Liam woke up the next day cradled by Amarie. Now that was a sentence he had never thought he’d ever hear his mind say.
Slowly his hand reached up to his neck and, with careful movements, removed the necklace hanging there, his mind beginning to clear as the sense of doom and foreboding that was always there whenever he woke up began to disappear. For a moment, in that fraction of time when his mind was lucid enough to think thoughts and still numbed enough that said thoughts were extremely stupid, he thought that maybe he should try fighting the Nightmare: maybe if he won he would manage to finally sleep again, to finally dream again. Even now he had to be careful, to not allow his mind to wander too much, ‘lest he start daydreaming and the Bloody Skill resurfaced once again.
He tried to move but found that Amarie had wrapped an arm around him and wouldn’t let go, her hand snaking underneath him and holding on tightly (but not uncomfortably) to his flank, the other one draped much more gently over his breast.
After a few milliseconds of him thinking about waking her up to start his day he nearly slapped himself in the forehead and instead decided to snuggle in closer because fuck the day ahead he had a girlfriend and the world wouldn’t stop turning if he took time to enjoy this.
They both laid there, Amarie sleeping peacefully beside him as he cuddled closer to her, turning around to embrace her as he fought off the assault of sleep: he didn’t want to put on the necklace, damaging his perception and ruining the moment. He wanted to enjoy this, to feel the warmth emanating from her body, to hear her deep breaths and feel her chest rise and fall against his, to hear her heartbeat under his ear.
The emotions they’d felt for each other had been subtle at first in the previous months, but now that they’d confessed to each other… they’d all erupted out, all at once, and they (luckily) didn’t seem to be stopping. He’d never thought he’d ever feel like this for someone. No, no, that was wrong. He’d always wanted this, always thought he’d one day find someone to make him feel like this: he just could have never imagined the… this.
Words weren’t enough, for they were too simple in scope. Thoughts came close with their images and sounds and concepts, but even then, sometimes, they felt lacking. A song, maybe, could’ve managed it, but it would need to be a great song.
He laid there, his mind trying to come up with some kind of rhyme or song that would even come close to explaining what he felt for Amarie, but words didn’t come, or rather, they came, and they felt like they weren’t enough.
Oh how the harpies would’ve laughed at seeing his struggles. They would’ve laughed and laughed and laughed, and then they would’ve taken him aside, in a room filled with light and lit candles with mage pictures and paintings of people who had once been alive, a window at the back showing a memory of an eternally blue sky with little clouds dotting it here and there, and there they would’ve taught him their language, the true one, the one they didn’t speak outside their islands and communities. A language of songs that human throats could never, would never, manage to recreate, of sounds impossible that made you hear light and colors, touch emotions and dance with them as they twirled you around and around.
And then they would’ve smiled sadly, for his ears could never hear the words, only bits and pieces: still beautiful, but also only such a small part.
He knew none of these things.
There was no need for him to.
He just needed to know that he was in love and that he was loved in turn.
So he laid in bed and listened to his beloved, the world outside fading away into nothingness. It was bliss.
And then it was an absence of thoughts.
But since reality abhorred absences, abhorred voids, no more than a few seconds later his brain decided to start thinking. And what did it latch onto?
I have no dreams.
And not dreams in the sense of visiting the Land of Dreams to have a pleasant night’s rest. He didn’t have a purpose.
Once upon a time a man said this: ‘A Man without Purpose is like a Ship without Rudder. A nothing.’
And every time Liam thought about that he felt just like that: like a complete, total, nothing. A hole in his form that left behind nothing but empty space, the knowledge that something should’ve been there without the proof of it having ever been there.
In all honesty, this wasn’t completely Liam’s fault. No, the fault, all of it, laid on the shoulders of the world he’d come from. A world that fed on dreams and desires and shat out only hardships which it took in its hands and threw at people like a monkey with its own shit.
