---Maddy---

Maddison’s verdant eye of creative luminance rolled about in a dizzying manner as she manipulated vines into meaning. From the outside, the eye in the socket high above the front door spun and spasmed like an insane person, while about it, the wood and greenery rustled and shifted quietly.

Looking closer one could see a densely packed spiral of text and shapes that grew slowly outwards without direction. The spiral pulled her wasted mana into itself and grew with purpose even without its creator’s focus.

Its spell was simple – the growing ability for the eye itself to manipulate mana and life about itself.

Something useful but ignored before this point – when she was in her body she could write by hand without wasting mana on the actual writing... but as an eye it was hard to do much of anything without some spells put in place.

That control was what was letting her sew vines into spells about her house shaped body. She was sketching ideas more than anything. Thoughts of things that could be spells using her affinity and a donation of mana. She then let the spells attempt to grow into actual strength on their own – most were failing but a surprising number were surviving and growing into spells without her needing to give more mana to them. Sure, they were sort of interacting with the magic of the house itself – growing into the reality-given illusion and absorbing bits of remnant mana from it…but it still felt like they were coming out ahead.

She – and this was confusing because while she considered herself ‘Maddy’, she knew other eyes might differ in their opinion – was of the opinion that all good things took time. Power was ‘grown’ not gained in a rush.

Rushing led to sloppy houses that could fall at a moment’s notice. Time…Time could grow a sapling into a towering tree. It could grow a temporary shelter into a home.

Sure mechanically there was a reason for time giving power to spells…but always focusing on mechanics hid the power.

If you took longer to write down a spell. Longer to cast it. Let it take longer to take effect…well than that was a ‘cost’. A restriction for power. Something old Maddy had considered and then attempted to subvert or take advantage of. She’d spent as much time as possible writing down and ‘creating’ the spells, then turned around and shortened its casting time and effect activation. Old Maddy had focused on spells that could attack or defend her when she finished casting them – spells that she wanted to activate and have take effect as soon as possible in the moment.

Current Maddy was revising her opinion on that magic style. She was settling into a new ‘truth’ built upon that ‘mechanic’.

Good things take time.

It was true. A truth that became more and more obvious the longer Maddy thought about it.

Time, Quality, Cost. Pick two to focus on. You couldn’t have all three. If cost was lowered due to her smaller pool…well she would just have to focus on the other two parts of the trifecta.

True creation takes time. Good food takes time – you can make some relatively nice instant meals but all the proper ones need time to prepare, and time to cook. True life is born and grown over time. Good magic follows these rules as well. All her biggest spells had included the largest amount of prep time.

Why did the spell have to activate right as it was cast and then disappear afterwards? What if she wanted her end spell to be permanent? Even if it was only permanent within her domain…shouldn’t she give every part of the process as much time as she could? Keeping it close to her was a different sort of cost but one she was willing to accept.

It all just made so much sense. Why hadn’t this obvious truth clicked till now? Maybe because she’d never actually had the time alone with her thoughts to consider this? Maybe some influence from her current body of limited affinity? Maybe…the idea of efficiency only appeared to a splinter of the whole trying its best with limited resources?

Considering Maddy currently had roughly 1/27th of her ‘overall’ mana pool and regeneration, it was hard to prove this truth as well as she could have hoped. She wanted some concrete numbers. After all, what she’d done on her own without begging her sisters for donations was many times less than what they had slapped together with a full pool of power…

Still…given enough time she felt like she could prove her truth as more than just some minor interaction of an exploitable mechanic.

That ‘felt’ was a similar sort of ‘felt’ as the feeling concepts gave her when they whispered their potential to her.

Her delineation of the world outside her house and the room inside had grown stronger over the past few hours of effort It had grown and continued to grow the more work she put into it. If she continued…well would she ever reach a maximum? Would it continue growing in strength forever? She wanted to know.

It was to the point where Maddy felt like she could almost begin growing the size of the space inside – although maybe that was too ambitious of a goal? She didn’t have any concepts for space or size after all…and spacial manipulation felt powerful enough it might even need a whole affinity and mana type to achieve.

Focusing on concepts in a limited manner instead of growing the concepts into something that could do anything was such a…well, “limited” view of things. She wouldn’t know until she tried after all.

