---Maddy---

Maddison stared across at the fake corpse, a growing urgency coating her body with pins and needles. At first, she thought it was a negative reaction to the death but…if she were being honest with herself she felt next to nothing from that.

Trying to consider the most moral thing she could do before following it was exhausting. She could go back to being a good person as soon as her life was in less danger.

How lazy, how weak her resolve was.

– No! She was a good person. She was just in shock or something...

Exausting. Something for future her to unpack.

Either way, this prickle wasn't a reaction. It felt like an attack. It felt like…well it simply felt like she was being lightly attacked by ‘something’ in some unknown way and at a low enough degree she could ignore it.

Paradox damage?

It said a lot about the dungeon, that, despite its heavy-handed storyline and “absolute” hand against breaking its rules…it was surprisingly lenient in its punishments? She had had a month to complete its first story. Now she had a full hour. Instead of a single instantly fatal attack, she’d been poisoned and warned.

A ‘soft’ punishment.

At this point it wasn’t even a ‘punishment’ outside of the story. It was simply a trial.

If the dungeon’s goal was truly to kill them it could probably have stuck instantly and lethally as soon as they broke the first rule. The cost of only being able to attack when its rules were broken…that would have boosted any conceptual weight.

Or, perhaps it had actually ‘struck instantly’ with the boulder… but…No. Considering James had managed to defend against that, the boulder had felt like a warning more than an attempt to kill them.

No, Maddy was sure the dungeon wanted them to succeed. It was true she might be anthropomorphizing the dungeon too much…but someone somewhere was pushing for them to succeed. If not the dungeon, then whoever created it. Something was intelligently pushing for them to gain a domain.

Maddy attempted to heal whatever damage was happening to her and only really managed to remove the painful prickle. What was being attacked? Her mind? Her soul?

She was distracted.

Jess slipped her hand into Maddy’s and to the girl’s surprise she felt the prickle dim.

Was her friend’s magic able to somehow block the damage? Was her domain of protection allowing her to protect against something esoteric?

Maddy didn’t know.

What she did know was she needed to perform a spell. One theoretically more important than any she had performed so far. She needed…to commit.

She had to transform herself.

…

“A life for me, but not for mine. A limit then! One made this time.

I've learned of costs and come to give; this spell a hope for mind to live.

An unlife yes, but not a curse; my soul stays strong, forgo the hearse!

An inspiration from decay rooted deep and complete – My heart will henceforth no longer beat.

But in exchange my heat will thrum, the concept of it's eternal drum, will soak the land and spread my will, a domain I say! One soaked in sound, my communication with the world abound. My body’s cost will not be death, my cost will take from what I’ve left.

An existence here, the cost for there. A single blip to anywhere.

Not a movement, not my luck. My soul is steady fast and stuck. My domain I hope you soon will see, is really just a part of me.

The part of me that interacts; it’s part of me is trueful facts.

And where I go and where I see; my domain spreads and recedes…” Maddy trailed off her chant.

In front of her was her array of eyes – all 27 of them laying on the fake corpse as if incubating themselves.

To Maddy’s ‘death’ sight, remnant death energy was slowly concentrating and pooling in points beneath each eye.

To Maddy’s ‘Light’ Sight, sunlight from the sky above was captured and held in each working – not because the light from the sky had anywhere near the power of her light mana but because the light held more ‘reality’ than her light mana. More ‘meaning’ she could imbue.

Maddy’s ‘real’ face was eyeless, her eyelids clenched tightly over empty sockets.

She looked peaceful and serene – calm and collected as if she weren’t in the middle of a life threatening ritual she barely understood.

Each eye stared up at the fleshy body standing above them. Each eye held a portion of her mind, each a piece of her soul.

Surrounding them as if as offerings were every single possession Maddy owned. She was including them in her list of what she was – with the hope of expanding upon them in the future.

She could feel herself fading as time went on. The kiss of the void prickled painfully across her skin – it ignored her healing and was only slightly blocked by Jess’s magic.

