---Maddy---
In the midst of Maddy’s celebration, Jess poked her head into the curtain and looked around.
“I’ve been calling your name – are you okay?”
🍖 Achievement get: Embedded focus. (Rare)
Description: Embedded a magical focus inside your body. One step up from a tattoo you attempted to hide the source of your intent somewhere inside your own body.
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Stat: +9 mental defense.
🍖 Achievement get: Pelvic power. (Unique)
Description: Through ritualistic surgery, you have somehow managed to convert two out of reach bones in your body into focal points for your magic. Is this a sign of genius or madness? Only time may tell.
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Stat: +9 mental power
Stat: +9 mental defense
Stat: +1 soul defense
Like the boxes had been waiting for Jess to enter the room, two achievements flickered into view below Maddy’s sight.
Maddy had, when preparing her room, attempted to set up a silenced area.
Destruction had the idea of breaking and removing something and by using destruction mana, her sound concept for direction and plenty of shaped ideas she was somewhat able to destroy sound before it left her area.
It hadn’t worked perfectly but it had muffled any sounds Maddy might have made – she didn’t want her companions to worry – and it appeared to have muffled Jess enough as well.
Maddy stood there glaring slightly at Jess who looked down, noticed Maddy wasn’t wearing pants and quickly retreated from the curtain.
Quickly getting dressed Maddy deactivated all her ritual enchantments and exited the room.
Clapping loudly to get both of her friend’s attention, Maddy began. “So, what are our plans? I have a time limit of just under a month for this dungeon, but we could also leave and come back? I’m planning on dedicating quite a bit of time to research and practice so I don’t want to waste both of your time…”
Troy twisted his head back and forth slightly and then responded – he was getting better at responding which was a good sign.
“I want to train as well but training in a vacuum doesn’t really do much. We’ve stopped gaining anything from the repeat dungeon delves but I heard there are some nests within a few kilometers…could we apply ourselves on each nest to get practical practice?”
Jess nodded slightly. “I agree with that, I don’t want to practice alone or split off for a while only to reconvene later. Practical bits seem like a good way of keeping in shape. A variety of nests will help round us out as well.”
It would cut into her study time but…she had to agree actually applying anything she practiced was smart. Maddy nodded and after picking a potential destination and time – a small nest a kilometer north of town and sometime tomorrow morning – she went on to a more exciting goal.
Creation study.
…
There was a certain sort of bias to shifting immediately to triple affinity work. It was quick and easy and gave a massive free boost of power.
…but starting from the basics would deepen her understanding in a way that heading directly to combinations wouldn’t
To start Maddy began creating a variety of shapes and items.
Also created a reasonably lifelike apple shape.
Between the three tests the first one broke after a few minutes while the other two remained in shape for over an hour without any sign of degradation.
Attempting to cut into either of them had the two better options start to degrade. Attempting to taste either of them led to them melting and disappearing in her mouth without a flavour or much of anything. Kind of like water flavored cotton candy made of air.
So, this was ‘fake’ matter. How could she go about making ‘real’ matter?
First Maddy used destruction magic to rip apart a chunk of wood she had watching as her magic ripped it into shreds and then dissipated the result into nothing.
She put some more effort into that spell, ripping it into nothing in a single swipe.
Then Maddy began channeling her new affinity through her mind watching as her sight changed and altered her perception slightly.
Unlike the other two affinities ‘reality’ sight gave everything about a sort of…density.
Everything Maddy saw from the wall to the curtains to her hand or failed tests looked normal enough as far as her eyes were concerned. What changed seemed to be how ‘real’ things felt. Most of the surroundings felt ‘relatively real’. Her hand felt ‘very real’. Her apples felt ‘barely real’.
Creating something while channeling this sight showed her mana reaching out and coalescing ‘real’ity from…itself?
Like her mana was crystalizing into the thing it created, shifting and then setting into something.
Channeling void sight was dangerous but feeling a numb sort of apathy rush across her as she began to trickle the barest bit of destruction into her brain Maddy saw instead how everything continued to have a sort of density but now it felt like how easy something was to break than how real it was.
It felt like creation gave the same sight but from a different angle and with more safety.
