---Maddy---

The entire rest of the day was spent tramping through the jungle.

That wasn’t quite as long as you would think – seems like they exited the barrier in the afternoon instead of morning this time – but it was still a few hours of walking.

Maddy’s feet would be killing her by the end of if not for a simple cheat – near the start of their trip she realized burning life mana through her feet – wasteful without the direction of a proper spell – made them feel great. On one hand simply sending mana at her feet was wasteful…on the other hand it was good visualization practice. She didn’t have a skill or innate ability to just manipulate mana as she pleased so having something to practice on let her build this ability further.

Maddy was understanding more and more about how magic worked – or at least how it worked for her. What she liked and disliked, what worked and what didn’t work. She was still in this strange honeymoon period with her magic…it felt like she could do anything – the world was her oyster.

This was good for now – her teacher had expressed that was an ideal state for a wizard's foundation…in time she could solidify herself further baking habits and strength into her soul but for now this was perfect.

The start of her ‘path’.

As a group they walked mostly in silence for a majority of the day. It felt like the proper thing to do – everyone’s mood was 'off' right now. Sometimes – often even – ignoring problems let them fester…but in this specific case it didn’t feel like a ‘problem’. In fact, trying to ‘fix’ anything might even make it worse – might backfire and become annoying or stretch it out somehow.

Troy was easy – he had some social hangups and was more comfortable if he didn’t have to talk. He still liked being included and liked being around them but didn’t want to speak if he didn’t have to.

Jess on the other hand was currently in a state of embarrassment and or frustration over them ‘running away’. She had understood and agreed with Maddy’s points so the frustration she now had was directed towards herself – an annoyance that it had needed to be pointed out vs an annoyance that it had been pointed out…

Either way it felt like if Maddy tried to act like a therapist and talk her through it the annoyance would shift to her instead.

Besides – as the day progressed Jess seemed to process it well enough herself.

By the time the evening hit for real she was fully ‘recovered’ – the way her friends were walking showed them getting more comfortable as they grew tired.

The natural light dimmed over the course of half an hour or so and the three slowly stepped closer and closer together. Grouping up for perceived safety. Instead of standing a few feet apart they were nearly holding hands as they walked.

“Do we want to set up a camp for the night?” Maddy asked as soon as her eyes began squinting to see the surroundings.

Jess stopped in her tracks and squinted. Slowly she spun shuffling her feet as she stared about the surroundings. “Yeah…I’d be down but we should probably find a clearing or something? Somewhere safer than right smack dab in the middle of nowhere.” She spoke her voice even and normal as if she hadn’t just spent the day in silence.

That was…fair. Maddy hadn’t actually been meaning right where they stood – if she left that alone would it seem like she was less competent? Would it harm her image in the group…or alternatively would pretending Jess had thought of something she hadn’t make Jess feel more confident? Should she work towards directing the source of her confidence towards Maddy? Raising her up while linking her good feelings towards Maddison?

Which way did Maddy want to play this?

…

Maddy didn’t want to ‘play this’. It was just a simple question between ‘friends she was not manipulating’ who were ‘following her because they liked her’.

Why was her mind so exhausting sometimes?

“Sure – of course. Good idea! Let’s continue on till we find a good spot, or it gets too dark.” she finally responded.

Beside her Troy held his hand up – slowly his skin began to glow the brightness casting shadows around them.

It was darker than Maddy had thought.

Why hadn’t she thought of making a light yet? Was it not dark enough to register as an issue she had to fix? Hindsight made her feel stupid – Maddy also had a light affinity now.

Magic wasn’t her first thought to anything.

Maybe it was just because she hadn’t done much with light yet? Maybe because darkness spoke to her more?

Well…not to be outdone. “An orb of light, shining bright, existing solely to illuminate the night.” Maddy softly sang – creating her own miniature sun above her head.

The orb was perhaps a bit too ‘bright’ – she had a bad habit of throwing most of her mana into spells and with her mental image and mention of ‘illumination’ instead of trying to ‘attack’ the spell was more focused…

She should have added a line in about lasting as long as possible but that wouldn’t have rhymed…

She should also have quickly written the spell down on something to increase its stability…

Maddy’s searchlight level spell lit up eyes in the darkness. She flickered life mana into her mind watching as indistinct shapes became more visible.