A bleak, gray, world that then took you by the hand and whispered that it was alright, that it was normal, that things should be the way they were and should stay as such. A world that then took out a little hankie and dabbed away at the worst of the shit on your face, maybe letting you open one eye to see the side of its face that smiled and showed it cared: a metaphor this is, naturally, where the hankie is entertainment and a distant hope that all the hard work, all the shit thrown in your face, will one day matter, will help you get as high as these people and allow you to throw your shit in the face of others below you.
So one can imagine why Liam, who had been a little Mr Nobody in the world, a person like any other, generic one might even say, had forgotten what it was like to have a dream. And now, now that he realized this, he felt… empty.
Luckily for him his thoughts were locked from escalating any further by Amarie shifting slightly around him as she opened her eyes, slowly blinking in the morning light streaming into the room through the window. For a few seconds she looked down blearily, her brain trying to catch up with the situation.
Then she realized what position she was in and suddenly her face was as red as a tomato, which was extremely cute.
“Good morning my little tomato,” he said both as a joke and genuinely.
As the compliment registered her blushing intensified and she slapped him on the arm: “Liam!”
They looked each other in the eyes… and began laughing.
When, finally, they calmed down, she smiled at him and kissed him.
“Good morning.”
And the day began.
----------------------------------------
He stood in front of the magic circle he’d painted yesterday and looked at the various items arrayed in front of it.
“Ok,” said Sigmund, clapping his hands, “Let us begin. As I said yesterday, we needed items to perform the rite to create this bag of holding. And, just as I said before that, we had been waiting for the right conditions to create a good one. Now, today is a Cremei, which has been proven being one of the best days to do such rituals, so that’s one thing off the list. Yesterday I didn’t allow the creation of any mana intensive items, so this room should be moderately filled with mana.
“We have Mana potions here and my personal take on Channeling Manacles. Yes, it’s a play on the words Mana and Manacles. Yes, it’s horrible. Basically, one of us will activate the rite, while the other two will feed him mana in an attempt to get more space out of it.
“After that we’ll need items to anchor the space to. Since this is going to be for Liam’s little crossbow project I decided to go for a small bolt box. Finally, we have the box’s lid to keep the space contained. It won’t be necessary in the future but this is called a rite for a reason: it needs some ritualisms and traditions to be respected.”
Gaius interrupted, saying in a low voice: “There is little difference between a [Mage Crafter] and a [Witch].”
“Exactly. Now, Liam, this is going to be your first time, so listen carefully, for this is an extremely complex process that will require a few steps.”
Liam nodded, getting ready to do anything he would need to do.
“Ok, first things first, put your hands outside the circles, letting only your fingers touch the crystal.”
He did as ordered, kneeling by the circle and letting his fingers come in contact with the cold crystal by his feet.
“Good. Now, let your mana flow into the circle while we put the Manacles on.”
“How do I do that?”
“Eh, it’s different for everyone,” he answered as Liam heard the sound of clinking chains, “For example, in my case, it feels like turning on a little candle in my heart and then pouring oil down my arms, letting the flame catch and go down.”
“In my case it’s like turning my heart into a forge and letting molten metal go down to my hands,” added the dwarf.
“It’s all a matter of visualization,” continued Sigmund with a nod of approval.
“So, what? Do I just visualize stuff flowing out of my heart into the hands in different variations until I get the right one?”
Sigmund chuckled: “It ain’t that easy boy. It’s completely different for every person: for example, Bevia sees it as letting an air current pass through her feathered arms; another student of mine felt it was like letting someone pour water over his head and letting it go down his body into his arms. As I said, everyone sees it in a different way. You just have to find your own.
“Now, get to it. Chop chop chop!”
And then there was silence, the lizardman and the dwarf looking down at him as they sat down on nearby chairs, their eyes watchful.
So this is all the information I’m going to get out of them? Feh, of course it couldn’t be easy.
