Felicia felt pain. Stars swirled around her consciousness, a seething mass of minuscule pinpricks combined with a smattering of blazing suns. They twisted around her like a kaleidoscope, eluding her grasp and attention yet taunting her through their dizzying dance. All of these stars had somehow sprung from her throat, bursting from between her ribcage and jaw like glowing instruments of torture. She begged them, pleaded with the waves crashing into her soul, tried to swallow and experience blankness again.

The moment she sat up, the world had changed. Where before it was the normal reality she had grown up with, it was so much more now. She had caught glimpses of it before and immediately cursed herself for not noticing its majesty earlier. The forest around her was alive. Each tree had veins of power and vitality running through it. Each swaying blade of grass screamed at her, yelling the fact that it was a living being into her face. She sought distraction from the overload of feelings and sights and cast her eyes upwards. Instead of finding the calmness of a blue sky speckled with white clouds, she saw the universe. A complex pattern of unfathomable resolution bored itself into her eyeballs, making them smoke and overload and hurt. So she looked down, but down she saw masses of ordered blocks of lights, their stillness boring into her heart with icy fingers of dread. She felt scared as she looked down, the lack of movement impressing an all invasive fear into her being. Looking ahead wasn’t much better. She saw rigid structures that shouted at her to stay away alongside a simple yet imperious regiment of order and containment. Felicia told everything to fuck off. She ordered it all to vanish.

It did, she felt full, and she passed out.

She woke hours later if the changing weather was any indication. She was wet and freezing. Rain spattered against her body, making her clothes stick to her skin and turning the bare ground she lay on into mud. Sitting up slowly, she saw a heavy mist permeate the world. Her sight cut off past a couple of dozen meters. Instead of feeling fear at this sudden partial blindness, she only felt relief at the rest granted to her eyeballs, the horror of sudden visual overload fresh in her mind. She decided to stop laying around and stood up. Then the event of the past two weeks came back to her. She realised she could react in two ways. One would consist out of collapsing into a weeping wreck, hopelessly lamenting the death of children and a mother. The other path she saw stretching before her was made up of iron, steel and a stern will. A path of control and blood as she carved out her own place.

She didn't even need to wipe away her tears as the rain washed them from her face. She didn't even need to feel at her neck to notice the complete lack of fatal injury. Instead, she marched over to the hut in the centre of her bare prison. Her feet strode through squelching mud, her tracks filling themselves with brown water. The faint glow of the central hut was visible through the thick rain pelting down on her head. She slowed when the small room came into focus. It’s brightness becoming painful once again as the volume of muting rain between herself and the shack lessened. Felicia sat down at the point where she could just barely manage to tolerate the blazing light and sat down.

She sat there for hours, letting the deluge wash the mud from her body. The heavy rain reduced to a drizzle, but her eyes had managed to adjust themselves to the brightness at this point. Slowly but surely, Felicia began to understand. The oppressive power she had felt when she first woke in this forest had been mana. The oppressive force invading her body the moment she first met Agren had been mana. The cooling and healing wave of power she had circulated through her hand had also been mana. The glowing stone that was preventing Felicia from swallowing was also mana.

The hut she had found Agren inside, suspended between floor and ceiling, was washed in the magical power. A constant stream of the stuff flowed through the cabin, keeping its wall strong and all evil contained. It came from a point in its roof, appearing from out of nowhere. It then streamed through the entire building, following invisible grooves and near imperceptible changes in internal structure. It congregated at the same point inside the middle of the roof, just a few centimetres lower. There it vanished at an angle.

Standing up, Felicia looked around. The wrongness of the faraway walls struck at her mind. The weather had cleared slightly at this point, allowing her a clearer view of all mana around her. It was night, but the lack of light did not hamper her in the slightest. She waded through thick mud towards the evil walls, approaching them and understanding. Agren had begged and pleaded to be away from the tall obstacles penning them in. She completely understood now. The walls dripped with danger, an ancient evil, the doom of the world and the end of the universe in one. All dark things in the night and the source of all suffering where but children compared to the wall. She understood that it was but a fantom, a fanciful weaving of mana meant to inspire fear in the heart of all dungeon related beings. She understood this, yet was completely buried under the sheer terror it exuded. No matter how she fought or struggled, the most primitive part of her brain refused to let her near the wall. She tried for hours, but nothing she did let her even touch this terrifying obstacle.

