For whatever reason, it took some time to warm Verin up to the idea of sleeping on mummy bandages. It didn’t help that once Cal learned of what I’d done, she’d laughed about it for days, only adding to Verin’s trepidations. In the end, though, between a comfortable mattress and a floor, there could only be one winner. As if calmed by the mattress’s comfort, she began to leave her room more, even if only to return to her earlier single-minded training.
If perhaps I didn’t end up telling Verin about the bandages’ other properties, then that was between me and the gods.
With Verin taken care of, I turned my efforts to myself, slowly repeating the process on my home-improvement days to make a second bed. Despite not really needing one, Cal requested a third, and then past that, I figured we could use some comfier furniture for the common room. The cloth wasn’t rigid enough to properly turn into a couch -- at least not with my skills -- but after filling large enough sacks with fur and feathers, the end result could generously be considered a sort of bean bag. It even earned me a new skill.
You have learned a new skill: Clothworking.
In the midst of making all that, I tried to replace my battered clothing. The aesthetics of anything I wore didn’t matter all that much considering I tended to wear my clothes under my armor, and for my first attempts, I leaned into that spirit. This caused me to look a lot like a mummy myself, and then after a few more trials, like some sort of street fighter who wrapped up their arms.
It didn’t help that I lacked any real sort of thread or yarn, instead relying on thinly cut strips of bandages and needles I summoned with Arcane Armament. Still, bit by bit my skills grew. While I never ended up earning a separate Tailoring skill, well before I’d finished my or Cal’s mattress, the skill had climbed to level 3.
With my home-improvement days all figured out for a while, I turned my efforts towards my training days. Two skills in particular received the brunt of my focus.
The first was nothing new: Spatial Magic. Maybe I was feeling pessimistic, but after our lackluster performance in the desert palace, I wasn’t much liking our chances of escaping this place by freeing the grand magus. That left my own magic.
Now able to funnel spatial mana into my weapons, armor, and shoes, I was having little problem powering through the novice levels. Already, the skill sat at level nine.
On the surface, the second skill I trained was a bit stranger: Breath Control.
Why Breath Control? Because I’d recently discovered what it felt like to slowly drown in a sand pit. Had the journey from the top of the desert to the palace taken much longer, I would have died just like that. It would be an embarrassing way for it to end, and on top of that, it was one of the few defensive weaknesses I had left, so I figured I would spend some time on it. All of that was doubly true if we ever wanted to cross the water to our south, too.
As an added bonus, it was very, very easy to train.
The initial skill had required me to be in an environment where it wasn’t possible to breath, like underwater. Leveling the skill up, however, had no such restrictions. All I had to do was… hold my breath.
I had some sense that consistently holding your breath, on and off again, all day long was supposed to be unthinkably unpleasant. It was here that I found an unexpected bonus to my broken mental state. When it came to the discomfort from holding my breath too long, I just… didn’t care that much?
Sure, it didn’t feel good, but who cared? If anything, it was the other way around. Whenever I grew conscious of my own breath, it was breathing that required effort. Not breathing only required me to do nothing.
As it so happened, nothing was something I was very good at doing.
What started as a training-day-only practice soon grew into something I did around the clock, resulting in the skill skyrocketing upwards faster than any other I’d ever had. A common skill, it didn’t require much to level, either, and before I knew it, the skill had already hit the Initiate rank. The augment was a fairly lackluster flat bonus to my lung capacity, but I would take whatever I could get. Besides, even if the skill wasn’t class-aligned, I had a feeling it wouldn’t take too long to get the next augment.
Those two skills, for all the effort I put into training them, were not the only two to level either. There were, after all, a few skills I had that were forced to work whether I tried to use them or not. Directly after an almost manic surge of Clothworking productivity, I’d retreated to my hidden cave for a rest day. After sleeping for even longer than usual, I awoke feeling more clear-headed than I was used to.
Soul Resistance has reached level 8!