He kneeled in front of the circle and, a moment later, changed positions so that he could sit instead because it was already getting uncomfortable.
Then he closed his eyes and began thinking.
They wanted him to get his mana out of his body, to let it flow into the magic circle. It should be easy, right? [Mages] did it all the time, heck, Sigmund did it all the time. And he’d seen it done in games… sort of. So maybe all he needed to do was concentrate and -
“You’re overthinking boy,” said Sigmund.
That shocked him out of his thoughts. Well, mostly it was the ‘boy’. It had been… a surprisingly long time since someone had called him that.
“Actually, the problem in general is that you’re probably thinking. These things don’t work with logic,” he tapped his finger to his forehead.
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Just let yourself go. Then, after you’ve learned the feeling for the first time, you’ll just know what to do. But, as with many things, first time’s the hardest.”
He glared at the lizardman, then sighed despondently and looked back down at the circle, his eyes closing.
And he let his mind drift.
That… was the biggest mistake he would be doing that day.
----------------------------------------
The Headless Knight was staring at the blood drenched ground between its armored feet (for a given meaning of staring since he didn’t have eyes. Or a head). It was sitting on a small pile of corpses, its sword buried through a man’s head and down into the stomach of the one below.
The boy, the one it was supposed to hunt and haunt, was gone. He had come for a short while at first, scared as a child, but then something had happened and now every night, when he appeared on the battlefield, his eyes were gone, just empty sockets looking into nothingness as the body stood in place. The first few times the Knight had attempted to kill him but every time his sword cut something off the part would slowly writhe on the ground and then slither up to where it was supposed to be, fixing the damage.
The sight hadn’t been unsettling to it, for it was a Nightmare, one of the Old Ones too, but the uselessness of it all had been frustrating, to the point where, now, it just sat around the whole time the boy was here, bored out of its armor.
For a moment it remembered the old glory days, when the Nightmare King had still been alive, when it and others like it, Nightmares sprouted from Chaos’ darkest thoughts, had inhabited the minds of the Masked Folk from the Yellow Palaces. Oh, those had been the days, when it could’ve spent years slaughtering people in their dreams and then have drunk enough wine to fill its armor in the company of its prey.
Then the Nothing had come and taken it all away.
They had survived only thanks to the Traveler’s kindness.
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As it reminisced it heard a familiar sound: screaming.
It hadn’t heard that sound since that one time when it had been stopped from accomplishing its purpose by that same Traveler. How dare he? Didn’t he know that, without this, it was going to go back to the Dark Place? It would be bored again!
The Nightmare around it shivered as it stood, the red sky laughing with its voice that had never existed to begin with.
The corpses on the ground shook and, suddenly, they began rising. The Knight extracted its sword from them and watched in satisfaction as the wounds began to close and the two soldiers opened their eyes, which at first were blank but, slowly, were filled with blood, fury and insanity.
The Knight looked away, uncaring again: it had one job, one objective, and it was slowly, unwittingly, walking down the stairs that had sprouted from the sky, descending into its reign of insanity and terror. It looked up at the sky, where a red sun glared down at the world, sometimes blinking, turning the whole world dark, other times observing, just like all the other stars in this strange world did.
It remembered, for a moment, when that same sun had observed this same battlefield in another world, the day it had been born, for things where it had come from didn’t quite die on some occasions, because Death had been a physical being that joined the battlefields and fought among the ranks of the Masked and, as such, could be killed. It happened more often than one thought, and until the right rites to turn the one who had killed Death into the new Death were performed nobody could die.
Ah, truly a wonderful and erratic reality, one that even this Nightmare couldn’t quite recreate.
The boy, its victim, reached the bottom of the stairs.
It knew it didn’t have much time, for the boy wasn’t asleep but just deep in thought, or rather, deep in an absence of thought which its… [Condition], right, that was the word that strange being used, had filled.
The Knight wanted to lick its lips but it didn’t have a head, so instead it flicked its sword and got the blood off it, letting the black metal gleam in the red light.
