The moment between moments ended, and Killian was overwhelmed. Sensory information flooded into his mind, paralyzing his higher functions. The white hellscape he had spent the last two months in only gave him a sense of gravity, bodily position, hearing, and sight, but even those senses were muted. There must not have been any real light in that place because he was instantly blinded by the full force of natural sunlight. He felt the warmth of it on his face, as well as the gentle breeze that pressed his clothes slightly against his skin. The breeze brought with it the scent of bark and summer leaves, soil, and clean air. Even the softness of the grass beneath his boots seemed to overwhelm him.

As he stood, finally able to move, Killian slammed his hands against his ears. The only sounds he had been able to listen to for the past two months were his and Amy's voices, and seeing as she could hear his thoughts, he had taken to just thinking about any questions or responses as he had begun his storing. The chirping of birds felt like pins pressing into his eardrums, not quite puncturing yet seeming like the next chirp would be the one to do it. The sound of the wind blowing the leaves of the trees that must surround him sounded like crashing ocean waves.

The familiar voice speaking into his mind gave him something else to focus his attention away from the pain.

"Just focus on my voice." Killian, I should have warned you. I am so sorry. No one I have overseen has ever stayed so long in that place, it never occurred to me that this would happen. This should pass quickly, but you shouldn’t have had to deal with it in the first place. I will send this to the higher deities to make sure a reaction like this can never happen again."

Listening to the goddess fret over him made him smile, and now that Amy couldn’t hear his every thought, Killian could admit that to himself without embarrassment. Killian removed his hands from his ears and relaxed his stance. He slowly began to peek his eyes open to start letting in the light. The goddess was right; it was already beginning to pass. He began to speak aloud to hurry his hearing along towards normalcy.

"It's ok, Amy; like you said, a new situation. Chock it up to a learning experience. For both of us. I should have been fully focused instead of letting my mind wander to worry like I did at the end."

Eyes mostly adjusted to the light Killian began to take in his surroundings. As he suspected, he stood surrounded by thick, tall trees. They looked like maple trees, save for their size. They were hundreds of feet tall. Scattered on the ground were seedpods; instead of tiny helicopter blades, however, they had little parachute attachments connected to a little bulb-like section near the top. As he held his hand out to feel the wind, Killian thought that maybe this breeze was constant enough that, with the height of the trees, these little seeds could go quite far away. Turning one full rotation, Killian saw the same thing. Trees. At least it felt nice here. Thank Amy or whatever deity decided not to drop him in a desert.

Placing his hands on his hips, he spoke aloud, "Well, I guess pick a direction and start exploring?"

"You could do that." Amy said. "But maybe this is a good chance to give my contractor my first suggestion."

Tilting his head upwards as if addressing her directly, Killian raised an eyebrow and said, "Your contractor is open to suggestions. Unless you are about to suggest I stay put and not explore the brand new world I now live in."

Chuckling cutely, Amy replied, "Nothing of the sort; my suggestion is that you delay your wandering long enough to get used to your new abilities. Aside from using your pocket spaces, you don’t know what it feels like to use them, and even then, it didn’t cost you any magic. I would think figuring out how to teleport now would be preferable to say, a few moments before something tries to swallow you whole."

"Well damn." Killian said mutely. "Guess that was some pretty sound advice. Guess you really are goddess huh?" He tried to poke back.

"Such glowing praise." The goddess said sarcastically.

Grinning Killian looked downward into his raised palms. "Guess I'll start with what I already know how to do first." He thought. He shifted a lighter from the desk in his base just to spite himself. Shaking his head with humor, he shifted it back. He felt something strange when he retrieved and stored the lighter. It was like a tug in his chest. It was almost insignificant, for sure, but seeing as it was a brand new sensation, he couldn’t miss it.

"Is that what using magic feels like?" He said to himself, "That must be my internal source of magic from being a sorcerer.

It wasn’t in words, but Amy sent a feeling of agreement. Moving to the next logical step, he shifted himself into his base. Arriving at the target he envisioned, the middle of the rug between his couch and entertainment center, he monitored the feeling closely. Once again, a tug-like sensation came from his chest. It didn’t feel wholly physical. He didn’t think he could choose precisely where it was if he only went by location. The tug was noticeably larger this time as well, but still negligible. Shifting back to the forest, he confirmed another thought he had. He had tried to shift to a point around five feet from where he was previously, but he returned to the spot he disappeared from in the first place. Walking forward ten feet, he shifted to and from his base again to have the same result.

"It seems I can only enter and exit a pocket space from the same location. You were right, Amy. Glad I figured that out now instead of during some situation where I'm running from some monsters only to be stuck in one place because they won't leave."

