I kept talking well into the night, rambling about alchemical reagents I had learned to cultivate after much trouble. It took a long time for me to realize that Val was sound asleep and probably had been for quite a while by that point. God their sleeping face is cute, much softer and natural than the mask they wear around the castle. That mask comes off to a point when it’s just the two of us but I wish they didn’t have to wear one at all. But when you’re pretending without knowing you are, the mask becomes second nature until either it consumes you or you shatter it. 

I want the best for Val but I think that learning how to shatter the mask has to be something you do yourself. I can’t force them to change no matter how much I want to set them free. I can, however, provide all the support that I possibly can while I’m here. 

But ohmygoshohmygosh I can do magic! Magic!  Gods, it was like my second love in this game right behind crafting. I one time checked to see if I re-specced as a Wizard what my spell casting proficiency would be. Turns out, I would’ve been able to mop the floor with pretty much any boss. Whether fortunately or unfortunately, I was a Witch, a spellcasting class focused on support and crafting, specifically alchemy but they get a few skills that are helpful to crafting anything. Part of why I chose Witch. I also chose Witch because there are so many cute outfits for them! Granted any class can wear any clothing except for exceptionally rare class-specific gear. Buuuut the witchy outfits really only feel right when they’re on a witch. To me at least. Oh, right, Wizard is a class based around high damage output, specifically giving bonuses to area of effect spells. They also have a bonus towards the ease with which they can learn new spells which I always felt made them cheating fuckwads but that’s just me. 

Man the more I think about it, the angrier I get at myself for giving up before I even tried to cast magic post-mortem. Currently I’m experimenting with the plants in Val’s flower box that they had to fight an entire squad of knights in order to get. I guess ol’ Robutt felt that if something as girly as a flower box was going in his ‘son’s’ room then by god he’d make sure Val was masculine enough to outweigh it. Which is stupid and just goes to show how much of a prick he is. Right, experimenting. I started off using some very simple nature spells, like Lesser Growth and Seed Harvest. 

Lesser Growth does what it says on the tin: grows plants a bit faster. Like fast enough that if you look away and then look back you’d be like “wow that plant grew fast!” but compared to some of the higher level spells it’s still slow as a molasses. We had a few marigolds that hadn’t yet bloomed so I used Lesser Growth in order to speed them up a bit and they’re gorgeous in the moonlight coming in through the window. I wish Val were awake so they could see it. 

Seed Harvest also does what it says on the tin, though there’s a bit more of a magic flare to it. It’s less a harvest and more a creation, cause the plant keeps its original seeds. Seed Harvest involves you choosing a plant in range that is fully grown, and then putting magic into it while making a motion with your hand like drawing a horizontal line with your index finger. I like to think it’s a finger scythe harvesting the plants. When your finger reaches the end of the line, a little pile of seeds will start to form in your palm. I have used Seed Harvest in the past to gather seeds from megaflora before and let me tell you, Seed Harvest makes the same number of seeds every time and when they don’t all fit in your hand they start spawning on top of the last one, which led to a severe concussion when I harvested the Giant Steel Pine’s seed cones. Each one is about the size of a basketball and weighs as much as twenty pounds. Now imagine 5 of those stacked on top of each other without regard for balance in your hand. Yeah it was not a good time. Got a pretty penny out of it though. Steel Pines are great for armor as they are essentially steel mixed with a stupid amount of elemental nature. Normally, steel has trace amounts of both earth and fire, so having natural steel is a blessing for crafters and those that are focused around the nature element. 

So now Val has a small pile of mixed flower and herb seeds on their floor by the window, as when the seeds formed in my hand they just fell straight through. Whoops. Sorry to the maids, or Val, depending on which one gets to the pile first. Still, I’m pretty pleased with the outcome of the experiment. What to test next that won’t wake Val up? Or trash the room. Oooh got it. I’ll just head outside. Man ghost powers can be great every once in a while!

I close my eyes and think of myself floating through the wall. I can’t do it with my eyes open as what counts as my body still reacts viscerally to the knowledge that people can’t walk through walls and when I tried as a kid it hurt so so much. I don’t even feel the wall pass through me and then I’m outside of the second tallest tower in the castle, also known as Raven’s Roost, because of the eerie attraction of an unkindness of ravens on the roof. Still, I like to think they look out for Val so I like them. Val also likes them, giving them little gifts when no one’s looking. The ravens seem to understand the unspoken rule of these exchanges and will gift them little shiny rocks, twigs, little things. Val has a little box they made as a proof of concept when I was teaching them basic carpentry that they use to keep the gifts. 

