Mother of Learning. Arc 3 Incomplete

[That, and there is also the little fact that it’s easier to sense and contact Open minds than those of… non-psychics,] the matriarch remarked, fumbling a little towards the end. [I somehow doubt you would find many Open individuals to practice on back on the surface. Fewer still would be willing to let you connect to them. Anyway. I realize that these initial stages are tedious and boring, but they are necessary. And if I have not explained things satisfactorily, I apologize, but I do not know how to do it any better. This ability is not something I learnt, it is something I do. Aranea learn how to do this as very young children, much like human children learn how to walk and talk. Can you explain to someone who has been paralyzed all their life how to move their legs?]

Zorian frowned. So he wasn’t even able to master telepathic baby skills? Wonderful. Just wonderful. Taking a deep breath to calm himself, he tried to consider the task in front of him and how to solve it. Yes, yes, the matriarch insisted he should just keep trying until he eventually succeeded by sheer weight of effort, but he was a mage damn it! Mages did things smarter, not harder.

Being psychic meant being a natural mind mage. For all that the matriarch kept bringing in her weird aranea spirituality into it, that’s what it all boiled down to. A psychic could read thoughts and emotions, trawl through people’s memories, hijack their senses and motor control, communicate with them telepathically and gods know what else, but all of it was mind related. Even the matriarch admitted that aranea used modified human magic for things like her speech spell and the rest of their non-mentalist magical arsenal.

Divinations were the key, he felt. If psychic powers were mind-based, why did they also enhance divinations?

[Not all divinations,] the matriarch remarked from the sidelines, apparently following his train of thought. [Only the ones that put information directly into your mind. The Gift helps you interpret the results of such spells more easily, and since most high-level divinations pour at least a part of the information straight into your mind… well, you can imagine how useful that can be.]

Suddenly, something clicked in Zorian’s mind. According to the books he read about the mind arts in the academy library, spells that were meant to read people’s thoughts were not terribly difficult in principle. The problem was that the result was totally incomprehensible to most users, unless they spent years training themselves how to interpret the results. Spells that aimed to establish telepathic communication also suffered this problem, though to a lesser extent — so long as the people in question spoke the same language, they could at least exchange verbal communication in such a fashion. In other words, human mind spells were remarkably like a divination that tried to simply dump its output into the mind of the caster… which wasn’t something most mages were equipped to handle.

Taking it all together, it seemed obvious to Zorian that one of the defining powers of a psychic was their ability to make sense of information entering the mind directly — whether it was other people’s thoughts or something more exotic like divination results. The immediately interesting part was that it was a passive skill. Using it wasn’t something he had to specifically activate, it was a state of being, so if he wanted to sense the minds of nearby aranea perhaps he should stop trying to push his power out towards his surroundings and concentrate inward. He took a deep breath, visualized the results as motes of light around him and then just… opened his mind.

Blazing suns erupted all around him, including a couple in places where he hadn’t expected there would be any aranea to begin with. Apparently the matriarch brought more guards with her than she had openly displayed to him.

[Your first success,] the matriarch remarked, her telepathic probe breaking his concentration and causing the entire vision to burst like a dream. [Well done. Things should go a lot faster from now on. I’d congratulate you on your fast progress, but I have to be honest and admit I have no idea how fast humans usually progress in this.]

«Perhaps things would have gone faster if you had actually told me I was doing things wrong,» Zorian said with annoyance. «Why didn’t you tell me I was supposed to concentrate inward instead of outward?»