Feeling a bit uncertain and a bit confused at the mental disconnect between the panic I assumed I should feel, and the complete lack thereof, I turned in place, taking in the room around me yet again. In any other circumstance, I could see myself eagerly exploring the place, inspecting every last detail, to revel in the combination of mediaeval and fantastical design philosophies.
Taking a deep breath, and closing my eyes once more, I tried to calm myself.
Rationally speaking, I couldn’t quite be certain about my assumptions quite yet. Sure, the signs were there, and it was almost frightening how many details aligned in ways that stood out to me, but I hadn’t yet gotten any definitive proof.
Perhaps some exploration would be a good idea after all. Even if it didn’t shine any light on my current circumstances, it would at least help calm me. I hoped, anyway. That was reason enough in my eyes.
Opening my eyes once again, I looked around one more time, before I started to aimlessly wander about. Every aspect of this room was interesting in some ways, and I really had no idea where I should start. So, I decided to leave that up to my subconsciousness, and decided to roam.
The first thing I noticed, apart from the rather dilapidated state this building was in, was how neat everything still was in this half of the room. Starting from the back behind the throne, a bit more than half of the grand hall seemed in suspiciously good condition. Sure, the ground was dirty, and there were obvious signs of debris falling from the ceiling, if only small ones, but everything else seemed quite well cared for.
The weapon stands were mostly fully intact, with only a few bearing cosmetic damage, the weapons similarly seemed almost entirely unblemished. The throne didn’t show so much as a layer of dust, and even the carpet leading from the grand doors all the way to the dais was mostly completely spotless.
I slowly wandered across the hall, taking in the small details. The torches arrayed along the wall, mostly intact and lit with a strange flame, a warm orange pooling around the room. Upon closer inspection they didn’t strike me as natural fire, which was a rather weird experience.
Moving one hand closer to one of the torches, noticing idly that I seemed a bit shorter than I thought I should be–not a surprise, given the body I now called my own–I found that the flame did radiate heat in the same way a normal torch would, but the fire itself didn’t seem to burn on anything. Picking up the torch in question, I freed it from its porch on the wall, and inspected it more closely.
The torch was quite curious, with no flammable material that fed the flames, instead the flame just sort of… existed in a bowl like container made of metal. There was no cloth, no wick, no candle wax or anything else I would have expected to see. It just… existed. As if by magic.
Most would probably scoff at that realisation. Magic wasn’t real, after all, otherwise the world would be a much better place. Or at least, that was the dream anyway.
But to me, it wasn’t quite that outlandish a claim. Granted, I also still had some issues coming to terms with… any of this, really, but the more I wandered around, the more I really took it all in, and the more I thought about what my new body looked and felt like, my hypothesis about where I was solidified.
And then there was this strange sensation I got when I looked at this torch.
To be perfectly honest, I had only noticed that particular detail after studying it for as long as I had. Just as I moved to return it to its place on the wall did I notice the strangeness coming from the item. Something that I somehow knew didn’t come from any of my normal senses.
It wasn’t really comparable to anything a normal human would be able to experience, which made it quite hard to describe. If I had to put the sensation into words, nonsensical as they may be, I would have to say that the torch somehow had… gravitas. There was an air of mystique about it, an aura it radiated, which bled out into the world and tickled some part of me that I had never felt before.
If magic was, in fact, a thing–a thought I was somewhat alarmed to realise I increasingly easily took at face value–then that wasn’t that much of a surprise, all things considered. Vuthe de Thal was, after all, a sorceress. An Arch-Umbramancer, to be exact, a being who had reached the pinnacle of dark and shadow magick, allowing her to call herself ‘Shade Dragon’.
Studying the flame idly, I thought about what that would mean for me.
In the original revision of the story, Vuthe de Thal had been one of only three trueblooded Shadow Dragons, a direct descendant of one of the oldest beings in existence. That lore had received some changes over the years, but even through all that, her nature as a dragon had remained, even if the details surrounding her had gotten some overhauls.
Dragons were, at least in my lore, beings of magick. They didn’t so much possess a physical body, as their body was a physical representation of their magick. They didn’t need to eat, or drink, or even sleep, like a normal living being would, as they entirely sustained themselves on magick.