Maddy’s Creative-life-light eye was so engrossed in her spell pruning and fertilizing she almost missed the moment Jess stepped through the barrier a hundred yards or so to the side.

Her one ‘actual’ job!

In her defense, Maddy only had a portion of her overall mind…although it felt like her portion was larger than some of her sisters. More aware? The single affinity eyes felt simpler and…well dumber if she were being honest. The double affinity eyes were better but still felt less aware on their own. Maddy’s mental focus wasn’t split evenly. That was the point she was getting at. She shouldn’t complain about a more limited focus when she was on the high end of the specturm.

Focusing on the spell grown below her, Maddy began activating the wooden mouth covered in runes for sound and transference of applied thoughts.

The wood slowly cracked open. A large leaf licked rough lips then called out, her voice hoarse sounding with the first use of her spell.

“Over here!” Maddy called.

Jess paused, then focused on Maddy’s welcoming shelter, a flash of confusion followed by recognition crossing her face.

Strolling across the grass, Jess looked up at the eye and smiled. A second later, her soft voice echoed back to Maddy’s senses. “Is this our new tent? Do I need a secret password to get in?”

Maddy forced the wooden mouth into a smile and cut the vines latching the door in place. The wooden door swung semi smoothly open and then shut behind her friend before Maddy grew the lock back.

…Maddy hadn’t grown a mouth onto the inside of the house. She hadn’t done much of anything to the inside of the house now that she thought of it.

Swiveling her eye to face ‘inwards’, Maddy stared into the unfurnished house sitting on dirt and cursed to herself. Dammit. She had spent too much time trying to improve defenses and had forgotten the chairs and stuff.

Jess looked around with a faint smile on her face – she totally knew Maddy had forgotten to work on furnishing and was totally making fun of her in her mind. The woman then raised a hand in a familiar gesture.

In a few seconds, a brilliant gold block ripped out of her hand and fused to the ground. With a squint, her friend moulded the boxy crate into a bed-like shape. Jess then reached down and gently picked Maddy’s body up off the dirt, laying it on the bed before ruffling her body’s hair.

Guess it was best to clean her things up – Maddy shouldn’t have left her body in the way. Jess then made herself a golden throne and sat back, a tired look slipping onto her face.

Yeah, Maddy felt that.

Calling back some of her sisters and getting a response from three, Maddy held the connection bands to her other eyes and felt them coming back towards her.

Her eyes weren’t constantly connected by design, although the connection process had improved quite a bit from the last point. Any eye could initiate a connection to as many eyes as they wanted. Then the ‘recivers’ could either refuse or accept it, turning the ‘request’ into a two-or-more way cord with transference concepts on all ends letting them share thoughts and mana or simple spells they could shove down the line.

One of Maddy’s first experiences with her eyes had been the mental effect from the sirens passing through the eye and back to her mind.

That event had stuck with her.

Now she wanted to be proactive about making sure mental attacks couldn’t spread from one eye to the other. Maddy did have a large portion of mental defense keeping her sanity high, but – just in case – every eye could accept and break a connection between them at any time. Technically, the eyes were also connected in some sort of metaphorical way with her spread apart soul…but that too had a nice chunk of soul defense in play after she coaxed the connections to try and be between both mind and soul. It felt like her stats themselves were multiplying this security feature, the defenses slowly growing to cover this permanent infrastructure in her network.

If one eye got affected by some sort of cognihazard or some sort of conceptually propagating effect, she should be good. All the other eyes would know to cut the infected off right away.

Should be at least.

No point spreading herself about for safety and then leaving such an obvious weak spot in place after all. It hadn’t been tested yet, but Maddy had high hopes for the system. If she left herself vulnerable, she was asking to be torn down. She was pretty sure at least one of her minds was actively focusing on improving it as well.

Now, if she could just finish growing this inner house-mouth, Maddy could ask her friend about her questions and what her plans were.

A flicker of sound bounced off of the delineation between the outside of the house and inside as one of Maddy’s eyes failed to teleport through the wall. The infrasound muffled past teleportation hosting levels and blocked easy entry.

Maddy’s creative-life-light eye turned to open a gap, but found herself squeezed to the side painfully. A mental gasp rang out as the impatient light eye rudely teleported through her and the gap. There was still an eye sized hole in the house after all – the one she’d made with a two way eye socket.

