I walked along in an indistinct forest glade, a thick layer of untrodden snow crunching beneath each step I walked along the path before me. I might have been immersed in what was clearly a dream if I were not so keenly aware that if I was actually here, I would probably have already keeled over and died. Nature didn't suit me, especially in the cold. Exposure brought more than the threat of a head cold to me, after all. I was not accustomed to lucid dreaming. I rarely dreamt at all, actually. So it seemed odd to me how aware I felt that evening, pacing through a beautiful wintry expanse I'd certainly never seen before. At least I didn't actually feel that chilly.

I wore a pair of heavy combat boots, a long, flowing black cloak that enveloped my whole being, and atop my head was a circular-rimmed crooked hat. I looked ridiculous. My subconscious was taking this witch thing far too seriously, but for some reason, I felt compelled not to toss the silly thing off of my head and press it into the snow.

"It suits you." Came an airy, familiar voice from somewhere in the woods.

I narrowed my eyes in a random direction, as if I might spot someone calling to me and gave an exasperated sigh. "Is this what's going to happen now? You're going to give me prophetic dreams from the land of the dead? No, never mind, I don't want to know. Let's end this farce now. I just wanted a peaceful nap before I get back to figuring out how to fix the mess from your book! It's time to wake up." I reached for my opposite arm beneath the cloak and pinched my skin together, letting out a pained grunt and pulling back when I actually felt it. Wasn't that how you're supposed to wake yourself from a dream?

The voice giggled quietly at my failed escape attempt. "I won't keep you long. Here. Take it." A stiff breeze made me hold up the cloak in front of my face, and when i lowered it, a tree in front of me suddenly had an intricate pattern carved deep into its bark.

It wasn't anything like the magic circle that started this mess. It reminded me of a Nordic rune, but far more intricate. Rigid straight lines arranged into a character outside of any language I recognized. I approached the tree slowly, watching my breath form small clouds as I walked, and when I reached the tree, I placed a hand on the trunk of the tree, feeling the lines of the symbol as if that might help me memorize it. "Magic, right? What's it do? I'm not using anything I don't understand. Never again."

"This is an aspect. The first aspect any witch learns." The voice clarified, wind picking up again as I tried to commit the shape to memory, burning it into my mind to try to bring it across the barrier between dream and reality. "This is but a component of true magic. Clarity. It will help you understand. It will show you the truth, and it will show you where and how to start."

—

I drew in a long slow breath, my eyelids flickering open and my vision coming into focus as I recalled where I was. I'd been living in my grandmother's house for a few days past a week now, but I still woke up each morning unsure why I wasn't back in my apartment. It was still so surreal that I now owned a house, and this would just be my residence from now on. A wonderful break from the transience of my living situation these last few years.

But I didn't have time to dwell on that. I scrambled out of the extravagantly soft bed in what had once been my grandmother's bedroom in a hurry. Pen. I needed a pen and paper immediately. I tripped over the comforter I'd had over me and yanked open the drawer on my bedside table. A leather-bound journal, but no pen. What use was that? I turned to the desk at the far end of the room, almost falling over while my legs were still trying to wake up. But I felt a strong sense of urgency. The symbol. It felt etched cleanly in my memory despite my sleep, but I knew it would fade if I didn't make it into something material. I reached the desk and pulled open a drawer, letting out a frustrated grunt as all I found was a junk drawer with a half-used stick of chalk on top. I bit my lip and fixated on it for a moment before groaning and taking up the implement.

I haphazardly lifted a painting off the wall and let it clatter to the floor before I made large, broad strokes of jagged white against the coarse wooden wall of my room, my eyes running over each movement I made again to make sure I had taken it down from my memory correctly. After a minute, I stepped back from the drawing, taking deep breaths in an effort to calm myself from my post-dream mania.

What was I doing? Did that memory of grandmother control me somehow? If that chalk wasn't there, I would have drawn on the wall with my blood if I had to. It had to come out of me, one way or another, like a compulsion. Magic was proving itself once more to be extremely dangerous.

