I gouged the floor in front of my visitors with meaningless chicken scratch. Hopefully it would get the key points across. I couldn’t read or write, though I did know my numbers. I could respond to yes or no questions, using an O for yes and an X for no or something, but getting across anything complex would be really difficult.

Senz sent the new guy—named Chennai—away, and decided to teach me to read and write. I scribbled a bunch of Xs on the floor at that, but she just chuckled and said she wouldn’t take no for an answer.

I got stuck with three hours of tutoring a day with Senz. Tutoring, like I was an Aelon or noble or something. She wouldn’t let me signal her any other way. I quickly learned to make paper out of wood she brought, though it was more like thin bark than the smooth sheets the Aelon shared their spells on. All I had to do then was slightly darken the area I wanted to write on with mana, or lighten it to erase. The mana drain that went into writing was reduced to a few mere sparks. I wanted to keep my mana.

Still, it was only three hours. I still got bored, and I hadn’t absorbed all that many samples to experiment with. With a frog that had hopped in my range I made a frog arena and watched them fight, which amused me. The survivors tended to grow bigger and tougher and leech more mana out of the air, and I was actually considering an animal arena a viable strategy for the Awakening trials. I also finally took Senz’s advice to quantify the amount of mana I could use.

A spark was the fundamental unit of mana. To the human eye it was invisible, but I could see each one. I knew I was pumping sixty-thousand sparks out of my mysterious mana gate each minute. A bit of testing revealed that it took roughly ten-thousand sparks clustered together to create a tiny marble of solid marble about as big as a grain of sand. Senz told me that it was a mana crystal and even a small one was extremely valuable. Which I already knew, seeing as how a stolen mana crystal was why I was here in the first place. Creating or destroying a chunk of stone the size of my soulstone (which, with all the expanding I’d done, was now about the size of my head when I’d been alive) took around four-hundred-thousand sparks. I could levitate nonliving things for a small amount of mana, which would make it incredibly easy to just make some spikes and shove them into someone if someone entered who I really didn’t want here. Living organisms were a bit more complicated.

Senz was nearly impossible to directly affect. I had to surround her with so much mana it nearly became solid, and I barely got her to hover an inch. But the frogs I made somehow counted as ‘mine’ and I could move, copy, and destroy them just like the stone. I had no idea how it worked, but it was worth taking note of.

“I’ve found some trustworthy people. If you’re up for it, I could bring some of them in tomorrow,” Senz said.

That sounded good. Some of the frogs had mutated magical attacks and defenses. I could scatter them over the floor and call that the first trial. I carefully scrawled yes in big letters on the parchment. Senz had wanted some ink so she could write too, but I was not giving away my ability to understand what she said that easily.

“Sure, that sounds good,” I said.

And then everything went straight to Hell.

Something burst into my chamber and scattered the entire area with stone shards. One caught Senz in the shoulder and then went through to the other side. But I couldn’t spare the time to deal with it—I had a demon to fight.

The giant worm was full to bursting with evil mana. It had stayed around a Hellmouth long enough to grow powerful, somehow without attracting the attention of the archers stationed just out of the zone where its mana reached. Maybe it had lurked around a Hellmouth that had just opened up.

It curled up then launched itself at Senz. It was so fast—Senz hadn’t even taken a full step back from the force of the fragment of stone that had rammed its way through her shoulder yet. But somehow, my reaction times were even faster. I contracted a segment of my mana circuit, forming a barrier of solid mana but halving my Domain’s size. Thankfully the area of my Domain took more than double the amount of mana it took to make it twice the size, so my barrier was large enough to stop the worm’s charge.

It stopped and hissed. Worms weren’t supposed to even have visible mouths, much less giant gaping skeletal maws. I tried to funnel its corrupted mana away to my own soulstone, but the mana didn’t cooperate with me. It twisted itself into looping knots instead of letting me pull it away. It didn’t even let me scan the worm.

There wasn’t enough mana in my Domain to completely cage the worm. I created a large rock and propelled it at the thing, but the demon was too fast. Tiny stone needles either broke against its steely surface or completely missed. I chased it around my Domain with a rain of projectiles, trying to find the balance between size and shape—not to big that it could easily avoid it, but not small enough to render it ineffectual. Making them act like those magic guided arrows worked up to a point, but when my mana got too close to the demon’s, it would fight off my influence.

Then it dodged around a larger rock I’d thrown out of frustration and bit Senz’s head clean off.

That small action cost the demon worm its life. I brought a huge amount of rock down on it, crushing the thing into paste. The corrupted mana cannibalized the corpse, then fought my own mana in a mad struggle until it was all gone. There was no chance to scan it.

Now I really knew why anything the Hellmouths corrupted was called a demon. I focused my attention on Senz and tried reattaching her head to her body. I reflected that I was strangely calm for this situation, but I’d always been the most clearheaded in moments of stress, and being a rock changed how I thought.

Still, something about how her body worked frustrated me. It was still nearly impossible to move, and I was really low on mana. I slowly, effortfully dragged her body into a hover while trying to stop the bleeding and reattach her head. There was something … if I could get her to stop fighting my influence, I might actually have had a chance of success.

Then I realized, as I swept my mana through her body again and again and only got back a view changed by a weird sort of static. Her body had its own mana. One I couldn’t sense directly, one I no longer possessed. It was her life force, and it ebbed away by the second. Organs and muscles and blood vessels were becoming clearer, though her brain was still a complete mystery. Maybe if I waited until she died and then brought her—

I froze as I felt her soul depart, turning entire sections of the brain into mush. I let the body fall to the floor. The head rolled away. I absorbed her body and all the spilled blood and stone fragments by quickly saturating it with mana and dissolving it. If I needed to make a human puppet, now I could. But Senz was gone.

I had just gathered enough mana to repair my wall without returning to an uncomfortably low level when I felt it. A foot slipped near my entrance, the edge just within my Domain for a split second. I snapped my attention in that direction, manifesting an eye based on Senz’s and seeing through it, and—

Woah. Human vision sucked. Sure, I saw a greater area, but everything was flat and shapeless and dull. I couldn’t even see mana through it. I powered through anyway, suffering the terrible vision and just about making out the form of—Chennai? What was he doing here? He looked … gah, my ability to recognize facial expressions had absolutely plummeted. Still, I thought I caught fear.

Oh. He’d just seen me eat Senz’s body, and probably hadn’t seen what had actually killed her, and assumed the worse. And I couldn’t talk. He ran away before I could create a bit of my special parchment and tell him what had really happened. Assuming he could even read, and assuming I could have remembered the right words.

I waited and hoped for his return so I could explain.

He didn’t.

No one did. Not for far too long.