Total pages in book: 177
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 171450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 857(@200wpm)___ 686(@250wpm)___ 572(@300wpm)
No. She knew New York like the back of her hand. The city was a road map of boroughs and niche areas and gangs and monster havens. It was all crisscrossed across her mind via the subway and a map of safe areas to walk through.
“The reason you need that visual cue is because you cannot portal somewhere you have not been before. It’s a good way to get split in two.”
Kierse grimaced. “Got it. No portaling places I’ve never been.”
“If you could even manage it,” he said with a shrug. “Half of portaling is being able to see where you’re going. I like to think of it like painting. Have you ever painted before?”
“By choice?”
He laughed jovially. “I’ll take that as a no.”
“Not a lot of time for that on the streets.”
“I suspect not. Well, I was raised in the aristocracy. My father was a politician and a soldier, but he enjoyed artwork. He hired and kept on many artists as their patron when I was young, and many of them taught me how to paint. It became a passion of my own, which is why when my magic came in…” He gestured to the walls. “This happened. I still dabble, but I must admit my talent should be something extraordinary after hundreds of years of lessons. I am never satisfied.”
“As with most things,” she said softly.
The grief of trying to be good at something for hundreds of years and still feeling inadequate was palpable in the room.
“Anyway, I’m good enough to explain to you how this applies to portals.” Kingston stepped away from her to an open section of hardwood floors. “You’ll want to have a nice, empty space, and you’ll want to open the other side of the portal to another nice, open space.”
“This much Graves explained.”
“Good. Then he remembers something. But it’s in the finesse of what happens next that he wouldn’t understand without the power. You want to imagine exactly where you’re going. And when I was first learning portals, I would literally take my hand out and paint a door.”
“A door?”
“Just a door.”
Kingston demonstrated easily by holding his hand out like he had a paintbrush and sketching a door in the middle of the room. It glowed gold around the edges and was firm and hard and empty. Just a blank space in the middle of the room. A door to nowhere.
“Try it. Try it.”
Kierse shot him a disbelieving look as she got into her own space and held her hand out. She’d never held a paintbrush before, but she understood the concept. And then she bent down and tried to concentrate on making a perfectly fake door appear out of nowhere.
It did not. Of course.
“Uh…” she said.
“That’s all right. It’s your first try.”
Kierse tried again, thinking of it as a pencil, but it was Gen who was the artist. She could sketch incredible things in her notebook. Kierse could barely draw stick figures on a good day.
“I didn’t expect you to get it right away,” Kingston told her easily. “Think on that and let’s come back to it. We need to think on filling the space we created.”
Kierse frowned. “And if I created no space?”
“Take it as a visualization theory.”
“Theory. Okay.”
Because she sucked.
“This might be difficult for you because you’ve never had to truly stretch your powers. With immunity, it is entirely passive. There are ways to use immunity to give it to other people and the like, but it will feel like it’s always on. This is a new muscle you have to warm up and stretch. We don’t want to overexert ourselves in the beginning or we’ll pull a hamstring, understand?”
“There were some mixed metaphors in there,” Graves said as he appeared back in the room.
“Alas, I am not knowledge,” Kingston said with a wave of his fake paintbrush. “Now, think of somewhere you have been, somewhere close. The next room perhaps, the loo, the park across the street. Anywhere near enough that you wouldn’t have to stretch yourself to draw it. Then I want you to focus your magical intent and paint that image into your doorway.”
Graves took a seat on a chair, crossed his leg at the ankle across his knee, and pulled out a brown leather book. His eyes scanned the pages as Kierse settled in to do as Kingston ordered.
She could imagine the park across the street. She’d marveled over how much it reminded her of Central Park in its own way. She could probably paint a picture of it in her mind but in reality?
She tried. She tried all of the ways that Kingston suggested to do it. She tried until she had no more will or intent. Until her muscles ached and her powers drained and she felt like an unformed ball of clay that had been thrown onto a pottery wheel.