A thousand bejewelled butterfly wings glistened in the light from the stained-glass windows. The sorcerer’s mad cackling echoed from the arched ceiling of the tower’s highest chamber.

To my shame, I was frozen in place, sword still in hand but unable to swing it. I could only watch as the insect swarm, which had only moments before been my companion Reinhart, rose from his now hollow armour. The empty breastplate clattered to the floor a heartbeat later.

The clash of metal on stone broke the horrified stillness and with a maddened scream, Sonja rushed forward. Her Broadsword arced over her head, but her blade never made it to the sorcerers' skull. She disappeared with an idle wave of the sorcerer’s hand and a sudden flash of lightning.

I was alone now. Bernard hadn’t even made it to the tower, torn to shreds on our way through the woods, and Hildegard we had left to bleed out three floors below after battling the vicious chimera the sorcerer had kept there.

The old man’s eyes turned on me.

They shone with the fire of madness, a flame fanned by the foul magic that crackled around his crooked form. His long fingers rose once more, pointing at me, and a new bout of laughter was the last thing I heard.

- Darkness -

I awoke.

It took a few moments for me to realize that I had woken up. I was surrounded by silent darkness, so there wasn’t much difference to when I wasn’t awake besides a faint awareness of, well, awareness.

I tried to look around, but then I realized I didn’t know how to. I couldn’t feel a head, or even eyes for that matter, to move around and take in my surroundings.

Perhaps I had already turned around, though, and simply not noticed. How, after all, would I be able to tell in this all consuming blackness.

I tried to think back to how I got here, wherever here was, but to no avail. I couldn’t remember how I got here. I couldn’t remember anything, now that I thought of it.

On that matter, who was I?

What was I?

Well, I was me, probably.

I pondered this an indeterminate amount of time but came to the conclusion that if I wasn’t me, then who would be thinking these thoughts? Therefore, I must have been myself.

With that baseline certainty established, I made out to discover more about the world surrounding me. This, however, proved difficult due to me neither seeing nor otherwise sensing them in any way.

From this, I began theorizing that perhaps there was nothing besides me. Maybe I was everything there was in this world.

A world. A strange notion, that. A place encompassing all places.

Where did that concept come from? For that matter, why had I expected to possess a head or eyes when first waking up?

These expectations and ideas must have come from somewhere, I decided. Most likely from those nebulous memories that were currently evading me, but of which I was sure they were there. Just lurking out of reach.

Out of reach. Another strange phrase, this one implying the possession of hands. Another body part I was currently lacking on account of not possessing a body.

After pondering that, I came to the conclusion that I was in a most horrifying situation, trapped in a void with no eyes to see nor a mouth to scream with.

I tried being horrified for a while as that seemed only appropriate, but it didn’t seem to get me any further either, so I stopped soon after.

After that, I stopped thinking. It appeared to me that I had exhausted every possible avenue of thought that was likely to get me any further, so I decided to save my energies and simply wait for something to happen that might illuminate my circumstances.

And indeed, something did happen eventually.

As I waited, the darkness became different in quality. It took on a texture and depth. Not sight, not as I had expected it upon waking up. Something else, that still allowed me to take in my surroundings without a need for light.

Slowly, my surroundings took shape around me. It appeared that I was hovering in the middle of a small, stony cave. Stalactites and stalagmites formed an irregular cage around me, and a small pond of water encircled that cage.

My own body was a blind spot, but I realized that I could see everything else at once. It was a strange feeling, to be able to look behind and in front of myself at the same time, though perhaps those weren’t the right words as I had no idea where my front actually was.

As the cave grew clearer around me, to the point that I saw the outer walls and began even sensing the tiny fissures and irregularities in the stone, I noticed other beings existing in the same space. Tiny insects were flying through the air and crawling along the walls of my cave, other creatures were swimming lazily through the pond surrounding my cage, and yet others I could feel burrowing through tiny cracks and fissures just outside my little cave. There were fungi too, growing where water dripped from stalagmites and around the edges of the pond, and moss was growing wherever moisture collected on the walls.