Was she going too far? Should she wait to try and give herself teleportation till a later point when she was stronger? Should she forgo this attempt at permanently keeping her mind in her soul instead of her body? This attempt at grasping immortality? She was moving too quickly – she needed more time to prepare.

It was too late now for regrets.

Maddy continued to fuel her spell.

She was doing the equivalent of tossing logs onto a fading fire – and then ripping bark off of trees she hadn't cut yet to throw more fuel in. She dragged the ritual out longer and longer well past the point it should have failed.

A heaviness began to fill the air as Maddy worked, slowly checking and double checking each part. A density to the suroundings as if the world were watching her.

Her voice was one ingredient. A rhyme for power and purpose. Her mana and materials were another ingredient. A seed of meaning and a fuel for what she hoped to accomplish. The largest point of the spell however was actually a stack of wooden paper.

A stack bound like a book containing all her wishes. It was less a spell and more a diary – each ‘page’ contained the ramblings of a scared little girl. Point form notes, legal verbiage for what she was and wasn’t willing to pay. Sketches and pictures of her plan. Everything peppered with runes and keywords.

Some of it had already been written, but the majority was filled out in the past forty minutes. She’d written faster than she thought possible – both hands jotting down notes simultaneously to double her efficiency – all her regen pumped into the book and the surroundings the majority put aside for the end.

She’d then spent an entire minute binding her wooden ‘book’ and making it look nice.

Maddy could have written more if only she’d had more arms. She could have written more if she had more time – even if she’d more efficiently used her time.

Heck – she had almost ten minutes left to perform the end of the ritual. She could probably have squeezed in a few more points…

But no. She was feeling more and more pressed by the paradox damage. Her mind was bruised and steadily becoming malleable.

It was time.

Painted across her entire stomach was a single rune. The one for ‘crystalized self’. The rune the dungeon had given her – which she had barely touched up till now. Given as a key for this spell – more proof the dungeon was a training aid.

Each eye sat on its own copy of the self rune – a instinct had took Maddy over, the concept whispering to her when she melted it into the headless corpse and dropped her blood and life energy into the rune.

She’d listened to parts of it and straight up ignored its prodding in others. She wouldn’t be led into this – not even by her magic. This spell was hers and hers alone.

Maddy continued to push mana into her spell ramping up till all her pools were dry. The prickling intensified as she worked – her pools were now dry but still her spell required more. It wasn’t enough – she didn’t have enough magic. Enough oomph.

The spell squeezed her empty pools and physically pulled the regeneration out of her to fuel its working.

Her pools were dry and shriveled and breaking and yet still her spell dragged at her – beginning to pull life energy from her blood and flesh. Jess looked on horrified at the side as her skin shriveled – Maddy had hidden a lot of her self mutilation from her friends up till now, but this was impossible to add to that pile of secrets. There was nothing more that could be done than take that final step.

Her mana and lifeforce was completely gone, her spell attempting to drag power out of her calcified bone spellwork.

Instead of resisting it Maddy relaxed, her voice continuing once again. As she spoke not a single bit of her mana remained and yet her concepts still filled her voice with power. She continued speaking softly her concept of sound helping her voice long after her lungs and mouth failed her.

“And so by sound and thought and will, I create a way to survive this bitter pill. I direct what I can and wish for what I can’t. I save myself by sacrificing myself in this Incant…”

From her multitude of perspectives Maddy watched her body begin to fade much more rapidly. ‘She’ was no longer really there. The ‘reality’ of that body had dropped below a certain threshold. It was like she was watching an illusion filled with useless gunk, instead of a body chant those final words.

The theory behind her spell was simple and yet every step of it was nerve-racking.

To teleport she had to destroy her body in one spot and create her body in another. There was no way she could create a fully functional body with enough ‘reality’ to be her, so she had to save the ‘reality’ of her in the original spot, transfer it to the end point and then use it to create the new body.

But that was teleportation – not domainwork. Maddy’s real goal was to shove a bit of her reality into each of her many eyes. They were already a part of her but…they weren’t really her.