There were half a dozen cat-like creatures watching them. Four in the trees. Two on the ground.

They were doing nothing but watching – the light causing them to back up slowly.

Troy shot an arrow up towards one of the tree cats, the thud causing it to hiss and run away.

Maddy continued burning life mana, watching them as they slinked away into the night.

Those…probably weren’t monsters. If they were monsters, they would have attacked wouldn’t they?

The group continued on more cautiously than before. After about ten minutes more of walking they found a place mostly suitable for the night.

It wasn’t perfect – not by a long shot – but there was a slight clearing and that was good enough.

“I’ll take first watch.” Maddy spoke. Nodding gratefully her friends pulled out their communal mat – they hadn’t been able to buy a tent or sleeping bags in any of the places they had gone – then rapidly fell asleep.

“Alright.” Maddy watched them for a moment then climbed up on a massive log holding her scythe close to her body just in case.

This seemed like as good a time as any to practice. Not like she hadn’t been practicing all day but some time to really sit down and think about things.

She still had to keep most of her mana free – to defend them at a moment’s notice – but it would be a waste not do anything with her ‘free’ regeneration.

It would be a waste not to increase her capabilities at any time she could.

The light above her winked out – it had been growing slowly dimmer and dimmer despite her attempt at making it last.

“Light orb.” Maddy spoke, creating a tiny ball with the minimum amount of mana she could. This one was already fading fast light mana leaking away from the weak casting – she had less than thirty seconds to get this working.

Fiddling about her bag, Maddy found her drawing tools and quickly wrote a few small sentences across the log below her – swapping out words for concepts when she could.

She threw in several of her partial concepts while she was down there – collect light for example she thought might hold the light mana better, but the partial collect seemed to only let her do the opposite of what she wanted dimming and preventing any light it ‘collected’ from illuminating the surroundings.

‘Collect darkness’ worked a bit – although it only really seemed to be increasing the brightness of existing light sources.

Finally she found a variant that seemed to work – a soft glow lighting up the entire log and trickling through her crossed legs.

Okay! Now that that’s out of the way the first thing I should do is test out my new ability. Really test it out…

One by one Maddy pushed different pools of mana into her mind and watched as the world changed. What she saw was enhanced, how she felt was shifted.

Light was perhaps the biggest change – she could see her spell working away beneath her legs. It was hard to describe the shapes and patterns she had unknowingly created…but it looked almost like a mutated sand timer. A pile of sand falling to the ground below – except the path it traveled looped and split and looked almost like a river…

She let the unstructured direction of magic fall.

So far it felt like the biggest change to the ability was what happened to her vision. It wasn’t fully affecting her eyes – other than maybe a bit of leaking from her brain – instead it was simply changing how she processed the input her eyes gave her…

But was that reality important? Should she focus on the effect it had on her eyes or not?

Maddy sat for a while. She really wanted to close her eyes and meditate on the feelings but…that would reduce her ‘distracted watch’ to literal uselessness.

She decided to play more with life and darkness mana pulling more deeply from that pool – it wouldn’t reduce her combat capabilities too much right now and it was hard to really practice mana with pinches at a time.

Standing up and stretching for a moment Maddy changed positions and pulled out her old slates.

“What do I want light to be? How will It help me? One of the big reasons I wanted it initially was the combined mana it would make…but what can it do for me alone?” Maddy softly spoke.

Behind her someone grunted slightly and rolled over.

Okay…shh. Don’t vocalize your thoughts.

She could focus on how light interacted with her concepts…try and bend her current skills to use light instead of death or similar but…

Maddy flared light into her brain watching the grains of mana falling through a twisted delta of magic.

So light really is a particle. Maddy joked watching the sand fall.

Maddy’s mind was a mess. More than she realized – she kept getting distracted by the different trains of thought instead of completing them separately.

She spent a moment gathering and flexing her consciousness trying to get into the right headspace then continued.

All mana has an innate concept. Fire has a fire concept and life has a life concept. It's why some spells are hard to do with certain affinities…the mana being used corrupts the spell. The concepts it carries don’t play well with the concepts you form your spell in.