I shook my head and stared at the symbol, still unsure exactly what it meant, but I knew one thing for certain. It was magic. It was some kind of component that would allow me, if I only knew the method, to manipulate the fabric of reality to my whim.

I let out a quiet huff and set the chalk down on the desk, then opened another drawer and rolled my eyes at the pen and stack of white printer paper within, taking them out to redraw the symbol in a more sensible medium.

—

"Clarity." Scarlet repeated calmly, the three of us having gathered back in my sitting room after Thomas had returned from his own excursion to the dorm halls some time ago. It was now the early hours of the next morning, and we sat in a circle around the book and a paper duplicate of the chalk drawing up in my room.

"That's what she said." I exhaled deeply, still finding the entire experience unbearably strange. "My dead grandma came to me in a dream and shoved a magic sigil into my brain. Why the fuck not?"

"Focus, Coraline." Scarlet commanded. "We're all still reeling from how bizarre this entire experience has been, but we need to keep ourselves objective if we're going to figure this out in a timely manner. Try not to focus so much on how far we are from normality."

Virtue sat next to Scarlet, alien black and yellow eyes darting between Thomas and I. It had taken on some kind of small almost-human form, and while it had clung tightly to Scarlet before, it now seemed to express some kind of affection to the woman. It was... concerning. But Scarlet seemed like she was keeping control of her. Maybe the thing mimicking us meant it wanted to be more like us. But it had to have learned how to look like that from somewhere. "Scarlet, about... Virtue." I changed the subject, feeling like I had to address the elephant in the room. "You didn't expose a kid to that thing, did you?"

Scarlet shook her head. "I accidentally showed it a picture of a child when I was asking it to develop its own human form. I guess it took a liking to it." She turned her head and gave just a slight quirk of a smile to Virtue, who returned an inhuman breathy rolling click sound and a wide innocent grin. "I think it imprinted on me."

"Like a lost duckling?" Thomas scoffed. "A monstrous, otherworldly, lost ducking thinks you're its mom?"

"Yes, exactly." Scarlet dismissed Thomas's banter. "I don't know if it understands things in familial terms like that, but I suppose I'm its adoptive guardian at this point." She gave a resigned sigh.

"Are we really going to keep calling it an 'it'?" I cringed, not really sure how I felt about that.

"It's not exactly obviously masculine or feminine." Scarlet turned back to look at Virtue again, this time fixing eyes with it and studying it for a few moments.

"Singular they?" I asked. I wanted to make sure I got it right, if this thing was really sentient.

"What's it matter? I thought 'it' worked fine." Thomas shrugged. "I don't think it cares."

"Pronouns are important." I declared, turning to Virtue myself. Why was I debating this among them when this thing could apparently understand me now? This was the weird alien thing's choice. "Alright, Virtue. What do you prefer? He, she, they, it, or something else?"

The creature shirked away from me slightly when I put my attention on it, but after a moment, it relaxed and closed its eyes. Scarlet patted it on the head and told it "once for he, twice for she, three for they, four for it, five if you want to figure this out later." Scarlet seemed to have a lot of patience for it, and when Virtue opened its eyes and smiled up at her again, the fast bond between the two was obvious in a way that hadn't been before it had taken on a humanoid shape. I supposed it was learning to express human body language. And though it couldn't speak yet, it seemed to understand what we were saying clearly. It gave off a series of four clear, rasping clicking noises before it beamed back at me with a child-like smile.

I shrugged. I guess if that's how it wanted to be referred, I definitely wasn't going to be the one to question it. "'It' it is then."

"We've gone a bit off topic." Thomas hummed, obviously trying not to stare at Virtue. He motioned to the symbol laid out on the paper. "So you had a dream where you saw this symbol, and your grandmother's voice told you that you'd need this?"

I cleared my throat. "Right, yeah. Cryptic bitch hardly told me what to do with it, though."

