I walked back to the inn with a pep in my step. My face hurt from smiling earlier, adding to my already hurting muscles, but I didn’t care, I hadn’t smiled in a long time and it was a relief to know I still could.
My feet moved me while my mind wandered, so it was a surprise when I arrived at Quinces’ temple. The place brought a mix of emotions, the temple was one of the only places that gave me a place to sleep on frozen nights and sometimes even gave me bread. It felt like so long ago that I had been a starving boy on the streets of Ziehrith, with a full stomach and warm shelter it was easy to forget where I was only a few days ago.
The temple had grand marble pillars withs streaks of blue running through them, the roof had motifs of water and waves painting it. The stairs leading up to the entrance were completely blue with water running down the sides that fell from the roof. The massive double doors were open giving a glimpse of the inside. The temple was absolutely massive, dwarfing any of the buildings surrounding it. A constant stream of people was heading into and out of the temple.
I didn’t know how long I stood there admiring the temple, I had seen it in the capital hundreds of times, but never like this, I had always been hungry, staying in the shadows. A voice broke me out of my revelry. “The gods really go overboard with their temples, and everything really; do you know how much the stone the place is made of costs? That is marble infused with water mana, just the stone cost more than a large village.” I turned and surprise, surprise, found Ruther waiting behind me. He was staring up at the temple with a smile that seemed almost sad.
“Come on kiddo, you can go admire architecture another time, but don’t bother worshipping any of them, the gods do not deserve your time or power, least of all your worship.” A few of the people around us gave Ruther angry looks but none of them said anything. Of course, Ruther hated the gods, he seemed to dislike them all. I had heard horror stories about gods, evil corrupt gods that forced their worshipers to do evil things, driving them to madness, but Quince was good, his priests gave me food when no one else did.
“Not all gods are bad, Quince is one of the good ones, he helps the poor and homeless.” I tried to put as much vehemency into my words as I could, but Ruther just let out a sigh and dropped his eyes from the temple onto me.
“Power corrupts, and gods are too young to fully control it. Their worshiper's minds very slightly infect their gods, it is a very small influence but it adds up over thousands of years and millions of worshipers, driving them mad. I can see you don’t believe me but you are still young and do not know the full truths of the world, you will come around or you will not, that is up to you to decide.” For the first time since I had seen Ruther, he did not seem to be energetic or jovial, just slightly sad sounding. Even when the mages destroyed his potion, he was still full of energy.
I tried to come up with a retort, but nothing came, his difference in attitude shook me.
“This place is insidious, and I can feel it already has a grip on you. Best to learn how to remove it, curses are always a pain.” Curse? What was he talking about?
“Yes, curse, did you really thing that they gave away food for nothing? Some gods may not be completely mad, but none are benevolent.” With that, we were back in the garden.
Ruther gave me a basic overture to curses. He said that curses were a very vague term, and that curses were just a specific part of certain magical fields. The main fields that the term curse is applied to were soul magic, blood magic and, depending on who you asked, mind magic.
The curse that was placed on me was from the mind magic school. When he said that I instantly tried to refute him, Quince would never do such a thing. Ruther asked me to say one bad thing about the temple, I tried to think back to one thing, but nothing came up. A sudden wave of dizziness came over me when I pushed harder and I forgot what I was looking for. My mind still didn’t believe I had been cursed, but I decided to play along with Ruther just to prove him wrong.
“You cannot remove a curse while you don’t know anything about the field of magic you are trying to remove the curse from. Since this is a basic curse, you should have the expertise to remove this curse in a week if you put all your effort in learning mind magic, however, learning a new school of magic while you are under that effect of magic is a bad idea. You do not want to examine your cursed mind and thing that the curse is the norm. For now, you can see how I remove the curse and what it looks like.” My vision turned black.
A blinding sphere of light burned into my vision with lines of light flashing across it constantly, surrounded by pitch blackness. I tried to turn my head and look away, but my vision did not move. I panicked as I couldn’t feel my body and tried to swing my arms. I felt a distance feeling, my body was not gone it just felt … very far away. I heard a clear voice even though all my senses were distant.
“Don’t panic, I am just showing a basic way of viewing a mind, in this case, this is your mind in the cognitive plane. Explore around your mind and the plane, tell me when you find the curse.”, I still felt a slight bit of panic, but it was quickly overwhelmed by my sense of wonder. It was beautiful, the soft blue light seemed to convey a feeling I couldn’t put a finger on. Something about it was unlike anything I had ever felt. I couldn’t describe it, felt like a new sense I didn’t know existed, like a new dimension to the world I had never felt.
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As I stared a few more other points of light appeared around my vision, they were small, tiny sparks near the flame that my mind shed. More and more lights appeared until my world was filled with bright spots of light.
I tried to turn my perspective and I felt the entire world shift in a way that would have made me nauseous if I were still connected to my body. I could somehow see everything around me in a full 360 degree’s, but that wasn’t all. I could see through, inside? I didn’t have a description of what I was seeing. I could see through the lights, but not in as in they were transparent, but as if everything was drawn on a sheet of paper and I was looking down at them from above. I could see each individual layer of the ball of light that was my brain. Like it was sliced in a million parts and I could see each part, and how they connected to make up the whole.
