I didn’t quite remember how exactly I made it down the mountainside when I woke up in the middle of the night, lying in a shallow puddle. Of course, it was raining again. It was surprisingly soothing.

Everything just hurt. My lungs hurt with every shallow breath. My paws hurt from roasting on the hot ground up in the caldera and the wild dash down from there afterwards. And the right side of my body was just a continuous area of constantly firing pain receptors, where it was swelling and blistering, and numbness, where it was charred black completely. Even my neck frill got some of it. I couldn’t see it obviously, but it felt not much better than the rest.

My beautiful ember scales were cracked and pus was seeping out practically everywhere. That didn’t look good at all. And I doubted the dirty water around me was exactly beneficial. I ached far too much to move, though. I was this battered and I didn’t even really fight. I just startled the elemental spirit. It didn’t even directly aim at me. How was I ever supposed to survive an encounter with them?

Well, I had to shelf that question for future me now. I found them. I knew where to come back to later after I figured out how not to keel over and die merely standing next to them first.

Job… partially done?

It didn’t matter. I wouldn’t do anything much but slowly heal for the foreseeable future. At least if I didn’t succumb to my wounds in the process. And eating. I supposed that was kinda important, wasn’t it? I’d get to that as soon as I could figure out how to move without feeling like I was tearing my skin off. Promise.

I cautiously turned my head to glance at the stump of my left hind leg. If that was able to heal back to full functionality, I should recover from these burns as well. In time. But I had nothing but time now anyways. As if I wasn’t bored enough, to begin with. Now I couldn’t even move properly. This would be just great, wouldn’t it?

Maybe I could use the time to sift through the rest of the mess that were previous me’s memories?

Nah. That would just depress me even more.

I could give magic another try though. I supposedly had an affinity with water. At least a bit. Whatever that specifically meant I had no clue. But if I remembered right, water was traditionally linked to healing in lots of mythology and esoteric drivel. The problem was, I didn’t get very far with my previous attempts at manipulating what I thought to be magic energy. Well, it wasn’t like I had something else to do to keep me occupied.

My stomach growled at that thought. Well maybe after I managed to stand up and find myself some breakfast.

When I finally felt satiated the sun was already about to set again. It took me the better part of the morning to just figure out how to move without croaking in agony. The final answer? Slowly. Very. Slowly. Then I tried to dig around in the underbrush and soil but that turned out nearly impossible for the time being.

So what did I eat in the end? Bland mushrooms and the occasional larva or worm hiding inside them. It wasn’t great but I was full and I really didn’t care all that much at the moment. I didn’t really have an appetite anyways. Pain can do that to you, or so I’ve heard.

The rain returned on schedule and I settled down for the night, trying my luck with meditative breathing exercises again. Hopefully this time I’d be able to stay awake for once. I followed the energy with my senses while taking deep and controlled painful breaths. As far as I could tell I still didn’t manage to influence it, but when I awoke the next morning my lungs felt remarkably better and if I was careful, shallow breathing nearly didn’t hurt at all anymore.

Now, I doubted that I healed that fast naturally or I’d been a fully functioning quadruped again weeks ago. Did I do something with the magic last night? Or did it do that on its own just by being part of the air I inhaled? I tried to sense it again, but since it didn’t rain anymore the saturation seemed not quite enough for me to grasp. I still could feel the energy circulating inside of my body though. Maybe it would be easier if I submerged myself in water?

I checked my profile for the first time since the day I’d gotten it.

Species: Scalamander

  Breed: n/a

  Sex: female

  Age: 126 days

Designation: none

  Aliases: Sweetie, Pesky Rascal  

  Titles: none

Occupation: Vagabond

Blessings: Champion of Memory

Traits: none

Affinities: Water (weak)

    Earth (traces)

Proficiencies: Swimming (basic)

      Hiking (basic)

Quests: Fire-Scalamander

Notes: empty

No hints there to what I was missing either. At least I wasn’t seen as ‘proficient’ in anything magic-related yet. So maybe I didn’t do anything after all? Or it just wasn’t enough to count?