"Clarity." Scarlet repeated the word once more. "It's supposed to show you something. Where to start."

"How about how to use it, to start?" I shook my head. "Don't tell me I need to bleed on it. Is that how all magic works? Witch's blood? Do I have to make myself woozy every time I cast a spell? Cause if that's how it's gotta be, then this isn't going to work out. I do not have a ton of blood to spare."

We sat in silence, staring at the sigil for a few more moments before Thomas spoke up. "Well, how'd you do it the first time, when you made the portal? Was it all just the blood? Or was there something else you did with it?"

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I shook my head. "I pricked my finger, and then I felt this... pulling sensation. Not really sure how to describe it. Like there was something... there. Inside me. Or the air around me, but not? Being pulled away from me? I-I don't know how to explain it."

"Some kind of magic field, perhaps? A layer of the world we can't see?" Scarlet pondered.

I gave a tired smile and muttered sarcastically, "Expending my spell slots."

"Excuse me?" Scarlet raised an eyebrow.

I waved her off. "Nothing, just stupid game stuff. But maybe it's not far off. What if it's like mana?"

Scarlet's brow creased in intrigued concern. "I haven't played many video games, enlighten me. What's mana?"

Wow. She was serious. That was a pretty elementary aspect of many fantasy games. Maybe after this was dealt with, I could show her what she was missing, but for now, a crash course would do. "Well, let me think about how to put this in broad terms. It's like... a resource. It's this well of power you have inside of you that you expend by casting spells and regain from the world around you over time. Some games represent it by renewing it while you rest while in others, you're constantly pulling it in from the world around you to refill that well."

Scarlet hummed quietly as she considered the concept. "So that begs the question of how magic works in reality. Is it something in the world to be manipulated, or is it something within that's projected onto the world?"

"Kinda obvious, isn't it?" Thomas finally chimed in, and we both turned to look at him. He glanced around, unsure why everyone looked so surprised. "I mean... Coraline's a witch, right? That means she's special. You and I can't do magic because we're not witches. So it's gotta be something from inside Coraline, right?"

"That, or she has some rare catalyst within that allows her to manipulate something in the world we're unable to touch." Scarlet retorted. "But yes, the power coming from within seems a sound assumption from what you've told us about your experience casting the portal. It felt like something was being pulled out from you, right?"

I nodded. "I suppose. Mana, for lack of a better term. So I just need to figure out how to use mana on this symbol? Can I do that? Or do I need a spell to pull it out?" I gave a frustrated grunt. "Where's the instruction manual for this shit?"

"Maybe just try concentrating on it or something?" Thomas suggested. "Maybe we're overcomplicating this. What if it's that simple? What if you just have to focus on what you want it to do, believe it's going to do it, and it'll just... go?"

I stared down at the sigil and shrugged my shoulders, sitting down at the table again and observing it for a moment. "Guess it can't make me look any more stupid than I already feel about this stuff." I muttered, putting both my hands on the sheet of paper, making sure I was in contact with the ink in case that mattered. I ran my hand along it just like I did in my dream, and then closed my eyes and imagined the symbol in my mind's eye as well.

Show me what to do. Make me understand. Allow me to comprehend. Give me clarity.

I felt that same pull away from me, like I did at the ritual site, but this felt different. Wrong. No. Abort. Cancel. I felt sick. My eyes shot open, and I felt the world around me twist and turn. I'd never experienced vertigo before, but I have to imagine from how I'd heard it described that it's what happened to me. My stomach dropped out from under me, and the entire world flashed bright red for just a moment. A spike of terrible pain shot behind my eye like a sharpened lobotomy pick finding its target, causing my head to suddenly shoot back.