Therefore it really wasn’t much of a surprise that I could sense the strangeness coming from the torch. And it also meant that this strangeness could potentially be a sense for magic. I didn’t have any other idea what exactly it could be, and given everything going on, would it be so weird in the grand scheme of things?
I nodded to myself, turning over the object in my hand, now more confident in its purpose and function. As I had surmised, the flame didn’t extinguish, no matter how hard I waved it around. That pretty much confirmed my theory.
Placing the torch back onto the wall, I turned and inspected the rest of the room. Now that I had noticed this strange new sensation, I could feel it coming from quite a few items found within this throne room. Again, that wasn’t really surprising, given that most of the weapons and armor should have at least some minor magical qualities.
Wandering over to the closest weapon rack, I looked at the various different weapons on display. Swords of all lengths, daggers, hammers, axes, spears, slingshots, mauls, maces, morningstars, and even more esoteric weaponry were organised in neat rows.
Picking up a wicked looking dagger forged from some strange black metal, I weighed it in my mind.
Immediately, details popped into my mind, startling me for a moment.
It wasn’t some sort of grand system explaining the function to me, instead it felt more like… muscle memory, or knowledge from ingrained training. The way it was forged, the material it was made out of, when and where I had first received it, and how to properly wield it.
Truth be told, the experience was fascinating. As someone who hadn’t ever held a weapon before–at least I didn’t think I did, again, with my limited recollection of anything before today that was hard to make out–it felt almost… overwhelming, yet despite this, I was quickly able to work through all the details without getting distracted.
This almost had to be knowledge from Vuthe bleeding through to me. Again, even with my limited recollection, I was almost certain I had never so much as held a weapon before, let alone used one. And then there were also details pertaining to this particular dagger, like where and when it was forged that I really should have no idea about. Yes, I might have written the character, but Vuthe’s arsenal was massive. I hadn’t thought about the details for all the weapons.
Heck, I didn’t even know most weapons she could use.
Vuthe de Thal had been trained to wield any weapon Satien, the world I was pretty sure I was now inhabiting, had on offer. She was competent with most of them, and basically completely unmatched with a few. Even those she didn’t know how to wield well she’d be at least average with. Three thousand years of training could do wonders about one’s competence with one’s chosen field.
As I thought it all over, I idly went through some of the motions that had come to mind when I picked up the dagger. Nothing overly fancy or strenuous, just a few of the various grips and slashes. It all felt… natural. Almost alarmingly so.
Placing the weapon back on the rack, I let my eyes wander for a bit, thinking about my next steps.
Quite frankly, a part of me was entirely too giddy. Even through all the questions I had, and through all the worries that plagued me about my current situation, the experience of just… knowing how to use a dagger purely by picking it up was… exhilarating. It made me want to pick up every single one of the weapons displayed here and learn how to use them.
But even more than that, it made me want to try my hand at magick.
There was still that skeptical part of me that vehemently refused to acknowledge even the possibility that magick existed, let alone that I was capable of using it, despite everything I had gone through so far. I was a skeptic at heart, and it was hard for me to ignore that, but for once in my life, that skepticism was utterly outvoted.
Still, the question was, how would magic even work? Sure, the body I was now inhabiting had a high likelihood of being able to use it, and I had dreamed up a magic system for this world, but that didn’t mean it would be the same here and now, or allow me to use it properly.
And even if I could manage to use it, could I do so without bringing forth a cataclysm of truly apocalyptic proportions? Vuthe wasn’t exactly weak, no matter which revision you decided to look at her from.
I took a deep breath, staring at my hands as I clenched and unclenched them again.
For all that my mind was throwing me reasons not to try, I had already decided that I would do so anyway. I had a somewhat reasonable shot at actually using magic, even if the thought was outlandish to think about, so I wanted to at least give it a proper go.
The nerd in me would never forgive me for passing up this chance.
With effort, I calmed myself down somewhat. With no better idea as to where to even start, I decided that my best shot would be to rely on the knowledge of the magic system I had originally devised for Satien. It was as likely to succeed as not, in my opinion, and so far I had no clue what other system might be in place.
