Felicia was nervous. The fact that she lacked a vital piece of information was gnawing a pit in her stomach. The last time she felt this nervous…

Felicia couldn’t remember the last time she had been this worked up. It was probably the night before her first school trip or something horribly banal like that. So the fact that she did not know what date it was twisted her guts in a tight knot. She had concluded that she had not died. She had also realised that she was unconscious for a certain period of time. This meant that she had an unknown amount of time to fix a lot of things. For one, she still couldn’t talk. The object inside her throat prevented her from making any form of intelligible speech — the only sounds she had been able to make where wails, grunts and coughs. She had stopped trying to vocalise when she understood how she must have looked. Her clothed where still distinctly blood stained where they weren’t caked in a thin layer of mud. Her clothes where a ripped mess and she was making these moronic noises while sitting in the mud.

She had tried so hard to sense mana. Now that she could, she didn’t want to anymore. She had forced Agren to practice his control nearly every second since she understood what he could do. Now that she could make stuff vanish and appear out of nothing, she found every single excuse not to practice. It felt horrible. Wielding mana felt like taking your own blood, the very stuff keeping you running and talking, and using it to fingerpaint. Taking in mana felt like stuffing rocks and sand into your veins by shooting it through your own heart with a shotgun. Felicia hated it. The worst part was that she felt it becoming easier. But the little progress she had made had merely downgraded the feeling from the worst thing she ever felt to the barely second worst thing she ever felt.

She had made some rough sums in her head, and she would only need to torture herself for three days before she reasoned she could do it while merely crying. The first few manipulations of mana and matter had almost felt good, she recalled with an aching heart. Then the reality of the situation had seemed to set in, and the unnaturalness of what she had been doing grated a massive and sharp file against her very soul each time she did anything supernatural.

Felicia stood up, and immediately wondered why she had done so. She had visualised this point in time different. The source of magic she was dependant on was now in her control. The annoying and incompetent barrier between her and the mystical power was gone. Agren hadn’t made a single peep. The stone in her neck felt wrong somehow, and she suspected the cool breeze she somehow felt flowing through her very flesh and bones was actually most of the mana leaking from her control. The entire fight had been too hectic and chaotic for her to clearly recall what and where the soldiers struck, but she imagined that hitting a diamond with a - possibly magical - tempered steel edge might do all kinds of bad things. Whenever she hadn't been forcing herself to practice controlling mana, this was what she had been thinking about. Agren had done a lot of growing. He might not even be a diamond, there used to be plenty of clear substances that acted like diamonds back on Earth. His internal structure might have been damaged or weakened by the fast level ups he had been going through. A couple hundred times the growth rate of ordinary dungeons might have caused faults and weaknesses in the stone, points that would make the stone crack like an egg if struck just so.

She started wandering again, slogging through the swamp of mud. The smell invading her nose reminded her why she had decided to get up and start moving. She had only managed to absorb a portion of the rotting animals below. She had fled the underground farm when the headaches she got from absorbing the dead animals became too much for her to bare. Removing the slab of stone covering the stairs to the outside had been an effort of will she still wasn’t recovered from. Now the hexagonal prison she was stuck in reeked of death, the fumes of decomposition wafting from underground. She was blasted with the stink each time the wind changed, her logical distribution of the feed chutes now coming back to haunt her olfactory senses.

The moment she sat down in a fresh patch of muck, it all became too much for her. For the first time in years, the woman broke down and cried. Her tears made clean rivulets as they ran down her cheeks, washing away the mud caking her face. She didn’t sob. She didn’t cry, she just sat in a catatonic state while letting the tears flow. This brought her a massive sense of peace. Her troubled heart became clear for the first time since waking up blinded by the shine of magic. She let herself fall backwards, unheeding the cold water as she curled up in a fetal position, an odd smile on her face. And Felicia slept the sleep of a baby.