They had her sight but…she couldn’t cast magic through them. The point she could activate spellwork through her eyes would be the point her eyes and all they saw contained her domain.

That felt like a significant enough point it should crystalize her domain with intent. The second part should help as well.

Some of this was kind of thrown into the pot – her possessions melting and filling the spells framework for example – but she had spent quite a bit of time thinking about this ritual.

So, to reiterate. Maddy would teleport into nothing and while doing so give a piece of herself to each of her eyes. Not a chunk of her replaceable body or a scrap of her mind. She would give a piece of what she was. A piece of her ‘reality’.

Hopefully by piggybacking off their ability to heal from each other, she could then heal back from any wound so long as at least one eye survived. Like a lich from fantasy. She’d forgone the protection of body stats and mutations, so now she had to make her own.

In fact her body stats – which had been nerfed and capped by the cost of her affinities pulled together the scraps feeding into her spell and gave her ritual their weight.

The idea behind her final body was simple and yet it had taken all her idle thoughts up till now to finally realize it.

To start one had to rewind a bit. Ever since the necromancer in charge of all the reincarnation systems had mentioned joining him, Maddy had seriously considered the idea of a lich and what it might mean. A dead body for immortality. The cost of a continued ageless existence was…a body of decay.

Simple equivalent exchange – the result, a smelly body with rotting flesh and who knows what else. A heavy heavy cost but one some might consider worth it for immortality however cursed.

If she was being honest…turning herself into an undead felt trivial using those levels of cost. Keeping her thoughts the same – preventing herself from being the equivalent of a zombie…that was a tiny bit harder but Maddy still felt like she could make that sort of permanent change relatively easily.

Technically this spell wasn’t hard – she simply had to pay that ‘cost’ and away she’d go.

If she had gone that ‘undead’ route Maddy would have tried for as strong an undead as she could think of. Something like a vampire whose ‘cost’ was to consume blood instead of a steadily deteriorating zombie.

If she had gone that route maybe she could have slowly offset that cost by building in a method of growth. Her increased power fixing her decaying form, an end result almost human once again.

But…if Maddy could, she would try for a better transformation than that. That might have been her only option if her only affinity was life and death, but Maddy had more…and with a dash of negative shaping she could ask for a cost that she would prefer – the fact her cost was slightly out of her control would make it more meaningful. “What is the most efficient cost I can pay that is also the least deliberating”. Hopefully one that let her continue to enjoy life – one she could offset as she grew stronger.

...

For a single drawn out moment the world changed. A moment shorter than a second and yet longer than a day, time lost its smothering hold upon the world.

Existence faded and all that remained was Madison.

Maddy, Maddy and Maddy. Me myself and I.

Maddy’s body was overlayed and then transformed into an elegant and masterful spider. A spider puppeteer – several almost invisible threads heading out in all directions.

This was perhaps the clearest picture Maddy had seen of this spider yet…clear enough she could clearly see the threads heading up into space above it. Even as the spider controlled others it too was controlled by something far above…a few threads were broken and yet the spider remained.

A therapist would have a field day if she told one about this.

Was this how Maddy saw herself? Was this a part of her?

The council of Maddy’s – each eye a separate portion of her mind – stood about the spider and stared silently. Her many eyes were each supported by their own shadowed figures – her life eye a wooden face, her light eye shining like a lamp.

The eyes were the jury – her spidered body the defendant in this kangaroo court of peers.

If…if this was a representation of who Maddy had been, a part of herself…the healthy option – the logical option should be something about accepting it. Maddy could imagine herself telling a therapist about this spider and a therapist talking her through acknowledging and hugging this thing or something sappy like that.

But…if this was who she had been, if this was a representation of that person she had been. The one she was still trying to escape.

Then why the hell should she accept this thing?

The stage shifted. The spider was bound at the stake the jury surrounding it on all sides.

Kill this creature I hate so that I may escape. Rend and break. Rend and break.

The spider began to struggle in panic and then pain as each eye took out its frustration on it.

Maddy would never condone needless violence against animals or even arachnids.

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Torture had no purpose.

