Chapter 27: How to Grow

After handing off the sword to Alex, Gavannon picked up the lightning enchanted sword.

As he pressed the activation rune on the guard arcs of electricity crackled through the air around the blade. Some of the arcs sought out the metal fixtures on the work station. Most of them seemed to jump from the guard directly onto the arm of the smith.

Gavannon simply grit his teeth and deactivated the enchantment.

"I must have made a mistake in my enchanting." Alex said apologetically. He knew he must have made a mistake, no one would use an enchantment if it damaged the user. Alex hung his head. Between what had occurred with the fifth enchantment, and this fiasco Alex could not bear to look at the smith.

"I should have realized he would need a different design... even the fire was a mid second grade..." The Smith was talking to himself as he looked over the weapon in his hand. He began to walk to the anvil again.

Alex was not listening to what Gavannon was saying. He was too busy wondering how he had managed to mess up the enchantment so much that it was a danger to the user. Alex heard the smith using his tools to destroy the runes on this sword, just like the last.

Alex braced himself for the coming reprimand. Strangely, a small part of him was looking forward to it as well. It was the part of him that thirsted for knowledge. He needed to know what he did wrong, and he knew the smith would tell him.

The reprimand and explanation never came.

The smith simply placed the sword onto the work table and picked up the shadow enchanted sword. He immediately activated the enchantment just like before.

Alex knew what the expected effect of this enchantment would be. It had been explained in detail in the book. The sword would be shrouded in darkness, and would reflect no light, regardless of any light source.

The reality was very different.

He expected to see the black silhouette of a short sword, instead an orb of darkness appeared. The orb was just a bit longer than the sword and was nearly twice as wide as the sword at its center. It seemed to be centered at the middle of the sword as well. Even the smiths hand, and part of his forearm, was shrouded in darkness.

Gavannon simply moved the sword through the air. He watched as the darkness clung to the blade, never distorting its elliptical shape.

There was no surprise on Gavannon's face. He simply nodded and deactivated the enchantment. He then placed the blade on the table next to the others.

"Sir, what just happened?" Alex asked. He was utterly confused. This was not what the book told him would happen. "Did I fail to reproduce the effects of the enchantments you asked me for? What did I do wrong?" The smith had not said a word to him with the last two weapons. He simply examined the effect and then moved on to the next after dealing with it.

"Fail?" The smith thought for a moment. "Yes, I suppose you could say that. Though, I doubt anyone who had seen what you have made would call them a failure."

This confused Alex even more. How can you fail, but also not fail? "But Ga..."

As soon as he had started to say the name he stopped himself. Only a single syllable escaped his lips. The look on the smith's face was stern and irritated. It held an intense warning.

"Blacksmith Gavannon, could you please explain?" Alex's voice wavered in fear for a moment. He did not know what would happen if he made that mistake again, but it would not be good.

"Yes, I can." His words were sharp and clear. They rang in Alex's mind for a moment. The tone seemed to say 'but I wont now.'

After a moment the smith overcame his irritation, and his cool rational once again settled in. "Wait until the end, and I will tell you. Telling you now would just make this take longer." With that explanation he placed the shadow blade down, after deactivating the enchantment. He then picked up the wind enchanted sword.

Alex was immediately happy that the smith had not asked him to demonstrate the enchantments.

As soon as the blacksmith activated the enchantment, a billowing wind whipped through the room. From the bulge of the blacksmiths forearm, Alex could tell that the wind exerted quite a lot of force on the blade.

If Alex was holding that sword, it would have been ripped form his hand by the force.

Gavannon then activated the second effect of the enchantment.

Nothing happened.

Gavannon then began looking over all of the runes. This went on for minutes.

Eventually, Alex heard a 'huff' of air come from the smiths nostrils. The smith put the sword on to the work table and simply pointed at a rune near the base of the blade.

It was the mana storage rune. Right where he had linked the second set of runes to the mana storage rune there was a small tool mark. It looked like, during the carving of the rune, he had made a slight mistake. This mistake made the mana flow around the linkage point, rather than too it. It was like building a dam, and then accidentally diverting the river in the process.

Alex was upset that he hadn't notice such an obvious mistake.

Gavannon, on the other hand, was not surprised. It was already amazing that the others had all worked without a problem. It was very common, when learning a skill as exacting as enchanting, to make some mistakes. This was to be expected.

Once again, Alex waited for admonishment, but none came.

"Do you see the mistake?" There was no reproach in Gavannon's voice. If anything, he sounded like a patient teacher, preparing to instruct a student.

"Yes Smith. I connected two lines in the mana storage rune. This caused the mana to flow around the linkage point in the rune, rather than to it." Alex was waiting for the hammer to fall as he finished.

"Good." Alex flinched slightly. Wait, good? He must have heard wrong.

"Good?" He asked unsteadily.

"Yes. Good." Gavannon's calm tone began to calm Alex's nerves. "Mistakes will happen. In fact, if we never made a mistake, we would never benefit from practice."

Alex was thoroughly confused now. "I don't understand. Isn't the point of practice to make sure you don't make mistakes?"

Now it was Gavannon's turn to be confused. "Why would I waste my time practicing something that I could not fail at? In the case where I make no mistakes at all, what did I learn? Nothing." He paused for a moment waiting for Alex to think through what was said, before continuing. "In the case where I do make a mistake, what did I learn?"

