Ceyda kicked the apple core across the basement floor.

“Dorskina’s grace!” she quickly yelped, and a sliver of magical energy rose from the ground, halting the apple in its tracks.

Ceyda pumped her fist up into the air with glee. “I can make a shield!”

You can make a fragment of a shield.

“Shield!” Ceyda grinned. “You know, I think I did not give Dorskina a fair shake. She seems pretty all right. Even if she can’t help me with teleportation.”

Ceyda summoned a few balls of light like she had during the interrogation, and took great joy in trying to capture the wisps of light in her hands. It didn’t act like a real light. Not a candle, or a light bulb. Those arguably, had a source. Either from fire or from electricity. But this was just… light.

The light at the edge of the orb was as bright and vibrant as the light in the center. And all of it was more soothing to look at than any nonmagical light she had seen.

Now was the time to explore the dank little basement. And then possibly break out. She had it figured out. She would break out, sneak back to her house, steal the food, and then return. It was a flawless plan with no downsides.

She eyed the meathook hanging on the wall that she had seen with the sense spell. Now that she wasn’t overwhelmed, she could explore the rest of the basement as well without collapsing in pain.

Her windowless prison was not nearly as windowless as it appeared. There were no clear openings, but along the corner, there was a small metal pipe that went through the ceiling. On this side, it was connected to nothing, but there were some iron pieces that implied it to used to be an oven.

The walls also showed more obvious water damage, with grimy lines warped around the bricks, around hip length. Chances were, this place had been flooded at some point. She hoped that wasn’t a consistent flaw, otherwise her situation was going to get rather bothersome the next rainfall.

Ceyda rolled her head back, contemplating what Doc had told her about the limits of spells she could cast.

She walked over to the meat hook, and reached up to get it but found she was too short.

“Dorskina, please let me jump higher!” Ceyda said, not knowing if that counted as an invocation or not.

She hopped inefficiently, only to suddenly leap two feet in the air. Ceyda grabbed the meathook, but found that she was now hanging at least a foot and a half off the ground.

“...Dorskina I think I need strength,” Ceyda requested.

You know that you’re not actually talking to Dorskina, right? There is no avatar up there granting every individual use of your spells.

“You told me to be more polite!”

Yes, you shouldn’t be making it sound like an order, per se, but Dorskina’s not up there. It’s more like a --------

Ceyda squinted.

“What was that? I can’t read what you’re writing.”

Uh, you know? A -------

“Nope.”

Huh. Okay. Like, a martial breath? When you are trained to punch someone, you expel a loud breath. And the logic is similar here.

“Why didn’t you just say that?” Ceyda asked, realizing her arms were aching something fierce, hanging from this giant meat hook.

I tried to. I guess that specific term just doesn’t translate to what you speak.

“What do you mean? We’re both speaking Lystratan, right?” Ceyda asked.

Well, you’re speaking that. I’m a magical book that writes in a language only you can understand.

“Right.”

Uh, Ceyda. So, the front of my book is awkwardly placed, I’ll admit, but are you in pain, just hanging there?

Ceyda blinked a few times and stared at her ever reddening hands. “Yes.”

Ceyda. Please let go of the giant fish hook.

“But I want it,” Ceyda said.

Why do you need a giant fish hook. Ceyda.

“Dorskina!” Ceyda yelled, with passion. Strength flowed through her, and quite suddenly, Ceyda was able to lift her own weight.

She climbed the hook, and put her foot in the curve, as she tried to untangle the rope that was keeping it tied to the ceiling. She tried to just break the rope, but evidently she wasn’t strong enough. What evil rope.

“Dorskina!”

The rope snapped in two.

“Yes!” Ceyda pumped her fist up, which hit the ceiling of the basement.Her fist effortlessly broke through the cold ceiling, shattering the rock into a burst of dust and debris.

At this realization that she had accidentally punched the ceiling, the rope came completely undone, and Ceyda fell to the floor with a dramatic clang, meat hook under her.

“Shit!” Ceyda swore. There was a sudden, cold sharp spike of pain--and then no pain at all. Ceyda lay on the ground, momentarily frozen, unsure of what just happened.

Ceyda. Why.

Something felt. Wrong. It didn’t hurt. Not really. But it felt like something. Disorienting? Numbed?

Ceyda started to feel her body, as her brain shook within its skull. Her breathing was uneven and her fingers trembled.