----------------------------------------
Liam knew this wasn’t real. He was certain of it, because he had been sitting in Sigmund’s lab underground and now he was on a battlefield, a headless armor following him with steady footsteps and somehow never getting further away from him even as he ran with all he had. Actually, it looked closer every time.
His feet squelched on the blood drenched ground and he prayed to every god that he knew that he wouldn’t -
He slipped.
His feet flailed in the air as his face came closer and closer to the ground until, finally, he met it, feeling something wet enter his nostrils and mouth.
He immediately pushed himself off the dirt and spit out the mouthful of earth and blood he’d nearly ingested before trying to lift himself from the ground, only to slip again on something squishier than the rest. Looking back… actually, that was a mistake, he definitely shouldn’t have done that, because he saw two things: one, the Knight was looking down at him from a few steps away; two, there was a dead body behind him and he’d just stepped on his face, destroying the eyes and peeling off a good chunk of half-rotten flesh.
Of the two though Liam was most scared by the Headless Knight which had stopped to look down at him and… had inclined its head. At least, he thought it had since one shoulder was lower than the other.
His arms frozen in place by fear and fascination he stared as the black armored thing stepped closer, the joints of its legs creaking ominously as it took a knee in front of him and pointed the tip of the sword to his chest.
Then… something he hadn’t expected happened.
“You… came… looking… for… knowledge… power…”
The voice was stunted and slow, it creaked just like the metal of the armor and was so deep it echoed. It also didn’t come from the Knight but from the Nightmare around him but the Knight was the Nightmare and vice versa and -
“I… will… give… power… you… will… return…”
What? Did it mean… was it going to give him…. what the fuck kind of power could something like this give him?
He didn’t know, he couldn’t tell, but the Nightmare? Oh, it had a very good idea because it lived in his head.
The System, too, knew, for it was all knowing and all-seeing… in a manner of speaking. And right now a single, small, part of It, insignificant even, held its breath. It couldn’t feel emotions, but It still had the ability to understand good from wrong and It intrinsically knew that wrong things were bad and shouldn’t be approved of. So, as it looked at the exchange, It could see the blood beginning to seep from the ground into Liam’s robes, trying to find a way into him. That would not be good.
“I… I don’t want it. Whatever power, I don’t want it! I won’t accept the deal! I DON’T!”
A sound like a thousand thousand nails falling over a blackboard sounded around him even though the Knight didn’t move.
Then he heard the one thing that all those who had been in his situation once upon a time feared most of all: “You… don’t… choose…”
The Knight stabbed Liam in the chest and through his heart.
The rivulets of blood that had been seeping into his clothes, looking for a way into his body, moved like many little snakes towards the weeping wound and forced their way in. Into his body. Into his mind.
The System sighed.
[Mage Crafter Level 15!]
[Skill - Gift of Blood Obtained.]
The Knight watched as Liam’s eyes went blank before he disappeared.
It watched as the battlefield around it slowly fell silent, as soldiers killed each other ruthlessly and started dismembering each other and bathing in their blood.
It felt… satisfied. Satisfied because it had worked. You see, in the weeks when it had been forced into inactivity the Knight had had a lot of time to just sit and think, and after much thinking it had realized this: it wanted more. It remembered the glorious days of fighting the endless battles of the Yellow City, the joy of feeling true, actual, blood running down its sword as it killed and feasted and killed and… you get it. Violence had been their greatest form of entertainment since Death wasn’t something to be worried about, because even when he or she did his or her job there were ways to bring back the dead through their masks.
It remembered the day the Nothingness had come, destroying everything in its path, killing permanently even the greatest of their people. They had thrown Death into it in an attempt to make themselves immortal, but they had failed. Then the Traveler had come, offering passage to somewhere safer, somewhere that wasn’t going to disappear anytime soon. He had even been kind enough to offer them to stay in a place where they would’ve practically been able to continue their endless revels, a place of Dreams. That was how they’d joined the ranks of the Nightmares. That was how they’d gained the title of Old Ones among them.
