I awoke from my levelling at the sound of lightning, rolling off my bed in fright and hitting my head on the ground. Returning from the flinch and moaning as I curled up, I couldn’t help but just want to curl in and in and in and in until I compressed myself into a ball of skin and hair as hard as rock.

“Why can’t I just escape this nightmare for one god’s damned minute? At least if I had a nightmare, I wouldn’t remember most of it,” I thought to myself, hissing as I held my head.

Why couldn’t I just sleep? And why wasn’t I tired enough to pull myself back onto the lonely mattress of the servant's quarters?

I was in a state of both wakefulness and emotion, the stresses of the day and evening draining me.

It was a shitty kind of feeling, which was made worse by a now-blooming pain in my head, the emotional flux of my quasi-relationship, the clarity brought to me by waking from a level up and the rush of my new stats, as meagre as they may be. I was running around and around in my head, my consciousness my worst enemy.

All the things I needed to do and all the things I wanted to do knocked around inside my mental room while my instinct ran around, making noises like it was fucking dying and knocking them off shelves. My thoughts growing apocalyptic as they collided.

And circling around all my new, fresh hells was one old one. I had seen a city burn before, but I had been numb to it. I hadn’t cared as much as I should have then. I had figured I wanted to die anyway, and a faster ride, all expenses paid, was as good as I could have hoped for.

And here I was, a scant few months later, stressing over a much less destructive fire, and yet it felt far worse because I wasn’t numb, not in the same way. I was numb because I knew it could be worse, and it wasn’t, and so because of that, it was somehow better than expected. There was my instinct, too, adding to the stress of it because it didn’t want to die, and I had let it down the last time I had the chance when it lay dormant in me.

Catching a breath, I had never lost, I pulled my arms away from my head. Forcing myself, I uncurled, uncomfortably letting myself lay flat against my own better wishes, staring at a baren unfamiliar ceiling and let my mind run.

Then, Instead of pushing things into their places to try and drag some kind of order to my mind, I let it go wild and feral.

I let them run rampant through my mind; I let them play out my worst prospects. I let them turn into an all-encompassing monster in my mind, and I stared into that darkness, into my worst future.

I closed my eyes and worked to calm my breath. I stared at each mental part as each desperate thing stitched itself together into a nightmare to overshadow life. Each part working itself into a portion of my future woe.

I let it grow and grow until it blocked out the light and drowned my mental world in sorrow, and I kept watching it as it shambled like an approximation of what life could be, until even my instinct curled up with me in a corner huddling in the dark barking against what it could barely understand. I let it go, until it revealed itself as what my feelings were, feelings, they were not real, they were based on what was real, and projected the worst possible future.

They projected what could be if everything were at its worst, and I did nothing to stop it. They projected a fake future that projected a fake darkness from it.

And so, I reached into it, into its stitching, into its fakest parts, and pulled.

I saw the stitching, I saw the hole, and I closed it. I pulled it until its stitching came apart, breaking it down into its miniscule irrelevancy’s, then that into its constituent parts, and then further. I took the initiative from it, not pushing but cutting. I carved my issues into type and then into components, separated wheat and chaff, and sorted them out into bundles that I could do something about. I broke them down until each grain could be picked apart.

I acknowledged them and then left them so I could work through them, separating them from myself so I could better view them, like I was shopping in a market, over here, anxiety, over here, hopes and dreams.

I pulled my instinct in, lifting it by the scruff as it protested and let it squirm where it couldn’t continue to influence me. I sorted everything out and opened my eyes because I needed to think, and I needed to plan, and I needed to get my shit together.

Taking a great big breath I let my tension leave me and got to work.

Anna things first.

Sophy had told me that I probably was fine, and I felt like I was so far up shit creek that I was vertical. She felt I hadn’t blown it, and so, I reached in and sifted through my thoughts, finding the desperate feelings and tossing them out, and leaving in our reactions, our words and replaying that in my mind.

Anna and I had talked past one another. We were talking with each other but from two very different mindsets. Both of us reached a point, then passed one another, like two ships in the night.

The hard part was trying to figure out where she was coming from, where she might be now, and how to repair that break, or I suppose, more accurately, how to bridge that gap. I couldn’t undo our talk, after all, but I could bridge that gap.

