Chapter 31 — Fireworks and Dynamite

I strode past them, through the doors, and across the room. I attempted keeping my feet free of blood, but it was a near impossible task. Luckily other footprints marred the ground, and the blood had generally dried. I got to work. I didn’t want Chris to change his mind. The others stayed by the door as I made my way towards the back opening to the clerk’s station.

I expanded my will while focusing my power. Using my aura like another ‘sense’ wasn’t as difficult as using a spell, it was an extension of myself that didn’t require the control of a circle, but it could benefit or be blocked off by the same.

The drawback to using my aura like this was that it left me exposed and open. Not necessarily to attack but to being known by whatever entity had been here. Another wizard or fae creature could sense me if they have left enough of their power in this place. The perceptions my aura picked up would also be much more visceral without a circle like the one I’d desired to make. I might feel things rather than simply seeing and understanding them. It would be like running my hand over a corpse, rather than looking at a photograph.

Auras were a projection of the soul, will, and mind. Even a mundane human would feel something if I directed my will and aura fully upon them. It was akin to someone staring at you, most people would eventually realize they were being watched or feel on edge. Even the military trained specialists to not stare or look too directly upon targets to avoid making that target aware of their presence. My aura was significantly more powerful than simply looking. Turning it upon a person would skew the response as they would be powerless to resist while knowing something was being observed about them. It made average people feel uncomfortable and distrustful around you and was likely one of the reasons wizards were more solitary when around the general public. People sensed something different and generally wanted to avoid it. Their inherent senses would realize the threat of a predator or a power beyond their kin and ascribe it to the right target even without magic.

Its why aura control was so important to wizards. Concealed, retracted, and hidden auras made it difficult to read another practitioner, but it was also necessary to be around people and to protect your mind and soul from ‘rubbing’ up on the worst things of the world in a magical or emotional senses.

I was opening myself up, akin to opening my eyes, ears, and senses to anything. Magnifying what those senses would normally pick up. It was like being able to zoom in my eyesight, enhance my smell, my taste, my ability to touch and feel, only on the magical plain.

The problem was, if you could increase your ability to see and a bright light was shown in your eyes it hurt, if you could increase the sensitivity of your skin then touched a hot stove, it would burn all the worse. Auras could be like that, and I was throwing mine unprotected into the fire of a gruesome murder.

A circle would afford me protection and more finesse with my aura. A circle and a well thought out spell along with my aura as a guide would be even better. Unfortunately, I didn’t personally know of any spell which could manage it off the top of my head and experimenting with spells was about as dangerous as it got. It was all a moot point since Chris wouldn’t allow me to disturb the crime scene anyway.

If I had to use something other than a spell, it was going to have to use my aura. I could enhance it by feeding it mana which would increase my senses to the magical world around me, then develop flows of power on the fly to make my aura uncover what I wanted. It was a fine line between aura work and crafting a spell. It would be less dangerous for the world around me, but for me personally it could be worse.

While other young wizards were playing with fireworks I was playing with dynamite. My power value being ‘Strong’ was amazing, but it made the stakes of a mistake much higher, even in something like this.

My control was good. It would grow greater with time, and as my mana core gained layer upon layer of reinforcement with cultivation. Only then would doing something like this not be as deadly. Right now, I wasn’t at a master level and that difference played out in my magic. Even with simple aura projection.

I couldn’t lose control of this spell no matter what I saw, felt, or experienced.

If I did, I could die, or worse, crack my core asunder and lose my ability to use magic. Even Fren couldn’t heal something like that.

I nodded my head, closed my eyes, and began to work. The lights began to flicker as power bled from my aura’s enhanced strength. I fed mana from my core directly into it, my soul itself feeling enlarged like fire ripping through my veins. If Chris’s phone wasn’t dead before, it was now, same for Gregory, even though I was purposefully directing my aura away from them. The incandescent bulbs began to pop as their inner elements burst. I heard someone shout but ignored them. It was going to get worse and was pointedly the reason I hadn’t told them about the possible side effects of using my mana and aura in a less controlled fashion. I had to see what this creature was beyond the vague infusion of magic I’d felt at the sites I’d been able to find.

I pushed my aura out in front of me, sensing the area. The spiritual, the physical, and the magical space in-between. I sensed power here, dark twisted power. It felt akin to sticking my arm into a fetid pond, hoping something wasn’t beneath the surface. The act was disgusting but worse I couldn’t feel the bottom—I needed to reach deeper. I couldn’t feel what I was looking for, not yet, not without extending myself further.

Inwardly I groaned, but knew I had to do it, I had to use a sense all wizards possessed which could significantly increase the sensitivity of our auras and magical senses.

I opened my third eye.

I didn’t literally have a third eye, but metaphysically we all did. Wizards simply learned to utilize theirs. With that and my aura blanketing the area I could now ‘see’ and ‘taste’ the magic of the area in a way that my aura alone, or my spells, had I been permitted to use them would only mimic or give the faintest impressions of.

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Dark energy and blackness stained my newly opened sight at the location of the murder, it hung in the air like a blackened miasma that roiled over the room, my aura, and my very being.

It was as if I’d jumped headfirst into a putrid bog, opened my mouth and breathed it all in, then found out it was full of the dead, diseased, and leeches.

It was filthy.

My mind burned with the dark energies, and it felt like I’d rubbed my brain straight onto asphalt, then did it again after dumping salt and acid onto the surface for good measure. I tasted the fear Phillis had felt, the terror, pain, and despair. I relieved her frantic last thoughts. Some lingering connection of those intense feelings would be attached to this place for decades. That was the power of emotions, of energy, of the soul.

There was also a foreign perception.

