The dark was like a tomb. An overpowering musty smell and something else unidentifiable hung in the air. Small sounds quickly fled, and there was no sense of distance.

Or safety. Leo had negotiated the stairs down to the basement without much trouble, since there was still a dim light filtering in from above. At the bottom of the stairs there had been an immediate left turn into a hallway. He had walked slowly down it, his arms out to either side and hands trailing along the rough walls. Twice, his fingers had crossed gaps that held closed doors, before he encountered another turn.

Some distance further on, he halted. His heart was hammering in his chest. The dark was peaceful in a way, true. But he was all too aware that he was in a world with monsters -- real monsters, some of whom certainly lived in the dark. What might be lurking down here, in wait?

Back the way he'd come, up the stairs, were the wood goblins. He felt certain that, given time, they'd figure out where he'd gone and follow him down here. So he couldn't go back up, nor could he just stay still and hide, as he so desperately wanted to.

But he couldn't seem to force himself to go on any further into the dark, either.

As a compromise, he sat down and tried to calm himself. Then he tried to think.

The building he was in had clearly been empty for many years, and in all that time, it looked like nothing had ever made its home there. The front door had been intact and locked. And this basement was just an extension of the house. So in all likelihood, there actually wasn't anything there, except dust. And spiders -- he'd felt a floating cobweb cross his face.

On the other hand, he didn't have a plan. It was dark enough to hide him from the goblins, that was true. But to find a good hiding spot, he first had to be able to see.

Maybe his magic could help?

Nemtal had mentioned that his Light spell was a cantrip. Easy to learn. Leo spent a moment cursing himself for not asking to learn it.

That was water under the bridge. But perhaps he could figure it out. He was capable of making illusions, after all.

He raised his hand in the darkness, concentrating. "Let there be... light," he spoke.

And it appeared! A ball of bright blue light, similar to the orb he'd followed around Arkfel when he first arrived. Joy bloomed in his heart. He had light!

A bright light, in fact. So bright that he couldn't see anything else. He blinked at it, then squeezed his eyes and looked away before opening them slightly, peering into the darkness.

No details appeared. The darkness was complete. But, paradoxically, there was a ball of pure light.

"That's weird," he muttered.

Lifting his hand, he directed the light slowly away from himself. At some point, it touched the wall. He could tell, because part of the ball began to disappear from view. But he still couldn't make out a single detail of the wall.

Suddenly, he recalled trying to use Phantasm to create a light before, in the classroom. Nemtal had had to bring his own Light over. Leo groaned, using his hand to rub his face.

"I get it," he whispered to the darkness. "It's not a real light. It's just the illusion of a light."

He thought about that for a moment. It made sense, in a way, and simultaneously told him something about his illusion magic. His illusions didn't create or interact with light, as he'd thought at first. Instead, they existed only in the mind of the beholder. His illusion magic was, in fact, mental manipulation magic.

That realization had interesting implications. Leo knew the human brain was an incredibly complex organ. Too complex for another mind to fool as completely as illusion magic did. So there had to be some being in this world that made the magic happen. Leo's soul had been "restructured" by the golem, true, but the idea of an outside entity just made sense.

What could that outside entity do? Illusion magic meant it was capable of mental manipulation and control. But the expedition's fire magic was real. So this entity could also break the laws of thermodynamics, making energy appear from nowhere. What else could it do? Could it create matter? If it could create energy, then why not?

Leo shook his head. Sitting alone in silence and darkness -- his illusory orb had vanished -- made it too easy to get lost in his musings. And he still had a pack of bloodthirsty wood goblins after him. He filed away his thoughts and went back to considering how he'd create a light.

He got the idea to use his illusions to test where the walls were -- creating a sort of outline. As he'd seen from the light orb, the illusions were cut off by solid matter, so when an illusion disappeared, that meant it had gone through something solid. A flat plane of light that he moved around could do that, more or less.

But it would take a lot of time and careful positioning to use his illusions that way, so it would be slow. And Phantasm was limited in size, so he'd have to scan everything with small squares of light, making the process even slower. Even if he pull it off, it wouldn't be good for seeing details.

