The pressure in my head is not the thing that brings me back to consciousness, but it helps me find the light again. My stomach is roiling, cramping and burning the back of my throat. My eyes shoot awake as I bend over the side of the bed I am laying in, snatching up a discarded bucket and emptying my already empty stomach into it. Vomit singes my tongue as I return the alcohol I had borrowed the night before, and my hand falls over my left eye as I collapse back into the bed.
I moan, feeling a pulsing ache in my left eye with each contraction of my heart. In a fog, the night’s events begin to trickle back to me, I am just on the edge of remembering when a chittering noise near my face freezes my mind and blood.
Opening my eyes, I find a spider, hairy and near, the size of a cat, standing on my chest and chattering at me with crooked mandibles. I scream, trying to slap the monster away, but my hand passes through its body like it isn’t even there.
“Kraaa….splenetae…corian….” The strange words that echo from its gnashing mouth spike into my head like a drill. I grab the pillow under my head and swing at the monster, but again the pillow passes through the spider like it is a ghost. The spider jumps backwards, landing on the air and continues to click its mandibles at me. “Ha’ll mana…Yullisataa…Hello.”
I only stop swinging at the creature when it greets me in its creaking, alien voice. Eight red eyes peer out from its face at me as it floats in the air above me. I still hold my pillow raised to smack it if it dares to come back within my reach.
“Human. Native language: Castinian.” It nods its head at me. “I am Galea, transitory fey spirit of analytical integration.” The monster spider looks as if it expects something from me in return, but I can do nothing except stare at the monster with my mouth agape. The spider examines its legs. “Form is inadequate for correspondence. Adjusting.”
I feel a hot poker burn through my left eye and sear back into my brain. I fall back into the bed with a moan, and I am sure that I pass out from the pain of it. The first conscious thought I have is about the golden light of morning pouring into the room from the arching window above the bed I lay in. A crystal decanter of water rests on the nightstand near my bed, a ceramic glass ready to be poured into. The room is bare other than a plain wooden chair resting against the wall opposite my bed, my clothes and pack sitting on it.
I feel myself, finding that I am dressed in silk robes the color of honey. A creature floats into my vision, staring down at me from above, and I cringe before seeing that it is not the spider I had almost forgotten about. A golden serpent with red, slitted eyes and scales that sparkle the color of the rainbow, looks down at me from a foot above my head. I realize what it is immediately, the dangerous claws of its legs, the bone-ridged lining of its wings, the wicked crook of its fanged mouth; a dragon the length of my forearm watches me as it flies circles over my head.
“This new form should be non-repulsive to you,” it says as it stretches its wings.
“What are you?” I ask. I find my voice raspy and painful. I pour myself a drink of water and swallow deep from my ceramic cup before repeating my question.
“I am Galea,” the golden dragon repeats. “I am a transitory fey spirit given the purpose of integrating analytical data. I live in your head.”
“In my head.” I touch my head, and find a bandage wrapped around my skull over my hair. Patting the bandage, I feel where it converges over my left eye. A second of looking around reveals a metallic cap the size of my eye laying loose on the floor, the back of the metal plate hosts a smear of dried blood. “The eye,” I say, remembering.
“The eye,” the dragon who calls itself Galea agrees. “When my previous host perished, I feared I might be decomposed and returned to the chaos. How happy I am that another host has found a use for me.”
“Don’t call me a host,” I tell the dragon. I start looking around the room. “Where is a mirror?”
At my question, a mess of information sprouts into the room around me. I hit my head on the bedpost as I startle backwards. Words, written in unnaturally straight script, float in the air on black, transparent paper over the objects I can see. Across the room from me I see a cluster of the signs: Wooden chair; common, Traveling clothes; common, The Manor of Gacious Moor(unique). I see more of the floating signs as my eyes roam over the room: Crystal decanter(uncommon)--filled with water, Ceramic cup(common)--half-empty, Mahogany nightstand(rare), Tin bucket(common), Vomit of Charlene Devardem(common).
“What is going on,” I whisper, putting my back to the wall and rubbing my temples, trying to arrest the headache I feel building.
“There is no mirror within the vicinity of your perception,” Galea relates to me, floating in the air in front of my face. “Might I suggest changing locations if you wish to discover one.”
“Are you doing this?” I ask the dragon, motioning to the floating, transparent signs about the room.
“No mistress,” Galea says. “This ability is yours, I am merely performing the action of interpreting your perceptions into the most helpful form that I can.”
