Content Warning

  suicidal thoughts

  “Well, we’ve got fuck all for food,” Archie said, as he came over to Sofia and I following a breakfast that consisted of a small piece of hardtack. It was our second morning here.

  Despite the tower seeming like a rather conspicuous hiding space, there wasn’t really a debate yesterday concerning our immediate next steps for today and the next. However, it wasn’t like we really had a choice; we were spent. Archie had to burn through more of his Aura than he should’ve with the undead. Similarly, Sofia and I both spent on Aura and Mana. Ivili was mostly fine, but trying to rely on her alone to keep us safe the rest of the way to civilization was a losing gambit.

  On the plus side, the plateau seemed safe enough from monsters, and there was a well for water, so it sort of worked. Unfortunately, we ran the risk that the elevated land and tower itself might attract the attention of our pursuers.

  “Ivili and I are gonna try our best at hunting,” Archie continued. “Ya two’ll need to watch the horses. Make sure nothing grabs them.”

  “Yea, that’s fine,” I responded, stifling a yawn in the process. Sleep continued to be ever elusive thanks to the constant buzzing. The one silver lining in all this was that the lack of sleep didn’t really seem to be slowing my mana recovery. If anything, it seemed almost like I was recovering mana faster. Though that likely meant that my mana pool had grown, as opposed to anything else. Which lent credence to the ‘leveling up’ theory, I had. Though why it wasn’t something Ivili experienced or knew of was odd.

  “Heh, I don’t think nothing should happen, but Ivili’s been spotting some things around us. Rest up. Your arse’s been looking real haggard the last while.”

  He wasn’t wrong, but I still gave him a glare at the insult before sighing. “Be careful yourself.” Archie had strongly insisted on having a funeral for Glenn tonight, so if they missed that, then something’s gone wrong. Not that we had a real means to help them.

  “Heh, don’t worry yourself, lass, we ain’t too far off from the city. Shouldn’t be anything we can’t handle out there,” he said before heading to the side of the plateau away from the tower, where a path down was carved out. Ivili was already waiting there, bow strung and carried over her shoulder.

  I took a seat on one of the logs and rubbed my head. This had been a mess so far, though the fact that we’d been here for two days and hadn’t been found was as good an omen as any. If things were still progressing as they should, then the Severance Knights were likely spread thin and finding us was a low priority. If they really wanted to find us, they would’ve by now, but their resources and stronger members are likely plotting and carrying out schemes for the upcoming civil war. Assassinating the most powerful archmage on the continent wasn’t exactly a trivial matter after all. My eyes looked up and scanned the wartorn landscape we found ourselves in. It was a frightening prospect that the Severance Knights would succeed, considering what their target was capable of, but a single person still has their limitations after all.

  Whatever, it wasn’t like Sofia or I were capable of beating them as we were if they were to show up today. I pulled out some scrap paper along with my spelltome; it was skinny even with the handful of blank pages I had bound in, but it was a start. I had rough copies of spells Jsvil had transcribed for me that I still needed to adapt to fit myself. There were several spells I would’ve liked to make or optimize, but time was not permitting.

  Move Dirt, Shotgun Shot, Stone Spike, Identify Magic, Rifling Shot, and Lightning Arc. Six first-tier spells for nine months of work really didn’t seem all too impressive. I spent too long trying to optimize the ones I made. Though let me tell you, I could shoot a stone like nobody's business. The process was fun: making and fine-tuning the Rifling Shot and Shotgun Shot spells for maximum power and efficiency. It took a lot of time, however, so my variety was limited. For the foreseeable future, adapting existing spells despite their shortcomings would be better. A handful of powerful choices plus some variety seems like a good adventuring combination.

  I had some half-finished calculations on a sheet of scrap paper. It was still funny to me how, even though wizardry was treated as something of a science, it still relied on some pseudoscientific-sounding reasoning.

  Namely, the core of how it worked was that the soul connects to the body in different places, and was responsible for affixing free aether into mana that can be used in spells. Mana accumulates until it reaches something of an equilibrium with the soul, where the mana resists any more being affixed. The literature was unclear how significant of a role the body played in determining the size of one’s mana pool. With it being an ongoing debate whether the body plays a role in pushing back against more mana being stored within it.

  Holy magics have it easy; the soul is used directly, drawing the required mana it needs into a spell. Meanwhile, wizards needed to force the mana to take the shape they wanted outside of their bodies, while keeping enough of a tie to them for their soul to ignite it. In both cases, the soul acts as the catalyst for the spell to start.

  My bridges to my soul are supposedly strongest at my head and lower spine. That was where I needed to draw the most mana from for my spells, but mana was still distributed throughout my body.

