Chapter 31: Meditation Circle

(I painted this in Procreate using the Colour Fill and Eaglehawk brushes. I felt that this chapter needed a tether/threads image rather than the interior of a miniature tower - Chaiga T. Cheska)

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They arrived all at once and stumbled.

The chamber resolved itself around them in a rush of warm air and stone, and all four of them lurched with the abrupt arrival, Oren catching himself against the wall, Tavik grabbing at Oren’s arm, Bran pitching sideways into Tavik’s shoulder. For a moment, they were simply a tangle of caught balance and sharp breath, the world reordering itself beneath their feet.

Nix had already found his footing. He dropped low and still, ears flat against his skull, pupils narrowed to thin vertical slits that swept the room in quick, raking arcs. His runes fractured across his forearms, stuttering and uneven, throwing brief erratic light. The room gave him nothing. Stone walls, still air, tapestries stirring in no wind. The runes slowed. His ears rose, sweeping forward. He straightened, no threats here.

Oren, Tavik and Bran had steadied themselves and were looking about. The chamber was circular, small enough to feel held rather than confined, its stone walls hung with tapestries between three windows, each one framing a portion of the Eldertrees beyond, their vast trunks already deep in the blue-grey of evening. Above, dark timber beams crossed the ceiling, knotted and gnarled with the grain of very old growth. A low bookcase in one corner, a table and chairs in another, cabinets along the far wall. And underfoot, what had appeared to be patterned rugs.

Bran dropped to his knees and pressed his palm flat against the floor. Not cloth. Moss and clover, dense and cool and living, so thick and deeply interlocked it gave beneath his hand like something drawing breath. The scent rose at his touch, bruised and green and faintly sweet, the smell of forest floor that has never known a hard frost. He looked across at Nix with wide eyes and found Nix already kneeling beside him, both palms spread flat, his runes settling to long unhurried pulses of deep green, shifting through the same colours as the living floor beneath them.

Oren stood looking down at his own feet. The moss rose in a wide and gentle circle all around where they stood, its surface lifting just perceptibly along a broad circumference that encompassed the whole heart of the chamber, a meditation circle, large enough for all four of them. He reached over and gripped Tavik’s shoulder, nodding downward.

Tavik looked at the circle beneath them, then lowered himself to sit cross-legged within it. Nix rose from where he had been kneeling and came to settle at Tavik’s right. Bran took his place at Tavik’s left. Oren folded down last, completing the circle. The four of them sat together within it, knees nearly touching, facing one another in the amber quiet of the small tower.

Bran looked around at each of them. “Do you remember,” he said, “on the Mistwing, when we were trying to learn how to awaken our elvish magic? We sat in a circle just like this. It feels so natural now to sit like this.” He paused. “Why haven’t we meditated like that since then? I think it could have helped us so much.”

Nix’s gaze moved to the three windows and the Eldertrees darkening beyond the glass. “I think this is how we help Harthos,” he said quietly. “Here, in this circle. What we do within it together.”

Bran looked at the nearest window, at the great trunks standing in the failing light, and the ease that had been in his face a moment before gave way to something more careful. “What do you suppose waits in there?” he asked, barely above a whisper. “In the labyrinth?”

No one answered.

They all jumped when Harthos’s voice came through the walls.

It came from everywhere at once, from the floor and the beams and the warm stone, resonating through all of it together, low and vast and very close. “Your thoughts are precisely as I had hoped, for I shall need your assistance to guide us safely through the labyrinth tonight. The mandala I have fashioned now resides within your travelling tower, and I see you have already found it.”

Four pairs of eyes went to the circle of moss beneath them.

“You may practise now, if you wish,” Harthos continued. “We have a little time yet before the sun fully sets and the moon rises. That is when I shall require you, and when I make my entry into the labyrinth. Use this time well.” A pause settled before his next words, and the weight of it was different, more deliberate. “But hear me: the creatures of the labyrinth will strive to lure you from your circle. You must find a way to hold it. You are stronger together, and you must keep one another safe.”

His voice withdrew, and the walls were simply walls again.

Nix looked sidelong at Tavik. “We need to find out what the tether between us can truly do,” he said. “I think it would be helpful.”

Tavik met his gaze steadily, but the steadiness had something uncertain behind it. “I don’t know how to go about that,” he said. “I can feel it. I just don’t know how to use it. It’s still so new.”