“This is me?” I look at the floating signs, and with the barest mental effort, find that I can make them disappear at my whim. “This is my power?”
Galea stretches out her claws and another page of transparent, black paper pops into the world in front of her.
Eye of Volaash(Very Rare):
Allows the bearer to analyze objects and beings within their range of perception.
I read the sign that Galea holds up in front of me again and again. “I don’t understand,” I tell Galea.
The dragon looks at me quizzically, flipping over the transparent paper in its claws and reading the sign itself, before turning the sign back to face me. “That should be impossible,” she states. “My interpretive abilities allow for perfect comprehension.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t understand how or why you are here.”
“I told you, Mistress, I am a fey spirit who inhabits the eye which was surgically supplanted into your ocular cavity. Integration of the eye has allowed me to spread myself into your ocular lobe and prefrontal cortex, granting me the power to act as an intermediary between the eye’s incredible analytical powers and your much more simple, human comprehension.”
I sit silently, staring at the strange creature that looks at me with innocent, pink eyes. It takes a while to fully remember what had happened the night before, my meeting with Arabella Willian, and the signing of the contract. In fact, it takes so long that I begin to fear that my brain has been damaged by whatever the woman did to put the eye into my head. My fingers probe my left eyelid, and I find the skin there bruised and far too squishy.
“I need to find Arabella,” I tell Galea.
“One moment,” the dragon says. She turns and scans the room before turning back to me. “Arabella Willian is not within the field of your perception,” she informs.
“Thanks.”
“Of course, mistress.”
“And stop calling me that,” I tell the dragon as I slip out of the bed, almost stepping in the tin bucket that holds my vomit. “My name is Charlene.”
“As you say, Mistress Charlene.”
I growl at the dragon, stamping over to the chair that holds my clothes and travel pack. A flurry of the transparent signs erupt into my vision as I open the pack. Sighing, I close the bag again.
I look down at myself for the first time since I woke up. The silk robe I have been dressed in is comfortable but lacks anything substantial beneath. I sniff my folded clothes, finding that they are still dirty from the competition, and toss them into the pack.
“Arabella Willian has entered the range of your perception,” Galea says from where she hovers at my shoulder. Despite her speaking directly into my ear, I can still hear the soft padding of footsteps outside the bedroom. A knock comes from the door.
I open the door to find Arabella Willian standing in the hallway. Just before I try to ask her anything, one of the signs appears in front of her face reading, “Ice Clone of Arabella Willian.”
“I apologize, Mistress Charlene, it seems that I was initially mistaken, though, to be fair to me, it was your perceptions that were fooled,” Galea says to me.
“Ms. Willian,” I say, inclining my head. “I have some questions that I need--”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
The woman in the lavender dress holds up a hand to stop me. Violet light swirls around her fingers, forming floating letters in the air in front of her. “My clones cannot speak,” it reads. “Follow. My work with you is not yet complete for the day.” Seeing that I have read the words, the ice clone turns and walks away.
The ache in my brain has continued to beat against my skull, and I duck back into the room to grab my cup of water before following the sashaying woman down the hallway. I have to walk at an awkward pace to keep up with Arabella's long legs that eat up the ground with each stride as we navigate the bizarrely undecorated manor.
Coming around a corner, I spot an elven girl--onyx metallic hair falling in waves over her dress of shifting metal, deep orange eyes peering out from an ivory, angular face, black painted lips chewing on a cinnamon stick. She studies a book, sitting against a wall. A sign appears in my vision above her head, “Coriander Mel'Draven, Daughter of Viscount Goram Mel’Draven of Tristrum.”
I stop dead in my stride, reading the title attached to the woman's name. “How do you know that?” I ask Galea.
“Did you say something?” The elven girl spits in my direction. I read disdain plain on her face. When I notice that she is holding the book upside down in her hands, I feel a blush warm my face.
“No, ma'am, lady, sorry.” I bow and try to turn away.
“Stop, girl.” The woman, gods I wish I wasn't so horrible at reading the age of elves, curls her metallic hair behind her ear and stands. “How do you know me?”
“I don't, my lady. We have not met.” I incline my head to her again. “I must be going.” It is the first noble person I have met. Not all elves are nobility, I know that, even though I always feel the need to remind myself of it, but all of the nobility in Gale are elves. Seeing this woman before me, the steel in her expression and the hawkish discernment in her eyes, I know for a fact that she is better than me.
