2fangs
Chapter 4:  Sated
by Tearra Wolfe

A 2kinds fanfic
The world of 2kinds is a creation of Tom Fischbach, and Zen and Natani are characters created by Tom Fischbach.  The rest sorta vary.

The simple meal was cheese cut from a large white wheel and chunks ripped from bread that was just a little stale.  They shared a small amount of smoked fish, a small enough amount that it nearly brought the juves to fighting over it.  Zen was grateful for it, as it was a better meal than he or Natani had eaten for two weeks, but still, he couldn't help longing for a good bit of meat.  It seemed the good meat, however, was reserved for the Tands.

The juves ate quietly and hungrily - not just the ones that had come with them, but also the juves that had already been on the boat.  After lunch, there wasn't much talk except amongst a few pairs here and there, all heads turned towards the small group of newcomers.  It was the quietest and most nervous Zen had ever seen a bunch of juves, but he supposed it made sense - there was no way this many young wolves could get together and be strangers to each other without several of them getting to blows over dominance.  He watched faces carefully - most of the faces were nervous and waiting, but there ... and there ... and there, he saw thoughtful, appraising looks - the current alpha contenders of the bunch, sizing up the new competition.

Slowly, the kids got over their nervousness over the batch of newcomers, and there was a brief spurt of conversation, centered around the events of joining.  Zen immediately noticed some exaggerations and outright lies as the stories of what had happened that morning began to be told.  He decided it would be prudent to say nothing - no sense making enemies, as long as it didn't affect them, and a little imagination and inflation was pretty much standard.  When Natani started to say something angrily, he put his hand on her shoulder and shook his head.  She stewed, but followed his lead.

He had to rethink that policy when Kimi started talking, though.  He listened to her brag about how, as the daughter of a respected Tand, she was, of course, far more highly qualified for entering the guild.  As she made stuff up whole cloth about being greeted warmly, Zen couldn't help but let just a little bit of wind out of her sails.  None of the rest would - she'd already asserted her dominance over the others before Zen and Natani had even gotten there.

"Of course, the problem being," Zen laughed, before Kimi could get too far into it, "Tand Arlee pretty much ripped every single one of us a new one."  He mimicked Tand Arlee's sharp, taunting voice as he puffed up his chest.  "None of you are worthy of the Brotherhood of the Fang!  In all my years, I've never seen a more useless bunch of cubs!  You all should run home and let your mommies put your hair in pigtails!" he exaggerated Tand Arlee's dismissal of their abilities.

Several of the others juves laughed at his impersonation, and he heard Natani giggle behind him.  "That sounds like Tand Arlee all right!" said one of the strangers, to a round of agreement.

Zen gave a hopeful grin at Kimi, but her glare told him that she had already decided to hate him and Natani.  Zen sighed - he supposed you couldn't make friends with everyone, but at least everyone else was on the same page.  He'd have to be careful, though, or she'd definitely start a fight with him.

After the laugh and some more shared experience, everyone started opening up some more.  Stories started being shared about why they had decided to join up with the Brotherhood.  Most seemed to think that it was more akin to a thief's guild or some grand adventure, much like Tand Arlee had accused.  The tales of their exploits were about stolen pies or stolen purses, about tricking adults and other sorts of tales that kids got to talking about when the adults were away.  Zen looked around at all the juves, several of them older than he was, and wondered when he had started looking down on them as kids.

He glanced at Natani as she joined in telling tales of her own impish misadventures.  He listened for a moment and realized that, no, she was talking about one of his own pranks - but taking credit for it as if she had done it.  He rolled his eyes.  It wasn't unusual, he supposed, for kids to tell about their mischievous exploits, but it seemed more common here than in other places he'd been - especially when the stories started straying to more serious thievery.

Zen and Natani exchanged amused glances as some of the stories started getting rather outlandish, becoming complex schemes that sounded better in theory than practice.  Of course, both of them had stolen before.  They'd stolen the clothes they were wearing, they'd stolen plenty of food, and a couple other things here and there, just to be able to survive.  Complex schemes never really worked, one had to keep it simple.  A moment's distraction, a quick hand, and never, ever run.  The stories about crazy chases following bold daylight robberies were obvious fictions.  You never got away if it came to running - better to never be chased in the first place.

Eventually, Zen and Natani drew back from the others.  The afternoon was waning, and they found themselves a corner and put their backs to it.  Succumbing to the slow, lazy rocking of the barge, While both of them lay back as if they were sleeping, Zen kept his eyes open just a slit while Natani napped.  It might be safe here, but they'd kept watch while the other napped for too long to feel comfortable otherwise.  In the wild it was one thing, but other people were just too dangerous.  In a short while, Natani would wake up, and then Zen would take his turn napping.