Killian grinned when the goddess managed to communicate an eyeroll through feeling alone. With the pocket space testing done, he decided to move on to the next part of his time/space magic, omni-directional spatial awareness, which he would just call spatial sense from now on. He began to think he would be renaming a few more things before this was done.

He thought about his spatial sense, and information became readily available to him in his mind, which surprised him.

"Ugh… Amy?" he slowly asked, glancing skyward once more. "What is all this information that just appeared in my mind about omni-directional spatial awareness?"

"That is the knowledge about and how to use that ability. Remember, you are basically a master of Space/Time Sorcery. If you knew nothing about your own magic, it wouldn’t be much of a gift. It can be a bit jarring at first, and that is the reason the higher deities didn’t wish to go too far with knowledge implantation. They can't give you true experience with anything without giving you false memories or those of others. Not only do they think too much mental manipulation is wrong, it could also damage your identity. So instead, you have had raw information, untainted by memory, paired with an intrinsic understanding of your chosen magics. An easy way to think of it is as a simple equation. Knowledge+Intuition=Experience. That is the way to get around memory implantation."

Killian thought there was a lot to unpack there but felt it was better to just leave it alone. The information in his head told him how to activate his spatial sense, and with a stronger tug from his chest, information began to flood his brain. Without putting too much magic into it, he began to sense everything in a sphere around him, about a fifteen-foot radius. Gritting his teeth, Killian was overwhelmed by sensory information for the second time. He could see, hear, and feel the entirety of everything in the sphere all at once. The shape of every blade of grass and seed pod, the trunks of the trees beside him, his whole body, and even the air itself. He could sense a hemi-spherical cut out of the ground with tree roots and insects burrowing beneath.

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"Jesus Christ!" Killian shouted, squatting into a crouch. "How many times am I going to flashbang my brain today!"

He felt he could pour more magic into it, but he didn’t feel like mopping up his own gray matter. He instead focused on only the visual information, and the rest surprisingly halted, leaving only what he wanted. It was still a lot for him to process, but it was enough to make him believe that he could build up to the maximum amount with continued use. Turning it off for now, he stood wondering how to test the third power. Directly manipulating space was already hard to mentally grasp, and the information in his mind held surprisingly little.

Killian reached out with his hand, focusing on wanting to pull on the air like it was made of fabric. When he pinched, he felt no tactile sensation, but the air, no, the space in front of him twisted much like a bedsheet would. Releasing it, the space snapped back like it had never moved. Next, he took his hands, palms up, and moved them together like he was closing a book. He felt the magic working and felt the magic being pulled from inside him, but it was hard to visually make out. Killian knew scholastically that as he bent and manipulated space, light and anything else in that space would move with it, like the lines of a drawing moving with the paper it was put on. He just had difficulty visualizing what he wanted in his mind, and so he had equal difficulties using the magic. Letting space return to normal, he pondered a few moments on an idea before deciding to practice it later.

Killian smiled as he focused on the information available about his favorite part of his new magic, beside the pocket spaces. Teleportation. It seemed he could focus on a point he could see or visualize a location within a few dozen feet, and he would transfer directly from his current location and appear at the chosen destination. There was no folding space; it was a point-to-point transfer. He chose an open space between two trees about fifty feet ahead and teleported. The feeling was strange, his surroundings instantly changing was the only sign it had worked. Laughing, Killian spent about twenty minutes testing the limits of what he now called his blink. He found he could maintain momentum through his blinks or he could choose not to, which he felt was almost assuredly going to save his life at some point. After calming down, he noticed a drop in the power inside him. It wasn’t a large one, but now he started to get an understanding of what his total magic could be. He thought it would require more testing. Just to be thorough, Totally.

With his primary magic out of the way, Killian began to focus on his secondary magic, magic manipulation. This one was more difficult, but since he had a sense of his internal magic, he could begin to feel the difference in the world around him. Killian knew his Dusk Elf racial ability to sense magic must be a passive ability because he realized he had been sensing the ambient magic the whole time, it was just so subtle he couldn’t pin point what it was. Now that he knew how to feel it, he was shocked to feel how much magic was just hanging around him. He went through everything he had up to this point, figuring out how to power his magic with ambient magic. This brought him to two conclusions. The first was that this is what Amy meant by giving him intuition. He didn’t immediately pick up how to start manipulating the ambient magic, but he was able to feel out how to do it pretty quickly. The second conclusion was that he HAD to pick a different name than magic for what powered his abilities. It was going to drive him insane that magic was just the catch-all word for anything…magic. Magical energy was out simply for having magic in the name. How about ethereal energy? It felt too long. Something like mana. But he thought that was too much, even for him. After some back and forth, Killian settled on ether. It was the short version of ethereal energy and still gave him a feeling of magic. With that settled, he continued to practice until he quickly switched between his internal ether and the ambient ether. With no other sources of magic to practice on, it was time for his abilities.

