What was magic?

Even when you are an expert in your field, occasionally a question will be posed to you which leaves you silent for a long moment. A question like 'What is magic?' wasn't easy for her to answer, even with all she knew.

Through her dark hair the Grey Witch gazed at the young man that had asked her the question, who now looked nervous under her unusual silence. He was only a peasant, and as far he knew that could have been the stupidest question ever asked to a mage.

No, not a mage. Not anymore. That word was tainted, it belonged to her husband now.

"Magic," She broke the silence, staring into the air as she spoke rather than the crowd which surrounded her, "is an expression of our souls upon the world. The magic you use is called your attunement not because it is attuned to a specific factor of our world, but because it is attuned to our souls."

Isabella shifted on her perch upon the well's edge. The commoners sat in the dirt or stood around her in a crowd, hanging on her every word. As a noble she was used to it, however this was different. It wasn't out of fear or obligation that they intently listened to her. It was respect. Awe. Gratitude.

"Magic isn't unique, because neither are our souls. While we are all certainly individuals, we can be boiled down to our base shared aspects. Your values. Your tendencies. Your likes. Your dislikes. Are you hotheaded, calm, wise, impatient, good, bad? Are you as temperamental as flame, as hardened as metal, as patient as time or as uncaring as death?

"Magic is a gift which we must make the most of. Its a divine power, separating mankind from bug and beast."

And then, something which amused her greatly. While many of the adults nodded sagely to try and impress her, a young redheaded girl spoke up with an actual good question, one no-one else had asked her since she started her teachings.

"If magic comes from our souls, why do you not teach magic to some people? We all have souls, right?"

Heh. She gave a brilliant smile to the girl, making her blush and grin with pride.

An excellent question. Not one that she would answer honestly.

"Some people's souls simply aren't strong enough to manifest magic."

She gave a warm smile and looked around at her followers. From a glance she could tell what their attunement would be: nature, water, air, emotion, light, earth, shadow. To her trained eye they were a dazzling myriad of colours and impressions; she saw each person around her not as flesh, but as souls.

Soul-sight wasn't necessarily something anyone could learn. Or perhaps they could? Perhaps it was that no-one had ever tried. Regardless, she hadn't learned it, she'd been gifted this power.

Her greyish-blue eyes settled on a cloaked man she hadn't noticed yet. He lingered at the back of the crowd and watched disinterestedly, even when she met his eyes directly. He regarded her with the boredom and emptiness one would observe a bug when waiting for public transport on a cold night. She would have recognised what he was without her soul sight. You could tell when you met one of these people, uncommon as they were.

Death.

"Alright everyone. Meet here after dinner and we'll begin your first lesson." As everyone began to disperse, she called out and pointed one finger at the cloaked man. "Except you, sir. I'm sorry but your soul doesn't seem strong enough to harness your magic."

Shrugging, he turned away. Her eyes followed him as left, idly pacing with the vigour of someone that desires nothing but sleep and perhaps a drink. At least death attuned souls were easy to deal with. They tended to be too indifferent to seriously pursue their magic.

She breathed deeply and stood from her rocky seat, grunting as her withered body struggled under its own weight. These days, she felt it was a prison, a decaying cell that crumbled apart around her beautiful soul.

Getting old wasn't fun. It was even less fun when you were actually young.

It does that to you, though. Power extorts a price, and her soul burned brighter than most. It was just a shame that a roaring inferno needed copious amounts of timber to continue its rampage. When the wood started to dwindle, so too would the flame.

She felt her back crack and leaned heavily on her cane, grimacing as she began to hobble towards the village hall for dinner.

-

That night after imparting her knowledge of the arcane, she retired to her bed. Well, someone's bed. Her travels had rendered her a wandering mendicant, and until she returned to her real home, if she ever did, she would stay with whoever was kind enough to share their home with her. Which turned out to be most people, so she had a pretty good selection of places to stay. It turns out life-changing knowledge of how to wield primordial forces puts people into your debt somewhat. Who knew?

She felt her eyes grow weary and saw her soul grow dim for the night as it was laid to rest. After only a few moments of darkness and rest, she was away.

Until she opened her eyes and screamed.

No! Not this place, not again!

Her body was suddenly young and fit as she scrambled to her feet and began to run. The ground crumbled beneath her, the indistinct flooring tumbling into the infinite abyss. She ran and screamed as a million howling creatures of light writhed and pleasured in the agony of their fleeting existence.

The sky itself bled, melting under the intense cold. There weren't clouds as such, but simply an endless sky of shifting colours that often became the ground or walls for a moment.

