Ginny looked around at the obsidian walls with gold flakes embedded in them. She was following a large demon in black robes at the moment, she wasn’t human. Some sort of creature made of swirling black mud. The demon was calling her king and she could feel a bone crown on her head as part of her. Yet…
It was all so familiar. Like nothing else she had ever felt in her short time of her memories. Everything called to her, twinging something in her mind and dragging the wisps of forgotten memories to the forefront of her mind.
They didn’t make any sense yet, but it was comforting to know that they were coming to the surface, that something was there underneath to recover. And more importantly she was about to learn magic from her new teacher.
They walked into a large room with a series of floating metallic balls. They were all sorts of different sizes, ranging from no bigger than her fist to taller than her. They lazily floated around, occasionally softly bumping into each other and being slowly repelled away and drifting off again. There was an invisible ball in mid-air that the balls all bounced off of leaving only a central pillar of air in the center of the room clattering with the floating orbs while the rest was left untouched. She looked on in amazement at the scene for a few seconds as Balthazar stood there waiting.
She looked at him, “What am I doing? I thought you were going to teach me magic?”
“I am,” he said calmly and waved his hand towards the metal balls, “Every true wizard must first learn both control and awareness of their surroundings. For larger spells the slightest disturbance in the spell structure can destabilize it and have disastrous consequences. At the same time, one must be aware so that enemies or even a strong gust of wind is not enough to shift your body and lead to the same result or worse. We shall begin with only a single orb.”
Balthazar took a floating orb the size of Ginny’s fist from the pocket of his robes. Somehow her name just popped into her mind as she thought hard about it. Maybe her memories were returning a little!
“Use your magical senses. Let them out, but not too much. Perhaps only ten or twenty meters from yourself.”
Ginny did so and immediately felt how magical everything around her was. Even the air thrummed with barely suppressed magical energy different than anything else she’d ever felt back on Earth.
“Now, I will toss this orb gently to you. Do you remember the sensation of injecting your magic into a weak point?”
Ginny nodded.
“You must do this, even without a medium to pierce through. Extent a tendril of magic outwards from your body and connect it to the ball as it approaches. Will it to stop and return to me gently. This is the basis of true telekinesis. It is a complex and demanding skill, but one with nearly limitless applications once truly explored. Alright, here I go.”
Ginny felt the orb slowly drifting towards her in her magical senses. She held her hand up, palm first towards the orb while imagining what she had done with the big door and old boot whose enchantments she broke. A spike of magic shot out of her palm, but it was brittle and after shooting out to a set distance it ripped and shattered into nothing.
“You are not breaking,” Balthazar said, “You are gently guiding. Magic reacts to your intent, your will and surety that an action will happen a certain way. Imagine a tree sprouting from your palm. It must grow slowly as the sun and rain nurture it over time. It can bend in the strong winds of a storm, yet is firm. Imagine this and try again.”
Ginny shut her eyes and only used her magical sense to sense the slow floating orb approaching her. She imagined the tree, the little sprout growing as the sun shined down on it and the rain watered its roots.
Slowly, so slowly she almost didn’t notice, a tendril of magic grew out of her palm. But it was not brittle and piercing like the last one but flexible and durable. Like the tree she had been imagining. It also was forming much much slower than her first tendril had. The orb was only five feet away now and Ginny’s tendril was now two feet long. She gently guided the tendril to line up with the orb and like it was sticky, her magic tendril drifted over and poked into the orb’s metal surface.
“Excellent. Now, push. Very slowly. Guide it in a new direction.”
Ginny imagined shoving the metal orb away with her hands and in an instant it shot off into a nearby wall with a loud clang.
“Oops.”
“Yes. You must not rush. Keep that gentle force in your mind at all times. The goal is to have the highest efficiency and use the lowest amount of magic possible. With that single fast burst of force you could have gently deflected dozens of similar orbs at least.”
Ginny looked down at her muddy hands, “But I don’t… feel tired? Shouldn’t that have drained my magic?”
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“You are the ruler of this domain. While you are here the crown will see to making sure your magical energy is not drained. When your intrinsic magic runs out you will have to switch to using the magic of this domain, or domain magic. It is much harder to use and is less pliable, but works identically to how your intrinsic magic does. It is even beneficial since when you switch back to your intrinsic magic after training with Domain magic everything will feel much easier.”
“Wow. So I can practice as much as I want?”
“Within reason. I do not see you ever running out of magic with the training exercises I have planned for you. Now, how about we try again?”
“Okay. I just push it gently away? Should I use the tree again?”
“Feel free to shop around to use different mental images. Everyone has their own preference. The tree is simply an easy starting point for beginners. Here it comes.”
