“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.”
Inscription on the gate to Hell, Dante’s Inferno
Refocusing my mind, I looked around myself and was shocked to find that my aura was blindingly powerful, extending out and flowing around me in vast waves. Looking at myself provided for me a grim reminder. Although my wound had closed, my skin had lost most of its color, leaving me ghastly pale. With the river as my mirror, I inspected myself, admiring my perfect, unblemished and unscarred skin.
I spent as much time around this water as possible, using it for sustenance and to increase my power. As I studied it, I found a way to track extremely small objects and particles just by their magical signature, giving me a form of “vision” that made up entirely for what I had lost upon coming to this world. With this, I could see everything. The springs of magical water that permeated this underground world, the powerful creatures that lurked in the darkness, and even an incredibly large, yet distant mass far above me.
I wasn’t about to subject myself to that power deep below me, though. It took up enough of my time and mind just learning to control my own powers more intuitively. I spent what felt like months just practicing something that should have been basic - telekinesis.
Directionally manipulating gravity to move an object in a certain direction was too costly and too hard to control.
Moving objects by trying to manipulate their aura from afar was a no-go. From a distance with no connection, it was far too weak to move anything bigger than a pebble.
Moving the air around an object was a terrible idea, it was far too inaccurate and nine out of ten times, whatever I was lifting shot straight into my forehead the moment I lost concentration.
‘Talk about adding injury to insult…’ I mumbled to myself, disgruntled. The worst mistake I could make here was calling this ‘training.’ I wasn’t training, I was fumbling around and messing up. ‘Experimenting’ would be putting it nicely.
It took much longer than I was comfortable with, but I had an epiphany. If I fired a wave of my own aura into the aura of another object, I could then manipulate it as if I were holding it. This meant I couldn’t exactly control things through walls, but I was easily powerful enough to destroy most walls. In a stressful situation, this would be incredibly reliable.
By this point, I had built quite a repertoire. I could move objects without touching them, consume the auras of living things, separate and purify materials and elements, spark explosions, and more recently, I had learned to conduct energy with my aura in the form of lightning.
Looking at where I was even just before falling into this strange underworld, I had certainly come a long way. The faint glow of my aura had become a powerful luminescent shine that twisted, turned, and flowed at my will.
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It was jarring and sudden. A shiver went up my spine, and my body lost the ability to hold itself up. ‘Wh…?’ I was unable to get any sound out of my mouth as I gazed out across the ground in shock.
What I saw only further numbed my body. To my horror, the sheer cliffs of stone transformed themselves into walls of unliving white. A door formed itself against the white wall. A shadowed figure slammed their fists against the small window in the door. Crimson flowed down the wall like paint, coating everything around me in that terrifying shade of red.
I sat up with a start, my heart pounding out of my chest. I gulped for air with ragged, shallow breaths. ‘Thank god…’ I thought as I looked down upon my small, pale hands. My wrists were intact, my mind was… probably intact, and I was free of that place.
Only one question was left in my shaken mind. ‘What the actual fuck was that?’
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I’d been plagued by this nightmare constantly for the past few nights. That same hallucination that paralyzed me and sucked me into it was constantly haunting my mind. I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew that I hated dying every time I slept. It was crushing torture, to watch as someone who loved me witnessed my death as the agony I inflicted upon myself destroyed my mind and my body.
Once I woke up on the third night of this, I knew i needed to get out.
‘This place is toying with my mind, grinding away at my sanity.’ I determined, and immediately began my escape.
It took very little to make it out. I had come out of the floor, not whatever was above me. That massive ball of energy made it very hard not to remember that.
A pit with no discernible end was my destination, and when I found it, I did not hesitate to step into it. However, as I felt that nostalgic sensation of falling, I sensed something. Just a few seconds of falling below me, there was a block. A floor of pure stone awaited me, likely to bring me to my death if I did not slow down.
However, I saw no reason to slow down. As I rapidly descended, I charged all the energy I could into my palm and forced it out, firing a massive beam of light and heat into the barrier. Even if the heat didn’t get through it, the sheer force of the air pushing against it would. I shot straight through the hole I punched in the floor and continued on my way to the beautiful blue sky.
As I enjoyed a faceful of grass, my tense muscles finally relaxed. Compared to the feeling of suffocation that I felt when I had first landed at the bottom of that pit of despair, I felt as if I could run miles without fatigue.
‘I didn’t expect that the magic density differential had such a big effect on both sides.’ I ruminated as I felt the massive difference of living on the surface against living on a particularly accommodating pile of rocks halfway down an abyss.
After deciding I had enjoyed enough of the hot afternoon with a bright, welcoming golden sun above me, I stood and leisurely strolled back towards home. Walking over hill after hill towards the massive heat signature the town gave off, my steps accelerated into a jog, and then into a run, and by the time I was at the top of the last hill, I found myself sprinting, riding the air as I propelled myself off of the ground. I saw a figure sitting out on the porch, sitting pensively. I knew I recognized her, and as I got close I found that I was indeed running towards my parent, Elpis. “Mother! Mother!” I called, but she stiffly stood up, stepping backwards and eventually diving through the door she half-opened.
I was heartbroken. My pain was only compounded as I watched her running down the road from afar.
“Guards! Guards! Please help me!” She cried in terror.