Body Hopping

The irony of it all was hitting her. The people she had killed moments before were fuel for him. He couldn’t reanimate people like she could, but he could put his soul into another person’s body and control it. She could tell it was him by the glowing purple eyes. She would hit him with a fireball, and it burned him like any other man. He burned, but then he discarded his wounded body for another one.

“Damn you!” Inella yelled, hurtling another ball of fire at the body switcher. How was it that she was so lucky as to have faced all three of the greatest assassins in the land? To her it was a matter of money, not virtue. She was crusading across the land, saving it from itself, giving the people freedom they couldn’t have under a patriarch. She was saving people, freeing them from oppression, but this did not make her terribly rich. The few living kings of the land were spending all their money, using all of their resources to stop Inella. For if they didn’t, she would surely kill them. The first two assassins were defeated- the third was just another obstacle she had to overcome in a long line of obstacles. It didn't matter. The corpse-shifter would run out of fresh bodies before she would run out of mana.

“Damn me all you’d like, witch, it changes nothing. When the kings of this land hired me, you were the one sentenced to be damned.”

Inella shot a fireball at what felt like the 100th corpse. Her teeth were tight, her jaw was locked. Her knees rocked with fatigue. Women had come back from the tents to help her because they didn’t understand what was going on.

As the witches understood it, Inella was the one with the ability to reanimate. Why was she fighting the zombies she was creating?

“These are not zombies I am creating! An enemy is within our midst.” Inella shouted. The assassin bounced back and forth between three bodies laughing all the while. A haunting laugh. A laugh that begged your mind to break and shatter into useless pieces.

The women went around defiling the corpses on the battlefield so that the assassin could not use them. It was a curious image. Women in a bloodied field cutting the heads off of corpses as casually as you might shear wheat. The assassin calculated that he would not be able to win, so he decided to flee. He could bide his time. The shadow that he was floated across the battlefield and up into the hills. The shadow returned to the true body of the assassin and soaked back in. The body of the assassin was sitting cross legged in the middle of a patch of fir trees. Addimar watched from behind a tree.