Running some tests Maddy found she could vanish her created items with barely a touch while something like her hand resisted destruction until she ramped up quite a bit.
Moving on slightly, Maddy created an apple using creation light. This time what looked like a perfect apple appeared – no purple with this conjuration! Maddy’s light mana correctly shifted the structure and made it look red and green. Just by the power of illusion her apple looked real – and yet flipping to a light sight Maddy saw her apple really was mostly that colour, it wasn’t an illusion, the creative light had truly created red ‘mostly matter’.
On the same note looking at the result in her reality sight showed that just by making the apple ‘look’ more real it ‘was’ more real.
That was even accounting for the dual mana type being stronger just by being a dual mana type.
A strange interaction but when channeling both light and creation into her mind, Maddy was able to better destroy the result – as if by seeing all sides of the fake apple she was better able to tear it apart at the seams. She could see the remnants of illusionary sand baked into the reality of the conjured item. only by viewing both at once could she see the apple as a conjured creation instead of a fake.
Moving on Maddy added life to her apple. Creative Light life and the combined shaping into an apple shape with her intent made a pretty accurate result. It even had a slight apple taste as she bit into it and felt it mostly fade till all that remained was an ‘essence of apple’.
Maddy returned to base creation mana. Breaking off another piece of wooden slate she wrote down her desires and tried a new test.
First she destroyed the chunk of wood and then a heartbeat later attempted to create it. Watching in her reality sight, Maddy saw her mana shred the ‘reality’ of the wood and then hold onto those crystalized bits of density – it wasn’t just density Maddy realized even as her spell attempted to push them all back together again. Density made it seem like each bit of it was the same…each bit of density was slightly different and when ripped apart there was a massive amount of variation to the bits of reality held in her mana’s grasp.
The spell completed and showed a mostly put together slate of wood once more. It looked ever so slightly off – too smooth, too uniform…but for the most part her spell had perfectly ‘created’ the slate of wood in its second half.
…could I use this to teleport? Maybe I’ll hold off on testing that on myself for now.
Maddy recreated the spell completely off on a new tangent. First a new bit of wood vanished with a sharp crack and then as the sound traveled across her ‘bedroom’ the wood reappeared where she had pointed out in her spellwork mostly intact from the journey.
Adding light mana in she tried again finding it seemed slightly more put together, attempting a third time with life mana had the final wood looking pretty much the same for the journey.
That just felt like a side effect of the combination mana being stronger by default. Maddy waited for her mana to regenerate and attempted it again, this time on a more complicated item. Her blanket was placed in a pile and teleported across her room in a sharp crack before Maddy rushed over and felt the fabric.
It had in fact mostly worked – there was a single part that had fused to itself when it had reformed in a heap, but Maddy still felt it was a success for such an early test.
The real question was how she could go about increasing the ‘reality’ of her creations. Was there something she could do with her mana to make it crystalize into ‘reality’ better or was the answer really just that using matter to create matter gave better results?
…
Some more testing with her new water concept proved the more that went into a spell the better the results ended up. Just by creating water with her water concept instead of creating a shape with just shaping intent she made something nearly as real as ‘reality’.
There was still a slight fakeness to it – especially if she scaled it up but that was fine.
Creating a few drops of water made something nearly indistinguishable from water but creating a entire basin full made something that was only roughly 80-90% ‘real’. Maddy could imagine if she tried to conjure an entire wave of water the conjured material would vanish relatively quickly just by sheer scale.
Maddy continued practicing late into the night. She woke up still thinking about how it all might work, and a portion of her attention focused on this problem even as she was dragged to fight a wave of small splitting fur balls that each halved their ‘reality’ before regenerating it slowly as they bounced around and attacked.
Maddy came into her second day of experimentation with a different mentality.
Before she even started, she had found herself asking an entirely different question.
“If magic is shaped by how we think it works and how we use it…long ago my teacher spoke of ignoring focusing on using components. At the time it made sense – there’s power in finding rare materials and using them to cast spells but only being able to cast spells with an external resource can limit or trap you if you don’t have access to it.
