Alatea and I looked at the spiritual tendrils levitating at the back of my head. They swayed around like grass on a light breeze. I was so tall, my head near the ceiling, and the tendrils flew even higher, they even clipped into the ceiling. The spiritual constructs were completely unphased by physical matter, shifting in and out of the white stone ceiling.

We looked at each other in pregnant silence. The two of us had many things to comment on, yet we were both left open-mouthed by what was happening.

Something that shouldn’t be happening.

The air warped as the tendrils oscillated. My soul permeating on the corporeal plane. It seemed as if reality itself had difficulties comprehending it.

Alatea took a deep breath, her nuclear white mana circling across her body as I typically did myself.

“Your soul is on the corporeal plane.” A statement.

***********

Stagnation ruled over Ferilyn. We loved it that way. Even then, I was one of the most progressive ellari in the city. But whenever that boy... no. Whenever that man appears before me, everything changes from the black-and-white monotony of the spiritual to a chaotic rhythm of the corporeal.

Strangely enough, he was the closest to spirituality incarnate I had ever seen. Even beyond the hidden draconid prince.

Edrie Nightfallen wasn’t an ellari, but a reincarnated being that refused to die.

Powerful mages, the raw energies of the world, gods, even Death itself, he refused them by clinging to his life.

For the longest time I had thought that mysticism had peaked with the draconid prince, and only I, with my longer lifespan, would be able to even ponder the creation of a Soul twelve-star spell.

But Edrie...

Edrie defied reality as he breathed.

In a week alone he had died more times than all of ellari in Ferilyn had done over the whole year. And what was the punishment for such an outright violation of the preestablished order?

Minor ailments.

I had seen young mages failing a spellcast and receiving more spiritual, mental, and physical damage than Edrie did by coming back from the dead.

At this point, I didn’t know if I should be amazed or terrified.

He just kept getting up.

And that scared me to my very core.

It was like a clever and vicious wolf that couldn’t be hunted down, put down no matter its wounds.

Decades of work, with the assistance of the Academy and the healing ward, multiple healers and mages of the eleven-star, and even a foreign mystic of a such star, that I was able to reach my current level.

I’m not interested in power. I never was. If I reached the eleventh star, it was because I wanted to help. I never looked after fame or wealth. I just wanted and want to help people.

That’s how the Resurrection spell was born.

That’s how I achieved the prior to the last milestone a mage could only desire to arrive.

A power great enough to defy existence itself.

Yet Edrie did it even before he was born.

This story didn’t begin the moment he became of the tenth star, no. It did on his first death.

A very crucial detail I noticed in his story was that he wasn’t affected by Death, or as he referred to it, the River of the Damned. Countless souls disappearing on a stream of blackness, possibly to then be reincarnated in the never-ending cycle of Life and Death.

How was it possible that a ‘pure soul’ ended in that place? And why was he unaffected?

The pure soul that later reincarnated as Edrie Nightfallen was able to defy reality as he was only a shimmer of consciousness floating on nothingness.

Too many questions.

So, I looked before me, lavender tendrils coming out of Edrie’s back. I instantly knew what they were.

“Edrie, your soul is showing.”

“What do you mean my soul is showing?” Edrie turned his head to look at the tentacles. “Oh, shit. My soul is showing.” It was terrifying how he only noticed after I told him myself.

Stolen story; please report.

“Your soul is on the corporeal plane.” I stated.

To an unobservant and ignorant mage, that may mean nothing. But to us, mystics, those words had weight beyond comprehension.

For there was only one reason, one way, for how his soul has physicalized.

“Singularity...” Edrie whispered, becoming aware of what was happening.

I had always discarded measuring Edrie’s power through his soul. For other mages, it was a functional enough metric to judge their power. For mystics, that became blurrier. For Edrie though, his soul had always been uncommon.

As a child, Edrie’s soul conflicted with his affinities, as if they weren’t natural. As if they were shoved in. A botched job. It was a speculation of mine and still is, though I just lied to him and told him that it was their affinities fighting for dominance. This was true because I had it seen before happening, but not the whole truth.

His soul was found in a never-ending struggle, making it outright impossible to tell where his power ended, and where his affinities began.

But as I saw the lavender tendrils grazing the air, distorting it, damaging it. I could now know exactly the power of his soul. Or at least the threshold he had surpassed.

Singularity.

A good word.

For his power, his soul had become so concentrated, so dense, that it tore through the fabric of reality. A power I achieved through investigation (though never truly used or even exhibited), he had done so through struggle. Confrontation.

He just needed a short moment of respite to physicalize it.

“Congratulations are in order, my disciple.” I clapped. I was astonished. He hadn’t done it through a spell, but sheer power alone. “You are now a fellow mage of the eleventh star.”