I racked my head about that for quite a while, going over it again and again, but I was unable to find the missing piece I needed to understand where she was coming from.

She was coming from a specific angle I could not bend my mind to. Somehow, the calculation of Failing to cast a spell, getting hurt, and the way I interacted with her mother and then with her did not lead to a clear answer.

Leaning on my instinct, metaphorically, I let it sniff the pieces to see if it could spot a missing portion. It sniffed around, but it only came back with an idea of weakness, a read not of solid words but of her body language.

I tried running myself along each rail, from angry with me leaning on her during the argument to failing to catch the lightning bolt to disregarding her wishes to be left alone. I even added in how someone feeling weak might factor into all of them, but I couldn’t read it.

At least once I figured that out, I realized that I knew I did not know. After sifting out the details, I placed that bushel on a metaphorical counter and left it. I could feel Anna in the morning.

Perhaps all that was needed to figure it out was to ask her, just a simple talk, or perhaps I would need to win her over, but if Sophy was right—and I was willing to bet she was—there was a chance.

I placed next to it, in a place of importance, the kernel of wisdom that Sophy had given me about how people would make a big point early and set it aside for what I would do tomorrow.

Not in the people sense, but in the me sense.

I sifted through the fifty gorgilion million things I felt and organized the smashed stuff into piles.

The things I needed to do were surprisingly short. I wouldn’t have to do much, but I would need to go back to the cottage, make sure it was clear, and close up behind me after doing chores. I would need to check in with Gunther to make sure we could get covers for the books; they would be worthless if they were destroyed from water damage. I would also need to get a cloak or something to keep the rain out, and I would need to do it quickly. I could bet that Gunther would be able to hook me up with one of her people to do it, too. I also needed to walk through the forms I had been shown. I had ample testing today, and they had almost immediately fallen apart. Though, if I had to put a finger on it, I was probably better than I had been before; even swinging, I had the forethought to grip my shovel better and aim better.

I needed to integrate that somehow, but I had no partner for that.

Next came things I was planning on doing but didn’t literally need to do, mostly magic, though also figuring out my skills and, as Selly would say, ‘showing off.’

I needed to finish my stuff already. I had done it piecemeal, reading a little here, thinking a little there, and I needed to stop kicking the can and get it done. I needed to figure out my answers and give them to Anna. I could get a slate or some dry paper and a quill, and I could write down the culmination of all my thoughts.

I needed to get my desperate ideas out of my head and refine them down to what made sense. Inside my head, they were far too mutable, ebbing as I thought on them like wet clay underhand. No matter how hard I turned them around, I couldn’t get them to sit still for long enough to crystallize into a final form, so I needed a solid place to put my fluid ideas, pile up all my thoughts in one place and fire them.

With those done, I could focus on practicing with both my magic and my skills.

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And I needed to really use my skills. Both my new and old ones. I needed to give the new ones a test run, learn their ins and outs and put them through their paces. I needed to know not just how they worked but how they moved like I knew how to move an arm. Selly had called it showing off, but I could read between the lines enough to know when she said, ‘show off,’ she meant, ‘go hog wild until you run flat into a wall.’

She thought I needed to cut loose, and knowing her, probably in more ways than one. She probably thought I was a bit too normal. If I were to estimate it, a normal person would probably not yell at a [Baroness] who could probably order me to be killed for failing to show her deference.

Old me would have shown deference if for no other reason than to be practical, but then again, old me wasn’t an unkillable representative of a god.

“I suppose… Now that I think of it… I should make sure to check my ego. At least I didn’t do it publicly… So long as I don’t let myself spiral into a totally obnoxious asshole, and I don’t make a habit of doing it publicly, she will probably consider me annoying but otherwise beneath notice.”

I sat there with a new fear and quickly sorted it out and put it into its pile, bringing my momentarily wandering mind back into focus.

Last was the most nebulous things I probably needed to pay attention to, at least in the short term.

Then, there were the things I needed to try and figure out.

There was now another screamer, for one. Another tormented soul. [Saints] were supposed to do things for their god, and while I didn’t know what I was supposed to do for sure because Death was a bitch who wouldn’t even respond to my prayers to give me a checklist, I had figured I was supposed to send souls over to the other side.

The problem with learning how to do that the hard way was that I had no gods damned idea how to deal with them.

Hells there was one in the living room.

It had screamed and screamed until it was background noise.

