Talia broke out of her meditative cycling trance and languidly stretched, her knuckles rapping against the top of her bunk. Her progress as a mage had increased tremendously now that she had the time to consistently practice. Capacity-wise, anyways. Without a teacher to help her master the finer parts of Imagery, that aspect of her power was…struggling. She’d taken the time to discuss it with Osra, and the pair had drawn up some theories on how she could practice precision, but without Zaric…
“You know what he’d say about it anyway, Tals,” said the man’s ghost, dramatically quoting…himself, “‘There are no formulae, no magic words, no gestures.’ Something, something, terrible pencil metaphor, something, something, smush you against the ceiling.”
They aren’t even trying to be subtle about it…
“Talia! You wound me! People change, don’t you know? And what bigger change is there than death? Ceasing to be? Passing on… Kissing your mother’s stone!” Torval chimed in.
The pair of apparitions giggled at the dead man’s made-up euphemism as if it was the funniest thing in the world. Talia rolled her eyes and shut them once more, ignoring the worrisome thought that they were her, instead focusing on making the ghosts disappear. It took an effort of will, almost akin to using her psionics on herself, but eventually, they faded away.
They’d be back. They always came back. Usually when she had to focus on something else for an extended period. Or when she was surprised.
She tensed for the inevitable summoning of Menace, her little hellion of a mirage lynx. Talia relaxed when she realized he wasn’t there. She’d finally decided to allow him free reign of the haven, with a strict set of instructions to avoid being spotted, and most importantly, to stay out of trouble. A variety of factors had played into the decision, from the fact that he was now almost as big as her torso, to the fact that she was completely out of jerky, but most importantly, the whelp seemed to have finally gotten a grasp of his instinctive invisibility. Without the help of her mindsense, she’d have been hard-pressed to even notice the now not-so-little bugger.
At first, she’d been afraid that he would just…leave. Fade away into the background and slip out the entrance to the haven as it opened one day and never return. Her worries had clearly been unfounded, as not only did he not leave, but he had also taken to hunting the rats and other little critters that crept about. Which in itself, wasn’t a problem. In fact, it was exactly what she’d hoped for. The problems arose when he took to leaving heads, tails and other, unidentifiable body parts on her bed for when she woke. No amount of psionic prodding seemed to convey the idea that while she appreciated it, the gifts were unnecessary, and he should keep them to himself.
Baby steps. At least he’s still hanging around, doing something productive…Just like I should be doing right now.
With a sigh and a jolt of firmly suppressed trepidation, Talia moved on to the second, newest part of her morning routine. The less satisfying, more terrifying part. Settling back on her haunches, hands on her knees, the psion went back into her trance, but instead of cycling, she goosed her Core, sending mana through the channels at the base of her skull. She passed from the trance into something deeper, at once more substantial and less real. Into her mindscape.
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Talia’s mindscape was a wash of colour and light, ranging across a spectrum that she couldn’t quite fathom, and had no words to describe. The lights pulsated, some shifting rapidly and others more slowly, spooling around nearly static areas.
As she’d gotten better at entering her own mind over the past three weeks, she’d begun to wonder why her mindscape was so…abstract. When she’d seen into Zaric’s mind, it had been a representation of the man’s childhood home, complete with paintings, lavish rooms, windows and even an outer courtyard. A tiny world unto itself.
Either it’s because I’m a psion, and he isn—wasn’t, or because I’m in my own mind instead of someone else’s.
“Could just be because you’re a special little crystal,” Torval/Zaric whisper-taunted.
Talia ignored them. She’d quickly learned that while she could banish them from the ‘real’ world, here, they had free reign. A problem that she was here to fix. Eventually. If only her brain would be more cooperative.
She sighed.
Instead of walking toward her goal, Talia focused on it, sank her hands into the walls at her side and pulled, watching as her mindscape shifted around her. She wasn’t sure if the new technique actually saved her any time in the ‘real’. Either way, if you asked her, subjective time wasted was still wasted time. It was hard to tell that anything was moving among the dizzying array of colours, but eventually, she arrived at the door to what she had taken to calling her place of power.
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The name was a little pretentious, but a little pretentiousness fit, given that, from what she could see, the partition in her brain was the source of her magic. Besides, it wasn’t like anyone else would be joining her. No one real, anyway.
The gap in her mindstuff was less a door and more of a terrifying void that seemed to lead straight into a fathomless abyss. But in the end, it was an opening. In a wall. To another room. Hence, door.
“You’re messing with things beyond your understanding again,” Zaric crooned.
“When has that stopped her?” Torval replied.
“Never. I think she must like it that way.”
“One wonders if—”
Ignoring their inane chatter, Talia took a single step, and suddenly she was in another place.