Her heart shaken by the constant assurity of imminent doom, she turned around and looked down. The feast she saw below made her drool. Small morsels of the best food she ever saw, heard, smelled or tasted where scattered throughout the underground caves she and Angren engineered. She ran through the barren mud field to get to the stairwell. She wailed when she found the sole entrance downwards covered by smooth stone. She never ran faster than she did then after she remembered the many feed chutes installed near the fields. She dove down into the first one she came across, sliding down the narrow tunnel at breakneck speeds. She smashed into a sea of wilting vegetables, the smell of pure rot and death invading her nose.

This was enough to clear her head. Felicia wondered what the fuck she had been doing since she woke up. Breathing in the green smells of fresh decay while taking in the relative darkness around her, she gathered her thoughts. The last thing she remembered was hearing men in iron carapace talking about murdering her employees like it was their usual nine to five. The stomach-churning knowledge that she was alone again took her a while to force under control. She then realised that she could see mana. She also realised that Agren was probably the reason why she couldn't swallow anymore. Feeling her neck, her fingers traced the thin line of scarring travelling across her jugulars. She tried to swallow again but felt her trachea being blocked by an object. She kept trying for a while, morbidly fascinated by the bizarre feeling of movement in her throat. She could have sworn that the obstacle moved a minuscule amount with each attempt, but she was still too frazzled to be sure.

Felicia stood up, telling herself that knowledge is key. She might be able to see mana like it was some glowing kind of magical fog, but she still needed to take stock of her assets before going forwards. Never base conclusions on partial information, unless forced to do so, she told herself. She pushed open the flap leading to the feed bunker she had been lying in, covering the walkway in a fresh layer of bile the moment she stepped through. Her animal farm was dead. Each being was in a state of decomposition, and Felicia felt like fainting. The smell of rotting corpses was combined with the taste of stale death. Felicia managed to put two and two together rather quickly.

The smell had become a problem the moment Agren had made the first underground breeding pens. She had asked the stone if absorbing air took much mana. He had told her that eating air cost a bit of mana, but not much. She had then ordered to stone to keep eating the air at the lowest levels of their farm, ensuring that a steady airflow kept bringing in fresh oxygen while minimising smells. Agren was no longer in a position to perform this menial task, she realised while touching her throat. All the animals had suffocated. She really didn't feel like being surrounded by masses of rotting corpses. If possible, she would like to have them disappear. Resigning herself to having to carry all the dead animals up the stairs, she stopped when she felt the dead critters vanish around her. She stood like a deer caught in the headlights as she sensed the stone inside her throat fill with dematerialized dead meat. She grasped at her neck the moment she understood what this meant.

The land up above had been cleared of trees and bush. Sue and her kids had been up there. She had not seen them as she walked through the mud. All she had seen was mud. Failing to swallow once again, she managed to keep from vomiting more. A part of her mind told he to not care. She was briefly torn between this foreign instinct and her human sensibilities. She then decided to take revenge. Whether or not she was a cannibal now was a problem she could solve after having killed those murdering pieces of scum. The thought that killing humans was wrong seemed slightly off to her. Why shouldn't she be able to take the lives of those who took the lives of herself and her employees?

Felicia inhaled fiercely. Besides air, she took in mana. Besides the mana floating around in the dead air, she took in the masses of dead mice, insects, bunnies and even the few dead badgers hidden in secret alcoves. She used the image of the rotting green badger to keep her own mind on track. She found it easy to do, all of a sudden. Her wet hair whipped in her face as the rushing wind cooled her down. Shivers ran across her skin as she noticed the feeling of fullness in her neck. She also noticed that she had just managed to dematerialise air alongside all the dead critters. Then Felicia smiled. She willed single mouse into existence. Her thoughts ground to a halt as the mana failed to do anything useful at all. Her previous acts of absorption had come naturally. She had adjusted to the blinding brightness of the mana infused hut with instinctual ease, making sure not to overload her new mana senses. These instincts left her dangling the moment she tried to create an animal.

Agren had seemed able to do this in an instant, but Felicia didn't even manage to materialise a single fly after hours of infuriating attempts.