And that left him with... nothing. While the spells the golem had taught him were fairly impressive, there were only two of them.

Could he figure out the actual Light spell? Nemtal had made it sound easy. A cantrip, usable by anyone. And according to Harald, magic users in Charun didn't have anything like the golem to help them. They just learned by practice, the way you would learn to throw a fastball, or use chopsticks.

Using magic was, so far, a lot like muscle memory. For Phantasm and Dread Aspect -- he didn't understand the spells, but he knew the movement. Even though he had no idea what "muscle" it used.

He tried thinking through the process of using Phantasm. Like imagining yourself moving your body, it seemed possible to imagine yourself casting a spell, without actually doing it.

It was like his thinking mind shut off for a moment. For just a moment, his entire mind was bent on --

Bent. That was an interesting word. It was like his mind took on a shape. The shape of the spell?

He imagined a rune representing the spell. That wasn't quite right, though. There was an actual function to the different "muscles" in his mind. He imagined casting Dread Aspect. That used somewhat different muscles than Phantasm.

"This feeling is how I create a Phantasm, and it's also used in Dread Aspect," he muttered. "So let's call that the mental manipulation muscle. Which leaves this feeling..."

He flexed the mental ability he was focused on. What was it used for? He had the feeling it was the power source that made the spell actually work. Which meant if he used it in absence of any spell, he'd just release raw power. Right?

He took a deep breath, then focused on it. "Light."

The same chilled feeling he got while casting spells seeped through him. Then he felt something else. Warmth? At the same time, he saw a faint, pastel aura flare around himself.

Raw power, but not what he wanted. "Too much to hope it would become light," he mumbled.

He began trying to use other movements of his mental body along with that release of power. "Light. Light. Light," he repeated each time, willing his power to become visible. He felt power ebbing away from him, the persistent feeling of chill invading his limbs, but he pushed on.

Finally, after too many attempts to count, there was a flare of light. He blinked. He was dazzled, the ghost of the light still throbbing in his eyes, but it was definitely gone. Yet he also knew he'd seen, just for a moment, grey brick walls around him.

"Light."

This time, he was looking away from the flash, down the hallway. And he could see that it extended much further, out to a room that he couldn't make out in that brief moment.

He chewed his lip, struggling to keep his thoughts in order in the face of his growing mental exhaustion. He'd figured out how to make a light, but only for a moment. It would be like navigating by the flashes of lightning on a stormy night. Possible, but not optimal.

Phantasm lasted for a longer period of time, maybe thirty seconds or so. What was it about Phantasm that he did? Maybe it was--

"Light."

This time, light flared into being and stayed put. As Leo's eyes quickly adjusted, he realized that it was actually fairly dim, not even as strong as Nemtal's true Light spell had been.

He also couldn't move it, even when he waved his hand and willed it to shift position. That was probably another, separate part of the actual Light spell. In any case, he didn't have time to sit around and puzzle it out. Instead, he examined his surroundings.

Behind him, he could see the turn that had brought him to this part of the hallway. It had felt like a long distance when he was walking in the dark, but with light to see by, he guessed it was only ten or so feet away. There were no doors along that part of the hall. And going back that way, of course, would bring him closer to the wood goblins, who might already have entered the house through the windows by now.

The other way, the hall extended perhaps twenty feet. Close to him, there was a door on the left side of the hall, and an empty doorway on the right. At the end, the hall let out into a room. That room was too large for him to see its back wall, but he could make out shapes on the floor.

He took a deep breath, moving forward.

His body, of course, immediately blocked most of the light, leaving him mostly blind again.

"Light."

A new ball of light flared ahead, and he moved forward to examine the doors.

The door on the left was made of wood, and had no visible handle. Despite visible aging, it didn't budge when he pushed on it. The dry, still atmosphere of the basement had helped preserve it, but it also appeared to be made from some heavy, unusually dense wood. He considered trying to kick it in, but he didn't want to make noise.

