That night, Lumina was tortured in his nightmare for hours. She was slowly overcome by her curse, growing more and more monstrous as the blackness crept from her hand, down her arm, and into her heart. Or she’d be torn apart by Awnadil’s cruel and cackling familiars, or blasted to ashes by the dragon. “She’ll leave you. She’ll always leave you.” The words repeated over and over through his mind.

The only thing that helped was knowing that wasn’t real. He watched it all silently, feeling the dream-emotions push into him and knowing this was all in his head.

The worst part was that inside his little dreamworld he had no idea how much time had passed. He felt like he'd been suffering through these nightmares for days or weeks, but in reality it might have only been an hour or two. There was nothing to do but lie there and suffer as his mind sent him every horrible image it could think of.

Eventually, something changed. In the middle of having her intestines devoured by wolves, dream-Lumina suddenly stopped. Her face went blank and she stared at Brin with an inscrutable expression. Her skin paled, her hair went dark and her features started to shift.

He felt a sudden burst of panic. Different, somehow from the dream emotions, this felt more real. He allowed himself to wake up.

He half expected a monster to be creeping into his room, but there was nothing there except Marksi sleeping at the foot of his bed, softly snoring with little squeaks.

He’d only slept for three hours. Today was going to be a rotten day. He tried to get back to sleep, but his heart was racing and his head was swimming. He lay there until dawn.

In the morning, the house felt empty. Hogg got up and made breakfast, which summoned Brin to the dining room, but they ate without speaking. Hogg’s eyes were distant, thinking about something.

When Hogg finished his eggs and fried mato, he jolted as if realizing Brin was there for the first time. “I’m going to talk to the caravan leaders today.”

“Sounds good. I think I want to work on those spells you gave me for my birthday. I’ve been focusing so much on glass recently that I’ve kind of neglected illusions,” said Brin.

Hogg shrugged. “You already have the main things. Dulling sound for sneaking up on monsters and bright lights for distractions; that’s all I had until I got [Split Focus].”

“Fair enough, but I just want to have every tool ready in case I need it. Speaking of neglected Skills, do you think there’s anything I can do with [Know What’s Wyrd]? I have resistance against Wyrd abilities, but I wonder if it’s something I could improve with practice. I also have a part of [Survivor of Travin’s Bog] I haven't used much. It should give me a warning if someone is about to deliver a fatal wound. I think I felt it go off once in the fight with Siphani, but I haven't felt anything from it since then.”

“Because no one has tried to kill you recently. Most people would call that a good thing. As for [Know What’s Wyrd], maybe Bruna would be willing to help you practice? But I honestly wouldn’t go there. [Witches] aren’t a Class to fool around with. Their hexes work off real spite. She can’t curse you unless she actually has animosity and believes that you deserve what she’s doing to you. You’d be asking her to toe a thin line.”

Brin grunted. “Maybe not, then.”

Hogg left, and he turned his attention to his birthday present. He’d been pretty excited to get started on the illusions that Hogg had written out for him, but now that he actually had time for that, he found himself strangely unmotivated. He spent a long time staring blankly at the papers, running his eyes along the words without reading them.

Pathetic. They’d only lived together for two months, and suddenly he couldn’t function without her? He activated [Directed Meditation] and got to work.

He started with the shortest one, Fire Starter. It was only four sentences long, and he was able to activate it the first time, a little pinprick of light that was hot enough to slowly light a candle after leaving it on the wick for twenty seconds. If he pumped more mana in, it would burn a little faster. He could get a fire started much easier by creating a lens with his glass magic and hanging it in the air, but still, he was using his light magic for something and that was a start.

He also knew he could do better. With his newly broadened understanding of the Language, he could add more meaning into each of the words and shorten the spell. Honestly, he could probably start fires with just <Light> at this point, but it wasn’t very mana-efficient. After an hour or so of experimentation, he settled on a happy medium.

“<Summon Light, Energetically Concentrate and Combine. Burn!>” The resulting concentrated dot of light was hot enough to light a candle after only two seconds.

Satisfied, he started on the next one. Copy Light looked fairly easy to cast, only about half a page of Language, but he also didn’t have any illusions to copy. He didn’t know if Hogg’s hard light would work for this; he assumed it probably wouldn’t. He decided to leave that one for later.

He also passed on Self-Invisibility. That one would be incredibly useful when he could get it working, but it was dauntingly long, three pages front and back. He was in the mood for something lighter.

Invisible Eye was a good compromise. The spell was only about as long as Mirror Image, which he’d already proved he could handle.

