Chapter 4

Magical Education

As the pair reappeared in the forge chamber, June stumbled away from the grip of the dwarf.

“Woah,” she breathed through gritted teeth.

As June sucked in air to catch her breath, the room around her came back into focus. On unsteady feet, June waddled over to the anvil in front of the blackstone fire pit, resting her hands on it. The skeleton lent forward, almost resting her skull on the cold metal surface. June took another deep breath, then turned her head to look at her companion.

Without saying a word, he dodged her gaze and walked past her. Bullin pulled a few boxes off of the wall, ripping open one of the wooden crates. He reached into the box and rummaged around for a few seconds. The man pulled out a small glass cylinder from the mix of random junk. Bullin stepped back toward the anvil, tube in hand. Bullin pushed the vial towards June, trying to get her to drink it.

“Probably feeling a little drained, right?” asked her blue-skinned companion. He offered his hand again, expecting her to take the proffered vial.

June was exhausted, more so than she could have expected. The confusing process of being dragged along this latest magical hoopla made her feel like she’d just run five miles. Every part of her person was stiff and sore, a feeling that was entirely alien without muscles or flesh. She tried to ignore it, but a heavy weight hung on her mind and body, trying to drag her down to the floor.

A slap on the back of head knocked her out of her inner thoughts. “Hey!” shouted the boisterous dwarf. “No falling over just yet, ya need to take this.” Bullin once again offered the vial to June. This time, though, he nearly shoved it into her mouth.

“Alright,” breathed the exhausted undead, feebly gripping the flask, she took the time to inspect it. A cyan liquid swirled around in the bottom half of it as it sat in her grasp. June looked down at the vial again, before uncorking it and putting it to her mouth. The liquid flowed out of the bottle, coming out more like gas, rather than a liquid. That was because instead of going down her non-existent throat, it sloshed down onto her bones.

Howling laughter was the only thing she could hear. “Oh wow, I haven’t gotten to see that happen in a while,” wheezed the doubled over dwarf across the anvil from her. The toothy grin on his face accented his laughing features as he howled at his fellow undead.

But try as she might to be angry at the seeming prank, she felt better. The liquid cooled a tension that had been building in her mind, it eased that weight hanging off of her bones. As the seconds ticked by, the pressure she had been under to slump to the floor was erased.

“Better?” asked the smiling dwarf with one more chuckle.

“Better than I have since I got here,” June said.

“You’d think after just a day, you wouldn’t be so tuckered out,” said the chubby dwarf.

June’s jaw dropped. June silently agreed with the man’s assessment, her entire body was racked with exhaustion. If she had muscles, they would have been sorer than she thought possible. Every part of her bony form was heavy prior to whatever potion she had been drenched in. The revelation of the slow passage of time sent her spiraling.

Her emotions raged inside her. June paused for a moment to consider what was happening. She was clearly trapped somewhere she didn’t know, not really. June never would have never expected being sucked into a video game to be something possible in real life. June thought back to her experiences before being dumped into this sack of bones. The words of that strange being at the campfire echoed through her mind. It was clear she would not get straight answers yet, she just hoped they would come soon. The further revelations were getting out of hand.

June thought through her old life. Many days had been endured in a haze of doing the same old thing when she was alive. She wrestled with the cognitive dissonance in her head at the notion of the word ‘alive’, as the feeling of unease about how to process these emotions gripped her mind. June knew she had spent too many years in isolation—that feeling of monotony hung heavy over her recent life. There was always this ball of uncertainty and hopelessness during those days; she often buried the negative feelings in either working or video games, but the hollowness never really left, it was just trapped in the tedium along with her.

June made the calculated decision to just take the same approach here, to hope for the best and keep going, it was all she could really do. At the very least, she had some kind of safety net in the familiarity of an MMO she knew all too well. June steeled her resolve for whatever was to come. She looked up and broke her contemplative state.

A glance shared between the two spoke volumes as they both searched each other’s eyes.

“Guess I just have to roll with this nonsense then,” said June in an uneven tone.

The dwarf had moved around the anvil to stand off to her left, patting her on the back. “Glad to see you’re catching on,” said the overweight smith.

“So what the hell am I doing here?” June asks, staring into the glinting eyes of the dwarf hovering over her.