***********

Alatea’s slow clapping snapped me out of my trance. A hint of envy filtered through her emerald eyes.

“How?” I was confused, incredibly so.

“If I had to say,” Alatea began, “it’s because of the power of your soul. It exceeds far anything I have seen. Probably anything that has existed. Your soul is that big and powerful, Edrie.”

I focused my sight on the spiritual plane, only to see great changes. A colossal tether coming from my soul expanded out to the horizon, disappearing into the unknown. That would be the case if it wasn’t because I knew its destination.

It was a bridge.

A bridge between my soul and the capacitor-slash-phylactery. As I had more or less completed the atrophied version of the Phylactery Bonding spell, I had reconnected my two souls. That should have just restored my soul to my previous state. It should. But it didn’t.

It upgraded it.

The tether was weak, so much so that I didn’t notice it until now. Even when I was constantly using Soul Sight. I felt the phylactery as I did before the spell, but now I could feel the mana stored inside. I couldn’t tap into it to gain basically unlimited mana reserves, but I felt like it was a question of time.

A phylactery. A capacitor. A transformer. All in one strange artifact.

“What are you doing?” Alatea commented as I had stayed a bit too much on the spiritual plane.

“Nothing,” I replied, subtly ever-so-fast.

The healer didn’t buy it. She had known I was observing the plane of souls, so she transferred her consciousness there. I replied in kind.

It was the first time Alatea and I were on the spiritual plane simultaneously in consciousness, not just in Soul Sight castings. It was as if her body had shifted into the plane, but I was well aware that it just was her avatar.

The avatar was a representation of her body made by her own ego (ego as in the spiritual kind, not any other negative connotation). So, the avatar was practically identical to her body, only that she didn’t wear clothes, and she was purely white, her purple skin left back on the corporeal plane. Though her eyes shone brightly in emerald light.

Alatea wasn’t phased by our mutual nakedness, as we were basically magical constructs, and even then, her sights were somewhere else.

“Edrie, what the fuck!” She shouted in the soundless plane.

“What?” The insults coming from the kind-spirited Alatea took me aback. Kind-spirited, heh.

“What’s that?” I thought she had pointed at the tether, but no. Our perspective on the non-linear space had shifted and we were before the phylactery.

“Oh.” I forgot to tell her about it, didn’t I? “That’s my phylactery?”

“For the love of...” Alatea sighed.

She didn’t have a body, and the plane didn’t have air, yet she sighed. Her very soul poured out of her construct after the exhalation.

“You casted Phylactery Bonding.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement. An incriminatory one at that.

“I had very good reasons to do so.”

“Really? Enlighten me.” She added sarcastically. “Have you not heard when I told you the spells on the anthology were evil? And you not only learned Mystic’s Dominion, which ended up doing a lot of damage to your soul, but also the most complex spell in the book.”

“First, I would be dead if it wasn’t for Mystic’s Dominion. Second, Marissa would be dead if it wasn’t for Mystic’s Dominion. Third, I would be dead if it wasn’t for Phylactery Bonding. Fourth... Wait, no. That’s all.” I explained, a bit of venom in my words.

It bothered me that Alatea still treated me like a child after telling her that I was older than her. Was I a moron? Absolutely. Was that reason for treating me like a child? Absolutely no.

“What do you mean you would be dead if it wasn’t for Phylactery Bonding?” Alatea asked, noticing my Freudian slip.

“Ah.” I take back everything I said. I was a dum dum child. “I may or may not have talked with the author of the book, which in return may or may not have escalated into a fight.”

“Edrie!” She shouted.

“Yes, yes. I know. I am the greatest moron the city of Ferilyn has ever known.”

At this point, Alatea no longer looked angry, just... tired. Somehow, that hurt even more.

“I... I don’t understand.” A hint of sadness and uncertainty permeated her voice. “How are you alive? You couldn’t have won against him. I certainly didn’t...”

I knew there was history between Eygaz and Alatea.

“I didn’t,” I revealed. “At most, and I’m being generous, it ended in a draw. I managed to survive by making a very, very botched cast of Phylactery Bonding, but even then, I couldn’t have won. I only did so because I put the prince between a leyline and a hard place.”

Her face told me she realized something.

“You brought them to his family,” Alatea said as she looked at her surrounding, becoming aware we were no longer in Ferilyn. “It makes sense, he ran away...” Her voice dwindled as she went deep in thought. “Is he still alive?”

“Very much so, why should he be dead?” I asked. “I certainly couldn’t kill him, that’s for sure. Do you want to see him?”

“I rather not.” Her soul vibrated. “Let’s go back, I think I get the idea of why you did what you did. It was more than justified.” She looked at me, emerald flaring. “Now let’s get you patched up, shall we?”

Her smile felt more powerful in this plane, more real. No physical masquerades in the middle, only the true Alatea and her smile.