Without the gaping holes, her place of power was a rough ovoid, with a row of thick cords that ran along the ceiling before diving across the far wall and out of view. Along every surface, purple strings of runes shifted and glimmered, morphing in and out of view. Interspersed between them were angrier hues of yellow and orange, with the occasional flaring red that was smothered as fast as it appeared.
When she’d met with the Matriarch, the centuries-old queen of the crescian spiders of the Chasm of the Lost, Talia’s place of power had been much less…whole. With the ancient being’s help, tumorous growth had been pruned and yawning gashes had been sewn shut. The omnipresent red had given way to specks of orange and spots of yellow. Talia had been made whole in ways she hadn’t realized was possible, for reasons she still couldn’t parse. That had been over a month ago now, nearly two.
The Matriarch’s work still held. Mostly.
Where before the runic had mostly been purple and a small gash of red that wouldn’t close, now the fiery hues were once more beginning to spread. The unsealed gash had widened, seeping carmine like dried blood across the amorphous walls. From there, tendrils of orange faded into yellow, creeping across healthy script.
Talia wasn’t sure if it was the severe manaburn she’d subjected herself to or some other reason, but her place of power was getting worse. For reasons she could only guess at. Who knew, perhaps the Ancients, or the gods or whatever you called them, had decreed that using psionics the way she had—to snip clean a life—was blasphemy, and therefore punishable by mage-madness. For some reason.
Reasons or no, time to get to work.
Sitting cross-legged, mirroring the position of her body in the ‘real’, Talia stretched out her power to the gash. Slowly but surely, one rune at a time, she began feeling her way back to wholeness. Slow didn’t even begin to cover it. Even with the Matriarch’s teachings, Talia hadn’t even come close to the spider’s speed. She was limited to one rune at a time, and more often than not, the colours would revert back as soon as she fixed them.
It was, to say the least, incredibly infuriating.
But it was also good practice, and though it was hard to tell at a glance, she’d definitely gotten better at it over the past few weeks. Regardless of speed, anything that staved off mage-madness was a good thing. Once she was confident enough with her skill, she planned on roping Osra into the loop and trying to see if she could do the same for the other girl, maybe even test if the other mage could do it herself.
The Matriarch had said that Osra was within reach of salvation, after all, and considering Talia’s progress on making it to the upper reaches, she had the time, and the inclination.
Focus, Tals. Won’t be able to help Osra if we don’t get better at this.
Talia shivered as she imagined what her friend’s place of power must look like. If it was anything like hers had been…
With a shake of her immaterial head, Talia laid her hands on the gash and got back to work.
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Talia wiped off the steam from the surface of the thin sheet of silver that served as a mirror for the cramped bathroom. A stranger looked back at her from within the fog.
Her already sharp features had been honed to a razor’s edge, her face stripped of any remaining hint of baby fat. Though her almond-shaped eyes were now grey—thanks to an oddly specific artefact that masked their colour—she knew that under the slate lay citrine irises glowing internal light. Below her right eye, a thin scar skipped across her cheekbone before catching further down her cheek and snarling its way down to her jaw. The scar’s larger sister picked up just below her collarbone, a jagged line of pink flesh that swerved sharply across her right breast down to the bottom of her ribs.
Talia sucked in a breath at the uncanniness of not recognizing herself. She was unrecognizable from the girl who’d embarked on the caravan months ago. If her face had lost all traces of fat, then the rest of her body had positively shunted it away, replacing it with snarls of lean muscle. She wasn’t buff by any means, but weeks of fighting and training had paid off, leaving her with nothing but muscle and bone.
A spiderweb of abstract geometric shapes traced out of her carmine hair to make its way across the left side of her neck down to her elbow in threads of shimmering gold, like a tattoo drawn by a mad mathematician. Her right arm, by comparison…looked lumpy. Still healing scars puckered in irritation where shards of bone had punctured the skin. The limp, lame limb was a permanent reminder of Mage-Commandrum Zaric’s last moments. Rage, madness and pain.
Despite that, the figure looking back at Talia from the mirror looked dangerous. All sharp angles and scars. The mage tore her gaze away from the mirror, picking up her knife to chop off the remnants of black dye from the ends of her brutally crimson hair. When it was back at the length she liked it—cropped just above her jaw—she considered the golden tattoo on her arm. Usually, she took the time after her morning exercise and shower to dive into the Matriarch’s gift. She’d spent a few hours each day whenever she could, diving through the vast array of memories, digging around for something useful.
She’d gotten close to something of late, a secret buried deep with the memories of dead spiders and centuries of dust.
Talia sighed, slipping on her adamite-scaled armour and cloak, grimacing as she finagled her lame arm into the vambrace with her left.
Not today. Too much to do.
Making her way to the back of the wagon, its door propped open in the safety of Karzurkul haven, Talia frowned as she heard jeering voices and the sounds of a scuffle coming from outside.
Wonder what’s got them so riled up this early?