Holding out his hand, he tapped a finger on the back of her own hand, showing the jewel embedded there. “Learning to use that,” he said plainly. “I’ve got to teach you how to channel first, then we can move onto the real fun,” spoke the round little man. The smile on his face spread like a wildfire, his glee would be apparent to anyone.

“How do we do that?” questioned the curious specter.

With surprising speed, the chubby dwarf squatted onto the floor, sitting on his haunches. He held his hand out in an invitation, calling for June to join him on the floor. As she did so, her bones popped as she shifted and clacked on the warm stone floor.

“You’re going to learn to channel Mana, and we’re going to put it to use,” quietly said the dwarf. “Now, just picture a void, total blackness. Lose yourself in it.” His reverberant tone echoed inside her mind. As she tried to tune out the world around her, June listened intently. As she listened to his voice more, an anxious mood lingering in the back of her mind fell away. The warmth of her bones on the floor soon followed.

Before he continued, a warning came from Bullin’s lips. His mood shifted completely. For the first time since June had been dumped in his lap, Bullin turned serious when addressing her. “Now, when you get in there, you need to focus,” said the glum dwarf. “It’s important that you fully devote yourself to relaxing and just channel the stuff.”

“Is it dangerous or something?” she whispered, looking at the dwarf with a fixed jaw, trying to project a stern look.

The dwarf paused for a beat and stroked his beard. “Not in a way that I can easily explain,” he said. “It’s just an easy thing to get lost in. Ya just gotta keep your head on straight, and you’ll be fine,” he drawled out.

With dulcet tones, the dwarf continued. “Remember the core you saw when we were above that pit? Picture your core floating in the aether.” Bullin paused a second, giving June an opportunity to follow the goal.

June did as commanded, trying to recall the image she had seen after falling into the void. Her vision filled with the small rotating ball of light burning like a raging campfire. Focusing deeper on it, the light adjusted, making details more visible to her inquisitive view. June saw that the ball was more than just a simple ball. The surface of the orb twisted, rotating in and around itself. The image reminded her of a ball of rubber bands that was somehow moving under its own power. June couldn’t even feel her bones on the floor anymore, it felt as though she was a spirit floating among utter emptiness.

“Now picture the forge you’re sitting in.” spoke the dwarf, with his voice echoing like a ghostly song in her mind. “Picture the orb sitting there, right in front of you.”

June tried to picture the void around her shifting, turning into the messy dungeon forge that she had just been sitting in. Everything around her looked very different from how it had previously been. Grey scale washed out all the color, replacing even that green light that had previously dominated the forge room. As June focused more on her breathing, something previously unseen became apparent. The features of the grey surroundings became blurred, shrouded.

The most notable element of what detail remained were the small whips of shadow. At first, the wisps appeared like a heat haze at the edge of her vision. As she tried to focus on them, they disappeared. But as June spent more time chasing them, they coalesced. Somewhere within her deeper consciousness, her actual Mana core began to twist faster and faster.

The thin wisps of black smoke crept around the room, swirling over the surfaces. The forge gave off the heaviest concentration, as if the fumes emanated from it, but they didn’t. Try as she might to locate a source, there didn’t seem to be a single one. The wispy vapors seemed to creep into the surrounding area from every surface, even through solid stone walls. In a flash, the gaseous umbral masses at the edges of her vision flipped inward. A rush of wind that came from nowhere filled the chamber. Nothing around June moved with it, but every penumbral wisp blew with it. The whipping mess of shadows became more corporeal, invaded more of the suite in June’s mind. Every single one of the shadow tentacles crawled towards her rotating core, still sitting harmoniously in the center of the room.

As the vapor descended on her envisioned core like a pack of hungry piranha, she commanded herself to keep calm. “Come on, you can do this,” she reminded herself. But the losing battle she fought against the encroaching shadow threatened to overwhelm her. As doubt crept in, a familiar voice broke through.

Through the chaos of her trying to control the shadows, June heard the voice of the forge master guiding her. In a full-toned roar, his voice broke through the surrounding din. “Focus yougin’. You need to just relax. Try to picture the Mana flowing slowly into your core.”

