Ozzy didn’t sleep at all. How could he after the discoveries he’d made? Any time he tried he found himself seeing stars in his mind. Then he’d end up getting back up and making some actual little twinkling lights around the room. He tried all kinds of variations. Size, shape, color as well as methods of creation. Over the course of the night he’d become intuitively familiar with the different speeds he needed for certain colors. Enough that he could almost immediately create the color he desired with a little preparation and wind up time. He’d tried to spin a ball of energy up to speeds comparable to the inertia experienced at the rate of vibration he got light at. That had technically worked. Although instead of a consistent color it gave a gradient due to the difference in speeds on the surface of the sphere. A cylinder gave a more consistent color. He’d then set up a contraption to set a cylinder to spinning independently at the ceiling and lit up the room.

The light shining in the dark room made him realize he was starting to create something like spells now. Sure he’d made what amounted to an almost living creature already, and that was amazing. Yet this reminded him of casting a ball of light spell and sticking it to a surface. He’d been able to reconstruct a similar effect based solely on experimenting with elementary reactions with the world. It was somehow more fulfilling to him than the other things he’d done so far. The difference might be that this was the first time he was doing something other than simply moving either his domain or something else with his domain. The first time he was creating some effect in the world that couldn’t also have happened by him simply moving the thing himself. The first thing that could justify him investing so much effort into improving his domain rather than just improving his body as Cederick had. It was a long awaited vindication. Well that or, he might just be nostalgic in a way for finally creating a spell he’d seen in popular culture his whole life and could relate to.

There was nothing to say it couldn’t be all of the above. Though he felt the relation to past expectations was a large factor. Not much of anything in his new paradigm could be equated to anything he was familiar with back home. The environment, physics, space itself, and even the people were all strange. Finding something he could point to as familiar was so refreshing. He even spent a bit miming some spell hand gestures as he made another light. He was pretty sure he looked ridiculous but there was no one to rain on his parade. The goofing off continued until he combined his two new skills and flew up to the ceiling while holding two mage lights in his hands while also crooning his best impression of Led Zeppelin’s iconic vocals. Hoping he was giving angelic vibes instead of harpy screeching and awkward floating.

Laughing to himself he realized he was going fully loopy from lack of sleep as he sat back down. There was no sense in trying to sleep once you stayed up half the night already so he set back to testing things out. Since he’d already familiarized himself with the frequency of several different colors he tested other things. Different sized blobs of energy, different shapes. He’d narrowed it down to really only needing a thin sheet to create light so shaped the sheet into stars, circles, and squares. He also tried doing multiple colors at once. Realizing as he did so, if he made squares small enough and with enough colors he could make images or even videos if he could change the colors fast enough. Currently it still took far too long to adjust to the initial color and between them for video to work.

Though that reminded him of his earlier assumption. That while this was resulting in the light he was hoping for, it wasn’t the end game. There was something else going on here. Another step he needed to take to make this faster and more efficient. With his familiarity of the process growing he was able to absentmindedly adjust to different colors and shapes while he focused on what he’d been detecting previously. He felt the discharging of energy on the rebound over and over again as he adjusted the colors. Getting a feel for exactly what was happening. Growing the sheet and shrinking it to compare and contrast exactly the way the energy’s release happened. Until he was ready to try a new method.

Preparing a new small sheet of energy he encapsulated it with his will and held the feeling from each of the multitude of emissions he’d watched. Injecting the held feeling he didn’t see anything from the sheet other than its disappearance. What he did see was from the door where the square was facing. A chunk the size of the sheet exploded into splinters as what he suspected was the entirety of the energy of the sheet in photon form collided with it, was absorbed, and heated it to, and beyond, the boiling point. With as much energy as was released he suspected some small parts of the wood sublimated instantly into a gas causing the explosion.

This was exactly the reason he was still facing the larger faces of the sheet to the sides. The result was a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t the goal. He’d been holding the feeling of releasing energy and focusing on it without any refinement. Going back to his variations of different colors, shapes, and sizes he narrowed them down to a nice green color. He did repeat other colors but as a contrast to what he wanted to create. He also focused this time on the amount of energy being released. As well as the near continuous nature. Repeating the process over and over until he could bring forward the feeling at a moment's notice. Returning to a sheet with no vibration he applied what he’d learned. Combining the color, energy level, and the consistency into a single feeling and watching the results. Shining onto the door was now a nice, bright emerald green color, no vibration necessary.

