“Before we start... I want us to test something else,” Tomar had said after dinner. We had a few different things we wanted to try out tonight, such as the black stone, but apparently he had another item to add to the list. I had no idea what else he might want to test and I was startled when Tomar suddenly started tilting to the side as if his strings had been cut. I barely managed to catch us before we would've headbutted the trunk we were sitting on.

“Tomar!?” I said in a panic. I was suddenly in control of his body, but something felt different from how it did when he was asleep. It was more as if it was my own body. It was easier to move around and my senses were stronger. “Did you just...?”

‘Wow...’ came a voice from inside my head.

“What’s going on?” Berla said with worry.

“Tomar gave full control over to me...” I told her.

‘This feels so weird...’

You tell me, I thought. However, hearing a voice in your mind like this was a strange sensation as well. It didn’t feel like actually hearing something, nor like talking to yourself. The voice just came from... somewhere.

I stood up and stretched. A proper, young body was something else.

“Miles? Did Tomar fall asleep?” Riala asked.

“No, Ria. Now he’s the voice in my head,” I said with a chuckle. “You should’ve said something before actually doing that, Tomar. Everything okay?”

‘I think so. It’s surreal. I’m wide awake, all my tiredness is gone.’

“Yea, it’s right here,” I said. The need for sleep was presumably tied to Tomar’s physical body, because whoever was in the back seat didn’t get tired. At all. Ever. It’s not as fun as it sounds, I thought. Right now it did feel like I had been walking all day, and I felt tired for the first time in weeks. “I kind of like it. I could go for a few hours of sleep. Being wide awake that first night was really irritating.”

‘Believe me, I remember. The headache the next morning was something else,’ Tomar said grumpily.

Berla looked at me curiously as I talked with Tomar. “You’re in full control now? What’s it like?” she asked.

“It’s... normal. As if this were my own body right now. When you’re up there you feel kind of like a puppeteer. And during the day, the puppet does whatever it wants...” I said with a laugh. “Although, this tingly feeling is weird.”

‘Hm? What do you mean?’ Tomar said in confusion.

Since shortly after I had been given control, there had been a slight prickling sensation in my entire body, and it was growing stronger. I didn’t recognize this feeling, and it slowly started to unnerve me how it got worse over time. It didn’t feel normal.

‘Maybe my body just feels different from your own?’

“I’m... not sure. It’s actually starting to hurt a little. It’s kind of like... my body is on fire! Let’s switch back! How do you do it?”

Tomar quickly explained to me how he had been picturing his own body not belonging to himself, and following his instructions I was suddenly back to being only a voice and felt almost nothing anymore.

‘Is the pain still there?’ I asked.

“No, I feel fine. Just like always,” Tomar said. “It was burning? Like... the mana before?”

‘I think so... Maybe your mana doesn’t like me...’ I said, crestfallen.

After the water source blew up, Tomar was in a lot of pain. I only felt it a little bit at the time, but he had said it was like fire flowed through his body. This pain had subsided over time, however, and eventually it disappeared completely. It coming back as soon as Tomar gave me the wheel probably wasn’t a coincidence. ‘Well... this sucks.’

***

I had decided to finally test what it would be like to give full control over to Miles. The experiment went well at first, and I experienced what it was like to be just a mind. Miles had never been too happy about this state he had found himself in, but I actually found it surprisingly relaxing. Most senses were toned down and you could just let yourself float. Maybe it wouldn’t be great over longer periods of time, but I could’ve seen myself switch with him from time to time. The test came to an abrupt stop, however.

After Riala and I had received mana, our bodies had burned as well. Based on Miles’ experience just now, he was assuming that “foreign” mana could be a problem. We guessed that the burning sensation back then was either us getting used to our own mana or that we had had a little bit of mana from the water source in us. That problem effectively disappeared on its own for Riala and me. However, even controlling my body, Miles wasn’t its owner, and maybe the mana would fight the “invader.”

“Still want to do some tests?” I asked compassionately.

‘Yea, let’s,’ Miles said with a sigh.

“Me first!” Riala yelled.

“No, not you first. Tree first,” I said.

The main test for today would be a script that was supposed to suck up external mana and funnel it back into the vessel. We had yet to find a way to execute a script without it running indefinitely or requiring a stone, but for this particular application, an infinite loop would actually be ideal. The idea was that the mana would be removed from the air and infused back into your body before it could cause any issues for other people. And if it worked, we would effectively not lose any mana, because it would go right back in.

I drew the script onto a tree as per Miles’ instructions and it activated automatically after the last stroke. Riala and I looked on in fascination as the mana that the tree emitted lessened.