She woke up because of the heat. Her mouth felt parched, and everything itched. She really would like a glass of water right about now. Fumbling dirty fingers across the cracking ground, she touched something hard and cold. Bringing the object to her lips, she drank the glass dry. She threw the glass away in a dramatic gesture the moment she drained it. It vanished into nothing the moment it left her hand, she somehow knew this had happened without looking. Sleep had done her mental state wonders. The grinding stars inside her chest and mind no longer bothered her. They had become a soothing field of gentle weeping sand instead. The simple use of mana failed to scrape painfully against her soul. And there was clarity in her mind.

Felicia woke again. She blinked her eyes against the sunlight. These last few days had been very strange — the only reason why she didn’t dismiss them as hallucinations was the fact that the walls and the hut were still glowing to her eyes. She rubbed them, and they glowed still. She stood, patting the cracking layer of mud from her clothes and skin. SHe looked around and was not happy with what she saw. Instead of the lush forest or orderly fields, she saw drying mud. No longer were there paths connecting the feed shutes, there was just raw soil and naked sun.

‘This is not acceptable at all,’ Felicia though as she got mad at herself. ‘So what. My employees have left me before. I have lost valuable assistants before.’ Her internal voice rose as she made herself angry. ‘I have experienced setbacks before, I have die-’ Here she stopped herself. Faking it until the making was done is a good strategy, but there was a thin line between motivating oneself and outright lying. Ignoring her slip up, she walked back towards the hut. The innocuous structure somehow felt different than before, but she couldn’t really tell why. She saw her true target after a small bit of brisk walking, the stairs going down underground. The stench wafting from the place was nearly visible, but Felicia wiled the air in front of her face to vanish. Dust fell from her hair as the wind ruffled her dirty locks. She strode downwards with confidence, only stopping once she saw it was pitch black.

She spent the next twenty minutes walking around the bare dirt above, uncovering all the glass pillars responsible for carrying light down into the bowels of the earth. She nearly thought that it would be smooth sailing from here on out, but the grinding feeling in her chest came back when she had cleaned most of the glass columns. She willed the dirt to vanish, feeling a slight trickle of light entering her body, just above the divet between her collar bones. She tried to swallow experimentally and found the entire experience unpleasant but doable, She sounded out a few words but stopped the moment she heard the oddly warbled and unrecognisable speech coming from her mouth. She soldiered on with her cleaning duties, and only felt faintly like dying by the time she had cleaned every single glass pillar she could remember.

That done, she tried going down the stairs again, but absorbing the bad air took her breath away from pain. Understanding the uselessness of her actions, she walked up the stairs and sat down. She must have been doing something wrong, right? A weird feeling told her to take a better look at the source of her soul-wrenching woes, so she tried to clear her head and look at the pain — the slivers of agony each star carved into her only growing worse as she started paying them conscious attention. She looked at the faint pinpricks of light with closed eyes, not even daring to consciously glance at the much larger balls of flames that sat in her mind's eye like silent children. She reached out to one of the smaller ones, a mere speck of dust floating near her trachea. She coaxed it to come forward, and nearly shat herself when it actually did. Then she understood that it was not a light, nor was it a speck of dust.

It was a seed.

So she told the seed to grow, to become more. She barely managed to send the spark flying away from herself before a green badger popped into existence. The animal landed on the ground, looked at her with accusing eyes and went belly up. The seed returned to her, even fainter than before. Stilling her shaking hands, she mentally asked the seed what it would like to become. It replied in a single thought of stillness, of waving In the breeze. The seed had not wanted to become a badger it seemed. So she gently guided the seed back to the ground and asked it to grow into a leaf of grass. The smile on her face when she saw a small patch of waving greenery appear caused a lot of mud to fall from her face.

Felicia felt like a magical fairy and farmer combination. She strolled around her little kingdom, scattering the smallest seeds with each wave of her arm. They turned into ferns, trees, grasses and conifers with abandon. She kept sensing the little sparks, each plant or cluster of leaves containing a minuscule light that was visible even through closed eyes. Each time she let a seed grow, the pain tearing at her soul diminished. She nearly felt like breaking out in song and dance.