All good questions I’d really like to have been able to ask someone. Preferably a certain someone who sent me down here with a stupid suicidal quest, no explanations, no directions and no reward.

Feeling quite aggrieved I glared at the sky.

After eating a bit, I found a deep puddle to lie down in. I brought my tail up around me, rested my head on it so it stayed out of the water and continued my breathing exercises while following and trying to nudge the energy flowing in and around my body with my senses. The water surrounding me helped a bit, but not very much. I only felt like I made progress again once another storm came through in the early afternoon.

I thought I could feel the healing boost in my lungs this time. With each breath, there was a small spike of vitality. Now I only had to figure out how to replicate this with my burnt skin.

It took me six days. Six days in which I only left the puddle to eat enough not to starve.

My lungs stopped hurting on day five. After that, the vitality spikes got smaller and smaller. I already feared I had missed my chance to learn something from them, but soon after, focusing on the ever more tiny spikes must have increased my perception somewhat.

Because suddenly I saw how the energy was being guided by the breath itself. Not from inside of my body, meaning my flesh, but from the moisture in the air in my lungs. I wasn’t able to influence it after entering my tissue. So I began and tried to replicate this effect with all the water in the puddle.

Watching the starry sky relatively unimpeded by a dense canopy was something I could get used to, I decided. Too bad, that even out of the thick forest swamp it was hidden by clouds most nights. It still helped with my meditation exercises. Or at least it seemed that way to me. The sight was very relaxing in any case.

Gazing at the sky every night also let me take a good look at the moon of this new reality. It had a bluish-purple tint. Was that called indigo? Consulting previous me’s memories about that only told me that I hadn’t been interested enough in colours back then to recognize the difference. It was just a light tint anyway. So who knew what part of the colouration were deviations of the reflected sunlight, which parts were changes in the composition of the atmosphere and what was just due to my very different operating eyes.

What I did find out in the process of pondering on this though - in nights without rain, when I couldn’t practice - was that the moon was going through its phases a bit faster than I was used to. It seemed like it might not have been bigger now, but actually a little closer.

At least figuring that out gave me some semblance of success, because I absolutely stagnated on the magic front.

Another half dozen days had passed and all I got for my efforts was an enormous headache. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to influence the murky liquid in my - by now - little pool at all.

Frustrated, I submerged my head underwater to alleviate a bit of my migraine, when I suddenly felt the response of the energy in the water surrounding me pick up tremendously. Shocked by the sensory overload I lifted my head into the air again. Immediately the new feedback strength was gone.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Very confused now, I looked around. Not sure if I’d imagined it. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. And my headache was still killing me. So I slowly lowered my head back down. As soon as the crest of my neck frill touched the water, the sensation was back.

Could it have been that simple? A kind of magic organ that helped as soon as it came into contact with the substance I wanted to control? Well, I did notice the higher concentration of energy in my neck shield before. But that was true for my lungs and heart as well so I didn’t read too much into that. The frill had been my gills once. So maybe this was just an extension of a former function into some kind of ‘magic water breathing’?

In the end, it didn’t really matter to me how or why it worked exactly. It was only important that I finally made some progress and that I could now try to steer the abundant magic in the puddle into my wounded body parts.

I succeeded! I healed myself… very, very slowly. Again I wasn’t sure how much to attribute to my natural healing and how much was thanks to my new efforts since I already had healed up a bit before I had this breakthrough. But after only a few more days I felt well enough to eat properly again.

I wasn’t yet anywhere near being whole again of course, but I really needed to get back to eating adequate amounts of food. I had lost a lot of weight over the past moon and felt way too weak to still consider myself as ‘sufficiently nourished’. I also began to notice a negative impact on the speed and focus of my thoughts and I couldn’t have that!

So I stumbled around the bottom of the volcano and, in time-honoured tradition, gobbled up any little tasty morsel that crossed my path.

It was glorious.

I almost could watch the energy levels of my body rising and soon enough I went into a euphoric eating frenzy.

