Janet’s body felt sore, and heavy. Rather than being rested, she woke up exhausted. Sleeping up a tree had indeed been ill-advised.
While the exhaustion was somewhat expected, all the noise around her wasn’t. Janet had fallen asleep to the backdrop of a fairly quiet jungle in the early hours of dawn. Now, however, the leaves in her tree practically vibrated with the cacophony of a fully-roused jungle.
Janet’s exhaustion had made her sleep way through the daytime, into the terrible hours of night when the jungle came alive. And the wild place was growling its hunger into the moonlit blackness.
The script of events to follow appeared almost by magic in Janet’s mind. First, something hungry and huge would sniff her stench in the chilly breeze. The beast would then creep and lumber its way towards her, in its wake bringing along a horde of scavengers and hangers-on. These would wait patiently by while the lumbering jerk slurped up her marrow and as her flesh was ripped apart by its ghastly claws…
Janet shook her head, vigorously, in an effort to fling away the pessimistic thoughts. She had not escaped Lakewood, that callously cruel former home of hers, to die like a nameless bug out there under an unfeeling sky.
The sole motivation behind her escape had been survival, and survive she would. Even if it killed her.
Even as another beast roared, followed closely by another’s shriek of death, Janet balled up her fist and sat up. She would do everything in her power to see the dawn.
So what if the jungle was a scary place filled with beasts, both magical and mundane, that would be more than happy to sate their hunger on a hapless lump of meat like her? She would fight to the death as they ripped her apart, then pluck out their souls and use them as fuel to mend her rent flesh.
Then, after they were thoroughly dead, she would light a cooking fire so she could feast upon the beast’s meat to restore her energy and fuel the journey that lay ahead.
It was a terrible plan, but what else could she do? Everything out here eclipsed her in power, even the fucking rats. Yet still, Janet purposed to survive.
A distressing realization occurred to Janet as she looked from her vantage up the tree. While very few things could reach her up there, she had no way of fighting against those that could. And while taking souls seemed like a foolproof plan, what if there were two attackers? Or worse, a whole pack like the trio that had forced her up the tree?
She needed a way, as physically weak as she was, to restrain attackers so she could deal with them one by one.
Wait a second, Marius!
In the cavern-best-forgotten, Marius had given Janet a masterclass on how to use shadow magic to keep things from moving. And if she was right, his shadow [Talent] should by now have been subsumed into Janet’s soul.
Janet thought about how shadow magic would make her life better. Not only could the element give her a weapon with which to defend herself, it would also come in handy in the search for food.
The jungle was full of all sorts of fruit trees, wild vegetables, edible herbs, you name it. Just a slight problem - how was one to gather the food if they also served as sustenance for the beasts that called the jungle home? The answer was simple: magic.
Most importantly, though, things that lived in the jungle wanted to eat her. Janet was slow and defenseless, and thus was easy prey. A Janet that remained hidden was a safe Janet. If she could help it, Janet felt it was prudent to avoid getting into any unnecessary fights until she somehow got strong enough to guarantee survival during altercations.
For that too, shadow was king. No element was better known for its stealth capabilities.
Hmm, Janet thought, its almost as if the stars aligned to grant me the element best suited to help me survive in a deadly jungle as a powerless, inexperienced novice!
All fantasies aside, Janet needed to get her new magic to work. Magic was a new frontier for her, and there was no guarantee that it would turn into the solution to all her problems that she envisioned.
To gauge whether the digestion of the vile man’s soul had been completed, Janet let her senses fall away from the physical world, and into the inner realms of her introspection. There, she searched around for any difference…
A smile bloomed on Janet’s face. It was done. Marius’ soul was fully absorbed into hers, and with it her shadowy saving grace.
Rather than waste precious moments reveling in the tiny triumph, Janet got to work. It was time to get her new [Talent] to work.
Janet, having grown without power or status owing to her being tagged a squib, was obsessed with finding out all she could about magic. The hungry yearn after food, the penniless after treasure. The light at the end of Janet’s dark, dreary tunnel had always been magic.
When she was a baby, that relentless desire had manifested in Janet grilling her caretakers with a million questions about why she was different, what exactly constituted magic, how casters constructed their spells, what made enchanted staves, wands and flaming swords special enough to mold magic, how to acquire some of that power for herself…
Tired of the overly inquisitive orphan, a nun had pointed her in the direction of the town’s library. “You’ll find your answers in there,” the stern-faced woman had pointed out.
Those curt words of dismissal had served as Janet’s license to inquire.
