Lily opened her red and blue bag and started pulling out the mushrooms as soon as she got to the upstairs office. The mushrooms, she knew from past experience, grew in the odd white light from the dome, but, once plucked, needed to be kept in a dark place otherwise they would turn soft and taste gross. She filled up all the drawers, and put the rest that were still in the bag under the bridge console, so that no light would get to them. It wasn’t the best place, but she could take the bag down to the basement when she went to bed.

Once that was taken care of, she moved to the console and jumped up on it. She slid down the side until she was right up against the window. Once she was there, she turned herself so that she was able to look upwards, towards the dome of light. She moved around until she was comfortable before she took a deep breath to relax.

She took a second to drop into her soul once more, then she looked upwards at the dome of light. The dome looked very different when she looked at it from inside her soul. For one thing it wasn’t as bright as when she looked at it with her physical eyes, and for another thing it was filled with spell balls. Most of them were blurry, but the few that she was able to make out were the same ones she had used in her spells. This was the true first step in creating a spell - finding new spell balls. She didn’t always need new spell balls because she could use the old ones, but the new ones sometimes helped where the old ones failed.

She had a little over two thousand spell balls that she had been able to make out, and were written in her grimoire. She had barely scratched the surface of the thousands of spell balls that were still blurry when she looked at them. She found the best way to learn to see them was just to watch one ball until she started to feel the feeling it was giving off. Once she had that down, then it wouldn’t be long until the shape inside the ball became clear. When she first started to figure them out, it took months to see a single ball. Now, she was able to make a new spell ball out once every three to four weeks.

The problem wasn’t just trying to see the spell balls, it was trying to fit them into a spell. She had only used a few hundred spell balls so far. There were just so many balls that didn’t seem to fit in any spells she tried to create. At times, she found it so frustrating that she wanted to just chuck the whole thing and walk into the light to die, but she had discovered that she was too much of a coward to do that. It took her a long time to be ok with not being able to kill herself. Not that she didn’t get so depressed that she became suicidal again. It came up every now and then, but so far she found she couldn’t go through with it.

The best medicine she found to keep herself sane was to keep herself busy. So she spent hours looking up into the dome of light and trying to find new spell balls that would help her escape the hellhole she was in. After a while she found it easier to just lay here and try to make a new spell ball become clear while at the same time going over the spell balls she knew and trying to make them fit correctly in her head. It helped, somehow, with both seeing a new spell ball clearly and trying to build a new spell.

The light from the dome never went out though. It was always there. It made sitting on the bridge console for hours manageable, but it also made sleeping and trying to keep track of days very hard. She never got a sunburn or anything like that as she lay in the light. She did get sick at first, when she spent too much time in the light, but that was ages ago. Now she could lay in the light as long as she wanted as she tried to make the spell balls clear enough for her to record it in her grimoire.

She let her eyes follow a single spell ball as it bounced off other blurry balls in a mad rush towards its endless dash across the dome. As she did, she thought about the spell she had just created. It wasn’t her first spell breaker. She had already created a few magical spell breakers, but they were very specific in comparison. Like her spell, Flame breaker that broke fire spell barriers or ice barriers - that sort of specificity. It seemed to her that she had gone backwards, though, in creating a physical barrier spell breaker. The dome of light was made out of magic, not a physical thing. Or at least she thought so.

Still, she thought to herself, maybe I’m thinking about this the wrong way. She had tried to create a teleport spell, but so far she had failed. She was not sure if that was a dead end, but after spending so much time on it she decided to move on to trying to dispel the dome. That seemed more reasonable, yet she was still stuck here. Even after creating all those barrier spell breakers.

She had tried to use her cave spell to tunnel out, but that failed, as she discovered that the dome wasn’t so much a dome, but a bubble with half of it under the ground. Flying was out as well, since the dome covered the entire sky. Not that she had discovered a spell that let her fly - she was still trying to work on that when she had time. The closest spell to flying she had was Levitate. It was a really cool spell that raised her up about a foot from the ground, and, if she jumped off the roof of her complex, it slowly lowered her until she was about foot off the ground again. She called the spell Levitate, because, while she hadn’t played D&D her brother had, and she had learned a few things when he had his nerdy friends over at the house.

“Okay. I can’t dispel the dome of light. I can’t teleport through it, nor can I tunnel under it. What’s left besides knowledge spells?” She asked herself, as she watched the spell ball that she had been tracking get stuck when a bunch of balls got bottle-necked in a spot high in the sky. She had tried to create a spell that told her how the dome worked, but all that did was create her area of vision spell.