I had no idea how to deal with them, but I did know I could stick them in a pot, so I could at least do that until I figured out how to give them their afterlife because I would keep trying until I could.

I had been separated from my loved ones for some time, their loss an ache whenever my mind stumbled upon something they would have done, and that was when I knew they were still there, out in the wider cosmos, living their afterlives.

I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like for their relatives, both here and there, if they had to live an eternity without them.

The idea was so bleak that it was something that I couldn’t believe, not even in a world as wide and terrible as this one could be. There was always a way, even if the only answer was I needed to subject myself to the torture of having my soul scraped out, I would eventually do it; only a truly Monstrous being deserved otherwise.

They were in pain, and I need to figure out a way to take that pain away, if I could, both to send them on their way and because no one should be in that much pain for eternity.

And that was just one thing.

What was my deal was another, and it was one that I didn’t want to figure out but would probably need to.

Sophy had thrown around terms like Mortal Spirit, Foundation, Anima, Etcetera. She had stuck me with a dearth of information, without any adjoining bits, like putting up the load-bearing beams of a house, without any walls, floors, or ceilings.

Forget the foundation I was missing; I was missing simple comprehension of how to stick a roof on it. Forget updating it later, I was missing the basics required to walk around inside it in the short term.

“I should really get Sophy to write this stuff down somehow, or maybe we could do something with a skill to comprehend it; she somehow knows all of this, and she’s made of skills,” I thought to myself.

I wanted to ask Selly to remember that, but she wasn’t here, and it wasn’t like she could come into my soul to remind me.

I brought myself back to the things at hand and worked through them, thinking out how I was going to do the things I wanted to do. I planned how to best do my daily tasks. First, I could go to Gunther rather than home, then back here after I fixed myself up an answer, then I could get on with stuff... stuff, in this case, being talking to Anna.

There was a lot of empty space in that, but I could do that.

I wiggled my instinct to try and understand its thoughts, but it gave little care to me running around doing silly things like learning magic. Why would it care? It wasn’t related to Anna; the only part it could even understand was me trying to stay dry.

Words meant nothing, nor did communing with ‘the short one,’ on matters of, ‘den material,’ or siting down to look at words. It did think it was worth doing it, but only because it understood that, ‘our mouse mate,’ wanted us to do it.

I gave it a pat on the head and placed it down in the room and kindly told it to stop being a total bitch about this, while I fixed up my mind.

Metaphorically, of course.

It was more like I was laying on my back, my eyes shut in concentration, doing literally nothing but breathing and thinking while my mind conjured random ideas through the power of imagination, but it worked out.

Opening my eyes my back to the cold ground, I stared into the dark at the wood ceiling, the only light coming from beneath the door, then down to the better lit stone foot that kept the timber off the wet ground, and the bed and thought on sleeping.

I got up and into bed and curled up to sleep.

I found none.

***

After what must have been a few hours, I decided that I wasn’t going to fall asleep. I just wasn’t sleepy. Despite being mentally tired, I just wasn’t getting that kick to sleep. Coupled with the whining of my instinct that we were missing the vital component of sleep, someone to cuddle with left me wanting to just get out of bed for the entire duration of laying down.

It was honestly annoying.

Annoying enough to get me out of bed in the middle of the night, unsure of what I should do.

Night wasn’t for doing things, it was for sleeping.

Sleeping was fun, relaxing, and helped me end this terrible day and decompress. Sleeping helped distance yourself from the previous day, and without it, I felt strangely stretched. It was still yesterday, but also today.

I felt like I should be sleeping but also getting my day on its way.

Stuck between these two states, I confusedly walked through my magic practice, running through the basics of casting, making, and manipulating a spell that I had first walked through while getting the [Magi] skill to begin with.

After playing around with that, I found a lamp in the corner and lit the damn thing to look for anything vaguely shaped like a shovel.

There was a singular broom, and I used it.

Its weight was wrong, the feel was wrong, everything about it was wrong, and it dragged through the air in a way that slowed me as I moved the unfamiliar haft in hand, but by the gods, I used it despite being cramped in the room.

I smashed up the broom quite a few times, but it was luckily reinforced, my skill considering a broom a tool.

But after that, I was still left in the dark of night, the storm blotting out any and all starlight outside, the tap, tap, taping of the rain like a bony finger.