Nothing around was big enough to be a threat to me as long as I stayed out of the water and kept away from the swamps further downhill. I glanced up towards the summit now and then, but other than the steady smoke and nightly light show nothing came from up there either. So absolutely nothing stopped me from completely gorging myself to the limit. And maybe a tiny little bit over it?

Suffice to say, I didn’t practice the following night. I just slept off my food coma.

From then on learning magic was a pretty steady process. As much as you could call a snail moving forward without stopping anywhere for all too long ‘steady’.

I couldn’t complain too much though, because I could now practice whenever I could submerge my head in water and didn’t have to wait for the next storm to come through to continue to patch myself up. That sadly was also all I could do with it for the time being. It wasn’t bad in any way to be able to heal faster, but using the water like that also seemed to deplete it of magic energy bit by bit.

Another look at my profile confirmed my suspicion.

Proficiencies: Swimming (basic)

      Hiking (basic)

      Energy Absorption (basic)

It looked like I didn’t do any magic at all until now. I just… ate it? I apparently wasn’t able to raise my affinity through that either. At least not to a noticeable degree. It still read ‘Water (weak)’ there. That was kind of a bummer, to be honest. It didn’t deter me at all from continuing to try though. Not after getting so far on my own. I really was a genius after all.

First I concentrated mainly on trying to manipulate the water in the immediate proximity of my neck frill. I tried to manipulate it to stay attached to my skin there whenever I emerged from my little pool.

That was somewhat successful until I noticed that it only stayed there as long as I kept absorbing the magic from it and then ran back down after I depleted it enough.

Next, I tried to catch the rain in a similar fashion, hoping that it would refill the energy faster than I could absorb it. That kind of worked, but it didn’t really help me with not absorbing it in the first place.

Then I finally had the first success when, for what felt like the millionth time, I was trying to just swirl the water around my head a bit while I stayed submerged. When I noticed, I first thought something came to my puddle to drink, causing a few ripples. But when I was looking for the source, already preparing for an afternoon snack, I couldn’t find it.

Instead there was a weak current circling my neck frill that suddenly just stopped when I lost focus. I resumed my last exercise, thinking of swirling motions, and the current picked back up.

Suffice to say, I was absolutely ecstatic!

I had done it! I could make water move with my thoughts! I was a genius! Well, the last thing wasn’t news to me but now I could prove it to anyone who’d dare doubt me!

Of course, it still didn’t become easier after that. My profile now read:

Proficiencies: Swimming (basic)

      Hiking (basic)

      Energy Absorption (basic)

      Ambient Energy Manipulation (basic)

But all I really could do was to cause little ripples in my pool. Every time I attempted to lift a bubble of water out into the air or I moved the water too far away from the back of my head, I lost control of it immediately. When I tried to prevent that, all I got for my efforts was a splitting migraine.

However, the more I practised the better my control became. Days began to blur into each other. The moon rushed through its phases. I didn’t bother keeping track. Every little advancement in my control of energy manipulation felt liberating.

I hadn’t noticed just how much confidence in myself I had lost after being burned in that caldera, after losing my leg to that stupid spike pike, after climbing that damn tree way back at the beginning of this fruitless journey. Of course, I had found the spirits, but where did that get me exactly?

But now I really was accomplishing something. My leg had grown back, my burns had healed nicely and I was confident the scars would fade with time as well. And now I even had magic! Sort of.

I couldn’t shoot water jets or ice spikes quite yet. I didn’t even figure out how to cool something down to make ice, to begin with, to be honest. But I did manage to throw bubbles of water over a small distance. That also was how I caught my first dragonfly!

It took days of target practice, after finally having enough control and range to be able to give the water ball a sufficient amount of momentum before just letting it fly. I used this old charred and broken tree trunk at first, aiming at the different mushrooms growing from it. I only started throwing from a body length away or so, but still I drenched everything but my targets for an embarrassingly long time.

I got better! And eventually, I tried myself at shooting down flying insects. Which earned me my first dragonfly. I was quite disappointed to report that it tasted quite… ordinary. It was pretty big, but most of that were the wings that really tasted like nothing at all. And the rest was just the usual crunchy, juicy bug flavour I already knew from other insects. Nothing special really.