And now?
Now the Knight had had the time to remember all of that, and it wanted it all back, but it couldn’t, not as long as it was bound to this fleshy little thing that kept staying away from it, escaping like a little rabbit from a hungry fox.
But now? Now he would no longer be able to run, not as much as he had so far.
It would get what it desired, and that boy would be the key to it.
----------------------------------------
Liam opened his eyes and gasped, but his hands seemed to be glued to the magic circle in front of him and suddenly he felt that new Skill activate: [Gifts of Blood].
He felt like someone was draining the blood out of him and suddenly the circle in front of him lit up. At the same time Sigmund and Gaius retched behind him and something heavy, probably the dwarf, toppled to the ground.
The young man didn’t get to look behind though as the circle flashed with a light so bright it made the sun pale in comparison.
And yet he still managed to see something: a tear formed at the very center of the magic circle, getting wider and wider and wider, and he saw… nothing on the other side of it. Just white. An endless, fathomless, depthless, eternal white that spread from top to bottom to horizon. Behind all that though there was… a presence. And it was feeling pain.
The Spell then began activating, cutting away at a part of the space, like a surgeon with the sharpest scalpel ever created, surgically removing a good chunk of the space behind the tear and transferring it into their reality, where seven different sets of runes kept it stable while three others rapidly began draining that not-space into the box he’d placed at the center of the circle, beginning to unravel the wooden lid placed nearby into thin threads that it wove through the immaterial, binding it to the material.
Then something went wrong. The scalpel was batted away as an armored hand took its place, a large black sword in hand. Another hand appeared, gripping the not-space, the Void; the sword came down.
The Void screamed in agony.
And what was probably the greatest amount of space to ever be harvested in a single try from the Void was taken away as the portal collapsed and the truly enormous chunk of unreality was drained into the box.
It all happened in but a few seconds, but it felt like minutes to him.
Then the light was gone.
And he sat there, completely stunned.
“Ok, what the fuck? Gaius, you alright?” shouted Sigmund, to which the dwarf responded with a groan and a thumbs up from the ground.
“Good. Now, Liam, you alright too?” he asked, kneeling unsteadily beside him and beginning to check him out.
When he looked him in his eyes he blanched, seeing how… empty they were.
“I… don’t know.”
Then everything went dark.
[Mage Crafter Level 16!]
[Skill - Bound Item: The Knight’s Bag of Holding Obtained!]
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Two weeks later
Liam had kindly asked Amarie and Sigmund not to worry about him, that nothing had gone wrong, or rather, that what had gone wrong had been that he’d just used up more mana than he wanted, which was an understatement considering he’d basically also drained the lizardman and the dwarf through the Manacles.
Now he stood over his Bag of Holding, which was apparently now bound to him. Sigmund had explained how such Skills worked, saying, to put it simply, that a Bound Item couldn’t be removed from the person it was bound to. As in, if you brought it too far from them it would teleport back.
Currently he was staring at the inside of it with a special item that the lizardman had called ‘Modelist’s Lense’. It looked like a common monocle to him, but apparently it was enchanted with enough magic that it gave off a magic signature all of its own. What was it used for? Well, apparently he wasn’t the first person to want to put things inside a bag of holding for reasons other than storage. It wasn’t rare for nobles to want for someone to create miniature rooms or even entire houses inside bags of holding.
Sigmund had said that he found the practice stupid and senseless, but then again, money was money, and the Lense Liam was using now had been a gift from the noble who’d wanted him specifically to craft him a miniature room.