“You will not excuse yourself until I am satisfied,” she says. The noble woman begins a march in my direction, her sharp heels clicking against the marble floor. I feel sweat begin to trickle down my back, sticking the robe to my skin. As I wither beneath the glare of the noble woman, Arabella Willian's clone steps between us.
Light flashes from the clone's hand, coalescing into floating words. “That is quite enough, Coriander, Ms. Devardem has business with my creator, and we cannot afford a delay.”
The woman, Coriander, the Viscount’s daughter, crosses her arms over her chest and purses her lips as she reads the words. “Be gone then, construct,” she says, turning back to her spot on the wall and walking away. “I am done with you.”
I release a held breath as the copy of Arabella leads me around another bend in the manor’s hallways. Galea drifts into my vision. “No, I don’t think that she did like you, Mistress Charlene.”
“What?” I breath the word like a fish gasping for air. I take a moment to slow my breath and pounding heart before jogging to keep up with Arabella again. “How did you know I was thinking that?” Though, I don’t suppose that it would be awfully difficult to guess my thoughts at the moment.
“I told you,” Galea hums as she floats backward, bobbing in the air in front of me. “I currently reside within your brain. The main aspect of my consciousness is tied into the language center of your frontal lobe.”
I narrow my eyes at the gold dragon. “You are trying to confuse me with words I don’t know aren’t you.”
“Not at all,” she says, panic evident. “I live to explain. That is all I ever wish to do.”
“Fine,” I say, putting up a hand to forestall anything else from the strange spirit. “You are saying that you can hear my thoughts.”
“Mistress Charlene is as intelligent as I supposed.” Galea claps her scaled claws together in a silent applause for me. “As such, you need not bother conversing with me aloud.”
I try to think at the dragon spirit. “Good to know.” Galea makes no indication that she had heard me. “You are hearing me now?”
“Oh, yes, Mistress Charlene. I apologize, I did not know that you were wishing for a response.”
I roll my eyes at the creature and come to a stop behind the ice clone. The tall woman smiles down at me, streaks of violet hair billowing in an ephemeral breeze. I spend a second wondering how ice is able to flow like it is moving on a magical wind but break from my thoughts when the ice clones places a hand on the door and opens it for me.
A bright light that stings my eyes, easily tripling the pain that I feel from the headache that continues to pound against my skull, stabs at me from inside. I walk into the room of blinding, white light, the shapes slowly resolving from blurry silhouette in front of me to reveal the true Arabella Willian standing in the center of the room, her hands plucking at an orb, the source of the light, like it was a harp.
“My Charlene,” she says, a cheery pep in her cadence. Her hands move over the globe, and the light in the room recedes to a tolerable only semi-blinding level. “It is good to see that you are up and about.”
I blink the black spots from my eyes, though my left one feels like someone stuck their finger in it. Shaking my head only helps to make my head hurt all the worse. “I am here,” I say weakly.
“Not fully recovered I see,” Arabella rounds the glowing orb in the center of the room and walks to loom over me. The woman bends down, bringing her face far too close to my own for comfort, and stares directly into my eyes. “Is your vision alright?”
“My vision…yes. I can see fine.”
“Good.” Arabella pulls away and clasps her hands together. “Yorick assured me that the transplantation was a success, but the man is an insatiable flirt. Too afraid to disappoint me, I think. Does that mean that you have made contact with Galea?”
“I have,” I say. “I’m still unclear on exactly what she is.”
“A fey spirit,” Arabella says with a shrug. Returning once more to the orb and playing her hands over it. The light that it emits begins to dim and shift across the spectrum of light, twinkling back and forth between a soft green and yellow.
“I have heard of fairies before,” I say, walking to join her at the glowing orb. “That doesn’t really sort it out though.” Looking around the room, I find that the walls are painted in something reflective that glows intensely with whatever color the orb is. Several cupboards, made out of steel or some other tough metal, stand at the edges of the room, eight in all. I realize that we stand in a foyer, the larger room beyond the smaller one we stand in dark and impossible to see.
“I suppose that it wouldn’t.” Arabella finishes her manipulations of the orb, leaving it to emanate a soft pink color. “Needing to condense the explanation, given that you lack formal training in the magical arts, let us say that Galea is a magical construct, like my ice constructs. Some abilities become so complex as a magician increases their power and rank that the magician’s skill becomes a limit in how well they are able to employ them. Often, in such cases, a magical construct is created to take over the burden of manipulating those abilities to some degree. The designation of fey indicates that the mechanation is ephemeral. Such constructs are usually bound to the minds of the individuals they are bonded to.”