From that point on, Janet formed a very intimate relationship with the library’s shelves and their wealth of text and illustrations. When she was still under the orphanage’s care, she had entered through the front door. The townspeople sneered at the rags she wore even then, but she still was allowed in. When the orphanage had burnt down years later and with it her all-access pass to the multi-story bookshelves of sequestered knowledge, she had been forced to sneak in.
In the harsh winters when the trashcans no longer held any edible garbage and the restaurants had no need for underpaid, underfed scullery maids, Janet and her stray animal friends hid in the library’s basement where it was warmer. There, within those cordoned-off cellars filled with yellowed scrolls that smelled of rat urine, hid the most precious of all the library’s knowledge, in Janet’s opinion.
The old scrolls spoke of an age before spells became ubiquitous. An era before spell circles and runic formations became the mainstay of magic power; an age before all magic practitioners could do was hurl spell after spell at the enemy.
In that period, all mages had to work with was the mana in their cores and their innate elemental affinities. None of all the fancy structured magic that characterized magecraft in Janet’s day and age.
And while Janet would eventually have to learn and master spells and put her knowledge of runes to use – she had spent a lot of winters obsessively reading about the research behind the language of magic – her straits at the moment demanded she employ the abilities of her new element, as those ancient mages had done in ages past.
First, as had been detailed multiple times in the texts, Janet needed to build intimacy with her affinity.
The ancient mages did this by immersing themselves in meditation and repetitively cycling their mana. By introspectively communing with the marks of their innate [Talents] present in their minds, their bodies, and their mana, they gained greater understanding into these facets of themselves, and thus acquired more power and control over their elements.
For Janet’s first attempt at magic – or rather her first foray into conventional elemental magic, Janet needed to meditate. To do that, she needed to first clear up her mind of all distractions.
First though, she had to rid her body of discomfort. Janet was still sore all over.
Her neck felt crooked and her spine and back ached with the slightest turn of her head. The state of her legs was even worse. She had slept with her back leaning against the trunk and both of her legs straddling a thick, mossy branch. They both now felt like dead, dry sticks. No pain or discomfort, just a still numbness that should probably have unnerved Janet more than it did.
To at least get her blood pumping again, Janet stood up from her seat across the tree branch. Her legs wobbled a bit like wet noodles, but a hand clasped on a higher branch kept her steady.
After the prickling needles were done exacting their toll across Janet’s feet and shins, she went through a series of stretches to release the last of her pent-up tension. That culminated in her joints cracking like wet wood in a campfire, which elicited from Janet an uncouth moan of sweet release.
It might have been foolish to make so much noise, seeing how Janet had just deduced that she needed to remain concealed and unnoticed, but her tiny noise couldn’t compare to the cacophonous riot that was the jungle. Her noise went unnoticed, the equivalent of dropping a pin in a pub full of rowdy revelers.
Now feeling as spry as a freshly-leafed sprig of holly on a crisp spring morning, Janet sat back down onto the branch that still retained some of her residual warmth. This time, she took a proper meditation stance, with her legs crossed and her back ramrod straight.
The first attempt was… it went just like a first try.
Her breathing was too loud. Her feet were itchy. Her new jacket felt too soft against her skin, and her fingers kept moving. it was unbearable!
Basically, her first attempt ended up introducing Janet to the whole sum of sensations she normally shunted to the background, rather than bringing her inner peace or whatever she was supposed to find.
However, she was undeterred. A failure was just a lesson on what not to do on the next try. Eyes were closed, shoulders were squared, and her breathing was modulated to a slow, steady cadence. Her thoughts wavered, and she might have focused a bit too much on the earthy scent of crushed moss tickling her nostrils, but even that too was soon ignored.
Gradually, despite the permeating sense of danger emanating from the jungle around her, Janet fell into a meditative state. Perhaps the background noise had helped her concentrate, or the skill had been another one of the spoils acquired from absorbing Marius’ soul. Or perhaps it was something instinctual to Janet?
Either way, after uncounted minutes, a try turned into a resounding success.
What was revealed in that state…
Fuck me! Janet cussed inside her head, for a moment losing hold of the state she had worked so hard to achieve. This is just the same state I arrive at every time my [Talent] mobilizes itself.
It usually happened whenever Janet was gravely injured, mere paces from death’s door. In those moments, the constant pull of her soul at the world around her became so pronounced and deafening, it infected her mind with a voracious, unquenchable hunger. In those moments, her consciousness was usually drawn into what she had come to term the 'Realm of Souls'.
