- The Cave -

When I woke again, it was much like the first time, just without as much confusion. I woke to all consuming darkness, only slowly lifting to reveal my cave as my awareness spread out again.

If I was right in that my awareness was a field of magic spreading out from my core, then that likely meant I had spent all of my magic in disintegrating that particle of rock. That I had fallen unconscious carried more worrying implications.

Was my mind powered by magic as well? If so, I should probably be more careful with my experiments from now on, lest I accidentally extinguish myself entirely. An uncomfortable thought, that I could accidentally end myself with a careless use of my power.

But first, I needed to figure out why this experiment had exhausted me so much in the first place.

In hindsight, it had probably been the attempt to split the crystal at every seam at once. There had to be more efficient ways than forcefully wedging matter apart at its most fundamental level.

As I was thinking, my awareness slowly filled the cave once more, comforting me with its already familiar shape. Besides the gaping hole where I had performed my experiment. In a radius of several paces surrounding the point where the crystal had been, the cave had simply ceased to exist, leaving only a perfectly circular emptiness. Surrounding its edge, plants and animals had been burned to ash, and the rest of the cave been singed quite badly. Only on the far opposite wall had plants and animals been mostly spared.

The space within the void felt different, somehow hostile, and my own awareness seeped in much slower than with the rest of the cave. When it did, it was much more hazy, leaving me with only vague guesses at shapes and colours, like a half-forgotten memory. It was enough for me to make sure the space was actually empty. Except for a small crystal, floating right in the middle of it. It was small and, as far as I could make out, perfectly cubical. In short, it looked exactly like the crystal that I had destroyed, floating right where I had destroyed it. Just that now, instead of being so minuscule you wouldn't have been able to see it, it was as big as the theoretical tip of my finger might have been.

What?

Was that really the crystal I had destroyed? Or rather, transformed? But how? My mishandling of magic had destroyed a good chunk of my cave, so how had this tiny crystal survived, much less grown. And why was my awareness spreading more slowly around it than the rest of the cave?

At least the latter question I could answer. Shifting my awareness to focus on the currents of magic within the cave, an increasingly familiar exercise, I could see that it had shifted since my experiment. Outside the crater, it was much the same a before, but within it, the natural magic from below flowed towards the crystal rather than myself. From there, it expanded in a field uncomfortably similar to my own awareness.

Was that what I was? A floating crystal that transformed magic? I hadn't thought of my body, my new one, much since waking. It was a blind-spot in my awareness, and I admit I much rather pretended the issue didn't exist. But, feeling it out now, the shape of it fit. Geometrical, and easily able to fit in the palm of my hand. Or the hand I used to have.

The thought didn't fit. I could not be that. I instinctively knew that I had a body, that I had hands and feet and a head with a pair of eyes. This was a truth so deep, it was the first thing I had been aware of after waking. Anything else just seemed too absurd to entertain, but here I was facing a mirror image of what I had become.

I was a dead little shard hung in the middle of an underground cave. I might never again be able to feel or taste or see again. Not truly. The senses my awareness granted were dull imitations, memories of sensation rather than sensation itself.

I was panicking, should have been panicking, but the sensation failed me here as well. No faltering breath, no thundering of my heart, no shaking in my hands. None of the thousands of comforting reminders of the flesh, the warmth and the sense of place that it offered. Only the sharp, cold awareness that I had been stripped of my- my everything. The holy, inviolable sanctity that was mastery of my own body, ripped away in its entirety, leaving only barren intellect and a shadow of sensory experience.

There was nothing I could do against it. I couldn't fix this. I couldn't do anything besides hang here in this dark hole for however many eternities before this prison of a new body would crumble to dust.

Whatever had done this to me would pay dearly. Not death but imprisonment like this one, however I would be able to achieve this. But for that, I would need to stay focused. The dreamlike numbness that had allowed me to stay calm so far would have to be replaced with grim purpose.

I needed work to occupy my thoughts, and so I went in search of it. The most obvious task was further experimentation with my magic, as that still seemed the only way for me to interact with my surroundings. Right after that came figuring out whether this new crystal was somehow dangerous. I still had no idea of what it was, exactly. Only theories and the vague knowledge that it was somehow similar to me.

I tried directing my focus to the crystal, but found it falling short. I apparently couldn't pierce through the surface to look into its inner workings. Focusing inside its territory at all was an effort. It still allowed me to see more clearly, though still with interference, but I could feel my awareness draining away the longer I maintained it. Taking more than a quick glimpse from time to time was likely more costly than I could afford, which also meant that proactive use of my magic inside its territory would be out of the question.

That also meant I had exhausted all available methods for studying the new crystal, besides just keeping watch.

So, I turned my attention to the havoc I wrought. A good half of the cave had been burned in the blast of my mistake, leaving nothing but ash and singed bones. The other half had fared only marginally better. Much there had survived, wounded and hurting, but much also hadn't. Already, though, the carrion birds of this little world were descending on the burned husks, devouring all that was yet to be devoured. Of course there were no birds here, and rather than fly, they crawled and slithered through the ashes. A legion of minuscule insects eagerly set to the task of repurposing what I had killed.

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Larger animals had survived too, and I decided to take a more focused categorization of the denizens of my domain.