Bran, who had been sitting very still beside Tavik, shifted. A small and careful movement, inching slightly away, and his shoulder found Oren’s arm and leaned against it.

Oren glanced down at him and read what was there without needing it spoken.

“The lightning,” Bran said, with the particular evenness of someone presenting a reasonable case as calmly as they can manage. “I don’t want to be thrown into another bramble bush. In another woodland. Alone. At night.” His eyes moved briefly to Tavik. “It’s nothing against you, Tav. Last time….bramble bush.”

Oren nudged Bran aside and switched places with him without comment, so that Bran now sat between himself and Nix, facing Tavik across the circle. Oren was now the one seated beside Tavik.

Tavik watched this rearrangement with an expression of frank and undisguised affront. “Are you serious?”

Oren turned to him and thumped his arm briskly. “Precautions… Tav. Doesn’t matter. Focus on Nix.”

Tavik held his brother’s look for one expressive moment, his objection fully visible and entirely unretracted, then turned to face Nix beside him while trying not to glower sideways at his brothers.

Nix sat straight and closed his eyes. He breathed in, slow and measured, and out in the same way, and his runes settled to a long, quiet rhythm. Tavik watched him and, without instruction, matched it, the habitual coiled readiness in his shoulders releasing as his breath found Nix’s rhythm and followed it down, in and out, until his eyes fell closed of their own weight.

Oren and Bran watched in silence, not really knowing what to expect. The rise and fall of Nix’s and Tavik’s chests grew even and synchronised, two separate rhythms finding each other the way two rivers find the same level, and the stillness that settled over them both was the stillness of deep attention, unhurried and complete.

With his eyes closed, Nix reached along the tether.

He had become slowly used to that living line of warmth running between himself and Tavik, thrumming with magic. He followed its length now in the dark behind his eyes and felt it pulse, and then, without thinking about it, as instinctively as his hands found the motions of weaving, he began drawing his Lightweaver magic around it. Thread by thread, the latticework built itself along the tether’s length, each strand of light crossing the next at precise angles, fine as hair and strong as root, geometry made luminous, encasing the tether within a barrier of protection so that whatever passed through it could not bleed beyond its boundary. His fingers moved with the weaving, though his eyes stayed shut, each thread finding its place with the certainty of deep instinct.

Behind his closed eyes, Tavik watched it happen, and the awe that moved through him was spiked with fear woven all the way through it. The Lightweaver magic came along the tether and enclosed it, and the change as it settled was a quality he felt rather than saw, something held and contained. Then Nix pushed his Caelvarae storm magic through.

It came in a current, and Tavik felt it arc all through him, crackling and alive, lightning running beneath his skin, and he understood in that moment with absolute clarity that it was his. It answered him. He held it, entirely astonished, for one long breath, then sent it back along the tether to Nix. He felt Nix receive it. He felt, unmistakably, Nix’s laughter coming back the other way, an unexpected delight as if in a game.

They passed it between them, back and forth, unhurried and easy, the latticework holding it all, and there was nothing threatening in it, only the extraordinary, simple pleasure of a thing newly understood and newly possessed. Then, through the tether, Tavik felt more than heard: “Open your eyes.”

Tavik opened his eyes.

In his upturned palms, resting on his knees, sat two small spheres of blue lightning, crackling softly, turning on themselves, perfectly still and perfectly contained. Opposite him, Nix held his own spheres of blue lightning in his open hands, his expression full of wonder and delight.

Tavik looked at his own palms. He looked up at Nix.

Oren and Bran had gone very still. Bran’s fingers were wrapped around Oren’s arm, and he was leaning back, his face caught between astonishment and the strong instinct to put considerably more distance between himself and the softly crackling spheres.

“We need to reconnect with the circle,” Nix said quietly to Tavik.

Carefully, both of them shifted, adjusting their positions with slow deliberateness until they were side by side within the meditation circle, facing Oren and Bran. They looked at each other, and then, as though the same thought had arrived in both at the same moment, they leaned back and tossed their spheres outward in opposite directions around the outside of the circle, going left and going right. The spheres raced away and circled, once, twice, gathering speed with every pass, trailing blue crackling light, until the trails met and merged and became a single humming wall of blue fire encircling all four of them, spinning faster and brighter with each circuit until it was a complete and constant barrier of crackling light, bright and enclosing and steady at their backs.