  It was a curious system, but I supposed it made sense with the lore. Magic was the power of the divine. Mortals could only use it because they had their own spark of divinity that lived in their souls. Even if it was imperfect, it was enough for them to use magic.

  I spent perhaps an hour or two getting nowhere on the simple Light Illusion spell I had been working on. Struggling more against my wavering focus and the numbers that were blurring together, rather than the math I needed to do. Weariness was an enemy I couldn’t overcome. Sofia was looking out and occasionally petting Nox, who lay nearby. I really didn’t know as much as I should about this devil, do I?

  “Sofia,” I said to no response as she kept staring off in the distance, “Hey Sofia, do you have enough mana to help me talk to Nox for a short while?”

  “O-oh, sorry, I think I should.” She reached down a hand and started feeding Nox some mana. From what I gathered, she could regenerate enough mana for a bit over one and a half first-tier spells a day.

  I looked down at my own hand. It felt silly that I hadn’t thought about it before, but could I release whatever was causing the buzzing? Later perhaps. “Alright, Nox, I know you can understand me, so if you can tell your answers to Sofia, we can finally have a chat.” He made eye contact and nodded his head. “Perfect. Let’s start off with the obvious: I’ve been wondering why you’re talking to Sofia and not me.” The telepathic link could only connect to one person, and once it was set, it stuck until it got removed or one of us died.

  “He, um, told me that your spell should’ve connected the two of you,” Sofia said, translating the words Nox had spoken in her mind, “but the link couldn’t take hold. I couldn’t quite understand what he said, but Nox mentioned something about the path between your soul’s memory and your physical memory being a lot more protected than it should be. Well, most of the connections between your soul and body are. Your mental soul bridge is far more guarded than anyone else's he’s seen.”

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  “Guarded, huh?” I turned back to Nox after Sofia finished translating. “Do you by chance know why exactly that is?” My first thought was that my mana pools more heavily in my head, and perhaps that made it more difficult, but I imagine I would’ve read something about that when researching the spell.

  “He can only guess it’s a boon that Lord Stultvultan gave you when he made you… W-were you made by a god? I thought you came from Borros… or is this that multiple lives thing you mentioned?”

  I stayed quiet for a moment. Great… my story and the holy lizard’s were conflating. Thankfully, Soifa wasn’t dubious of me to my knowledge. What was Stult going with… that I was some creation of his? Odd, but I could pivot. It seems doubtful that he’d be the reason I was here. Plus, there’s always the chance that Nox was lying to try to get me to slip up as well.

  “I mean, normal people don’t exactly have multiple lives, do they? I don’t have a lot of insight as to what I am,” I said, giving a small reassuring smile to Sofia. She seemed at least placated by this, so I turned back to Nox. “How well can you see souls, and how guarded are my ‘bridges’?”

  “In this form, he can only see the connections between your soul and body. It’s too weak to see much more. He wants a stronger body. He says in his true or a stronger form, he can see a lot more. Oh, and your bridge is very guarded. He-err said that likely only a spell of at least seventh tier could interfere with it.”

  In otherwords between that and the buzzing, I really was abnormal. “His true form, huh? What is that, Nox?”

  “H-he says he’ll tell you more after he gets a better body in this world,” Sofia said, before shifting around. “I’m not sure how much more mana I should use.”

  “What you’ve done is plenty, thank you,” I said as Sofia started smiling, trying to hide it while also posturing in a very diminutive way. She really wasn’t doing well, was she? It wasn’t like I really knew how to help her.

  Instead, we sat together in an uneasy silence on the log. I let my mind wander while keeping an eye on the horses. There was plenty to think about.

  I had to study some basic mental magics to get the telepathic link. Both the helpful and harmful ones use the same method of attack. It followed the same logic that I came up with when thinking about this back when I was building the world. Because of absurd and high-level healing spells that can virtually bring someone back with just their body if they were decapitated, there had to be some mechanism to restore memories. What I came up with was that the soul can both read and write memories to the body. Mental manipulation spells effectively hijack the memory writing process by pretending to be the soul. The memories of the soul are never altered, only the memories of the body. Though the false memories can reach the soul if they’re thought about enough times.

  For the last nine months, I’d mostly referred to myself as a goddess in a very tongue-in-cheek way. I made the lore and created this world, but I never inhabited my canonical avatar for it. No matter how abnormal my soul was, my body was still weak. Who knew if it was even capable of handling ‘divine power’, whatever form that might take.