It was the same question she had been asking for a really long time. So far, she had no idea what else she could do. She knew her pattern by now. She would try to think of a new way to get out then she would invariably go back to trying the old methods. When she failed, she would then try to create some random spell to keep her mind off the fact that she had no idea how to get out of this hellhole.

She thought about knowledge spells as she watched the stupid spell ball break free of the bottleneck and speed off, only to bounce into a similar, fast-traveling ball. The ball then ricocheted off a few other balls. She was still thinking of going back to knowledge spells when she felt a tugging in her chest like something was trying to pull something out. She frowned, but kept her eyes on the ball. She was not sure if it was the spell ball feeling just before it became clear or if it was something else. It wasn’t painful, so she continued watching the ball,afraid if she looked away she would lose sight of it.

One second the symbols on the ball were blurry and the next they were clear as day. Smiling, she sat up and continued to watch the ball. The ball suddenly stopped moving and the tugging got worse in her chest. She couldn’t look away from the frozen ball. It was like it wouldn’t let her. She had never seen a ball stop moving before. Sure, they slowed down sometimes when they got caught up in something, like a bottleneck, but they never stopped. This was something completely different. Then, all of a sudden, something broke free of her chest.

Then she was rising in the air towards the frozen ball. She was paralysed, but, no matter what, she couldn’t take her eyes off of it. The ball was like a magnet, pulling her eyes to look at it. It was like her body... Not her body, her soul - her soul was rising. She had no idea how she knew it. She just knew it was just her soul that was rising, leaving her body behind. She started to panic as she passed right through the glass and into the sky.

As she rose, she could see the other balls bounce off the ball she was unable to look away from the ball in front of her. The ball she was unable to look away from never moved. It stayed where it was as other balls hit it and bounced off. It was something she had never seen before. As she moved toward the ball, it seemed to grow bigger and bigger - another thing she had never seen before. It took her a second to realize it really was growing bigger as the other balls remained the same size they alway were. The spell balls had always been the same size. The only thing that was previously different between them was the feeling and the symbol that was inside of them.

The symbol inside the spell ball that was pulling her into it was two curved lines. The curves of the lines were facing away from each other and were sitting on the top and bottom of the ball. There was an S shape in the center, but it wasn’t a nice, normal S shape, with nice, symmetrical curves. Instead, there were sharp breaks in it, like how people drew lightning bolts on paper. There were four dots, all the same size, littered around the ball, in what appeared to be random areas. In the exact center was a horizontal line connected to two parallel lines that angled off slightly from the center line.

She was examining the symbol when the horizontal line with the two parallel lines started to spin - something else she had never seen before. Symbols never before moved at all except if she moved them. The symbols rotated to face the same way, no matter how she moved them, after she wrote them down either on the wall or in her grimoire. They always face what she had come to term upright. It was kind of like a gyroscope. The outside of the ball moved, but the shape always stayed the same. This symbol had the three lines in the center spinning slowly, but the rest of the lines and dots remained frozen.

Lily’s eyes flickered from the outlying shape of the symbol to the center again as she realized that the shape was spinning faster now. It seemed to Lily like it was a fan sucking her in towards itself. She tried to move. She tried to look away, but everything except her eyes were frozen, paralyzed, as she floated upwards to the ever-growing spell ball. She tried to cry out, but she couldn’t even breathe. The three lines were a blur now, moving so fast that they looked like just a black hole in the center of the spell ball. To her horror, she was being drawn into the spinning symbol. The spell ball was so large it was all she could see now. Then she hit the spell ball and the world exploded.

She had a quick view of endless clouds filled with lightning, then her vision was full of exploding, bright colors. Lily would have screamed if she could have as the colors seemed to try and squish her. What was worse was the feeling that she was falling. She could feel herself falling faster and faster. Unable to move, and feeling like she was being squished. She fell, incapable of moving or even screaming.

The pressure of being squeezed got worse and worse, then her vision cleared up for a split second and she saw that she was in a huge, black whirlpool. It looked like a black hole, like she had seen in movies so long ago, but, unlike the movies, this whirlpool was full of flashing light in the deep blackness. She fell slowly into the whirlpool, slipping inexorably sideways and spinning into the depths. As she fell, she felt the pressure all around her get stronger and stronger until all she could feel was pain while her soul was squeezed into what felt like a tiny, little ball.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Then the pressure was gone and she was free. She floated, with complete darkness all around her, except for when she spun around slowly. Behind her, she saw what looked like a beam of light pouring into the darkness. It was rapidly growing small though, as she floated away from it.

Then she felt like an extremely tiny insect was taking a bite out of her. It caused a brief, sharp pain that quickly disappeared. It was so fast that she almost thought she imagined it. Then she felt another sharp pinch, and then another. Still paralyzed, she was unable to do anything as she felt like a swarm of something in the deep darkness ate her alive as she drifted. There was no sense of movement anymore. The only thing she felt was the biting of the darkness.