I float to the roof and see the unkindness mostly asleep but with a few night sentinels. I give the sentinel a nod, they nod back. That’s another reason I like them: ravens can see me! So can cats, bats, crows, owls, snakes, and vultures. I have no idea why it seems to just be these but I’m happiest that the cats and corvids can see me. Cats are my favorite animal, followed by corvids of all types. I imagine sitting on the edge of the roof, swinging my legs over the void while I ponder what spell to use. I turn towards Frankie, the name I gave this raven just now, and tell him that I’m about to cast some magic and not to freak out as I won’t hit any of our friends. Another nod and he also hops over to stand beside me, looking out at the moon with me. 

Chin in hand I think about what magic I want to cast. The unkindness has put me in a gothic mood, so let’s do some dark magic. Not like “Banned for being evil” dark magic but “operating off the element of dark” magic. Some people call it shadow magic, but it’s not all shadow themed so I just say dark magic. I cross my fingers, pointed downwards. As I do, the very essence of the darkness surrounding me begins to creep over my body, coalescing in my fingertips dyeing them a pure and honestly beautiful dark. When I feel I’ve gathered enough energy, in one motion I uncross my fingers and point them outwards in a flicking motion. This results in innumerable tentacles of that beautiful dark extending from my fingers like the lashes of a whip. They succeed in grabbing nothing, as I directed them into the void but had there been, say, a living creature there the Shadow Lashes would’ve pierced them and developed hooks on the ends, effectively trapping the prey. It’s a highly effective spell to limit movement. The longer you charge it, the greater the number of lashes and thus the greater the amount of force required to break free. 

Frankie gives a small cawing noise of approval and bounces over to rest on my not-knee, which amounts to him sitting inside my leg. As much as they can apparently see souls, it seems that nothing can interact with me. A shame because Frankie here’s real friendly and I’d love to pet him a bit. 

Moving on, I decide to go a bit nutso with my next spell. As one of the top tier spells, period, it requires a bit of chanting. It sucks that the developers were amazingly good at coming up with cringe to force the players to say because the incantation was:

“Oh holy and most malevolent darkness, heed my call and gather to me. Grant me your power in this, my time of need, when all hope is lost. I call upon the Goddess of Night and the God of Murder, the spirits of shadow and the creatures of darkness and hereby make this pact: All I see and hate will be snuffed out in this, my Black Hole!”

Meanwhile, whilst chanting that horrible incantation, I have been making a ridiculous series of hand gestures. Not that they gestures themselves are ridiculous, just the fact that there’s like 30 poses you have to do. But once I’ve finished the chant and the gestures I reach out my hand, palm down, then clench my fist. Immediately a pinprick of nothingness appears in the air about 400 feet in front of me, quickly growing to the size of an apple at which point it stops. Immediately when it was created, the air in the surroundings began to rush into the literal void, causing a howling wind. Leaves from the tall trees near it begin to get sucked into it and now Frankie’s cawing up a storm and pecking at my leg. I quickly unclench my fist and the Black Hole dissipates as though it was never there. 

Frankie’s cawing has awoken the rest of the unkindness and thankfully got me to stop the spell before anyone got hurt. I bow my head to Frankie and apologize for my thoughtlessness. He croaks once more and pecks my head but then makes a series of gestures and little noises that get the unkindness to settle down and return to their rest. As part of my apology, I promise not to use any area of effect magic while I’m here. 

So what next? I’m avoiding fire and light magic because strange lights appearing around Val’s tower wouldn’t be a good look for us. Similarly, Earth and water magic are out due to the amount of noise they create typically. Mind magic is out as I have no targets I dislike enough to do such things as the messed up spells like “Induce Schizophrenia” which, devs? Not cool. I still learned the spell but never used it for obvious reasons. It also has such wonders as “Induce Migraine” and “Memory Erase”. The latter is one I used once and never again. I had been haggling with an NPC and things started getting heated and he said I was banned from his shop. That seemed unacceptable to me so I mind-whammied him and I’ve regretted it ever since as he just stopped. Stopped everything. Stopped speaking, moving, and I was almost positive he stopped breathing for a solid minute. Then something seemed to snap and he started babbling gibberish and looking at me with a dopey smile, as though every care he’d ever had had been whisked away, along with his higher brain functions. It was like he regressed to a 6-month old’s brain. It was like I erased not just the memory of him banning me, but also every other memory he’d ever made which if I’m honest is one of the most fucked up things I’ve ever done I feel. 