June couldn’t see him, but Bullin looked worried, staring at his new trainee. He was standing above her now, eyes and hands both glowing with a cobalt blaze. He was pushing a deluge of Death Mana away from the skeleton using his own. For a reason he didn’t understand, the flow seemed intent on consuming the sitting apprentice. He was doing what he could to allow them to focus in relative peace. He fired his Mana Sense ability and worked to use his own Core to siphon off some of the negative energy flood.

Letting the Mana course through and working to form it into the ball that was expected of her, she tried to picture the commanded visual—then she noticed something new. Voices, a whispered din of them. They all came in like the mellow sound of wind chimes, gentle and slow.

June listened to the peaceful murmurs that echoed around at the edges of her awareness. They drew her in, dredging up a memory of the music she often listened to in her old life while working, helping her to focus. The voices couldn't be understood, even if they weren't a mess of noise, the languages being spoken were alien to her.

But something she hadn’t expected came up with the mysterious vocals. Smells, brackish and stale all, overtook her senses. The image from when she first awoke here flooded into her mind. That tide of undead beings, lacking all smells of decay. The scene came flooding back to her, but this time the stank stormed in with it.

Blood, dust, mildew, and so many other foul smells attacked her. A toxic mixture of many offending stinks assaulted her at once. The overpowering odor collapsed all of her other senses. The hallway turned physically empty, but saturated with the invisible scent of death. It felt like she was trapped in a basement that had been sealed for years after being loaded with rot and mold. The darkness forming at the edges of her vision wanted to grab her, force her to retreat in fear. The unfamiliar scents chased her away from focusing on relaxing, threatening to push her out of the trance entirely. Panic set in, dominating her mind before she could control the negative emotions rushing in. Just as she was about to be fully lost to the mess around her, a wave washed over her. Not knowing why, all the noises were gone, and the smells along with them. June found herself sitting back in the ghostly variant of the forge chamber, just her skeletal form and mana core.

The black tentacles were still there. June recalled the dwarf’s instructions, she tried to refocus on pulling the ethereal gas into her foundation. The first glimmer of shadowed power entered her core in the tiniest rope. The energy absorbed into the orb in a small twisting motion, wrapping in a thin ring around the ever-burning sphere. June focused on the ring of shadow. She stared into the mini star before her, watching it burn just a bit brighter as more energy was consumed. The burning fire of the orb grew a bit as time passed. Was it getting larger? That now familiar feeling of being pulled started to tug at her awareness.

She resisted the urge to be yanked forward. The burning sphere and the ring of shadow were her focus, and she hardened herself against anything else. After a few seconds, the process entered a state of equilibrium. When the shadow flowed lazily into the room, it was carefully pulled into two strands. As the strands were dragged around the glowing sphere, a ring of darkness formed around it. The sight reminded June of a solar eclipse. The tiniest part of the ring, closest to the Core, was crushed to a single point on the upper side of the ring—before being pulled into the sphere itself.

For a few minutes, serenity set in on June’s mind. She peacefully watched the energy being consumed. In a random instant, June snapped out of her trance, as if she was yanked out of a peaceful water’s surface by her neck.

“Whoa, that was intense,” breathed the overwhelmed skeleton, still seated on the floor. Noticing that the dwarf was standing, she raised her head to look up at him. “But what was that—”

“That was me,” intoned the concerned-looking dwarf. “I pulled you out. You’ve learned enough for now.”

Focusing in on the surrounding scene, June noted the beads of sweat on the dwarf’s forehead. All the wisps from that haunted realm were gone. Wait, June saw glimmers on the edge of her vision here too. She darted her head in the direction of the mysterious tendrils.

“You can see it, can’t you?” asked the dwarf.

June turned back to the dwarf, feeling a chill run down her spine.. “Those black tentacle things, you mean?” she said in response to the prompting dwarf.

“Death Mana,” he stated in a stern tone. “This place is stuffed with it, being a tomb and all.”

The implication of what Bullin had said slammed into June. Death Mana was something she had never heard of, but she could put the pieces together. The image of her core pulling the shade into it was a hell of a thing to think about. June couldn’t help but be very weirded out, picturing the zombies and other undead she had seen since arriving here. Was she truly the same as those horrors?