I was young when I died.

I vaguely remembered impressions of chaos… the world shaking and sky blazing with an unnatural magenta light. Screams as people fell to the street, burning from the inside with magical flames. Someone – my mother? – shoving me into a tunnel, the facade which had concealed it now a pile of rubble in the street. Being told to run, and too frightened to even think of doing anything else.

Strange that I could remember anything, come to think of it. How did that happen? I knew I died, in a terrified huddle in the room I found within those tunnels, curled around a beautiful crystal, hoping its evident magical nature would somehow protect me.

It hadn’t.

I should have been more concerned, right? I died. Did that make me undead? That didn’t feel right, but what did I know? I was just a kid. Or at least, I had been. I chose to assume I was alive until something convinced me otherwise.

Alright, well since I clearly wasn’t panicking, I decided to take stock. I opened my eyes.

Or, well, I tried to open my eyes. What happened was quite a bit stranger, as I suddenly became aware in a way I’d never experienced before. I perceived things, though I didn’t know if I’d really call it sight.

Alright, more confirmation that my stress responses seemed to be nonfunctional, because I was currently buried alive and the only reason I could accept for why I wasn’t panicking a whole lot just then was that I literally couldn’t.

Okay, this probably explained why I couldn’t move right now. Or feel my body at all.

I decided to focus on what I could do, and examined my surroundings. I found that, with concentration and effort, I could expand the small bubble of perception I had, slowly seeing more of my surroundings.

I could sense rubble. Enormous chunks of stone surrounded me, the gaps crammed with smaller stones and pebbles, with a fine coating of dust and pulverized stone filling in the cracks down to the floor.

Ah, right. The ceiling collapsed on top of me. I didn’t really remember, but then I supposed I wouldn’t, if that was the end.

Scattered throughout the destruction were fragments of the crystal. A shame, I thought, that it didn’t fare any better than I.

I suddenly realized – all of that dust had settled. I mean every speck, every mote. I could feel it all, and I didn't sense even the slightest movement. Just how long had it been?

I wondered if anyone survived… surely that catastrophe didn’t kill everyone in the city and beyond. Surely I wasn’t the only one left?

What if I was?

I don’t know how long I sat with that thought, mulling through the implications. Eventually I concluded that it was too early to jump to conclusions. I needed more information, and I wasn’t going to get it without action.

I tried to push my senses further, looking for any remnant of the tunnel upward. Instead, I found my body.

That was… disturbing. Not the way it should have been, not with my emotions in this strange state, but… I mean, it was my body. Or what was left of it. Really just a mostly pulverized skeleton, underneath the full weight of the collapse. It was still weird as hell to look at, not least because it meant that I, whatever I currently was, was not my body.

Well then.

Unfortunately for me, pushing my perceptions outward like that seemed to be taking a toll on me. I felt my thoughts turn muzzy, and I decided to see if resting was still something that benefited me.

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It turned out, the fundamentals of resting still applied, and after some amount of time I had no way of tracking, I felt refreshed and decided to try again.

While I waited, I’d noticed that my perception seemed to be expanding in a sphere, not just the direction I thought the tunnel would be in.

I also took the chance to examine what lay at the very center of the sphere. Me, presumably. As it turned out, I was now a sizable chunk of crystal. From the outside, I appeared much like the others scattered about, but I shone with a dim but steady light.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

To my new senses, this light seemed… greenish? Maybe closer to cyan, really, though as it was the only source of light or color within my sphere, I couldn’t say if that wasn’t just how I would see everything now.

Beginning to focus once again, I felt my sphere begin to sweep outward, encompassing more and more of the same, nondescript rubble. The rate felt slow. That might just be the lack of anything else to do, or any way of knowing how much time was passing. Had I been awake for hours? Days? Longer?

I reached a smooth section of stone which had to be a remnant of the old ceiling that hadn’t caved in, giving me some sense of the original boundaries of the room. It seemed to be a corner, joining with two equally smooth walls.

