Chapter 239: The Importance of Rituals
In the Briar, after sharing a sumptuous dinner with Heila, Talauia, and Jacques the night before, Ashlynn and Amahle left early in the morning following an abbreviated breakfast of oats left to simmer overnight and a cold, smoked sausage.
When they entered the wide, flat-bottomed boat, the fog of the Briar had only begun to lighten for the day. Despite that, the witch who had made the Briar her home navigated smoothly through the mist shrouded waterways toward their destination, providing a lesson as they went.
"The practice of sorcery rarely requires elaborate rituals or the use of external focuses," Amahle explained. "The amount of power a sorcerer can use is limited to the energy of their own body. You can think of it like serving tea to a small group of friends. The pot of tea represents your own body and the tea itself is the energy within you. How difficult is it to pour tea?"
"Not very," Ashlynn said, looking out into the mist as she listened to Amahle’s lesson. "A bit of practice to make sure you don’t accidentally drip while pouring, maybe more practice to make sure everyone’s cup is filled exactly the same amount, but it isn’t difficult."
"Now, if you were to serve tea at a fancy ball, like the one where you met little Jacques," Amahle continued. "And everyone at the ball needed to have their tea at the same time, and it needed to be just as hot and perfectly steeped as the tea you served for just a few friends, how difficult would that be?"
"Much more difficult," Ashlynn admitted. "I’d need to have the help of several servants just to pass out the tea if everyone had to have their tea at the same time. Just keeping track of all the pots of tea and making sure everyone had a cup ready for the tea would take more work."
"It’s more than that, darlin’," the older witch said. "You’d need a large cauldron to boil the water before you pour it into all of the tea pots. If you don’t steep your tea in the cauldron, but steep it in the tea pots, then you need scales to weigh your tea, just to make sure every tea pot gets the right amount..."
"So, witchcraft requires more elaborate rituals or tools like wands because we work with the energy of the world?" Ashlynn asked, turning to look at Amahle to make sure she understood correctly.
"My little sister is a clever one," Amahle said with a smile. "A wand is a focus for gathering the energy of the world. It makes it easier to summon power. A ritual is a method of guiding that power. The tea analogy isn’t as good for understanding how ritual works, but it gets us close enough," the witch said, pausing to maneuver the boat into a narrower channel before continuing her lesson.