(( Continued from here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2494 ))

"Once again," Freja said, her voice full of that indefinable emotion as she watched Nauleth's face carefully. "Feel into the void. Sense that which lies just beyond the perimeter of our world, sense it as you would a fellow mind in the darkness. Pull it through. Do not let the pain of it overcome you. You are causing the Material more pain than it causes you, remember that."

It was the first time Nauleth had seen Professor Lux since the collective meeting, and he had the faint impression that these meetings had been going on without him; meanwhile, she had elected to meet with him in private to coach him in the art of Making.

The way she said it, and the others repeated it, sounded like a prayer, and worthy of capitalization. So too was the Material, a substance she would not name.

She had showed him how to position his body to concentrate hardest on the Otherworld, but she had mentioned that it was different for everyone. "It will not come to you easily," she had said before they began. "Several weeks it took the others to pull even a little." There was a hardness to her voice, bitter over the failures of her students.

Now she strode over to him and positioned his hands a bit farther from his body. Her hands felt cool, as though she had been handling ice. She straightened his posture, efficient and businesslike, before stepping aside to let him work.

He was quite sure that if Freja ever chose to fully express even a single moment of her veiled emotions, Brunnhold and its entire population would cease to exist. Forever. Some part of Naul was confident that if the Hoxian could break free of her cultural upbringing, all of Vita would be in serious, soul-consuming danger. Already concerned for the stability of the gray matter between his ears as it was, he couldn't bring himself to be that concerned about anyone else who might ever find themselves at the wrong end of her wrath.

The professor's icy touch didn't disrupt his concentration so much as focus it, regardless of just how strange her words still seemed to be in all this. If the dark-eyed boy had the thoughts to spare, he would admit that strange was an understatement.

Wordlessly, Nauleth attempted to act upon his mysterious instructions, closing his eyes and allowing himself to reach out with his consciousness past the dark behind his eyelids into whatever he'd been informed of existed beyond himself. He was supposed to grasp for something, and so he set about to find it, straining non-physical senses further than he even normally reserved for spell casting on the Lawn.

Before he could pull anything anywhere, he had to find what this Material was.

Like always, nothing happened. And it happened quickly. Perhaps the greatest virtue of the room Freja had chosen for their sessions - a dank, sequestered classroom in some forgotten part of Wolvarn Hall - was that it was completely silent. It was the type of silence that made your ears ring, and all those small nagging thoughts disappeared in favor of large blank expanses of waiting. It was this silence that overcame them now, rippling briefly from the noise of Freja's footsteps but quickly muffling itself, closing over Nauleth's ears like thick wool.

And as usual he could feel every ounce of blood in his body pounding through his head, feel his tense muscles try not to move as he reached out with his mind. These were familiar feelings, no different from the last dozen times he had tried it.

In typical casting, frustration is a detracting force. It interrupts concentration, blocks the smooth pathways through which the mona work. But he had begun to get the impression that frustration could be useful, too. It was an itch, a motivator. As he focused, he sank into it.

There it was again - the sensation that a part of his brain was falling asleep from constricted blood flow. The itch was constant and infuriating, but there was a new sensation now. His eyes were closed, and the room was dark, darker than it had ever been, darker than was natural. But it was not blackness that filled his vision; it was greyness, like a thick fog in his mind, clear, empty nothingness. It was at once full and empty, and he experienced that strange lack of sensation that he felt around the Material.

Nauleth had never disliked not knowing more than he disliked whatever this was that he'd gotten himself tangled up into. It was nothing like all the classes he'd taken in the past eight years, nothing at all. He couldn't go to the library and study until his eyes burned. It would've been torturous had it not been so tantalizing. Maybe it was both, but he wasn't quite willing to admit one above the other.

Not yet.

The whole situation would have been terrifying had the dark-eyed boy not been so stubbornly determined. With a slow exhale, Naul attempted to let himself relax into the strange emptiness, straining to endure what he didn't understand to reach out with his mind and grab hold of what technically didn't exist.

He wanted to touch it, whatever it was—the elusive secret something hidden in this grey nothing he found himself floating in.

The greyness did not like him.

It struggled with him, once he had made his presence known. It was a sensation not unlike being lost under the covers of a well-dressed bed as a small child, all limbs and sheets and tangles. It was a suffocating feeling. He was reminded of being underwater, or of being smothered by a kiss that lasted entirely too long, or of eating too much while dying of hunger.

Through the greyness his mind seemed to snag. Eyesight thrives off differences, variations in color and form, but here nothing worked the way it ought to, and he saw it - part of the greyness, all of it or none of it, his for the taking. There was no distinction between this greyness and the next, but he saw it, what he must take out of this world and into his own. He saw it like one sees a ghost out of the corner of one's eye, like a half-memory or a dream. The conscious part of his brain was busy insisting that it existed, while the subconscious was cheerily producing random images of his life. The other bit, the one Freja had encouraged him to use, was fixated on this point in unreality like a bloodhound, poised and taut like a bear trap.

Socially speaking, Nauleth was most certainly used to being disliked. He wasn't entirely bosom buddies with the mona, either, as far as he knew. Whatever this was, new and alien, was just going to have to clocking take a number and get in line. Opposition was nothing new, but it wasn't entirely welcomed or expected, either.

If his body reacted to the strain with a noise or an expression, he had no idea, for it took enough of his senses to concentrate on whatever elusively strange task at hand as it was. Still, he had no idea how much to grab or hold or pull or touch or use or—

Did it matter? Once he had it?

Naul attempted to snatch up what he could see (was it really seeing?) to establish some kind of tenuous, mental grip on this important greyness. He wanted to see it with more than his mind's eye, but to do that, he'd have to yank it into existence.

So, without any real anticipation of what to expect, he reached further and pulled.

It hurt.

The pain came from a place just outside his body, hovering near like a shadow-self, wracked in agony. It was a familiar pain in many ways, like the pulling of a tooth or the shock after a fall, but it persisted in a deep and penetrating way unlike any physical harm he had ever endured.

It was bleeding, pushing and writhing, oozing like a sack of skin and an ocean of slime, hard and crystalline as the inside of a geode, aching like sugar against sensitive teeth; there was no way to characterize it in reality, though his brain supplied these thoughts and more out of sheer descriptive instinct. He felt it wrench its way out of his hands, wilder than a leopard, but it returned somehow because he had never really let go.

When it was born into the world he felt a thunderclap in his ears, and his body wrenched to and fro into the same position that Simon's had in their earlier lesson; he had lost control of his body in favor of controlling the thing that now shivered in midair like disembodied plasma. It was a terrifying hole in the universe, and being near it reminded him of standing on the edge of a bottomless pit.

It was solid enough, and Freja stepped up to it, laying her hand near it as though feeling it radiate. But he could soon feel the heat in the room being sapped, and his blood began to freeze. He had to blink back the icy water in his eyes.

"Navigate the thermal waves," she reminded him softly. He could sense immense pleasure in her voice. "Seal it off, so that it does not consume all the world's energy."