Once again, I pulled in as much magic as I could. I held it for a moment and then pulled even more. I did this several more times until I was as full of magic as I could possibly be. I felt like I was going to burst and rays of light would start shooting out my pores.
I focused on my second break and began folding magic. Or at least that is what I tried to do. My magic didn’t fold. It just swirled around like the mist it was.
I tried to compress it into a sheet and then fold it. The sheet didn’t hold and it just floated away.
I tried to fold magic on a small scale, with no luck, so I tried on a large scale. Bermuda had seemed to fold the magic throughout his whole body so I tried that. It was just too big of a task for me. I couldn’t get my magic to fold. Instead it swirled around like crazy and made me feel sick.
I couldn’t throw up, not like this, so I stopped.
I played over what I’d seen with Bermuda in my mind. When he started folding, the magic inside him had been thick. It had felt like hot taffy, or thick syrup. My magic, even at full capacity, felt like a dense mist. I finally, sadly, came to the realization that I couldn’t fold mist. It just wasn’t going to happen.
Since I couldn’t duplicate what Bermuda had done, I started working on my second rib. This bone wasn’t cracked at an angle, it was more of a clean break. That meant there was less of the bone surface that needed to be awakened. That was the good news. The bad news was the bone had pulled apart slightly so it would take more growth to bridge the gap.
Oh well, might as well get started. I zoomed in like before, picked a fairly flat spot of cells, and started calling my magic. It wasn’t long before my first dust bunny magic cloud showed up and I got to work. It certainly took more magic to get the process started in a brand new location. I’d gotten used to how easy it was on the other rib. After I’d awakened about fifty cells or so, I started working the edges again and I started picking up speed.
My idea of trying to fold magic in this area was paying off. It wasn’t long before the ‘sky’ was thick with dust bunny clouds. I lost myself in the work. It was a simple repetitive task, pull magic from the sky, push it into a cell until it awakened, go to the next cell.
I was doing this for what seemed like hours before I saw my first twinkle lightning. Magic flashed down from the sky, merged with a cell, and now there were two of them. It wasn’t happening very often but at least it had finally started.
This seemed like a good moment to pause and celebrate my success. Once again, I was struck by just how different the landscape looked. The land was a dense jungle of cells, all interlocked with each other. There were hills and valleys, just like the hills of Kentucky.
I looked around and drank it all in. I was still in wonder that my magic sight could zoom down this far. I would never have tried something like this if I hadn’t been so desperate. I’m not saying this made my broken bones worth it, but it was a tiny silver lining to an otherwise very dark cloud.
I looked up at the sky and admired the magic lights. They were cool to look at. With the green and blue it sort of looked like Christmas. It occurred to me that I’d spent a lot of time examining my cells, but I hadn’t really spent much time thinking about the clouds.
I traced a couple of the individual lights to see where they went. They were long and slim, like a hair, with a center part that was a bit thicker and held the bulk of the light. It looked like these hairs had loosely run into each other then stuck together. That was the definition of a hairball or dust bunny and that’s why I called these clouds “dust bunny magic”.
I knew that when I called them down they changed shape, though. I called one down to examine it. While I held it in my ‘hands’ it changed from a hair shape into more of an oblong sphere. Think of it like one of those healthy pills, like fish oil, only bigger. The magic felt pretty dense and stayed together.
I’d seen a video of astronauts in space playing with water. The surface tension of the water kept it all together in one sphere and it just floated in the air. It looked like a ripply balloon made of water. This unit of magic reminded me of that.
The unit of magic I’d pulled down was green, so I pulled down another one. It turned into an oblong sphere as well. I put the two together to see if they would merge, but they didn’t. Instead I had two units of green magic, about the same size, and very close together.
I pulled down more and kept adding them to my layer. I stopped when I had 15 of them all floating together. The individual units seemed to stick to their neighbors a bit. I could pull them apart easily, but if I left them touching, they would stay together.
How did a piece of magic end up looking like a long hair? I had thought that maybe if a lot of them were together then they would start getting longer and more hair like. That wasn’t happening though. Instead it looked like a granny’s pill box, filled with green fish oil capsules. A very organized pill box with giant capsules, but still, any granny would be proud.
I started adding a second layer of magic capsules. Once I had 15 there, I started a third. So far everything was sticking together and everything was keeping its shape. I was done with the third layer and most of the fourth when suddenly there was a pop.
The whole mass of magic turned into one giant green sphere. It wasn’t oblong either, it was an actual round sphere.
That was interesting! This was a seriously large chunk of dense magic. Was this what I was looking for?
With any experiment you have to be able to duplicate your results. I was so excited I put my first large ball aside and started calling down more green magic.
Let’s see, 15 units of magic by four layers would be 60 total capsules. I didn’t make it all pretty and neat this time. I just pulled down 60 green units of magic and bunched them all together. Nothing happened. I added one more capsule and got the pop. Again, I had a large sphere of green magic.
So this wasn’t a fluke! It looked like I could make large balls of condensed magic. This was a lot more condensed than the loose hairball of magic in the sky. Time to keep experimenting and see if there were other variations of this.