All that effort…
Looking closer however, there were some differences. Unlike in those moments she remembered, the hunger, the sense of a deep emptiness that could only be filled through mindless consumption, was absent.
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No, the hunger was still there, like a patient beast waiting in the background for the chance to emerge. Her soul seemed content to slowly and silently consume the ambient matter of its native realm, for now.
Another big difference was that Janet could feel her body, even in this state. The breeze across her cheek, the teeth gritting against each other because of her frustration that the result was so mundane, the legs that were beginning to become sore in their unfamiliar pose, the pangs of hunger… Janet felt all that, and much, much more.
It looked like meditation was not so much about removing oneself from the world, rather more a way of bringing oneself in tune with one’s mind and body. In the process, meditation also attuned one to their soul – and thus the world itself – as well, but Janet doubted many people had nearly as much insight and access to their souls as she did.
Regardless, the first step, achieving a meditative state, was complete.
The second step would involve cultivating a reflex. Or at least it had said so in most texts.
According to most authors, elemental [Talents] could always, always be mobilized by reflexive action. It was why gaining control was so important. To grow in power, true, but also to prevent spontaneous activation of potentially detrimental magics.
A child born with elemental fire would always love the hypnotic motions of a candleflame. The draw to the element at that age was so powerful, it was rare to meet a fire mage child without burn scars.
A wind-blessed newborn on the other hand would very quickly fall in love with sneezing. The action of expelling air at high velocities was described as being quite pleasurable for them. They were also drawn to open spaces where wind blew freely, and were happy as could be blowing their own breezes to go with the swirling winds.
To the baby, being in the presence of their elements was like scratching an itch. Innate magic wanted to be used, and ‘spoke’ to its wielder, demanding activation. And just like with a limb, unuse led to great discomfort. Children were taught along with speech and how to stand on their feet, how to soothe the instincts that came with their magics.
But that was in the ancient ages, where villages often burnt down as a result of a fire-baby walking around with their magic on full blast. In modern times, magic was sealed till the child reached ten years of age, after which training began in earnest.
Of course, for Janet, such measures had been unnecessary. To everyone but her, to every imaginable test and every exploratory healing method used by healers, she was utterly magicless.
Her soul-related [Talent] did activate reflexively, and had done so since her first encounter with grievous injury at the tender age of four, but who would believe a magicless child had killed a boar that had knocked her down and perforated her stomach… when there was no sign of injury?
Janet had hidden the bloody clothes in a hastily-dug hole, and although she got a tongue-lashing from the nuns at the orphanage, they were mostly glad that she had escaped unscathed. The good eating that week also quieted most questions about the gore on the boar’s hoof. Boars trampled all sorts of things in their walks in the wild.
Bad memories aside, what Janet needed to do now was simple, and yet incredibly difficult. She needed to somehow create so deep a connection with a borrowed [Talent], it would become second nature. Born mages had their elements guiding them towards activation since birth. Janet needed to do the same for her artificially acquired [Talent].
Janet’s stomach growled out its frustration at being empty, in the process sending piercing pangs of hunger that threatened to snuff out Janet’s concentration. While Janet hadn’t had a meal for more than a day, food was not on her mind at the moment.
No matter how hungry she got, the gradually worsening sensation was secondary to attaining a means with which to defend her life.
An elemental [Talent] would also help Janet blend in better with other groups of people she met along her travels – a magicless human stuck out like a patch of snow in the height of summer. Again, an inconspicuous Janet was a safe Janet.
Even more to the point, once a [Talent] had been activated and mobilized, the process was permanently etched into memory. Similar to how no one ever forgot how to exhale, the activation of a [Talent] cultivated as intrinsic an instinct as a child’s first cry.
Janet desperately needed to get through this second step. After that would come the real work of cultivating power and control, but second things first.
In the depths of Janet’s meditation was a scene captured by her introspective ‘sight’. Janet could see the result of Marius’ subsumption into her soul.
Marius’ soul had been a big orb of light – as most souls appeared to be in Janet’s ‘sight’ – but covered entirely by thick, crisscrossing, concentric bands of shadowy matter. In contrast, Janet’s looked like it was made entirely of something darker than shadow, only made distinct because the Realm of Souls was a place filled with glowing strands of energy.
In the midst of a lightless mass that slowly, constantly drew streams the glowing energies into its depths, Janet could spot a section that felt… unfamiliar. That was it. That was what she had gained from Marius.
