The Tower is really big! And kind of a maze! There are lots of hallways and doors, most of them locked! Some of the doors which aren't locked lead to stairs which go up or down a very very very long way!

There are hertasi! The little lizardfolk adore children and they talk to little Azabel, ask her who her mother is and if she's all right and where she's trying to go. 

"My mother is Ranara and she is fine! I am looking around to know where things are."

Awwww she's a cute child and also a curious one! Their favourite! Several more hertasi converge on her location.

"Do you want to come look at the kitchens?" one of them suggests.  

"Okay! Don't go fast."

A friendly old hertasi grandmother wearing an apron offers her a hand. 

They lead her down the stairs and courteously show her around the kitchen. It's a truly enormous kitchen. They have to feed a LOT of mage students. 

Aza wants to see MAGIC APPLIANCES. And eat sweets.

They can show her so many magic appliances! And lots of sweets. So many sweets. 

Then they have a very happy sugared child on their hands. Where else is there to go?

Oh, wow, she's the most adventurous child they've met all this decade! 

Does she want to meet the gryphons? She can totally meet the gryphons if she wants! 

"Yes! Can I pet them???"

"Oh, I am sure you can! We can take you to visit the babies in particular..." 

Skandranon is a little baby gryphon in the gryphon eyrie! He's very fierce! He gives the newly-arrived stranger a challenging glare, fully of bravado. 

(He is about half her current size.) 

"Hi baby gryphon! ...Are you gonna bite me?"

"Arre you going to bite me ffirst?" the tiny baby gryphon says to her in a piping sibilant voice. 

"No! I only bite food. Also I'm full."

"Oh." 

"...Wanna play? I have a ball, sssee?" 

The baby gryphon picks up in his beak and tosses a brightly coloured ball, made of some stretchy cloth-like substance inflated with air. 

"I can't run around, I fall down. I could throw it and you could get it though?" She holds out her hands.

The little baby gryphon has SO much energy and does not question her assertion that she'll fall down if she runs. He's delighted to have a playmate and can absolutely try to catch the ball when she throws it and they bring it back to her in his beak. 

He also falls on his face a lot while he's attempting this, but he doesn't seem to mind. 

She will throw the ball! And pet him in between throws.

He loves being petted! After the first couple of times, once he's willing to relax enough, he goes all limp and melty when she does it, and rolls over to expose his belly, which is all soft fluffy downy black feathers. 

That is GREAT. Petpetpetpetpet.

Awwww the hertasi are so delighted that their favourite baby gryphon has a new friend! 

They escort Azabel back to her mother's apartment at the end of the day - they know everyone's work hours, and they don't want her to worry - but they'll be waiting outside in the morning, if Azabel wants to go back and play with Skan some more? 

She DOES want that! But she also wants to explore more places. Maybe Skan can come with her more places?

Skan has barely been outside the nest and would love to explore with his new friend! Maybe they'll even find enemies to fight! 

"Why would there be enemies to fight around here?"

"I dunno, just, that's what gryphons do. Fight enemies." 

"Why?"

"'Caussse we got big beakss and wingss and clawss. Look." Skan shows her his claws. He's very proud of them. They're already quite sharp, even though he's little. 

"What if there aren't any?"

Skan looks like someone who has never particularly asked himself this question before. 

"...I dunno. What'd you thhink I sshould do then?" 

"Can you read books? Or is it hard to turn pages."

"Dunno how to read. I'm too little." 

"I can read! I could read you a book."

"Oh!" Bounce bounce bounce. "What ssort of book?" 

"My favorites are all at my house but I BET that the Tower has a LIBRARY." Where is the nearest hertasi.

Right nearby and very eager to help! 

Then they will go to the library! Aza will read titles to him till something catches his interest.

Ohhohhh there's a book about historical BATTLES, he wants to hear THAT one. 

Well, if that's what he wants! She will take it down off the shelf and find somewhere nice to sit and scritch him while she reads it.

Happy snuggly gryphon is delighted to get scritches and hear all about the battles!

...It's not as exciting as he imagined, really, a lot of it is kind of repetitive, there are a lot of descriptions of where rivers and hills are and how many soldiers and mages each side had, and not nearly as many dramatic aerial duels as he'd been picturing. 

Well, if he wants another book there are lots here.

He will bounce around and look for which books have interesting pictures inside! He finds a book which turns out to be about building bridges! It's actually a lot more interesting than the one about battles! This is sort of baffling to him. 

Maybe it's a better author? Or bridges are just very interesting, or battles are in fact dull in practice. She will read him the bridges book.

Eventually a polite hertasi suggests that she had better go home before her mother gets too worried, but they would be delighted to bring both of them to the library again tomorrow. 

Azabel's mother knows that she is very responsible and not getting into trouble but she doesn't argue with the hertasi.

She is back the next day!

Skan has decided that bridges are the most interesting thing in the WORLD and he wants her to help him find more books about them, and also maybe teach him to read??? 

"My mama can teach you to read! This way," she says, and she attempts to lead him into her mama's classroom.

He obediently follows his new friend. 

"Mama, mama!" says Azabel, interrupting.

"- Aza?" says her mama, in the middle of explaining the different ways people sometimes spell "morning".

"Mama, this is Skan and he can't read."

"Oh, I see. How about you start him on the alphabet for now," says Ranara, with acceptable grace, "and he can see about enrolling next time I circle back to the beginning? I'm not at the alphabet just now."

"Oh, all right," says Aza. She swipes a spare alphabet book.

Skan puzzles over it very seriously! He finds it hard to wrap his head around but he's trying so hard. 

Aza has known the alphabet for years and tries to be patient but that is hard.

Skan gets some of his letters down, sort of, but it's hard going. Eventually he slumps down on the library floor. 

"Look, I know I am sstupid, I can ssee you are ssmarter, I am not blind. I am trying!" 

"Maybe that's as many letters as you can learn in a day. We can try again tomorrow."

Skan flops on the floor in despair about being so stupid! 

It's short-lived despair, though, in keeping with his attention span. Soon he hops up again and suggests they go look for enemies in the gardens. 

"I don't want to find enemies! If we found any they'd attack us and if we didn't find any it would mean there weren't any there so why were we looking."

"Because I want to fight enemies!" Bounce bounce bounce. 

"Well I don't! I can't even run."

"Awww." Skan is thinking that fine, it's probably rude to keep insisting when poor Azabel can't even run. "What do you wanna do then?" 

"I wanna read more books! And explore more of the Tower, it's very big."

"Oooh we should explore - I heard the Tower is the tallest building EVER, we could try to go to the very very top!" 

"Oooh okay! Can you fly yet -"

"A little!" He demonstrates for her, flapflapflap he can flutter up to the ceiling and make it halfway down the hall and then he glides awkwardly down and lands in a heap. 

"Hmmm but you sure can't carry me. Do you have parents who could carry me all the way to the top -"

"Can't we jusst go up the elevator?" 

"I guess the first time we can go up the elevator but do you think they could carry me, it looks fun." She heads for the elevator.

"Maybe, but they are very bussy. Being grownup sssounds very bad. Bussssy all the time." 

He follows her to the elevator. 

"I like being busy! What do your parents do?" Into the elevator they go. How does this thing work.

You have to say a word and then the magic activates and the platform starts going up!

"My parentss work with Urtho. I am not ssure what they do." 

"Maybe he gets them to fly him around. That's what I'd do probably. I guess he can Gate but that doesn't look the same sort of fun."

"When I'm bigger I could fly and carry you!"

They ride up and up and up. The elevator-platform passes by windows, sometimes, which show the ground further and further away. 

"That would be so great!"

Up and up and up. "Ooooooh."

The elevator won't take them all the way to the very top of the spire, which Skan is disappointed about, but it does bring them to a sort of glassed-in observation deck that runs in a circle all the way around the spire, three-quarters of the way to its peak. 

Skan skips and bounces around it, claws skittering on the marble floor. "Look! Itss sso high!" 

"Wow, you can see for miles!!"

"We could try to ssee if there are enemiess! Can you ssee any?" 