“The thing is, there really is power in the environment. A part of a monster, a rare ore or plant…there’s mana in those items. There are people who use components and have powerful results. I get not wanting to crush a fire petal every time you want to cast a fireball or something but…if I’m trying to create something permanent than using a permanent material makes sense?
“In some ways I’m working towards crystalizing my domain and strengthening what I can do but if I never once cast a spell using a component, I literally will not be able to cast them when my domain crystalizes and my magic locks in.
“Components are in a way like rhyming. They are something that makes a spell slightly harder to do and thus make the result slightly stronger. Wanting to create a permanent spell…it seems like the perfect time to use a limited resource. It feels more worth it.” Maddy continued to speak her thoughts aloud attempting to work her way through them.
She was returning to something she hadn’t done in a long time. Creating golems.
Reusing her basin – why not, she already had it – Maddy had filled the wide bucket with silty soil. It wasn’t quite clay, but it felt similar and was gathered near the beach to the lake – they hadn’t wanted to get too close in case they got trapped. She had her friends help her carry it back to their place before she continued the setup. They had gotten some weird looks, but no one stopped her and after setting up her basin she moved on.
Drenching the soil with magic Maddy continuously created life-light-water with as neutral and as concentrated an effect as she could imagine. The goal wasn’t to immediately fill the basin with healing liquid it was to create single drops of liquid as close to 100% ‘real’ as possible with as much mana as she could pack in each time.
Stirring each set of drops in before regenerating, Maddy slowly created a wet muddy result that felt connected to her and strong.
In some ways this felt like over kill, in other ways it felt like it wasn’t enough. She could cast a spell with a fraction of this power, but her goal wasn’t to cast it once it was to cast it and have it continue working forever past that point.
Next Maddy began to form the seed for each eye. Maggots poured from where they had been stored in her arm.
She had fed and captured these on the nest monsters each collecting a portion of life energy before being held as stable as she could. Many felt stale and faded but keeping them in her arm had kept the majority relatively stable.
There was a qualitative difference between the energy created by killing something and simply generated from nothing as her mana was. At first, she thought it was part of the innate sort of energy but now Maddy was beginning to suspect it was closer to her uniform understanding of magic. Life energy was ‘harder’ to gain and thus was stronger because of that. The hidden part of magic was meaning and there was meaning in this energy that her base mana lacked.
Moving on, Maddy began mass producing her seeds. To start Maddy had a large slate. She placed her runes and wrote down as much as she hoped and dreamed for. Her eye spell and more – she nearly wrote a short story with how much of a description she packed into the tablet.
She then attempted to condense it. Creating miniature ‘tablets’ just under an inch in height and half that in width, Maddy pulled out the next tool she had bought in preparation. A lens. A large magnifying glass style ring of glass that had cost more than it should have. Taking a deep breath, Maddy carefully began a ritual to transfer her words to a smaller form.
Placing an array of the small tablets to her side, Maddy poured mana into a spell and spoke, creating faint destructive-death-light beams that sort of shone out of the original tablet bounced and then focused through the lens slowly burning into the tablet below.
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Maddy immediately stopped after seeing the result. The imprint was backwards. Either the lens or…Maddy held her tablet and eyeballed it holding it and imagining the way the light would flow from it to the smaller tablets.
Okay. No, it was simply that she was focusing from the side she had written it on. That made sense – bit of a brain fart but something she could solve. Carefully setting up a separate spell, Maddy burned the original writing through to the other side of the tablet then shone the ‘backwards’ version of it through the process once more.
The new spell was slowly burned into place like an arcane printing press.
Several of her first burns had been fuzzy as her hands shook but after conjuring a contraption to hold the lens and getting into a groove, Maddy began stamping out spells quite consistently.
To start, Maddy began creating a hundred eyes. They were eyes who needed to be real enough to exist and continue existing, but did not need to interact with the world beyond sight. They could be ethereal or intangible or any matter of fake – Maddy didn’t care. She simply wanted them to last and do their one job.
Maddy wanted them to be able to teleport about – fading into shadows to appear in others. Collecting at her word and flying forth in a wave of scouts like a stream of crows.
She wanted a following. A collection of eyes constantly feeding her information.