Life-light Maddy healed the spider up a bit so the council could continue – they hadn't all gotten their turn yet.

This wasn’t something as crass as torture. It was all in her head after all.

It was her moving on. Healthy mental exercises for a healthy mind – one that was in the process of growing stronger.

Maddy gleefully continued to attack. She bent and melted and burned and twisted. She snapped legs and used them to stab the creatures many eyes. She erassed the creatures shell exposing its innards to the elements and spread its human innards about the stage mercilessly up till the moment a healing mind was too slow and the endless exhilarating moment ended.

...

There were two more parts to this ritual. Two parts that could only happen when – and if – her first spell was successful.

Her body continued to look like it was standing there speaking but to most of Maddy’s sights it had completely faded. There wasn’t even ‘meaning’ in the words anymore, the chant might as well be the ravings of a lunatic for how little meaning they held.

The remnant ‘gunk’ that had been floating about had already burned away under the ministrations of the void. It had dissapeared in that drawn out second in her mind.

Good. The toxic sludge was gone.

All that truly remained was parts of her skeleton and a shell of light – illusion thin enough you could see through it to the bones beneath.

Maddy could see the spells she had carved on her bones pulse and resist. There was quite a lot of meaning embedded in them despite their relatively new addition. Quite a lot of ‘weight’ resisting her mana – even if she wanted this, they contested her new spell.

The bones felt they were more important than her ritual. They had used more mana in the past few weeks. Their ritual had been more involved with more resources and time. They had done more, they had more thought put into them. It wasn’t the ritual that should take over her bones her bones should take over the ritual to add it to its store of spells.

Her bones – especially her pelvic focus – were dense to Maddy’s reality sight and fought conceptually.

Heavy and full of swirls of ‘meaning’ and whatever else her reality sight showed her. They rejected being subordinated.

Maddy pushed her desires toward them. She imagined herself stroking the bones and saying ‘Its okay. Do this for me, I haven’t forgotten you. You aren’t being replaced’.

Suddenly the illusion flickered and faded from physical sight causing Jess to gasp. For a single moment Maddy’s skeleton stood and then it too began to collapse. Bones disintegrated into dust as the spellwork disappeared – a grey powder floating to the side.

No, not faded. Condensed into a bundle of meaning – the physical form discarded.

Dimly, Maddy was aware of Jess running forward – her friends entire body was coated in brilliant golden armour.

There was a brief trembling moment where all the minds contained in her eyes began to fade and in a shadowed way, Maddy could see the necromancer just out of sight watching her.

The eyes were infused with part of the ‘everything’ that made up the girl – the rest of her meaning held in a leaking shell of mana. A single speck of the reality of her focus begrudgingly slid into the eyes – an end point just as much as it was a copy. To the side the shadow of her potential savior turned and faded away once again, a complex look upon his bone white face. He looked annoyed he had come and not been needed? Almost proud? It was hard to tell when the girl could barely focus on the man made of bones and cloth.

The girl felt strange. For a single moment she was 27 separate people – not a single person split into 27 separate positions.

And then the feeling faded and she was alive – if split into parts and without a body. The entire grassy area was covered in a golden dome as Jess panicked and attempted to help.

It was nice to know she cared.

Maddy couldn’t feel anything.

She couldn’t taste or smell. Maddy could see and listen but that was it and even those felt muted.

She couldn’t feel anything in her eyes and so Maddy wasn’t sure if they were continuing to be attacked but…she was relatively sure the damage had stopped.

Step one done.

Each of her eyes felt a pinprick of mana. Her pools…they were beginning to appear in each of her eyes as something Maddy did not understand took hold and held her in comforting arms.

She’d pushed a bit too quickly with this spell. She’d tried to grow stronger too fast – the work of years done in an hour.

As soon as the new feeling passed, blue boxes rolled in.

👀 Achievement get: Eyes of M. (Unique)

Description: Sacrificed. Archived. Solidified. I'm sorry.

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

Stat: +81 'Eyes of M' Soul Defense.

Paradox resolved.