"I don't see any, wouldn't there be alarms or something?"

"I guesss." Skan makes a humphh sound and sits down, resting his foreclaws on the railing and staring out. 

"Is that what your parents do, do they fight enemies? Who even are the enemies?"

"They do not tell me about work. They play fighting gamess with uss. Teach uss how to fight. Gryphonss are good at fighting becausse we have natural weaponss." He proudly shows her his claws again. 

"I guess that'd help! Are claws better than having a sword? Or magic?"

"Magic iss alsso good! Some gryphonss have it. A ssword can be taken away by your enemiess, sso I think it iss not ass good." 

"Sometimes my mama has to cut my nails. If somebody's your enemy maybe they would cut your claws. Just like taking away your sword."

Skan hisses and recoils! "I had not thought of that!" He looks horrified. "Would they?" 

"Well, the point of enemies is that they want to do bad things, right, and not have you get in the way? And that would do both things, so probably."

Skan spends a while bouncing around in agitation. 

"That would not be fun at all," he concludes finally. 

"It doesn't sound it!" she agrees.

Skan stares morosely out the window, fidgeting, like he's suddenly unsure what to do with his claws. 

"- Do you ssee any bridgess?" he says finally, hopeful. 

"- yes! See, over there, a little one over that stream. My house is near there."

Skan cheers up. He's very excited when he manages to spot her house, and he tries to find bridges he can point to as well, and then other sorts of buildings. 

Eventually the sun sets. Skan admits he should go home too, but eagerly suggests they could play outside in the courtyard tomorrow? Maybe after he tries to learn a few more letters. Learning letters is really hard but being able to read books on his own is an appealing prospect. 

"Sure! Tomorrow you can learn some more and some more the next day till you have them all."

Skan plays with Azabel most days after that. And diligently tries to learn his letters, and then puzzle through sounding out sentences, and eventually makes enough progress to join her mother's class, though he often can't make it through the whole class session because he's incredibly hyperactive and terrible at sitting still, which distracts the other students. 

He likes his new friend a lot! He reads books about bridges and dams, and tries to get her to build sandcastles with him in the gardens. And sometimes to coax her into roughhousing, but eventually it sinks in that she's never ever interested. 

Gryphons grow fast, and by the end of that year he's able to fly all the way to the top of the Tower spire and do aerial acrobatics. Within a couple of years he'll be strong enough to carry Azabel too. 

She likes building sandcastles! She imagines people to live in sand cities and rules over them as their benevolent Queen. She does not want to roughhouse but she'll throw balls for him, or invent tasks for him - can he burrow, can he fly from there to there before the sun dips behind the Tower, can he catch the light that bounces off this shiny pail while she tilts it all over the courtyard? Can he carry heavy things in the air so that he'll be strong enough sooner?

Skan loves all her challenges! He's very competitive. He will ABSOLUTELY try to show off how good he is at carrying heavy things in the air! 

This only leads to a couple of incidents of tiring himself out and tumbling down into the gardens in a semi-controlled landing, and only one of these ends up a broken bone and a lecture from an exasperated Healer. Skan is slightly cowed by this, and more nervous about the challenges for a few weeks even once his leg is healed, but after that he's back to his old self. 

He grows more. He can pick Azabel up and fly short distances now, although only if she holds onto his forelegs, he can't manage with her riding on his back yet. 

She will get some rope and loop it around him and her and also hold on, to be extra sure, but then: WHEEEEEEE!

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!! This is AMAAAAAZING!!! He's so proud of himself! 

Flying is VERY GOOD. The first time they land after he flies her around she hugs him around the neck and faceplants in his feathers with delight.

This is how Azabel discovers that very happy gryphons purr like cats! 

Awwwwwww. Scritch scritch.

Skan likes scritches a lot! 

By the time another year has passed, he's big enough to carry her properly; he's nearly full-sized, now, though he still has the general maturity level of a kid Azabel's age. He's big enough to join the other young gryphons in flying lessons, now, and is bursting with pride about this, especially because he seems to already be ahead of the others, maybe all his aerial challenges with Azabel are helping. 

She certainly thinks she helped.

She learns to do arithmetic and reads longer and more complicated books and tutors the kids in her mother's class if they fall behind.

Skan continues to sometimes sigh and complain that he's stupid, since he's quite far behind Azabel on academics, and isn't learning fast enough to close the difference. He haaaaates mathematics but is convinced by his father to study diligently anyway, when informed that it can be important for fighting wars. 

He stills talks a lot about learning to fight enemies, possibly because this seems to be most of what gryphon children like talking about amongst themselves. 

"You aren't stupid, I think, it's just I'm very smart. I'm smarter than most everybody."

"You are very ssmart!"

Skan is somewhat reassured by this, and spends a while bragging to his gryphon friends about how his friend is the SMARTEST. 

This is very gratifying. She studies very hard to maintain her title.

Skan wins prizes in gryphon races and obstacle-courses and aerial acrobatics. He is incredibly fierce when he roughhouses with other gryphons, but with Azabel he nearly always remembers to be gentle and not run fast when she can't keep up. 

That's good because she doesn't grow out of not being able to run at all. She walks slowly, even when startled, because if she doesn't she'll go sprawling and bloody her nose.

Skan feels very badly for his friend, he would be so upset if he couldn't go fast! He will solicitously walk close to her so if she trips he can dart ahead and catch her on his soft feathers, and he's always willing to fly her somewhere if she doesn't want to walk. 

Having a gryphon friend is very convenient. Sometimes she just likes to lean on him and read, sometimes aloud, glancing over now and then to see if he's paying attention or if he's imagining fancily tactical battles in the air with imaginary enemies instead. It's almost funny how his mind keeps winding its way back to the subject, like a -

- like a gear, turning, always rotating back into the same position, like -

- huh -

Skan is right there, the breeze ruffling his feathers, his beak hanging very slightly open the way it always does when he's daydreaming, and he looks exactly like he always has...

- And yet there's more, somehow, more to be seen than there was before, it's as though her eyes are sliding in and out of focus on it, the way you can look out a window or look at the window and suddenly see the reflections of the room behind you. It's not a room, though, it's...intricate interlocking parts, wheels within wheels, gears, laid out so clearly and straightforwardly, Skan isn't at all the sort of person who's ever pretended to be anything other than what he is. Which she already knew, of course, but she can see it, now, in a way that isn't metaphorical or at least not entirely, it's right there... 

Skan is oblivious. He's imagining a battle where he does that cool diving move where you pull up at the last second right before you'd hit the ground and break every bone in your body, and the other gryphons are losing to mysterious enemies (as usual in his fantasies, they're dark and hazy and not entirely filled out, as though made of black smoke) except he's there, heroically intervening to save the day. 

Aaaaah how does she stop. She is pretty sure she is being HEINOUSLY RUDE.

It's really not clear! Closing her eyes doesn't help, then all she can see is the turning gears. Trying to unfocus on it mostly makes it swim in and out of focus even faster. 

Skan notices that she's distracted and seems upset, tears himself free of the daydream; gears spin, wheels suddenly switch direction, the whole pattern shifting direction. "Aza? Are you all right?" 

"Is there a Gift that makes you see clockwork because I think I have it only the clockwork is you and I'm scared I'm going to poke the clockwork that is you but I don't know how to stop looking I'm sorry -"

"I'm clockwork? What doess it look like?" Skan bounces a bit; now that he's so big, he's learned to do it gently so as not to knock Azabel, who's way smaller than him now, right over. 

"Well, like a lot of gears and springs and things, only they mean things - I don't know how to stop -"

"I don't know what Gift that iss! Maybe we sshould find a grownup." 

"Yeah I think so." She holds onto his feathers for balance, not accustomed to walking with double vision.

He's tempted to fly, but maybe that's a bad idea if she might poke his clockwork by accident, whatever his clockwork is, he never heard of mages seeing clockwork inside people.

He spots an adult with a group of mage-students practicing shields in the courtyard, and jumps up and down to get his attention. "Hello! We have a quesstion!" 

The man comes over, looking puzzled and a bit annoyed to be interrupted. "What is it?" 