Maddy had such high hopes for these – in many ways she knew she should refine the spell several times but acting like this would fail her first time was just setting herself up for failure. With all the effort she was putting in, Maddy secretly expected it to work perfectly.
Carefully placing lumps of soaked earth and topping each with a slate and a living maggot filled with lifeforce and a drop of her own blood… Maddy laughed to herself suddenly. It looked like a snack – a cracker complete with some foreign delicacy. A risky charcuterie board.
Forbidden snack.
Taking each lump and hand molding them into a sphere Maddy worked her way down the line creating a hundred lumpy spheres roughly an inch in diameter. Roughly the size of a human eye.
She then melted the flesh off the bone of her index finger pulling out the bone and placing it under her printing press.
With a second thought, Maddy burned the binding into her body, coping and compressing the link down to fit on the bone.
Placing the bone in the middle of her workspace, Maddy last minute made a change to her ritual. Instead of leaving the lumps roughly in lines, she began placing them in the shape of a giant eye the finger link sitting in the center of the pupil.
Happy enough with the setup, Maddy began pumping mana into the working. Instead of picking shapes one by one she carefully held every single ball in her mind and pumped a steady stream of mana towards them simultaneously.
Shockingly easy to do with her mental foundation.
She could probably extend this level of multitasking into the thousands easily this level of multicasting felt dead easy.
Slowly but surely Maddy filled all the already drenched and magical balls with more mana, activating them after a few minutes of effort.
One by one the balls grew brighter and brighter as light mana filled the earthy flesh turning it into something that could ‘see’. Even as they grew brighter a film of darkness spread across them the inky shell capturing the light and causing it to bounce around and focus.
A final shell of living creation-light gave the spheres texture and colour – the act of making her spell look like an eye increasing the power of the shape and increasing the ‘reality’ of its existence.
With small pops each eye she created disappeared one by one as they activated flickering into nothing more than mana and re-appearing about her in the shadows of her room.
They spread slowly – the sound they were now making shifting to just out of the regular human auditory spectrum as they shifted and flipped about almost like they each had a mind of their own.
Placing her bone back on the tip of her finger and heal-creating the flesh back around it, Maddy was suddenly connected to the network. Each eye gave her a slightly disorienting piece of its vision if she focused on it or a mute stream of impressions as they relayed information through words and feelings.
It had been a success!
This was exactly what Maddy had been hoping for. She had spent the entire afternoon working on this project…it looked like tomorrows nest fight would test them out in a more practical sense.
…
The project hadn’t quite been a success no matter how likely it had seemed at the time.
Despite appearing to work correctly near the start over the course of hours several of the eyes failed for various reasons.
Some had simply stopped working – had gone to teleport, disappeared in a silent pop and then…just not re-appeared once again. From what one of them looked like it was like each of its teleports had degraded it slightly – causing the eye to appear more and more melted before after rapidly jumping about it simply lost too much reality to keep jumping.
At least one was eaten by what Maddy thought might have been a cat? It was hard to tell from the dying burst of information she had received while a dozen more had been hypnotized by the scirens below and fell into the water. They stayed there dangerous buzzing links in Maddy’s mind she didn’t want to look through – the first time she fell she had been attacked through the scout’s sight after all…by the morning those links had faded the eyes having vanished down below.
Finally, at roughly 4am one of her eyes had woken Maddy up. She had introduced a bit of spellwork feeding into her ‘awake’ concept that would let her eyes wake her up if they thought she needed to know something. In their hotel a room was being robbed – a pair of women in blurry forms were holding a old man at knife point and dumping all of his belongings in a sack.
Maddy…felt like it wasn’t her responsibility. Stuff like this happened all the time, the only thing that had changed was she was now aware of it.
She felt guilty as she went back to sleep tossing and turning before waking up with bags the next morning.
A steady stream of healing mana and awake concept fixed her right up for the day and they headed off for their second nest.
All told, by the next morning Maddy had lost over 30 of her 100 eyes. Not a good sign – it had taken so long to create them, and she had really wanted them to be ‘permanent’.
They fought against a massive moving tree made of glittering motes of life mana that tried to infect everyone through smell. Maddy spent the majority of the battle keeping them from being infected while Troy burned through the trees health and Jess blocked every single lashing branch attack.