Magickal system, not System system, to be clear. While I did enjoy the GameLit approach in my reading, I found writing such systems to be quite involved and mindnumbingly annoying. I had some worlds that I had tried to build with a system in mind, but Satien very deliberately wasn’t one of them.
Given my current situation, and my complete lack of any idea when it came to proper spellcasting, I decided to start small. Vuthe had a number of magical abilities that came directly from her draconic heritage, one of which being a sort of inventory system in the form of her shadow storage.
Not only was it one of her most useful abilities, it would also, hopefully, allow me to kill two birds with one stone: Learning magic, and potentially procuring a mirror.
The thought had come to me after I had gone through what I knew about the magic system from my story. While I hadn’t thought about everything she had in her shadow storage, just as I hadn’t thought of all the details in regards to all the weapons she possessed, I knew at the very least that she did carry a mirror, if only I could extract it. Similarly, my hopes were that her racial magick would be easier to get a grasp on than any proper spells, since in the lore, those abilities should come almost instinctively.
Of course, quite unsurprisingly, it wasn’t as easy as just… willing things to go my way. I spent a good few minutes just standing there, trying various approaches as to where to even start. That much was to be expected, given that magic would be quite difficult to learn even if you were born into such a world, and studied it for your entire life.
Still, even knowing that, I quickly felt myself growing… frustrated. The more I tried, the more I just… knew I should be able to use magick. I couldn’t quite pinpoint where that certainty came from, but it was definitely there. Somewhere at the edge of my awareness.
Deciding to switch up my approach, I focused on that feeling of annoyance that poked at me when I tried to think of any way to use magick. It took me quite a while until I finally had a vague idea where it came from, although even then it wasn’t as if I suddenly had some revelation as to what it was.
The mind was a strange place, and quite hard to understand at times, so it didn’t surprise me that just finding it didn’t suddenly open my third eye or whatever. But, what it did allow me, was to home in on what exactly that sensation was annoyed about. Such as, for example, the mere mental mention of a third eye.
It took some doing to get a better feel for it, throwing more and more outlandish ideas into the void, just to see what happened, and each and every time the annoyance became more pronounced. At some point it began to almost feel… dangerous, as if mocking it was a very bad idea.
That said, it wasn’t without merit.
Just as with the torch, I could slowly start to feel that very same strangeness all around myself. I wouldn’t have noticed it if that annoyed sensation wouldn’t have grabbed me by the metaphorical ear and dragged me towards thoughts of the torch, a sensation that was… quite the experience, truth be told.
But once I had noticed it, it came to me quite clearly. And with that sense, also came something else. Knowledge, more instinctual than academic. This part was probably the strangest feeling of everything so far. Since it came with concepts that I had absolutely no idea even existed, nor had I words to even describe it, yet somehow I still understood.
It took me an almost embarrassing amount of time to realise that this was knowledge about magick. Proper magick. Which would explain the entirely too alien feeling it carried.
Doing my best to keep myself calm, and to ignore the giddy jitters going through me, I tried to focus on this new knowledge.
To be entirely clear, I had absolutely no idea what exactly happened when I thought about it. It was the strangest sensation I had ever felt, like being completely wasted, yet sober at the same time, stumbling around like a newborn toddler, yet steady as a cliff in brutal waves.
From one moment to the next, things shifted, and I could feel a wave of that all-permeating strangeness ripple out from me.
The shadows beneath me twitched. Then they expanded, sliding across the dimly lit floor as if in complete contradiction to the basic laws of light and physics, forming into a pool roughly a meter across, before spitting out a silver framed mirror, hovering a decimeter above the floor.
I stared, blankly.
I had done it.
A silly grin spread across my face, and I could see the stupidly happy expression I wore on my face in the reflective surface before me. It took me every last shred of willpower not to jump around in giddy joy.
Then the giddiness won out, and I started laughing out loud in pure glee.
Fucking magick!
Maybe this entire mess wasn’t nearly as bad as I had first dreaded it would be.
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