LSRO: Chapter 48 - Such a Crick in the... (Patreon)

Why yes, this is yet another, perhaps slightly more obscure chapter reference (since I don't complete the saying). Ahhhh I love doing this.

Anyhu! Another extra chapter so I can finish writeathon!

Here is the next chapter!

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Chapter 48

Suck a crick in the…

The screaming in her own head wouldn't stop. It felt like something was ripping her brain from its cavity, flaying the skin from her bones.

And then it stopped.

Suddenly.

Everything around her became dark and soothing, at least externally. She could feel, more than hear, Aradie's panicked hooting and the flash of her wings against Quinn's face, as if they were open. The throbbing inside her head felt worse than any migraine Quinn had ever experienced in her life, even worse than the car accident she'd been in with her parents when she was twelve.

A concussion had nothing on this.

She could feel the bile rising in her throat, the need to expel anything from her body. She rolled over onto her left elbow and emptied her guts, before rolling back to lie on the cool mat in the training room. She could hear voices now, whispering softly. Malachi sounded guilty and Milaro was there, she thought, if she identified the voice correctly. But she couldn't quite tell through all the pounding.

What she could hear was a sibilant whisper in the back of her mind if she concentrated, telling her that not all was as it seemed and that magic was chaos. Chaos should have free reign. Chaos could help her feel no pain ever again.

It made her wonder for a moment if maybe it could. Was that really how things worked? Would it perhaps be better to simply give in to the magic and let it have its way? Sure, it might consume some who were weaker...

She blinked her eyes open as a hoot echoed around her. Encompassing and safe. Aradie stood with her beak right in front of Quinn's nose, bearing down on her, looking directly into Quinn's eyes. Hoot she said again. Be careful, be safe, protection. Thoughts, not your own.

Quinn blinked and the blinking let too much light in, which made her grip her head as she rolled to the right side and pushed herself up onto her knees. She gasped for air, blinking more and directed the library to dim whatever lights were in the training room. She couldn't handle the bright light all around her. It was too much.

"Quinn," Milaro rushed over to her. "Are you okay? Let me just test." He held his hands about an inch shy on each side of her head and after an inquiring peck to his hand, he glanced at the owl and said, "I'm not hurting her. I'm healing her."

Aradie shuffled sideways and remained next to Quinn, alert and aggressive. Milaro continued to hold his hands over Quinn's head and slowly, very slowly, the migraine receded and the pain faded into a dull stinging. She squeezed her eyes shut again.

Quinn wasn't sure how, but she could tell that Milaro had crouched down next to her.

"How are you feeling, Quinn?" he asked, his voice soothing and soft.

Aradie appeared to be on alert still. Quinn could feel a wariness radiating from the owl, and she appreciated it. It felt, ever since Lynx's absence, like she'd been more on her own, and Aradie really made her feel a little safer. Even though she was quite certain that Milaro meant her no ill will, it was still nice to know that she definitively had somebody in her corner.

"I feel like shit," Quinn said, analyzing every space of her still-pounding head, even if it wasn't in as much agony as it had been several minutes ago.

"Well, it's good that you're cohesive enough to express that," he said. "I need you to stand up, and I need you to come and sit down on a seat."

Quinn took the hand he offered and rose, blinking her eyes back open again. She felt shaky on her limbs as if she couldn't quite trust them, but she followed him obediently to the couch and sat down.

"You may not feel like it right now, but it is the best time for you to learn and harness your mental skills. I apologize for telling Malakai to instruct you in something that he is not an expert in." There was genuine remorse in Milaro's words. They resonated through Quinn.

"See, I didn't mean to hurt you." Malakai sounded pretty pissed off. She couldn't see him, there were still kind of blurs in front of her eyes, but she didn't need to, to know that the Elf Prince was pissed off at his grandfather.

"I did not expect your reactions to be so instinctive, which compounded the exercise I instructed Malakai to give you."

Quinn nodded and wished she hadn't, because it made her head pound more.

"Okay, here," Malakai handed her one of the food pouches from Cook. In it was a juice of some kind that she didn't recognize, didn't care about because she was dying of thirst, and one of those little energy balls. It tasted different when she popped it in her mouth though, with a definite sesame seed-esque flavor to it. It was delicious.

"That's just for body recovery. It's a gem that one. It'll help rejuvenate body and fight the nausea and the headaches," Milaro said.

Malakai scowled and threw himself down on the other end of the couch. "How are you feeling?"

