The shadows which clouded the practice chamber weren’t anything extraordinary. A simple dimming of the lights with a bit of playful flickering which suggested movement and lasted no more than three breaths before ebbing away.

“It worked,” Jaye said, amazement robbing her of the certainty of her senses.

“Quite well in fact,” Shadow said. “It looked for a moment as though the spell might get away from you, but it seems the reordering of the basic casting form worked a treat.”

“Can I do it again?” Jaye asked, eagerness appearing in her voice for the first time.

“Most certainly, though we must counsel against casting again too soon. We can speak from personal experience on how unpleasant that can be.”

“What happened?” Jaye asked pausing in mid-practice of the gestures.

“Recall that we explained it took us five years to succeed on what you just achieved in under five hours? As you might well imagine, we felt as though we had finally broken through to power without limit! Surely if we could cast one spell, we could cast them all! We wish we could claim that it was the hubris of youth which drove us to such folly, but while we do not recall all of the years we have walked down, we were in at least one sense quite old enough to know better by that point.”

“What happened though!”

“We froze our fingers off.”

“But, wait, don’t you have fingers still?” Jaye looked more closely and Shadow held up his hands to display a clear set of ten digits.

“We are fortunately quite malleable. Restoring our fingers took only a few days of work, but, it is not an experience we would recommend to anyone.”

“Why did they freeze though? There wasn’t anything cold about that spell, was there?”

“Quite observant. There are no aspects of ice, cold, or anti-fire in either the gestures or the words. Casting the same spell in quick succession presents special dangers for entirely internal reasons. The magic which is drawn in washes a pathway through the caster. Especially early on it is very difficult to gather sufficient Awakened Aether to fuel the spell, control and channel the aether, and restrict it down to a small a channel through you as possible.”

“We’re supposed to do all that? I thought it was just words and breath and gestures?” Jaye seemed, quite reasonably, disappointed to learn that overcoming the challenges she had to cast a spell was only the beginning of the obstacles before her.

Shadow pointed to one of the lights on the wall which turned a ghostly green and bounced from it’s everburning candle to land in his hand in the form of a tiny fiery rat.

“The basic forms, the Words, the Gestures, and the Breath aren’t required, they are simply external tools which make the task of casting a spell easier. There are other, less convenient, tools which casters make use of as well – long periods of meditation, aspected locations, burnt offerings, the list goes on and one. All of them serve to augment the natural capabilities of the caster. The actual casting of the spell however? That happens solely within the caster. That’s one of the reasons cited by the humanocentric instruction manuals for why the Nature Blessed ‘can’t cast spells’, because within you there is already magic and the instinctual capacity to shape it. They claim that those instincts would prevent a Nature Blessed from channeling the energies of the spell into general effects. They think that you should only be capable of channeling it towards the transformations your instincts are honed to provide you with from birth. As we can see however, that is quite incorrect.”

“I kind of did use my instincts though,” Jaye said. “I had to think about transforming to make the magic come.”

“Using one’s instinct is very different from being constrained by them,” Shadow said.

“That part wasn’t hard. It was holding it all together I couldn’t do,” Jaye waved her hands and twitched her fingers like the magic was still threatening to fly from her grasp.

“And yet you did. Did the Words help with that, or was it saying them that completed the spell?” Shadow asked.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” Jaye said with a shrug.

“That will come in time. This isn’t the clumsiest you will feel as a caster, but all of the sources agree that proficiency will come in time.”

“Not the clumsiest?”

“As one learns a skill, it’s common to find that you get worse at it before you grow better. There are many reports of promising students who abandoned the casting arts because they felt as though they’d only been lucky the first time they succeeded when their subsequent attempts proved to be less adept or outright failures.”

“So I might not be able to cast you then?”

“Able to? You are absolutely able to cast us. The issue is not one of capability, it’s one of self assessment,” Shadow said. “When we froze our fingers off, do you know what our thoughts were?”

“Oww, oww, that really hurt?” Jaye asked with a teasing smile.

“Okay, yes, but after that? After that our thoughts were ‘we will need to practice that some more’.”

“But you’d just frozen your fingers off.”

“Indeed. And that did make our efforts noticeably more difficult. The key however was that we did not take the failure as an indictment of our capacity to do the task, only as proof that there was more that we could learn.”

“I don’t think I understand?”

“The key is whether you look at something you don’t know as something you want to simply do, or something you want to practice. Wanting to ‘do’ something focuses you only on the output. If you can get the output, then it’s worth doing. If you can’t, then it’s not, and failures can quickly reinforce the notion that even things you’ve managed to do are things you can’t do reliably enough to be worthwhile. Desiring to ‘practice’ something is the opposite focus. The goal is not the end result, it’s understanding and learning. Do not mistake us, failures are still just as aggravating, but they also stand as opportunities. They raise curiosity; why did we fail, what can we try next time, how does this really work?”

“I want to practice then,” Jaye said and failed to suppress a yawn.

“Then practice you shall, but the hour does grow late and today has been taxing for you. There are guest rooms, though the we cannot recall the Witch ever entertaining anyone in them, but nevertheless, they shall be at your disposal.”

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep at all though,” Jaye said and smiled with delight. “I cast a spell!”