Taking a detour to get some of the bodies from the previous days nest and then collecting a similar group of materials, Maddy lay everything out and began infusing her dirt slowly and carefully while thinking things through.
She…she had put everything she had into the previous days attempt. She really didn’t know how to proceed from here. She had one idea but…she didn’t have high hopes for it.
She needed to do the exact same ritual but better. That was the goal. One thing she was going to try and introduce was the monster’s ability to split into two. That way even if eyes died as long as she had some still alive, they could multiply and continue growing.
Except she had never really used a monster material in a spell before and it felt too clean of a solution. She also wanted to put in a self-preservation note so the eyes tried to survive better but that also felt too simple.
She needed…she needed something else. She already had a massive amount of mana in this. She had a good mix of concepts and shaped intent built into the spell. What else could she do? Short of having an actual eye concept to click the whole thing into place or drastically change her methodology?
…
Maddy thought things through by bringing up different ideas and meditating on them. She spent two entire hours filling the bucket – taking breaks to channel mana into her mind and think under the influence of each. She would have to start her ritual soon if she wanted to get it done by the end of the day…but Maddy wanted something better. Finally, something began bubbling up.
She…she wasn’t committing enough. Sure, she had thought she had put her all into that last spell…but she hadn’t committed. Not in the way she could have.
There wasn’t enough ‘meaning’ to this. A huge chunk of the spell was just what she wanted. Her technique was great. If she committed to doing this whole ritual continuously, she would only get better at it. The problem was in cost relative to her goal.
She wanted something and wasn’t giving up enough to get it. She wanted something permanent and thought a mere five to six hours was enough to get that result for the rest of her life.
She needed…she needed to put in more effort. Take her time. This was also a chance to finally commit with something else.
Her foundation. All those weeks ago Maddy had gained a mental modification. One that specifically said it would be more effective with a spell. So far, she had simply pushed mana into her brain and used the altered perception to see or think of things she hadn’t seen before.
There were many possibilities but that was the use she had found for it. this seemed like the spell to use it with…didn’t it?
She wanted a magical sight and had a base that provided a different sort of magical sight. If all of her eyes could see the life and light and reality of their surroundings…that would be perfect, wouldn’t it? In many ways she would finally be locking that in after all. Locking it in would give strength as she tossed uses, she hadn’t reached before…right?
To truly achieve what she wanted Maddy should take her time – something that was hard to do with the invisible timer the dungeon had put on her. It felt like taking more than a day on this was a waste of time she could be using to try and escape the curse’s clutches.
That sense of rushing was what was holding Maddy back from achieving this.
Maddy stopped her ritual for the night and began to do some small experiments, each which confirmed what she believed. She then stopped and tried to confirm if they were simply conforming to her belief or actually how it might work…realizing the results were the same in the end Maddy continued.
Using the collected monster bodies in tests confirmed some things Maddy had guessed and heading out for a late stroll around the market for random trinkets let her practice component magic for the first time.
She used a small fire crystal to create a flaming scythe in the air despite not having a fire concept or element. She created a brilliant bolt of light that burned a small hole in her wall with a talon of a radiant monster and used a small living magot to create a maggot spell many times stronger than her simple shaping.
Heading to sleep and then heading out to fight another group of monsters, Maddy once again collected the splitting bodies and then returned to her room for the days work. Her initial group of eyes was now down to less than twenty. The ones who remained were all slightly strange – as if they half existed and were clawing themselves into continuing to serve their purpose.
Maddy finally began her ritual once again. This time she worked slower and more methodically.
The ‘reality’ she saw effecting created items – and even the world around them – was directly proportional to her inferred ‘meaning’.
When destroyed she could effect that reality a bit and that was how she saw her component magic working. She was ripping apart something with void mana and then feeding the scraps of ‘meaning’ into the spell…obviously the mechanics of it were different for someone who didn’t have void mana but it fit in with what she knew nicely.
So, this is how her final ritual went.
This was going to be the final one – this time Maddy wasn’t going to have a do over or second shot. It was probably going to take over a day, however.
