Parry let Domo stand behind and beside him, hands on his while he steadied the bow.

"Draw strength from your stance," the man advised. "You don't have the arms alone to try a shot like this, but then, no one does. A good archer makes it look like sheer upper-body strength, but it's more than that."

Far in the distance, the target had come to resemble a porcupine, which should have made any bowman proud. Sadly, there were many more arrows scattered near and far. It added up to frustration in Parry that was making his aim all the worse.

"I know how to hit it," he grumbled to his instructor. "I just can't fight the fatigue."

He let fly, and this one hit the hay bale, if not squarely, at least not poorly. Parry looked at his fingers, raw under the glove's leather visible through the holes. His biceps shook and his chest felt like it'd been run over by a cart and six horses.

You're building the muscles you'll need, he tried to reassure himself. This is necessary. Knowing how to shoot isn't the same as having strength and experience to hit the mark. Be patient.

Domo approved of how hard the boy would push himself, but he had no illusions about Parry's abilities. At twelve, no one is a world-class archer.

"That's enough. Run over, gather back the arrows, and come in for dinner."

Parry almost complained, asking for a few more rounds, but he felt the wetness of a burst blister on his fingers, and the sun was almost under the horizon. He nodded and jogged to the target, stuffing hundreds of arrows into his enchanted quiver.

The evening saw Parry in his bed, his last candle out. Salve of Winterroot did its work on his fingers and his heel, where days of hard running had opened a sore. Tomorrow morning there'd be an even further run: he was pushing lungs and heart as hard as he was his muscles and mind. Time was the enemy, he had to get stronger.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The sting of the ointment made sleep difficult, the night-blindness robbed him of his real-world sight. It was a relief to step into his mind, and an excuse to check in on his other project.

Parry wouldn't use the demon for everything. One had to stretch and work ones magic or it would never grow, like anything else. But the boost he could wring out of the little imp did him worlds of good, accelerating much of his shaper practice and even his physical improvement. It was a lucky early acquisition, if a foul-mouthed one.

He peered into the memory well.

It was empty.

Parry snapped up, scanning the surface of his knowledge, that seemingly endless plane, miles and miles in every direction, featureless to the distant walls...nothing.

"Impossible!"

In his own thoughts, he didn't really have a body, it was a useful fiction, but a persistent one. Use anything in your imagination enough and it becomes habit, and then it becomes almost real. Distressingly, right now, that meant a surge of panic and sweaty palms.

He jumped down, hands to either wall, slowing his descent, landing on the floor of the cell: no kitten, no demon, nothing.

Parry pulled out his slate, or at least the mental version of the sigil he'd drawn during the Ritual of the Second Step. The design had changed a little, some of the lines were more substantial, thicker, bolder. Some areas were new, reflecting learned spells and attributes. But there was no real change to the demon and its binding to his soul.

"The damn thing has to be here."

Down to hands and knees, Parry felt around, testing the floor, the walls the--a tear? There was a rent in one of the sides, he could fit his hand through it.

Cursing, he mentally expanded it until it was flush with the bottom of the shaft, then crawled in. A cell of his memory, empty, except for...another tear in the far wall.

"Oh no."

The next cell was empty. And the next. There were tears in the floor, leading down. Then the left, then the right, cell after cell, empty except for the rip leading to the next. Parry crawled as fast as he could, using the fissures like blazes on a trail, following the devastation, the burrow of empty cells that randomly bored through his memories.

He caught up with the demon just as it was devouring a memory. The calico kitten looked bloated and its eyes sparkled with mischief and triumph.

"Hello, Parry," the thing purred around a smile, swallowing the spark of knowledge from the cell. "...Martin. Your middle name is 'Martin.' How adorable."