“A fancy little trick, but I can’t have you killing Inella.” Addimar said. “Sorry.” Addimar created a violent vacuum that ripped the assassin in half on multiple horizontal and vertical planes. The stench bothered Addimar so he transformed the pieces into paper confetti. Pink, blue, white, yellow, green. All in a soggy pile, decorating shed evergreen needles. Addimar walked down the hill and towards the gates of Baz. He needed to speak with Inella- join her as promised.

~~~

Inella’s Lessons with Addimar

“Inella, I killed the assassin you were dancing with earlier.” Addimar said.

“Oh? the one I was shooting fireballs at?” Inella responded.

“Indeed.” Addimar adjusted his cloak with a wiggling thumb. “I found him after he retreated. Based on what I observed, I can tell you precisely what his power was. The man had parked his main body beneath a bough; he was sending his soul out to jump around on the battlefield, but quickly I dispatched him. Dead, he surely is.” Addimar adjusted his cloak again, this time with an extra finger.

“Well, thank you. I appreciate what you have done for me.” Inella said. “And I understand you are here to teach me.”

“Right once more. Let us begin.” Addimar made a fancy spell. Alternative dimensions, all with altered, incongruent spaces, they flashed and warped into a coliseum around Addimar and Inella. It was a little show meant for the two of them. When all the performative falseness was finished, Inella was sitting at a children’s desk. Addimar was standing up with a pointer in his hand made of aluminum alloys. They were in a classroom modeled after the outdated layouts you could find in the United States. Cramped, clumped desks inaccessible and difficult to navigate. By sitting you were prone to injury because of the outdated equipment. The faint smell of whiteboard markers and their strange debris.

“Anything that can be done can be done right. A person should do a thing the right way, should they not?” Addimar asked with a wicked smile that creased his wrinkled face. “We will do your training the right way. The society of my world was not done right, but with your power, you will make this world right. Let us not get ahead of ourselves, you have much to learn. You will learn, and you will restore the balance this world so desperately needs.” Addimar paused for a moment of contemplation. He looked as if he was editing a story in his head- waiting for the new words before he began to speak. “Let me tell you about my world. My world was called Earth. Earth was a beautiful place, but its people were ugly. Society was constructed so that men could not practice magic, but women could. This is similar to your world, but the opposite.” Addimar waited for Inella to nod in understanding. “There was fear that men would be too reckless, too powerful. These claims were made from the roots of misunderstanding. There was no truth to the accusation. For you, this world would be fine. As a woman, you would be allowed to practice magic to the extent you wanted to. However, for me, as a man, I was not allowed to even study it. I know that this is a position you have found yourself in on Panatea. This is a position of torture. Knowledge is meant to be discovered, and learned… eventually taught. I had to study magic in private by unseemly means. I had to escape that world, so that I could become what I am now.” Here Addimar brought out a board and chalk so that he could diagram his teaching.

He drew a figure of the three keys of spellcasting that was familiar to Inella. Inella secretly wondered whether or not magic was taught similarly on Earth.

“You may think that you know the three keys of spellcasting, but in what way do you truly know them?” Addimar addressed Inella with a firm tone, his wealth of knowledge was implied. He wore a blue spotted cloak that appeared flawless. As Inella looked at the cloak the wind around it seemed to stir surreptitiously, making the cloak seem whole in a way that disabled any individual piece of the cloak from being identifiable, or even perceivable. The cloak was there, but at the same time it was not. It seemed like it was there. Inella certainly thought it was there, but without touching it, Inella could not be certain that it was there at all. Light seemed to blend the colors into mischievous patterns. “Well?” Addimar refocused Inella to the question he posed by breaking the spacious silence.

“The three keys of spellcasting are: first, imagination: you have to think of what you want to do. Second, concentration: you have to picture yourself doing whatever it is that you want to do. If you are turning yourself into a bear then it is helpful to concentrate on the type of magic that is at hand- druidism. The final key is creation, where you turn a concentrated mental image into a tangible spell; you do this by spending energy that is stored in your body. The energy comes out and turns into what you have imagined.” Inella recited the three keys of spellcasting as if they were a nursery rhyme (which to her, they were). She looked into Addimar’s eyes to see if he was impressed with her explanation, but there was no recognition in the domicile of his dark cyan pigment.

“I’m glad that you’ve recited the keys like a child, for that is the level of knowledge you have of them. The keys are much more than just definitions. The keys are greater than technique or process. If you can fully understand the three keys of spellcasting then you can do anything.” There was a passionate fire in his voice that warmed Inella’s heart. For Inella, having a mentor that knew about and was interested in magic was akin to the father she never had, but certainly deserved. Addimar’s cloak began to rise at its edges, as if hot air was blowing under it. Addimar’s gray hair was a deep brown, and the wrinkles around her eyes were no longer pleated. Addimar seemed to be floating, instead of standing- his youth restored, his power tangible. “And when I say ‘anything’ I mean it quite literally. You once asked me to describe the difference in our magical ability. I told you that your power is similar to a grain of sand, if my power is the largest whale in all the several oceans.” Addimar looked at Inella with a seriousness that was sharp in his features. Even the shadows on Addimar’s nose expressed focus to Inella. “Inella, if you truly understand the three keys of spellcasting, you would have the power of all the oceans combined, and more. Even I do not fully understand the three keys, although I know a great deal more about them than you do.”