I pulled down sapphire blue magic and tried to combine it. It worked and it only needed about 35 units before it merged into a sphere. I made a few of those to see if the ratio held and it was about 35 or 36 every time.
I made a few more green ones to see if that ratio held and it did too. It was always somewhere between 59 and 63 capsules before it condensed.
I didn’t have to stack the capsules neatly either. It seemed like I just needed to get the right number of units very close together and the compression happened on its own.
I tried mixing blue and green capsules together but it would not condense. I stacked more than 200 mixed colors together before I gave up. It looks like the colors had to be the same. Rather than leave this big stack of mixed colors together, I took the time to break it down into large balls too. I was definitely getting faster at the process.
I tried making a large sphere with more capsules. My hope was to make a giant sphere made up of hundreds of capsules. That would be some dense magic! It didn’t work, though. Once it hit that limit of 63 green capsules it wouldn’t take any more. Instead it repelled any new magic.
I wondered how many larger balls I had at this point so I looked over to count them. I had seventeen green spheres and eight smaller blue ones. As I was counting them I noticed something interesting, they were forming a pattern.
When I’d been making them, I’d just put them to the side. I had expected there to just be a pile of finished spheres. Instead, the spheres seemed to be reacting with each other. It seemed like the spheres couldn’t be too close to each other. Maybe I could use this to make a magic matrix?
To test that idea, I made a new green ball, and put it in a spot in front of me. Then I made a second ball and gradually moved it toward the first one. When the second ball got close enough to the first one, the first one started moving away.
Interesting! It seeme
d to me that this was similar to magnets. If you move two magnets together, they will either stick together or repel each other. It seemed like the green ones would repel each other.
I put those two to the side, and made two blue ones. The same thing happened. Once the two spheres got close to each other, they would start repelling each other.
How about a blue and a green one? I made a green one, made a blue one, and then started moving them together. I expected the green one to start moving away, but it didn’t. The spheres were almost touching before the blue one started pushing the green one away.
So, it wasn’t just magic pushing against magic. The two magic types had to be identical. It seemed like there was so much to learn. I knew that magic attracted other magic. I’d seen that happen in the park when we had charged the charms. Now it seemed like in some instances it repelled it to. Maybe it was because the magic in the park had been neutral magic? The green and blue were my colors. Maybe that made them similar enough to repel each other? I’d have to ask Sandy about all this when I was healed. Hopefully she’d have some insights for me.
Ok, so I now knew how to condense similar magic from its hair like dust bunny form and turn it into a large ball of magic. I’d figured out these large balls repelled each other. So maybe it was time to build a matrix!
I called a green sphere to me and put it in my work space. Then I called a second sphere and move it close until it started repelling. Then I called a third and fourth sphere and completed the square. I made another square on top of the first one and now I had a box.
I needed to work the blue spheres in here somehow. There was a lot more emerald magic than sapphire, maybe I could just put one sapphire in the middle? I wasn’t sure if the ratio was right but it was a place to start.
The blue sphere slipped into the middle of the green box and seemed ok. Now to expand the matrix even more. I took four more green balls and added them to the matrix on the right. I popped a blue one in the center and I now had two boxes. I took six more green spheres and two blue ones and added two more boxes to the top. I now had four boxes total.
I kept adding on more boxes. When I ran out of premade spheres, I just pulled down more magic capsules and made new ones. It wasn’t long before I had what seemed to me to be a pretty large matrix. It was twenty boxes wide by twenty boxes tall by twenty boxes deep.
It was beautiful. I liked patterns and this just looked right to me.
Now I had such a large structure I could compare it to the dust bunny clouds above. I didn’t have a good way to say how condensed the magic was, so I thought I would go with brightness.
The dust bunny clouds were pretty and they had seemed bright to me when I’d first called them. Compared to the new matrix, though, they were pretty dim. It seemed like it took a cloud, which was pretty big, to make four boxes, which was much smaller.
I didn’t have anything exact to work with, but it seemed to me that it was a five-to-one ratio. The magic in the matrix took up one-fifth as much space as it would in cloud form. Or, to put it another way, I could pack five times as much magic into the same space in matrix form as I could in cloud form.
That seemed pretty significant.
I went back to making boxes and expanding my matrix. I started to notice that the new spheres I was adding seemed to snap into position. I kept working for a while, and decided to test the stability of the structure I was building.
I picked out a green ball that was deep in the matrix and gave it a gentle tug. I didn’t want to have the whole thing fall apart so I kept a light touch. The green ball moved slightly toward me, and the matrix distorted a bit, but when I let go it snapped back into place. That was good news. It meant this whole thing wasn’t going to get jumbled up easily. It was taking a lot of time to make this matrix and I didn’t want it falling apart.
The next change I noticed was when I was about 100 boxes square. The matrix was big enough that it was starting to get close to the clouds and they were reacting to it. Sticking with the idea of magnets, the bigger the magnet, the stronger the magnetic field. My magic matrix was a pretty powerful force now compared to a cloud.