Killian knew with every fiber of his being that if he tried flying first, it would be hours before he got to anything else, so he went for the most boring option instead.

Speaking aloud once more, Killian asked, "Amy, if I try some target practice, will I draw anything bad around here to me?"

"There is a small chance, but your current location is not a dangerous one, and I believe the transfer caused enough of a disturbance in the local magical environment that it chased anything too bad away."

Nodding Killian pulled the Glock from his shoulder holster, chose a tree about twenty yards away, and squeezed off a few shots. The Basic Combat Weapon Handling ability, now shortened to just weapon handling, was interesting because it didn’t just have information in his mind, it gave him muscle memory as well. His body unconsciously fell into a stable stance, and he didn’t wait in between shots like he had the few times he had been to the range back home. It was only because of that experience he even noticed it. Shifting the magazine in his hand for a full one waiting on the armory worktable, he slid it back into the gun and holstered it. He wanted to have the full mag just in case. Walking to the same tree, he shot Killian shifted a longsword from a warehouse he stored many handmade weapons he thought he could use. Killian thought he would still get a well-made sword from this world when he could; he didn’t store the types of swords you could buy at the mall, but he didn’t want to put too much faith in swords made in a world that no longer used them. Taking an unfamiliar but comfortable stance, he began to practice swings into the already damaged trunk. Uncomplicated but strong, steady slashes chopped chunks from the tree. After five minutes of this, he was comfortable relying on the skill should it be needed and shifted the sword back into place.

Leaning down to pick up a handful of broken pieces of bark, Killian was intrigued to test out his next ability. Throwing the pieces into the air, he activated cognitive acceleration. Feeding the minimum amount of ether into the ability, the pieces of bark slowed their ascent by half. Killian watched the change with a small amount of awe. When the bark reached its zenith and began to fall, he poured more ether into the ability. Killian's perception of time slowed down to a fourth, then a sixth, and then to an eighth. By the time he reached a tenth, he was pouring an incredible amount of ether into the ability from his internal reserve. Even when switching to ambient ether, these speeds were incredibly expensive to maintain. He stopped before he expended too much of his resources, coming to the conclusion that he needed to pay attention to how fast his internal ether regenerated. Killian knew this ability was going to be one of his greatest tools, so learning to manage its cost should be high on his list of priorities.

Getting his bearings with the normal perception of time again, Killian couldn’t hold back his smile. He lifted his head to the sky once more, this time not just to speak to the goddess.

"Well, I only have one more thing to test. You won't complain if I let loose with this one, will you?"

With humor clearly in her voice, Amy responded, "This is your new life, my contractor; if not now, when would be a better time? Just to lose focus on everything else, this journey started too soon to be cut short due to distraction."

Killian smiled broadly, aimed for a break in the canopy above, and shot into the sky, filling the air with shouts of joy.

The breeze that brushed past his ears when he arrived in this world caused him pain. The wind that rushed around him now made him feel alive. It took less than two seconds to break the canopy and see the sky above him. It was clear, with only a few scattered clouds to break the endless blue above him. After climbing for a few more seconds, he came to a stop. Breathing hard, he was overcome with emotion, fighting back tears. He failed as his weeping pant broke into laughter. Crying and laughing in the sky of a completely different world than he was born in, he thought back on his old life. The wish to fly like this he carried his entire life. From a battered child wanting to fly away from the pain waiting at home, to a broken adult wanting the freedom he so desperately yearned, Digging deep, Killian screamed. Touching on that writhing ball of pain and joy, he roared his heart and soul into the winds of The Elder Realm. His old life would still be with him; those scars still remain, but at least for now he could let this wind take some of them away.

Feeling lighter than he had in some time, he let the wind dry his eyes as he practiced the precision movements of his chosen version of flight. He quickly realized that if he got into a habit of fighting and knew himself well enough to say he would, this would make him a nightmare once he mastered it. The ease of movement and grace he had would give him an unpredictability that would frustrate and confuse any opponent.

With a workable ability with flight, he slowly rotated, scanning the distance for something to head for. Spotting what he believed was a road just before the horizon, Killian stopped flying and dropped from the sky. Only a few dozen feet from the treetops and rocketed forward at full speed to see what waited him on the next step of his journey.