"I'm feeling much better, I think." And she wasn't lying. Quinn legitimately thought the world was ending for her not fifteen minutes ago.

"Excellent." Milaro rubbed his hands together. "Now, you are going to pull on minimal energy when you utilize your abilities, and you will pull on a lot more mana when you activate the skills that count as a type of spell casting."

She really didn't want to learn. All she wanted to do was curl up in a ball and go to sleep. But she knew this had to be done. She couldn't keep putting this off or she'd end up getting them all killed. "Is that like when I build my walls?"

"No. That expends energy to construct and maintain. You're not casting those. That's not necessarily a blink of an eye sort of ability, but it could be once you practice first, get faster at it, and then it becomes a reflex, which draws on energy and not mana." Milaro explained into her haze of confusion.

Quinn blinked. "Couldn't they have just pooled mana and energy and made the system so much easier?"

"Well, I'm not sure who you think this 'they' is," Milaro said, a grin on his face. "But no, the universe was set up this way. It's been like that since time immemorial. Just get used to it."

"Great, so the universe doesn't even have logic," Quinn mumbled. But with the pain even farther gone now, she found that she was ready to learn whatever this next lesson would be. "Okay, boss, tell me what to do."

"I just want you to sit, cross your legs as if you're about to absorb a book, and relax. Ease your mind, close your eyes, and feel out every nook and cranny that you can sense inside of your head. Every area that thoughts enter, that actions come from, everything where your memories reside, feel it all out." He spoke in an almost hypnotic way. Soothing, and calming.

Quinn obliged him, finding that it felt much more spacious in her mind than she'd anticipated. It was an odd sensation. She nodded slowly, painfully aware of how her mind moved when she did so.

He continued on in an almost droning tone, like someone who was trying to lull her to sleep. "Excellent. Now we're going to go back into the mental blocking and fortitude that we should have been working on a lot slower. I want you to take each of those blocks and blend them with the mortar and push them together mentally. You have to feel them click into each other."

Quinn concentrated hard. It took a long time. The bricks kept slipping out of the mortar, and she couldn't understand how she had originally thought it was so easy. And that's when one of them basically bent to the will of the mortar. It wasn't clicked in. It was sort of just hanging. So what she had done was constructed more of a hammock originally, and hammocks had holes, which meant that the attacks eventually overwhelmed and broke through those holes.

"Wow," she said out loud. "I was way too eager earlier."

"Yes, but that isn't your fault," Malakai said.

"Stop blaming me." His grandfather snapped.

But Malakai's mood obviously wasn't getting better. "Well, it was your fault."

"Stop arguing," Quinn snapped. "It's okay. I've got it now."

And finally, a brick clicked into place, and the more she did it, the faster she could click them together. The first several took a while, but after what seemed like 20 minutes, she had a nice little four-by-20 wall going. She paused, opening her eyes.

"I think I get it now."

"Excellent," Milaro said. "Now we move on. Now that you know how to construct your own defenses, you can do so and leave them intact permanently. Tuning them up when you need to. But for now we have to go and look at what has already been seeded inside your mind."

"Inside my mind? What do you mean?" Quinn felt a wariness at his words but realized it didn't come from her. No. It came from something that felt foreign to her.

"Where do you think that dream with Kajaro came from? I'm not exactly sure how far forward he planned everything, but your interactions with him were no accident. He might not have thought that you would get the jump on him in the end, but he planted thoughts in your head. He planted events for you to witness when you close your eyes and when your guard is down. We have to ferret them out, figure out how he did it, and make sure we protect you from any future onslaughts." This time Milaro's tone was anything but soothing.

It has hard, determined, and protective.

Quinn decided that she definitely liked his plan. "Okay, let's do this," she said.

Milaro sighed. "I'm going to need you to give me your hands, and I will need you to trust me enough to guide you."

Aradie chose that moment to inch closer and onto Quinn's shoulder again. She rubbed her wings against Quinn's head and images flooded Quinn's mind. Safety. Protection. And basically the sensation that no harm would come to Quinn while Aradie was there.

Quinn raised an eyebrow and looked at Milaro. "You realize she's going to peck you to death if you try to do something to me, right?"

Milaro chuckled. "Yes, I am quite sure she would do precisely that."

"Okay then, let's get this over with." And with that, Milaro dove in with her. At first, the sensation of someone else's thoughts, of their presence along with her in her innermost sanctum felt decidedly wrong. But after a short while her hesitance vanished. The aura that accompanied Milaro was perhaps a smidgen mischievous, but there was nothing malevolent about it.