I was vaguely aware of the others shouting, of movement around me as they rushed to try to secure me. But there was nothing to be done about it in the material world. I was elsewhere. Somewhere deep inside of my mind or in another realm of thought, time slowed to a crawl. Burning pain arced across my brain, but I couldn't move my arm to hold my head. I was locked in that eternal moment of suffering. Another spike crossed my mind, and I wished I could scream, or cry, or pass out. How had I not passed out? I'd certainly never endured anything like this before, but my blood pressure had surely shot up to dangerous levels when the process began. Where was my comforting oblivion of forced unconsciousness? It was locked in time with the rest of my body. This pain was not physical. It was something else. Something higher. These were thorns in my soul.

The world as I saw it slowly became less distinct around me, fading into a vague blur while my eyes gradually lost focus on anything physical.

Another sharp spike punctured the very essence of my existence as a single smudged stroke burned itself directly into my vision. Then another, just as horrid as the first, then another. Then another. Each line made me want to scream and vomit and thrash for some manner of relief. The symbol it built glowed and burned itself into my soul, becoming a part of me. Something that could never be forgotten. The symbol faded from my vision, but I couldn't put it out of my mind. It was etched into me, a permanent addition to my spirit. That's what it meant. Soul. An aspect of the intangible branding my soul with what it was. A divine element of being. The fundamental building block of what made humans, and presumably other higher beings, alive and aware. A web of infinite depth. It felt like it was so simple now that I could see it. The composition of a soul was hardly a mystery now. I knew on either a divine or a nightmarish level just what I was made of, and the very concept made me feel like I'd go mad if I kept staring.

And then just as I thought I might be driven insane staring at the eldritch knowledge I'd just absorbed, I felt yet another spike and yet another new stroke of a new sigil tore itself into my eyes.

No. Please. No more. I can't! This is too much! I don't want to know anymore! I don't want to understand! Magic can remain a mystery! I already knew too much! Just let this stop! I silently begged to be freed from this frozen nightmare, but the magic I'd invoked only continued with my next lesson, uncaring for my pleading. This was a path that I couldn't turn back from. And in one more movement of the universe's uncaring brush across my mind, I understood the elemental understanding of the opposite of soul, oblivion. Nothing. Absolute elemental emptiness. Where soul meant infinite complexity, oblivion was ultimate simplicity. That was the realm that I'd tapped into a few days ago. I'd unleashed a terrible thing. The antimatter of life as humanity understood it.

Another stroke. No...

My lessons continued rapidly from there, teaching me the building blocks of reality in binaries. Salience to Dream. Entropy to Stasis. Energy to Potential. Hundreds of aspects buried themselves so deeply into my memory and implanted themselves into the fiber of my being. They came faster and faster, even though after the first dozen, I'd lost my capacity for thought. I became numb to the pain, and though I learned, I could no longer acknowledge. It was merely a vessel for the knowledge. There was nothing else. Everything that made me who I was and what I could experience had been buried beneath forbidden knowledge.

And finally, the next sigil became something familiar. Clarity. I understood. I could see now.

Just as I had resigned myself to an endless tortured existence as a library of the meaning of the universe, everything snapped back.

I took in a sharp gasp as lungs I'd forgotten existed burned with a desire for air that I wasn't sure I'd ever experienced before. My eyes ached, crusted over with something that prevented me from opening them.

"Holy shit." I heard a voice mutter above me, but my mind was so muddled that I couldn't put a name to it. Sigils flashed through my memory too quickly to make sense of them, even though I recognized each and every individual definition clearly. My senses felt foreign to me. My own gasps coming around to my ears felt like something alien. I tasted something foul on my lips, and my body was shaking like I'd come out of a snowstorm. I didn't know what to do with my tongue as my breath settled, and I opened my mouth trying to express something, but words felt like a foreign concept.

It felt like I'd just spent an eternity in limbo, having knowledge forced into my skull. Being back in tangible reality felt alien. Having a body felt strange. There was nothing of me left. My soul that I had seen defined so clearly at the beginning of my lessons was buried so deep now. Did it exist anymore? Did it have meaning? Purpose? Was I merely a font of arcane knowledge and nothing more?