The matrix was causing nearby clouds to compress a bit. One cloud even split apart into its individual magic capsules. That made the whole process a bit faster. I started pulling the clouds closer to the matrix and soon I was showered in hundreds of capsules.
My next speed boost came when I was at 300 boxes square. The matrix was exerting so much influence on the clouds, that it was splitting and compressing them at the same time. Now they were transforming directly into large balls and skipping the capsule stage all together. There were also some stray capsules I had to gather and clean up, but overall, it was much faster than doing my own capsule stacking.
When I got around 1,000 boxes square, I started running out of magic. I zoomed out to see how I was doing overall. My mist was now much fainter throughout the rest of my body. The matrix by my rib, though, shone like a thousand LED lights. Those thousand boxes only seemed like a 3-inch square when you looked at the total size of my body.
I had originally pulled in so much magic I felt like I would burst. Now I felt empty of magic. This matrix was amazing! I’d thought my magic was compressed five-to-one. Now I was thinking it might be more like ten-to-one. More magic meant more healing. Maybe my road to recovery would be a lot less than I’d feared.
I’d been so focused on matrix building I’d shut out the rest of the world. Now it all came rushing back. I felt hungry, thirsty, and exhausted. I couldn’t eat, not yet. But I could get a bit of water. I twitched my one good hand and John came over with what I needed. A couple questions later and a squirt of water. It felt wonderful.
Can a supernatural starve to death? I wasn’t sure. I know regular people can last for a month without food. Hopefully I wouldn’t have too. I really needed to get my mobility back, and then fix my face.
I also really needed to learn how to defend myself so this never happened again! I didn’t know exactly how that was going to happen, but I was surely going to figure it out. This sucked.
The pain was still there, of course, but I was getting used to it. Tyler was right, I was finding my balance. This was my new normal.
I don’t know how long I’d been working on my matrix. Several hours for sure. Maybe longer. I didn’t know what day it was or even what time. I was tired, though. It was time to find out if I could get back into my throne room and sleep.
First, though, I wanted to check on Bermuda. He’d moved a bit and was back to sleeping again. I didn’t want to wake him up so I gently stroked his head with my finger. I checked him with my magic sight. It was so much easier to see inside him since he had sucked in my magic. The twinkle lightning was still happening and the bones were healing. I couldn’t zoom in that much to get a real view, but I think all of his bones were more than a quarter connected.
That was just amazing. It normally takes weeks to heal a break. Bermuda had multiple breaks and yet they would be healed in only a few more days.
I was so thrilled. I was glad that I had helped him out and he didn’t have to suffer any more than was necessary. I was also so glad he had shown me that I could compress my magic! Maybe I would be up and running again soon too.
In the meantime, I was beat. It was time to sleep.
I was nervous about trying to get back to my throne room. It had just happened before. Hopefully it would just happen again.
I started where I had last time, acceptance. I took time to just accept and relax. I threw out my arms, leaned my head back, and closed my eyes. I just accepted and let it all go again.
I accepted the pain that was still there. I accepted that I’d had success with the matrix. I accepted that there was still so much to do.
Once again, I felt power. This time I’d had much more success than before, but I’d still started resisting everything. Letting my worry and fear evaporate gave me back strength I didn’t know I was missing.
I fe
lt my power, and I felt the power of my throne room. I drifted toward it, and then I was there.
My throne room looked like before except it seemed slightly better. I don’t know if I was just used to how poor it looked, or if it genuinely improved. I went and sat on my throne again.
It was still threadbare and hard, but it didn’t look as chipped and faded as before. I looked around again. The throne room was definitely looking better. The ceiling had been a wreck last time, now it just looked moderately dilapidated.
I wasn’t sure exactly what to do with the throne and this space. It felt like the throne was some sort of command center. I should be able to do something with it. How it worked I wasn’t sure. I was really here for some sleep, though.
The cot was still there, with the perfect pillow and the comfortable blanket neatly folded beside it. I told my throne ‘Thank you.’ That just seemed the right thing to do somehow. Then I went over and laid down on the cot. I pulled up the blanket and snuggled in.
It felt perfect. I took a deep breath. Gave a long sigh. And fell asleep.
19 Hold the Shields
I woke up to the sound of an air raid siren.
It was so loud I felt the House vibrate. Tyler was with me. He shot up in bed and bolted out of the room.
The wail went on and on and on. I didn’t know what was happening, but nobody could be sleeping through this. I wanted to cover up my ears, until I realized the alarm was magical. I was hearing it magically somehow.
Finally, it cut off and all was quiet for a moment. Then I heard a distant boom. There was a long pause, and then another one. What the heck was happening?
I felt a gentle presence flow over my aura. It was unlike anything I’d felt before. It felt ancient, but friendly. It seemed to interface with me somehow, and my magic vision suddenly expanded.
It was like I was suddenly in the air above the House. I could see the whole House and everything in it, as well as the park and the whole street. The view was amazing and I quickly caught up on what was happening.
Misfit Mage Page 24