A Jaded Life

“That thing is loud,” Luna complained, glancing towards the deeper parts of our shelter, towards the piece of rock I used as a door to contain the captured Shattered. And she was right, the thing was incredibly noisy, trying to bash its way through a wall even if the wall had been reinforced to the point that it would take a stupid amount of force to break. Even worse, the thing was stupid enough to try breaking through the back of the cell, where the wall was backed by metres of soil, depending in which direction you went. The only wall it could try to break through and have less success in getting out of the cell would be trying to go down, in there, it would have to dig through the entire planet, or something like that. Not that those circumstances stopped the stupid thing, it just kept bashing.

Curiously, it was smart enough to keep its efforts contained enough for its regeneration to heal the damage repeatedly striking rock caused its hands, and skull if it used its head, but that was the only indication that the thing had any intelligence at all. In every other regard, it was nothing more but a ball of instincts, maybe with some emotion thrown in for good measure. Emotions like hunger, anger and likely some stubborn determination, a determination that fueled its continued attempts to break through the stone.

“Loud, and an utterly confusing case, magically speaking,” I grumbled in return, thinking of the different experiments I had performed on it during the day, even forgoing a bit of sleep to keep testing things. The problem was, Mind Magic didn’t work on it in any predictable fashion, it was as if the magic worked in one way on one occasion and in a completely different way on another. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to predict which mechanism would be in play, leaving me utterly confused and incredibly annoyed.

How was I supposed to start understanding the Mind and its connection to Body and Soul when my test subjects lacked the common decency to react in a consistent manner? Poke them once, get a twitch, poke them again and get a temper tantrum that leaves more blood on the wall than seemingly possible. If there was some sort of build-up, I could get their irritation but as of yet, I hadn’t been able to find any patterns.

Nor had I been able to read their emotions with my Mind Magic, something I had been training myself to do. The idea was somewhat similar to the Observe ability, something that would give me information I’d normally not have, maybe even an ability that’d eventually allow me to read their actual surface thoughts or deeper memories. Sure, those ideas were far, far off, but for now I was content to start slow and small.

Only, the Shattered didn’t work as a target for that, at least not in a consistent matter. Testing things with Luna and Lia, I had been able to get flashes of emotion from Luna and some strange sensations from Lia, with similar results when I tried it on Sigmir and Alex. But with the Shattered, I got mixed results, in some cases, it was as if I was working on Luna, only for that to suddenly change, and it was as if I was trying to read Lia. There were similarities, but there also was a fundamental difference. Not quite alcohol and water but somewhat similar.

My initial idea was that there might be something within the Shattered’s soul that might cause those fluctuations and, when I checked on its soul, I immediately got a huge headache and understood the term ‘Shattered’ a whole lot better. Where a normal soul appeared to be somewhat spherical in my sight, with coloured light radiating from it that gave me an idea of its elemental alignment and a few other things, depending on the intensity, the clarity and so on, and a vampiric soul was trying to draw in light, allowing me to get some idea of its alignment by the vortex, the Shattered had neither of those. Instead, it looked as if the ball I usually saw had been Shattered into countless fragments, all of them radiating or drawing in light in a chaotic dance of oscillating powers. It was as if a disco ball had been shattered, while hundreds of floodlights were illuminating the area from all directions, creating an utterly headache-inducing display of light and colours.

That, in turn, shed some light on my problems but it didn’t really help. With a Soul in a state like this, the connection between Body, Mind and Soul wouldn’t be stable, let alone allow for predictable results, unless I managed to take the entirety of this Shattered mess into account.

“Say, Luna, what do you see when you focus on the Shattered and their souls?” I asked, hoping that maybe her divinely given eyes would see something that I couldn’t, or make sense of the mess I could see.

“They are sparkly, it looks pretty cool,” she explained, before trying to elaborate when I raised an eyebrow. Sadly, the more she tried to elaborate and put the impressions she got into words we both could understand, the less sense I managed to make of her explanation. Most likely, this was another of those subjective experiences that could barely be shared between people who used the same base comparison and in this case, my Soul Sight worked with a different mechanism than her Eyes of the Moon.

“So, do you think we can put these grains of sand back together?” I asked, using her metaphor for the scattered shards I had seen.

“Maybe?” she shrugged, obviously uncertain, “It might work, but wasn’t this one supposed to be Lia’s?” she asked, reminding me of my other daughter who was currently resting.

“We can always get more of them,” I grinned, already curious about the effects this experiment would have. “But I’ll ask her anyway.”

As hoped, Lia didn’t really mind letting Luna and me go first, she just wanted to watch what we were doing. By now, she, too, understood that the transformation into Vampires was partially Soul Magic, so she tried to learn as much as possible about the skill and these experiments were part of that.

Given the Shattered’s hostile disposition, we didn’t try to enter its cell, instead, I opened a small gap in the rock, allowing us to observe it directly as we were working.

And work, it was. Hard work, complicated work and, quite frankly, messy work. Trying to fit the Shattered Soul back together was akin to assembling a puzzle. Only, it was a puzzle made up of magnets, with fiddly and completely randomly sized pieces and in zero-gravity. Additionally, while trying to assemble it you had to wear thick work gloves, making any kind of fine manipulation impossible, to say nothing of trying to feel the size and shapes of your pieces.

The shards didn’t stay where we tried to put them, moving them magically was both incredibly difficult and illogical and they seemed to randomly repel or attract each other, sometimes at the same time.

But, as we worked, I had a feeling we were making progress, or maybe I was simply projecting my own perceptions on the work we were doing. It might be working, or I might be turning insane, until finally, I decided that I had enough and stopped trying to finagle things. If the problem was one that could be solved, maybe it could be solved with good, old brute force.

The moment I decided, I activated Overflow, putting all the considerable weight of my magical power behind the simple actions I was trying to perform. Instead of putting one piece next to another and trying to make them fit seamlessly, I simply grabbed all the pieces I could and pushed them together, irregardless of shape and size.

I could feel the Astral Power rushing out of me and into the Shattered. Somewhere at the edge of my consciousness, I noticed that the Shattered’s body was completely stiff and unmoving, in comparison to its earlier pacing and attempts to break out of the cell to get at us but I didn’t really care. I wanted to put this Soul back together and into the right shape, so I simply pushed and prodded, as if I was trying to form a ball out of wet sand.

Finally, after I had spent far more Astral Power than I had anticipated, enough to drain me almost entirely, the Soul shifted one final time and something strange changed. It stopped fighting me and fit together in a roughly spherical shape, just as I had planned.

But that wasn’t all. Moments later, just as I was about to let out a content sigh of success, I could feel Astral Power from all around us rush into the cell and the Shattered, the surge big enough to be perceived as a slight moving of the wind, despite Astral Power being supposedly non-physical.

And then, just as the surge seemed to peak, the Shattered within the cell let out a howl of agony, only to be cut off when its entire body burst apart, painting the cell gory red, with a few chunks of bone and other pieces strewn in for good measure.

“Oops,” I muttered, uncertain what had caused this particular reaction.