"Coraline. Coraline! Are you still in there, girl?" I heard a different voice call. Coraline. That's my name. That's the name I fought so fucking hard for. My soul burned bright beneath its countless scars. I grasped tight to that memory and everything started rushing back to me. My name was Coraline. I was a sickly human being and a witch. I was studying literature at Brightcrest University. A few weeks ago, my grandmother died and left me her house. Almost three days ago, I accidentally ripped open reality and let the vice into our material plane. And my name is Coraline, and nothing else.

My breathing slowed. I was not an intangible library of all the raw concepts of the universe. I was a person, and I existed to do more than suffer and absorb knowledge. One last deep breath helped me pull myself back together. "What happened?" I called in an unsteady voice I hadn't heard in ages. I cleared my throat, regretting it the moment the taste of blood and bile crawled up my esophagus, then repeated myself more clearly. "What happened? Physically?"

Thomas gave a confused stammer and then just muttered, "A-A lot."

I reached up and felt at my eyes. There was a liquid crusted over them. I scratched at them and hissed. It had partially solidified in my eye. Those weren't tears. I heard Scarlet take a calming breath above me. "You closed your eyes and touched the paper, then... it almost looked like you got shot in the forehead. You coughed up a bunch of blood and started bleeding from your eyes too, and then fell back and got really, really still. We thought you died, Coraline."

I felt weak, but with a whine, I forced myself to gently rub at the crust on my eyes, slowly loosening it until I could open one eye. I'll never forget what I saw the first time I truly opened my eyes.

My house looked familiar, but everything felt ethereal. Dream-like. I saw colorful waves gently flowing through the air while sigils flowed in and out of existence, defining things they passed in the new language of aspects I'd subsumed. Everything I saw displayed illusory 'words' over my vision, fading in and out as I focused on them. But my open eye quickly settled on Scarlet, who had a faint stain of red below her mouth. My soul quickly defined it as a number of things, but primary life and energy. "Uhh..." I muttered, unable to find words to describe what I was seeing.

"CPR." Scarlet glanced away, avoiding eye contact. The aspects defined her physical action too quickly for me to parse it. "It seemed prudent when you stopped breathing." She was somehow so calm in contrast to Thomas, who was pale as a ghost and watching me carefully. Ever since we opened the portal, she seemed like a different person. Always calm, collected, and focused rather than the cheery social girl I'd gotten to know the past week. Maybe a little too serious, as well. I wondered if this was just how she handled a crisis.

"Thanks." I muttered, rubbing my other eye open. I was amazed that I didn't feel utterly exhausted after that. My body had suffered trauma of its own while I was somewhere else, after all.

"Okay, we shouldn't mess with this stuff anymore," Thomas declared. I looked at him and my eyes went wide. The oblivion symbol glowed an ominous red in my vision, right up against his soul sigil. His existence was in conflict. Was it that infection he kept talking about? Was he in danger? "You've almost died twice now, Coraline, and what do we have to show for it?"

"So much..." I muttered, and he creased his brow at me.

I rubbed my eye and tried to sit up, but Thomas leaned over and prepared to catch me. "Easy, calm down. Just breathe."

"Don't touch me." I sputtered back, quickly jerking my shoulder away from his touch. I looked around Scarlet, seeing Virtue nervously peek out from behind her.

It had such a different composition from a human. A powerful aspect of entropy. But most notably, its core was made of oblivion... and only the faintest whisper of a soul with a volatile glow alongside it. Another conflict, but in the opposite to Thomas.

"Okay. No, Thomas. You're wrong. I need to use more magic." I declared, pushing myself fully back up to sitting. The world felt brand new. There was so much I understood now, even if I wasn't any closer to knowing how to use magic. I understood how to understand magic. I cleared my throat again. "Okay, so... I can't possibly explain what I just experienced, but be glad you can't. It was horrifying. I'm going to have nightmares about that, I know it. But I get it now. That was the instruction manual."

"To... magic?" Thomas asked.

I couldn't help but grin. They could never understand. "To everything."