This time, instead of trying to mass produce the slates for the eyes Maddy began making a separate large slate for each eye. She didn’t try to cheat and write them all at once, she didn’t skip steps or rush on any of them.
There was meaning in sitting here writing each eye into existence. The same meaning that creating a thousand paper cranes might have, the same meaning that fed into magic in a way she couldn’t quite control.
There was a ‘mundane’ eye with a 'pure' affinity along with one of each actual affinity. Light, dark, life, death, creation, destruction. Each would have the sight tinged in the same way her mental foundation worked.
Maddy then worked upwards, an eye for every single one of the affinity combinations. 27 eyes in total arrayed in a repeating triangle pattern about the marked floor.
Less than last time but there was more hope held in this attempt.
Next Maddy began burning each spell into a smaller form.
First, she burned the words on the backside, then she burned the words through light onto their smaller forms and then finally she ‘melted’ the slate itself sundering it into nothing more than scraps of meaning she shoved into the small crackers of wood. She infused the big slate into the words of the small slate until each felt almost more real than the surroundings.
This had taken her two nights of effort. She had dumped mana into the dirt up to a point she needed a separate script to help contain it all in her ‘eye flesh’ without it evaporating away too badly.
Next, she created the balls. She stacked her items and then began cutting small scraps of various items she had found in the market. In some ways this form of component-based magic felt cheap – the only real cost was money…in other ways just introducing a foreign energy felt meaningful for her goals.
The minor items she used in this stage weren’t anything special – just a group of magical trinkets matching each of the eyes. a vial of troll blood for the life eye, the scale of a shadow snake for the dark eye. Nothing huge despite using the majority of her saved up money.
Maddy arrayed her balls about the floor in her room working quickly before the primed earth lost too much of her mana.
She took a deep breath. And. Began.
Melting the last of her materials – a flicker quill from a porcupine that could shoot quills across space and a mummified egg of some beast known for evasion and a pile of the annoying splitting balls. Maddy carefully teased out the meaning and infused each of her eggs with the foreign concepts. The concepts she had stolen and claimed as her own if only for this ritual. Next – performing the task with the fever of a cultist. Maddy spoke. She softly chanted her desires into the silenced room and poured her power into her hope – at the crescendo of her chant, Maddy popped out her eye. Her real eye, the final piece of the puzzle. The concept of eyes that would complete this spell. The concept of her eyes that would cause this spell to be her sight. Her eye. Her eyes. Her sight.
Maddy crushed the eye in her hand, even as she ripped it apart, feeding more meaning into the spell than she had ever done before. She could feel a line of power connecting to each eye as they ate of her flesh and exploded in potential.
The socket in Maddy’s skull throbbed painfully – she was barely focused on reducing the pain and a wet trickle fell down her face splattering onto the floor below.
That was meaning too. As easy as wiping all pain away was, the fact that pain was involved would give power to the working.
A sort of ‘limit’. A sort of ‘cost’. Removing it made things easier. Leaving it in made things harder.
Her chanting grew – at some point it felt like her words had been taken over, she barely knew what she was saying anymore the stream of English blurring together into nothing more than the concept of sound.
It couldn’t be English anymore, could it? There was nothing more than vibrations of meaning in the air by this point.
Maddy melted all her eyes together into one. She turned to her setup struggling to remain focused and began pouring in the final part. Quickly she pushed the last of her mana into a separate spell with relief – the main ritual kept threating to drain her completely dry and after giving up one of her eyes Maddy…would have only one more shot.
No…she wouldn’t have a second shot. That was the point of this, this was a spell for forever. She was still holding back even now.
Maddy thumbed her second eye out vomiting a bit at the sensation of the ball in her hands even as she crushed it and fed it into this combined eye mush.
The world was darkness. Maddy had completely wiped out her sight this time. Feeling out she activated the spell and felt the heat of her mana burning the ritual into her cheek. Into her skin, into her bone, into her very skull, this ritual was supposed to head as deep into her brain as it could, interfacing with the magic that was her mental foundation.
Maddy didn’t have mana anymore. She didn’t have life mana to wipe away the pain and the application burned.
She thought it might have finished, but there was no way of checking so she continued to hold herself as still as she could, feeling the burning tunnel of magic as it slowly, moment by moment, began to fade.