Then, after what felt like forever, she felt like she was falling again. She had a sense of spinning once more. Slowly, a gray haze appeared every so often as she spun in the darkness, falling towards something. The haze slowly got bigger and bigger as she fell towards it. The grayness wore away and became more white than gray. The white haze slowly became clouds that moved like waves in the ocean. She was pulled along with the waves towards something far away. The waves slowly grew bigger and bigger until she was tumbling violently in them.

The feeling of falling ended and the feeling of being spun over and over again replaced it. It felt like she was trapped in a washing or drying machine. That too faded, as the waves grew so big they started to crush her. The feeling of tumbling went away and she felt like she was falling once more. In the distance she could see black specks. Not too long after that, lightning started appearing here and there. The lightning slowly grew in intensity until it was almost constant. Her soul got hit by a few stray bolts, but they didn’t really hurt - she felt a little buzzing feeling when they hit, but it didn’t hurt. The pressure increased as time went on.

As she grew closer to the black specks, she realized that they were black whirlpools. They looked identical to the one she had seen before. The lightning increased, until all she saw were spots of light. The pressure increased and increased until she felt she was being compressed again. The pain increased and the world beyond the light went away. Then she was caught in the black whirlpools once more. The lights faded, even as she was compressed once more to the size of a ball. Then she was shot out of the whirlpool to the darkness beyond the whirlpool. She basked in the relief for a while, until the darkness started taking bits out of her again.

She lost count of how many times she went through the white and black worlds. Time seemed to have no meaning as she floated through both the cycles. Because it was a cycle; one that repeated over and over again, as she floated, unable to move - completely at the mercy of the universe around her. Then she was floating in the dark nothingness, once more, getting bit a thousand times, when a giant turtle was suddenly in front of her.

The first thing she noted, beyond the fact that it was a giant turtle the size of a city, was the fact that it had huge, kind eyes. It slowly floated towards her, growing bigger and bigger, until it floated in front of her. She watched the turtle’s eyes as it stared at her. Its pupils were the size of skyscrapers. The turtle's skin was tan, with many creases criss-crossing its exposed body. Its shell was brown and yellow with bits of green growing on it, like moss. The turtle’s face had two giant slits for a nose and ended in a sharp beak.

She was floating along beside it in agony as the darkness ate tiny pieces of her when, out of nowhere, its head flashed forward and it caught her in its mouth. She had a brief feeling of its tongue as she lay there when, all of a sudden, it spit her out of its mouth. Lily flew back the way she came. She could see the turtle slowly grow smaller as she fell away from it. Then the darkness started to lighten up. It took a bit for her body to spin around, but she saw she was headed towards a beam of light shooting out of the black whirlpool. She had only seconds to take it in before her world exploded in white light.

She screamed and jumped up. She was back in her body again in the small office trapped under the dome. She looked up and saw the spell ball that had drawn her into the sky. It was shrinking back to a normal-sized spell ball, but it was still big - almost the size of a basketball. She felt the spell ball tug at her again, but she quickly looked away. The last thing she wanted was to get pulled into it again. She was pretty sure that there wouldn’t be a giant, kind turtle to spit her back out again.

She quickly cast her Grimoire spell and opened her book. The book opened to the last page of her dictionary of spell balls. She drew the spell ball in her book, but, as soon as she was done with it, she felt it tug at her soul. She quickly used her thumb to erase the drawing before she turned the page in her book. It opened onto a blank page. There, she wrote what she saw and her impressions of what had happened. Then, when she was done, she quickly drew the spell ball. As soon as she was done she closed the book and let go of the spell before it could start tugging on her soul. She let go of the Grimoire spell and let her book fade.

She found herself staring at her desk, too afraid to look up, in case she saw the spell ball was still floating in the sky. She had no idea how long she sat there, terrified she would be sent back to that place of white and darkness. She only started to move again when her stomach growled at her. Blinking out of her funk, she turned and grabbed her red and blue bag that still had some mushrooms in it. She grabbed the biggest and ate it slowly with two hands, like she was eating bread. Once she was done, she wanted out of her office and away from the spell balls that floated all around her in the dome. She grabbed her bag again and went to the door. She looked around for any signs of beasts or monsters, but the space around her tiny complex was empty - she made sure not to look at the dome of light as she did so.

She quickly opened the door and raced down the stairs to the green, wooden door to her basement. She quickly yanked it open and dashed inside. She made sure to lock the door behind her once she was in. Inside the basement it still felt too close to the dome above her. She grabbed the mattress off the bed and tossed it down into the hole. She nearly jumped down after it, only grabbing the ladder cut into the side of the rock to slow herself down. Once in the safety of her hole, she spread out her bedding before she laid down on her golden fur blanket.

