That quelled any kind of objection he may have had. Despite her abrasive manner, he found he could endure it for the chance to learn from her.

"Very well. We begin," she announced.

Despite his annoyance, he was quickly caught up in the utterly fascinating realms of true Sorcery. Spyder demonstrated how she commanded the Weave, and both of them absorbed her every word intensely, watching her like hawks eyeing a mouse. She showed them how slow and clumsy they truly were, accessing her power with an ease that made them both look like Novices again. But as she demonstrated, she taught. She showed them how to get around the resistance the Weave offered to them, a newfound resistance that came with being a sui'kun . They both had learned Weavespinner ways on their own, and they both had discovered how inefficient their way really was as they watched a true master of the art perform. "You are not weaving spells. You are bringing the magic of the Weave to life. It is not a profession, or a skill, or a craft. It is an art, and you must feel that art in your soul. The more you feel it within you, the more responsive the magic becomes to you. When you and the Weave are one, it will respond to you as quickly as it does for me. Some of the resistance you encounter is because you don't put your soul into your spells. Sorcery is a thing of beauty, every spell a work of art. You must breathe life into your creations, and when you do, the magic will come to you as easily as it did once before."

"Why is it that the Weave resists us now, when it didn't before?" Jenna asked curiously after Spyder finished demonstrating a rather complicated weave that caused a swirling nexus of energy to appear over her head.

"Because of what you are," she replied immediately. "The immunity from the fire the power of the Weave can spawn also causes us to resist magic. Magic is like water, it will always follow the path of least resistance," she explained when she was confronted with two blank looks. "Before, you were downhill from the magic. Now, you are uphill. Magic is but a form of energy, as is heat, which is fire. Our resistance to the heat the Weave can generate in us also makes us resistant to the magic we try to draw in."

"I guess that makes sense," Tarrin said after a moment of mulling it over. "You said magic. You didn't just say Sorcery," he realized.

"Correct. Should some Wizard or Priest actually manage to blindside you with a spell, your body will actively resist its power. Depending on the power of the spell and the skill of the caster, it will either fizzle out, be cancelled, have its power reduced, or affect you as it would any other person. But that is a moot point, young one. No Wizard or Priest should ever be able to manage to finish a spell against you. If he does, it will be because you allow it."

"Nobody's ever taught me how to do that," he told her. "Block magic."

"Truly? Do they teach the new Sorcerers anything at all?" Spyder asked in exasperation.

"Actually, they do, but I was never really trained," he said contritely. "What I do, I kind of learned by myself."

"Ah. Then you truly are as sensitive to the Weave as I hoped," she said with a nod. "What you do comes to you through the Weave, as it whispers its secrets to you. Some are very sensitive to it, and can hear things that others can't. You seem to be one of those who are very sensitive, since the Weave whispers spells to you. That takes great sensitivity, for it's something that requires a great deal of information to come to you. As you know, the whispers of the Weave are very faint, very subtle, and often they aren't complete."

He knew that to be true. The sense of things he got from the Weave had been fragmented, jumbled, just bits and pieces here and there. A piece of a sentence, a short image that was often fuzzy or indistinct. What little of it he remembered, or knew to be coming from it. If the instructions of how to weave spells were coming to him from the echoes of memory within the Weave, then he must be able to hear much more than he first thought.

"It's also why you could hear me whispering from so far away," she smiled. "That first time. I didn't expect you to hear it from such a distance."

" That's how you do it!" he realized immediately, when she called it whispering. "You're speaking right into the Weave!"

"Is it so hard to understand?" she asked with a very disarming smile. "It's not even something that requires a spell. You can join with the Weave. If you can do that, then you can send words into it without actively joining with it."

"And since only sui'kun can sense the Weave like that, then we're the only ones who can hear it," Jenna concluded.

"Not precisely, child. Any who have crossed over can hear it. You forget that the vast majority of what you'd call Weavespinners are da'shar, the Enlightened. Any who can join with the Weave can hear a whisper. But just as there is more than one way to speak, there is more than one way to whisper. You can send your voice to a specific person, if you're familiar with them. Or a group, if you know each of them. But we digress. Back to your lessons!"

Tarrin felt a bit ecstatic that he managed to solve that nagging mystery more or less on his own, and that gave him a bit of added interest as the Urzani continued to show them how to go about drawing the magic out. He was still impressed and awed at the speed and skill with which she worked her magic. "Remember, young ones, it is not a spell. It is a work of art. You are not workers or magicians, you are artists. You must give of yourself when you form the weaves, you must be willing to put into the weave what the Goddess does on your behalf. When you can give of yourself, the Weave will respond. After all, no relationship can work if it only has one side. In order to take, you must give."

"That doesn't make sense," Jenna complained. "How can you give and take at the same time?"

"That is the dilemma," Spyder smiled. "It is nothing that I can easily answer. You remember what it was like the very first time you touched the Weave? How it seemed impossible, and yet there it was, responding to you?" They both nodded. "This is much the same. Any da'shar or sui'kun can weave spells by force, as you two do, but a true Weavespinner knows that the secret to gaining the power is to give back to the Goddess. What you give back is what you must learn. When you understand, it will come to you as easily as breathing."

Tarrin didn't find that to be a very straightforward answer. He looked at the ground and mulled it over. Give back. Give back what? He couldn't expend power into the Weave, since that's where he drew it in the first place. One couldn't give back more than what was taken; it was one of the fundamental rules of magic. But if he didn't give back energy or power, what did he have to surrender to the Goddess in order to secure the unmitigated cooperation of the Weave?

She called it an art. When artists made something-true artists, anyway, like how his father made bows and arrows-they poured themselves into their creation. The best of them could breathe that spark into them that made those items and objects truly remarkable. That breath, that spark, came from the artist, a piece of their inspiration and vision that was transferred into the object upon which they labored to transform into that special work. Maybe it was a piece of themselves, maybe it was the inspiration or the touch, but something definitely passed from the artist to the object of his creation during that process.

But Weaves weren't works of art. They were patterns of energy, arranged so that when they were released to interact with the physical world, their arrangement and cascading effect and counter-effect with the physical world and with one another produced a repeatable, consistent effect. Weaves couldn't be seen or sensed except by other Sorcerers, and when the spell was released, the weave literally destroyed itself. How could that be art? And how did giving something back raise simple weaving into art?