The stolen [Talent] manifested as a slightly less dark patch on her pitch-black soul, looking almost like an uneven film of black oil floating on lightless waters that hinted at a depthless abyss below.
It was great that she could discern the [Talent] apart from the rest of her soul, but that was the extent of that advantage. The patch of formless shadow would not co-operate with her at all.
Janet tried it all. She prodded it with a mental nudge to see if she could feel some feedback, but nothing. She then attempted to gather the patch into a tendril of shadow, only to fail when her mental fingers slipped off without finding purchase.
She then tried stretching her entire soul out, like she had done on that terrible night, to see whether the shadowy patch would be stretched as well. Janet’s soul did deform into a rough elliptical shape, but the shadowy patch seemed utterly content to remain unchanged, placid and calm as a nonchalant pond of tar.
As the hours went by, and the far-off noises seemed to creep closer and closer as if to encircle Janet in a mishmash of animalistic rumbles, her patience began to fray. Her hunger pangs became bitingly sharp as realization began to dawn upon her that in all the scrolls and books she’d read, there had been nothing about awakening a [Talent].
Everyone was born with magic in their veins, with mana pumping through their core and pathways since before their first breaths. Everyone but Janet. Perhaps… perhaps she was never meant to wield any elemental magic, after all.
Maybe her plan was all a pipe dream and she had been doomed to fail from the start.
With that final thought, a disconsolate Janet let go of her meditative state. She felt the sensations of life slam into her like a returning tide, burying her melancholy for a tiny instant with the sights, sounds, and scents of the physical world.
Even that proved to be too brief a respite as a moment later, the realization that she had failed utterly and would probably die soon as a result reaffirmed its position at the center of her exhausted mind.
It began as scratches, like a rat’s claws on a wall of dry wood. Janet ignored it. She was neck-deep in depressive stupor imaging out her bleak future. The second sound however, the distinct noise of a quick scurry up her tree’s trunk, jolted her off of her thoughts and into full alertness.
Most large cats did not follow their prey into trees. They were content to hunt on the forest floor, or the plains where they roamed. But leopards? Their hunt was relentless, even into the boughs of evergreens. A huge rodent with one such cat on its trail had chosen Janet’s tree as a refuge, and the huge predator had followed.
Janet would have let the hunt play out without her involvement. She even harbored thoughts of mooching off of the remains of the leopard’s dinner. She had eaten rodents before, so this would not be breaking new ground.
There was a slight snag, however. As thin and bony as Janet was, she would make for a more filling meal than the hound-sized rodent. She was even frozen in place, which would make the hunt multiple times easier than the spiritedly scampering rodent!
Keen, slitted eyes found Janet’s terrified gaze as the cat, muscles twitching with barely-contained ferocity prepared to pounce. Claws found purchase on the thick bark, and the leopard leapt from trunk to a branch, and from there to a higher branch, fast on a path towards Janet.
As she stood there transfixed, another divide between branches was vaulted. The agility and accuracy of the predator almost made the climb look effortless. It occurred to Janet then that she was not the least bit agile, especially not with hunger assailing her concentration like a sledgehammer on ice. The still sore muscles from her ill-advised but necessary day-long nap on a tree would also make a quick escape all but impossible.
Another branch was vaulted over, and death drew closer. Janet could almost smell her entrails, an image of her viscera spattering on the forest floor inundating her with fear and terror. A thought came to her mind, that she must have made the easiest prey for the leopard thus far, too scared to lift a finger in defense, and frozen still by the knowledge that she was too weak to outrun the mature predator.
Above her, Janet witnessed as the rodent – a thin, gangly thing that looked like a cross between a marmot and a squirrel, chose a trajectory of descent that put it on the opposite side of the trunk from its pursuer, and slid its way down at a frightening pace. Its body bounces against branches, twigs, and the trunk, banging against the tree as it tumbled down past Janet’s line of sight.
There was no sound released from any of the impacts, not even a whisper as its body banged against wood. Janet paused to listen for the expected thump when the rodent hit the ground. No sound of an impact, just rapid footfalls as the rodent safely escaped.
Blasted magic! Fucking [Talents].
Even stinking rodents had magic that worked. Why wouldn’t hers at the very least activate?
As anger-inducing as the rodent’s safe tumble had been, Janet had to focus. The leopard had approached close enough during her distracted moment for Janet to hear its panting over the jungle’s hubbub. Terror once more seized Janet’s insides.
Foul breath was carried upon the wind and into Janet’s nostrils. She should have lost consciousness as blood pounded against her ears. She didn’t.