"I think I have a new Gift and I don't know what it is and I don't know how to stop!" she says shrilly. Oh wow this guy is also clockwork.

He is clockwork which is running smoothly, with more layers and folded-away inner parts than Skan, and he seems unconcerned and kind of bored. 

"Well," he says a bit impatiently, "are you seeing or hearing things that you couldn't before? Is it just people or can you see energy all around us?" 

"Just people - people being gears and springs and things that I can see -"

He stops, blinks, looks more concerned than before. "Gears, and springs? That - are they emotions, can you tell what feeling I am having, or can you tell what people are thinking -?"

"Not exactly? Um, I don't think this is thoughts or feelings it's - the thing that makes those. I could guess if that one there started spinning really fast it would be because you were scared but it could be something else, it would depend..."

"...Huh. I have never heard of a Gift feeling like that! I think perhaps I had better take you to Urtho, he knows how to test for Gifts, and he has seen even the very rare ones. One moment." He calls out to his class, informing them that they're dismissed, and then jerks his chin at Azabel, gesturing for her to follow him, and starts walking. Fast. 

"Hey!" Skan calls after him. "Misster! You have to ssslow down! Azabel can't run." 

"I really want to figure out how to stop soon though," she says, hauling herself onto Skan's back, "can you -"

"Oh, you are strong enough to fly with a passenger? Meet me at the top, then, do you see that balcony?" 

Skan has very good eyesight. "The white one? With gargoyless under it?" 

"Yes, that one." 

Skan takes off and pumps his wings hard, trying to gain altitude. With such a short runway, he has to work hard, but he's very strong.

They reach the balcony, presumably well before the mage-teacher can possibly have caught up.  

There are nearly always hertasi around, though, and this is no exception. One of them pops out. "Can I help you?" 

"I have a new Gift and don't know how to stop using it and the first grownup we found said to go to Urtho?"

"Oh, goodness! Congratulations! Urtho is working, but he never minds being interrupted for that, so I will take you right there!" 

This hertasi also has to be told to slow down by Skan, but after that they make their way down the hallway without incident. The hertasi knocks on a heavy oak door and waits. 

The hertasi's gears are different and it's interesting but she's trying not to stare.

A tall, thin man with silver hair falling to his shoulders and piercing blue eyes over a beak-like nose opens the door. Looks a bit confused, then turns his gaze downward and sees Azabel. He beams at her. "Why, hello there! What brings you here, child?" 

His mind is incredible. The gears are in such an incredibly vastly complex pattern, so perfectly shaped, fitting together into such an elegant whole. Some of the movement is refocused on her, but most of it is still spinning and whirling away, absorbed in something else. 

Ooooooh - wait no this is still HEINOUSLY RUDE - "I have a new Gift and I don't know what it is or how to stop."

"Oh!" He's so excited! More of the gears switch directions, it's pretty self-evident that this represents his attention shifting to her. "Well, do come in and have a seat - tea? ...Where did I put the teapot, oh, thank you, Gesten... May I have a look?"

"How do you mean?"

"Well, I imagine you are here because it was not obvious what the new Gift is, usually the youngsters are not brought to me right away if it is that obvious, and so the simplest way for me to check is to just go and look in your head. Only for a moment, and I will not be reading your thoughts or feelings at all, merely having a peek at the place where Gifts go. It does not hurt but it does feel funny, I am told." 

"Okay."

He puts his hand gently on the top of her head. It takes about three seconds, and as promised it doesn't hurt, but it does feel a bit like someone is tickling the inside of her head, vaguely near where the feeling-of-seeing-gears started from. 

"Yeep!"

"I am so sorry for startling you, dear. All done." He's grinning, though, his gears whizzing. "You are going to be a Mindhealer! A very rare and important Gift, I am so pleased for you. And potential for others, too! I expect you will be a Mindspeaker, and you have the potential for mage-gift, though I am not sure if it will awaken." 

"- can you make it awaken - also how do I stop looking at everybody's gears, they're very pretty but I can't stop and I can't ask!"

"Oh, I had better teach you to shield then - new Gifts can be so distracting, but no one will be upset with you for it, we understand how difficult it is. I am afraid we do not know the secret of why some Gifts awaken while others stay dormant, nor how to awaken them on purpose. You seem young for it, too - how old are you?"

"Almost ten. I would be mad if somebody was looking at all my gears!"

"Fair enough, I suppose. It will be good when you do learn to shield reliably, just, do not beat yourself up about it if it takes time to learn. I must teach you to centre and ground, first. You need to focus on your breathing and - try to feel the point inside you that feels the most stable and still, that does not move even when the breath does - does that make sense?" 

"...my feet don't move when I breathe?"

"I suppose not! Most people find a spot that is sort of inside their chest or stomach or throat, but perhaps feet will work for you. Now, I want you to try to clear your mind and focus all of your attention on that point, and when you have done that, try to feel the place where you and the floor beneath you connect. It might help to imagine the walls all the way down the Tower and how that connects to the earth and the bedrock. And feel how it is much bigger than you, and very stable, and you can use it to steady yourself." 

Like how it helps to hold on to things when she's balancing, maybe. Feet seem like the easiest option if you're trying to connect to the ground, don't they? She tries.

For a couple of minutes it doesn't really feel like it's doing anything, and then - it's like something settles into place, and suddenly the gears-sense is less unbalanced, staying in focus rather than shifting in and out at random. 

"That did something..."

"Good! When you are properly centered and grounded, it ought be less the case that any change in your own state or emotions causes your Gift to fluctuate at random, and so you will have the base to build control on. I want you to try a motion like leaning into it, try to bring it more into focus, and once you can do that, try leaning back and sort of folding it away." 

Okay, she - stares real hard at the pretty gears - and then sticks herself back to the Tower which is stuck to the ground.

She can stare hard at the gears and they get clearer and sharper and she can see way more detail! It takes a couple of tries before she can get the hang of the pulling-back, rather than just having the not-sight oscillate wildly in and out, but then she's done it, it feels a bit like changing the focus all the way on a telescope so that the sky is totally blurred and then unscrewing the eyepiece and putting it away. 

"Oh - okay, I think I got it."

"Wonderful! That was quick. You must be very clever." 

Skan has been trying so valiantly to sit still, and he's practically vibrating with the effort of it. "She is!" he bursts out. "She's the SMARTEST. Probably in the whole world!" He bounces. 

She giggles and scritches him. "What do Mindhealers do? I can kind of guess from the name but I don't think people have real gears that can get - bent teeth or sand in them or anything -"

"Not literally, no. Your Sight is a metaphor, just like how some Empaths see emotions as colours, except that mind-structure is more complicated. You ought to have lessons with an actual Mindhealer, I do not know much about it myself, but - well, sometimes people's minds do not work the way they want, and they need help setting it right. They might be uncontrollably sad all the time, or be troubled by memories of a very bad thing that happened to them, or be paralyzingly afraid of going outside or of small spaces or heights or snakes, or have trouble stopping themselves from losing their temper or drinking too much wine even though they regret it afterward. Things like that. And a Mindhealer can help a person understand what is going wrong, and work with them to put their mind into a shape they are happier and healthier with." 

"Oh." She considers this very solemnly for a while. "Is there one here who can teach me?"

Urtho is smiling fondly at her. She looks so serious and he bets she'll be a diligent student. "Yes, there is. His name is Lionwind k'Leshya, he is of the Kaled'a'in people. He does tours of the surrounding area, since he is one of very few Mindhealers in Ka'venusho, but he will be back in the Tower tomorrow. I can arrange for him to meet you for a lesson." 

"Okay!"

"Well, child, it was a pleasure to meet you. I wish you the very best of luck with your lessons. Having Gifts is a wonderful and precious thing." 

Skan follows her when the hertasi escorts them out, and manages to wait until they're out in the hallway before BOUNCEBOUNCEBOUNCE. 

"Aza that'ss sso amazing you can fix people'ss headss! I have to tell all my friendss! - Do you think you can make me read better? Is that a stuck gear? It feels like it ssometimess." 