The light, while bright, wasn’t blinding, and most importantly wasn’t blowing a hole in the door. He examined the sheet of energy and the rate it was decaying. While there was still energy drain, it was a trickle compared to the small stream from vibration. It would last days like this. Reabsorbing the energy he created a half sphere and recreated a slightly different intent. This time with a different color, the emission on the spherical portion, and a few added layers for functionality. Affixing the resulting construct to his ceiling he released his hold on it and mentally told it ‘on’. A soft yellow glow lit up the shack and he smiled to himself. With another mystical replacement for a modern convenience in the bag Ozzy felt another wave of accomplishment wash over him.

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He’d even weaved in motion detection and a timer. The light would go off if no motion was detected inside of the shack for about an hour. He’d also added a switch he could mentally flip to switch it on or off. If it was in the ‘on’ position but the timer had expired any new motion would turn it back on and restart the timer. With the way he had it set up and the size it would last easily a few months. Maybe more like a year. Ozzy pulled out his notepad and used the new light to jot down a few of the more important bits of information he’d garnered. While he was pretty sure he’d never forget what he’d just done, the particulars would definitely fog over time. With the notes coming together he realized he was penning his first spellbook.

With the new rush of success he had an even harder time getting to bed and ended up staying up well past the transition to day. The light peeking through the new hole in his door brought on a glut of exhaustion. He’d never understood why the human body worked that way. Once you got that second wind it pushed and pushed until it saw the light of day, then suddenly it gave out on you. Telling you to go to bed right when you should be ready to get up. He was still young though. Maybe it was something you grew out of. Thankfully he had no obligations today, or any day really. Switching off his new light he laid back and let sleep take him.

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Waking up groggily with what felt like a pounding headache. He felt around at his nightstand for his water cup and took a sip to help wake him up and maybe ease the pain. Which is when he realized he wasn’t actually feeling pain. The pounding in his head was his haven repeatedly alerting him with more pressure than it ever had before. There had to be something absolutely monstrous out there for it to be so frightened. Drawing his new full body suit and spears to him he melded it around himself while lifting himself from the. As he readied himself he also turned part of his focus outside his shack and examined the surroundings. It was a little more difficult now that he’d expanded so much. It wasn’t helping that his haven was still metaphorically slapping him in the face and yelling danger every half second. Pushing a sense of awareness and calm to the haven he was glad to feel the haven’s incessant prodding lessen, but not stop entirely.

Despite the relative peace and quiet allowing him to look more thoroughly he still wasn’t seeing anything to indicate something was in the haven. Taking another pass he started with the quadrant his shack was in as it had the least amount of tiles. Then the empty field of random tiles opposite his only building. The lack of anything growing taller than a few inches made it almost as easy to confirm there was nothing moving about despite the much larger section. Then the quadrant with his small garden of wheat, sugarcane, the cotton flowers he’d moved there, and the other plants. Again nothing stood out. The little grove he’d made was the most difficult section to check, but it wasn’t that large. It was only after looking through it twice that he realized he hadn’t been checking the underside of his haven.

However, a quick sweep of the three empty quadrants found not a single thing out of the ordinary. Carefully combing through the trees on the underside yielded the same results. Trying again, and again, he checked the underside and topside several times. There was absolutely nothing in the haven he hadn’t already seen. Tentatively he reached out to his haven itself and tried for the first time, a more direct communication. ‘What danger?’ he sent quizzically. The response came back so urgently that he felt his head turn before he even realized it had come. ‘There!’ The haven’s response reverberated through his head as it turned seemingly on its own. His head now looking at the north east with its empty field he nearly asked again when he saw it. On the horizon past the tiles was… nothing. A glitch in the shining daylight. Not a starry night as might be expected if his scheduled changes were coming on, but a hole into the void between havens.

Staring at the anomaly, it appeared to be a gash in the membrane surrounding the haven. As if it’d been sliced right through. The edges fluttered a bit as he watched as air escaped. He hadn’t noticed before, but a breeze was rushing toward that side of the haven. His groggy morning mind was struggling to parse what he was seeing and understand what he should do about it. The havens were able to react and change their membranes. His foggy mind couldn’t understand why it wouldn’t repair the damage on its own. He was about to reach out and ask when something changed. The whole world twisted. He felt like he was a pearl at the bottom of a clam that had just been pried open. The rent in the side of the haven appeared to have ripped open the sky from east to west then splayed the haven wide.

The emptiness above and around him was an oppressive nothing. Not the nothing of space, but a true void that was pulling at him from every angle. The feeling was that it desired to pull every fiber of his being apart then splay the ends of each fiber. Tearing even fundamental strings into bits until there was literally nothing left. The impression was so strong that as he froze he almost didn’t see the real danger. A small portion of the expanse wasn’t the same kind of nothing. It reached out with something like his domain, only not. Like a tongue or tentacle it wrapped around one of the random tiles in the field and forcefully jerked it out. As it did so the haven warped back closed. The rent shrinking back to its original size.