Technically it shouldn’t have hurt – the vibrations that passed through her eye were low enough they shouldn’t cause damage, but some sort of ‘souls squeezing past each other’ effect came into play and left her watering. The tears rolled down her bark unbidden even as she began carving a second hole in the back of the house. She'd regrow this hole in such a way that eyes could telport through it but nothing could crawl through the weak point...try and make it so the sound defense could be turned on and off by eyes who wanted to use it as well.

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Could she get the house to recognize herself? That was a good goal. Either way this could be like a pet door for eyes too rude to wait for her to open and close the human sized door – Oh! Troy just got out as well.

“Over here!” Maddy called – this time her outer mouth formed the words quicker and with significantly less rasp.

All good things need time to grow.

…

The three eyes who came back to base had briefly fought over who got to use the body. They had then compromised and dug out a third eye socket in the bodies forehead. Maddy’s body had then been woken up and puppeted as her Light, Illuminant-Death and Destructive-light eyes all synced into a single almost-combined mind.

One surprisingly Light heavy – this ‘imbalance’ made her body almost hyper as they spoke. Creative-Life-light Maddy could see the way her ‘awake’ concept was leaking out of her body’s words. Were they doing that on purpose? Either way, her friends had the tiredness eased and Maddy could feel herself becoming more alert so it was a happy side effect.

She continued keeping watch even as the light began to fall outside.

Soon monsters began to appear.

They arrived by the dozen – somehow spawning wherever Maddy wasn’t looking…probably because everywhere within her sight was partially her domain? Either way, the monsters appeared out of the corner of her eye and then padded and skittered towards the house unaffected.

Maddy watched as a poisonously purple bear-like creature slammed its toxic paws into her front door. Three thick grooves of mana slowly corrupted the entranceway lines of grey lingering and sinking deeper.

A weird flickering centipede tried to squeeze through a gap in the doorframe, but Maddy’s entranceway was conceptually cut off more than that. The monster and its friends found itself unable to slip through the gap.

A second slash of purple paws left a deeper groove – and it appeared her friends could hear that one, both leaping up at the sound.

Troy flickered into darkness and fell into the shadow cast by Maddy’s golden bed. She felt the way he disappeared from her senses and knew if she were boosting her domain she could see the way he entered a shadow dimension right beside theirs.

It took him a moment to reappear outside – guess her defenses hadn’t grown into this theoretical shadow plane yet – and with a glance at the surroundings he relocated himself to the roof glowing arrows beginning to stream away from him into the night – each potent enough to kill most of the weaker monsters in a single shot.

She could probably grow defenses into the shadow plane if she worked with Troy. Her domain activation and claim of his mana and concepts should bridge the gap. A domain activation would probably chunk too much of her stability at the moment – she’d only just healed back the effects from her last activation.

Not a ‘no’ but not something she should do just to see if she could.

Troy kept firing even as Jess opened the front door from the inside and sliced the purple bear in two with a swipe of her whip. First Jess ripped out a seat for herself right out side the front door spending a second to get comfortable. The defender slowly formed a barrier about them. Her defense was a large transparent gold sphere containing so much more than Maddy’s house.

It was almost embarrassing. Then again trying to compete against her friends specialization would lead to another mushy conversation...and the point of having partners was so they could cover Maddy's weakness. The point of friendship was a bit different but her friends being her teammates hadn't changed a bit.

The barrier had the concept of protection at the very center of its spell structure after all. Jess’s domain probably had a passive effect leading her to some deeper truth about protection as well.

Really it was a relatively simple protection when you thought about it. The dome deflected nearly all the monster's attacks while allowing Troy to fire out of it unimpeded.

One of the attacks that did manage to pass through the barrier had been a retaliatory strike that flowed through the reverse concept of revenge and nearly skewered Troy after he hit the hedgehog responsible for it. The spike that had appeared in front of him had been slapped away by a protective gauntlet – Jess having activated her domain before Troy had even shot the arrow her jump upwards aided by stilts of gold. She’d gotten some premonition of protection, letting her sense the danger before it had even arrived.

It was nice to have competent friends. Maddy…felt subtly safer at that reminder of her friend’s protection.