Your past self killed your current self by foolishly dying to your hand and thus the timeline has been restored. Your continued existence is no longer protected by the narrative. You are an abnormality outside of causality.

Abnormalities do not draw the eyes of fate, but blasphemy angers fates followers. Be wary for you haven’t escaped the domain of fate quite yet.

Maddy felt her mana pool in all the eyes – the pinpoints expanding into normal as soon as each eye held three soul defense. The pools felt diminished and small – like her pools had been a meal that was cut up and distributed amongst the eyes. Distributed instead of something accessed by all of them or duplicated between them as her goal had been.

There wasn’t enough mana in any of her eyes individually to continue her plan. That…wasn’t ideal.

Collectively there was enough of course and in a few minutes she should have enough mana to continue…but she hadn’t been planning on cooperatively casting this way and every mistake was a mistake she shouldn’t have made with her life on the line. She’d have to figure out how to share mana with herself for the future.

In the future. That was the important point.

There was a strange lack of urgency held in her eyes as she struggled to coordinate the plan between them.

She could see the rest of her reality right there. It was leaking. Diminishing with every moment it was held in storage.

She should be panicking. Logically she knew that and yet…maybe her lack of a body prevented the emotional response from hitting her?

Either way Maddy continued to calmly gather mana, a detached interest in following the plan she had started.

The eyes hadn’t been built to communicate with each other – they could toss ideas back to her body and her body could toss ideas back to her eyes but…there was a link between eyes for the resurrection mechanic. It was incredibly hard to piggyback off that link – as a mage, intent was hard to convey purely through thoughts.

Still the message was simple and she finally managed to get her separate minds to focus. Finally they begin directing their mana into the spell.

As soon as Maddy linked her spellwork, an illusion of her appeared in the area once again.

A golden knight spun and attempted to hug the reappearing illusion but fell through – stumbling past the shell of light painted on dark. Jess panicked for another moment, then noticeably took a deep breath before watching Maddy continue.

First, two eyes teleported up to sit in the illusions sockets.

They shouldn’t have been able to sit in the air and yet, perhaps as a side effect of the rest of her magic they attached to the illusion as if it were real.

Next with a flicker – taking much less time than the initial disappearance – her bones reappeared. They were illusions as well, but ones with weight and meaning that spread through the rest of the shell of light.

An effort was made to push the rest of her little understood ‘meaning’ into this shell before moving on to her final affinity Maddy began to heal. She filled her body with life mana and the pilfered life energy from her previous body. Her magic and affinity swirled in the air before latching onto ‘her’ body. They found something in the illusion and suddenly ‘saw’ her for what she was.

Soon life mana began attempting to fix the endless lethal problems that riddled her form.

…

Maddy felt faint and dizzy. Her body was…not quite there right now. Reality leaked from her luminous pores and she was heavily dissociating from the the world.

It wasn’t getting better.

She was still leaking! Maddy concentrated as hard as she could, halting the loss of reality with a constant firm grip of her intent. She needed to make a spell to do this automatically. She shouldn’t still be leaking.

Nothing felt real.

That…was bad.

The world about her wasn’t real. The world about that world wasn’t real – that…was bad.

Maybe it was fitting that she wasn’t real as well? A fake girl in a fake world surrounded by fake people.

At the end of the day was anything real? Probably not right, She was just having a dream or something. Soon she would wake up and find herself back on earth. Actually was earth real? Maybe it was all just a hallucination.

The girl had reached out to pick up her bag absentmindedly and her hands passed through the strap. Pausing the girl tried several times to grasp the bag – was the bag an illusion? Probably.

Stupid illusion.

The girl focused correctly – she told the illusion beside her that it was real and then picked the cloth up triumphantly.

Oh was she the illusion? This was…this was fine. She knew that.

She’d already put a lot of through into the creation – she’d always planned on attempting immortality the timeline had just been shifted rapidly.

She was alive. She was good. She’d succeeded. Illusion hands seemed like a better price than rotting flesh.

This was fine.