It was twisted in rage, hate, and the desire to hunt. I felt power, ancient forces of the world but skewed toward darkness, destruction, and blight. It hunted for… something… no, someone. It was frustrated and had killed Phillis too quickly in a fit of rage. Perhaps with a circle I might have gleaned information more clearly. It would have been a more tolerable experience for my mind, and I could have lingered on each new detail, studying them and I tried to see the whole. As it was, I skittered from one element to another like a drop of water on an oiled pan. The experience was sharper, I felt the heat but was too involved for the world itself to be clear. My mind unable or unwilling to linger longer. The quick staccato of warring sensations gave me impressions but nothing deeper. I couldn’t allow myself to be exposed to this too deeply.

That being said, I did know a few things. There was no magical residue left in the space, which would be present from a wizard like me using a spell. I could completely rule out that the being had used magic in this place, at least one operating at the levels I understood. I relaxed my power as it all began to grow too much, I began to force my third eye closed.

As I did the lingering energy of this place didn’t wait, it leapt for me, striving to enter my being through my open and unguarded third eye. It assaulted me as if the residual energies of the being’s presence had a sentience of their own and were strong enough to attack and consume me.

I instantly resisted, wresting my control from the entity, my true being warding off the incorporeal. Without my instantly raised defenses, my firmed resolve, and the certainty of who I was and what I stood for, those invasive energies, thoughts, and intents might have become my own. Imprinting over my mind like the simulacra of a human.

I’d nearly experienced a partial possession, and it freaked me the hell out. But the attack wasn’t over. I heaved the energies of it back.

I’d heard the third eye could open you up to things like that if you weren’t careful or used them in the wrong settings. Clair had made that exceptionally clear in my training. The one time I’d been taken to the headquarters of the Tribunal itself for testing and membership it had involved seeing the Sanctum. It was a place filled with the mad and insane. Apprentices and full wizards many of whom had exposed themselves through their third eye to the madnesses of the powers out there. Some were catatonic, others appeared totally normal but even being in their presence for a moment made me want to shirk away and hide, others possessed by evil.

Clair’s instructions then had been thorough. These were only the more benign as severe cases had blessedly been put to death as their odds of recovering were infinitesimal.

I saw that horrible place as the darkness inched ever closer to what made me—me.

As my mind was assaulted, I fought to remain strong, clinging to myself. My core bolstering my soul as I sought to close the third eye, I surged my mana forward into my aura and eye for a moment overcoming the other entity enough to close off my enhanced senses without pulling something of it inside with me.

Still, I learned more through the fight, I learned its true desires.

Once safe, I rested, closing my eyes and taking several shuddering breaths. I was on the ground flat on my back. I raced my hands over my chest and body looking for wounds or anything out of the ordinary, feeling that I was still myself, my clothes felt familiar, my hands and body were fully my own.

Relieved flooded over me like a wave of water, I was still me, alive, and unharmed.

A sheen of sweat covered my entire body. My mind felt like it was stuttering as I returned to normal sense and awareness. Despite the evil I’d felt, closing my third eye always felt like a loss, though in this case it was a welcome. In more ideal scenarios it felt like my awareness of the world was lessened. It felt like I was choosing to close my true eyes with the intent to never use them again…ever.

I felt less but that passed as my normal senses returned to focus. I opened my natural eyes to see the room was darker, every light had been blown out. The only light into the room was tinted yellow as it passed through the front doorway and the yellow plastic adhered to the glass.

“Well, that was unpleasant,” I muttered, the others not knowing the filth I’d had to expose myself to simply to get a glimpse of what was going on. My head ached and my vision flickered between what was real and the remembered senses from my third eye of the space around me. The black miasma that filled this room, the fear, chaos and evil. I could almost pretend that it wasn’t there, that it had been a trick of my mind. But I knew those things were here in this room, as was an entity composed of them, feasting off the evil and death.

That entity wasn’t the enemy, only an opportunistic parasite of the unseen world.

I rubbed a hand across my nose, and felt warm blood stain my wrist. I dabbed it with a small cloth from my pocket. I’d burn it later. I hadn’t used my third eye in years because what you saw could literally change your soul, your person—If you weren’t careful.

I thought I had been, but it was still an uncomfortable affair to use that sense as I had. I’d need to train it with Fren, that attack had been far too close to overcoming me. He had senses beyond my own and could perceive of this side of things at all times.

“Sooooo?” Chris asked, drawing the words out far, far too loudly as I adjusted back to my senses.

I held up a hand. Taking a moment for the world to fully set to rights. I could barely make him out a dozen feet away.

“Clearly something happened,” Gregory said to the others, his tone fueled by adrenaline. He still sounded freaked out and was busy trying to get his phone to turn on for more light I presumed.

“Sorry. I should have warned you,” I said.

“Happened to mine yesterday,” Lana said. “Cal is bad on electronics. But it does verify what he can do, right?”

“What exactly was it he can do? He just stood there moaning after the lights blew out.” Gregory asked carefully. “Then he fell or flew back. I couldn’t make it out.”

Chris ignored both of them his eyes locked onto mine.

“—I got some answers,” I said. They all went quiet, waiting while I scrunched my eyes closed in an attempt to reduce my burgeoning headache. “It is a supernatural creature, that’s for certain. Its mind, thoughts and intents were foreign in a way a humans would not be but more intelligent than an animal’s.”

“Anything else?”

“It’s hunting something, for someone. It’s frustrated its target is not clearer to it and its hunting off senses we don’t even have words to describe. It’s frustrated to be at another’s beckoning but its frankly terrified of them. It was exasperated that the human.” I took a breath, shaking my head to clear it. The thoughts I’d felt weren’t mine, they were the creatures. “I’m sorry—Phillis, didn’t know more about its query.”