A seed of defiance awakened in her. Janet had survived a sacrificial cult, and had even met a goddess in the aftermath, for crying out loud.
Not many people could say that, mostly because sacrifices tended to stay dead, but still.
She was even the holder of Life’s [Blessing], granted in person by the goddess herself. Janet suspected that such an event was unheard of in all of history.
She refused, just plain refused, to be scared of a large cat.
But Janet’s only functional weapon was her innate [Talent]. Her dagger could have been of use, but she was untrained. Flailing randomly would not help here. All she had to turn to for survival was her borderline vampiric abilities, so with a keen eye on her fast-approaching would-be killer, she gritted her teeth and put her little finger in her right palm, and twisted.
There was a crack! Then Janet winced as she fought back tears as pain lanced through her left side.
It was too little, too late. By the time tears cleared off her eyes, and her soul reached out for the nearest source of energy to kickstart the healing process, the leopard was well into its final pounce.
Aghast eyes met the acute predator’s gaze. This time around armed with the knowledge that she had a sliver of a chance at winning, Janet did not back down. She straightened her back and prepared for the pain. She would outlast and out-endure her opponent, then use its own gathered power as her sustenance.
If only reality was made of dreams. The leopard was a born lone hunter. It only ate once its prey was dead. Thus, unlike the gnashing, tearing teeth of hounds, the cat’s first instinct was to immobilize. By going for the jugular.
Legend went that her father, similarly talented and far more experienced than herself, had been brought down by decapitation. Janet could taste her fear. She could actually die here, her resting place no longer the lofty and vaunted battleground she always imagined, but rather in a pile of leopard poop.
As claw descended upon her neck, Janet scrambled backwards. The trunk was to her back; she was trapped.
The next thing, the only thing she could do was evade, but she was too slow. Sharpened claws descended, accompanied by a roar of triumph. Dinner was served.
What met claw though, was not soft skin, or the expected spurt of blood. Instead, a poofy, stretchy inkiness had covered Janet’s neck. Shadow had come to the rescue.
To her front, the leopard landed, its paws finding purchase on tree bark. It spared a look at the shadowy cocoon now covering its prey and shook its head. This was a hunt, and the hunt would continue till it was concluded, The leopard took another step ahead, this time preparing itself to bite off Janet's head.
Janet winced as her head began to throb. She had not been decapitated by the knife-like claws, but the blow had been enough to concuss, or even kill her outright. She accepted her defeat in this fight.
Not all was lost, however. Dazed and disoriented, Janet did the only thing left to her. She let herself drop, just like the rodent before her had done.
As she descended, her fall was punctuated with thumps and painful impacts with branches and the trunk. The impacts were strangely dulled, which Janet attributed to her groggy state messing with her hearing.
Above her, Janet heard the leopard let out a frustrated huff, then begin its descent, following her at a blinding pace down the tree.
Not gonna happen!
Before Janet even got to the bottom, she acquiesced to the demand of her reflexive will. Hunger, deafening and incessant, was rising like a tide inside her. She let herself be engulfed.
Janet felt her soul move, to devour the leopard. She felt as it made contact with a brownish ball of energy, before it engulfed it whole.
She might have imagined it, but Janet thought she saw an amorphous, shadowy arm-shaped protuberance rise from underneath a tree branch and reach into the leopard’s passing body.
Anyway, the fight was over. The cat had not been nearly as strong spiritually as its lithe body and explosive strength had let on. Unlike with Marius, Janet had felt zero resistance.
A final thud, more painful this time, was immediately followed by a heavy poof as the leopard’s lifeless body landed on Janet. Despite fighting to remain aware, she lost consciousness, again. The tree fall had injured her gravely, and the cat had possessed a disappointingly weak soul.
The leopard went smoothly into her storage tattoo. Janet was not going to give away her first kill since she began her new life to any passing opportunistic beast.
Before she lost all awareness, Janet decided to try and conceal herself in the tree’s shadow. A hidden Janet... this would become a mantra if she repeated it often enough.
She would have been overjoyed had she been conscious, or even half-lucid. As the most grievous breaks and gashes began to reknit from the cat’s gallant offering, a slick darkness, like a film of soap yet more matte and lacking a discernible shape, extended from her moon-cast shadow. It extended to the tree’s shadow, somehow altering the larger object’s shadow to cover her tiny form.
The most curious thing, though, was how the film prevented the escape of odor or heat. It seemed the purloined [Talent] conferred more than just constructs of shadow, including in its capabilities innate qualities that prevented detection by most senses.