Life mana has a life concept – it's why you can heal with it…the idea of healing is contained within the concept of life.

Death also has a concept – it's why death mana by default necrotizes things…the mana’s concept bends towards killing.

So light. Light has an innate concept…and what might that be? Light is…sight…Light is…the way everything sees. The ‘thing’ that everything sees.

I should be able to shape that into something visible…in other words, without using any of my concept runes I should be able make an illusion that people can see. I should be able to…see?

Maddy paused, a goal suddenly appearing in her mind. She had something she already needed to do – create something to scout or watch about for danger…and she had an affinity who’s base ability lent itself towards sight.

Maybe.

Well then. Magic is at least partly based on imagination and intent. What do I think of as sight? Should I pull in any of my other concepts and build this scout around that?

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Maddy shifted between and then settled on a single underutilized concept.

Orbs.

So far she had kind of thrown orbs at relevant parts and moved on – her eggs had worked fine before she had turned them into orb eggs after all.

But she wanted something that could see and eyes were kind of like orbs weren’t they?

So, she just had to create an eye.

An eye to sight and see for me. An orb of collected light for thee. An eyeball of veins blue and red. Go forth and scout for me I said! Transfer all you think you saw. Tell me danger tooth and maw.

Maddy found a flat sort of fern – some prehistoric leaf – and wrote her spell down, maintaining a mental image of the eye she wanted to create. Necrotic mana on her finger burnt an oval egg shape around her poem and a massive amount of light mana pushed in and twisted about her words.

“An eye for me, a sight it shall see. An eye for me, a light it be. Apply my mana upon this spell. Apply my mana I do tell.” She softly chanted nonsense – whispering the words again and again as she worked. At this point her attempt to rhyme was repeating the same ideas again and again breaking meaning apart slightly as she ran out of ideas. The mana didn’t seem to mind – responding to her words and imagination and the physical connection and resonance in her voice more than the words themselves by this point.

She left a tiny bit of light mana left to channel into her mind and better comprehend the spell she had created.

Before Maddy’s eyes it seemed like the instant transfer of mana was almost slowed down. Light mana radiated off of her body in all directions at the speed of light. The mana surged with each word she spoke – as if she were wiping away a fogging window with each syllable – the light shining through brighter and then dimming slightly as more fog grew.

As the mana flew towards her creation at the speed of light, it seemed to coalesce into drops…tiny grains of clear sand that slowly became a pile and then a sand sculpture. The nature of light mana was like a thousand tiny pearls when forced to stay still.

She dropped her light sight for a second to see the spell properly.

Yes…that was an eye about the ‘leaf’.

A remarkably realistic looking eye – it was fuzzy in parts she hadn’t thought important to imagine, but otherwise it looked real. It didn’t look like something fake – it wasn’t see through or glowing or anything like that…

Maddy flicked the last of her light mana into her brain once more to stare at the result.

Okay…

The illusion broke down slightly when she looked at it with her light-sight. The sand castle came to the forefront – she could see the leaf vaguely distorted below the beads of light…

Pushing her scout off Maddy watched in slight disappointment as it floated…down.

Back and forth the eye fluttered – a falling leaf – before the scout landed on the ground below her and stayed still.

Okay…so the spell is not strong enough to move with the concepts I gave it…I don’t have a kinetic affinity and I can’t have the scout fly off and about with just an orb and some shaped dreams…

Bending down she picked her eye up. There was a faint imagined sense of squishing an eye – the illusion itself bulged around her fingers like she was squeezing it – but…at the end of the day the illusion wasn’t real. She could feel the leaf below it and feel a faint warmth from the light mana surrounding her fingers but that was it.

Walking over to the opposite side of the ‘camp’ Maddy carefully placed her ‘eye’ down balancing it on a shrub. Then stepped back.

Walking back towards her seat on the log – carefully taking the long way around her friends so she didn’t wake them up…

Troy had his arm wrapped around Jess so that was a thing. Jess had her arms and legs splayed and flung out as if she were in the midst of a comfy bed and not a makeshift mat in the middle of the forest.