She should also be able to teleport again and with how Maddy had planned things, the next attempt should be a magnitude easier. Maybe after a few more attempts Maddy could start activating it in seconds – and as she used that spellwork it should strengthen and grow more efficient.

Yes, the first attempt is the worst. Only way to go is up from here.

The other girl was asking her something, a concerned look upon her face.

Sound wasn’t quite reaching the girl – Maddy focused on her eyes letting them resonate the concept of sound into her mind.

I am me. My name is Maddison. I am 20 years old. I just did some magic. I love magic. I’m made of magic. I’m going to be fine.

“…okay? Are you there? Is there anything I can do to help?” Jess spoke, standing a good hands length away from Maddy. She stood as if afraid to touch Maddy – as if Maddy was fragile and a single touch would break her.

Her friend was probably right about that.

Jess’s head was locked in a helmet that almost appeared to be made of hair – flowing whip like strands of barrier fell down jess’s back and swayed behind her on an invisible wind. Jess’s eyes peered out of a visor red and strained flecks of gold standing out in her brown irises.

Jess’s arms and legs were coated in interlocking plates – an incredibly solid feeling of ‘reality’ emanating from the conjured armor. That dense feeling of protection extended out to the dome that surrounded them. Was this her friends avatar? She’d completed her domain first? Good for her…

“I’m fine. That took a lot out of me and I still have a final step to create my active domain power.” Maddy spoke wincing at the pain of vocalization.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Jess asked, concern continuing to radiate towards her.

“Just…continue to stay here with me. Please protect me from anything you can while I finish off.” Maddy allowed herself some weakness. Jess nodded and reached out a hand hesitantly.

Maddy reached out and gave her friend a quick hug before crouching down and conjuring a slate to write on.

She had sacrificed her charcoal pencil so with another painful prickle she created a new one conjuring the illusion and giving it, some remembered weight.

She started to write – and then paused. This was important – it had to go on her bones…

Maddy almost absentmindedly reached into her body and dragged out a nice solid writing surface from her leg.

The flesh parted easily – a perk of being over half illusion.

Her skull felt more meaningful but a part of her resisted that. How could she use her body to write with if her head didn’t have its skull in it? That was silly.

Her destructive-darkness eye popped over to rest on the end of her pen and sacrificed its entire pool and regeneration to cut and burn runes into her bone.

Her bone was slippery – her pen kept slipping through the canvas and so a second eye popped over – her life-creation eye feeding its mana into her bone and causing it to solidify enough to write on.

Each and every time she activated one of these spellworks her focal burns twinged with pain. A tiny concerning prickle and ache – but a good one. Her focus felt stronger as mana flowed through it. Her body felt more here.

It felt like by using her bones she was reminding them they existed. She was reminding her focus of its purpose and fed meaning into its weakened existence.

By making a new spell she was expanding her focus to cover more of her bones. The spell was completely separate but the meaning of her bones holding magic fed into the whole skeleton conceptually.

And as soon as it had more meaning her life mana could heal it better.

Synergy!

Okay. Step two. Maddy needed to make a few changes to her original final plan. The goal was once again to rip her body apart and…she really shouldn’t do so again in such a short amount of time but it felt like she had to.

It would damage her even more than she was already damaged – still Maddy felt like her domain was already formed and if she didn’t finalize it right now it would settle…If it settled now and she tried to realize its active form later…well it would be weaker.

She had to finish no matter how damaging it would be. She needed to be strong. She needed to have power – she couldn’t’ fall behind or fail to live up to her potential she just couldn’t.

She wanted to be one of the strongest people in this world. They had all started at the same place – Maddy refused to end up fallen behind by the end of this race.

Maddy knew she was currently being reckless. She knew she wanted to plan more – but she’d been planning for days now.

Okay. Maddy was ready. She hadn’t included a lot of text on this bone, so she’d have to speak more to finalize this spell.

A few tweaks to her bone and then Maddy pushed it back into her leg – flesh parting in a bloodless squish.

She held a link to her partially created spell and then began to speak. This spell was almost a framework. A guide for what she wanted her future domain declaration to be.