Was this pain? It didn’t feel like pain? Pain hurt, for one. It was something-- something else. Thinking was hard and she didn’t like it one bit. This didn’t so much hurt as--

Overwhelming burning pain shot through her without warning. She had only tried to adjust her body, and it was like everything had turned alive. Ceyda couldn’t even scream, and the air was forcibly ripped from her lungs in utter confusion.

Next to her, covered in blood, was the meat hook that she had unknowingly moved herself off of.

“...Doc?” Ceyda whispered, having no idea how to handle herself. She was bleeding. And not in the normal once a month way. In an actual way. An actual deadly way.

What?

She glanced over where the book was. It was laying on the wooden pallet, propped up slightly, and was now completely out of view of Ceyda.

“I think I stabbed myself. With--uh--meat hook--I fell.”

...fuck. All right, where are you bleeding? Upper back or lower back? Did it pierce your other side?

Ceyda woozily shook her head. “Middle...”

Just keep pressure on the wound. This at least mean you probably didn’t stab a kidney or your spine.

Tears were flowing freely down her face. She didn’t know when she had started to cry and by this point it didn’t really matter. Her hands clapped to her back, and immediately turned red from the bleeding.

...two days. You had a spell book for two days. And you managed to almost kill yourself! Aaargh! Ceyda!

Ceyda didn’t reply, as she was too frantically focused on the fact she was bleeding.

Aaargh. You’re going to get infected probably--we need to get you to a doctor.

Ceyda tried to force herself to stand up, but found that her legs were no longer working. That wasn’t true--they worked just fine, but Ceyda was terrified to make them work. Even has her feet pressed on the floor, her brain was screaming that it was wrong. Like a raw bone placed against a slate.

Nothing like this had happened before. She had just been messing around!

She got on her knees, and placed her hands on the ground. Crawl. She needed to crawl. Crawl because for some reason she couldn’t just teleport because magic was stupid.

She placed one hand in front of the other, and as if in a fugue, she slowly and pathetically made it up the stairs. Ceyda wasn’t even sure how, but she did know it took both a mere moment and fifty thousand years.

“Dorskina,” she muttered, as she reached for the handle, and snapped it from its locked mechanism. The door swung open.

She was leaving a trail of blood behind her. Great.

The room outside the basement was depressing. An uneven wooden floor, with the errant nail sticking out, old and musty cloths covering the windows, to stop the light from pouring in.

Blurry Weapons littered the walls. Ceyda couldn’t tell if they were in good shape or not, but she was going to guess they very much were not.

Doc trailed behind her, dragging along the ground. It flopped over nails and ridges in the most ungraceful manner. Oh Ceyda hoped the grimoire wouldn’t get torn or scratched. Ceyda would feel really bad about that.

In a pile of straw stuffed cushions, a single human being, most likely Gilbert, was fast asleep, cradling what appeared to be a fire poker as if it was a child.

Ceyda slowly made her way over.

“Awaken!” she ordered, as she forcibly poked the sleeping human in the eyelid.

The person yelled.Oh good--it was indeed Gilbert! Hello Gilbert!

He reeled back, and started to wave the fire poker as a weapon, immediately clonking Ceyda in the head with far better reflexes than predicted.

“Ow!” Ceyda yelled.

“Bwuh--what did you--” Gilbert blinked blearily as adrenaline faded.

“AAA what’s going on” another familiar voice cried, this time Lyle’s. He jolted up from the other side, having been obscured by more neutral fabrics that blended in with the wall.

“I need something from you,” Ceyda said feebly.

“Did you--fuck how did you get out?” Lyle swore, staggering up to go over.

“I broke out. With my supreme magical abilities. I can kill you both with my eyeballs!” Ceyda declared.

Gilbert stared at her. “...are you serious?!”

“There is no way she can kill us with her eyeballs,” Lyle chimed in.

Ceyda grabbed the firepoker, and proceeded to bend it backwards in a tremendous display of force.

Lyle immediately walked behind Ceyda, so as to avoid line of sight. Her bluff had done wonders. Lying had its uses! She needed to lie more often, honestly.

“Now you’re my hostages!” Ceyda said, nodding weakly to herself. Her vision blurred, her blood ran cold, and she resisted the urge to vomit what little contents were in her stomach.

“F-fine. What are you going to do,” Gilbert asked slowly, eyes darting to the wall.

“I demand that you--take me to the doctor,” Ceyda ordered.