Maddy had the option to lend a hand by using her own magic on the barrier, but it could be just as likely to hinder her friend's spell as it was to help. Even higher chance of doing nothing now that she thought about it. Better to just focus on her job as mage for the group and deal with the weirder threats.

…

Maddy almost wasn’t even needed.

It was nice to have competent friends…but she wanted to prove her worth as well. She wasn’t just a portable tent creator! Maybe Jess should let something through so she could heal them…

…

Night passed uneventfully. Maddy had “needed” to attack once when a swarm of hornets tipped by void stingers had begun chipping away at the barrier – They would have out paced Jess’s mana regeneration if the group left them alone. The little pests were also too small and numerous for Troy to pick them off with arrows in a timely manner. Perfect case for Maddy to step in.

Borrowing the mana from two dozen eyes, Maddy spoke death and caused the wasps and a few of the weaker monsters listening to her house-voice to rot away from the inside.

It felt good. A hour or so later into the night, Maddy did it again just to show she could. After that some of the other eyes resented donating for non emergencies. Greedy Creative-Life-Light thought to herself. She was sharing with herself after all.

What could they even be doing that was more important than attacking the monsters around them!

The only other event worth mentioning was the death of some of her eyes. Around ten had returned to the safety of their temporary base, but the others had either been too far away to return in time or had gotten arrogant in their self-sufficiency.

Pure mana eye. Dark mana eye. Death mana eye. Life mana eye. It seemed like most of the casualties were single affinity eyes that had come across monsters that countered them or caught them by surprise. This was actually the first time since Maddy had upgraded her eyes and evolved her race that any eyes had died.

The deaths each twinged a phantom pain across her network and revealed a new side effect in their loss.

When Maddy had originally made the spell, each eye was fully disposable. It was just a waste of time and a bit of mana.

If they ‘died’ they would take a few hours to a day to grow back in the network splitting one of the existing eyes and healing back into full capability over time.

Now…

Well now each eye represented a portion of Maddy’s mana pool.

Mana pools but split even further from their base state.

Originally Maddy had a sort of pyramid of pools with her base affinities filling first and then cascading into the pools above them.

Life/death mana would refill her life/death pool and then divert to fill her life/death-creation/destruction pool, etc.

Now…well now the two halves of each affinity weren’t even joined in a single pool. Her life mana was a separate eye from her death mana –each with their own completely separate chunk of aspected mana and link to innate concepts.

Maddy couldn’t even cast her early egg spell with the mana shifting into life for allies and death for enemies anymore – not unless both eyes worked together and sort of passed the spell back and forth between them. If everyone coordinated she was the same as always but…coordination was a new problem she had to work on.

The firm link between each pool was also broken – each pool had its own regeneration, but that regeneration was linked to similar eyes in a sort of resonating way. From what Maddy could tell, as soon as her life eye had died, her death eye had fallen shortly after. The loss of its ‘twin’ had effected it far more than every other eye and led it into danger as well. The pure mana eye on the other hand, had effected every single eye still alive but by a nearly unnoticeably small amount.

Add to the fact that the dead eyes weren’t making their own mana anymore and each death was more than a loss of 1/27th of Maddy’s total mana per minute. A cost where none had existed before - more accurately, an ongoing cost for her new existence.

It was strange. Easy to imagine and discover and yet unaccounted for. Maddy needed to explore her new body more in the coming days. It wouldn’t do to be surprised by her new form.

Considering how it worked, it also felt like should all her eyes but one be killed it would take weeks to heal them back with a single eye’s regeneration.

Her light eye had been safely at the house but Maddy was sure if it had been exploring alone, it would have fallen when the dark eye had fallen.

Once both twins had died, that combined loss had cascaded. All eyes with either a life or death affinity had felt their mana regeneration drop to a third – a portion they could tell was being funneled into the respawn mechanic of their resurrection spell but the other portion was simply lost…like there was a hole in their pool and the liquid of their mana was leaking out.

Or…like there was a hole in their soul leaking mana out into the surroundings. Was mana the blood of the soul?

All her life eyes seemed to agree that idea had a lot of merit. Most of her other eyes disagreed with the hypothesis.

…

A hundred feet below the ground Dark Destruction’s Eye lit up with purpose.

She was needed already! Of course she was. She would always be needed.

