Despite his earlier failed tests screwing with time must be possible. Timothy was absolutely sure of it. How else could a moment go by like nothing, or linger for what felt like hours?

It had help though. Pain. It did funny things to the senses and that was something he had more than a fair bit of experience with. Or so he’d thought. The worse the pain the more it faded it became. Looking back it wasn’t just the fish that were larger, but the pain was muted as well.

A damn good thing too. He’d been in attendance for both the birth of both of Regi’s children and despite what many described as, umm, generous hips, neither quick nor easy belonged anywhere near it. Would she have had a second if she’d clearly remembered how bad the first had felt? He wondered.

The mind protected itself by misremembering the depths of pain. What he hadn’t quite clicked for him was that this applied to him as well. It had been a long time since his pseudo deaths in the tutorial and his lying mind had painted it decidedly rose-colored. The depth of pain radiating from his damaged and partially contaminated aura was an unwelcome reminder.

Merely breathing aggravated the furrows carved into his chest, but even that wasn’t the worst of it. It was almost soothing in comparison to the wounds in his aura. If the aura was the light from his soul then that light was currently a flashbang and it made the merely physical seem like a joke in comparison. There was a thought. Maybe pain was relative. It was only the worst source of pain that mattered. The rest were so far away they might as well be a massage pleasantly tingling on his nerve ends.

Said nerve ends took that moment to not together and ripped a scream from his lips.

That or he was getting incoherent. Ya, that was more likely. He forced his mind back into the moment. Refusing to fade out. He was no masochist, but if he fainted right now he might fall into shock and a very real chance of death. Not from the physical wounds. His self rune was in working order and could fully recreate this body at need. But it wasn’t just his body that was fucked up here and while his body could and would rise phoenix-like from the ashes, it didn't happen for free. It put a considerable amount of stress on his aura and soul to pull it off. Stress he wasn’t sure he could take at the moment.

No. Best if this body held on.

So hold he did. In cycles of coherence followed by mental escapes into any and everything. Conjectures and theories about life, love and everything (42 of course). Cycling through crazier and crazier nonsense in an endless horror hall of pain.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” And a doorway from that hall appeared. If he could grasp it. He forced his eyes open, ignoring an unpleasant stickiness for a moment, realizing as his barely opened eyes began to burn that it was drying blood, not merely rheum. Still, the faint burning was barely noticeable. A penny whistle in front of a symphonic orchestra playing the crescendo from Checovsky’s 1812 overture. Complete with cannons. Focus Timothy! Focus!

Ma was absent-mindedly crossing herself for the inadvertent blasphemy even as she rushed over to his side. “What have you done to yourself?”

“Hurt.” He managed to get out between clenched teeth.

“Very helpful that is!” She snorted, already sorting through a purse that always looked disconcertingly large on her small frame. As a kid, he’d wondered if it had an extra dimension space inside. Bigger on the inside than the out to fit the endless parade of junk she’d been known to pull from it. TARDIS-like perhaps. A good connection, that was. He did need a doctor.

His head snapped lightly to the side with a sudden impact. “None of that! Stay with me, Timothy.” She held up the partially filled healing potion. “How much more can your aura take?” She had a flesh molder in her hand. A sewing needle and thread trapped in a thumb-thick transparent rod of runed glass.

“No more!” He gasped out, getting a bit worried by the slight gurgling he heard in his own voice. That didn't sound good. Like a brook babbling along safely in the mountain- he wrenched his focus back on track.

This could not continue. He was slipping away and he had far too much to do still to go that route. “Sew it – please. Time.” He bit out with immense effort. But that wasn’t enough. He tried again. “Buy. Me. Time.” He tried to ignore the tears trickling down her face. Maybe he shouldn’t have called her. If he failed here it would be the height of cruelty.

He slashed that thought angrily. He would NOT fail. Even allowing that thought to occur would decrease his chances. He kept that thought foremost in his mind. He WOULD survive this. For that matter- “Believe for me, Ma. “ He ground out. A mother's love, a drop of hope and a dram of belief. If those weren't the ingredients for a genuine miracle he didn’t know what was. Not that he needed a miracle. His fate was still very much in his own hands and those hands had strength in them yet.

He looked her in the eyes for a moment, pressing his resolve outward. Talking was too difficult, and what little mana he had left he would have to husband for the coming trial, but intent was powered by the will, the soul. Exhaustion withered away his will, but a core of him refused to give in. To lie down and die. As long as that core stood then his intent would still have some potency. Right up until he killed himself. He ignored that thought and pushed his resolve at her. He would survive. He knew it. Believed it. And he needed her to believe it too. With a slightly strangled breath, she straightened up and nodded decisively. Turning, she raised the mender above her head and brought it down on the edge of a table with a loud crack and the accompanying tinkle of shattered glass falling to the floor. Well, that was one way to get a needle and thread.