Mental Resistance has reached level 15!
The dual levels were the first set of unabashedly good news I’d gotten in a while. The skills’ leveling speed had been slowing down for a while, to the point that I was worried they’d stopped entirely. To have both level in a single night was an unexpected blessing.
In fact, maybe it’s time…
In all the months that I’d been stuck here, there was only truly one thing that I’d been avoiding. Not the heat of the desert or the claws of the panthers. Not fighting my way through hordes of gryphons. Not even the much more terrifying prospect of holding a long conversation.
No, if there was one single thing I’d yet to do, it was return to my mental space.
After all, why bother? My mind was wrecked. I knew that already. I didn’t need a constant reminder, and my last trip there hadn’t been particularly sunny or pleasant.
On the flip side, it was the site of my one Legendary skill. More than that, there was a chance it had healed a good bit by now, right? My resistances had continued to creep upwards, and as they always say, time heals all wounds. I’d gone from mutely staring at the ground to cooking dinners and building houses. I played card games now! Things had changed. With two extra levels at once, maybe I was practically better, in fact!
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Holding on to that sense of optimism with all my might, I decided to take the plunge. All at once, the cave disappeared, replaced by the pervasive darkness of my mental space.
A single look around told me all that I needed to know.
“Oh.”
To say that my mental space was completely unchanged would have been a lie. There was a difference. The last time I’d been here, the floor had been a mess. The unblemished ground of the original skill had been transformed into a wobbly latticework of black plates, tied together with thick purple lines. Each of them used to tremble with my every footstep, making it feel as though I was about to fall into oblivion.
That… hadn’t fully changed. But it was starting to, I thought.
A few of those plates had fused together. Others had pulled one another closer, leaving fewer large gaps to fall into. Sturdier, the ground didn’t wobble as much with my passing. It was… progress. Slow progress, but there was no doubt about it. My skill clearly showed that I was getting better.
At the same time, sometimes progress only served to highlight how impossibly far off a goal was. I picked up one of the many jagged rocks that filled the space, turning it over in my hands. It was not lost on me that nothing had happened to the rubble in my absence.
Whether by instinct or from some feedback of the Stygian Citadel skill, I knew without a doubt that no amount of resistances would touch them. The floors -- the broken foundation of my mind -- might continue to heal, but the rest of it needed something more. The walls and the palace weren’t coming back. The very best I could hope for was a barren, empty void where my mind had once been.
I could hope for a little more improvement, but my emotions would be forever muted. My energy levels weren’t going to fully return. My sense of self was permanently shattered. I’d known that the first time I’d seen the damage, but naively, I’d hoped to be proven wrong.
True healing would take more powerful magic than I had access to.
Even as I had that thought, I found myself coming to a stop.
Why does that sound so strange, though? A powerful sense of wrongness started to nag me. Was I missing something? I wasn’t sure just how long I stood there before it finally hit me.
Since when did I believe mental problems could only be solved with magic?
In another life, the realization would have forced a laugh out of me. Just how off the rails had everything gotten that magic was my first thought?
Many, many moons ago, in what felt like several lifetimes ago, I’d been a therapist.
Now, there were a lot of misconceptions about what that meant. Friends and family often joked that I could use what I’d learned to magically make myself happy all the time. Others seemed to think that my master’s degree had turned me into some social Sherlock Holmes, capable of psychoanalyzing everyone I met, reading their minds and triumphing in every social setting.
The truth, in some weird way, was closer to the opposite. It had long been a running joke in my program that half the people who got a Psychology degree were there to figure out what was wrong with them. The other half were people who’d had awful experiences with therapists in the past, vowing that they could do the job far better. The program hadn’t been some shining utopia filled with only the mentally healthiest of citizens. Most of the therapists I’d known had therapists of their own, and at various points in my life, I’d been no exception.