Bran gripped Oren’s arm with both hands. “If I have to be thrown into another bramble bush, you’re coming too!” he said to Oren, who rolled his eyes at his youngest brother. “I’m not doing that again, especially on my own!”

Tavik and Nix both laughed, easy and warm. “It’s keeping us safe, Bran, you idiot,” Tavik said. “All of us. That’s all it’s doing. It won’t hurt you.”

Oren had been studying Tavik throughout. He watched him still, with the quiet and careful attention he gave to things that had shifted and needed proper reckoning. “Something’s different about you, Tav,” he said, thoughtfully, while trying to pry Brans fingers off his arm.

Tavik straightened immediately. A particular and entirely transparent hope crossed his face. “Have I grown taller, then?”

Oren laughed. “No, you’re still shorter than me, Tav.” He absorbed the thump on his arm without moving. “I mean, the way you’re holding yourself. Something in you has changed.”

Tavik said nothing. He looked briefly at his open hands and allowed himself a small smile, wondering.

Bran, meanwhile, had been glancing back at the spinning blue barrier behind them with increasing unease. He turned to Nix and Tavik. “I’m afraid to move,” he said plainly. “I’m afraid if I lean back at all I’ll accidentally touch it and be thrown somewhere sharp and pointy again.”

Tavik rolled his eyes. Nix said nothing, but reached back and pressed his elbow into the blue barrier with great deliberateness.

“Nix.” Tavik’s voice came out immediate, pained, and pleading. A shudder moved through him from crown to boots, full and involuntary, his face contracting into an expression of profound helpless discomfort. “Stop that. It feels like being tickled from the inside out.” He shuddered again, and the thoroughness of his distress was so unlike his usual composure that Oren smirked and Bran’s grip on his arm loosened by several degrees.

“It’s there to protect us,” Nix said, looking at Bran. “It won’t harm any of us from the inside.”

Bran considered this, glanced once more at the barrier, and released Oren’s arm entirely.

Tavik and Nix regarded Oren and Bran as if the tether had put the same thought in their heads at the same time, which perhaps it did. “We’ve found out what Nix and I can do between us,” said Tavik, regarding his brothers critically. “What can your magic do?”

Oren and Bran exchanged a look. Oren nudged Bran’s shoulder. “Go on, Bran, use the magic you did in the tree house.”

Bran gave his eldest brother a look that suggested Oren was being an idiot. “I put my hand in a bowl whilst reading,” he said. “I don’t know what I did. I’ve no idea if I can do it again. Why don’t you do something with your glowing crown thing?”

Oren scowled at Bran, then at Tavik, and threw up his hands. “It’s just a crown of light. It just sits on my head. It doesn’t do anything,” he said, feeling irritated.

“So you’re just for decoration now?” laughed Tavik, then ducked sideways as Oren’s swat missed his head by inches. Oren’s expression suggested he had filed this away and would be returning to it.

Nix said quietly, “Perhaps if you meditated on the feeling of the magic from the inside and saw what happened”

The other three looked at him. He looked back at them steadily, the runes along his cerulean skin shimmering slightly, which may or may not have been the only sign of exasperation from their quiet cousin.

Nix turned his attention to Bran and held it there, and Bran felt the quality of it, not merely looking but reading, the way Nix looked at things he was genuinely trying to understand from the inside out. After a moment, Nix spoke softly. “You possess Portalsight. I can see it in you. If you are as I am, you will sense predators and threats long before they draw near.”

He tilted his head, studying Bran with an intensity that made the tips of his fangs lengthen, a gesture Bran read as a challenge, not a menacing one, but a challenge all the same. “Should you wish, we could combine our magic.”

“Um…alright, yes,” stammered Bran, watching the fangs with some disconcertion and sitting up straighter, hoping his thumping heart wasn’t obvious. “How do I learn to use Portalsight?”

Nix turned to face him fully, and Bran shifted to meet him. Nix drew in a measured breath, his eyes never leaving Bran, and after a moment, Bran mirrored the action, closing his eyes, grateful, in truth, for the reprieve from the fangs.