“First Delineate my Domain.” Maddy spoke and willed her eyes to start contributing.

Everything she saw was her domain. Her domain overlapped with the dungeons domain but by delineating it Maddy drew a line between them. She drew attention to the fact her domain existed. She purposefully separated it from the surroundings.

She tried to force the position her domain covered to be hers. Foreign domains had no sway here. A line at the edge of her sight.

Maddy actually failed to kick out the dungeon but did manage to turn the area into something ‘contested’. Her domain was now fighting instead of existing peacefully alongside.

“Scatter mana as seeds, condense orbs of environment, expand the roster of eyes and increase the council of minds!” Maddy began to speak.

“My truth is thus, As each of my affinities has shown me something new and allowed me to interact with a new realm…to contest magic I can’t understand I need to see it. If I can see it, it’s possible to fight it. Collect the mana concepts and shapes of the surroundings. The domain I’m in, the environment I’m around. Create eyes that contain that foreign meaning. Contain eyes that can see the magic around me. Create temporary eyes – I don’t care how they appear – and allow them to see that which they were created out of. To lend weight I offer my body. Temporarily cause my eyes to have meaning – give them the ability to cast spells by making them me.” Maddy paused for a moment as if waiting for an invisible cue. Then in a rush she finished her spell.

“World of sight. Peak under the curtain and reveal all. Domain Expansion!”

Maddy’s body melted – disappearing in seconds this time, as she sliced her meaning into a thousand pieces and tossed it into the still forming eyes.

There was a weird chicken and egg scenario as she put this completed spell into her bone then turned her bone into meaning and split it evenly amongst the eyes to complete the spell. It felt like a paradox even as the reality of Maddy dipped lower.

A pleasant surprise was it felt like a lot of the ‘reality’ that had leaked away from Maddy into the environment was captured by these eyes.

They were bound in the spell and these eyes so it was still a loss but…as a way to strengthen these eyes it felt great.

Astonishingly the negative logic of her spell latched onto a concept Maddy didn’t use often.

Water.

The base for conjuring healing liquid spiraled into the sky. Out of the air as if condensing the water from the atmosphere, countless droplets started to appear and fall.

Each drop was an eye – a misshapen eye that fell through the air and then hit the ground before melting away into nothing.

Many eyes didn’t fully form – many of them were misshapen orbs without enough mana to do more than fill the environment.

Still, a few did what Maddy had hoped they would do even as they were created and destroyed proof they were temporary.

The world shifted and became more.

There was logic in everything. Rules that underpinned each point in the surroundings. Binary gears set to activate settings and interact with other gears spreading out into the distance.

There was form in shape and shape in form – the tapestry of the world something that could be painted with the colors of existence to continue its story.

There was earth and a feeling of steady resilience in the ground and certain surroundings. There was space and the way you could drag and stretch it – scaffolding built out of and into the surroundings that stretched the world around them to insane lengths.

There was even a sense of devotion and divinity – of religious connections between all bonds.

And, overwhelming all other sights... there was time.

A sense of what will happen and what could happen. Splitting lines of effect that balled up and showed a future if they were followed.

It felt like every choice made a different future but some choices were more likely than others – those futures more solid.

This web was natural – it was simply a part of the world she hadn’t seen up till now. A steady fact of the environment – or maybe just a fact inside of this domain.

Was this how the dungeon saw the world? Or was the dungeon able to do this by feel…Maddy translating its feelings into a sight instead?

None of these questions mattered – as long as Maddy focused on the results the truth was unimportant.

Wrapping around these webs of future and past, Maddy saw swirls of smokey mana invisible up till now. It felt like certain futures were highlighted – the dungeon’s mana strengthening the ‘meaning’ of those threads.

No…meaning was a term for reality sight and creation and destruction magic. It was not the same thing at all.

The mana strengthened certain threads raising their ‘destiny’. That felt like a better term for making them more likely to happen.