Gilbert stared at her. “Come again?”

“I stabbed myself and I’m dying. Doctor please.”

“What do you--holy shit!” Gilbert yelped, immediately getting down on one knee to examine Ceyda’s wound. “How did you manage this?”

“I got into a fight with the meat hook and lost,” Ceyda said, staring in the distance.

Lyle looked down at the ground and yelled. “Have you been trailing blood this entire time?”

“Only for--” Ceyda paused as she looked down at her fingers, and started counting.

Lyle did not wait for an answer and bolted towards where the basement was.

“What the fuck is that hook doing here? Was that there the entire time?” Lyle yelled. “And why is there a glowing orb?”

“It’s harmless! It’s just magic!” Ceyda shot back.

“It’s...it’s shrinking? Is it supposed to do that?” Lyle yelled.

“Maybe?”

Yes. Yes it is supposed to do that, Doc supplied.

“Yes!” Ceyda corrected, smiling brightly.

Gilbert suddenly had loose fabric in his hands, from where, Ceyda didn’t know. They were cold and wet, evidently having just been washed.

“Can I--uh--” Gilbert faltered.

Ceyda grabbed the dress she was wearing and hefted it up so her wound was exposed.

Gilbert immediately set to wrapping the fabric around her waist as tightly as possible.

“Are you a doctor?” Ceyda asked.

“No. I should be able to just patch you up here,”Gilbert muttered.

“I want a doctor. My wound could get infected,” Ceyda said.

Gilbert paused, mid wrapping the wound. “...what do you mean?”

Ceyda paused for a moment. “You know, when something dirty wounds you, it can cause an infection? That you can die from?”

“Right. Yeah. Sorry I just-- okay fine,” he stuttered.

Lyle returned, carrying the meat hook with significantly more ease than Ceyda had.

He dropped it against the wall, and walked over to Gilbert’s poor attempt at doctoring.

“So what do we do?” Lyle asked loudly.

“Do--do I look like I know what I’m doing?” Gilbert whimpered, shutting his eyes in horror.

“You could take me to a doctor,” Ceyda suggested.

“Yeah, sure, we’ll just find a random doctor! That’ll be fucking easy!” Lyle snapped.

“I feel like you’re mocking me but I made my demands quite clear,” Ceyda said, her eyelids drooping. She was overcome with exhaustion and wooziness. “I think I’m going to rest now.”

“No! You can’t!” Gilbert interjected. “That’s how you die!”

“What? No it isn’t!” Lyle replied.

“Yeah, it is. If you start to fall asleep that means you’re getting ready to die!”

“You’re thinking of head injuries! Not fucking stab wounds!” Lyle gripped Ceyda’s shoulders tightly as he spoke this.

“So? What’s the difference?” Gilbert grabbed at Ceyda as well, as if she was tug of war. “Sleep means you lose control of your body, right?”

Actually, both of those are profoundly untrue, and you should fall asleep whenever you think you should. The only time you shouldn’t is if you are in a situation of extremely cold temperatures, and even then, there are ways to fix that.

Also you probably want to go to sleep because you've had very little, frequently interrupted sleep, you’re injured, and you have consumed a depressingly low amount of food in twenty four hours.

Of course, neither Lyle nor Gilbert could hear Doc’s answer. Ceyda decided to listen to the one who had doctor as their namesake. She kneeled down where Gilbert had been resting.

“Argue amongst yourselves,” Ceyda ordered lazily, as her eyelids drooped further.

“Dammit, I’ll go find that doctor,” Lyle swore. “You make sure she doesn’t die.”

“How about you stay here, and I find the doctor?”

Ceyda closed her eyes and let the ever building exhaustion take her.

She immediately found herself back in the dream she had last night, with the pink clouds. The transition had been near instantaneous. One moment in the building with Gilbert and Lyle, the next here. And yet, she had no feeling of her body or the voices outside.

Here she was, in the same dream as last night, in an intensely deep sleep. Was this… death? Was she dying? Her Ritesgiver had always described death as a winding river, always moving, never quite ending. This felt quite a good deal more peaceful than that.

Then--a name occured to her, one Doc had told her about: Esterath.

The avatar with the spells pertaining to dreams. Doc had said she could only learn them from other people, but maybe having an ancient magical book changed things? Or maybe Doc telling her about it had been the lesson?

