Growing Lilies

The water falling on her forehead woke her up. For a second, she didn’t remember where she was, and then it all came rushing back to her.

The pit.

She was in the pit.

She snapped awake and sat up. Immediately, she was thankful she could sit up, and hadn’t injured herself too badly. She wondered how long she had been down here. She was soaked through. But she had been before she fell, right? She was cold, but not as cold as when she fell asleep on the boat deck. It was dark in here but… she looked up. Darkness above as well. It had already been evening when she got here, so that didn’t tell her as much as she’d like.

She groaned. Her head was pounding out of her skull. She felt around her surroundings. She was sitting on a concrete slab, tilted slightly so that her feet were lower than her head. It was wet, but not underwater. She couldn’t even see the opening above her, because there were no stars to help with light.

Lily pulled out her phone. It wouldn’t turn on. Was it broken from the fall? Flooded with the water? Or just out of batteries? She couldn’t tell down here. Her body didn’t want to move. Lily took a deep breath.

Okay, how was she going to get out of this…? Wait. Lily laughed. That was absurd. How was she going to get out of this? Why did she feel more capable of getting through this than she had of getting through a day at home earlier?

“Always prepared for the end of the world. Can’t take a Tuesday. That’s me.”

How was she going to get out of here? She couldn’t even see to find a way out. It was too dark. Even if she could… She was in a pit. She remembered it being shaped like a vase or an urn. Small hole on top, but bowed out walls. So, she couldn’t imagine there was a way to just climb straight up. Especially with them being wet. How deep was the water anyway? Hell, where did the water begin? Was it safe to be in, or full of sharp rebar?

Yet, she didn’t feel as hopeless as earlier. She was already level 8 in clearing life or death scenarios. It was when nothing was going on that she was really scared. She almost giggled at her own thoughts. Okay, maybe she was also not thinking quite clearly. Her head really hurt. She was starting to wonder if there was some persistent magical effect on her too. Like, had she been recovering from injuries faster than normal? At no point had she been not injured at all since this all began, but even dire issues seemed to make her non-functional for a day, and just messed up the next. How could she measure that..? Lily shook her head.

“Not the time for that Lily. Have good thoughts when you’re not dying.”

Well, first she needed light. How did she get light? Fish around and hope for a flashlight? Hah, like that would happen. She edged closer to the top of her concrete, feeling around for a dry spot. No such luck. Well, it looked like she’d have to get down and hope the water wasn’t too deep. If she could find her way under the ceiling she might be able to find a dry spot.

Lily lowered herself carefully down from her slab, feeling around. Her ankles entered the water, then up to her knees. She had just decided maybe this was a bad idea when she slipped off and fell in. Thankfully, it stopped at her thighs. She let out a little yelp as she sank in, and could hear it echo around her. Well, now she had at least some idea of how big the room was. Fifteen feet across maybe? She wasn’t sure. Large but not huge.

She took a few careful steps. The ground was uneven. She had a horrible mental image of her weight causing the ground to buckle, and the force of the water pulling her through a new hole full of sharp metal and rough concrete into deep water and– Nope. No. No thinking about that. Careful steps.

She continued along carefully, feeling around with her hands as best she could. There! She found another piece to crawl up onto. This one was under the roof, so it was dry. Once she was up out of the water and not being rained on, Lily stopped to breathe. She wished she had some light. She was so cold. Could she start a fire?

Not with her wet clothes. What about magic? She didn’t have anything to write with. She could try scratching a circle into the rock? But she wouldn’t be able to see what she was doing and it would take a long time. She might lose track of what she had already drawn. If only she had chalk, or paint or… oh.

Her stomach lurched. Lily had an idea, but she didn’t like it. Still, it would help a lot and she didn’t need to draw a big circle. What would she need? She thought about it. Gather Mana to have something to run the spell on. A Capacitor to make sure it didn’t grow out of control easily. Then just… Flame. Right? Gather Mana > Capacitor > Flame. Three glyphs. A circle with three smaller circles connected by a triangle. Inside each node, a glyph. She thought she could do that, and she’d have heat and light. Then she could work from there.

“This is going to suck real bad. Oh I hate this. Oh this is a terrible idea.”

Lily gritted her teeth, and undid the bandage on her injured hand. She took a deep breath, and pushed her good index finger into the center of her wound. Pain exploded through her hand. She tried to push it down, but she let out a pained cry.

Outside, she heard a howl. Star must have been able to hear her! He’d waited all this time? He must have been driving himself mad trying to figure out how to help. She called out.

“Good boy! I’m okay! I’ll figure this out and be out in no time! Just wait for me!”

Lily redoubled her efforts. She pushed harder, ignoring the pain. Blood. She could draw the circle in blood. It was hard to know how much she needed, so she pressed hard and made sure she could feel it on her finger. This was a terrible idea. But it was going to work, she could feel it.