It gave me cravings for crayfish though. Maybe I could risk returning to a river after I learned a bit more water magic?

That was how my stomach decided my next project after the water bullet. Something defensive. A water shield or a whirlpool? And maybe something cutting? Water was supposed to be able to cut well, right? But on second thought, this ought to require a lot of pressure. So that would probably still be a bit further off. Something for future me then.

After testing a bit, I went with the whirlpool idea. I controlled a ball of water with me as the centre and rotated it around itself as fast as I could. It had obvious weak points at the top and bottom where it didn’t move much at all, but when I tried to fix that, it just messed up the currents and everything unraveled after being torn apart by its own movements.

I tried to fix that with just layering two bubbles into each other. The outer one rotating horizontally and the inner one vertically. Disregarding that I couldn’t keep that up for very long before I got too tired, it also only worked if I was freely suspended with water all around me. I still had to find a way to defend against something from above when I stood on or was too close to the ground.

Before that came days upon days of endurance training though. Magic was exhausting! I had to start taking whole days off from practising because my mind was getting all sluggish. Another component I needed to train if I wanted to get better.

So far I was aware of five provisional categories I could improve in. Intent, focus, control, reach, and now… mental stamina? I’d come up with a better term later.

Intent was basically the strength and clarity of the mental image of what I wanted to achieve. If I didn’t have a clear picture, nothing happened no matter how much I concentrated.

Focus just meant that I had to keep my intent on the forefront of my mind throughout the whole magic process. As soon as I got distracted, everything unraveled and I had to start from the beginning.

Control I used to describe how much magic I could do at once and how precisely I could translate my intent into action.

Reach just determined how far away from my neck shield I still could manipulate Energy. I wasn’t sure yet if this was just another part of control or it’s own thing. It just seemed to improve tiny bit by tiny bit whenever I tried to go over my limit.

And finally, every one of those four caused mental strain whenever I used them. I had yet to figure out if that was due to some resource I spent and the tank emptied with use or if it was more like a muscle getting tired with extended use. Or possibly a combination of both? I’d had to watch my inner energy workings while doing magic to find out more about that, but so far trying to do so immediately caused me to lose focus. So I had to give up on that particular endeavour for now.

Then there also were the affinities. I didn’t find a way to increase them yet. Or change them in any way. Memory’s quest also said something about attunement. But I had no idea whatsoever what that could be about.

Speaking of the quest, I firmly decided to shelf it. If Memory wanted to see me cooked well-done, she could do it her fucking self, thank you very much. I wouldn’t entertain her with aimlessly flailing around for her amusement anymore. At least not without a better reason than ‘Well, I had nothing better to do’.

Because now I indeed had something better to do. Not dying a painful death for one. And two, becoming the best mage there ever was! What did I care about the next ice age? I’d just be reborn somewhere else as something else when the time came. She told me herself, I’d always come back.

Now, how could I let her know about my decision to abandon her quest? I mean, I could wait for her to figure it out herself when I just didn’t do it after a few years. I did have this empty “Notes” section in my profile, I’ve never done anything with, though.

With just a thought it now read:

Notes: Dear Memory, if you can read this, I wanted to let you know that I quit! Your Quest is stupid. I nearly died from merely getting close to one of those spirits. And burning to death was definitely not on the list of things, I really wanted to try out once. So I’ll just do my own thing now. See you when I die, I guess?

Best regards, definitely-not-Sweetie.

Yeah, maybe I still was a tiny bit salty. But I had my own goals now. And I was done with doing things just because she told me to do them.

Next thing on my agenda was procuring some delicious prawns!

Quite satisfied with myself, I took stock of my still scarred but otherwise whole again body. No pain, no aches, everything where it should be. Perfect.

I looked up towards the smoke billowing from the top of the mountain. Then I turned 180° and walked away, downwards into the swamp forest.

Maybe I could follow a river to the coast. There surely must be interesting new things to see there. And the more water there was around, the more I’d have to play with.