Threads were everywhere into and out of everything but the majority linked to living creatures. Jess had hundreds of threads heading into her body – and yet where insidious fate mana pushed down certain futures her friends golden mana partially blocked and defended.

Her friend’s avatar was ‘protecting’ itself from the largest destiny-based attacks. Not perfectly – not yet – but still…it looked like she was gaining in strength as well.

Maddy borrowed the concept of future sight burning the rune into the grass with decay and linking the meaning of her bone spellwork into a spell. She pushed mana from as many points as she could reach into her new attack spell – the very fact she could see, allowed her concepts to latch on… even if they were outclassed in experience and home field advantage she had reached the battlefield for the first time.

A wave of sound phased into alignment with the time-sight-surroundings using polarity. A sprinkling of seeds spread out – tiny maggots that attacked negative futures and foreign influence with all their unstable might. One of her ‘future sight’ temporary eyes grabbed a portion of her split mind and ripped itself out of her domain with glee. It grabbed a troupe of maggots and rushed off in a vaguely upward direction in glee.

Her own eyes seemed to have nearly no lines of fate directly connecting to them and yet threads brushed by and touched every single one of them in a round about manner. There were still environmental threads that interacted with futures she was in. Everything was connected – even if she was an ‘abnormality’ she was still affected – at least until she used magic to try and push those threads away and insulate herself more. How could she go about doing that? She was getting distracted she didn’t have enough mana to even attempt this right now. There were plenty of much more important threats directly about them.

There were living creatures fighting hard in the surroundings. They were fighting in ‘truth’ and yet their magic was low – it was hard for Maddy to make them out as important, despite her expanded sight.

When had they arrived? It didn’t matter. Sometime when she had been distracted by time.

Maddy’s domain spell flickered out, too weak to continue.

Involuntarily her body began to reform – a single orb condensing out of the environment as it pulled her mana and reality back to a single point.

In space the flesh orb pulsed and flickered.

Maddy’s heart hung in space vulnerable and exposed.

Thump.

And now her heart was surrounded by wispy bones – a cage that barely protected such an exposed ball of mana and life.

Thump.

Now the shell of light and life was back – her ‘stability’ had taken a massive hit for the successive casts and her body remained dangerously transparent.

Thump.

Maddy was mostly back again. She had her body back – her domain expansion was over.

But…the costs had piled up.

The disassociation she had felt after her transformation was nothing in comparison to what she felt right now in this anxiety filled moment.

The girl threw all of her thoughts into staying alive. Staying in existence. Staying apart of existence existence staying apart of her…whatever!

It felt like if she stopped caring for a single second, she would fade away into nothing…and yet she didn’t even know why she cared only that she did. If she let her grip relax for any reason she would fade too far into ‘fakeness’ never to return.

Sure her eyes were solid and firm but…without the meaning held in her body how long would they last?

Dimly outside of the dying girl’s weakened body a vision came forth. She saw her golden knight was being attacked.

Those fighting shapes remained…dimly Maddy knew them to be the villagers. Fates followers. They were being attacked by the whole village – Maddy watched as Jess kicked like a soccer player – her friend's foot smashing a child’s head like a soccer ball.

The girl watched the other separate girl who was not her…protecting her. That didn’t make sense. How could she protect her if she wasn’t her? They were different people so that’s why it worked? She had to move. They had to escape the dungeon before it collapsed. Or something. She barely knew what was happening – just that she was fading but everything was fun and bubbly because…she was tired? This game was fun not that she’d tell anyone. They had to know how seriously she was taking the game.

A confused illusion led her protector away puppeting her silly little feet – not puppeting! Asking nicely... while watching from the surroundings because that was easier. Towards they moved towards the wall and safety. They beat cultists and fakes using the power of friendship. The sky got all rumbly and rained hard chunks of itself and then were swallowed by the exit to the fake world – the domain of fate was bested by the knights shining arms and the princesses' feeble little cheers and encouragements.

What a great story. I’m glad I got to be a part of it, the character smiled and winked at the camera.

Ah…I’m going have to fix this aren’t I. The girl had a final lucid thought before disappearing into another game.