Most of them were known to me from the surface, bugs and flies and worms, though many bore peculiar adaptations to the everlasting night of this place. Only few had eyes, and those that did were enormous to let in the faint violet glow of magic being used. These skittering hordes were the lowest of this kingdom, subsisting on that which was left by their larger counterparts, whether through death or defecation.

Next to them were the many plants, mostly ferns and mosses, glowing a faint violet from the magic they were absorbing in place of light. They provided the basis for the entire population, transforming water, rock and ambient magic into the basic building block of life. My attention lingered on them. They were taking in magic and using it like I had used air to breathe. I watched them, closely, delving deep into their structure to observe the process of it. Learning the structure of this process might help me glean some insight on how to use my own magic more efficiently, so I dedicated myself to studying it.

It was a magnificent machine that I had uncovered, like the most complex clockwork mechanism one could imagine. And though I didn't understand much of the process, its basic shape was evident. Mana was taken in and used to form water and air into energy, producing the violet glow. The energy was then used to form matter from the ground into more plant. A magnificent dance of tiny particles beyond my comprehension, yet with the right modulation of my attention, the overall shape became evident to me in a glowing network of energy. A flow of energy, magic and matter mingling into a stream of life.

But I needed to know more. As I had previously noted, the plant was structured into small building blocks, which I turn were constructed from even smaller ones. Each block, or cell, was akin to its own little machine, working away for the god of the greater whole. They contained many different structures, not unlike the organs of an animal, dedicated to fulfil the particular task the cell was dedicated to. I searched out the cells that were responsible for transforming magic, air and water into energy and managed to identify the organ that was facilitating the alchemical transformation.

The plant was funnelling strands of magic through gateways in the cell's wall, but how the magic was attracted to them was still a mystery to me. However, once inside, then the magic was guided through further gates into the transformative organ. There, the magic was twisted into a particular shape, and the particles of air and water made to interact with it. The shape of the strand pulled only lightly, brushing against the particles in a certain way here, pushing up against them there, and through an almost gentle actress, the particles were made to come apart and form anew. The process was expertly balanced, impacting the particles only ever as much as absolutely necessary, encouraging the desired result through nothing but a fractional strengthening or weakening of particular bonds until they came apart willingly.

If this was what it was to be a magician, then I couldn't possibly comprehend how any working larger than at this smallest of scales could ever be attempted.

But then again, the magic I knew of was performed through acts of will, something a plant was entirely lacking in. This living machine was manipulating the strands one at a time, physically twisting them into the shape that it needed. I myself had previously just willed them into doing what I needed of them. This likely meant that I would not have to know the exact arrangement making this little process possible, but could instead use the basic principles I had learned to structure the general shape of my working.

I turned my attention away and toward one of the ponds that populated the cave. Their inhabitants had seemingly been spared from the fiery destruction, but I would study them later. Above the water's surface, I concentrated on the particles of air and water. If I could replicate the process here, I was confident I could learn to use my magic for more complex workings.

I focused on the structures of the particles, and imagined how they would interact. The short exchange of components resulting in two different materials. The gentle tugging and pushing that would move them apart. And true enough, the magic moved to exercise my will. The water moved, mingling with the air in a fist-sized space, moved by the strands of my accumulated magic. The exchange wasn't as efficient as the one I had observed, but it worked! Strands moved to gently tug and prod until the interaction was initiated.

The effort drained my reserves, but only at a negligible rate, almost balanced out by what I gained naturally.

The drain increased, though, the longer I held it. Slowly at first, but then faster and faster, until the surface of the water broke.

One of the fish living in the pond had come up, gulping up the energy particles I had created. It was the reason my working had become more costly. There was a faint magic field around it, which had disrupted my own. Not to the extent that my awareness suffered, but my working was shattered by it, dissolving into chaotic whirls.

The fish didn't seem particularly special in any way, even lacking the violet glow of magic most other animals here had. Was this a wizard fish?

I looked through the rest of the ponds, finding more of the big, grey, eyeless fish, and to my surprise all of them had the same field.

It was faint, barely perceptible, and I'd have missed it entirely if I hadn't been looking. On that note, I found similar fields around the smaller fish, and when I went looking, the other animals too. The strength varied, generally getting denser the larger the animal was, but that wasn't a rule. For instance, the salamander lions, the few that still remained, had denser fields than the giant spiders that were hunting them. I supposed this would be due to the salamander lions actively gathering magic with their manes, while the spiders seemed largely unmagical.

I tried focusing my awareness on the flow of vitality, as I had when studying the plant, and true enough, the magical field seemed to be an outgrowth of the magic the Salamander Lion had coursing through its body. The same went for the spiders, though, and their bodies held a lot more magic than that of the lion. It had rivers and brooks of magic flowing through its body similar to veins, which, on closer inspection, it was lacking. Riga complex magical flow seemed to entirely replace the need for blood in these spiders, distributing air and food by tangling it in the threads. Yet they had no obvious organs through which to collect magic. Only their silk, I saw while peering into one's abdomen, had the tell-tale colour.

Now that I was already back to studying animals, I decided to shelf this whole tangent for now and continue studying the ecology of my cave.

However, as I broadened my attention to envelop the fullness of its bounds, I noticed something had changed around the new crystal.

It was growing more crystals on the rock of its cave section, glowing in a familiar violet. As I watched one of them closer, I could visibly see the growth of layer after layer. And then it started moving.