Reciting the spell for the first time went a lot quicker than he’d expected. When he’d first learned Mirror Image, it had taken him hours upon hours of effort to learn each of the words well enough to put them all together into a spell that would activate. This time, he got most of them on the first try, after only a little bit of study and thought. Lumina’s tutelage had borne serious fruit here. His spell power had increased by leaps and bounds, but he was starting to see that his increased ability to learn was the real prize. He’d have to tell her so in his next letter.

Soon enough, the spell activated for the first time and his awareness shifted to a small eye, floating invisibly in the air in front of him.

Now he had a new problem. The spell was simple to use while [Directed Meditation] kept his focus on it, but while using that he couldn’t concentrate on actually looking around. He had to let the meditation state go, but when he did that the spell collapsed.

He cast it again, this time without [Directed Meditation] and kept it going for a minute, but when he started to notice how strange and warped the world looked through his new eye, he lost concentration and it fell apart.

It took several cycles of trial and error before he found the right balance. He had to keep just enough attention on the spell to keep it going, while at the same time having enough brainpower left to actually direct the invisible eye and think about what it was looking at.

Hearing also took a minute to get used to. It was like having a third ear, far separate from his body. Not as jarring as having a third eye, but it was a distraction when he wasn’t expecting it. This was a spell for spying or scouting, and it could both see and hear despite its name.

It was sort of like driving a car. When he first learned, all his attention was absorbed with remembering each of the steps. Left pedal to brake, right pedal for gas–never mix them up! But after a while it became second nature and he could move the car without thinking about it. Same concept, this was just a matter of practice.

His first trial sent the eye through the wall, down the road and into town. The eye careened down the road at a blinding speed, the trees and landscape blurring by. When he got into town he sent the eye high up into the air. That image updated his mental map; he had a pretty good understanding of every street and corner in Hammon’s Bog by now, but something about seeing it all at once firmed the map in his mind the way that nothing else could. It also drove home how small it was, and how widespread the damage from the undead army had been. More than half of the town was still being rebuilt.If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Before he realized what he was doing, he started spying on everyone. He found Hogg first, in the town square. He was chatting with the caravan master, and after a few boring minutes of listening to exactly where the caravan had picked up their last shipment of beef tallow, Brin decided to move on.

He found Zilly next, practicing her swordwork. She was in the area behind Toros’ shop practicing against a sparring dummy. She danced around, dodging invisible enemies, and delivering punishment to a wooden log that had been roughly decorated to look like a man. He wondered how long she’d go on, after all no one was around to watch her, but as the minutes dragged by, Zilly showed no signs of stopping.

He drifted away to find Davi instead. The big guy wasn’t at his farm or the family’s house in town. He checked the public house, but he wasn’t there either. He widened his search, and only found him half by accident.

Davi was creeping down the alleyways, lute case in hands, looking decidedly suspicious. He avoided eye contact, kept to the side streets, and doubled back two or three times to make sure he wasn’t being followed.

He made his way to the walls, newly cleared away and not yet rebuilt, and then sprinted the entire way into the forest. Once inside the cover of trees, he turned around to watch the town to see if anyone was following.

Throughout it all, Brin’s curiosity only increased. What was Davi up to that he was so afraid of letting anyone see? Could this have something to do with Bruna? Brin still didn’t know if Davi knew that his mother was a [Witch].

It might actually be something even more private, and Brin wondered if he better not just cut the illusion here.

Davi knelt on the ground and pulled open his lute case. Inside, lay the big lute, what Davi had called an Oud. But on the lid, there was a netting full of books. Davi glanced both ways, took out a book, and began to read.

Brin checked the cover. A collection of myths from Ithmal. He looked at the other titles. Histories, a book of songs, and a book on persuasive essays.

Davi was just… reading.

Now he felt bad. Brin had teased Davi for being smart one time and he’d given the big guy a complex over it. He’d make sure to be in the middle of a book the next time Davi came over, just to show that there was nothing to be ashamed of.

Lumina had made a few comments to Brin that he should spend a bit more time reading, which was still crazy to him. In his old life, his parents had urged him to spend less time reading and to go outside once in a while. Why was he so different now? Had he become a jock in this life?

Recently, it was hard to do anything that took a lot of mental focus while sitting still because of how tired he always was. But what about before that?

Well, Davi was boring, so Brin moved on.

Myra was next. He found her in her [Weaver’s] hut. Whether it hadn’t been destroyed or if it had been rebuilt he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that it looked exactly like it had the last time he’d snuck inside, with the exception of the strange fate weaving that had been hanging in the middle of the room.

Myra sat alone, winding and unwinding the unbreakable string she had. After a minute, she let the string fall, wearily made her way to her bed and fell into it face first. Her shoulders shook, and she quietly wept into the covers.

The utter shamelessness of what he was doing finally caught up with him. Brin stopped the spell.

[Call Light through Glass] has leveled up! 31-> 32