Oren and Tavik watched the two of them, wondering what Portalsight was, both privately arriving at the conclusion that whatever it was, it explained a great deal about Nix.

The breathing settled between them and found its shared rhythm, and then something began that neither had expected.

Nix felt his own Portalsight the way he always felt it, as pressure and current, the slow pulse of the world’s fabric shifting beneath his attention, thresholds opening and closing like breath. He reached along it as naturally as breathing, and found Bran’s magic already present, but shaped in a way that made him falter. It did not move like current at all. It moved like rings in old wood, spreading outward from Bran in slow circles, each one carrying a different weight of time, old and older and older still, season upon season laid down and still present, still speaking. Nix had never felt anything shaped like that before, and the strangeness of it moved through him like cold water, a brief and involuntary recoil before he caught himself and held steady.

Bran felt the friction of it before he understood what it was, two unlike surfaces finding each other and not yet fitting, something pushing back against him from the inside. But beneath the friction, his own magic was doing something, turning outward toward the thresholds the way his hands turned toward a wound without being asked, and from each threshold something arrived that was almost sound, almost taste, each one its own distinct signature pressing itself against the back of his tongue. A creature. A path. The particular quality of a place where the world thinned to nothing and something else began. He had not known he could feel any of this until this moment, and the feeling of it was both astonishing and slightly too much all at once, like stepping from a dim room into full sun.

Oren leaned towards Tavik, his voice low. “Should we pull them apart? What if they’re hurting each other?”

Tavik waved his hand, shushing him, and mouthed: give them a chance.

And then, without either of them deciding to, both Bran and Nix stopped pressing. Nix let go of the shape his own Portalsight usually held, and Bran stopped trying to direct his rings toward anything in particular, and in the space the letting go made between them, something arrived that neither of them had summoned. Not a merging. More like two different waters finding the same level, the rings of Bran’s magic widening and slowing, Nix’s currents threading through the spaces they opened, and where the two met, they shaped something that neither could have reached alone.

A column of spiralling light, soft as dawn through still water, rose from around Bran and twined around Nix in a pattern of extraordinary delicacy, pulsing once, twice, and then gathered itself and shot through the ceiling of the tower like a brief and silent beacon and was gone, leaving Oren and Tavik blinking in the quiet that followed.

Bran and Nix opened their eyes and looked at each other, something settled and certain passing between them, as Tavik leaned forward, too impatient to wait. “What happened? What was that light? Are you both alright?”

Bran and Nix blinked around at Oren and Tavik as if just remembering they were there. Bran opened and closed his mouth a few times, unable to put into words what he had experienced and what he now knew, so Nix said it for him. “We can see through thresholds with each other’s eyes. Our Portalsight is combined.”

No one spoke for a moment. Oren opened and closed his mouth before finding his voice. “What does that mean, exactly?”

Nix looked at Bran, then back at Oren and Tavik. “We can see predators, pathways, and anything before it happens, and potentially relocate everyone if need be, though that will drain us both, so we have to be careful about when we use it.”

Oren and Tavik looked between the two younger boys, trying to take it in. “Drain you both? What do you mean? Bran hasn’t got a wound, has he?” Oren’s voice carried a worried edge.

“Just opening portals is what will drain us,” Bran said, understanding gathering as he glanced at Nix. “Your wound is mine too now, isn’t it?”

Nix looked back at him and was quiet for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “I am sorry.”

Silence spread between them as Bran pulled the neck of his tunic wide and looked at the left side of his chest, where strange blue lines ran beneath the skin, fine as frost-work, not on the surface but deep, as though they had always been there and had only now decided to show themselves.

He looked up. Nix had gone still in the particular way he went still when he was waiting for the consequences of something and had already accepted them.

Tavik reached over and draped his arm around Nix’s shoulders without ceremony. “You’re not alone in this,” he said quietly. “You and I are bound by the tether. You and Bran have this. We’re family. We stick together.” Nix looked sharply at Tavik, then at Oren, who nodded once, then at Bran, who sighed and laid his hand on Nix’s shoulder. Nix relaxed slightly and looked at Oren. “Thank you,” he said. Then, after a moment, “I need to look at your threads now. Are you ready to meditate with me?”