Alex thought about his meaning. He felt that the answer was obvious, you learned what not to do. He also wanted to argue that practicing a skill that you know, but have not mastered, was still important, but this too felt like a trap.

After taking some time to think Alex realized that he could not come up with an answer that did not seem too shallow.

"I am not sure. The answers that I want to say seem incorrect to me for some reason." Alex was indeed thinking very hard about this.

"Being able to understand our own lack of understanding is a valuable skill. Don't lose it." Gavannon's mouth was curled into a smile that could be seen in his eyes. "In essence, when you practice something, never do so with intent being to simply repeat an action or skill. Always have a goal. If you are not pushing your skills to the point that a mistake is possible, then you are not breaking new ground." Gavannon took a deep breath and let out a great sigh.

"I have know many talented and intelligent people in my life. I have seen many such people waste years of their lives repeating the same actions over and over again. Sure, this may breed familiarity, or even a slight increase in speed, but did it make them better. Did it grow the skills that they really wanted to increase?"

Alex did not understand what the smith was trying to say. In his mind, this was the same as saying that there was no need to practice a skill. Gavannon could see the confusion written on Alex's face.

"Let me make it easier. There are two sword smiths. They both have the goal of making the best sword in the world. The first will make the same type of sword every day for forty years. Simply practicing the creation of that sword over and over. The second makes a sword every day for forty years, just like the first. Unlike the first he will never make the same type of sword twice." Gavannon once again paused to let Alex absorb the information.

"At the end of the forty years, both smiths bring you the last sword they will ever make. It is a sword that they put their entire forty years of knowledge into making. Which do you choose?"

Alex didn't even need a moment to think.

"I would choose the second smiths sword." He was sure it was the right answer.

"Good, but I sense you do not understand the heart of the matter." Gavannon had an evil looking grin on his face. "Let me ask you a couple more questions." Alex nodded in response.

"What kind of quality would the first smiths sword most likely have? Which smith practiced the fundamentals of sword forging more frequently? What is the difference in the skills possessed by the smiths?"

Alex thought for a long while this time. He wanted to be sure he get this right. At the same time he was trying to analyze his own thoughts.

"The sword he made would most likely be a wonderful sword, with no faults. As for the second question, they both forged swords every day. Making any sword would require you to know the fundamentals of sword forging. So they should be tied. For the last question, the second smith would have vastly more of an understanding about swords and sword forging." Alex was starting to understand, but he still could not quite grasp the concept enough to put it into words.

"So what you are saying is that, practicing a skill repetitiously will make you better at doing that one exact thing. But practicing the broader concept and your understanding of a subject is where true mastery comes from."

As soon as Alex heard this he understood why he had been wrong earlier. His goal in enchanting was not to be the best at making a wind enchantment. His goal was to learn as much as possible about enchanting.

Simply practicing enchanting by making the same enchantments, over and over, would help him be better at making those enchantments. They might even give him some insight into that particular enchantment, allowing him to make it even better.

But it would not help him much when it came to creating a new enchantment, or understanding one he had never seen before.

For that he would need to experience a multitude of various runes and enchantments, over and over again. Gaining knowledge and skills from the field of enchanting, rather than a single enchantment.

"Thank you Blacksmith Gavannon. I will not forget this lesson." Alex could not express just how much lesson meant to him, nor would he ever know just how much it would effect the rest of his life.

Gavannon simply nodded, then he picked up the ice enchanted sword. After examining every rune on the sword, the smith nodded to himself.

Out of nowhere, Gavannon activated the enchantment and swung the sword into the ground.

A loud cracking sound rang out in the forge. Alex felt the temperature drop immediately. He looked to where the blacksmith had been standing and a strange sight.

A large blue and white wall of ice now separated him from the the other side of the room. He could not see through the wall of ice. Fortunately, the height of the wall tapered off to the left and right of where the blacksmith had struck.

At its highest, the wall was nearly six feet tall. The wall was nearly eight feet wide.

Slowly, Gavannon began walking around the wall of ice. He seemed to be inspecting its strength and thickness as he walked around it. He eventually turned back to face Alex again.

"Good. With this, I can now tell you why your enchantments are so different then how they were described in the book I gave you." There seemed to be a slight twinkle in the smiths eye as he said this. If Alex did not know better, he would have thought the smith was jealous of him. "You are quite gifted my young friend. You see for some reason your mana must have a unique property." Gavannon paused here for a while, he seemed to be mulling over an idea.

"Either, your mana is more condensed than your rank should allow." As he said this he searched Alex's expression for any hint of a response. "Or, for some reason your mana resonates with the atmospheric mana in a much more potent manner than normal." His tone showed that even he was not sure which it was.

"You are saying that my enchantments are stronger than they should be?" Alex asked to be sure.

"Simply put, yes. Though I would not spread this information around if I was you. Many people would risk quite a bit to know how and why you have have this ability." The smiths voice was deep and foreboding. "I will keep this secret for you, but you must pay a price."

"What price would that be?" Alex couldn't help but notice that his mouth had suddenly gotten very dry.

"You will come and work for me, taking my job requests every weekend, unless I say otherwise. The only rewards will be knowledge and points for the ranking." Gavannon's tone left no room for discussion.

Alex actually would have loved to come back here every weekend to learn more from the smith. Once the offer was made as an ultimatum, with his life on the line, or at the very least his freedom. He couldn't feel good about it.

With a sigh of resignation, Alex agreed. "Yes, smith."