Maddy paused to review their body language and innocent looking faces.

There wasn’t something there…they weren’t hooking up ‘behind’ her back. She was 99% certain.

…not that there would be a problem with that.

Maddy climbed up to her perch once more, then felt about inside her.

Reaching for her eye – it felt like it was attached to her head just behind her real eyes – she tried to ‘see’ what it saw.

Closing one eye to try and view through it…barely just barely might have done something. There was a vague blurry sort of outline of the woods on that side of the camp.

Burning light mana – the act becoming second nature by this point – her view of the forest through the eye she had made grew…slowly but surely more details were formed until after a minute she could swear that was her real eye sitting in the bush.

Dropping the struggled attempt to see through her scout, she instead tried to ‘ask’ it what it saw.

There was a pause as if it was struggling and then the eye sent back a vague ‘all clear’.

Okay.

It worked but could definitely be better. Maddy had vaguely planned for the eye to talk to her – hoping the concept of sound would push through and let it communicate but that hadn’t been enough just yet.

No spells worked perfectly first try after all she had some time.

…

The next attempt at a scout was to detach it from the spell she made. Instead of a leaf that was an ‘eye to see’ she made a leaf that ‘created’ an eye to see…

Except it didn’t really create it it more just did the same as the previous and then pushed the eye away from it.

The leaf fluttered to the ground and the eye mostly stayed floating above it. moving the leaf vaguely moved the eye – kind of like how the original orb skill followed her about – but…it wasn’t a scout that could move about.

She placed the floating eye on a new fresh side and tried again.

Bit by bit her spell became more refined as if her mana knew what to do the more eyes she made. Sadly it looked like the first eye was one of her best – it was still glowing over there on the bush nearly an hour later while all her other attempts were already broken.

The magic really felt quite a bit more stable when wrapping completely around the leaf – trying to push it away free floating ‘worked’ but it lasted a fraction of the time…

What she was doing suddenly reminded Maddy of golems in stories. They usually had a piece of paper with like holy words or rules or something on it embedded inside of them.

…it would probably be pretty easy to make a golem if she wanted.

With a wink at the back of her head as it flicked out – that spell had lasted more than most – her first eye disappeared.

Stepping off her log Maddy bent and dug her hands into the hard peat of the forest floor.

She scraped and dug the ground then pulled up a crumbly sort of dirt. Carefully tansfering a good handful to one hand she grabbed another leaf then retreated to her perch – the bush she was pulling them all from was nearly completely stripped for materials now.

Slowly Maddy played with the materials thinking about her desire.

She had started off wanting to make a scout spell – she could spend some time and make a eye that floated and ‘flew away’ from her sending back what it saw…but that eye would fall apart after a few seconds.

Sometimes you had to work with what you got – instead of trying to force that spell to work, for now Maddy would double down on her first version.

She didn’t have a creation affinity so there wasn’t a huge chance she could make anything permanent – like making a spell whose goal was ‘movement’ without a speed affinity…but she could still try her best.

The first step was to infuse the leaf with life mana. To create a living spell – a ball of collected life that just wanted to continue existing and nothing else.

Maddy paused then shifted her mental image.

At the center was a leaf and one of her maggots. A tiny little grub – one of the weakest versions that could last the longest...altered further in the hopes it would last even longer.

She didn’t have any left in her scythe – they tended to burrow in and hibernate for as long as they could after she killed something but still faded after an hour or two – so she was forced to make one from scratch.

She could try and visualize it but Maddy inherently knew that wouldn’t really add anything to her spell. It needed something real and impactful to matter – ideally she’d kill a monster with her reapers seed spell then transfer the maggot to here but…the monsters seemed to be leaving them alone pretty surprisingly right now.

Maddy cut her arm, twisting her mana through her scythe in a practiced manner.

It felt off to use her skill this way – trying to create a maggot was inherently trying to attack something…if she were using her skill to heal the egg would hatch into roots and quickly consume themselves to heal anything they found…and she was ‘attacking’ herself right now the skill confused and conflicted as the maggot seemed to want to protect her as well as head straight towards her heart.