Oren sat straight and took a slow breath. Nix copied his posture, closed his eyes, and went inward, searching for Oren’s threads of magic. What he found there stopped him. Oren’s threads were arranged like a star map, each one a point of steady light with long lines running between them, a vast interior constellation, and the whole of it had the quality of something that had been patient in the dark for a very long time.

Nix read magic the way he read weather, by feel and pressure and the particular quality of the air before something changed. Oren’s magic felt like a weather system that had not yet decided what it was, only that it was vast and deep-rooted, with an elvish resonance that ran all the way down into something ancient and unhurried. When Nix touched the nearest thread, it thrummed under his attention like a plucked string, and then reacted like a sleeping thing suddenly aware of being touched, a heartbeat surging where there had been stillness. Nix gasped, pulling back, taking several steadying breaths before he understood what was happening. He was not reading Oren’s magic. He was waking it up. And he had no way of knowing what would come next.

What came from Oren outward struck the small tower as a bell struck very hard, a wave of force rolling in all directions and pushing Bran and Tavik sideways, books tumbling from the corner shelf as the air filled with a low resonance that settled deep in the chest. Oren’s crown at his temples blazed upward into a vertical pillar of white light several feet high before it steadied and settled back, burning slower and deeper than before, and the ground beneath Oren pressed itself flat as though bracing.

Nix’s own currents wound around Oren’s waking magic, not directing it but moving alongside it, and the two together sent a force radiating outward through the walls of the tower so that the great boughs of the Eldertrees beyond the glass shifted and buffeted as though something had passed through them, their ancient canopy rustling in the still spring air.

Nix opened his eyes, breathing hard. Oren opened his eyes a moment later and looked around at the others.

“Oren,” Nix said, still catching his breath. “Your elvish magic is awake. Fully awake. I wasn’t expecting that.”

Tavik and Bran stared at their eldest brother with their mouths open, quite unable to close them, which went on long enough that Oren grew visibly uncomfortable. He flapped his hand at both of them until they stopped.

After a moment, he sat up straighter. “So how do we actually help Harthos?” he said. “I still don’t know what we’re supposed to do. How exactly will meditating together help him?”

Oren thought about this, about the way Harthos had spoken. “I don’t think we’ll know until we’re doing it,” he said. “We won’t find it by planning. We’ll find it by beginning.”

One by one, they closed their eyes.

The rhythm came without effort. They had found it before, on the Mistwing’s deck in the river mornings, in the quarters of the mandala that afternoon, and it returned to them now as familiar things return when you stop pressing towards them. Four rhythms of breath moved together in the quiet of the small tower, breath soft and unhurried, the barrier humming steadily at their backs. As the breathing deepened and settled, the threads came.

Nix perceived them first, as he always did, but tonight they were not his alone. In the shared stillness of the meditation circle, the living floor breathing beneath them, the threads came to all four of them: strands of living light in silver-blue and amber and deep green and rust-red and gold, running out from each of them in every direction, connecting them to the chamber and the tower and to Harthos somewhere beyond the walls, to the Eldertrees pressing close beyond the glass, to every life they had come from and all those still ahead, everything reaching outward to everything else in the vast quiet web of the world’s connections.

Then somehow they collectively understood that they were looking through Harthos’s eyes.

The Eldertrees rose before them in the failing light, their vast trunks soaring upward into a canopy too high to fully comprehend, bark forming great plates of grey and amber, roots arching from the dark earth like the vaulted ribs of cathedrals set deep into the soil. The air amongst the Eldertrees was cool and green-scented, carrying the sweetness of leaf-bud and the rich damp of old moss, a spring chill in it but nothing harder. They felt each of Harthos’s footsteps as he moved steadily deeper into the forest, the ground rising through his feet with the ancient and unhurried certainty of a being entirely at home in itself, and the Eldertrees ahead grew older and more closely grown with every step, their roots more deeply interlocked, the air between them stiller and more attended.

“Glad to have you with me at last,” Harthos’s voice said, surrounding them in resonating warmth, his voice seeming to thrum around them.

The whole forest breathed with them. Their own breath had become part of its long, slow exhalation, the Eldertrees and the spring night and the dark drawing in around them like a soft and living weight, encompassing without diminishing. Above the canopy, the pale moon was climbing, and its light came filtering down through the Eldertrees in long shifting columns amongst the new spring leaves, cool and silver, moving as the high boughs moved in the light evening wind.