Balthazar reached into his robes and pulled out another metal orb and tossed it at her again. Ginny focused and closed her eyes again. She lifted her palm and held it out towards where she could feel the ball. Her tendril connected to the ball just like last time. Ginny imagined the ball sinking into the branches of the tree, bending them and applying a slow force pushing the other way as it pushed through. The orb slowly came to a stop two feet away from her face, then slowly began to inch back towards Balthazar. Ginny stayed focused and kept it moving and opened her eyes again to see the orb gently floating away.
“Yay! I did it!” Ginny cheered, only for the ball go flying off into the wall again as she lost focus and her magic flung it away.
“Oh, well. I still did it!” Ginny said, staring at the ball slowly drifting away from where it had impacted the wall, “Did you see, Balthazar, did you see?”
“Yes, King,” Balthazar said with a smile, “Very good.”
“Why are you calling me king?” Ginny asked suddenly, “I’m a girl. Shouldn’t you be calling me the queen?”
Balthazar’s eyebrows rose, “A girl? How surprising. Would you like me to call you queen?”
“Well, I don’t know… can you just call me Ginny? You don’t have to use the fancy title if you don’t want to.”
“Ginny… very well. So, Ginny. Are you ready for more?”
“Yeah! Using magic is awesome!” Ginny said while staring expectantly at Balthazar.
“Very good. Now, let’s break any bad habits early. Your tendril should not be reliant on any point on your body. No using the palm as a focal point, no point on your body at all. Feel it come from within you, not from you. Do you understand?”
“Kinda? But it has to leave my skin somewhere, right? How does that work?”
“Yes, it leaves your skin at one point. But it should not be anchored at that point. If you trained only creating tendrils from your palm then when your fist was closed you may be unable to generate a tendril from your elbow, chest, or forehead. And once created that tendril could be rooted at that point, unable to shift or move freely across your skin as needed. You must be able to make a tendril of magic anywhere on your body and move it freely. Let’s give it a try.”
Balthazar threw more of the floating balls at Ginny and she tried to do what he said. It was very hard, each time she instinctively tried to anchor the tendril to a single point on her skin. It was only Balthazar telling her to make her even realize that she was doing it at all half the time. But slowly, she started to get a hang of it. She still made a mistake occasionally, but most of the time she was able to freely shift and slide her magic tendrils over her body as needed. It still excited her every time to see the balls approaching her slowly stop and get pushed away again.
Magic was amazing!
But slowly despite her excitement and eagerness to keep learning, she started growing restless. It felt like something was urging her to move, to return to that first room she had woken up in with the door.
Balthazar paused after throwing the last ball and Ginny deflected it again to her satisfaction.
“It seems it is time for you to leave, Ginny,” he said, “The Chains of Fate grow stronger even now.”
“Chains of fate?” Ginny said as she stood, “What do you mean?”
“Fate is a powerful, very real entity in your world. You have a special place in her plans. Plans that can’t be accomplished without you there in your world. Every time you come here, it is likely that you will only have a limited time before the pull of the chains grows strong enough to force you to leave again.”
“Can’t I just, not go?” Ginny asked, “I want to keep practicing magic with you. For a little longer at least.”
Balthazar chuckled, “Feel free to practice magic in your world. You could stay here for a while longer, but the longer you wait the higher the chance of… something bad happening to your mind. Just to be safe you should leave now before the pull grows too strong.”
“Oh. Well, okay. How will I get back here, anyway? I don’t remember how I got here in the first place. It was… Something bad happened and I just woke up here.”
“I do not know,” Balthazar said as they left the room and walked through the hallways, “It is something for you to discover yourself, Ginny. Once mastered you should be able to leave and enter this place on a whim. The door is simply a tool for those that are not the rulers of this domain to enter and leave.”
“Okay. Thanks for the help, Balthazar. That was a lot of fun.”
They entered the room with the door and Ginny felt a sudden urge to go and run through.
“Best of luck in your world, Ginny. Remember to not fall into bad habits as you practice,” Balthazar said, “Oh, and make sure to not use magical foci if you can. Wands, staves, rings, the like. They are the worst offenders for creating bad habits in novice wizards. Until next time.”
“Bye, Balthazar. Thanks again.”
Ginny could now feel how unnatural the urge to jump through the doorway was. But she still felt it, it was irresistible. Something she just had to do. She walked to the doorway, suppressing her urge to jog. She stood at the edge of the frame and glanced back at Balthazar standing there stoically looking at her calmly. He nodded to her. She turned back and stepped through and her body of mud dissolved.
The last thing she saw before she fell unconscious was a web of golden strings wrapped around her soul, the same ones that had controlled her just after she had woken up in the Chamber of Secrets.