Above her a single snaking tube with bends and trapped pinholes led to the place she had started digging. When her sisters respawned near her, they could teleport up through the tube but not much else could reach her. She’d even left thin plates of stone you had to put some effort to teleport through - vibrations could pass but nothing else, not even air could penetrate the following tubes.

…she’d opened up a seperate hole for digging after the skin of her eye started to feel like it would pop from the low pressure. The air vent was set to destroy absolutely everything other than air and she planned to bug one of her creation sisters to refill it when the digging slowed down.

She knew conceptually it made more sense for one of the life cores to dedicate themselves to growing back her sisters. They had the concept of healing in their life mana after all – might even be able to work on trying to heal back as soon as they could as well.

Still…dark destruction felt comfortable down here in the darkness and didn’t feel like she needed to ask anyone to join her just yet.

She loved digging – melting her way through tons of stone with an army of worms, and had managed to get quite good at vaporizing runes into the walls. Teeny tiny detail worms were used to turn her thoughts into permanent marks on the world - she really was carving her will into the environment as she carved runes.

Really, it would be convenient to skip having to carve spells – just have the magic happen when she wanted it to happen...but besides the physical effect of carving words it acted as a sort of filter for intrusive thoughts. If her magic just worked based on her thoughts an errant 'what would happen if...' could bite her in the butt. writing down what she wanted was the filter between her messy mind and the world.

Maybe when she got really good at this she could carve her will into the air instead of the walls. Temporary spells boosted by their temporary medium...

That felt like a good goal to work towards.

At first Maddy had made some chambers as offshoots to her eye wide tubes. She had a vague plan of creating rooms like you’d find in an ants nest or similar…but after a certain size the chance of a monster randomly appearing in the tiny cave got pretty high. They’d only appear when she wasn’t there and the chance was pretty low with small chambers…but it was still a shock to backtrack and find an angry trapped void slug eating away at the tube behind her.

At one point a flickering cenetped thing had crawled down from above – what were her sisters doing letting stuff in the house! But it died to her airlock so besides needing to go back and melt its corpse away the event was barely worth mentioning.

The defense network had grown from that point – her tunnels themselves forming themselves into runes as she built her home.

The resurrection spell for her sisters was weird. Tons of meaning and power had gone into making it, but the amount of knowledge they’d had at the time of making it had been much lower. The amount of inverse shaping had twisted the spell into something she couldn’t fully grasp and it had been iterated upon to the point the way the spell worked was a black box to her.

What Dark Destruction did know was that she could push at the spell.

She could feel it and interact with it.

Maddy could push and pull and bully the bit of herself into accepting her current consciousness as the spawn point. She could force it to germinate a new eye early – splitting off bits of herself into birthing chambers. These unfinished bits of herself could grow cocoons and continuing to regrow in a little alcove she’d made for each of them…it was more vulnerable than being inside of her but less costly on the network.

That was the point a sister joined her.

It seems some of her thoughts had leaked into the network because dark-life had joined the cave life! She’d thought having a life sister would have boosted her plan and she was right. Dark life agreed the tunnels were comfortable and cozy without harsh light to blind them – dark destruction didn’t mind sharing and had secretly wanted this. They were the same girl after all and sister dark-life was friendly and two eyes were better than one. A third would be even better – someone with a creation affinity at least – but Dark-Destruction would let sisters find their own way here.

Dark-life began to grow her own mana into the birthing chambers, slowly forming wombs of power to heal the missing bits of their collective back as fast as possible.

Eggs of comfortable blackness. Each orb a ‘collection’ and ‘concentration’ of what Maddy was.

She grew pitch black moss as a velvet fuzz across the wall to make squeezing through the tunnels uber comfortable.

Together they spoke of growing more defenses – the runes were great but had to be activated with one of Maddy’s mana pools or maintained every few hours. If they focused on creating magical items or growing magical plants that could survive and attack without an influx of mana…well then their final bastion of safety would be higher.

Dark destruction spoke of making a making a second bunker as well – it was no good creating a defence against death and then piling their final hope into one physical location. If they had multiple eyes set on respawn duty, they would be even safer.

The two giggled softly to themselves in the dark as they planned their dungeon. Together they were probably the most important pair of Maddy’s eyes.

…

A few hours later one of her twins, Dark-Creation joined them silently and set to work creating defenses in ways the initial pair lacked.

Threes are good.