“And tomorrow you shall cast more, but rest your head here for a moment whilst we tidy up one of the rooms for you,” Shadow said, waiting for Jaye’s shrug and nod before departing.

Somewhat predictably, by the time Shadow returned a few minutes later, Jaye had fallen into a nearly comatose slumber.

With a gentle wind spell, Shadow lifted her up and floated her to the bed that was waiting for her, turned the lights in the room down low, but left a few dim flames going so Jaye would be able to get her bearing when she woke.

It was well past sunrise by the time she finally stirred though, the toll of the previous day demanding restitution and being only partially satisfied with even a long night’s sleep.

Or perhaps it was the waking world in general her subconscious wished to avoid? The room she woke to was pleasant, but it wasn’t her room. Wasn’t in her house. And she wasn’t with her…

Would crying have been appropriate? Would it have made her feel better? She couldn’t answer those questions because somewhere in the week of travel as a prisoner of the Hunters it felt like she’d cried out the last of her tears. Waking in a new place should have been either terrifying, or exciting, or both, but in rising and wandering off in search of a bathroom, all Jaye could feel was fuzzy, hungry, and numb.

Hunger won out as soon as she was done in the bathroom, which proved to be opposite her room, and she followed her nose towards a new room which was a different kitchen than the one she’d had tea in the night before.

“We guessed you might be somewhat ravenous this morning, so we are experimenting!” Shadow said.

He was just as much a fuzzy patch of darkness in humanoid form as he’d been the night before, but his apron was new. 

“Good morning,” Jaye said, and took a seat at the table Shadow gestured to with the pan he was holding.

“With the tea having proven the efficacy of witch’s preservation spells, we thought that perhaps her general stockpile of foodstuffs might prove to be palatable for you as well,” Shadow said and slid three cakes from the pan he was holding onto a dish in front of Jaye. “There is more tea, fresh conjured water, and some cider newly wrung from apples we are reasonably certain were not magical before we enspelled their juices from them.”

Jaye took a bite of the first wonderful smelling cake that Shadow had provided her and spit it out almost instantly.

“Ugh, it tastes like a swamp,” Jaye said, reaching for the water to wash the taste from her mouth.

“Oh dear! Our apologies! It…hmm…no the food should still be as it was when the witch departed, so then why?” Shadow began to pace the kitchen, while Jaye leaned forward to take a sniff of the other cakes.

“These smell the same,” she said. “I don’t think they’ve gone bad. I think they started like this.”

“Why would the witch want…oh,” Shadow said and deflated. “It’s witch food. And doesn’t that sound obvious now they we say it?”

“Why would witches want bad food?” Jaye asked.

“It’s not bad, or it’s not bad for them,” Shadow said. “We read about it in a book, perhaps fifty years ago, so our memory may be somewhat inaccurate, but apparently many casters enjoy ‘Witch’s Food’; that is food which is readily enchantable for taste, consistency, and even nutrition. We believe accounts were mixed as to whether actual witches had anything to do with the stuff. Apparently, at least our witch did. Or perhaps she only favored it for the food which needed to be kept in long term storage? It would explain why it was still fresh we suppose.”

“Can you enchant it, if that’s how it’s supposed to be eaten?” Jaye was visibly unhappy with the idea, but hunger can be a persuasive voice.

“Our apologies. We have studied those spells in the rather distant past, but we have never had the means to determine if the results we obtained were what was intended. It might be rather risky?”

“Well, maybe you could try and I could take a tiny bite of one of the cakes?” Jaye suggested.

“We shall make our best go at it,” Shadow said. “Do you have any favorite flavors we might aim for?”

“Summerberries? If you can do that?” Jaye said and her stomach growled in agreement.

“Summerberries it shall be!” Shadow said and spoke a word in one of the ancient Human languages followed by a series of gestures so complicated that Jaye lost track after the first three and could only guess that there were something more than twenty in total.

When Shadow at last finished there was a brief spark of light and the scent of Summerberries wafted up from the plate just as Jaye had hoped.

That was her downfall though, as it tempted her into taking a much larger bite than she’d intended and was left wretching the moment it touched her tongue.

“Ugh, uck, that is so much worse!” she said, taking the glass of water over to the sink so that she could alternate between taking gulps and spiting them out.

“Did it taste like berries at all?” Shadow asked, cringing in embarrassment.

“No. It was meat. Rotten, spoiled meat. Uck, I can still taste it,” Jaye said.

“Oh dear,” Shadow said and conjured more water so Jaye could continue washing her mouth out. “We could try again?”

“No. No, please, thank you. Is there other food? A village? A farm? Real berries?” Jaye asked.

“Things that grow in the witch’s forest are not generally safe to consume unless she gifts them. Apparently we are not recognized as allowed to gift on her behalf. The nearest village is, or was, perhaps two miles to the west of here.”

“I can walk for two miles,” Jaye said. “Let’s go.”

“But you were going to practice casting more?” Shadow said.

“We’ll practice while I walk,” Jaye said. “I can’t stay here and, you said you’d come with me, right?”

“You mean it?” Shadow asked.

“You saved me, I want to save you too,” Jaye said, turning from the table and setting her feet towards the road.