the damage, leaving no scar. She didn’t manage it before the next meal. Dahli told her to cut herself again, as the old wound had begun to heal naturally. It was the third cut that she managed to heal.
He then brought a small animal with a shallow cut on its snout. This proved harder to heal than she expected. The animal was not a part of her body. She did not know its pattern. Though she had sensed things outside herself, nothing had been this complicated, and she hadn’t tried to affect anything. But it was more like learning to dance than to walk–most of the mental coordination was in place. She healed the cut within hours rather than days.
When she had, Dahli replaced it with a spiny creature with a broken toe.
“Now block the pain before you heal this one.”
That was easier than she had expected. The animal’s mind told her when she had succeeded. It wasn’t until much later that she realised she could now use magic to understand the minds of other creatures. When Dahli returned she asked him if she was right.
“Yes, you can.” He shrugged. “It’s not as useful an ability as you imagine. We don’t need animals for transport or to fetch things, and raising them for food or other products or uses is usually a task given to the people who serve us. I’ve known a few ageless who keep pets and find the ability adds to the entertainment and pleasure of owning them.”
He handed her a small animal with a pointy nose and white-flecked grey fur, then took the spiny creature and held it carefully as he explained what she must do next.
“What you have been doing is a simpler form of pattern shifting. Aside from when you changed your hair colour, you were helping living matter return to its original pattern. This is what it is inclined to do. What you must learn now is to alter the underlying pattern of a living creature to one that it never would have developed into. He nodded at the animal in her hands.
“Make his legs longer.”
“That seems… cruel.”
“Only if you make them very long. A little extra height will do him no harm–and other breeds of this animal are taller. If you were to increase your height you would have to maintain the change, because if you have magical ability your body will return to its original pattern.”
Not wanting to distress the animal unduly, she spent a little time soothing and playing with him. Settling quickly, he went to sleep in a corner of the room. It was easily enough to see that the creature was old, and a look inside him told her he had been recently fed.
Sitting cross-legged next to it, she slowly and carefully began to work. Remembering how the girl with the deformed leg had gasped in pain when Valhan had begun healing her, Rielle first numbed the animal’s limbs. He woke and examined his legs with puzzlement, then lay on his side and went back to sleep.
She realised soon after that altering the existing pattern meant inventing a new one. In this case, at least, she could take the information already there and enhance it. The work had a creative aspect that appealed to her, though the task itself did not.