Slowly the tiny wisp of death mana grew feeding on Maddy in some unseen way…

“Oh!” Maddy jumped – pushing death mana into her brain and looking down.

The maggot spun and chewed on Maddy’s lifeforce, becoming plump as it gorged on the invisible energy of her body.

She could immediately see how weak the maggot was – she could snuff it out with a thought if she cared to – but she could also see how it could be improved. Minute flaws laid bare towards a clinical pessimistic side to her brain…

She turned off death mana and shoved as much life mana into her mind as she could to try and compensate.

Any negative impact from using death mana in such an important area slowly faded and Maddy breathed deeply.

Okay. Now to continue.

Pulling the maggot out of her arm – healing the tiny slice by pushing life mana through a healing spell on her scythe then dragging it back to the cut – she placed it on the leaf she had made earlier.

Carefully Maddy spat into a bit of dirt clumping the wet soil around her leaf and living seed infusing the whole process with life mana as she did.

Then as if as an afterthought she activated her eye spell – slowly weaving it into the hibernating seed below. The maggot seemed to dig about the muddy dirt as she worked – chewing the leaf and mud and leaving something…different in its wake.

Finally, Maddy was left with a very real fitting eye. She carefully brought it over to the first eyes shrub and placed it on the top then retreated once more.

“What do you see?”

“The forest is clear” Her maggot told her – peering out at the world in front of it.

Perfect.

…

The next experiment Maddy moved to was improving her existing skills.

Adding light…adding an illusion of what the skill looked like increased its strength. That meant if she used her dark-life/death mana and created eggs they would be stronger if she covered them in light mana illusions of eggs.

Her wispy maggots would have more form with fleshy looking white bodies – her slashes would have more oomph if she made them look like they had more oomph.

And then she moved on – Maddy didn’t have a way to track how much time was passing or when she should wake someone up to take over…but she still felt wide awake. Each channel of life mana through her body banished the tired feeling slightly – kicking the ball down towards a future her.

This skill...now this one...

Slowly she better made her skills physically look like she imagined them. A simple enough boost to her strength that only took some time to modify the spells on her staff. A line or two of descriptive words. Some imagination and iteration as she created maggots then studied them up close – filling in details they lacked or studying how the light mana coating her skills blended into them slightly.

…

One of her eyes alerted her to some movement and a quick back and forth let her notice what was happening behind her back.

Jess extracted herself up off the ground – looked around – then spotted Maddy and began tip toeing towards her carefully.

Even if she didn’t have eyes behind her head Maddy would have heard the rustling as Jess brushed through undergrowth but she pretended not to hear.

With a lunge, Jess wrapped her arms around Maddy’s side hugging her back and ducking her head around beside her.

“Whatchu working on?” Jess asked staring up at her – seemingly disappointed she hadn’t jumped out of her skin.

“Well…look around" – Maddy pointed out her eyes sitting on roots and logs and balancing on bushes around them. Jess squinted and then jumped when she noticed one.

“Creepy” Jess laughed brushing off her surprise then climbing up beside her crouching down and sliding her legs around the log.

“I think you should head to bed – I’ll take second watch. Shoo, shoo” Jess nudged Maddy.

She was being more touchy than usual. Was everything fine?

Maddy stared into her friend's face.

Everything was…not fine but it wasn’t a big deal? It was small and… Had Jess had a nightmare?

Maddy continued staring then nodded. “Okay, thanks. I’ll renew the spell on the log below you so you have light for as long as possible…

Maddy bent and found her previous script then pushed a huge chunk of life-light into it attempting a weaker version of her previous maggot discoveries – she didn’t want to make one in front of Jess right now. Finishing up the glowing base Maddy shoved the entirety of her light pool into the spell – doubling up on what was already there – then nodded and slid down from the log.

“Good night Jess…Good luck and make sure to wake me up if anything happens.” Maddy spoke yawning suddenly as if her body suddenly realized how tired it was.

Picking an empty place at the edge of the matt Madison curled up and attempted to fall asleep.

Sleeping in the woods sucked.

Sleeping without a blanket sucked.

The last thoughts that filled her mind as she drifted away were how she had wasted her time making scouts…she should have figured out how to make a bed or blankets first.

