Book One – Chapter 10

How was she supposed to figure any of this out? Midnight did not understand new things out of nothing; she learned through her body, through instinct and intuition. From the earliest days of her existence, Midnight had relied on her innate knowledge and abilities to survive. She had known how to run and climb and fight. Her intuition had told her what to eat and how to hunt. She had been able to do all of these things while her wizard needed years just to learn how to walk. He had needed to be shown how feed on his own, which had also taken years. It would have probably taken many more, if she had not been there, because if he ever got anything out of their bond, Midnight was sure that it was this necessary independence for basic survival. Nothing wizards did came from innate knowledge. While her instincts guided her to safety, and her senses provided all she needed to know about new places and plants and beasts, her wizard needed to be instructed about the world and about how to behave amongst others and even on how to speak to other wizards. Wizards had so much potential to develop different abilities, but they needed decades of academy schooling to realise them. Midnight had been instructed on many things, too, but even when honing her midnight stalker abilities, she had only ever done what felt natural. She had all the knowledge and all the abilities within her. Practice just made her better. When Yves had practiced his magic at Emery Thurm, he had very often been told that he needed to do things differently from the way he was doing them. To him, the wrong things had often felt good and easy, and the right things had felt difficult. And yet, despite all of this, he could learn and understand and foresee things by himself, out of sheer nothing. Midnight did not learn or feel like this. She only felt that she was doing things right, and because she only did what felt right, she was never in a situation where she had to feel otherwise. But now the sprites told her that what felt so right was wrong, but how could she discern the truth? How could she learn to understand on her own? How could she understand what she did wrong? How could she improve, how could she do something better if everything already felt exactly right? No, there was absolutely nothing wrong with her; she was a powerful beast, imbued with strength and skill and acknowledged by her Gods of Darkness. Yet, these twisted sprites continued to toy with her. This was not a lesson, nor an attempt to guide her, and there was no guarantee that they would ever cease their interference, regardless of what she did. All of this was just another cowardly ploy to get her killed.