He taught her how to strengthen the blocks that she'd already built. How to reinforce the mortar and allow for more flexibility so it could absorb attacks and reflect attacks without coming undone. He taught her how to concentrate. How to leverage her counterattacks using the weight of those that were flung against her mind. And how to barricade herself down like an igloo with no entrance or exit in times when someone might simply force an all-out onslaught onto her mind.

That way she would be ultimately protected.

Her mind would be anyway.

Quinn wove her defenses and began accepting attacks from Milaro. His were pointed and not wild. Not like Malakai's. They were both at the same time easier and far more difficult to deflect. But eventually, she got it down. When the point hit, she allowed it to absorb into the brick ever so slightly before catapulting it back out the other side toward her attacker. The more she practiced, the easier it would be to target that specific return.

She let out a deep sigh and looked up at Milaro. "Okay. I'm ready for you to dive in deeper."

He nodded solemnly. "It might hurt. I can tell it's pretty far in."

Quinn nodded. "I know. While I was out of it, I had some thoughts I don't think I would have by myself."

Melaro nodded. Whether he really understood, Quinn couldn't be sure. But she knew those thoughts about chaotic energy and how perhaps chaotic magic was the best way for magic to exist. She knew those thoughts weren't her own. They'd never been her own.

She could feel his consciousness sink into her own. Seeking out something. Not knowing exactly what he was looking for. Aradie's presence on her exterior was still there. Foreboding toward any enemies and yet oddly comforting for Quinn. She allowed herself to relax.

Milaro's thoughts were distinctively not inquisitive. He didn't seek any other part of her. He was simply following a very thin strand that Quinn was quite certain led to whatever Kajaro had left in her head. The elf moved in a deliberate, determined way bypassing anything personal.

There were flashes of the fight by the lake. Of the way his magic had hit her. Of the way the void he had cast had clipped her hairs at the side of her head. She hadn't even noticed. Messy buns. Messy ponytails had always been her forte. It was easy not to notice them go missing. And that's how Kajaro had got a foothold. Through that minuscule touch, a hair follicle. He had burried in under her skin and threw that seed into the very depths of her thoughts.

She shuddered. "It's okay," Milaro's voice spoke both in and outside of her head. It was an odd cacophony of sound, of words, and of comfort. She allowed herself to relax even if it was one of the most difficult things she had ever done.

And then she could see it at the same time that he did.

There at the very back of her thought process was this tiny sliver of doubt. Doubt about everything.

About everything new she had learned.

About everything she had ever been told.

Including all the information about her parents and her life back on earth.

She paused. There was something else underlying it all. A grain of what felt like truth. There was comfort from Aradie very briefly, the glimpse of a comforting aura, but then it was gone. Instead, something about her parents' death wasn't what she'd known. How she would find that out now that she wasn't on earth, she didn't know.

Milaro dug deeper, pulling through. Until he finally tapped directly onto the chaos Kajaro implanted in her head.

It was like a tiny ball that slowly spun. So much until it swirled like a vortex. Like the vortex he had cast on her. And it began to suck everything in from all around it into a black hole.

Which included their consciousnesses.

Quinn was no longer in the library. No longer sitting on a couch in the training room. No longer surrounded by Malachi, Milaro, and Aradie. Milaro stood there in front of her. Perplexed in his expression. But Aradie was not there. Her presence only lingered ever so faintly on the outside.

It was the only thing that led Quinn to know this was only a vision. And she wasn't alone. And Milaro was not the threat.

She took a deep breath, centered and then calmed herself.

"Well done, Quinn," Milaro said, his voice ever so slightly strained. "This is unexpected."

The bluey-black vortex enlarged in the middle of the room. Swirling and pulling everything from the edges in toward it, even tugging at the two of them now. Very slowly, Milaro inched around to stand next to her.

"This is entirely unexpected. Hold on to me. We'll get out of this."

Quinn wondered if he could sense the lack of conviction in his words.

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TADAAAAAA

It's okay... tomorrow is another chapter!

You see - I'm obsessed with mind magic, and while I didn't go into this with the intention to mind magic everything - I mean knowledge is power and where does knowledge initially reside (before it translates to muscle memory or anything else)? The brain! Mind magic.

WEEEEEEE

Okay... Okay

Let me know what you thought!

Much love

KT