Isabella was torn apart by a falling spike of rock, but her insides quickly set on fire and fused together again. Not that she had insides here, she was just light too.

This place.

Chaos.

There was no way out, she knew that already. Until she came across the Soul there was no escape. She’d been here a handful of times, each time leaving her with some nightmarish revelation on how reality functions or some power she couldn’t explain away as simple magic.

She paused running to look around. The ground fell beneath her, but since the sky was predominantly purple at that moment it fell to the side instead of down, bringing her closer to where she wanted to be. As she rode the chunk of nothingness she observed her escape, an area in the nightmare where everything seemed to congregate. The floating islands of not-rock were denser there, almost a solid landmass, swirling up into a double helix around the Soul.

Out of the back of her eyes she saw the sky shift to yellow and quickly abandoned her makeshift vehicle before it began to fall upwards. She grabbed onto the smooth underside of a floating rock and fell inside it, swimming her way up through the stone until she emerged from its surface.

The more time you spent here the more things made sense, but the more you lost yourself. She reminded herself that nothing made sense here, and if it did then she was already starting to slip.

She began to run, the ground dense enough here that she could hop between the floating rocks in a fairly straight line towards the spiral she knew surrounded the Soul. A few creatures of light, mainly limbs and teeth, tried to attack her but she ignored them since they didn’t exist yet.

The air grew more chaotic as she approached the centre of the nightmarish realm. In a literal and metaphorical sense. There were certain areas where you would drown in the air, you could tell because there were signs saying ‘WARNING: Drowning is NOT the opposite of burning. It is quite unpleasant.”

She just had to remember that one in the hand is worth two in the bush, so she couldn’t step into any of the brown plants unless she had something to trade with the natives there.

“Please! Please help me! I’m not dying!” A thousand-limbed creature screamed at her with no mouth as she ran past it. She gave it a look that could kill, ending its life instantly.

You couldn’t think in this place. There was no time to think, this place was pure sensory input.

At last, the tower of twisting earth was before her. She began to climb up it, descending backwards in order to avoid falling up it. Up, down, left, right. Nothing made sense. She had to remind herself of that. Nothing made sense. If she let herself, even for a second, rationalise anything she saw here she would never make it out.

Goddess, things were getting worse. As far as Isabella was concerned this place was pure magic, utter chaos, everything and nothing at the same time. Was it real? Yes. No.

As she climbed, a round spike pierced her hand. She quickly barked out a laugh, healing it. A one-legged humanoid creature, which she somehow knew to be invincible, tried to chase her, using its eighteen arms to crawl across the rocky cliff towards her.

“Your mother smells like fish and probably doesn’t exist!” She screamed at it. Her words cut deep, and it began to fall upwards as a massive wound opened across its body.

Almost there, almost there. She could see a four-sided circle up ahead that would lead her into the inner chamber of the helix. Once there, it would hopefully release her. The rocks grew a little sharp, so she began to float up through them to avoid the pain. She insulted a rageful light-plant to send a dagger into its heart, smiled at another to light up its world and blind it, then crushed a final beast by reminding it of all the obligations it had on its shoulders.

At last, she hauled herself down and into the tunnel entrance. It stretched infinitely onwards into the dark and would take her countless years to traverse it, but she quickly got to the other side by singing a song and having some fun.

At last, she emerged into the infinite but constricting chamber of the Soul. It was a blinding light, impossible to comprehend a divine being she could only collapse before.

The world quite literally revolved around it, it was the center of this nightmarish hell. It spared her a glance which thankfully didn’t kill her, though certainly could have if the entity desired it to.

Her mind trembled beneath its attention. In such an overbearing presence, the world seemed to fade away. She only existed in a dark void, completely at the mercy of an unknowable mind. Her own thoughts seemed to melt into simple lines of text as she knew it was reading her mind.

Her teachings. Her followers. Her makeshift army of witches. Satisfaction, the feeling emanated across her entire existence as the entity seemed pleased she was obeying its orders. Her master released her as one would release a fly that landed on their hand, throwing it away to send it spiraling through infinite nothingness.

Groggily, she sat up in bed, blinking her eyes at the daylight streaming into the bedroom. She was back in reality, back in her own flesh. She wandered over to the nearest window and peered out it, sighing in satisfaction as she saw the sky was blue, things fell downwards and the villagers walking about were not made of pure light.

One could write that off as a bad dream. The first time she'd gone to that hell she had wrote it off afterwards.

But now she didn’t.

Why?

Her hair was now multicoloured, soaked with shimmering blood.