He spared a moment to wonder about glass shards sticking to them. Then shook the thoughts away. He would have to trust her. He closed his eyes and focused inside. Imagining his chest first, then populating the thin image with data from what his aura, no matter how damaged, could sense. A wounded eye staring at itself. Ma had a bible story about that. Something about removing the splinter from your own eye before trying to help with others.

He was escaping again. Focusing briefly on the pain he used it to drag him out of the soft clouds and narrowing vision.

Wounded or not, what he could see would have to be enough. He focused, straining out the hash of incomprehensible clutter. Some of it pain, some the useless contribution of damaged senses. Like multiple unfocused cameras, all overlaid on top of the working ones. It didn’t matter how well the working ones worked when he couldn’t see through all the garbage.

With deliberate care and effort, he began to screen them out. Bit by bit identifying and suppressing the portions of his aura that weren’t working. Like a lotto scratch card, bit by bit revealing the truth beneath.

And he wasn’t a winner.

A clinging malignant brown coated the wounds, sizzling and spitting like a dull acid. It looked with the texture of fiberglass insulation, tasted like a beginner practicing the violin and smelled of the clean open forest and week-old roadkill.

Ok, so his auras senses weren’t really fixed. It would have to do because he didn’t have time to go back and fix anything more.

Taste, smell, sight or sound. All of them were telling him that the attack wasn’t over. Rather than slowly healing with time, the wounds were getting worse under the lingering intent.

He wasn’t depressed by this. It was still an improvement. Now he knew what was wrong and knowing that really was half the battle.

Now all he had to do was win the other half.

Just that. Right.

He forced his mind to make contact with the remnant, refusing to flinch as it screamed “DIE!” into his very soul. It hadn’t given up on killing him. He would have to change that.

So he responded as he intended to continue. Simply but with power. “NO.”

This was his aura. His house, his sanctum sanctorum. The fractured remnant thoughts of a trash scavenging varmint had no power here. A fact he began to grind into those remnants. Step by step he imposed his will on them. Not trying to remove them, that would come later and would take a considerable amount of time. No, first he had to crush the still living will. So he ground down his refusal to give in. His authority and power in this place. He force-fed the aura until at last, he crushed the remnant and killed the will that animated it. Leaving behind the gunk but now like a brown, stinking, stagnant pool rather than a filthy harbor repeatedly crushing waves into the shores of his mind.

It wasn’t healed. Wasn’t even starting to heal, but it was also no longer getting worse. And without the interference of foreign willpower, he was more and more able to see and understand what was going on around him.

So he took the time to take care of a couple small irritants that had slipped beneath his sight earlier. There were still rings in his aura. Increasing his weight and making every breath he took labored. Step by step, ring by ring he began to shatter them. Not fighting them, but merely recognizing that they were not a real part of him. They were merely the competing belief of an ascended animal. And that animal wasn’t here. Forced to accept this simple truth they broke and his breath trickled in with far greater ease and a lack of pain that almost threw him for a loop in surprise at its absence.

That led to his next discovery. Liquid was bubbling from his lips, if slightly, with each exhalation. A pierced lung wasn’t nearly the danger that a torn soul was, but it was something that needed fixing. At least if he wanted to keep this particular flesh suit in repairable condition.

Thankfully, he didn’t need to attempt any kind of manual fix. Without the rings and the remnant will his aura was firming up nicely. Enough for a healing potion, he judged. Or at least part of one considering he had to leave some margin of safety. An aura that took in too much of foreign intent would mutate. And not in any clean useful ways. More like spiritual cancer on steroids. A straight death sentence, unless the luck levels were over 9000. No something he was ever going to count on.

He administered another small mental slap. He was exhausted and it was showing. His mind flowing aside in pointless derivatives. The darkness wasn’t so ominous now. More like a welcoming old friend. But it wasn’t a friend he could let in quite yet. No, sleep would have to wait.

He opened his eyes, a task that felt like using a mental crowbar on a rusted shut car door. Unpleasant and a significant amount of work, but he managed. Go me! He mentally muttered sarcastically. I can open my eyes! Call the presses.