  ***

  That afternoon, Archie and Ivili came back with some monster meat, which was far better than the hardtack. As evening began to draw near and before the Haze, the four of us had gathered outside the tower. I flipped the pages in my grimoire to my lovely Move Dirt spell. I don’t care what anyone says, the ability to move dirt with ease will always be overpowered, only ever behind movement buffs. If only I could make it work faster, I could make sinkholes underneath people instead of setting traps in advance. Eventually…

  I looked at the spot on the ground Archie picked out. It was flat enough and not too far away from the tower. Six feet deep, huh? Easy enough as long as there weren’t any major rocks that I couldn’t move yet. I passed Archie the Planar Pouch as he took out Glenn’s body. Sofia began blessing the body.

  “Dear gods, please grant this body peace. Cleanse and free it of its energies and reunite any of what may be left of its soul, so that the scourge of the Pale Night may not desecrate the memory of who we once knew.” Sofia chanted in the language of the gods. Her spell seemed to take effect soon after as the body began to glow a warm light.

  There was nothing like a funeral to reignite grieving for the dead. Though if it gave them closure, so be it. At least Glenn would get a respectable burial. Even as his name and memory would doubtlessly be smeared back in Firstlanding.

  Aside from making the hole and using some rope to help Archie lower Glenn’s body into it, I kept my distance. I wasn’t going to pretend that I was really a part of this. It hadn’t even been a year, and most of my relationship with Glenn consisted of me borrowing money or disagreeing with him. I could empathize with what they were going through; I’d been in an all too similar situation myself before, but his death just hadn’t hit me the same.

  “You know, you can only wish you’d be mourned,” the specter came whispering to me. “Ivili already said that Archie’s wary of you. Do you really think she’s not as well? Glenn was starting to sour against you before he died. This is simply your lot in life, to be shunned and hated. Do you think Sofia clings to you because she likes you? She’s only grieving. You know that won’t last. She’ll make you feel special, like you can be a part of her life as if she’d actually care about you. Then she’ll leave. Vanish into the night. You’ll be suffering to live, struggling to bear the weight of this world alone. You can dig your own grave with ease. Surely joining Glenn now will be far less painful than continuing on.”

  I stood there despondent, even when someone called my name. The three of them had already started filling the grave with handfuls of dirt. They wanted me to join in as well. Why was that? Social obligation because I was there? Stepping to the mound of dirt I dug up, I filled both hands and tossed it back into the hole. Glenn’s once shiny armor was dimmed from blood and now coated in dirt, though perhaps the latter was from crawling through the crypts.

  I clenched my jaw as I began to walk away, back to where I felt was a reasonable distance away, but before I could, I felt a tug on my arm and a teary-eyed Sofia looking back. Don’t do this to me, don’t give me false hope, it might very well kill me when it inevitably gets ripped away. I let her keep clinging for a bit before pulling her in for a hug. What else could I do?

  “You could leave for once,” the spectre whispered to me as Sofia cried in my arms again. “Once you get somewhere safe, how much more utility can you squeeze out of these people? You’ve already ruined their lives with what you’ve created. If you stay, you know what’s coming. You’re not a masochist, so why subject yourself to the pain you know is coming? We both know you’re better than so many others, but you’ll never actually make anything of your life. You can call yourself a goddess all you want, but we both know you’re a nobody who wants to pretend she’s actually significant.”

  Archie and Ivili ended up shoving most of the dirt back in while I stayed with Sofia. I probably should’ve used a spell, but I didn’t exactly know funeral traditions here all too well. The deaths of player characters were rare enough that it didn’t come up enough in a meaningful way for me to spend the time to make them up. Nor was it something I all too often wanted to think about.

  ***

  That night, I took first watch. I wanted some time alone to try my earlier theory. I focused on the buzzing that had been plaguing my sleep. Trying to move it, like mana to my hand. It didn’t take long for something to seem like it was working. The buzzing intensified in my hand before spreading up my arm. Slowly it began to grow warmer, then blazing hot as though I was holding an inferno. I clenched my jaw shut and endured. I felt my flesh seeming to shift and alter, as though the buzzing was trying to push out from inside me and escape through it.

  I couldn’t wake the others. I knew I was on thin ice already. A weak and suspicious wizard that barely provided anything useful to the party was an easy member to part with. I doubted they’d keep me around with something else I couldn’t properly explain. I kept pushing the force to the palm of my hand, trying to push out. A glowing golden light erupted from my hand. I pulled it into my body to hide it the best I could. It stung there as well. Until suddenly it started fading. The heat subsided in turn, and the buzzing grew quiet.

  I grit my teeth and breathed heavily. The pain lingered. What the fuck was that? Before I could properly gather myself, I heard footsteps coming from the tower.