Then, movement! A trickle of water, running down what had once been the wall, pooling slightly in a little pocket it seemed to have worn away in the rubble before continuing down out of my view. Now that was interesting! My sphere had yet to reveal anything below me but solid stone, but this implied that I might find a cave, or perhaps an underground river, if I kept expanding.

My memories of the room, fractured though they were, told me that I would discover the tunnel soon at this rate, but I felt the exhaustion creeping in and, reluctantly, decided to rest again. I didn’t know if depleting myself would do any lasting harm, and at the end of the day it seemed one thing I had down here was time.

As I rested there, feeling my energy return bit by bit, I decided to try something. I didn’t have arms, or any way of physically interacting with my surroundings, but if I could perceive without eyes or ears, then maybe… I focused my attention on my remains, willing them to move, and almost before I could imagine it they just… disappeared, almost melting away.

I felt a rush of energy surge into me as the bone fragments dematerialized, as though I had somehow consumed them, which was a thought I did not care for at all. On the other hand, this opened all sorts of possibilities.

I tried again, focusing on one of the smaller fragments of rock, and… nothing. I tried picturing it melting away as the bones had, then I imagined it moving, then cracking or crumbling or melting to slag. Nothing worked, but as my focus lingered I felt more and more connected to it somehow, and that just made me more sure I could do it.

It took a small eternity of just imagining different scenarios, getting more vague as I went on, but suddenly I felt a sort of settling sensation, like something fitting into place, and I could feel the stone. It was almost like the sensation of having a body again! Almost.

The stone hadn’t disappeared like my remains, but something had definitely happened. I tried to flex the new connection I had, and the fragment smoothed into a sphere. I could feel it grinding softly against the surrounding rubble as it did.

Eagerly, I tried to connect with one of the larger chunks of stone, repeating the successful image of me claiming it. It was kind of like imagining picking something up, but with no hands, and the thing didn’t move… Like I said, my image was pretty vague, but it worked! This new stone, too, I felt as though it were a part of me. I began trying to reshape it, only to freeze as I sensed the rubble all around me shift.

Right. Let’s respect the collapse that already killed me once.

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It took some experimentation and a lot of time, but I managed to learn a few things about this new state of being.

Firstly, claiming new stones was draining. Not too much, and it seemed to be proportional to the size of the stone, but as I set about trying to claim the entire contents of my sphere, I had to rest over a dozen times.

The second was that the other shards of the crystal behaved completely differently from the rest of the rubble. I could feel that same connection to them after just a moment of focusing, much faster than the plain stones, but no matter how hard I tried to claim them I could never manage it.

I also learned I couldn’t claim water. I’d expected that result with the water that was flowing through my sphere, but even after what must have been several hours, the water which had pooled within the chamber still frustrated my attempts.

Giving up, I’d gone back to claiming stones. Eventually, I’d gotten all of them, and expanded my sphere enough to include the ruined doorway and what had been the beginning of the hall.

I decided to practice there first, as I doubted I would damage the crystal which was apparently me even if I caused that debris to shift.

Flexing my connection just as I had done before, I began to reshape the stone in the hallway ceiling. It responded easily, melting under my control like clay, spreading and forming one solid piece of stone from the door to the edge of my sphere.

I was ecstatic! I immediately did the hallway’s walls, as far as I could. Then, encouraged by my success, I started on my ceiling. I went carefully, beginning from where the edges of the ceiling remained intact and fusing them into whatever debris happened to be touching them. Continuing inward, fusing and smoothing stone after stone, I felt a rising unease as the exhaustion began to settle over me. Should I rest? Could I afford to? What if I’d destabilized things above me? All it would take was one unfortunate shift and the stones above me would shatter my new body under their weight.

I pushed through the exhaustion, giving up on smoothing and shaping the boulders which were becoming my new ceiling so I could spread it faster, until I finally had one continuous, if extremely lumpy, ceiling spanning the full dimensions of my room. The exhaustion was so much worse than before, the blanket wrapped around my mind so thick and tight that trying to think was a slow, almost painful affair, and so I simply didn’t.