The vaulted ceiling above him we’re subtly not right. The familiar arches weren’t quite where he was sure they should be. What-? The thought died stillborn as his eyes rotated down the walls. A distinctive mass of carved lines covering the entire wall caught his eyes. More cave than modern art, it showed a stunningly simplistic river flowing around an island. Trees on one side, planes on the other. That’s what Timothy saw, but only because he knew this piece. For newcomers, it was merely a hash of lines and curves. Like someone gave a madman a chisel and let him go hoss on the sides of his padded room. Only when they walked as far back as possible and let their eyes unfocus would it paradoxically come into focus. Lines and incomprehensible scribbles suddenly became three-dimensional and full of meaning.

It was one of his favorite bits of art in an entire tower filled with the stuff. Somehow managing to capture the chaotic nature of the background magic field and yet offer hope that if he could just change his frame of reference, it could all make sense. He mentally slapped himself. The quality of the mural wasn’t important right now, where it was carved was. Ma’d moved him into the original ready room.

They’d long since moved that over into the government building on the opposite side of the hold, but this room remained. Too useful for sudden meetings or private discussions for him to let it get overrun with projects like nearly every other room of his tower. Mostly, he guiltily corrected himself as his eyes flicked around to see a half dozen such projects lying piled against the wall.

“Potion.” He muttered, aghast at how weak his voice sounded. He barely had time for another spluttering breath before the half-filled bottle from earlier, already catalyzed by his will, was brought to his lips. Struggling against a sudden desire to cough he forced the liquid down, managing most of it before the irresistible remnants of the cough spread the remainder in a thin mist in front of him.

Considering his wounds, he mused, it probably wasn't wasted. Topical application worked pretty well with potions. Still, he had no time to consider that now. Dropping back into his magic sight he focused on the rush of healing energy that followed the physical liquid down his throat, already beginning to spread out in an elegant tracery of sapphire cobwebs here and there emphasized by a brilliant mote of emerald. A fascinating mix of colors that were his mind's attempt to interpret the comingling of his own activating intent with the underlying meaning Jenny had pressed into the liquid when she’d brewed it.

By default each potion was a general tonic for health, spreading itself equally through the body in pursuit of injuries, but that was wasteful. The rest of his body would heal on its own in time but he needed to fix his lungs up now. Two or three potions would do that, but those little emeralds were contaminants, gentler by far than the remnant brown junk but in large enough quantities still problematic. Especially when adding them to the stagnant sewer that his aura currently felt like.

He gently pushed at the elegant webs. Trying to guide them without damaging their shape. It failed miserably. What was normally as easy as reaching down to pick up a pebble was suddenly more like playing Sisyphus. He showed that comparison down. Sisyphus had an impossible task. This wasn’t. Merely difficult, and he dealt with difficult all the time.

Doubling down, he forced the healing energy to follow his will, accepting that his clumsier than usual handling reduced the effectiveness, but still redirecting a good portion of it into his lungs. The rest spread out and greatly reduced the strains and aches that his muscles, overtaxed from his increased weight and the pull of severed strands, had stored up.

It also spread those small green energy crystals everywhere. Like beautiful centerpieces in a landfill. He shuddered thinking about the amount of work it was going to be to clean all that up.

He mentally slapped himself again. Better than dying. Relaxing his focus he moved his attention back out into the world at large. An experimental breath devolved into a ruthless fit of coughing, rapidly spitting out blood phlegm and other even less appetizing liquids into the bucket Ma was suddenly holding in front of him. Or mostly into it, bits of crimson joined large splatters of a similar color in making a Jackson Pollock-esque mess on her dress. A dress that he was not stable enough to notice was fairly ornate. Thin bleached leopard leather (calling it cat leather had nearly gotten him lynched.) and hand-spun linen melded to drape her petite figure in elegantly simple falls. The kind of simplicity of that was nothing of the kind. It took a great deal of skill and careful tailoring to make something look that accidentally elegant. The hems and sleeves were lined in more deceptively simple embroidered patterns. Embroidery that she likely spent countless hours making. Good clothing couldn’t simply be magicked up. It took a great deal of time, skill and effort and the results were always one-offs. It wasn’t everyday wear, but a festival dress. Or it used to be. It was now liberally coated in blood, vomit and the emotional intent that went with it.

Guilt ate at his guts. It was something special to her, and he’d ruined it. Blood was easy to remove. It had to be with hunting teams coming in and out so often. Vomit was harder, not being one consistent thing but a hash of half-digested ones, but it too could be cleaned.

The emotions contaminating the dress were something else. Like a favored restaurant that suddenly sent you homesick, the links between traumatic events and the objects around them were not easily severable. Not at all. The memory of trauma would linger and taint any further activity.

