Eventually, I came back to myself. The stone and dust which had been shifted when I reshaped the ceiling lay still now,

It was easier to let my thoughts wander than try to direct them in any particular way

It felt a bit like descriptions I’d heard of hangovers. Actually, it felt a lot like what mana depletion was meant to feel like. That… made sense. The degree to which I could affect my surroundings couldn’t be energy-efficient, and the mechanism was obviously magical. I must have been cycling through my mana each time I tired myself out, though that raised new questions.

Like how did I regenerate mana without eating? I hadn’t been allowed to begin learning spellcraft yet, but I knew mages needed to replenish their mana with food, and I certainly hadn’t been doing that.

Setting that aside, how was I even using mana at all? I wasn’t forming spells – I didn’t even know any – and if I had learned how, every mage I’d ever seen had needed some kind of gesture or invocation. I clearly wasn’t doing any of that.

I reached out again to the stone around me, trying to focus on how I was manipulating it. The nearest way I could relate it to my old life was as flexing muscles and moving limbs. I was focusing on what I wanted the stone to do, and it just did it, like a hand closing around an object when you put your mind to picking it up.

The way it followed my intent rather than my direction ran directly counter to everything I knew about magic, and yet as I cleared the rubble away from the stone in which I now resided I could feel the mana gradually draining from me.

Soon enough, I had cleared the space between me and the trickling water and I needed to rest again. I might have been able to keep going, but after my recent brush with mana depletion I decided to play it safe. That was not an experience I wished to repeat.

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I continued in that way for some time, clearing as much of the debris as I could, and then resting until had recovered enough to continue. Once my room was cleared, save for the rubble spilling from the hallway, I decided to try expanding my sphere of perception again. If I could reach my influence back out to the street, perhaps I could carve some letters in the stone to attract someone’s attention.

If anyone was still alive out there to read it.

I could remember running through a labyrinth of tunnels, taking turns as I came to them, hoping to find someone. Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to expand in a single direction. Each time I tried to push along the tunnel only, I felt the sphere creeping outward through the stone all around.

And so I expanded, and rested, and expanded more.

I fell into a rhythm, the time slipping past me as I pushed my perceptions farther. It was mindless work, and with no way to mark the time it quickly turned to a blur.

As my sphere expanded, the hallways beyond my room took shape in my perceptions. Some stretches were remarkably undamaged, others entirely ruined, and I found many other rooms filling the spaces between them. It seemed to have been some kind of underground complex, though I had never heard of it before.

Of course, there were also the bodies. Crushed under the rubble as it fell, or for one unfortunate, trapped between two caved-in sections of hall and left to suffocate or worse. The desiccated remains told a miserable story of their final hours.

In some of the rooms, I found the splintered remains of wooden furniture: Beds, wardrobes, desks, and other detritus of long-term habitation. In others, I found ruins to hint at a variety of purposes, from a meeting room to restrooms to a particularly intact vault.

That last one was by far the most interesting, and I spent my next resting phase curiously combing through the strongboxes. Mostly, they held coins, but I found some weapons and armor, some clothing, and one which was entirely filled with vials and sachets of various substances.

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It was nice to have something engaging to do while I rested. The boredom was wearing at me, and made all the worse by the fact that I was entirely conscious the whole time. I had always resented the time that sleep took from my life, time I could have spent with my studies, or bothering my sister, or just playing with my friend, but by this point I’d happily have traded the mindlessness of wakeful rest for the diversion of dreams.

In an attempt to stave off the gloom, I left the expansion of my sphere for the time being, instead trying to clear out and rebuild some of the hallways. I didn’t have any use for them, but the feeling of making visible progress on something constructive did wonders for my mood.

I didn’t know what to do with the bodies. I was reluctant to claim them, in case they were consumed the way mine had been, but it felt wrong to leave them where they were. After a rest, I decided to clear a room for them. I figured out a trick where I could send a kind of ripple through the stone floor, bearing along anything atop it, and I used that to relocate most of the bodies. Some were too fractured to be moved and I had to leave them, and some crumbled as I moved them, but I got most of most of them into separate piles in my little makeshift morgue. Then, I had to rest once again.

I wondered if I had met any of them when they were alive. Doubtful, since clearly they had all been a part of the same organization, whoever had created this complex. I didn’t think secret societies associated with nobility all that often. Or, actually, maybe that’s exactly who they would associate with. With some of the people I’d met, I could believe it.

I was roused from my thoughts by movement – actual movement! – within one of my newly-cleared hallways. A bedraggled she-wolf was limping into range of my sphere, favoring one of her hind legs and trailing blood and water. In her jaws, she carried a tiny bundle of sopping fur. It took me a moment to realize that it was a tiny wolf pup. I watched, fascinated, as she rounded a corner, struggling deeper into my space.

Something actually alive, and clearly from the outside. I was close to reaching the surface! What’s more, I wasn’t alone. I felt a weight lift, one I hadn’t even fully known I was carrying. There was still life out there. And rain! A proper storm, judging by the state of her. I felt a sudden fierce longing to feel the wind and rain on my face again. I hadn’t realized just how deprived I had been of sensation, down here in the dark, my only source of sound or movement the trickle of water running down my wall.

My racing mind snapped back to the moment as the wolf collapsed in the middle of the hall. The little bundle wriggled free of her hold and turned to lick at her muzzle, and it suddenly struck home that she wasn’t just looking to lick her wounds here. Each labored breath brought her closer to death, and I had no hands, no bandages, no way to stop it. I felt a hollow certainty that her child wouldn’t survive without her.

My first connection to the outside world in what felt like months of consciousness, and I was forced to watch this tragedy play out?

I didn’t know if it would work, but I had to try something.

I felt for her in my senses, not just with my perception but with my mana itself, pushing it towards her, trying to claim her as I did with stone. I hadn’t been resting for long, and was working with a limited pool of mana, but I didn’t have a choice. If I could repair walls and floors, maybe I could do the same for her.

I felt a resistance to my push, something I’d not felt with the stones, and I understood that it was the wolf’s own mana, a proud and wild thing. I pushed again, silently begging her to let me help her, and I felt the moment she acquiesced, the resistance fading and my mana surging into her.

I felt the exhaustion wash over me as I parted with nearly everything I had, but almost immediately I felt a flood of mana pour into me from the wolf’s own body. Dozens of times more than I had ever held even when rested, flowing from her to me. The feeling was a revelation, but I didn’t have time to process it.

I ran my senses through her body, finding everywhere that felt wrong to me. Damaged tissue, fractured bone, a severed tendon. It all stood out to my senses, like her mana knew what her body was meant to be, wanted to restore her body to that, but mana on its own could do nothing.

I willed it to be so, allowing her mana to use my intent as a conduit. The fractures in her bone sealed themselves up, her muscles reknit, and I watched the flesh of her flank become whole. She was left with her flank whole and undamaged, although more bald than not.

Her breathing evened out, and she lapsed into unconsciousness with her pup sniffing over her wound and starting to lick clean the matted fur around it. Its little tongue was not making much of a change, but could feel that the two of them were going to be alright.

As for me, the flow of mana from the wolf had slowed, but not stopped. I felt more energized than I had been since before I died, and I was going to make very good use of it.