The tap, tap, taping went on so long that after passing around for what had to be half a glass, I almost missed the similar, though metallic, taping on the door.

Turning to the door, I called out, “I’m decent,” and waited.

One of the estate's guards carefully opened the door like he was peeking into the room while I might not be decent and had perhaps heard a noise that concerned him.

He stared at me, my pitter-patter of feet halting while I stared back at him.

“Uhh… Can I ask you to stop that?” He asked, slightly confused.

Confused, I asked, clarifying, “My pacing?”

I would have protested if that was the case, but he quickly shook his head.

“No, not the pacing, the skill you’re using, the one that’s getting me through the wall.” He said as if that was a skill I was using.

“I’m not using a skill to hurt you?” I halfheartedly told him, my confusion mounting.

He shrugged in response, clearly believing it had to be me. “It has to be you. It's reaching through a wall, but it's centered on you. So, I’ll ask again, stop using a skill to slowly hurt me; I’ve been putting up with it for four glasses now, and it's been making my body ache like when I was drunk under the table back as a [Soldier]. Pull in you’re auras, that’s the best guess I have.”

“I only have a few auras,” I told him, “And none of them hurt…”

I stopped, and the time plus the fact that I did, in fact, have harmful auras. Two brand new harmful ones, one that killed people, and one that bolstered the other and dragged the death mana from him and into the aura, making a shroud of death mana, which was presumably harmful.

“Oh… Oh, shoot, sorry about that. I picked up two of them when I levelled up.” I told the far stronger guard who I had been killing for several hours and was ‘hurt,’ instead of ‘severely wounded and dying,’ which split the difference between level and the skills effect.

“Good for you,” he said, clearly caring greatly for my achievement, “So you can deal with it. Rein it in. Your skills are bound to hurt someone.”

“Yeah, that would be great for me right now. Killing a villager via my auras right after a tragedy. That would give me quite the thing to stew over, and the people that stoned me quite the vindication, the fucking pricks.” I thought to myself.

“Hehe… Yeah, I would hate to have [Aura of Decay] and [Aura of Death] kill someone… I… Just one problem… How do I do that?” I asked him.

He looked at me and, as if struck by a sudden headache, squinted.

“By the Righteous fucking Blade’s tits woman. You have two lethal auras and can’t retract them? Can you turn the off?” He said, the oath unfamiliar to my ear.

“I can probably pull it in; I just don’t know how,” I told him.

He looked at me like I was a particularly dim child, gesturing vaguely at me.

“I’m not a bloody [Paladin], lady. Figure it out, or I’ll come back in here and knock you flat. I’ll be back in a quarter hour,” he said grumpily, leaving me with a clunk of the door that spoke of finality.

“Well, shit…” I thought to myself, “Land, how do you pull in an aura?” I asked it, checking if it could give me a hint.

It gave me a gurgling noise like it was gargling salt water.

“Very elucidating,” I told it, “thank you.”

“Very good,” it said, its voice a damp patter of water, a roiling feeling to it that was more cloud than open sky.

And so, following my friends very intellectually stimulating idea, and my ability to push mana into the aura to expand it, I tried sucking the mana out of it.

At first, it was easy; I pulled it in by about a quarter, then the ‘sucking’ became harder. I managed to pull it in close enough over the quarter hour the guard gave me to not get knocked unconscious, but it took my about a glass to get it into half, and until the mornings light to bring it in close enough that I would need to be touching someone to pass along the effect.

To be fair, it was hard. It was like sucking in a pond for each aura, and I had reached in and done the same for my other auras including my [Wellspring of Renewal] which despite its name, functioned like an aura.

I also noticed that my [Aura of Renewal] and [Aura of Decay] mirrored one another in a way so uncanny they were like mirrors. Their effects were nearly identical to the point where they were interfering with one another.

It probably didn’t help that all of my auras were sucked in close enough to be buzzing, each aura wanting to fold out like I was sucking in my gut.

It also didn’t help that I got a second knock while I was lost in sucking in my auras, the disturbance almost shocking me out of my control.

“I’m still decent,” I called out to the guard, “I’m not exactly going to strip naked in the middle of training.”

The door clicked open at my comment, and the guard nodded less awkwardly this time.

“The young lord has called for you,” he told me, “You’ll need to head in to see him.”