She drew out the circle from memory. It wasn’t hard. She had a clear image of it in her mind’s eye. She just had to focus. She pushed herself. Focus. Focus. Draw it.

Then.

Fwoosh.

In the center of her little circle, drawn in blood, a flame sprouted. Lily backed up in case it got too big. But, it didn’t. It grew slowly until the mana it was able to pull in leveled out. Warmth washed over her, and she was able to see.

She looked around the room. It was about as she expected. In the center of the room she could see the slab she had originally landed on, with rain falling on it from above. The rest of the room was shaped more or less like a donut around it. But the hole in the roof was at least ten feet up. Even if she jumped and was strong enough to pull herself up, she’d never jump high enough.

Also, the water was weird. Dark shapes jutted out of it. The metal frame of what seemed to be a sofa. A kitchen fridge. A broken TV. But there was something about the water itself too. She took a minute to let her eyes adjust. It was moving. Flowing, but not going anywhere. The water had a current. It was flowing in a perfect circle. Not like a whirlpool, but just… flowing. Slowly.

Then Lily saw why. She was sitting inside a magic circle. Was that why this room was this shape? It covered the entire room. It was made of… whatever the circle around the original everburning flame was made of. Something immaterial. Concentrated mana?

It was also a lot bigger than any circle she’d seen before. It was four concentric rings. Three seemed to be connected, and the fourth one around all of them wasn’t connected. It was running independently. Taking a closer look, it seemed almost like this was really clumsily put together. Her everburning flame looked like a masterpiece compared to this. Glyphs were haphazardly placed in no clear order. But it was creating a working spell.

“Plus one for the theory that the ones in nature aren’t optimal I guess. But what is it doing exactly? Something with the water…”

Lily tried to read it, but there were a LOT of glyphs she didn’t know. In a normal situation that would be a huge win. But right now she didn’t want to mess with anything she didn’t understand. She wanted to get out of the pit.

Well, first things first. Lily removed her shirt, and found a sharp piece of rebar to poke a hole. Then she tore until she got a strip of fabric, and re-wrapped her wound. She wouldn’t have it festering if she could avoid it. She’d need to clean it really well when she got home.

When she got home?

“Look at me, being all optimistic and stuff. Now, what do you do, circle?”

She tried to make out some of the glyphs. On the plus side, some of them were not that hard to figure out. One was droplets shaped like the Gather Ambient Mana glyph, and another was wavy lines in that same shape. She would work off the assumption that it was Gather Water and Gather Air for now, since that seemed like a really safe bet. That meant the inner circle was just a bunch of Gather Water glyphs, then outputting that to the second ring. Sure. Not too hard.

The next circle was going to be key. It had a lot of stuff Lily was going to have to guess at. The first node at least seemed to be Gather Air. After that… something to do with air and water. At least, it had the droplet and the wavy pattern. It was… maybe mixing them up? After that the real mystery began. It was a mess of arrows, a different mess of arrows, and then the first one again. It was moving the stuff around a lot? That didn’t seem to make a lot of sense.

Okay, well, what was the spell doing? It had water and air, and water was falling from the air. Why was it falling instead of just gathering in the center of the circle? Was this ring making it do that? Or was it making the water flow in circles?

If she had to guess, it was making the water fall. If only because the arrows on the glyphs didn’t seem to be pointing in a circular direction. They were more inward than that.

So, she decided the second ring was making the water rain. She just didn’t know how.

The third one was just a new mess of arrows, and the middle one from the second circle…

“Ugh, this is so stupid and confusing! How am I supposed to figure this out while trying to get out of this stupid pit! I hate this!”

She heard barking from outside, and tried to calm her tone.

“No, no. It’s okay Star! I’m okay! I’ll figure it out! I just need to… think!”

So, she thought. The second circle made the rain. The third circle must be doing the circular flow then. And the final ring… Just seemed to be doing something with mana. It was disconnected from all the other ones, but seemed to be pushing a ton of mana into this area. Oh!

She whirled and looked at her fire spell. But, the Capacitor was keeping it from overflowing. She breathed a sigh of relief.

“Okay. So. It gathers water, and then mixes it with air to make… mist I guess? Then that mist needs to go up so it can fall, right? So whatever this is doing, it’s pushing the mist up.”

That made sense to her. And it was promising! If it could push mist into the sky, maybe it could push her or something she was holding onto up out of the hole too.

“I think the glyph present in both rings must be for pushing things. Because that would explain the movement of the water both times. What chooses the direction I wonder? It’s the same glyph. Maybe it’s like the capacitor glyph that can be set? Hmm.”

