I am…

We are…

Was? Am? Will?

It’s all so unclear. I, we, don’t remember how this happened. One moment there was us, now there is only me. Or is there?

We are still there, we still exist don’t we?

But I’m here, and I am so how can I be we?

I think I’m itchy.

It hurts. Everything hurts. It burns us, and it makes us itch.

What was that? I thought there was something there for a moment…

We didn’t want this, we never wanted this! I don’t understand. Pain. Pain everywhere.

I can’t feel anything anymore, the itch is gone too…

We are in so much pain…

Who am I? Who are we? Who was I? Who were we? Who will I become? Who will we become?

So many questions, but there is no answer. Am I asking all those questions? I can’t really tell, but I think I can hear two voices. They are familiar yet unknown to me.

We hate this, make this end.

I don’t understand what they want.

Why did we do this? Why must we suffer?

Do they know me? Can they hear me as I hear them?

We are not the same. We cannot be the same…

I feel strange, like something is wrong somehow. I can’t tell what is wrong, but I sense that something is…

It all hurts. Why? Why would we do this to ourselves!?

In the end I can’t tell what’s wrong, maybe I never will…

We were us, but now we are not. We are… No! Not “we”, not anymore…

I think I understand now…

It shouldn’t have been like this… He didn’t think it would turn out like this, that it would hurt us so…

But I’m so tired…

It just wanted a new experience, it didn’t imagine how horrible the unknown could be when it agreed…

Sleepy…

THIS MUST END!

***

I felt horrible. My body ached in a way I didn’t think was possible and my head felt like it had pins jammed inside it.

At least on the upside I was myself again. For a while there I think I didn’t exist, almost like the being Lux and the being dark elemental were metaphysically smashed together and shattered into pieces while a toddler tried to put them back together again. It was a less then pleasant experience and I’d very much like to never have it again.

Still I’m me again, at least I’m mostly me again. Enough me that I can recognize myself and not notice anything wrong with myself. I hate thinking about this, it makes my headache hurt worse. Stupid metaphysical identity issues…

I seem to be floating in a white… Expanse? It was a white space that was actually pretty harsh on the eyes to look at, but overhead I saw an endless void of black darker and deeper than anything I could ever imagine. Where the hell I was and what the fuck I was supposed to do here was anyone’s guess. Hell I could be dead and this could be the afterlife for all I knew.

This. This was exactly why you should never text out an experimental spell on yourself. Well, in my case it was more of an idea for an experimental spell that I somehow might have managed to cast. Maybe.

Nothing like flying blind.

As I was trying to gather my bearings and count up my marbles to see how many I had lost from this whole ordeal I noticed I wasn’t alone. There was something else floating in the white with me. It looked like a fluffy grey cloud that if I squinted really hard sort of had the shape of a human. It didn’t take me long to guess that my new elemental friend ended up in the same boat as me, but then again that wasn’t all that surprising. The whole point of this endeavor had been to fuse my very being with that of the elemental’s. At least, that was what I was trying for.

What actually happened was anyone’s guess, for all I knew I blew us both up in a dazzling but pointless display of magic and idiocy.

I decided that I should try and make contact with the elemental and figure out what we’d need to do to get out of this place. But first I think I’ll just float here quietly for a while, just resting until I feel less like death warmed over. It should only take a small eternity.

***

Hours passed, or at least it seemed that way.

This place seemed to be timeless, there was a certain peaceful quality to it as well. It was a good place to just float and think, and given the way I had rushed into this situation in the first place having time to just think was a good thing. In hindsight the idea of fusing myself with some other being to change my soul enough that the slave crest got removed was pretty much the most insane thing I had ever come up with. If I wasn’t so desperate then I probably would have thought things through a bit more and tested the theory on a few random test subjects.

I was all for poking around with the bleeding edge of new magic, but normally that was when I had a few safeties in place to keep me alive and well. Without anything to assure me of my safety I was pretty much doing the magical equivalent of stumbling through a cave full of sleeping bears while blindfolded, screaming at the top of my lungs, and swinging around a stick. Sure there was a chance that everything could turn out fine, but the most likely outcome would be a violent and painful death.

That was the problem with inventing some outlandish new magic or spell, you had no idea when, how, or if the magic would fail. Sure the skill and knowledge of the magic caster are a factor, but in the end magic can be a finicky and wild thing. Inventing little spells and charms is fairly easy, it was when you started trying to create new rituals and heavy reality bending spells. Of course there was a work around for things like this, but it usually involved throwing massive amounts of mana at any issue that pops up while casting spells. I can say with surety that no single magic caster outside of the gods themselves have the mana pools to just casually invent new rituals and massive spells on the fly.