Blood leaked from her eye sockets and sizzled as it impacted where Maddy was trying to burn her spell into her flesh.
It hurt. It hurt but she was doing it to herself and so it was bearable in a way an external pain wouldn’t have been.
Finally, it was over. She couldn’t feel the spell being burned anymore and Maddy collapsed.
She lay on her back in darkness and only began to stir when a view of the surroundings. Began to appear.
She could see herself. She could see herself from a dozen angles. She could see the pained expression. See the twin lines of blood trailing down her cheeks and dirtying the wooden floor below. A strange dark red tattoo sat on her cheekbone – a eye directly below the eye above it more meaning than purposeful spell contained in its shape. There was so much tangled linework that looked like it might be words mushed together…but what truly stood out was the view any of her eyes with reality sight saw.
The tattoo melted into her cheekbone below looked more real than everything else. It looked at least twice as real as Maddy herself.
She watched her own smile begin to grow and saw herself open her two eyes.
One was bright purple, the other green. Creation and life? Yes of course those were the two contained in her head right now…that’s not a ‘her’, that’s me.
Maddy was looking out at the room even as she looked down at herself.
As much as her eyes were a cost – as much as they were a commitment to the spell…she wanted to keep looking relatively normal. Two of her spells were currently nestled inside her skull. Not because that’s where they belonged but because they could belong anywhere, and she didn’t want others to see her empty sockets.
Blinking Maddy felt the eyes shift and teleport away. A moment later two separate eyes appeared and pushed themselves into her socket. Her eyelids fluctuated slightly in an annoying way – gross for anyone who could see her face in the swap…but once she opened her eyes again she could see a light life and creative life eye held in both of her sockets. They were both mostly greenish and looked normal – although slightly different shades and the light life eye glowed more than eyes normally did…
Maddy continued to watch herself enraptured. She used her eyes like a mirror to stare and inspect her body.
She looked different. Slightly malnourished in comparison to what she remembered. Her hair was dirty and matted. Her clothes covered in sweat and blood.
…this was her?
…or was this simply a vessel for her?
Was this even her body?
…
Yes. This was her. This right here was her body. Those were her two eyes. Those eyes over there under the bed were hers too. They were all her body. Not some fake vessel for her mind and soul. They were her.
Sure she had created it so her eyes would continue to exist, spawning from each other if they were destroyed – something she hadn’t tested but knew without a shadow of a doubt would work.
Sure she had swapped bodies already.
It didn’t mean that that wasn’t her. That wasn’t her body down there and over there and up there…
Maybe she should take a break for the rest of the afternoon?
Slowly standing up, Maddy felt enough of her mana had returned to start conjuring water.
She filled her hands with drops of the cleansing liquid and wiped off her face.
Next Maddy slipped out of her clothes briefly drenching herself in a steady stream of mostly fake liquid and sighed out. Below she filled her basin with gunk and slowly began to feel more clean. She needed soap. Why hadn’t she bought soap?
After her shower Maddy slipped into her spare clothes – her less adventurous outfit. The one meant for normal use.
Using her surrounding sight, Maddy carefully unknotted her hair finding it easier to melt and reform some of the matts.
Reaching up she felt her tattoo slightly. In some ways it was a weakness…she could try and hide it with an illusion or paint over it or…
Or just leave it for now. If someone was attacking it they were attacking her head. That was already a weakness.
One of her eyes appeared directly above jess's bed and caught her gaze directly causing Maddy's friend to jump.
👀 Achievement get: Permenant power! (Rare)
Description: Through masterful work and great personal effort you have managed to create a permanent spell. Difficult and powerful this is a point many mages never reach.
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Stat: +27 soul
…
I really need a break.
Bursting out of her curtain Maddy found both of her friends in a state of sleepiness and roused them out of their meditation.
“Let’s go out for dinner tonight. My treat.” Maddy called pulling both of them to their feet. Troy stumbled confused after her while Jess’s eyes lit up even as she nodded and closed her curtain to get dressed.
A moment later the group headed out into the town.
Just to live a little.
More magic and fighting could wait till tomorrow.