Meanwhile, Berla stood at our side, glancing back and forth between us and the tree. “Uhm. How do you know if it’s doing anything?” she asked.

“We can see the mana, and it is doing something,” I said in fascination. After just a few moments, the mana around the tree disappeared completely. I was about to announce the experiment a success, when something unexpected happened.

‘Does the tree look darker to you than before?’

“It’s difficult to say in this light...” I said, but when the tree’s trunk started to slowly crumble away, we knew something was wrong.

“Get back!” I instructed the other two and we quickly put some distance between ourselves and the tree, from where we kept watching as it slowly destroyed itself. Within seconds, the middle part of the trunk was not able to hold the rest of the tree anymore and it toppled over with a loud creaking noise. We stared at the fallen tree in a daze, as well as the script on its trunk that had felled it.

‘... Volunteers?’

***

When Aelene had left Oryn in his room in the afternoon, he was unresponsive and mumbled something about being a fraud. Physically he had appeared fine, so she hadn’t been too worried about her eccentric colleague. It was normal for him to sway back and forth between enthusiasm and frustration at a moment’s notice. However, when he hadn’t come to the dining hall in the evening, she was starting to become a little concerned after all. She made her way back to his room and knocked, but no answer came. When she put her ear to the door, however, she could hear noises from inside.

“Oryn?” she said and carefully opened the door. “Are you okay?”

Through the crack in the door she could see him stand at his table, working on something, but as he was blocking the view, she couldn’t see what exactly he was doing. In an attempt to get his attention, she raised her voice. “Oryn!” she said, and he finally turned around.

“Aelene? What is it?”

“I just wanted to check on you. When you didn’t come to the dining hall I thought you might still be sulking.”

“Oh, no. Don’t worry,” he said, turning back to the water source on his table. “Now that I know what I did wrong, I just have to continue... I will have my success, come what may.”

“So you haven’t reported what happened today to the High Priest yet? I imagine he would be delighted, even if you got lucky.”

“Afterwards he would just send me back to continue anyway, I might as well make a big impression,” he said while putting the finishing touches on the scripture on the cube. “This is the one, and it will be my own accomplishment.”

She looked at the scripture, which seemed just a little bit different from the one he had tried earlier. “What is this one supposed to do then?”

“The boy had another one on his body, and I noticed a certain pattern between the sigils in that one, the water source scripture, and the one I tested today. If I’m right, this will change everything.”

Oryn finished the scripture and put down the stick of chalk, taking a deep breath as he grabbed a blue stone from a bowl. “Theoretically, this should put a decent size hole in the wall.”

“Wait, what!? Oryn, you—” she started, but he was so fixated on his test that he didn’t even hear her. He held the stone to the cube and it started vibrating. Aelene’s eyes widened as the cube appeared to fall in on itself, while Oryn was staring intently at the wall. A stream of water shot out of one side of the cube and into the wall, while another force hit Oryn and Aelene. Both were thrown backwards and landed hard on the floor, though the wet carpet cushioned their fall a bit.

Aelene propped herself up with a groan before looking at the hole in the wall and starting to yell at Oryn, who was still lying on his back. “You maniac! What were you thinking!? There are rooms on the other side of that wall!”

Oryn didn’t react to her admonishments. He was entirely focused on his experiment. In a whisper he said “I understand it, Aelene. I actually understand the change I made to the scripture. My theory is correct.”

As he was lying on the wet floor, Oryn marveled at the fact that he had made a purposeful change to the scripture. Something that, to his knowledge, no priest had accomplished before. I finally did it, he thought. All those years, all the time I spent on researching the scripture sigils, all— Wait, did the water source just...!? The realization of what had actually happened struck Oryn like a brick. He looked at the empty table where the water source had stood just moments ago. He hadn’t intended to destroy it, but he realized that Tomar probably had done the same thing. The chained water source disappeared, a stream of water injured a beast heavily, and then...

Aelene was about to yell at him again, when all of a sudden both of their bodies tensed up and a searing pain made them scream in agony. ““Ahhh!!!””

It didn’t take long for silence to fall over the room. Other Priests who had heard the ruckus approached the room carefully, but it was emitting an eerie atmosphere that reached into the hallway. At first nobody dared to approach the room, until one priest slowly walked up to the open door and looked inside. He saw Aelene and Oryn lying on the floor, neither of them moving. He didn’t understand why, but he had a hard time formulating a clear thought in his mind. He took a few, stumbling steps back, struggling to even look away. “G-Get the High Priest!!” he finally managed to blurt out, fear in his voice.