"I don't know! I didn't see any stuck gears but I was kind of trying not to look because I think it is RUDE to look at people's gears without permission probably. I can ask tomorrow but I should probably at least have one lesson so that if it is very easy I can just have the teacher tell me 'actually it's very easy' instead of guessing and if it's very hard I will need lots of lessons."

"I guesss it'ss rude, and - I wouldn't like it if ssomeone looked at mine and then ssaid I was sstupid and made fun of me. But you already know you're ssmarter than me and you don't ever teasse me about it. So I don't mind." 

"I think maybe you should think about it more before you say I can look! I wouldn't want anybody to look at my gears even though I bet they are very beautiful and nobody would make fun... I wonder if I can actually..." Can she see her own gears.

It's a slightly different mental motion from looking at other people, sort of like she has to screw the imaginary-telescope-eyepiece on backwards, but with a few tries she can do it! 

"- I can! Oh, I am very interesting to look at and I don't have to feel rude about it at all since I'm me. I have a really big gear that hooks up to everything else - I don't think you could actually build this, I think some of the gears are going through each other? But it works for imaginary gears..."

"Oh! I wonder if that'ss how being ssmart workss. I heard Urtho iss ssupossed to be brilliant, did he have that?" 

"His gears were also really cool, I looked at them harder than at yours or the hertasi's since he seemed to think it was okay. I don't know if some of the differences are from me and him being humans or if it means something else."

"Dunno." Bounce bounce. "You sshould go tell your mother! I bet sshe'll be sso proud." 

"I will, once she's done teaching! I can't go interrupt."

Skan would absolutely interrupt his parents at work if he'd just gotten Gifts, but Aza is the smartest so probably she's right. "We could go to the library?" he suggests. "Maybe there are bookss about it." 

"Oh good idea, I bet there are!" Off to the library to see what it has to say about Mindhealing.

It takes a while to find anything! There are whole library sections for every other Gift, but not that, and they end up having to go find and ask the librarian. 

Once that's done, though, there are a handful of treatises on it, tucked away in the depths of the very large section on ordinary physical Healing. The foreword in the first one warns that Mindhealing is an especially tricky discipline to learn from books, as different Mindhealers end up with different Sight-metaphors, and since they're so rare they often work mostly alone and don't have the same chance to standardize a curriculum that Healers do. This treatise is by three traveling Mindhealers who exchanged regular correspondence for decades and met up once a year to share case studies and get each other's advice. They want to disclaim that the things they're writing about is what worked for them; in cases where they disagreed with each other on what ought to be the theory or the best practice, this will be explained in the footnotes.

The three Mindhealers in question had the following Sight metaphors: city-maps, coral reefs (that Mindhealer grew up in a fishing-village on the far southern coast and used to go swim and dive around the coral reefs as a child), and kitchens. If they use descriptions reminiscent of these things, that's why. 

To start! A lot of people think Mindhealing is like Empathy, but it really isn't! It's not that much like Thoughtsensing either! It's common for Mindhealers to have one or both of those Gifts too, but Mindhealing in isolation is its own thing, and pure Mindhealing-Sight doesn't show the content of thoughts at all. 

What is does show is the structure, and also the - movement, or use-patterns, or shapes-of-thoughts, they never agreed on a good word for it. The rapid changes over seconds and minutes, is what that means, whereas changes to the deeper structure can happen but generally over weeks to years. Here is a page of tips for how to think about focusing your Sight in order to see one versus the other better. They're very poetic and flowery. 

City maps sound like a decent metaphor but the others sound worse! Aza is glad she has gears.

She reads this entire book straight through raptly and takes a lot of notes.

The different metaphors lean to different strengths; the kitchen one, for example, gives the Mindhealer in question much stronger guesses about the function of various mind-bits, what they mean to the patient, but it's harder to see fine detail by going in deeper. The coral-reef Mindhealer can very easily swap between focusing on the realtime patterns-of-thought (schools of fish or other sea life interacting with the reef) and more permanent structure (the coral itself), but needs to do a lot more back and forth with the patient to understand what it means in their particular context. The city-map Mindhealer can very easily see large-scale structure at a glance or zoom in closer and see fine-scale patterns, but finds it a bit overwhelming to focus on realtime thought-shapes. 

Huh. She thinks gears seem very all purpose but maybe there is something they are worse at. Does the book mostly just talk about Sight or does it also talk about messing around with stuff and how to make that safe?

The second half is mostly about that! It also opens with an opinionated preface!

The Mindhealer with the map metaphor is firmly of the opinion that seeing what's going on is the most important part, and changing things with the direct use of Mindhealing Gift should be done sparingly (there are many footnoted disagreements on what 'sparingly' means in practice.) In his opinion, patients will benefit the most from a Mindhealer helping them figure out what's already happening in their mind, so they can relate to it better and learn self-acceptance. 

The Mindhealer with the kitchen metaphor thinks that helping patients 'clean up' and 'organize' their minds, with Mindhealing Gift, is often very helpful; sometimes certain skills, like calming themselves down by taking deep breaths, will be hard to use in, say, an angry argument, because that tool isn't very accessible from that 'corner' of the 'kitchen'. 

The coral-reef Mindhealer thinks that you should find which parts of patients' minds are 'hidden' and can have emotions or habits build up in a way the patient isn't consciously aware of, and help them 'open' this so there are fewer obstacles to their feelings. 

...

The textbook is not a replacement for an apprenticeship with an adult Mindhealer! You should if at all possible have that! It's much safer for an untrained Mindhealer to practice Gift-control on an adult, trained Mindhealer who can set their own mind right easily. That being said, they fully understand that sometimes this is impossible, given the rarity of the Gift. In which case you should practice on fairly mentally healthy patients (who've agreed to this!!) before you try to treat people who are very badly off and fragile. 

'Detours' are a way of pinning down a particular reflexive thought-pattern, and changing it so it instead ends somewhere different and more helpful. For example, a child struggling in school might have a habitual train of thought of "it's hopeless, I'm just stupid" every time they find something difficult, or a man who sometimes loses his temper and hits his girlfriends might have the thought "that bitch isn't treating me the way I deserve" whenever she does something minorly inconsiderate, which most people wouldn't explode into anger over. These could be shifted to "I don't know how to do this yet but I can ask the teacher for help" for the child, or "but I remember when she did something very kind for me" for the man with a temper. 

Fences are a more substantial and invasive technique, generally used when a patient is suffering because their thoughts keep going back to the same painful subject. For example, a mother who survived a fire while her child died might feel incredibly guilty and like she doesn't deserve life as much and wishes she could trade herself for her child, and this can easily become a sort of pit or downhill slope (in the kitchen metaphor, a hole shattered in the counter, or a place where it's cracked and everything slides downhill into the crack). In the long run these feelings need to be fully processed, in a safe context, but in the short run, the patient is only with the Mindhealer a candlemark or two a week, and the rest of the time they may not have the emotional skills yet to avoid making the problem even worse by ruminating. A fence is like putting up a guard-rail around the entire region of their mind, so they fall into it less. There is disagreement between the Mindhealers on how freely one ought to use fences; the kitchen Mindhealer thinks they're a very useful therapeutic technique, the city-map one is technically very good at them but thinks they ought be used sparingly and with a lot of forethought and planning, keeping an eye on not disturbing the overall structure of the patient's mind. The coral-reef Mindhealer haaaaaates them with a fiery passion and this is apparently an ongoing dispute between the book's authors. 

Sometimes a Mindhealer will want to do the opposite of a fence! The patient's mind will have partitioned off an area, so they mostly never think about it, and when they do it may be overwhelming and distressing. For example, a man with unprocessed anger toward his neglectful father might believe that he's an adult and entirely over this petty childhood pain, but occasionally explode into rage at his wife when she nags him about not doing something in a way that reminds him of his own mother nagging her husband, and makes him feel as though he's being compared to his own father, who he can't bear the idea of resembling. The man might be baffled at his own behaviour after the fact, and regret it, but it's going to be hard to stop if he cannot even understand where this response is coming from, and getting to the root of the emotions often involves taking down the fences. The Mindhealer should make sure the patient is ready for this, and set aside extra time in case they need a longer session to process it. 