More importantly, she didn’t have enough blood to draw a bunch of circles figuring this out. All of the spells she’d found had been made of mana. Could she do that? How?

Well. She’d made changes to spells like that a few times. It had been as simple as closing her eyes, feeling it out, and really holding an image of what she wanted it to be in her mind. Could it be done with a whole circle? Well, there was one way to find out. She was certain the fire spell she had set up was safe, so she would duplicate that first.

She closed her eyes, and focused. See the lines. A circle with a triangle inside. At the points of the triangle, three more circles. Nodes. Inside the nodes, glyphs. Gather Ambient Mana, Capacitor, Flame. Imagine the full circle. Every little detail. She could feel it. The same feeling she’d gotten when she’d made small edits to them in the past. But still nothing was happening.

She pulled on that feeling hard. It was there. It was real. It wasn’t all in her head. Pull on it, and push it into her mental image. See how the mana should flow around the circle. See how it should function. See how–

Fwoosh

A flame sprouted into being. It sat on the surface of the water, right where she had imagined it. Around it, she could feel the circle she had made. It was there. She opened her mouth to cheer! Her head started spinning. Oh, she did not feel good all of a sudden. She lay back on her concrete slab, gasping. She felt like she had just run a marathon! All the energy drained out of her in a second. It took her a few minutes to catch her breath.

“What the fuck was that…?”

She felt like she already knew though. She had formed a circle from mana. It had to come from somewhere. She felt tired after. It just made too much sense. She’d created a circle with her mana. But that took an absurd amount of her own energy to do! How was that fair? It was such a simple spell! With chalk she could have drawn it out in two minutes!

Wait. She was still breathing hard, but if that’s how it worked, there could be a pretty simple solution to get her energy right back, right…?

So, she focused on creating another circle. This one around her. Three glyphs. Nice and easy. Gather Ambient Mana, Capacitor (LOW output), Infuse Mana. She pictured how mana would flow into the circle, be diffused by the capacitor into the environment if it wasn’t used, and a small amount would flow into her directly. Like it had with the wood in the everburning flame. That should fix it, right?

She pulled. It was easier this time, despite how tired it was. Like moving a limb she hadn’t known was there, now she knew how. She pulled. She formed the circle. She let go. She doubled over, wheezing. Trying to catch her breath. She should have waited another few minutes!

But… after a few seconds she was already starting to feel better. It was like she’d just downed an energy drink even. She knew not a lot of mana was actually flowing into her, because she'd turned the capacitor way down. So it really surprised her how fast she was feeling better.

Actually, it really was like an energy drink. Her heart was beating pretty fast. It was… a little uncomfortable even. Okay, time to turn that off. Lily wasn’t taking any chances with that. She focused on breaking the circle. It took another ten seconds, but the circle broke and dissolved just like she wanted.

She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. The world looked like it was… spinning? Oh no. Vertigo hit her like a truck. Her stomach roiled. The world was spinning. She scrambled over to the edge of the slab she was on and–

She threw up.

The world was still spinning, but not quite as badly. She had to figure out something to do. She had to get it out of her. Concentrate. Concentrate. She couldn’t concentrate! She felt so sick, and it was only getting worse. The fire spell! She’d done that one twice now. She could do it again. She closed her eyes again and focused as hard as she could.

She drew the first circle in her mind. It was like opening a bloated expired milk carton inside herself. The pressure dislodged as she pulled, and it felt disgusting and horrible. But, she held it. She formed the circle. She pulled for the mana and it was there.

She felt a tiny, tiny bit of relief. She opened her eyes. A new flame was growing. But she didn’t feel all that better. She needed to get it out of her! Maybe it didn’t take a lot, but her capacity was just tiny? How could she use enough to not be exhausted or over full?

An idea struck her. She focused again. One more circle. This time, no mana gathering. No capacitor. Just Flame. A one node spell. She formed it in her mind. Nice and easy. She imagined the circle forming. Fire. Flame. Just the one glyph. Let the mana flow out of her and into the circle. Not just the creation of it, but the circle itself. She pulled it out of herself and pushed!

She could feel it forming. The mana took shape but it was still inside her. It hurt. It was like an electric fire running through her veins. She didn’t know how to let it out! But she knew what she wanted, so she willed it to happen. She held out a hand and focused on letting it go through her palm.

There was a small fwoosh as a burst of flame left her hand. It burned! But only for a second. She yelped, and shook her hand in the cool air.

“God damn! Why does learning have to hurt so much?”

She whined to herself. She felt better though. Not good by any means, but no longer on death’s door in either direction. That was good enough for now.

“But I’m still no closer to getting out of here. Am I gonna die in here…?”

Lily needed a break. It wasn’t ideal, but at least she had her fire. She laid out close enough to keep warm.

“I hope Star is okay.”