Chapter Text
So Stiles hadn’t exactly planned it like this okay? Sure, he had thought that maybe he’d learn some neat tricks, a few gimmicks and some manipulation. Learn how to handle the strange ingredients that seemed to have an effect on the things that went bump in the night.
This though? This was like, Buffy shit right here.
It started in belief, Deaton hadn’t been wrong about that, but belief could only do so much, extending a mountain ash line, mixing cures and curses.
The heavy stuff? Latin, archaic, rhyming chants whispered under the breath, blood spilled, sigils carved into bones and things so creepy he feverishly hoped that his Dad never bothered to dig deeper into his regularly erased search history. Words held the power here.
Stiles had always been good at words.
Hell, he was Willow, he was a fucking goddess. Or you know, whatever.
He had only been training for a year, his seventeenth birthday not even a month past, and he could feel the difference, feel it in his bones- his energy, his core. His mother had always been sort of heavy into that. As practical his dad was, his mom had swung in a whole different direction. He remembered chakras, tantric chants, spiritual vision quests, things his dad had never really bothered to learn, but Stiles had soaked up with all the enthusiasm of a kid who knew that this might be the last time he’d get to hear her voice, feel her presence.
Even though he’d let those practices fade away, as sure as the scent of her was disappearing from the house, he guessed the roots had grown in a bit too deep to rip out.
Not that it mattered much, but it gave him an extra boost, and an increased affinity that was solid enough that even Deaton couldn’t help but be surprised at the speed Stiles picked things up.
He was smart. He might not be the fastest, or the strongest, or even the most traditionally intelligent with Lydia in the group, but when he got something, he got it. And he never lost it.
It was coming majorly in handy in a trade where memorization and instinct was the name of the game. Deaton had been pressing that while there were standards, guidelines to follow, most of the magic cast was cobbled together, the power and effectiveness of it dependent on the knowledge of the maker.
Stiles could do knowledge.
He still researched for Derek, and sometimes Scott, same as always, and turned in his assignments on time, or, well, the ones that interested him at least. Before he had gotten started on all this though, there was a significant portion of his days devoted to doing jack shit. Scott wasn’t there anymore to play video games on his off-time, too caught up in Allison and the ever-revolving drama of her family, not that Stiles could blame the dude, and he wasn’t that interested in picking up knitting.
So when Deaton had held him back after a routine visit to Scott in order to offer him the chance to learn something like this, something useful, but more importantly something that felt right; natural. Stiles had jumped at the chance.
Literally- who could blame him, because magic? That was the stuff out of movies and legends and those video games that Scott had always said were too girly to play but that he secretly pined over with hearts in his eyes.
Deaton had pressed that magic wasn’t the right term, specifically; he had seemed to cringe at it a bit. Moving the Earth is what he liked to phrase it as, the Earth, the air, the elements, the energy around them. That was a little too wordy for Stiles tastes, so he mostly called it shifting.
Maybe Scott had been confused for a few days and okay, he still got caught off guard sometimes. But it was Scott. Stiles loved the guy, but vocabulary was never his strong suit.
Besides, he wasn’t about to let werewolves and their altered state ruin the totally awesome phrase that whispered magic, quicksilver in his mind every time he said it.
This was heady shit.
Even his dad, who still didn’t have a confirmed clue as to what he was doing, although Stiles knew that he definitely had an idea because c’mon, he was a good cop, had noticed. He was still Stiles, he was goofy, callous, would defend Lydia and Scott and his dad to the death, but he was also more.
He didn’t doubt himself so much, for all that humbleness was important, and Deaton pushed awareness down his throat like nothing else. Power could be overwhelming, and now Stiles had power, more than he could’ve ever imagined.
At the start of last summer, he’d never thought that maybe Scott would be the weak one, or Derek. But they were, compared to him, and he was only growing stronger.
Physically he was the same, taller maybe, a bit thinner, though his dad had been trying to get him to eat more, and his personality was as sparkling as ever. There were new channels formed though, new associations and abilities that were cemented in his mind.
There weren’t many of them. Deaton called what they were, or more what Stiles was becoming, a dying breed. There were witches, more of them than they could ever accurately count, and plenty of people who could do parlor tricks that amounted to what Stiles had done on that first night with the barrier of extended mountain ash.
Fuck, if Stiles had never learned anything more than that, he would’ve thought that was pretty intense.
That was barely scratching the surface though. The surface of the surface. It hadn’t even reached the stratosphere.
Their numbers were few, because this power? It could get to people, it did get to them. Whatever had made the supernatural a reality, be it science or something else, it had been smart. It created a failsafe.
You let the power go to your head, flow from you uncontrolled, and you would die, burned from the inside out. A restored balance- you took too much from the Earth, and sometimes it would stop giving and decide to take back what you owed, with interest.
Deaton had made that clear to him before he had even started to learn anything, forced him to consider it for a month before he had even begun to teach Stiles the simplest chants. Stiles had thought about it too, he hadn’t ignored the hairy part of that slice of life, since the failure rate, yeah, that was enormously high.
He knew he could do it though, and he would, and he was. Past, present, and future, this was happening.
They weren’t witches, magicians, humans with a trick up their sleeves. Nothing was more powerful than the Earth itself, and those who learned to harness it.
They were shaman.