“And that is why I am here to learn.” Inella said, eager. She did not feel like a woman as she said it. Instead, she felt the sublime nausea of joy waving and shimmering through her body. A feeling that only prepubescent children know. Inella felt like a child. Inella’s inner dialogue was not communicating this thought process though, for she was too enraptured in her own passion. Inella’s subconscious felt tricked, but everything was fine on the surface.

“Then the first thing you shall learn is how to look at something.” Addimar sneered at Inella’s blossoming confusion.

“What do you mean ‘look at something?’” Inella was beginning to lose the sweet feeling of childlike ignorance, it was deflating into the sorrow of reality.

“I’ve been casting a spell on you for the duration of this entire conversation, Inella. I want you to tell me what it is. To do that, you will need to look for it.” Addimar still appeared to be floating, his cloak shivering in an imaginary wind. Inella stopped for a moment and tried to analyze her surroundings. She started looking in all the wrong places in a horrible series of guesses.

Inella looked behind at the trees, all of which stood straight and noble. Inella looked at the sky, which was one solid color, an expansive blue that stretched on without any interruption from clouds or sun, for the sun was blocked by the tall hats of the trees. Inella looked at the ground, and no dust seemed to be unsettled, or displaced. Then she finally looked at Addimar. She saw how young his face looked, but she thought nothing of it at first. She saw how his feet were not touching the ground, but it didn’t seem strange to her in the slightest.

It was only at the moment that Inella licked her lower lip in contemplation that the pieces began to come together. There was no wind on her tongue, but there was wind in Addimar’s cloak. How? How was he floating? How was his face so young? Inella berated herself with internal questions until an answer formed in the pulp of her thoughts.

“You are casting some sort of illusion on me, are you not?” Inella asked, fairly certain what the answer would be.

“Yes. An illusion.” Addimar tapped Inella on the shoulder from behind. The floating image of a younger Addimar dissipated in front of Inella as she turned her head around to glance at the grey haired man. “One of the things about the second key you will soon come to understand is that it is not just about your concentration. To think such a thing is small minded selfishness. Concentration is constantly going on in every person to varying degrees- there are things you will learn about this, how to improve it, exploit it, change it, or manipulate it. What do you do when you concentrate?”

Inella was hesitant to answer. Now that she was being asked, she wasn’t truly sure. “I think of that thing and only that thing.” Inella nodded tentatively in tandem with her response.

“So does that mean you are only capable of concentrating on one thing at a time?” Addimar’s question was certainly leading somewhere, but Inella had no idea the direction that it would take.

“I suppose so.” Inella answered succinctly.

“I want you to look at my cloak.” Addimar waited a few seconds so that Inella could adjust her eyes onto the blues, browns, and greys of his cloak. “What do you see?”

“I see that the primary color of the cloak is blue. There are confusing colors mixed in at various spots, browns and greys. The secondary colors seem to be moving though, it’s as if my mind can’t focus on them.” Addimar nodded his head, expecting the answer Inella gave.

“If you want to see the brown and the grey, you can not look at them. You must instead look only at the blue.” Inella let the brown and grey colors dance around in her peripheral vision, focusing only on the blue. When Inella felt like she was finally concentrating on the blue, the cloak split into three separate entities. The gray colors became a small cloak, lined with owl feathers at the collar. The brown cloak was made of bear fur, acting like insulation on top of the grey cloak. The blue cloak was covered in cryptic designs of precise stitching and it perched atop the bearskin cloak with a reflective quality, impermeable to rain and snow.

“I don’t believe it.” Inella stammered. Her face was pale in disbelief, her lip quivering, her nose sniffling.

“You can see a part of what this cloak truly is. I can see what it truly is at all times, because I know how to look at it.” Addimar paused for emphasis, repeating himself so that Inella would understand the labor of his rhetoric. “I know how to look.”

The sky did not fall, and the trees did not shake, but immense power was unlocking in Inella at that moment, charging within her at rapidly increasing percentages. “So you will teach me how to look?” Inella barely asked the question, her certainty connected to her pride.

“I will teach you how to look. The first part of looking is always understanding the context of what you are looking at. If you stare blankly at something you may have your eyes pointed in the right direction, but that does not mean you are looking at it. If you were to look into the eyes of a beautiful man and get lost in them as he spoke to you, what would happen? Your eyes would be open ignorantly. You would not understand a single thing he said, even if you managed to hear individual words. That is why beauty is often deceiving. That is why nobody knows how to look naturally; I will teach you how to look as I was once taught, many years ago.”