…

Maddy dreamed a disorienting mess of scenes that night. She was a child again – being led through a mall by her mother. She was a young adult once again – holed up in her room to escape him. She was a mage – she knew magic – and she was flying about the sky on a broom.

Her broom was her scythe – it curved beneath her legs and held her up as she cut through the air.

She was a scythe – her body firm her arm a blade.

She was in high school – acting so much cattier than she remembered. She was drinking in a bar with Jess and Troy – Troy wore a spooky looking cloak that hid his eyes and Jess was loud as he yelled for refills on the ale at the bar.

Finally as if trying to make some sense of the nonsense her mind shifted and solidified. She was dreaming – it was all a dream.

She floated above her head staring down at her mind below. The same view as when she had distributed her mind stats. The web of connected nodes and wires between them – some near the edges looked frayed while others were strong and almost humming with mental energy.

This…this was her mind. The representation of her mind.

Except it wasn’t just a ‘web’ in name. it really was a spider's web the more she looked. A single spider sat at the center appearing to grow as she noticed and focused on it.

A controlling arachnid.

Faint threads floated out as the spider manipulated its surroundings.

This was her…she was a spider.

Faint threads snaked away from her head and puppeted the bodies of her friends beside her.

She was nothing more than a puppet master…they weren’t her friends. Not really – not if they knew what she was like. They were just convenient tools she had picked up – they didn’t actually like her she had just forced them to like her.

No.

Maddy struggled to drag her eyes away. This…no I’m not like this.

The spider cackled with her mother’s voice. “There’s nothing wrong with being yourself”.

Maddy began arguing with her mother – a frustrated argument about leaving her alone. About how she was getting better. She was her own person now... she had never won an argument with her mother before.- All her points were shot down with simple 'facts' or twisted into no longer mattering.

And yet a part of her felt…felt at peace. A part of Maddy turned away from the drama in front of her and looked around.

Twin pairs of eyes stared at her from both sides of the woods.

The ‘cats’ from earlier slowly but surely stepped towards the clearing.

The log beneath Jess was growing dimmer and dimmer as Maddy’s spell left it, and as the light retreated the cats moved closer.

They shimmered in Maddy’s vision – flickering and blurring slightly in her dream.

Suddenly a tiny voice flickered into Maddy’s mind.

“Something there”

Her eyes shot open and with a gasp Maddy jumped to her feet.

Jess spun slightly on her dim log to stare at her in confusion.

“Something here” her maggot eye nudged her.

It was still working – what had to be hours later and the scout she had made was still going strong.

“Light orb” Maddy spoke quick casting a weak version of her light spell, the ball suddenly illuminating the eyes.

Her dream had been real.

“Aha!” Jess yelled jumping off the log far faster than she should have been able to – her arm flicking out with a void whip seconds later.

The slash ripped through the creature still shocked by the bright light in front of it and scoured a deep gash on the tree beside them.

The cat both ‘died’ like a regular creature and partly melted as if made of clouds – a haze of life rising up into the air as its body was split in two.

Mine.

Scrambling to pick her scythe up Maddy slashed out – cutting through the mist and harvesting its life. She condensed the death energy down into seeds then turned just in time to see Troy firing an arrow from his half asleep position.

The second cat died with a hiss and ripple of clouds.

Maddy looked around then walked over and harvested this death as well.

“Show yourself!” Jess yelled into the darkness even as troy rapid fire created glowing bolts of light and shot them into the surroundings.

All of his bolts landed true and continued to shine brightly – it was like he was stabbing glowsticks into the trees around them.

There weren’t any other cats…

💤 Achievement get: Sleeping sentinal. (Rare)

Description: Alert yourself and respond to an attack upon your sleeping form.

----------------------------------------

Stat: +3 mental power.

Stat: +3 mental defense.

Stat: +3 mental speed.

Partial-Concept: Awake

Slowly the three gathered up and waited.

“…does anyone else feel like that was anticlimactic?” Jess spoke after a minute of silence.

“I don’t know but I don’t want to go back to bed” Maddy sighed.

It was early but the sky already looked brighter.

Guess today was going to start early.

Camping sucks.