There were purification methods and rituals that could do the task. Able to wipe an object back to a blank, inert state. But those would not work here. The dress was an expression of creativity and thus intent. Its maker (and Ma with her embroidery) had put a good deal of themselves into the creation. Their intent created something beautiful and joyful. Made for celebration. Remove that and you had just another well-tailored sack.

He’d ruined it.

His head rocked back suddenly again. “Fool boy.” Her voice kicked his mind out of the rut it was rapidly cutting. “If you think for even one moment that I wouldn’t sacrifice a hundred dresses to keep my son alive then more fool you.”

How? She always had been able to read him better than most. But was that all? With his face liberally coated with unpleasant mementos, it couldn’t be easy to read.

He glanced inside again for a moment and barely held back from swearing. All the contaminants in his aura were shorting out his hard-won control. Bits and pieces of his aura were fluctuating and spiking out uncontrollably. Like solar flares shooting out beyond his skin, and with some similarly unpleasant effects. As possibly the most potent will power focused pathfinder in the union his intent, even unintended, wasn’t something that could be ignored. Most magic users of any strength would shred paper if they tried to write on it. Their intent was too much for a simple, fragile object to withstand. He wasn’t just any old magician. His uncontrolled intent would do more than harm objects. Norms exposed to it would rapidly guilt spiral, their emotions filtered into the context of their own lives but distinctly guilt all the same. If left in it, and if he continued to wallow in his shortcomings, it might drive them to suicide.

It wouldn’t be safe for him to go out in public until he had this back under control. Bad enough to expose his thoughts and feelings in this way, he wasn’t dick enough to deliberately harm those around him. Not without a damn good reason at least.

He tried to contain the flares but quickly gave it up as a lost cause. It wasn’t something he could manage in his current state. And maybe not even when he’d rested. He needed to spend the time to reprocess the energy stored in his aura. Going through it bit by bit and either incorporating or removing every piece of foreign energy he could find. Rinse and repeat until it was clean enough to suit. It was a common enough task. Required by anyone who ate high-tier meat. They just didn’t usually let it get this far. That and he was woefully out of his depths. He didn’t eat that meat and had thus let this bit of common skill slip by. He’d pay for that in the coming week. Or weeks.

“Sorry Ma.”

“Do I need to slap you again? Forget the dress.”

“No. It meant something to you and while I’m grateful that I mean more, that doesn’t mean that I can just ignore your loss. Love leaves debts too.”

“Bother with your debts! I don’t care.”

“I know. I love you for it. Among many other things. But I do care and I will try to make it up to you.”

“I can’t stop you from being stupid. If I could, I wouldn't be here!”

He winced slightly. He couldn’t exactly defend himself. It had been stupid. Even if he still wasn’t entirely sure what ‘it’ was.

He attempted to sit up but was stopped immediately by her hand. Not that it was a muscular hand or any such, but because of the habits of youth. And love. Stay still, you’ll pull out the stitches.”

He couldn’t feel them and the potion had probably healed the skin around them, but he lay back just the same. He would definitely have to take another potion, or a portion of one still to fully heal things but he was safe enough for now. Not that he was about to argue with her about it.

Her voice snapped him out of his meanderings. Again. He really needed some sleep. His thoughts were flickering around from topic to topic like a demented mongoose.

“Now how the hell did you wind up like this?” She asked, and thoughts of sleep were pushed back again. That was the question, wasn’t it? His curiosity was stronger than the sandman. At least for now.

“I-” he paused for a second to organize his scattered thoughts. “I’m not entirely sure.” He did what you should do when a situation didn’t make sense. He went back and started at the beginning. “-horde of mosquitoes forced them to go to ground-” and described it as accurately as he could all the way through. It wasn’t something he liked to do. Or was even willing to do most of the time. He had far too many secrets for that. But he owed her for the help, and explaining it to another person might actually make the scribbles and scrawls of this particular art piece make sense.

It took a while, and only a pot full of the ubiquitous ginger tea kept his head in decent enough shape to push through to the ending.

“- as my projection was dispersing his claws made contact. And not just with an illusion as you can see. It caught me completely out. I didn’t bother trying to defend myself because it was just an illusion. With its wounds, I’d delayed the beast enough that it was no longer a threat to the team. I was taping out and planning to let it carry the day.”

She nodded, more like a ‘go on’ gesture than agreement or understanding. “I think-” He hesitated, working through it slowly as he had been for the entire tale. “I was there pretty strongly. I had to be. It had been a long day and my mana and will were fairly depleted. It was that or a Sacrifice and it didn’t seem worth the cost.” He chose to ignore the doubtful look she gave his now well-swaddled chest. It wasn’t like she was wrong. Trying to avoid the downtime a minor Sacrifice would have cost had instead left him in a much worse situation.

