I had been able to figure out a spell, and now I was thoroughly uncomfortable staying on the beach. The Dwarf’s corpse burned with merry blue flames, from which dark smoke rose in the shapes of skulls… that somehow gnawed away at the darkness itself, leaving everything bathed in light that was like moonlight.

It also made every shadow loom horribly, so I was taking the staircase up. Unfortunately, I was out of shape and the stairs were made for people much smaller than me. I was crossing over my legs to stay stead on each step, leaning against the wall and away from the slowly growing fall as I made my way up… and around what seemed to be a pillar of stone in the middle of a sea of mercury, not a lake as I had originally though.

I took a breather as my other Power, Talismania came off cooldown. I looked at my first Talisman - the thing that I had needed to finally cast my spell. It had been just a patch of sand that I had been drawing mindlessly in, until Talismania activated itself, alongside the ‘Mania’ part of it.

The sand, once the Power had sunk into it, had become a plate of black glass. The idle scrawls had become crude drawings of flames and skulls - basically, it was just as edgy as the dwarf had been. It was just a little bigger than my hands, and some of the jagged edges would be enough to cut my skin, so I was careful with it.

“My… Precioussss” I hissed, into the dark, then laughed morosely at my joke. For all that it was edgy and objectively terrible, I couldn’t bear to part with it. I carefully pulled out one of the spare scalpels, and pondered using the Power on it. I immediately got a tingling sensation - I could anoint it with blood, water, lava… or carve prayers into it… or combine it with… something else.

At that point, the Power strained in my mind - I had to choose, now, or abandon the attempt.

I wanted more Talismans. In fact, I was pretty sure that I needed more if I ever wanted to see proper sunlight again.

I started humming a half-forgotten song from my youth, and power slowly started trickling into the scalpel. It flickered in the darkness, like a star about to go under. I got a sense that it would be weak, barely more than a glorified battery of sound and magic - but that was enough for me right now, I just needed a short break.

And to cast another light spell, in case there was a sharp turn that I missed in the dark.

I was stiff by the time I finished, and working out the kinks on the narrow staircase with - again - steps no wider than my foot was an entirely new kind of stressful.

Then, I activated [Synthesise Spell], and the world changed.

The scalpel and the glass plate both lit up with strange designs, and I immediately focused on what I wanted, which was light to help me get up the stairs.

Transmutation, Sound-Light, Destructive Matrix.

It needed a little something, I had learned. Once I had an Emanation available - basically a point of origin for the magic - the Matrix would spin itself up. Activating it would require something else. An Offering and an Action, to please the Muses in this case.

I carefully made a shallow cut with the scalpel, and dribbled some blood on the plate, then rapped the scalpel off it, with a resonant ‘ting’.

A moment later my heart no longer sounded in my ears. Instead, faint pulsing light began pouring off my body. I breathed out, in a way that should have been noisy, and a thin cloud of light scattered out into the darkness around me.

It was cool, but also very, very disturbing.

I put the Scalpel and the Plate reverently back into the Satchel, and made my way further up the stairs until I finally reached the top of the cliff. The light guttered out the moment my shoulders which I had been pressing against the wall were clear.

A gentle wind pushed against me - and knowing how far down it was, with reference to the weird not-darkness that I had created earlier, that led to an incredibly stressful minute as I tried to to turn, make it further up the cliff, and not fall all at the same time.

I finally cleared the top, and laid down on my back. My muscles weren’t as sore as I had expected them to be after climbing up what felt like a mile of stone.