This is a really good book! Aza doesn't think she wants any fences or detours in her own personal clockwork but she can try to figure out what they'd look like - maybe she could put a hinge on a gear, swing it out of the way of another that locks into it sometimes, put it either in empty space or meshed up to a different gear depending. Maybe she needs a book on actual literal clockwork?

She can find lots and lots of those in the section on engineering, subsection mechanical devices. 

Skan wants to know things about clockwork! 

Then she can leave the pages open a bit longer and take notes while he catches up.

He runs out of attention span well before she does, and bounces around the library pretending to fight imaginary enemies. 

Skan is very Skan.

She is by this time pretty sure she will not accidentally knock somebody's gears out of alignment. "Skan?" she says, when she has extracted the vocabulary she wants out of the clockwork book.

He bounces over. "Did you learn things?" 

"Yeah. Uh - is it okay, if I look at your gears - you don't have to let me even though I saw them before or because we're friends or anything - just to practice looking, I can wait till I have a teacher tomorrow -"

"I don't mind! I thought about it a lot and I still don't." (By 'a lot' he means about five minutes, but that really is a long time to sit down and think about something, for Skan.) 

"You can tell me if you want me to stop, okay? And I'll stop." Scritch scritch.

Peek.

Skan flops and purrs under her scritches. 

His gears still look different from her own or Urtho's! There are fewer layers to his, nearly all of it is right there on the surface. He doesn't have a big central gear connected to everything else, like Azabel does, but he does have a couple of different...long gearshafts or something, which link up distant areas so that movement in a handful of specific gears can very rapidly grab and shift all of his mind toward it. This is clearly not something he can do for just anything, though, especially reading. The attentional-patterns in his gears are very distributed and a lot of them seem very deeply linked into the physical; it looks like it would be easier for him to keep his attention on something the more it involved all of his senses and using his whole body. 

"Huh! - do you want me to tell you what it looks like -"

"Yess!" He vibrates with excitement. 

So she can fumble through an explanation, and try to find pictures in the clockwork book to use as visual aids. "That's probably why you don't like reading for a long time."

"Oh. That makess ssensse. I wissh I could read better but I like being able to fly and dodge fasst. - Ooh, can you ssee in your gearss why you can't run?" 

"That's a really good question - let's see -" Where does her physically-doing-things hook up, hm?

It's really interesting! Compared to the way Skan's mind is very distributed so it's hard to keep his attention on one thing instead of everything else, but he has the gearshafts that let him instantly engage nearly all of his mind for a physical response, Azabel's mind is the opposite! Her big central gear doesn't connect to the gears that are physically-doing-things, and those gears don't connect very well to each other either or to the gears that do seeing and hearing things and recognizing them. At a glance it looks like setup can sort of manage, but it's slow to react and clearly not doing as much fast complicated recognition of things like, say, a crack in the path ahead of her, let alone a ball flying at her face (which Skan can leap up and catch while not even pausing in their conversation.) 

"I think I can see the problem, which might mean I can fix it! I shouldn't try by myself though. Even if it looks like just oiling all those gears would be fine."

"Probably not! It would be bad if you made it worsse." 

"Yeah, or if I did something totally different by accident!"

"I dunno what elsse you could do by accident but it'ss probably bad!" Skan runs out of patience for sitting still, and flap-runs around a bit. "Okay want me to fly you home now?" It's nearly sunset. 

"Yes please!"

Zoooooom!!! Flyyyyyyyy!!!! Skan loves flying so much, and loves showing off, and especially both at once! He also knows exactly how much he can get away with things like sudden steep dives or doing flips without scaring Aza. He gets her home pretty fast, but finds time to have lots of fun along the way. 

She whoops very appreciatively when he does tricks! And hugs him around the neck when she's dismounted, and goes in to tell her mama.

She shows up right on time for her lesson the next day.

Her teacher introduces himself as Lionwind k'Leshya. "So. You have a new Mindhealing Gift, yes? Tell me what you have learned so far." 

She has notes! About the Mindhealing book, about clockwork, and about people's gears (hers, Skan's, and her mama's, mostly, so she hasn't drawn firm conclusions about what differences if any are species-based). "What's your metaphor?" she asks as she skims these for reportable insight.

He is very impressed with her diligence and intelligence, and tells her so! 

"My metaphor is rivers. Occasionally some people are ponds or lakes instead." 

"Who's a pond or a lake instead?"

"I cannot tell you specifically who for reasons of patient confidentiality, unless I asked their permission for you to sit in with us as a student assistant - which you are not ready for, yet, that will come. In general, it tends to be people with calm, stable temperaments; people who are reliable and trustworthy while - perhaps not being the brightest or most ambitious. There is a range, rivers can be both fast and slow, and slow rivers begin to resemble lakes."

"Yeah sorry I didn't mean who specifically, just what makes somebody pondy. I was trying to figure out what about Skan is from being a gryphon and what's just him but I haven't looked at any other gryphons - and I saw a hertasi before I knew how to stop but I was trying not to look so I don't remember much and haven't looked at other ones -"

"Oh, clever girl! Yes, there are species differences, though - in general it is a matter of the average difference, there is always a range. Gryphons tend to be faster rivers with more rocks to my Sight, for example, but there are gryphons who are are more lake-like than some humans. And of course we will need to figure out how that corresponds to your Sight-metaphor. Often we Mindhealers learn very early on to - focus on, or emphasize, different aspects of the mind." 

"Yes, the book said about that! I can do it, the gears are all still there but they go through each other in funny directions and I can change which ones are more in front to me."

"Oh, very good! For our first lesson, then, I think we ought start with a Sight-refining exercise. You can do it on yourself, if that is easiest; you have my permission to look at my mind as well if you prefer that." 

"I can try both, maybe? What do I do?"

"I would like you to select a particular area to focus on, that contains one to several gears at the scale where you are viewing the mind as a whole. I want you to tell me what you think it represents, and then we will try to go in closer on it and see more detail."

She peers at her own gears, and picks out one of the problem sections that has to do with her balance problem, and she reports this. "I want to fix it but didn't think I had better try anything without asking you," she says.

"Oh, hmm." He looks thoughtful. "I think that sort of thing involves problems that need fixing at a very fine scale, and I have not personally had much luck with it, but it is often easier to do fine-scale work on ourselves and it is possible your metaphor is more conducive to it than mine. What do you see if you go in closer, so you are looking only at that part and not the rest of your mind?" 

"The teeth don't fit right. Sometimes there's a jam and a lot of force has to build up before it'll tick over. And other times they slide out of alignment till a counterweight sort of thing shoves them back together, I tried spinning around a little bit on my bed till I fell over last night at home so I could see what went wrong and that's what happened. I think if I could just make all the pieces be different shapes I would know how to make them fit, but I don't know if I can do it that way or not."

"Very good! Excellent control on the level of detail. We will need to discover if your Gift can change the shapes of gears in your metaphor; it may be that you are not strong enough yet but will be once you are older and have more practice, we will see. It would be better to test your strength on an area less critical than balance, though. Hmm. Have you discovered yet how to find a particular area by thinking of it, or having a patient think of it, and then seeing that area move or light up?" 

"I don't have any patients! I haven't tried having the people I was looking at steer me around, though. I don't think gears light up..."

"Can you try thinking of a particular memory, or habit you have, that is not of incredible importance to you? I am going to have you try to nudge it, and almost certainly you or I can put it back, but nonetheless I do not want you to try it for the first time on something very critical." 

"- I think all of my memories are of incredible importance to me!" she says.

"- You know, fair enough. I do not mind if you try on one of mine, though, I am very good at putting them back. I am going to think of one - tell me if you notice where it is?" 

"Okay..." Stare stare.

It's hard to see at first, but after a moment she can notice a flicker of movement, it feels almost like it's in her peripheral vision rather than right in front of her, somewhere in his gears but deeper. 

She cocks her head and "squints" at whatever just ticked.

