MAGUS INFINITE

Could my life get any crazier?

I should have known better than to ask, even inside my own head, because the universe has a sense of humor and it is not a kind one. But for the moment nothing answered me, just the chill deepening in my soul, as I stood on the roof of a rising god’s prison.

I hung in the black, gasping, the cold of the void pressing against my skin like a thousand needles. The pyramid continued its impossible ascent beneath me, a thirty-kilometer spear of ancient stone thrusting into the darkness between stars. Something about its momentum had changed; I did not think the Pale Matron was pushing it any longer, but she had already accomplished her desire, and one part of her prison had returned to the void, but the only problem was that it was now empty.

I fell on my back, gasping in pain, as the wound in my shoulder was still weeping silver blood, the flesh raw and torn where the Thul’s teeth had been buried, as my shoulder chose to remind me that it was in ruin.

I needed to stitch myself together before the second Thul returned, or if it did not, find a way to survive this journey in space, and plan my next move, because not in a thousand years did I imagine myself to be here. I had only climbed the Caelith to escape the devastation that would arise from the Pale Matron Awakening, not find myself in freaking space.

Threads of lightning emerged from my fingers as I pulled my focus towards healing. I had learned this technique from the Hollow Avatar, watched it stitch my severed arm back to my body in the crater beneath Caelith Mourne. Now I would do it myself.

I pushed the threads into the wound, and the pain was immediate and total. The threads weaved through torn muscle, pulling them back into place, sealing the ruptured vessels. I gritted my teeth and kept working.

My flesh was attuned with lightning to a ridiculous degree, but it was still flesh, and although becoming Lightning Incarnate could make me lightning, I would still have to return to my body.

The cold of space was already trying to freeze the moisture on my skin, but my body was not the same as it had been. The Celestial Marrow in my bones was burning, generating heat, keeping me alive in a place where no mortal should survive. Heck, I did not know I could survive the void of space until this moment, and it was almost surprising to me how well my body was holding up.

I thought about the Thul’s flesh magic as I worked. The way it had reshaped itself, flowing like water, its body a canvas for its will. It had been able to heal wounds by consuming its own torn flesh, to grow armor from its skin, to stretch and contort in ways that defied biology. It was disgusting, but so amazing to see the extent that magic could reshape something as tangible as flesh.

Titan’s Marrow was the same thing, wasn’t it? My body could expand, grow, compress itself into a smaller, denser form. But I had never thought to use it the way the Thul did, to actively reshape my flesh, to heal wounds by willing them closed, to grow armor or weapons from my own body.

The Thul had shown me what was possible. It had been a terrible teacher, but a teacher nonetheless.

I was no longer in the Academy; I did not have access to teachers, books, or the vast resources that thousands of years of magus civilization could give me. Instead, my teachers were my enemies... I had a singular desire to stop the ending of the world, and everything I was becoming was a counter to their abilities.

I know that my developmental pathways and my spells and abilities must be awfully skewed at the moment, but I was still satisfied with my progress. I was not aiming to be a complete mage, just the antithesis to my enemies, and I had a lot of time to refine myself into something like that.

I closed the last of the wounds and flexed my shoulder. The muscles pulled tight, but they held. The threads would dissolve in time, absorbed by my body, leaving only the memory of the injury behind, coupled with the insane vitality of my body and the strength of my soul that would ensure that my flesh always returned to a perfect condition without scarring; then it would not be long before I was a hundred percent.

Sighing in contentment as the pain had been greatly reduced, I looked up, and the stars were everywhere. Now, these were not the faint, distant stars I had seen from the surface of the world; no, these were bright, close, and seemingly hungry.

They burned with a cold, ancient light that made my soul ache. I could see the void between them, the endless black that stretched in every direction, and I felt the weight of it pressing against my consciousness.

Closing my eyes for a moment to rid myself of the shock of the moment, I opened them to really observe what I was looking at.

Space was not like the sky. The sky had air, sound, the familiar touch of the world. Space was silent, like a question that had no answer.

I have looked up at night my whole life, at the familiar scatter of lights over Aelmar, and thought I understood what a star was. I understood nothing. Up here, past the last of the air, they burned.

There were more of them than the sky below had ever shown me, a black filled edge to edge with cold fire and nothing between me and any of it. Just me and the stars.

For one breath I forgot the fight. I forgot the gate, and the demon god below. Something in me ached, because the heavens in all its immensity was beautiful, in a way that I did not think I would ever be able to describe, since every one would look at the heavens and see a different thing, it was just too massive for one mind to hold... and I knew that Aurora would have loved it more than anything, and she was asleep at the bottom of my soul and could not see it.

’I’ll show you,’ I said to the sleeping warmth. ’When you wake. I’ll get you up here somehow and show you the real stars, and you’ll say something insufferable, and I’ll let you.’

My magic felt strange here. Lightning Incarnate, which had always been a part of me, now felt like a foreign language. The essence that powered my spells was thin, scattered, barely present. In the void, there was no air to carry the charge, no atmosphere to ground the lightning. My spells would work, but they would cost more, and they would be less stable.

And the space around me, the fabric of reality itself, seemed to warp and twist in ways I could not fully comprehend. My Space Resonance was screaming at me, telling me that something was very, very wrong.

Frowning, I opened my status screen to check if I could detect any changes in them, and what I saw made my heart stop.