Chapter 8: Stone

After the attack, people treated me differently. There was more respect course, but also a tinge of wariness, especially from the King of Viyaha. He praised me to the heights in public, but in private, even a hint of the rapport that we had been building faded away. This puzzled me quite a bit. Wasn’t he supposed to act closer to me when I had saved his life?

The only constant was honor, duty and service. I still attended all of the events that the King did, and watched for any twinges through the prann. But these events came few and far between—the attack had really shaken the King—and I had a lot of free time. I used quite a bit of it trying to pry open the prann stone’s secrets.

Prann diviners, like the soothsayer my father took me to visit as a child, were people who could pry open secrets from the prann. The best of them—it was said—could read secrets out of the past, and divine the future. They were also the first to have discovered the uses of a prann stone and how to bend it to man’s will. The Kingdom of Vihaya might be a political backwater, but because of its illustrious past, it had one of the biggest libraries in the South. My Shield captain had told me about the stone and its primary uses: that of enabling greater stamina in its posessor, but she had no clue how to unlock the stone’s power. In consultation with the library, I picked up the first steps of how to tap into it.

You were supposed to focus into the stone, preferably with a hand around it. The books then spoke of a mindscape that will open up, that’ll allow me to use the functions of the stone. There were severe warnings about doing this only to a bonded stone, with horrendous repurcussions otherwise. The books said the stones had a sort of intelligence about them, and would repulse anyone not worthy.

The first time I tried to focus into the stone, I was sitting down in the lotus posture, and deep in a nidra trance. I was aware of the stone in the prann space around me, much like how the Sun would be aware of its planets. Then I tied tapping into its vibrations, gently opening it up like a flower. Nothing happened. I spent quite a bit of time sitting in that space, trying one thing after another, until I gave up. But when I came out of the trance, frustrated and a bit angry, I could sense another presence in the prann, much like a person—so very like another man—but centered around my chest, and clearly coming from the stone.

The books hadn’t mentioned anything about this. We had been taught even as kids to communicate through the prann of course. But it was never convenient & only used in emergencies. The vocabulary was dismal, and anybody not holding the prann would be deaf to the message. If it felt like a person, I thought, maybe it could communicate like a person?

I held the prann, and asked it: Who?