She had covered the majority of her hexagonal prison in lush greenery by the time she ran out of the smallest sparks. All her lights the size of dust particles now hung around her, each one covered in a shell of green matter in the shape of a plant. She had had tens of thousands of the shining dust particles. Looking inwards, she saw a much smaller collection of much brighter lights, grains of sand with a fierce inner glow. She grabbed one of these blazing kernels and willed it into a badger once again. She plopped down on the soft grass as she felt her strength leave her. She had a flashback to waking up for the first time, the irrational fear that the wild animal would truly eat her this time flaring up from out of nowhere. Then the odd creature sniffed her once and fell asleep, curled up beside her.

Felicia was overwhelmed. She wondered if this is how new mothers felt when they held their baby for the first time. She had created this being, this fluffy animal that seemed rather cute now that she could take a better look at the critter. Its fur was a pale green, a washed out pastel version of the vibrant green grass it was sleeping on. Its eyes, surrounded by streaks of white hair contrasting with the rest of its mossy fuzz, were closed tightly in sleep. The beast sniffed the air and nuzzled closer against her thighs. She felt a distinct connection with the being as if she was its mother and it was her child. Unquestioning love and trust flowed between the two. Felicia blinked her eyes, refusing to give in to the absurd feeling of emotional fullness rising from her chest.

She hesitatingly held out a hand towards the creature, unwilling but determined to test the next logical step. The spark was hers, and she felt the slow flows of mana that it was sending through the badger. She also knew why Agren had told her that the beings it created had been his. This badger was hers, without a shadow of a doubt. She carefully tried to pry the spark free, attempting to separate flesh from the seed. The badger woke, looked at her with begging, innocent eyes and croaked. Felicia was left with an unbreathing, mana deprived corpse and a spark, which hovered above her hand. The dead animal was still staring into her eyes with a questioning accusation. She felt that the fullness in her chest had lessened by a slight fraction. Agren had told her that creating and absorbing animals had cost him some mana, Felicia could attest to this fact.

Agren had also claimed that setting the beings free had felt horrible. She had ignored each and every single one of his complaints, refusing to listen the moment his voice became the mournful whine he used when he complained about her orders being unfair. Felicia took a deep breath. She suspected what she needed to do now, and decided to just get it over with. She willed the spark to become a badger again, which it did with gusto. She then started spreading her hands, ordering the light within the being to start fracturing and breaking apart. It felt like someone took the inside of her skull and went to town on it. With a jackhammer. The size of a skyscraper.

She regretted ordering Agren to do what she told him to do. Each time the stone had freed the critters, he had taken a relatively long time. Felicia understood why now. All his other actions had been done nearly instantaneous, from the creation of new life to preparing the fields for new crops. Only the release of his own creations cost him a lot of time. Each animal must have felt like he was breaking his own body into pieces.

Half an hour later, Felicia fell down on the soft grass, gasping for breath and shaking all over. The small light inside the badger was no more. She had made it break and fracture through sheer force of will, fighting against the agony caused by the process each and every step. Her mind still recoiled with the memory of the supernatural agony she had just put herself through. She stared at the grass around herself, lamenting at her own conclusions. Agren had been less unwilling to release the plants, but Felicia had refused to listen to him anyway. The amount of mana generated by photosynthesis was a pittance compared to the lifeforce machines that were the small mammals they had tested. She ran a hand through a small patch of grass, letting the minuscule light withing fracture into nothingness. This merely felt like someone was hollowing out her insides with a rusty spoon, truly a heavenly feeling compared to releasing that single badger.

A dull tingle started running up her arm as she lay in the grass, mentally exhausted and entirely spent. She managed to drag her head to the side, allowing her to see what was causing the small irritation. She mutely registered the sight of a green badger chewing on her elbow — the anger that resulted from the freshly released beast gnawing on her arm allowed her to punt the beast into the bushes. The surprised squawk it gave at the ungrateful cretin smashed into a low hanging branch was almost worth the bleeding arm. She then walked to her underground apartment, forcefully absorbed all the stinking air inside the place and sealed up the entrance into the farm while she was at it. She managed to wrap her elbow in a shirt she ripped to shreds before falling asleep on her bed.

Felicia slept peacefully for the first time in what felt like a very long time.