There's a dizzying moment of falling, gears going half-transparent as she slips through them - 

- and then she's looking at something much deeper in, a collection of wheels and wires and springs, which are in motion but subtly, twisting and rippling. 

"Oh, it has - little tiny gears in the big ones -"

"Yes! Now, I want you to look - there should be some place where it is linked to the larger pattern, the rest of my mind - for me it is channels or grooves in the riverbed, I am not sure how it would appear for you." 

"I see it, there's a bit where if it comes around far enough it'll push a funny-shaped gear into a different section and then it'll feed into the rest of the mechanism."

"All right. I want you to have a look around, and see if there is anywhere you could move it so that gear would be moved somewhere else. Here, I will think about it from a few angles so you can see how it moves." 

He does that. Wiggle spin twist flip spin go the gears. 

"Whoa - it's going by really fast - I guess if I pushed on this bit it'd turn and I could get it onto this gearshaft's end?"

"I am sorry, I would try to slow it for you but thoughts are fast - it will be easier to catch it anyway with more practice. Watch it a little more, and then try that? You will want to start gentle, which will probably not move it at all, but better to ramp up carefully than hit it too hard." 

"Yes," she agrees, watching intently.

When it seems like a good time, she gives the surface of the gear a tap, willing it to spin as though twirling across a table on its bottom tooth, till it comes loose and is caught by the incoming shaft she chose.

If she taps it from the right angle, where there's little resistance to push against, it takes almost no effort! It settles neatly into place. 

"- Ah, good work. One moment." Lionwind closes his eyes, stands there for a moment, and then suddenly bursts into a deep belly laugh. 

"What? What'd I do?"

"Oh, oh, that is just too funny!" He slaps his knee. "I am almost tempted to leave it like that, it is so... The memory was of a time I went river-rafting with my friends, we were being quite reckless, and we - might have caught our raft on a rock and made a hole in the bottom. And usually it links to the - broader concept, I suppose, more than a specific incident, of being scolded severely by my poor mother. Except now it is linked to - the first time I kissed my wife, in particular, and also the broader concept of first kisses - that is so hilarious, I am going to have to write to my colleague about this one..." He is almost crying with laughter. 

Okay, that is a little funny. "Who's your colleague?"

"Her name is Tayata, she is a Mindhealer from Acabarrin who came to train at the Tower, and returns sometimes to teach for a time. She taught me when I was a child." 

"What's her metaphor?"

"Beehives! I know, it is an odd one. Her parents were beekeepers." 

"With - bees in them and everything? Wow. I don't know why I'm clockwork, I don't actually know how to build a clock..."

"Bees, and bee larvae, and honey, and a queen... I learned so many facts about bees from her explaining her metaphor to me." 

"I do like my metaphor. But I don't know why it would be that."

"I do not think anyone understands why our metaphors end up being what they are! I had hardly had much to do with rivers when my Gift awakened. Though I did then find it valuable to learn more of their geography and features, and the detail in my Sight became more usefully interpretable as a result." 

"Oh, I thought maybe you went river-rafting more than once. Or was that after your Gift came in?"

"After. I became far more interested in rivers generally! And also reached the age at which boys most like to do reckless things, I was twelve when my Gift awakened and not quite so adventurous yet." 

Nod. "Should I try to put the gear back?"

"If you think you can see how, then yes, by all means!" 

Nudge nudge nudge?

It clicks back into place, neatly! 

"Excellent work! That was very tidy. You have good control already." 

"Thank you! It would be scary if I didn't..."

He nods, solemnly. "I am glad you understand that already. Perhaps because of how they are named, many people fail to understand that Healing and Mindhealing can be at least as dangerous, if not more so, than those Gifts traditionally considered useful for combat." 

"I don't know how I'd fight with it but doing something stupid and random would be really bad."

"Yes. And harder to set right than when the mage-students squabble and burn each other with fireballs. I am glad I do not need to scare you with tales of what can go wrong, for you to take that as seriously as it deserves." 

"...can you tell me them anyway though?"

"Yes, of course." 

Lionwind spends a while doing that, relating the stories of times he was called in - or stories his teacher told him of times she was called in, often from another city, to fix something some student had done to a patient or more often to their friend or classmate, while goofing around or just entirely by accident. A common beginner's mistake for students with strong Gifts, especially if they're strong Empaths too, is to be startled by someone's fear or sadness and fling a lot of poorly-aimed Mindhealing at them, which usually just makes people hallucinate; more subtly, it can make them see sounds, or taste colours. You can accidentally make someone unable to remember a category of words, like the names of colours or seasons; you can make people unable to recognize faces; you can scramble someone's ability to read or sing a tune; he once had a student Mindheal someone in some bizarre way where they could only sing, not speak. You can give people random phobias to things like stairs or cups. 

In some of these cases he has theories of what was going on; often, he or whoever was there just did their best to set it right without ever understanding how exactly it went wrong in that way. Minds are complicated, even for experienced Mindhealers. 

Aza takes extremely careful notes on all these things. "I don't think I knew that all those things would be - things the way a rock is a thing instead of the way a bucket of different rocks is a thing," she remarks.

"I will be honest, we do not even understand which things in the mind are - objects that way, that can be modified as a single move, versus not. For example, it is very hard to block access to a specific memory and no others, though many Kings and spies have wanted this done. But you can quite easily make someone unable to recognize or recall the name of an object they are holding, even though they can describe its appearance and shape exactly! I do not know why!" 

"What! That's so weird! Why!!! I know you said you don't know but WHY!"

He smiles broadly. "So curious! Perhaps someday you will be the one who discovers the answer." 

"Maybe I will! That will teach brains to be so mysterious."

"I think you are going to be an excellent Mindhealer! Well, that is perhaps enough for a first lesson. Do you have any more questions on today?" 

"Can we make people need less sleep?"

"Huh! Assuming you mean in the long run, I am actually not sure. There is a trick for making yourself more alert for a short period - Healers can do it too, coming from a different 'angle', our scholars think that this means the two Gifts are looking at the same underlying structure but it could be entirely distinct mechanisms. Anyway. I had never thought to even try whether making someone need fewer candlemarks of sleep per night on a permanent basis can be done. What an intriguing idea - you are so creative!" 

"It would be so useful!"

"I had not really thought about it, since I like sleeping, but - yes, I suppose it would." He seems surprised and a bit nonplussed. 

"I like sleeping too but I don't need to do it all night. Once in a while would be fine. Or just a few hours every night is probably more doable. If this is doable at all."

"...I have heard of people needing more or less sleep innately, so one assumes that if you can find the ones who need less sleep and obtain permission to look at their minds, you could at least check if the difference is one that Mindhealing can affect." 

"I want to do that! How can I find people who need different amounts of sleep?"

Lionwind thinks for a moment. "- Hmm, I am not aware of any treatises written recently such that you could still find the patients studied. You may have to just ask your acquaintances. I suppose you could write to Mindhealers across the region - I could give you a list - but they will mostly only see very sick patients, who I think on average tend to sleep more - or else very erratically and poorly - because of their mental illnesses." 

"Why do those make people sleep more or worse?"

"I think that is another case where our scholars do not yet understand everything! The theories are that some mental conditions, such as depression, involve having less life-energy to drive a mind, which thus spends more time in sleep, whereas conditions like wild-madness involve an out-of-balance excess of these energies - where the patients sleep less and yet this compounds their imbalance and their madness and wildness." 

"Why do energies need to balance? My metaphor has some weights that could tip stuff over if they were wrong but beehives don't, what's going on in the actual mind?"

"I am not sure. I...suspect that there are large-scale loops of some kind that need to balance, where - as you say, it can tip over into one whirlpool or another that is hard to escape - but to be honest, our scholarship on this is not very advanced." 

"Oh, okay. I guess I'll fix that and then we'll know."

(Awww she is adorably enthusiastic and excited.) 

"Of course. Any other questions?" 

"I will think of more for next time. When is next time?"

"I thought we could meet three times a week, to start, at this same time? And I will give you homework exercises, this time it will just be to practice refining your Sight on your own mind." 

"Okay!!!"

