Farmers & Mercenaries Read Online Free PDF Page B

plush chairs in the room groan under the weight of his instructor. “And now what does it look like?”
    Alant studied the two collective piles of colored dots.
    Not dots! Spectals.
    “They both still have the look of parchment, Sier. The one you burned, however, seems smaller, somewhat constricted now. Oh, and very blue. Its Spectals move even slower now, hardly at all.”
    “You may release the Sight now, Alant.”
    The Essence slipped from Alant’s eyes like water passing over a sheet of glass. A grayish, shadowy chamber materialized around him. The strain of the shift forced him to rub his eyes. After a moment, the room became clear; in his normal vision, everything seemed dark compared to viewing it with the Sight of the Essence. He stood where he had assumed, a few paces from the large, black-gray marble table. The only light in the room spilled from the few lanterns that hung in its corners. The piece of parchment Sier Sarlimac had burnt still lay on the table, crumpled and black.
    A useless pile of ash.
    The small lab, where Alant had spent more sessions in private lessons than he cared to remember, was lined with bookshelves stuffed with bound books, rolled parchment, and anything else that would fit upon them—dried and bleached skulls, as varied in size as in style, pieces of colored glass or crystal, small carved statues, and more that Alant had never been able to identify, even up close. A set of four leather chairs, a half dozen stools, and the large granite table was the only other furniture in the room.
    His instructor, Sier Sarlimac, was a plump old man with a shaggy, white-gray beard that did not quite cover his chin. He sat lounging in one chair, his dark blue robes stretched tight over his ample belly. Golden starbursts lined the cuffs and hem of the robe, marking Sarlimac as a Master Shaper. “You see, Alant.” The teacher motioned for Alant to sit in the leather chair opposite him. “As you have learned, the Essence resides in all things. We see it as Spectals, this you know. It is a fact that can never change. What we can change is the item’s potential here in the physical Plane.” He pointed back to the table. “Could I burn the burnt parchment again?”
    “Nix, Sier.” Alant lowered himself into the plush chair. “It would not catch again.”
    “Why?”
    “You cannot burn it twice, Sier, everyone knows this.”
    “Can you write on the burnt parchment?”
    “Nix, Sier, it is now ash.”
    “Is that so? Did it change to the pattern of ash while you watched it using the Sight of the Essence?” Sarlimac put his hands in the form of a steeple and placed the point under his chin on a spot that had no hair, as he often did when lecturing. Several coarse bristles of his beard stuck out at odd angles.
    “Nix, Sier. When I looked upon it with the Sight, it seemed to remain parchment. The Spectals simply changed color, most turning blue… And they moved more slowly.”
    Sarlimac nodded. “If you looked upon it with the Sight now, you would see the blue Spectals are motionless. This is because there is nothing left in the parchment that will burn. It has no stored energy—potential—left in it to create fire. As you learned from your studies, the color of the Spectals indicates their potential . Blue shows you an item having no more potential to burn.”
    “Alas, Sier, there are no blue Spectals within the lab table.” Alant’s interruption came close to being considered rude, yet in his excitement, he forged on. “Granite cannot burn, so why would it not have blue Spectals in it as well.”
    “Ah, except the granite has never had the potential to burn. The blue Spectals indicate that an item does not have the potential to burn currently . However, the material holding the blue Spectals has the potential to burn in one of its other forms. Like the ash that used to be parchment sitting on the table, two distinctly different states of the same material. Now, as a Shaper, you will be