Emily takes another deep breath, a cold trickle of sweat dripping down her neck and passing by her collar as it makes its way down her back. Her eyes are screwed shut, squeezed with every ounce of strength she has. She feels nervous… Trepidatious. It takes all the willpower she has to not bolt at this very moment.

  “No more delays… I’ll lose my nerve if I don’t do it now.”

  She takes another deep breath and centers herself, letting go of the sensations of her body one by one. Starting from her head, she relaxes her muscles, going down her body to her shoulders, then her waist, then her butt and all the way to her toes. She filters out the distractions, the things that could moor her to reality. The feeling of the ground underneath her butt. The warm sunlight filtering through the trees and hitting her skin. The slight breeze that tickles her cheeks and gently blows the stray strands of her hair across her face. It all disappears, losing meaning and losing its impact on her. She feels herself sink deep into her own body, in a form of meditative trance, one that she hasn’t sunk into in a while now.

  She takes another deep breath of the crisp, early morning air before she forces herself to ignore the cold feeling of it trickling down her throat and into her lungs.

  Her uncle always made her do this in the early morning. She once asked him why. She fully expected him to give her some long-winded lecture about optimal mana levels in the air, or how the sun stimulates the mana flowing through things, or some other detailed explanation as to why mornings are the only time that you can do this kind of thing.

  Instead, he told her that it was easier to catch an eagle in mid-flight with a fishing hook than it was to get her to concentrate on anything after breakfast.

  And as her stomach growls, she can’t help but reluctantly agree with him, just a tiny bit.

  Because she’ll be darned if she lets this delay breakfast.

  Finally, she sees it in her mind’s eye: Her reservoir, about the size of her stomach, sitting in the center of her body. And within that reservoir sits all of the mana she’s managed to gather throughout the day.

  The mana sits golden in her mind’s eye, glowing with a brilliance that has her screwing her eyes shut tighter out of instinct. It’s brilliant and calm, bubbling joyfully and squirming playfully around. Apparently everyone sees their mana differently, her uncle’s having supposedly been a calm grey that stirred and shifted like the morning mist in a windless valley. He couldn’t tell her why, but it didn’t really matter to Emily all that much. She always found the movement of her mana mesmerizing; a sight that she could observe for hours on end without growing bored.

  Part of her wants to do just that: sit here and watch it move and shift and dance. She pokes it in her mind, and it bounces around joyfully, smooth blobs of it breaking off and defying gravity as they split from the main form and float upwards, before touching the top of her reservoir and bouncing back to join the main mass.

  Letting out a sigh, she decides to stop delaying. This has been a problem for long enough, now. And she needs to solve it.

  Slowly at first, she starts to stir her mana, speeding it up within her reservoir and letting it brush up against the sides of it. A slow heat starts to spread from the center of her body, stretching out its warm tendrils through the rest of her cells as she spins it ever faster and faster.

  Her beautiful, playful and mercurial mana is forced ever closer to the walls, spreading out and occupying as much space on the sides as it can, growing thinner and thinner and more compressed by the moment as she keeps going ever faster and faster.

  She feels the heat grow from warm, to hot, to uncomfortable, and then finally… To unbearable.

  She feels the pressure building within her, the walls of her reservoir subtly stretching just the tiniest bit from the sheer speed and force of her mana spinning. A tiny bit of her mana leaks into the unsaturated cells around them, slowly saturating them once again and causing the main mass of spinning mana to lose the tiniest amount of mana.

  And that’s when Emily gathers more mana from the world around her, bringing it into herself to spin with the rest, replenishing the mana that was used up to saturate the cells around her and force her reservoir to expand ever further through her body.

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  Her uncle told her, long ago, that reservoirs aren’t really located in the body. So far, nobody has ever been able to actually physically find the reservoir in a body before. It’s not like the reservoir is a hollow point in the body, where all the mana sits, taking up precious space where more important organs should go. So by all accounts, expanding your reservoir should be impossible. Drawing pathways for spells in your cells should be impossible. Draining those cells of mana and feeling the burn of it should also be impossible.

  And yet, Emily almost keels over, as she feels her reservoir expand through her body just that tiny bit more than before.

  And she feels the cells that she drained slowly, one by one, become saturated again.

  She takes a few quick breaths, deciding that she’s done enough for today. She never was the most disciplined of mages, having only learned magic because she thought it was cool and because her uncle insisted on teaching her. And, it did get her out of farm work, which was worth a little bit of pain to younger Emily.

  Frankly, she’s convinced that most mages must be masochists, to put themselves through this much pain willingly and on such a regular basis. She’s never been much of a fighter, so she’s never really seen the point in continuing her uncle-imposed magic lesson after he left, satisfied with what she could do so far.

  But now, circumstances have changed. Even this tiny amount of extra mana could be the difference between life and death.

  With that thought in mind, she decides to do one last thing.

  She takes the spinning mana and sends it shooting through her pathways, zipping them around them faster and faster and faster, feeling the burn of it as it saturates and widens them just the tiniest, teeniest bit as well, until all of it withers out and disappears, her mana spent throughout the entirety of her body except for a tiny bit that she keeps in reserve; just enough for two spells, should she need them.

  It won’t do much right now, but over time, it’ll make it faster and easier for her to cast her spells. And she even sent some down pathways for spells that she hasn’t touched in years by now; deadlier ones that her uncle made her swear never to tell or show her mother. That little bit sitting in the channels will make it just the tiniest amount cheaper for her to cast.

  They might be needed in the near future, after all.

  Having given it everything she’s got, Emily finally opens her eyes once again, blinking them against the blinding rays of morning. She holds up a hand to block the sun, as the sensations of the world crash back into her all at once: the uncomfortable pain of sitting in an awkward position for so long; the sweat dripping down her face and causing her hair and clothes to cling tightly to her from all the exertion; and the dry thirst that clings to her throat once again, now a familiar feeling after the days of no water she went through, but this time it’s much easier to remedy.

  She reaches into her pack next to her and brings out one of the canteens that she pilfered, uncapping it and taking some appreciative gulps from it.

  She slakes her thirst, capping the canteen once again and placing it away carefully once again in her pack. Letting out a satisfied sigh, she leans back on her arms, tugging at the wet shirt that’s clinging to her and pulling it away from her skin with a disgusted grimace.

  “Great… I must smell so bad. Maybe I should go back to that lake and have another bath?”

  She considers her plan for a moment, before dismissing it with a shake of her head.

  “Nah… It’s only been a day since I was last there. Those guys could be back there right now.”

  That idea dead, she thinks about what else she needs to do in order to prepare for her and Blue’s eventual departure from this forest. Probably the first thing she’ll need to do is plot a route out of this place, which is made infinitely easier with the map and compass.

  Decision made, she reaches for her pack again, about to bring out her precious map and compass.

  Until she realizes that something’s not quite right.

  There’s something… Off, about the forest, right now.

  Something that has the hair of her neck standing on end, despite all of the sweat coating her.

  And with a start, she realizes just what it is.

  The whole forest has fallen dead silent, as if every single creature, and every single plant, is holding their breath for what’s about to come.

  And at that very moment, Emily hears a rustling coming from the foliage, followed by the put-put-put of footsteps rapidly approaching her.