Jeez, now that I think of it, are there any acceptable spells in the school of mind magic? There’s Mind Shatter, which literally shatters someone’s brain which is both horrifying and gross. It also has an extremely low success rate so it’s both not effective and also super messed up in concept. There’s Temporary Hemisphere Separation, which, as its name suggests, separates the two halves of the brain from each other, which thankfully is temporary but also messes up a bunch of things such as learning new motor skills and a lot of verbal functions. So essentially, want to make someone in a position of power look incompetent to the average flunkie? This is your spell. Also, “temporary” means two months. Which is frankly insane. I think the nicest spell in mind magic is “Induce Dream” which, when this was a game to me, had a very narrow use case. Now that it’s my afterlife, I bet I could curate Val’s dreams, making sure they’re pleasant. Or at least changing a nightmare to a comforting dream. Let’s go do that actually. 

I close my eyes and imagine myself leaning backwards and somersaulting through the roof to Val’s room below, flipping twice and landing on my feet perfectly. Who says this acrobatics shit is hard? Perfectly easy when your movements are based on your imagination! I digress. I look over towards Val, who seems to be having a not so nice dream. They’re tossing and turning a lot while muttering something faintly. I’m not one to pry into someone else’s traumas or distress so I don’t cast a simple air magic spell called Extend Hearing. Instead I float over to their bedside and gently place my hand on their head.

This spell is mid-tier for mind magic and as such requires only a bit of a chant. Well, more of a song. I’m not the best singer but I do enjoy singing so it doesn’t sound awful, at least to me. 

“Be still, be calm, and rest under my balm. May your dreams be sweet and keep you safe from harm.”

A much less cringy chant to my ears but that might just be because of the purpose of the spell. There’s also a song to induce nightmares and a song to remove someone’s dream entirely, but again, limited use cases in-game so I don’t remember those as much. The spell is mainly used in a quest where a tribe’s chieftain is suffering from night terrors that all feature his tribe dying in fire. The chieftain saw it as prophecy, but the shaman suspected foul play. In the end, it turns out that there was a dream demon haunting the chieftain. The way you learn this is by casting Induce Dream on the chieftain and in the morning the demon confronts you looking to make a deal: unimaginable wealth in exchange for leaving it to its scheme. If you turn it down and tell the chieftain about it it turns into a trick fight with the trick being that if you Induce Dream on the demon with good dreams, it cleanses it and turns it into a dream spirit. I always liked that quest even though it didn’t give good crafting materials, just because it seemed like a fairly straightforward “helping someone with a problem” kinda quest. The tribe also pays you fairly well which is a plus for any adventurer. 

The dream I gave Val was something I dreamed a long time ago, one of those dreams that stays with you instead of dissolving when morning comes. It’s about a ship on an ocean with the full moon beaming down. Inside the hold is a tavern with a large number of animal people all nursing their drinks and generally giving the silence free reign. Until one starts a song, low and slow and almost a hymn. A song about loss of common things and finding them again after forgetting them. A song about love and indifference. A song about compassion and a song about the bitter sweet taste of memories that we just barely can’t grasp any longer. It starts with one voice but gradually, as the song moves them, more join in until the entire tavern is no longer silent but instead filled with this beautifully melancholy song. The dream ends when the song does, but you wake, or at least I did, with a feeling that the ship will continue to sail the moonlit seas, always calm but also missing what they can no longer remember.

It might not be the happiest dream I could’ve given but it is a memory I treasure and gives me a calm feeling in my soul whenever I remember it. Every time I write it down or try to tell someone about it I know in my heart that I can’t give justice to it with just words. But, passing the memory through a spell should give an exact copy of the dream I think. Val seems to calm down, settling down out of their tossing and turning and relaxing their face. I’m glad they don’t seem to be as distressed anymore. I figure this is enough magic for one night and, checking my status screen, I’m nearly out of mana. Turns out casting mid and high tier magic will take it out of you. I’ll probably get it back by morning though so should be fine. 

Now that I know I can protect Val myself, I feel a lot better about standing guard at night. I imagine hopping up and sitting on the window sill and alternate watching Val sleep and watching the door to the room. All and all, the night passed uneventfully. Oh yeah, Frankie did end up coming down and hanging with me on the sill so that was cool. He left before Val woke up though.