My fucking up this huge complicated spell that I invented in the half hour I was running away from a battlefield, not all that surprising…

I had almost no idea what I was doing while casting the spell, and I had even less of a clue about what had gone wrong and how I could fix things. I was pretty much just stuck here in this white place, and I would remain stuck here until I figured out how to safely undue the spell I had cast. That or figured out how to force the effect I was trying to achieve and complete the spell manually for lack of a better term.

Either option would take me a long time, and I only had the faintest of ideas on how I could go about attempting either process. I had a guess that the fusion had failed because the elemental and I were too different and we jointly rejected the union, but I couldn’t be sure that was the case. My best guess as to how I could complete the fusion process was to just make the both of us more compatible with one another, the way that could be done was escaping me though. How I would go about ending the spell and undoing the effects it had on me was looking to be the much more difficult issue, and even if I managed to undo the spell with no side effects I would still be stuck with a slave crest on my soul.

Maybe it was because I had pretty much nothing to lose, but I was leaning towards just seeing the fusion through to the end.

Floating in this white expanse was a unique experience, but it was also probably a temporary situation. I couldn’t imagine that I’d just be stuck here forever, instead I had a feeling that this place would eventually break down or disappear taking both me and the elemental with it. Sadly I didn’t know when the white expanse would break down, or even if it would, I was just working with a feeling.

I tried to move over to the elemental, and by tried I mean I wiggled around in what felt like zero gravity while going nowhere. It was actually a little depressing, and I was more than a little glad that the only thing around to see my embarrassingly futile struggle was an unconscious elemental…

***

It turned out that the key to moving around in the white expanse was to simply imagine yourself in a new position. You think about yourself in a new spot then you sort of just poof into being in that new spot, it reminded me of the more complex teleportation spells that were all but impossible for a single magic caster to cast. I admit that I wasted a while playing around with the effect, but who could blame me? It wasn’t every day you could instantly teleport around without tons of effort or prep work.

Now I was waiting right next to the elemental, I was hoping that when it woke up I could try and make us more compatible with each other. My plan was simple, I’d just be honest and share everything about myself as I could. The idea was our compatibility with each other would have to rise if we knew more about one another, and I figured the more we discovered about each other the greater our compatibility would become. It was a fairly simple idea, but sometimes the simplest solutions were the most effective.

It was almost funny in a way, the only way to save myself was to be sharing and caring with another being that was a total stranger to me. It was like fate saw my paranoia and unsocial nature, laughed at it, and flipped me off while leading me into a situation that would force me to go against my nature. I had once heard a saying from a mage, fate was a vindictive and spiteful /bitch and so was her sister karma. I have no idea how that saying went over with the goddess of fate and destiny, but I do know that the first man credited with the speaking that saying aloud was killed in a… unpleasant manner.

Regardless, I didn’t really see anything that could be done until the elemental woke up. I was stuck just killing time until then, which normally wouldn’t be a problem for a mage but I didn’t have access to my mana in this place for whatever reason. No magical tinkering to stave off boredom for me, instead I had to amuse myself with more mundane means. I quickly discovered that twiddling your thumbs could be oddly satisfying if you make a game of it.

I also had plenty of time to think about what I’d do even if I managed to escape my slave crest, and the lack of answers I found depressed me to no end. The sad truth of things was that I had no real direction on my own, most of my life was spent simply doing what others told me. I had desires, sure, but that wasn’t the same as having concrete goals or plans for myself. I didn’t want to go back to Avalon and if I could manage it I wouldn’t mind becoming an archmage, but outside of that I had no real life goals. I didn’t really want to settle down with some woman and start a family, a life like that would bore me to tears. I didn’t really want to reap bloody vengeance upon the kingdom of Avalon or Rainer and his precious lions, I still felt some irrational attachment to them for some reason. I certainly didn’t want to become a god and ascend to the divine realm either, that seemed like far too much work for a really shitty reward.

In the end I really didn’t have an idea about my future, not even an idea on what I wanted out of the future. I liked being a battlemage so I’d probably find a way to keep fighting people, I also rather liked the idea of carving out a place for myself somewhere in the four worlds so I might try that too. That was about it.

Turns out I didn’t like thinking about how aimless I was and how I didn’t even know what I wanted to do with freedom even if I gain it. Maybe that was part of the reason twiddling my thumbs seemed like a far better way to kill time than considering the future or planning ahead.