As darkness started to fall, the slow barge anchored itself on the river, and the juves were told to go to sleep, and not to leave the cabin.  Zen and Natani continued to lay in the corner, their heads resting against each other as if already asleep, but both watching through slitted eyes as the other juves slowly settled down into a bunch of small dark heaps.  They waited patiently, ears perked, as the quiet murmurs and whispers here and there became more rare as the kids fell to sleep one by one.

After the ship had been silent for a bit, Zen finally decided to open his eyes and stand up.  Natani immediately followed after him as he picked his way past the dark lumps of other juves on the floor, taking care not to step on any outstretched paws or tails.

They slipped the door open carefully and peered out.  There didn't seem to be a guard in the hall, luckily for them.  They crept towards the hatch and peeked out on deck.  There was a couple of sailors at the fore of the ship, but all the Tand seemed to be asleep, luckily for them.

They made their ways carefully through the shadows to move to the rear of the barge, slipping quietly around back of the deck house.  Zen hopped up onto the low end of the slanted roof, then reached down help Natani up after him.  They scrambled a short way up the roof, then Zen craned his neck to make sure they weren't visible to the men up front.  They were safe, he was relieved - the only way anyone would see them was if they came around back and then looked up on the roof, so if they were quiet, they should go unnoticed.

"Is this good for you?" he whispered to Natani.  She closed her eyes and stretched out her hand, then nodded.

"I can feel it," she whispered back.  "I like mana on the river - it's so relaxing."

Zen smiled and nodded.  "Great," he replied.  "Let's get started, then."

Natani sat cross-legged on the rooftop, closing her eyes and reaching out with her mind.  Zen could feel the tingling as she started taking hold of the threads of magic floating through the air around them, drawing them into herself.  He would be doing similarly, shortly.  He pulled some chalk from his pocket, a small nub all that was left.  He looked at it sadly, realizing they would have to steal another piece soon.  Then he brightened, realizing that if all went well, they'd be able to get a new piece without any problems, and maybe even use something better than chalk.

It always took longer to adapt to raw mana than to just use the stones, but it was necessary to do it if you wanted to actually make some stones for yourself.  He chalked some rough runes onto the weather-worn boards making up the roof, then curved some lines around them, a combination of patterns drawing the eye towards the center, then surrounded the whole thing with as perfect a circle as he could draw with the chalk and a bit of string.

To finish it off, he pulled out some small, smooth, river-worn stones that they had collected a couple days earlier.  They seemed like a good fit for storing mana collected off the river.  Then he closed his eyes and brought his mind to a calm as well.  He felt a nudge against his mental feelers, and Natani fed some of the mana she'd already been easing together into his grasp.

Their mother had taught them how to do this.  Neither of them were skilled enough to become a full-fledged mage, though they'd been improving greatly over the last few weeks with all the practice they'd been getting.

He had the control.  The ability to take the floating little bits of life energy, so chaotic and random, and crystallize them into the matrix of the stone so that it could be easily and quickly used later.  That was the control a mage needed, not just over mana, but over all things around them.

He drew upon the lines of mana and gathered yet more together, teasing the power slowly towards the rough runes on the wood.  The runes glowed with a soft light as the mana fed into them, smoothing out the roughness with their mystic glow.  Zen nervously glanced over his shoulder again, hoping the soft light wouldn't be seen by the sailors, and was relieved at the lack of an outcry.

As the runes filled with mana, the task became easier, the smoothed out symbols much easier to send the mana into than the rough, imperfect ones.  The trick to magic was getting it started - it got easier the more you did it, and the better your tools were, the easier it was to start.  Once the symbols were full, he pushed through them to focus the concentrated mana inwards, feeding through the softly curving lines and filling those as well with the soft blue light, until all the chalk he had laid down was no longer rough drawings, but smooth symbols of pure magic, the mana finally feeding into the stone in the center.

This is where the control came into play the most, as he carefully eased the mana into the rock, into the patterns that would keep it in place once he no longer was shepherding it.  The rock vibrated as the magic entered it, and Zen had to redirect some of that magic not towards storage, but towards smoothing out the imperfections in the rock, inside and outside, to turn it into a perfect pattern.  Again, if he had better materials to work with, alchemically created crystals instead of river stones, this would be so much easier ... but he didn't, and there was no sense in regretting it.

While this took most of his concentration, he was always vaguely aware of Natani's actions.  She didn't create the telltale glow, and she didn't force magic into rigid patterns.  Instead, she drew the magic in slowly, and played with it as a cat might play with a bit of string, pushing it this way and that, teasing it, getting to understand how it moves on its own.  Once the mana was rolling around between her hands and her thoughts, she sent it out to do small bits of work.

It wasn't a finally controlled stream like he was using, but instead she seemed to lightly nudge the mana's unrestrained flow so that it naturally did what she wanted it to do.  He couldn't think of a better way of putting it, and he couldn't do it himself, but it was why she was better at casting than he was, even though she found it almost impossible to make a manastone.

