The world splashed into colours. I paid it no heed. My attention was on myself. On the essence of my body. And there I was. As expected, metal and glass were the predominant aspects. They sat interwoven all around my body. Order held them in place. In a way, my form was more real in this weird space only because there was just so much magic. I was not just a blob of energy with an approximate form. I had fully defined ends and beginnings. Just as my Skill ended, I glimpsed something more within this outer layer.

As I returned to reality I found myself face to face with dark brown eyes set in green skin.

“What did you just do?” the ork asked, “Was that a Skill? Can your species do that? Or is that your Class?”

Too intense. Way too close. I flapped my wings and jumped back. I hit something but paid it little mind. Only once I had some distance did I focus on Ignas again. He was groaning, face contorted in pain his left hand holding the right arm. I had hit him with my wing. Maybe this form had more uses than just making annoying sounds. And looking pretty. I did look kind of pretty right now.

“Ouch, that hurt.”

He was not injured too badly it seemed.

“This will bruise. Careful with those wings, girl. More importantly, can you do that again? Show me. I need to study it!”

He was crawling forward, favouring his unharmed arm. I clicked my tongue. Clang. He stopped.

“Right, let’s move closer to my parchment. I need to write this down.”

With that, Ignas turned around and half crawled, half jumped over to his place on the ground. I eyed him for a moment before walking a little closer. After sorting through the mess of sheets all around him he finally found a few unused ones and sat up facing me.

“Alright, go on,” he said.

I pushed out a shadow tendril and laid it in between us. Then I pointed at him and his side.

“What? What’s that for?”

I rolled my head. Bringing over my feather and a sheet I wrote down what I wanted to say.

Don’t cross this line.

“Fine, I get it.”

Ignas scuttled forward on his knees until he sat right in front of my shadow. Expectantly he eyed me.

I sighed. I would not get my peace without indulging him. I just hoped his presence would not be detrimental to my observations.

I focused again. What I had seen a minute ago was still vivid in my mind. This time I wanted to get a closer look at the inside. There was something within me that existed in the shifted world. It was time.

Colours. Metal and crystal in a mesh of order. There! An opening! This was my beak? And suddenly I looked not at the shifted colours of the world around me but the inside of my essence. Flight, beast, darkness, body. And in the very centre a tiny spot of something new. Something I had not seen before. Soul. There was an aspect of soul. Of course, there was. And it was right where my inner gate should be. The last thing I spotted was a fine mesh of dark, crystalline branches covered in purple feathers forming a tiny spiral around the spot. It was connected to my outside, my crystal and metal from through tiny strands of energy.

I returned to the world of the living. Ignas gaze was intense but I ignored him. He would not harm me as long as I could show him something interesting. Instead, I focused on myself. I had seen the connections. Through my inner gate, the vis in my soul and body were connected. Now that I knew what to look for I even saw it just focusing on myself without shifting. There was a flow of mana circulating between my physical form and my soul. Some tendrils moved energy one way, some the other. And they all held an aspect I had formed in my soul very recently. Change. Permutatio. Shift.

I had formed it to combine my two magical sides. It was the perfect connection between destruction and order. And right now it did something completely different. It exchanged mana from inside my soul with what was layered on my body. Mana of equal type. What if I adjusted these channels? Could I even do it?

I was very careful. Another flux overcharge was the last thing I wanted. But I did want to figure this out very badly. So I nudged one of the channels slightly with my mind. It wobbled a tiny bit. I nudged slightly stronger. It wobbled a bit more. Another increase in force. Furious wobbling. This time, the channel nearly broke. A small rip had formed alongside the flowing mana and shot energy into my body. I willed it closed before too much flux built up in my buffer. Maybe I should go at it from a different angle?

I had a second idea. Using mana to influence it. Specifically the mana of change. It should support my will of adjusting the channel. I wanted to drain energy from my body into my soul. Going from the outer edge of my body towards the inner gate I was unable to do anything with it. Only once I reached the inner gate could I change something. The mana flowing through the channel suddenly changed from metal and crystal to darkness and alien. And order was replaced with entropy.

It only took a moment for changes to start taking place. My almost geometric form started to crumble into an irregular mosaic. Crystal cracked, metal turned to dust. In those cracks, darkness found a place. From this darkness, purple swathes drifted outwards filling with transparent tentacles and hints of eyes. Soon my body was nothing like before. I felt far lighter than I had ever been. My feathers had been replaced by shadows and intangible alien forms. Instead of well ordered fractal structures, they were shaped without rhyme and reason. Some parts of myself appeared two-dimensional while others had hints of four or more dimensions. I hooted. Instead of a normal hoot or the previous organ pipe sound my throat now released a whispering chorus of madness. Hissing, growling, mumbling deep and low, a child’s giggling and panicked screaming mashed together.