And what was he doing now? Well, technically the part Liam was working on would be, when everything was assembled, the magazine of his gun. In the last two weeks he’d worked on creating a storage system inside the space of the bag of holding, which, they’d found out, was as big as half the laboratory. Inside the ammunition used by the weapon would be stored and spit out when the need came. With the help of the Lense, which nullified the disorienting effect of an item shrinking to fit inside, they’d built an actual wall with the cheapest wood they could find and covered the walls with tons enough runes and magical script to write a small book, all of which could be translated into a very simple line of commands: Start at designated Signal. Drag ammunition towards opening. Repeat with the next row. Repeat until storage is emptied. Stop upon designated Signal.
That had taken them most of the two weeks to write down.
Afterwards they’d mounted the actual rows to hold the ammunition, which had been an excruciatingly long process as the rows had to align perfectly with some specific runes that ‘watched’ for the presence of arrows to shoot and either gave the signal that there was ammunition or told the Spell to move to the next row.
Finally, when all of that had been said and done, they’d built a second wall and, inside, had placed exactly thirty mana stones. Most of them had been bought for cheap from the adventurer’s guild (but since there were so many it had cost them… Sigmund had actually refused to say the number when he’d read it, just saying ‘Money exists to be spent’ and throwing the paper into the fire), but four of them had come from some extremely powerful monsters. Which ones he didn’t know, but the four of them combined had cost more than the other twenty six.
Still, it would be worth it if everything worked. The four big stones would be needed to jumpstart the loop that would keep the mana of the other stones from running out by giving a boost to the absorption of mana from the outside world. It was probably very close to being a perpetual motion device, but he knew all too well that he’d need to change the gems regularly. Still, again, it would be worth it, he knew it! It had to be after what he’d given up to the Nightmare.
“Everything seems fine,” he told Sigmund, who was sitting beside him with a pleased smile.
“Very good. I do hope this works after all the money I spent on it.”
“I can’t thank you enough Sigmund, truly.”
“Nah, don’t worry, you absolutely can. After all, you gave me an interesting challenge to work on with you. Haven’t Leveled Up yet, but I’m sure it’ll happen soon.”
“So, how are we going to test if it works?”
“I’ve got a mana-saturated room for special occasions. Takes a fuckton of time to get it ready to go, what with the circle needing to extract enough ambient mana to focus inside it, but it’s going to be perfect for an initial test on this. Remember Liam, when testing things, first you do it in an ideal environment, then, and only then, you start doing stress test.”
Liam nodded as Sigmund walked towards the end of the room, where a few doors stood closed: the testing chambers.
He opened the leftmost one and walked in, followed soon by the young man.
The room was simple and undecorated, the greatest form of comfort in it taking the form of three uncomfortable looking chairs with comfortable looking cushions on them. Hand knitted if his eyes weren’t betraying him.
Other than that there was only a circle painted on the ground with gem goop, much simpler in design than the one he’d had to work on, but a dozen times bigger.
“Ok, place the box at the center of the circle,” said Sigmund as he took a seat.
Liam did as ordered.
“Good, and now send the signal to start.”
Liam hesitated for a moment, clearly not knowing if he should be doing that. After all now, every time he tried to use his mana, the Knight made an appearance, exacting his price in phantom pains and giving everything he did just that little push to make it all better.
In the end though he did it: he sent the signal. A small wave of his hand caused a precise pattern of mana to reach the box which, a moment later, began spitting out arrows. Meanwhile he felt like someone had planted a knife in his hand for a moment, a phantom pain that disappeared as fast as it had come.
“Now what?”
“Now we wait. My [Real-Time Inventory] Skill will be counting how many arrows are appearing and, if everything works well, the number of them it spits out will be the same as the number we put in.”
Then the wait began.
A wait of exactly twenty three minutes.
When that time had passed the box suddenly stopped spitting out arrows.
Liam looked expectantly at Sigmund.
He smiled bitterly and shook his head: “Didn’t even reach the halfway point.”
The young man looked at the lizardman.
Then he fell to the ground.
He had failed.
[Mage Crafter Level 19!]