There was something else here as well but as a new world opened up to me, my mind couldn’t take it, and everything turned black.
I had no idea when I came too, but I was still in the cognitive realm, everything was back to normal. Well, normal in the context that I wasn’t doing an acid trip while somersaulting in an illusion trap. I could still see all around me at once, I had to focus in on one place, taking in all that sensory input was too much.
I tried to remember what it looked like before, but my mind refused to imagine the confusing memory. I just couldn’t bring up the memory of what it like, even though I had experienced it. Shaking of the disorientation I decided to look around and do what I came here for.
I tried to move forwards - whatever that meant when there was no direction/orientation – and to my surprise, I moved. I raced around the emptiness and, it was surprisingly fun, being able to move however I liked with any restraints. This was probably somewhat how flying felt like.
Circling around my mind it all looked perfect to me. I had a beautiful mind if I do say so myself. When I was about to call Ruther a liar, I found a spot of black on the otherwise perfectly blue-ish white surface. I tried to move closer to it and my perspective zoomed in. As I got closer a sense of revulsion swept across me, it was like looking at someone with warts and puss oozing blisters covering their body, but a hundred time worse.
A voice sounded in my head. “You found it, I told you it was a weak curse. A more powerful curse would be way harder to find. This is the hard part, harder part. It is actually quite easy, but you do not want to mess with your mind when you have no idea what you’re doing.”
A blazing green light manifested, dwarfing the brightness of any other lights in this place. I tried to close my eyes, but I had no eyelids, it shouldn’t even hurt, I was not seeing with eyes. How was the light hurting? I was about to ask when Ruhter beat me to it.
“This is a representation of my mana; I need it to be ‘sharp’ so I need to at a lot of power to it. I’ll block you from the effects, watch closely.” The pain was instantly gone, and I stared down at the light, which I could now see was a knife approaching the blackness on my mind.
As the knife touched the black dot it started burning, releasing black smoke. The knife continued down, severing a large blob of blackness. There were still some pieces of blackness clinging to my mind, so Ruhter shrunk the knife until it was much smaller and proceeded to carefully cut it away.
When it was all gone, I appeared back into my body, stumbling onto my butt.
“What you saw is not what actually happened, but it was a good enough analogy. That plane is too much for your mind to handle, so you see it in a way that you can comprehend. Either way, the curse is gone, now think about something bad about the temple of Quince.” Ruther said.
I tried to think about something bad and nothing came at first, until a recent memory popped into my head. I was sick and hungry, I tried to go to the temple and they kicked me out, literally. I had a bruise for a week.
A wave of flaming anger bloomed deep in my chest. Getting my mind manipulated was one of my greatest fears, and they did it while pretending to be charitable. How had no one done anything about this, mind magic was heavily controlled almost everywhere?!
A smug smile bloomed on Ruther’s face, “Told you gods are pricks. You can have your revenge later, for now, you need to be able to defend against mind magic, getting your mind fucked with is some nasty stuff.” I took to this training with a passion, I would not have my mind messed with again!
My promise was quickly broken as Ruther brought me up on the basics of mind magic and started poking and prodding at my brain. Being forced to do burpees while making chicken noises was not fun. I tried to block him, but it was like trying to stop a boulder without hands while balancing on a tightrope. I could sense his influence – he made it easy to detect – but stopping him was impossible, which made me all the more annoyed.
I could only see a very rudimentary view of what I had seen when I was guided into the cognitive realm, it was more like I could sense a very narrow piece of what was actually there, rather than actually see it. Even that was with a few hours of coaching and intense focus, just holding onto that perception while be forced to do annoying and distracting tasks was extremely difficult. This all meant that I spent more time trying to reach that state where I could feel the cognitive realm, than trying to fight back against Ruther.
When Ruther finally called a holt, I was sweating a downpour and my already sore muscles were having an existential crisis. My voice also hurt from the horrible singing I had done. My mind was on the verge of collapse, the intense concentration completely depleting its energy stores. At the end of the ‘training’, I couldn’t even sense the tiniest thing from the cognitive realm. I had no idea how I was always supposed to keep my mind protected, especially in a fight.
“You did better than I expected, people really struggle to sense that realm as well as you have. Good job.” I instantly brightened at Ruther’s words, I was still annoyed and pissed at him, but he never gave praise, and I felt a swelling in my chest at the thought. If my mind were still functional I would have known something was up.
“You may not have stopped my attempts, but I never planned for you too. That exercise was all about feeling the realm, and there’s no better way to do that than trying to stop an annoying prick from messing with you. Good job on your perseverance, you’ll be a master in no time!” My brain froze for a second, my mind trying to understand what he said.
He never meant for me to be able to block him. He tortured me without giving me a chance to stop him! My mouth opened and closed, no words coming out at my brain overloaded.
“Great job, I’ll see you at the academy tomorrow, don’t be late. Don’t forget to use some body spray, you stink.” With that, he was gone. Only leaving behind a can of body spray that bounced off my head onto my lap.
I was usually a quiet person, I looked down at people who screamed at the slightest provocation. But now I understood their pain, as a scream left my already raw throat.
I lay my head down, planning on cursing Ruther through the night, but the second my head touched the grass I was fast asleep.