He pats her shoulder. "See you in a couple of days. You are making very quick progress so far." 

"I'll see you then!"

And she comes back two days later with a great big list of questions. What makes people have mental problems in the first place? Why do people have to sleep at all? Why was the first kiss thing near the rafting memory? Why is anything near anything? What kinds of things can't Mindhealers do that it might seem they would be able to? Her mama wants her to ask if this will help her defend herself when she goes on the long trip to visit her papa, it's usually not very dangerous but it would be good to know. Can she make her other potential Gifts awaken? Is there a standard best practice for making very sure someone is REALLY okay with letting her look besides just what she's been doing.

"So many questions! You are such a wonderfully curious student." And Lionwind sets himself to answering them methodically, one at a time. 

It's not entirely understood why people have mental problems! Some of it seems to be an inborn predisposition; the same way some people are physically frail and prone to sickliness, or born with heart problems, or end up falling ill with cancers, some people are prone to nerves and phobias and melancholy, or succumb to sudden madness. Sometimes it's caused by stressful or traumatic life events, but how damaged different people are by the same event also seems to vary. It's a known pattern that many women because depressed after giving birth, and some much smaller fraction have bouts of madness, and honestly no one has any idea why! 

There are theories about sleep but it's mostly Healers who've studied it, she could go look at books in the library on it. The current understanding is that memories end up near each other because of similarity, where the similarity can be on a number of aspects - place or time are one kind, but he suspects the rafting and the kiss were already near each other because they were both exciting, exhilarating experiences. 

He's not sure how to answer her question on kinds of things Mindhealers 'should' be able to do but can't, maybe because he's had such a long time to get accustomed to the reality of what's easy or hard or impossible; she has fewer preconceptions, maybe after this she could list out what she would expect and he can correct her? 

...There are ways a Mindhealer can incapacitate people but he wouldn't recommend she try that in self-defence this early in her training, unless she's literally about to die, it's a lot harder to undo than it is to do in the first place. Depending on when the trip is planned, though, she can ask him about it again later. He doesn't know whether one can awaken potential Gifts much less how. 

In terms of best practices for consent, the other thing to keep an eye on is whether people will feel like they have to say yes, either because they want to please her or think she'll be disappointed in them otherwise or are scared of the consequences if they aren't cooperative. Probably she doesn't have to worry about this yet, since she's a young trainee and he doubts her friends are worried about losing the friendship if they decline to let her practice on their brains, but it'll be something to keep in mind more once she's an adult and a trained Mindhealer. 

"Well, like, you said you can't just make people forget only one thing, why not? It seems like we should be able to. Can you tell in advance who's going to have a problem? What is the self defense thing, I won't try it. Why do we have metaphors at all, nobody else does with other gifts."

"- I will start with the last one first, because in a sense I think that many Gifts do have metaphors? Thoughtsensers often experience 'hearing' thoughts, but thoughts are not really sound, and some Thoughtsensers instead 'see' words written down. I have heard Empaths describe what emotions feel like to them as everything from a smell to a taste to the sense that they can half-feel the other person's body as well as their own. Mages see glowing lines of energy in the world, but a ley-line is not really a glowing river, and different mages see it differently! Some mages instead experience it as 'touching' magic, not visually at all. I also know of a Healer blind from birth who instead of Healing "Sight", has Healing-touch and Healing-smell. This becomes more obvious when Gifted people work together in larger numbers and learn concert-Sight and concert-work." 

"What's concert-work like?"

"The most common kinds are mage-work and Healing-melds. I am not sure I have ever actually heard of Mindhealers doing it; there are not really enough of us, and there is the question of patient confidentiality, which does not apply at all to mage-work and which Healers have different protocols around. The key part is that people must be in mental rapport with each other, but of a different kind from what Thoughtsensers do to either establish a formal Mindspeech link or to share thoughts more directly. Healers will often merge only their lower-level shields, in order to make their reserves a common pool, and then one Healer will use that to take charge and direct the energies into Healing a critical patient. Done skillfully with the right training, this does not require exposing one's thoughts to one's colleagues, though I think many rural Healers without that training find it easiest to just merge everything. Mages will more often also share senses with each other, since large workings are very complex as well as power-requiring, and require tight coordination of who will do what; the communication can be done either via formal Mindspeech with a conductor, or by thought-sharing, this is mostly a matter of preference and local practice." 

"Do people share thoughts when they're first practicing?"

"Probably it is not uncommon. I think I avoided it; I have done Healing-melds sometimes, since I see patients at the healing centre sometimes and the Healers can call on me as an extra body in an emergency, but I was already fully trained when I first started that, I suspect accidentally sharing thoughts is more common for Healing-trainees who need to learn melds in their first year." 

"Hmmm."

Lionwind waits for a moment to see if he has more, then rubs his forehead. "...I do apologize, could you remind me of your other questions? I seem to have gone off on a tangent here." 

She can go back and reread her previous questions to him.

"Hmm. So the question of memory blocking comes down to the fact that any one memory is linked to a huge number of other things in the mind, and - our Sight does not quite work in a way where a 'memory' is a particular object, that can be plucked out without affecting the rest. What you saw in my mind, the other day - my memory was not a gear, it was somehow held in the pattern of how the gears fit together. Trying to erase it by removing a gear would probably both not have worked that well and caused more extensive damage to nearby memories."  

"Huh. Yeah, that makes sense."

"In terms of predicting problems in advance - I think this was studied once, but it was by a Mindhealer who had...questionable ethics...and went around looking at everyone's mind at the academy where he worked, and then kept personal records on his predictions of who would have troubles later. And I have only heard of this secondhand, anyway, his work was never published in a treatise." He frowns, rubs his chin. "The risk for some problems does seem to run in families? Becoming addicted to drugs and sudden madness later in life, in particular, are more likely if someone's parent or sibling suffered the same problem." 

"Doesn't being addicted to drugs only happen if you actually take any ever?"

"I mean, yes, but if you include alcohol, most people will have some at least once in their lives, though of course most never become addicted. ...Also there is likely a factor that children with parents who drink or take drugs will likely have those drugs around in their homes. I am not sure if it has been well-studied whether children by blood, but raised elsewhere, still have the higher risk." 

"That would be interesting..." She writes it down. "If I have money later is it okay to pay people to let me look or to answer my questions - like if they don't mind it, and it would just be annoying to sit there waiting for me to see whatever I was looking for, I mean -"

"Oh. Hmm. I am not sure that is something where Mindhealers have a settled answer. Healers might, there are more of them and they sometimes want to study healthy patients for comparison and will pay them to sit still all afternoon for it. Many people feel more private about their thoughts than about their bodies, but Mindhealing Sight per se does not actually look at thoughts. I think it would be all right, but you would want to explain and get their opinion before telling them how much money, and be cautious of the fact that very poor people might think it worthwhile to make themselves very uncomfortable for twenty coppers." 

She thinks about that for a moment, then nods.

"I continue to be very pleased with how carefully you think about this. Ah, and your last question was about defence. There is something that a Mindhealer can do called a set-command; it involves imposing a certain intent on a patient, usually expressed as an imperative word or phrase in Mindspeech, and pushing it into place with your Gift. You could, for example, force someone to 'stop moving', and they would stop attacking you. The single positive quality of set-commands is that they are fast, a second or two to place. They are very sloppy, will not wear off, and take much greater skill and time to undo afterward, which is why I do not recommend this unless you are in critical danger." 

Nod nod. "Does it have to be something simple like that - or something negative like that -"

"It does generally have to be simple, because of the lack of finesse. I believe positive set-commands are possible, for example ordering someone to run away." 

Nod nod.

He sits back. "Have you been practicing your Sight? Anything in particular you have noticed?" 

"I think the gears don't actually go through each other, they just go in directions that don't exist."

"Fascinating! It is definitely remarked by many Mindhealers that our Sight can contain physically impossible things, and that this is useful for conveying the full detail of the mind." 

"I'm not sure yet how many directions that don't exist there are.'