The darkness around him gave him a constant itching between his shoulderblades, as if something were lurking just out of sight, waiting for him to make the wrong move.

He turned and regarded the empty doorway on the other side of him. The light, just below his chest, barely illuminated anything in that room. So he cast it again inside the room, trying to ignore the draining feeling of casting. It was just a small spell so he should be able to cast it repeatedly, he told himself.

The room was about fifteen by ten feet, with shelving on either side, now collapsed onto the floor. He saw the remnants of containers in the litter. They didn't seem worth digging through, so he backed out of the room.

He ignored the tightening feeling in his chest as he walked down the hall into the large room at the end. The unidentifiable smell that pervaded the basement was growing more powerful. It was... sweet? But also rotten. He was trying to conserve his energy, so by the time he reached the entry, he was once again cloaked in utter gloom.

Once inside, he swallowed his fear to cast the spell. "Light." And the details sprang into view.

He found himself cowering, his arms raised to ward off blows from the towering figures all around him. But they were only pillars. Strangely shaped ones.

What had they been used for? There was a dull crystalline tube lodged in the side of each pillar. At the bottom of the tubes, there was a small funnel or pipe of some sort. He also noticed strange, dark stains spreading across the floor.

It took him a long moment to figure out a possible explanation. The building above looked like it had been someone's home, or rather, mansion. And what did rich people have under their houses? Wine cellars, of course.

A wine cellar in his world had bottles or casks, of course, not weird crystalline tubes. But the tubes had clearly been storing liquid. Some still were, while the pipe on others had broken or fallen off during the long years of abandonment, spilling the contents across the floor. As he looked closer, he saw the dark stains were actually a carpet of mold. Touching it with his foot made the delicate tendrils crumble. It had been a long time since the liquid spilled out.

He set out into the room, the mold softly crunching underfoot as he walked.

This basement room turned out to be even larger than the size of the main floor above, by Leo's reckoning. After passing through the forest of crystal pillars, casting his light spell every so often, he came to a section that appeared to have been excavated but never used. The walls on either side closed in, made only of rough-hewn stone that looked like a cave. The floor, similarly, had become rough and unpolished.

In the back of the cellar, he found a locked door. The same type of magic door that had been inside the school, and at the entrance of this mansion.

He breathed a sigh of relief. The wood goblins couldn't get past this kind of door. So even if it only led to a dead end room, he could just hide behind it for a day or so, by which time the goblins would certainly get bored and leave.

They hadn't pursued him into the basement so far, though, which meant he still had time to go back and explore the rest of the doors he'd passed before he created his light spell. He'd just take a look at what was behind the door before going back.

The familiar chill went through his palm, allowing him to turn the handle of the door and pull it. At first he just opened it a crack. As he did, air began to flow past him, and he felt an answering stream of colder air pushing in from the other side. Not hearing anything or seeing any movement from the other side, Leo pulled the door open wider.

The light dimly illuminated a passage that looked neither like a natural cave or a human-built hallway. It was roughly circular, with rippling stone walls and a sheen of flowing water at the bottom. Curious how far back the cave ran, he created a light past the doorway and stepped down, careful to position his feet on either side of the water.

To the right, the passage curved, while to the left, it simply ran on out of sight. After reassuring himself that nothing was lurking in the darkness, he looked down, curious what his boot was touching.

There was a low, black plant growing out of the water. He frowned and bent down to touch it before stopping, narrowing his eyes. It looked like a plant, true, but it was in a place that plants shouldn't be able to grow. He straightened back up, shivering from the cold air, or perhaps the prospect of exploring that strange tunnel.

But he still had more of the basement to look through, assuming the goblins hadn't followed him in yet. He turned to go back through the door.

And stopped dead, staring at the wall. The door was gone. Only the rough cave wall remained.

Suddenly distraught, he ran his hands over the rock, cursing under his breath as he searched for any kind of seam or crack. But there was nothing. It was as if the door had never existed.

Once again, he was trapped.