I collapsed to the ground, breathing heavily. I gasped for air as my muscles ached and my body burned with pain. Still full of adrenaline, I picked myself off the ground, wincing a little as tiny shards of gemstone pierced my skin. I picked them out like splinters and looked around. The lakeside was a mess. Giant grooves were gashed into the ground. The pristine lake surface was muddy, with parts of the shore breaking off into the water during the fight. It would settle with time. Noel sat resting against a tree.

I waved to Noel. She smiled and waved back. We’d done it. Somehow, we’d defeated a five star monster. The Immortal of Desire’s information had been totally worth it. The Immortal told us The Terrible was actually a gem golem monster, which meant it had a core somewhere in its body. The Immortal didn’t know where that core would be, since every golem would keep their core in a different place, but just knowing that our enemy had a massive weakness we could exploit was useful enough. By developing the invisible hands we created for motion magic into hands of pure magic, Noel and I were able to reach into The Terrible’s body and rip apart the core!

I limped towards Noel but she gestured to say she was alright. I nodded and went to the lake instead. I sat down on the edge of the lake, dipped my feet into the water, and reached for a cigarette. Realizing I didn’t even have pockets, let alone cigarettes, I instead paddled my feet in the water, sending ripples across the surface. A wave of nostalgia washed over me. I stopped, stared at my reflection in the murky, disturbed water. I touched my face and the elf in the lake did so too. I smiled. It was hard to explain. The fantasy stories from my Earth never really talked about it, but when you find yourself in a body you don’t recognize, there’s this weird feeling in your gut.

Your body may look a certain way but your mind thinks it should look like something else. You’re not used to the height, finding yourself reaching for things you would have reached before, but can’t anymore. Staring into people’s chests instead of their eyes, because you aren’t used to looking up. You trail your hand through your hair, expecting resistance, finding none. Take a bath, touch places you didn’t before, feel like you’re washing a doll, or a suit, rather than your own body. And man, don’t get me started on the ears. It took a long time to convince myself those things weren’t glued on or something. Like, I knew they were real, and if they were on someone else, I could accept it. But for my own ears to suddenly be long and pointy? That felt so strange, so alienating, that I barely have the words to describe it.

But now I’d been here long enough, lived in this body long enough, experienced enough life threatening adventures, to be comfortable in my body again. My mind still imagined myself as Caspian Eriksen Holm from New York state, but I didn’t mind thinking of myself as Caspian Jora, an elf of the Jora tribe. I reached into my reflection, tried to sieve out as much dirt as I could with my hands, and then washed my face.

“Don’t wash your wounds with that water,” came a voice from behind.

“I wasn’t going to,” I said.

Noel sat besides me and washed her face too. I stared at her as she did so. When she was done, I ran a cold, wet hand over her hair. She shivered and glared at me. I smiled. She grabbed a handful of water and splashed it on my ragged hide tunic. I narrowed my eyes and kicked the surface of the water, getting both of us wet. We played like little kids for a while.

We didn’t dry our clothes before heading back to the tribe. We rang out some of the water from our clothes, but the cold water offered a welcome respite from the heat. It was almost summer and the rains had already fallen, even if most of them had been created with magic. The tribes of the Plains of Serenity would head for the highlands soon. Now that The Terrible was gone, we didn’t need to worry about its judgment or curse anymore either. There were bright days ahead, for all the elves of the plains.

We left the Forest of Three as the sun dipped in the sky. We would reach the camp by dusk, at the earliest. Noel and I got our stories straight. We needed to tell the tribesmen that The Terrible was actually an evil monster and that the Oracle was working with that monster. Honestly, Noel and I still weren’t sure what the Oracle got from sending so many elves to their deaths at the hands of The Terrible, but that didn’t matter. The only problem would be dealing with Sharun, since he was still under the Oracle’s control. The mind control resistance magic that I had used against The Terrible might be able to help us free Sharun, but I wasn’t sure if I could use it on other people yet. It had been a small miracle it had worked on me at all, since we’d had no way to test it before showing up at The Terrible’s cavern.

The idea behind the magic was simple enough. It was an amalgamation of all sorts of important concepts from philosophy. Things like ‘what is reality’ and ‘who am I’ and ‘how do I know that I exist.” I ended up using one of the most famous phrases in philosophy to solidify my magic.

“Cogito ergo sum,” I whispered.

“What was that?” asked Noel.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking to myself.”

Yes, Renes Descartes’ famous statement, sometimes translated as: I think, therefore, I am. I knew this idea could be used in all sorts of magic, and I intended to use it again later. I also knew that there were various ideas that led up to this statement, and used them all to make my mind control resistance magic as powerful as I could. I used Plato’s idea of “knowledge of knowledge,” also explained in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as well as the various offshoots it set off to establish that by being conscious of the fact that I was thinking and that I knew of things, I was asserting a sort of existence that could not be overwritten by mind control magic.

I ended up using Avicenna’s Floating Man thought experiment too. He figured that since someone deprived of all senses, left floating in the void, would still be able to conclude that there was someone there to experience the nothingness, that must mean that I, at least, exist. I also liked the Hindu philosopher Adi Shankara’s idea that the presence of doubt itself proved that existence could not be doubted.

Of course, there were limitations with this line of thinking. Descartes’ idea had a problem: was it really ‘I’ that was thinking, or was it something else? Just because one can assume that something is thinking, doesn’t mean that it has to be ‘me.’ My mind control resistance magic got around all the problems Noel and I had predicted by not trying to counteract the specific mind control magic being used.

Wanna control my body but leave my mind? Sorry, my existence is tied to my sense of self, of which my body is a part. To control me, you would have to kill me, and I don’t think your magic is powerful enough for that. Wanna control my mind by changing my thoughts and motivations? If I exist because I can think, you would have to overwrite my existence to change my thoughts by force.

It wasn’t the most solid of logic, but it didn’t have to be. I was sure some gem monster wasn’t going to try to pick apart the flaws in my resistance magic, especially if it never had any time to react to it. All I needed to do, was to protect myself with a type of ‘knowledge’ that could resist the ‘knowledge’ used by the monster to try to control me, while being so complicated and unexpected that the monster would never be able to react. And it worked! Man, even I’m impressed by how smart I am.

As those thoughts made happy fireworks go off in my brain, we approached the rocks behind which the Jora tribe’s camp was hidden. As we stepped closer, Noel grabbed my shoulder. I squinted. Something was wrong. Where were the scouts? Noel looked at me. I met her gaze. We rushed forward, ignoring our aching bodies. We pressed our bodies against a rock and peeked over the edge.

Groups of elves lay cowering near a fire. I recognized them as the elves of the Jora tribe. I couldn’t see elders Starry and Vell. A crowd of elves we had never seen before held spears at the ready, glaring at the cowering elves in the middle. Near the back of the group, standing next to the elders’ tents, was Sharun, his eyes still burning red. I couldn’t tell if that was because he was being controlled or because he was staring right into the fire. The Oracle sat next to him, her one visible eye closed, breathing deeply and coughing from time to time.