"I suspect your mind is still trying to absorb all of the information involved, and find ways of working with it. I - admit that your concept of more than one imaginary direction makes my head spin a little, but that may work fine for you. For myself, I found as a teenager that I could imagine the water of rivers and lakes as coloured, and this gave my metaphor a way of conveying more. The metaphor seems to respond to visualizations in this way." 

"That's smart! I'm not sure it will work for me because of how gears have to touch other gears to work though."

"Hmm. I think that it is not uncommon for Empaths to sense emotion as a colour, or smell, or equivalent to another sense, and emotional valence - or simpler valences - is a quality that can be attached to a gear or a cluster of gears but is not necessarily about the way they touch... I am not sure. This is something that is worth extensive consideration on your own, I think." His lips curve into a smile. "Which I am certain you will do. You are every teacher's ideal student." 

"Thank you!"

He pats her shoulder. "Anyway. More questions, or are you ready to move on to the exercises I had prepared for today?" 

"I'm ready, what are they?"

"So, one of the most common actual uses of our Gift that we will be called on to do with patients, is when they are troubled by an association - emotional or otherwise - with a particular situation, and - at least in the short run - would find it easier to go on with their lives if they did not have this. So I am going to give you a situation that I associate with strong emotions, and I want you to try to do a detour or fence around this. - I will of course put it back afterward. However, do you have any questions, first, about this practice in general?" 

"How come the detour or fence won't make it so you can't think about it to fix?"

"I suppose if you did a fence thoroughly enough it would make it trickier, but I have quite a lot of practice with this, and it is almost impossible to make a fence thorough enough that no angles are approachable, especially if one has Mindhealing-Sight." 

"Okay... how do I actually do it?"

"It is an extension of what you did to move the memory-association, but in a more directed way - would you like me to demonstrate a simple one on myself?"

"I think that would help. Show me where first though."

"Of course. You can watch now - tell me when you see it." 

Lionwind takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and settles himself. 

After about a minute, something several-layers-deep in a different corner of his mind moves - and then suddenly the movement is radiating outward, being conveyed in a sort of ripple or wave to other areas, including quite distant ones. 

"- can you undo that and then do it again -"

"I did not actually do anything with my Gift yet; that is just what it looks like when something has a strong emotional association. I can do the redirect now and then undo it, if you are ready to watch." 

"Oh, okay. I'm watching."

He closes his eyes again, takes a few moments to focus, and then - something shifts, in the layer of his mind where the reaction spread outward. He nudges a gear a little to the side, so that the drive-chain stringing it to another gear that conveys that initial spread slips off and hangs loosely, no longer able to transmit the movement of the first gear. 

"Now watch." And he does the focusing-on-it motion again, whatever 'it' is in this case, and there's a little ripple but it almost instantly dies out rather than being echoed around. 

"- ohhhhh, okay - and putting it back would be - can I try that actually -"

"Yes, of course!" He smiles encouragingly at her. 

Puuuut back?

She has to get at the unhooked chain from exactly the right 'angle', but when she does it pops very easily back onto the right gear, and Lionwind grins at her. "Perfect! You have such fine control already." 

She bounces in her chair a little.

Azabel's next few weeks and months of lessons go well! Lionwind still has nothing but praise for her, though he says it'll be at least a year before she's ready to see patients partnered with him. He finds her some books of patient case studies (with names and other personal facts obfuscated), and gets permission from some of his own patients to share his notes with her. Mostly he has her practice refining and interpreting her Sight, knowing which questions to ask to clarify it when the Sight alone isn't enough information, and various basic Mindhealing techniques like the fences and detours. 

Skan continues to be a willing and eager volunteer for having his mind looked at, though his attention-span difficulties with reading prove non-obvious to fix, at least at her current skill level. 

...And nine months later, shortly after her eleventh birthday, she's sitting out in the garden with Skan, who's reading a book, murmuring the words out loud to himself under his breath, which he hasn't needed to do to manage reading in years - 

- or, wait, maybe it's not quite reading out loud...

...experimentally, she covers her ears.

This does not make the murmuring-to-himself stop, or change at all! 

She centers and grounds. She is right here on the ground, new Gift, see, go away.

She's at this point very good at center-ground-shield. The new Gift obediently stops overhearing Skan's internal monologue as he reads. 

"I think my Thoughtsensing woke up," she says. "All I got was the words in your book though."

"Mmm? –Oh!" Skan drops the book. "That'ss sso exciting!" 

"It means I'll be able to shield, which makes me feel better, I don't like having to expect everybody to be polite. Sometimes people are not polite about everything else, so I bet sometimes they aren't polite about that. And it'll be convenient!"

Bounce bounce bounce. "It sseems sso usseful! For doing Mindhealing. If your patientss ssay you can usse it, I mean." He's quietly reflective for a moment. "I think I'd let a Mindhealer read my thoughtss. Ssometimes it'ss hard to ssay what your feelings are in wordss." 

"Well, I'm not ready to have patients yet, but I guess it could be useful for that if someone wants me to. Mostly I meant it'd be convenient for talking if somebody's far away - or when we're flying around and it's windy."

"That too! And we could have ssecret converssationss in front of people. Like sspiess." Skan looks delighted about this. 

"We could! I should ask Lionwind if he knows how I can do that if the other person isn't a Mindspeaker - or if they are for that matter - or if I need to take separate lessons."

"You sshould! I have no idea. He iss a Mindsspeaker too, right?" 

"He's never Mindspoken me, so I don't remember for sure."

"Fair enough!"

Skan looks down at his book, and decides he's had his fill of reading for now. "Going flying, you coming?" 

"Yeah!" Up she hops.

At their next lesson, Lionwind is delighted to hear about her new Gift. "Wonderful! ...And, yes, I have a little bit of Mindspeech. Not enough to reach beyond a room, or Mindspeak someone without the Gift themselves." 

"But you can teach me how it works."

"I can teach you the basics, yes. You may want to seek another teacher if your Gift proves strong enough for long-distance Mindspeech, which is a valuable skill to have and not one I am equipped to teach you. We need not get ahead of ourselves, though, there are many basics. Have you been able to figure out shielding?" 

"I centered and grounded like when Urtho told me how to stop with the Mindhealing-Sight."

"May I have a look at your shields? Knowing you, I am guessing you will want them to be very thoroughly proof against other Thoughtsensers, as well as enough to prevent you from picking up the thoughts of others." 

Nod nod. "Can you look without reading my thoughts or should I try to think of something boring?"

"Hmm. I can avoid reading your thoughts for more than a fraction of a second, but in order to test your shields I do need to probe, so perhaps you should think of something boring anyway." 

"Ready," she says, reading the spines of the books in the room.

At first she doesn't feel anything, and Lionwind makes a quietly approving noise. "Well, you are not leaking anything to a passive read, that is a good start." 

- then there's a firm, very weird sensation of pokepokepoke, and the third or fourth poke seems to slip through something, for only the briefest instant before the pressure vanishes. 

AAAH she doesn't like that and it makes it VERY hard to concentrate on book titles.

"I apologize. That is a pretty good start for a shield, though. To make it stronger and more proof against probes, you will want to - usually I describe this to students as weaving it finer and tougher, rather than thicker. Some people find it useful to imagine literally weaving, as though shaping the energy around you into cloth, others use different visualizations such as shaping armour." 

She collects herself. Finer and tougher rather than thicker. An - eggshell, that goes all the way around because it grew that way with no holes.

Lionwind waits. 

"Good," he says after a couple of minutes. "Are you ready for me to test it again?" 

She starts doubling numbers in her head and nods.

Poke poke pokepokepoke. He does it with about the same firmness as before, and this time it doesn't seem to get through. "Very good! It might not stop someone with a strong Gift and sufficient determination, but you would notice the attempt and have an opportunity to react." 

"I guess I could set-command them about it."

"That might be seen as a disproportionate response, but I would certainly not blame you for it." 

"Well, I can't run away!"

"Fair enough. All right - you will want to check your shield often, at first, and practice reinforcing it. It will not be instinctive at first. Once you are comfortable enough to find it easy, you can start practicing building multiple layers, which will make it less brittle to strong probes."