A mage, of course, needed both of those qualities, and neither could do what the other could.  The best mages, they were told over and over again, needed tight control over the magic, and needed to understand the magic enough to let it do most of the work.  The most powerful spells were highly controlled patterns of vast complexity, but more orchestrated than constructed by the spell caster.

Natani reached out her hand, and water flowed up over the side of the boat.  Not a lot of water, just a little, perhaps enough to fill a large mug, but it flowed through the air as if it were carried by a spirit.  She pulled into a sphere in her hands, then twisted it into a spiral.  She turned it in her hands, prodding at it, playing with it as if it were clay.

First, she just delighted in being able to manipulate the water like that.  Zen understood, he had occasionally pulled off this trick, and it was amazing to feel the water bend underneath your will, to feel the water so ... there wasn't a word for it, but he supposed 'thick' would be a good one.  You could make the water become hard, without losing any of its flexibility.  It was like warm, liquid ice.  After a few minutes, though, Natani went on to harder things, which he was never quite able to do just right.  He saw the mists start to drip from the surface of the water as she dropped the temperature of it slowly, saw the faint crystallization as she brought it close to freezing.  She drew her hand across the surface of the murky ball of river water, and it rippled, and the murk collected to one side with the stroke of her hand.  She dipped her fingers into her water and pulled out the small bit of filth, tossing it carelessly into the stream - the plop just another sound amidst the frogs, crickets, and leaping fish.

She did that a few more times, collecting out the silt, mud, tiny stones, and bits of algae that was in every water source across the world.  It took her several passes, but eventually the watery ball floating above her hand was as clear as a noble woman's glass window or silver mirror, water so fresh it could only be gotten through magic.

The top of the sphere rippled, and a tendril eased up from it.  Natani leaned towards the water and wrapped her lips around the small strand of water, drinking thirstily from the bubble between her hands.  The bubble shrank as she sipped from it, and then she smiled and offered it to him.

He paused briefly to drink from it as well, the cold water soothing in his throat, though the water seemed a little bland, lacking in flavor.  He'd never been a big fan of the flavor of slow-moving river water, anyway, so it really wasn't much of a loss there.

Once they had both drank from the purified water, there was little more than a tiny marble left.  Natani tossed it up in the air and caught it in her mouth as if it were a morsel of food, and Zen couldn't help but let out a chuckle.

The stone trembled in the center of the runes, and he rapidly turned his attention back to it, settling the magic back into its place.  If he could keep his focus, he might get two stones made tonight, maybe even three.  If he lost focus, lost that control, the magic escaping from the tight bonds of the rocky prison would rip the pebble apart, and he'd have to start all over again and be lucky to get even one stone done.

"That is a neat trick," said a man's voice behind Zen.  He jumped in surprise, turning around to see who had spoken.  There was a detonation as the rock exploded, leaving a small crater amongst the broken runes in the weather-worn boards.  Natani squeaked and jumped in surprise as well, but forgot that she was on a slanting roof and spent several seconds scrambling for her balance.

Zen saw Tand Ahiga smiling at them.  He had no idea how Tand Ahiga had gotten there - he would have had to sneak past both of them, or scramble up the long way without making any noise.

"What's a pair of young Magi doing joining the Brotherhood like this?" Tand Ahiga mused quietly, almost more to himself than asking them.  "Dressed in stolen rags and starving for a bite to eat ... when just about any mage society would be glad to bring them in as apprentices.  "They'd have soft beds, hot food, meat instead of bread, and possibly even a decent allowance."

Zen and Natani squirmed uncomfortably, looking at each other.

"Well," Zen put forth, hesitantly, "There's magic-users in the Brotherhood, right?"

Tand Ahiga nodded.  "Yes, but all of them had some reason.  It wasn't the pay, prestige, or comfortable surroundings, I can tell you that.  What's your reason?  I thought it was just so you could escape hunger, and get a roof over your heads.  If you can do this, there are much better ways to make your way in the world."

Zen paused.  He had promised to take care of Natani - maybe this wasn't fair of him, to be doing this to her.  He could take care of her a whole lot better if they went to a mage guild.  Perhaps they could learn how to get past their limitations.  They could become powerful and wealthy mages.  Wouldn't that be a better way to keep his promise?

"It's our home," Natani blurted out.  "Why did it happen?"

Tand Ahiga blinked.  "I ... don't know."

"Who did it?" Zen asked, now that Natani had started.

"You said it was humans," replied Tand Ahiga.

Zen nodded.  "Yes, but there are lots of humans.  Which group?  Why?"  Tand Ahiga nodded, an understanding expression on his face.  "That's why we're here.  Because if any group is going to know, is going to find out, it's going to be you, and it's going to be us."