“A very strong connection… An image with my own likeness… Fuck-” He ignored her half-hearted head swat with the ease of long practice. “I made a voodoo doll of myself!” It was freaking obvious in retrospect. He’d even made protections against it happening with normal projections. Protective ritual circles and replacement dolls to take backlash or injury on his behalf. All of them useless when his actual awareness was not here in the tower to be protected! It was floating out there just asking for it!

She sighed, snapping him out of his furious self-castigations. “Well, how about you don’t do that again, hmm?”

He bit back a snapping retort. He’d screwed up and she’d helped clean up the mess. He glanced over at the bucket and a couple dirty rags now stuffed into it. Both literally and figuratively. She had the right to make pithy comments, and he was duty-bound to sit (lie really) here and take it. Progress would only occur if he fully faced his shortcomings and paid all the prices associated with them.

Even when it physically hurt not responding to that comment.

“Worry about all that later.” She instructed, grabbing a new rag and beginning to wipe him down. Another task he wasn’t strong enough, physically or emotionally at the moment to resist. “For now you have a lot of healing left to do. And it looks like you can barely keep your eyes open.”

He had to agree to that. Besides the desperately needed sleep, he had a miserable time ahead of him. Just cleansing enough of his aura to allow another healing potion to work would take him several hours. That should be enough for now on that end. But the spiritual damage would need considerably more work. His aura would slowly heal on its own, but if it did so with all the gunk in his aura, then it could fix some of those contaminates into the healed aura making them 100 times more difficult to remove. And might even have to reopen the wounds to get them out. The very thought of that, and the pain it would bring, had cold sweat beading up on his brow.

He paused in horror. Finally in his exhausted state working through what was coming. He was going to have to keep those spiritual wounds open and unhealed until he was fully cleansed. The pain was tolerable now but hardly gone. He’d have to live with it. Meditate through it. For at least a week.

Fuck.

Ma was giving him a speculative look, she had to have felt the burst of horror his discovery had caused, but he refused to explain. If he had to do this, and he did, then he would do so with at least some dignity.

He hoped.

His eyes started to close, mostly of their own accord, but he rallied one last time.

“Ma?”

“Yes Timothy?”

“There's a blood remover in the cabinet marked ‘utility’ downstairs.” Funny he still said it that way when there were no stairs... Stay focused!

She looked at him in some confusion. Before shaking her head with regret. “I appreciate the offer Timothy, but I do have my own-” she patted her purse “-and neither will save this dress.”

He grimaced, guilt making his words hurt as he forced them out. “I know it won’t, but please don’t leave here covered in blood. It might start a panic.” He paused, but she deserved to hear the rest. “And no one can know about this.”

She stared at him. Suspicious beginning to take the place of confusion. “You can’t stop there Timothy. I’m going to need a reason. Keeping secrets for secret's sake is just paranoia.”

“Mystery prevents bloodshed. My mystery. Most people out there don’t understand how much work magic is. They don’t understand how much it costs me to do what I do. And because they don’t they see the spells I pull off at the drop of a hat, seemingly effortlessly and they stop and think. Then they decide to take a pass. Instead of plotting and scheming.”

“People don’t just randomly plot against you, Timothy! That bit about paranoia is sounding more and more valid.”

“People as a whole may not. But individuals do. From that nut job in Templeton.” He wasn’t going to say his name in this weekend state. Connections could go both ways. ”To a full dozen others, who I won't bother to Name, who wish they had the dominant voice in the union. You can’t ignore the extents people will go to for power Ma. A bit of healthy-” he paused, fear wasn’t quite the right word. “-caution can prevent a whole lot of grandstanding. Grandstanding we can’t afford.”

“And so you need to act like the boogeyman?” She snapped out angrily. “Or the world police?”

He tried to laugh it off. “No, more like a nosey neighbor. Policemen have to see too much human nastiness for me. No thank you.” That and it sounded entirely too much like work. Not even interesting work either. He carefully didn’t respond to the boogeyman comment. It was a bit too on the nose. Don't plot a coup or- he cut the thought short.

“Fine, I don’t think I approve, Timothy, but it's your choice-” She paused, dragging out the moment a bit, “So long as you don’t expect me to support it all the time. Now go to sleep. I’m here in case you need me.”

He wasn’t sure if he could hold on to his man card for thinking it, but hearing her say that took a weight off his mind and he let the darkness close in at last.