A little paradise of my own, I decided. A garden to keep me company.

My understanding of the cave was still expanding, to the point that I was now slowly becoming aware of the plants and creatures inhabiting my tiny garden. The flying creatures, I soon realized, were tiny moths, eternally fluttering through the darkness. They seemed to be feeding off of strange flowers growing in patches of moss on the walls. Their petals were tiny and colorless, yet strangely shaped, almost like the wings of the moths that were feeding on them. But even stranger were their leaves, long and thin and forming feathery structures. They reminded me of a herb, Dill. Unlike the petals, the leafs were of a faint purple, seemingly the only colour down here, as I had already seen it in bushels of hair on the tips of the moth's antennae.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

I still didn't know how I knew their colour or shape. I certainly didn't see them, more like the memory of it just formed in my head when I concentrated my focus on the matter.

That too was another trick I learned. Even though I was able to take in the entire cave at once, that understanding was hazy and unfocused. If I instead concentrated on a particular part of it, my awareness grew sharper, leading to my discovery of the flowers when I had simply focused on a random patch of wall. They had evaded my awareness completely, before then, but now that I knew they were there I was still vaguely aware of them still when I broadened my focus again.

I concentrated my focus once more, narrowing in on the patch of moss. I wondered how deep my focus would be able to go. I limited my awareness to the patch, taking it in entirely with all the flowers and months currently inside it, and as I did, the picture clarified. I became aware of the roots with which the flowers anchored the patch in the wall. I became aware of the other insects that were living inside the moss. Translucent pill bugs first, like tiny pebbles crawling across their vertical lawn, grazing peacefully. But then I noticed ever smaller mites and worms who were inhabiting the moss as if it were a large forest. They were feasting on decaying leaves, on the remains of their own and the refuse of their larger neighbours.

But still I could go deeper. As I focused in on one of the mites, itself smaller than a grain of sand, I still kept discovering other beings living on it's shell. These were unlike anything I'd ever seen. Amorphous blobs containing a variety of shapes, undulating and flailing about in the faint layer of moisture on the Mite's shell. When I dove deeper, I discovered the building blocks these blobs were made from, fitting into one another like gears in clockwork, each with a unique shape fit for its purpose, though their purposes I couldn't even remotely guess at. Deeper still there lay more confusion. A realm of nothingness and fizzing energy far beyond my understanding. I got lost in it for some time before finding back to the world I was used to.

When I returned, I found that my awareness of the cave had sharpened once more. It seemed that it grew over time, filling the cave like water in a cup, and after closer examination it seemed it was emanating from myself. Without focusing, my awareness was just the slightest bit sharper around my immediate body, whatever that was, than at the edge of the cave.

Interesting, yet not immediately helpful. I returned to examining the contents of my little cave. The floor was covered in a veritable forest of mosses and flowers, at least the half of it that wasn't taken up by shallow ponds. The land area seemed to be dominated by long, pink, eel-like creatures moving on four feet. Instead of eyes, they had a large mane of feathery hairs that extended all the way around their head, and their maw was lined with stone lips like a crude attempt at teeth. The mane, once again, was of the same faint purple as the leaves and antennae. Curiously, the hue intensified slightly as I focused my attention on the creature.

These little Salamander lions were a joy to behold, plodding along the mossy ground and quickly waddling into the nearest pond when something startled them. All in all, I imagined they would be of the same length as my arm if I had one. They seemed rather peaceful, feeding off of leaves, bugs and snails they crushed with their stony lips. As I watched them, I discovered that I could still hear in a manner. Much like my sight, it was more the memory of having heard than actual hearing, but it was better than the silence I had known until now. The discovery happened when I observed one of them drawing their head back and up rhythmically with their mouth open, and when I focused on the strange movement, I became aware of a melodic croaking. They were communicating with one another. Suddenly, my cave became alive with a strange kind of subterranean birdsong.

