In the end, however, his curiosity and anticipation won out over his fear and he walked out into the wide open world... only for him to run back into the cave after seeing just how big it was outside the cave. In the end, it took a lot of coaxing and silent encouragement from his mother before he was willing to leave again. Over the next weeks, they slowly explored the area around the cave, his mother allowing him to become used to the idea of the outside bit by bit. At the start, his mother would always be the first one out of the cave where she would wait for him to muster the courage to follow. By the end of the third week, however, the order flipped and he would be the one to exit first, making impatient noises for his mother to follow behind him. It was six months later when they finally left the cave for the final time.
In reality, creatures such as them weren't sedentary. If they found a good place, they could mark out a territory, and hang around for a year or two before moving on. Otherwise, no one place could sustain creatures like them for too long. In the course of the five years that his mother had been in one place raising him, she'd gradually been forced to go further and further away from the cave just to find enough food to sustain both herself and him. Towards the end of the five years, most of her time outside the cave was spent just walking to and from her feeding grounds. It was in their travels outside the cave that Greg learned the next facet of his connection with the earth.
As it turns out, within the confines of a small cave, he could easily keep up with his mother. It was once they were outside the cave and in the open forests and plains that he learned just how great the gulf not only in speed and endurance there was between the two of them. Large as she was, and unhurried as her steps seemed to be, she somehow always managed to pull ahead of him. He would often find himself having to run just to keep up with her walking. And while the difference in their size might have explained part of it, it couldn't fully account for why even while running, the gap between his mother and himself would still grow. And unlike back when he was in the cave, this time his mother wasn't quite as willing to coddle him as before. Not only would she never stop or slow down for him, but even when Greg seemed to be catching up she would somehow pick up pace without moving any faster. For the next year, Greg would be dead tired by the time the end of the day came along. Despite his best efforts, he never caught up by the end of the day, instead his mother usually had to circle back to where he'd collapsed from exhaustion.
It took him a whole year to learn the concept of borrowing strength from the earth. And while the pace might be considered slow by some, compared to his former learning speed, it was rather fast. Asking the earth to move with him was all fine and dandy as a foundation for his future abilities. In the end, however, it was little more than a waste of energy and mana, not to mention pointless. After all, he was already moving himself, what did it matter if the earth moved as well? It wasn't until one afternoon, watching his mother seemingly walk leisurely in the distance that his frustration made him stomp the ground with utter frustration wanting to move as fast as she was. Greg who'd been huffing and puffing as he ran after her at the time, almost fell forward on his snout when the earth shifted forward slightly.
Having already grown steadily familiar with his earth connection over the course of that one year, he immediately picked up on the difference. For the first time in a long time, he just stood frozen in one place. It was one of those moments where just one piece falls into place and suddenly the whole puzzle snaps together into one coherent picture. It suddenly clicked in his mind why, despite never looking like she was moving with any haste, his mother was always moving far faster than he was. Even better, why, despite this, she never seemed to get tired the way he did! As it turns out, she wasn't wasting energy getting the earth to repeat what she was already doing. Instead, she was borrowing the strength of the earth to propel herself forward. As such she was moving at two, three, even four times the speed for less than half the energy simple walking would require. Just three days after making this discovery, he was easily and leisurely moving beside his mother...
***
"You are his familiar! You are supposed to be connected to him at the level of the soul! How is it that you can't reach him, even with the formation?" Alena asked with clear frustration.
The soul-tether formation, as its name suggests is supposed to act as an anchor. A lifeline that one can draw on to find their way back to reality no matter how deep into an illusion they sink. Even more than just being a road map back to reality, it also acts as a way of preserving one's identity so that, no matter what they see, hear, or feel within the illusion, they won't lose themselves to it. By the time they had finished carving out the soul-tether formation, Roka had only been inside the illusion for two hours. Alena had been already worried as depending on the illusion, years may have already passed inside his head. That, however, had been more than a day before.
Since then, they made several attempts to connect with Roka's soul, all for naught. He had already gone into the illusion without first being anchored by the soul-tether formation, so some difficulty in connecting to him was to be expected. The complete lack of even minimal success, however, left the two of them both stunned and completely baffled. At first, they had thought that in their rush, they had probably gotten something wrong with the formation. They had gone over it again with a fine tooth comb looking for anything that might explain their failure. But other than one or two minor errors that didn't, in the final analysis, affect the formation all that much, they found nothing.
After there were no more flaws left in the formation, they made another try. Given that she made the first attempt, Alena allowed the familiar to make the second one, hoping that she would have greater success than her. Two hours later, the familiar too gave up in frustration. Whatever was going on with the boy and the beast core, he seemed to have been locked off beyond their reach with the formation. Whether he would pull through this whole ordeal, seemed to depend entirely on the boy alone, a proposition that left her with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. And so they had alternated in their attempts to make use of the soul-tether formation half a dozen more times, all to no avail.
"As I've told you three times already, I can only tell what is going on with him based on the thoughts and emotions passing through his mind. As soon as he connected to the beast-core, it's like his soul got locked behind a fort. No matter what I do, I can't reach him through our connection. I mean, if it was that easy, do you think I'd be sitting here with your grumpy self? She countered. The answer was snippy, but so had been her question, so Alena couldn't exactly blame Olivia. The two of them were just an unhealthy mixture of worried and frustrated.
"Ca... can we contact her?" Alena tentatively asked. There was clear hesitation in her voice as she did. Part of it was because of the capricious nature of such powerful beings. The last time they had called her she had seemed perfectly reasonable. But that may have been merely because she had something of worth to offer her in trade. Who knows how she would act if called on for this? The other reason behind the hesitation in her voice was the price they would be asked to pay. Alena wasn't naïve. Help from such beings never came with no strings attached. A sorcerer she once knew had warned her that it's not when they ask for exorbitant payments for their aid that you should be worried. It's when they offered to do something for a pittance, or worse, for free that you should run for the hills. If they called on Olivia's true self, perhaps what she would ask in return would be something neither she nor her student would be willing to pay, worse yet, she might not ask for something, keeping this as a card against them that she could use at any point.
"Have you ever had students, Alena?" Came the strange question from the familiar.
A number of faces fleeted through Alena's mind even as she nodded. "I've taken a few under my wing over the years," She replied.
"Did you swoop in to save them every time they got themselves into a bit of trouble?" The familiar followed up with another question. Alena remained quiet, the answer not having to be spoken out loud. Part of nurturing one's students was allowing them to make their own mistakes and to learn from them. Alena had been prepared to pay exorbitantly for any help offered, she hadn't been ready for complete apathy and disinterest. "If I were to try and summon my true self because of this, she would do little more than glance our way before going on with whatever else she has going on.