Ignas had been deep into his writing and on hearing my new voice jump-crawled away screaming obscenities. I clicked my tongue. Squelch. As if a boot was pulled out of a swamp. Or a tentacle pulled of its suction cups from a glass surface.

“Wha-wha-wha-what? What is going on? What did you do? What are you? Hiiieee!”

I have to admit the squeal he let out made me chuckle a bit. Which let out a horrifying sound leading to another scream.

I shook my head and looked inside myself again. Change. I could just change what parts of my mana flowed into my body. The ones I had not used yet were… earth, air and void? That did not sound like a good combination. Even as I thought about it, I felt it would not work. A body needed to be made out of at least three somewhat connected aspects. While air and void fit together very well, earth did not fit at all. I took a look at my status next.

Species: Great Eagle Owl (fledgeling)

Age: 0

Name: Fio

Gender: female

Status: sapient, healthy, mana enriched (major), darkened, estranged, entropic

Level: 13

Class: [Assassin lvl 43], -

Strength: 15

Constitution: 12

Dexterity: 21

Perception: 22

Intelligence: 28

Wisdom: 26

AP: 0

Skills:

Racial:

Utility: [Owl Senses lvl 5], [Preening lvl 3], [Owl Stomach lvl 4], [Soundless Flight lvl 4]

Offensive: [Solid Grip lvl 4], [Intimidating Screech lvl 4], [Owl’s Shadow lvl 6], [Aerial Combat lvl 4]

General:

[Maths lvl 4], [Identify lvl 4]

Assassin:

[Sneak lvl 5], [Surprise Attack lvl 4], [Mingling lvl 3], [Eldritch Shift lvl 4]

Three new ailments. Although, they did not seem harmful. Maybe calling them effects would be better? On closer inspection, I found nothing interesting. They had the same uninformative notification as the three before. Darkened for tenebrae mana, estranged for alienis and entropic for perditio.

As I was inspecting myself I felt parts of my body float off. Little fumes of darkness and alien fog started to drift off into the air. A part of my foot even sunk into the ground. Entropic was not good. I quickly changed my mana flow back to metal, crystal and order. It took half a minute at most and I was back to my statue-like appearance. The parts that had floated off were replaced in the process. The little fumes still stuck around though. Now I only needed to figure out how to go back to my real body.

A shuffling step brought my attention back to my one ork audience. He was in the process of standing up, glasses covering his eyes and mouth wide enough to fit a large rat. I huffed another chuckle. This time a metallic flute. I might have broken his view of reality.

He was progressing so slowly I decided to look at my inner self again. Without shifting, I thought, before I felt my reserves. I had over three quarters remaining. Did the major mana enrichment double my energy? I was definitely able to shift eight times in a row now. I still kept at using my [Owl Senses] to feel my inner world. The energy tendrils connected my inner gate, my soul, directly with my body. Through them, aspected mana flowed into reality and changed my form. What if I moved the entrances into my actual body? I would have to remove the return paths when all my mana was replaced with what it should be, but it was definitely worth a try.

And so I grabbed the tendrils near my inner gate. I moved them to draw my natural darkness, flying and beast aspected mana. Slowly, my metal and glass parts were replaced. I was lucky. The energy did not flow everywhere at the same speed. This staggered the timings for me to pull off the exits. Once the first drop of new energy flowed into the return tendrils, I pulled them off and placed them on my soul. They now form tiny loops. At the same time, I pulled off the tendril feeding my natural aspects into my body and formed a loop within myself. One by one, until finally they were all settled.

I opened my eyes and carefully spread my wings. Ignas sat before me, still gaping but now also furiously scribbling. I ignored him in favour of my wings. My completely normal wings. Brown feathers with a few black stripes on their backs. White down covering my chest and legs. Clack. Hoot. Chuckle. All my sounds were normal again. I was myself again. And I had done it all on my own. I was a genius!

“You are a genius, girl!” Ignis praised “I have never seen something like this before. You are an absolute natural. And only at level thirteen! No magical beast I have heard of could do something this spectacular. Not a single one! I have to, yes, this will be absolutely spectacular. My other research, can wait. Without the node, I can’t get far anyways. I need to learn more about vis enrichment. Tell me, how did you get this much vis into yourself without breaking your body?”

I tilted my head. Should I help him? Hmm. He was asking nicely. Well, not what I considered nicely, but for him just asking was already being nice. Fine. I nodded. I would tell him about absorbing mana crystals first, then going for nodes. What could go wrong? He had no chance to catch up to me. After all, I was an eldritch being at the soul. My senses were made to push my magic to its limits. This guy would just kill himself if he directly touched a major node.