She tried to sleep, but she couldn’t. She was tired, but thoughts of the spell ball kept her awake. She knew, not guessed, but knew, that the spell ball represented the universe or something very much like it. It was the most powerful spell ball she had ever seen before. She didn’t know what the blackness or the whiteness represented, but she knew the two of them together somehow represented the universe. All she knew was that she didn’t want to use it in any way. It was too dangerous. It was the first time she felt fear towards a spell ball.

Thoughts about the spell ball didn’t go away though, as she lay there under her fur blanket in the hole. “Can I use it to create my own universe?” She wondered. “Can I use it to get out of here?”

Those thoughts kept on rolling in her mind as she lay there. Finally she drifted off to sleep, only to dream of falling in the white and blackness. She woke up screaming. It took a few seconds to realize where she was and to calm down. Once she did, she had no desire to go outside - on the off chance she would spot the spell ball. Not that she could without looking though her soul, but, even though she knew her fear was irrational, she couldn’t make herself leave her hole.

She ate her mushrooms and stayed in bed, only leaving it to go to the bathroom in her basement. Her bathroom was just a bucket with a spell in the bottom to vaporise her waste. She had come up with it years ago when she was trying to create combat spells. It was a dud as a combat spell because it had to be placed inside something enclosed, but, after some thought, she discovered it was perfect for a toilet, if you didn’t have a real one. She had been using it ever since. She called it after what she used it for, Toilet.

Thoughts about using the spell ball kept on popping up in Lily’s head. So much so that she started to work on a spell to create her own reality. It was just a thing she did to pass the time since she had no desire to go outside. It started to get real after a while. The more work she put into it, the more she thought it might be possible.

One day, while she was working on the spell to create her own reality, she ran out of food in her bag. She had more in the office above her, but nothing left in the basement or the hole. She was terrified of the outdoors now. She knew she was being stupid, but she couldn’t help it. She knew she wouldn’t be able to see spell balls while she wasn’t using her soul. Hell, she knew the drawing she made in her grimoire was more dangerous than anything outside her basement. Not that it mattered. Fear was fear.

She waited until her stomach started to hurt before she made up her mind to go to the office. She grabbed her bag and, for the first time in many years, she cast her Mobile spell barrier and had her Greater flamethrower spell ready as she got ready to crack the door open. She hesitated for a few seconds, then, with a deep huff, she pulled the door open…

...And saw a giant wolf standing not five feet from her door. They both saw each other at the same time. Lily screamed and lowered her left hand at the wolf. The wolf roared and jumped at her even as she set her spell off. The purple flames leaped out and smashed into the wolf in midair, knocking it backwards and onto the ground, where it burned for a few seconds before it fell apart into black ash.

Lily automatically started pulling another root out of her mana well, pulling it towards her right palm, when she heard another roar that was echoed by two more voices. She didn’t hesitate anymore as she stepped outside the door. She saw another wolf come running at her as she finished casting her first spell, holding onto it as she started to pull a mana root to her left hand to cast it again with the hand she had just used.

The next wolf landed just past the cars and, without pause, ran right at her. Lily dropped her right hand and set the spell off, roasting the wolf. She finished the spell for her left hand before the wolf died, so she was ready when another wolf jumped over the flames coming from her right hand side. She lifted her left hand and set the spell off even as she raised her right hand to catch the wolf in the air with her old spell that was still going off. Her new spell hit before the old one did. It knocked the wolf backwards into a rusted car. It tried to get up, but quickly fell back down as its legs burned away as the second spell hit it. It roasted to ash soon afterwards.

Lily let both spells go only to spin them back up as she looked for more wolves. She was in the process of dropping the spell ball when something hit her from behind knocking her forward. She took a step to stop herself from falling before she turned around to see yet another wolf behind her. Her barrier spell had saved her life while sending the wolf backwards into the door to her home. The protections lit up and the wolf died as electricity burned through the monster. It left a really bad smell as it fell to the ground - sort of wet, burned hair. Lily completed her spell and fired on the wolf, ending the smell. She turned around, but nothing challenged her. She waited for a few seconds, but nothing came forward.

Shrugging, she walked up the stairs and entered her office. It was only once she was inside her office that she realized that her fear of the outside was gone. She let herself go and started to laugh. She laughed until she started crying. She curled up on the floor and cried for a really long time. When she felt better, she got up, opened one of the drawers and took out a mushroom. She chewed on it like a squirrel until it was gone. She then grabbed another one and ate it slowly, like the first one.