I look at the dragon floating around Arabella’s shoulders, thinking, “You could have said that much.”
“I thought that I did,” Galea replies.
Arabella catches the shift in my eyes. “Is Galea here now?” she asks.
“Yes. You could have warned me that I would be waking up with a giant spider squatting on my chest. For that matter, you could have warned me that you were going to knock me out with magic, or whatever it was that you did.”
“That is fairly close,” Arabella says. She strokes her chin. “So, Galea was in the form of a spider. I suppose that makes sense, given Volaash.”
“She’s a dragon now,” I say.
“A dragon.” A sparkle gleams in Arabella’s eyes, an actual sparkle of light. “Now that is interesting. No time to concern ourselves with it now. We have more work that needs to be done. You only have three years to earn the third rank, and every moment you lose is a moment that can never be reclaimed.”
I take a step away from the woman. “What do you need from me now?”
“Nothing insidious, my dear,” she keens. “Nothing sinister. I have brought you here so that you can make one of the most important choices that you have left to you.” With a gesture, the cupboards around the room click and their doors glide open on well-oiled hinges. The pink light of the room is muted by the multitudes of colors like dazzling lights that beam out from inside the cupboards. Dozens, no, hundreds of essentia of all colors and textures beam out from inside of the cupboards at me. “It is time to choose what kind of magician you are going to be in the future.”
“I don’t…” I start to say, but I cannot find the words. “What do I do?” The extravagance that I see before me could buy a town, maybe even a small city. I want to tuck my hands away, but the silk robe I wear has no pockets. Looking at the shining lights, like a rainbow of stars brought to the earth, I find it hard to breathe. My mind screams at me that one small, wrong step, and I could destroy a fortune.
“With Galea’s aide you should be able to identify the essentia.” Arabella looks about at the shining magical pyramids and beams. “I have been around for…a long time, let us say. Essentia are marvelous things, naturally occurring points of power that are the first stepping stones for mortals to reach heights denied to us by our base natures. Unfortunately, three is all any one person can integrate into their souls. At a certain point the idea of selling them for simple, mundane money grew too painful. Now I collect them. I offer my collection to you. You have an essentia already, Gold. That is a rare one, not very sought after by adventurers due to its tendency to not produce abilities that are useful in combat.” Arabella taps the globe in the middle of the room. “This is an index of conflux combinations. There are not many that involve the Gold Essentia, so I do not know how useful it will be to you. However, if you already have a particular conflux that you are wishing to manifest, you can likely use this to navigate your way toward that.”
I look at the woman offering me the world. It is hard to remember that this gift comes with strings attached, I have already signed away three years of my life to this woman, and if I gain membership into her prestigious guild, likely more years. Letting go of a deliberate breath, I steel myself.
“What should I choose?” I ask.
“Whatever it is that you might want,” she says. “What you see before you represents hundreds of thousands of different combinations.”
“What essentia do you have?”
Arabella’s smile turns feral. “I will forgive your asking, but in the wider world we know that it is a dangerous thing to ask someone what their essentia are. Essentia magicians live for a very long time, it is common for a practitioner’s carelessness with their abilities in their youth to come back and bite them from behind later, maybe even centuries later. That kind of carelessness can be fatal. I have found it best to project competence and mystery, while keeping your true capabilities hidden.”
“You aren’t going to tell me then,” I say.
“No, Charlene. No, I am not.” Arabella walks past me toward the door back into the hallway. “While it would tickle me to watch you mull over this very important decision for however long it might take you to do so, I have other business I must be about. I will leave a clone with you, she will notify me once you have come to your ultimate conclusion.”
“But I don’t know what I should be trying for,” I complain.
“Then choose at random. Choose them based on their color. Choose them based on their rarity. I am of the belief that the abilities an individual manifests are based more upon their personalities and affinities than on which essentia they pick. Do whatever feels the most right to you, and you will find an answer that satisfies you.”
Without a further word, the brilliant woman exits the room and leaves me behind with her body double. Looking back at the sparkling rows upon rows of essentia that likely each cost more than my parent’s home, I can feel my heart speeding up, and I have to forcefully keep myself from hyperventilating. I settle my hands onto the pink orb that glows in the middle of the room, pulling my attention away from the essentia.