The lion lizards weren't without foe, though. Not long after I became aware of the sound, I noticed a different kind of call. Hurried and more high-pitched. Directing my attention toward it, I saw one of the Salamander lions alone and surrounded by a pack of abnormally large spiders. The spiders seemed to have circled the lone salamander lion and were now advancing on it in unison. The sight of spiders displaying such unnatural behaviour was quite disconcerting, and their size didn't help at all. They were continually drumming their legs on the ground in strange rhythms, perhaps another form of communication.

However, before the spiders could get close enough, the lion darted through their line and into the nearest pond. Quite literally, through them. The creature had temporarily shirked off its corporeal nature and ignored every obstacle between itself and the pond. The sight of such a small creature using such strong magic was strange, yet not unheard of. However, that would have to mean the amount of magic in this cave would have to be unusually high. When I focused, I could still see traces of it in the air where the salamander lion had run through, hair-like slivers of purple light. I turned and searched the cave for other traces, and soon enough I found them, seeping up from the ground. All magic came from the world's core, but this place seemed to lie on a particularly strong font of it. This explained the purple colours I kept finding, the plants and animals here were feeding off of the ambient magic like plants above fed on light.

As I examined the strands closer, I found they weren't moving randomly. Instead, they seemed to converge in the middle of the cave, that is to say, the hole in my perception that was my body. The magic was drawn into it like water down a drain. Maybe that's how I was taking in my surroundings, by using the magic and spreading it through the cave. So the reason my awareness continued growing was because I kept collecting more magic. It'd also explain why the magic-sensitive plants and animals were reacting when I focused my attention on them, I was concentrating more magic into the area.

I wondered if I might be able to use this magic in other ways. I would have to experiment on that, try to do something simple with it, and the simplest thing of all was to break something apart. So, I began examining the walls of my cave for a suitable target.

Stone, as it turned out, was a surprisingly complex matter. Really, I should have expected as much after finding an entire cosmos on the back of a mite dwarfed by the tiny patch of moss that was its world, but finding the complex geometric forms and interlocking crystals that made up the minuscule structure of my cave's walls still filled me with wonder.

But, be that as it may, I hadn't come here to marvel at rocks, fascinating as they might be. I had focused on this tiny part of my world in order to test whether I could wield magic. A dangerous indulgence of my curiosity, everyone knew magic was as powerful as it was unpredictable, but still. My entire existence, as far as I could remember, had been nothing but passive observation. If the use of magic could allow me some agency, then I'd accept the risks.

However, I also didn't want to risk my little cave world falling in on itself, so I had resolved to start as small as I could. I finally settled on a cube-shaped crystal that would've been dozens of times too small to be seen with the naked eye, and concentrated.

Wherever my knowledge of magic, and everything else for that matter, was coming from, it didn't grant me the knowledge of how to actually use magic. I was vaguely aware that magic was a power permeating the world, which would be used by certain people to impose their will on reality. That was where my knowledge of its use ended, though. I could tell you quite a lot about how it corrupted body, mind and soul and how it tended to turn places where it was used often into dark, twisted parodies. Under the wrong circumstances, it could even tear apart the fabric of the world, shunting parts of it into other realms or vice versa.

So, with all that in mind, I started concentrating on the crystal very, very carefully. I imagined how it would crumple, how the seams between the tiniest parts of it might break apart, how the world would be when it was no more. As I concentrated on this, I became aware of the energies that held it together, and I noticed how my will, my magic, concentrated ever more precisely on the crystal. As I continued, my awareness of everything else shrunk and disappeared until the crystal was my entire world and I was aware of every facet of it. The shape, texture, colour, even taste and the sound it made as the wall it sat in was disturbed by creatures walking upon and burrowing within it. I saw every single one of the fundamental energies that I had glimpsed when delving into the empty void at the heart of everything. I saw how they came together to form the crystal, and I began weaving strands of magic in between their seams. I poured more and more magic into them, until they began to stretch and tear and suddenly, all at once, they split.

The crystal came undone on the smallest scale, and my world became light and violent energy and pain.

And then it was darkness once more.