She looked around. The floor was pink clouds, as she had noted before, but everything around her seemed to made up of...nothing. Not sky, not darkness, not the inability to see four feet in front of her. Nothing.

There was a vast gulf of just nothing.

She was alone.

All alone.

Because no one else was using magic.

Well, that wasn’t true, was it? There were loads of mages in Kesterline, and a lot of them used magic! Probably thousands all over.

So why was she floating out by herself? Wouldn’t one of them have found her? In fact, if they really could travel through dreams, she should have been found ages ago. If they were even looking for her. But if Ceyda was in charge of this sort of thing, she’d be invading everyone’s dreams and figuring out everyone’s business.

It seemed the most effective method.

Or was this not some vast dream world, but her own brain? Did this mean she was really as empty headed as everyone said? That would be horrible. She’d be so mad if that was the case. She’d figure out which Avatar was in charge of brains and kill them. It would be her one defining goal in this life.

Or maybe it was just an empty house, with no one to furnish it. She shut her dream-eyes and imagined a flying pink elephant. It had an oversized head, a small hat, and wings the size of the Blanche manor.

She opened her eyes, to see no such elephant had appeared.

Tragic.

Was this going to be her fate from now on? No more dreams? Just drifting on a pink cloud, unable to do anything because no one could tell her how?

That was profoundly disappointing. It wouldn’t do! Ceyda actually liked dreaming, when they weren’t about being trapped in her room while the house was on fire.

“Esterath!” Ceyda called. “I would very much like to go to a normal dream now!”

Nothing. Alas, she didn’t expect anything different, but she had to try.

She lay down on the pink cloud, and stared at the nothingness around her. It was at least a peaceful place. Utterly calming. Even her own jitteriness was soothed. Perhaps she would just lie here and wait for the doctor to arrive.

Ceyda spent some time counting to a hundred, when she saw in the distance--another little cloud. Just floating there. She sat up and stared at the single new item in existence.

She stood up and walked towards it--there was a door. A plain, wooden door. Ceyda clapped her hands in excitement and jumped up and down for a few moments.

There had to be some way to get across without falling into the gulf of nothingness between the two clouds!

Ceyda got on her knees and ripped off a piece of cloud fluff. It immediately disintegrated in her hands. She cursed and tried a few more times, taking a larger and larger cluster of cloud each time. Finally, a piece of cloud the size of her head remained in her hands, not dissipating. She extended her hands over the gulf and dropped it. The cloud did no such thing, and instead remained where it was, floating in mid-nothing.

She reared her head back and spit into the gulf of nothing. It seemed to disappear after a few feet, with no noise.

Was it even real spit? If she was dreaming? Oh, sacred skies, no, this was going to get far too existential for her liking. She just needed to accept what was going on and roll with it, like any dream.

She placed her hand out. To her surprise, it didn’t fall. Instead it set on the nothing as if it were a floor. Ceyda slowly started to walk. It was dreadfully unintuitive. It wasn’t like walking in the real world, where things like gravity and solid ground existed. This was just walking on nothing. She wobbled with every step, as her feet bobbed up and down, but never falling.

After much struggle, she managed to make it to the other floating cloud. As Ceyda reached out for the door handle, something caught her eye--her hand.

Her normally brown skin now had a purple hue to it.

It wasn’t noticeably purple, but Ceyda had quite the experience with how her hand looked, and in this moment it was more purple than she ever expected it to be.

Was she dying? Or was that just a symptom of the dream world? Was her entire body purple? And why purple?

Not wanting to contemplate such things further, she touched the wooden door. It was a dark, cherry wood, with long deep grooves in it, as if something had scratched against the grain. There was no door handle, so Ceyda experimentally pushed the door shaped wooden lump. It swung open, and a bright white light shone through, making it impossible to see what was inside.

What if she wasn’t dreaming? What if she was dying and this is how she travelled to the afterlife? What if this was all an elaborate concoction in her mind to symbolize the inevitable grasp of death?

All the same, what if it wasn’t?

Fear and curiosity overwhelmed her. She so desperately wanted to know what was on the other side of this door, but so terrified she would not be able to come back.

Her own logic argued endlessly with itself, until she reached a simple conclusion:

She was dying. There was no way to go but up from here, and if there was some murky depths Ceyda knew nothing about, then she would find out. But for now, an opportunity was presenting itself and she couldn’t just not take it.

Ceyda took a deep breath, and walked into the bright light.

The door shut behind her.