Not that it always helped. There were dozens of different frameworks for approaching the field, and on top of that, some therapists truly just sucked. I liked to believe I hadn’t been that bad, but there was no denying that it hadn’t been my calling. Plus, even if I had been god’s gift to mental health, I’d been much more focused on clinical depression and anxiety than I had been on PTSD and complex trauma. This was not my ballpark to begin with.
All that to say, there was no paragraph I could read out of a textbook that would suddenly cure me, nor was there some perfect, set, step-by-step solution. What it did mean, though, was something much simpler.
I’d been a therapist. Fundamentally, I believed that talk therapy was good.
Trauma Suppression had kept me from seeking it out, the skill fighting against the very idea of examining my trauma more closely. After it broke, it had taken me months before I could even think about my mental state.
Now, though? I’d have been lying if I said the idea thrilled me, but maybe it had some merit. Even if there wasn’t a convenient licensed therapist I could call up, maybe just the act of talking about some of my problems might bring me a measure of comfort.
The real question is who to talk to, though? Not Cal. Or Verin. In their own ways, I was sure that both would try to help. Both would listen. A large portion of my actions since arriving here had been aimed at not letting them know just how messed up I still was. They needed “Tess, incredible fighter and dependable party member,” not “Tess, one bad moment away from breaking down at any opportunity.”
With that in mind, the answer was somewhat obvious. Within moments, I left my quiet cave and started the long journey back to the prairie. When I returned, rather than alerting the others, I located the hole in the ground that I’d descended only once before. After one trip down the long spiraling hallway, I made my way deep into the massive chamber and its unbelievably complex spell diagrams.
At last, I came to a stop before the room’s chained occupant, taking a comfortable seat before him.
“Hi Sett. Verin said we’re not supposed to bug you. I think you’re sleeping though. Are you going to wake up if I talk?” When the grand magus did not immediately open his eyes and start peppering me with battle magic, I took that as a sign to continue. “Nice. Anyway. I decided I need therapy. I’m going to start by talking to you.”
Admittedly, a big part of therapy was talking to someone and having them respond, but there was a lot of good that could come from getting things off your chest. Unmoving, unable to judge me, and without much better to do, Sett would be the perfect sounding board for now.
“Where do I even start?” Already, this was the most I’d talked in ages. Though I knew it wasn’t possible with my Constitution, it felt like my throat was hoarse from surpassing its atrophied limits. “Actually, I think I have a pretty good spot.” Maybe later, I’d dig deeper and talk about my family. Friends I was missing and would never see again. Comfort foods I had no hope of ever tasting. For now, though, there was something simpler.
“In a weird way,” I began, “it all sort of starts with this elderly dog named Duke…”
----------------------------------------
From there on out, Cal, Verin, and I settled into our new normal. Cal would continue to roam about, rarely at the cabin. Verin would train her ice magic all day long. I would stick to my schedule, occasionally making time to sneak off and babble to Sett. If not deeply transformative, it was helping, I thought. Outside of that, the three of us would schedule occasional celebratory nights where we let loose, drank some moonshine, and played some cards.
With our collective reluctance to challenge the rest of the dungeon again, I could see us falling into this routine for months if not years at this point. After all, what else was there to do?
It came as something of a shock then, when Cal decided to drop a bombshell on us one day.
In fairness, if anyone had something of interest to report, I’d have expected it to be her. Especially with the recent revelation that the dungeon was host to countless secrets, I wouldn’t have put it past her to scrounge up something interesting. It was, then, even more surprising when, instead of telling us something she’d found, she came up with a strange proposal.
At the end of dinner and after sneakily getting us to agree to a few moonshine shots, she struck.
“So, I know this is going to be an unpopular position, but just hear me out. I’ve been doing some thinking, and…” Uncharacteristically for the usually bold and unflappable rogue, she fidgeted around with each word. “I think I should sunder my class.”
Before we could even react, she one-upped herself, turning her attention to Verin.
“And along with me, I really think Verin should too.”