A Different Lens...

Feeling the cobbles underneath my feet I focussed on the sensations traversing my neurons. My sense of smell was first, the pungent wetness of the air muting most odours that possibly could have been picked up by my nose. Sucking in the wet air through my nasal passage all I got was the deep submerging of my sense of smell in nothingness. I opened my mouth a little, my tongue touching the faint movement of air in the space. The result was the same, total Nihility of all senses. The only sense that seemed to work the way I wanted it to were my eyes.

Rapidly I began flicking my eyes between the hallway behind and in front of me. Stomach churning and the feeling of loneliness ever-present, I slowly began walking forwards. Every step was dull and lacked a firm impact. No noise was heard by me, a vacuous nothingness purportedly consuming that as well. Another step, then I found my pace halted, a pressure holding me backwards from my destination. My nose was scrunched and squished before I pulled back. Checking my nose with my right hand I slowly extended my left out to touch what had stopped me. A solid wall. More solid than anything I had ever touched.

Reaching for my magic I quickly realised my predicament. Feeling my mana was impossible. I grimaced as I slowly stepped backwards, worry shooting across my body in the form of shivers.

'Think Silviana... Raistlin said it had to do with my eyes...'

I stood perfectly still for several moments, my thoughts and sight being the only things available to me at this current moment. The lights flickered again, a faint whispering on the wind shuddering through the almost-still air. Jolting to the direction that had come from the essence of something was being picked up by my sight.

'My eyes can let me access the luminal space. It can also allow me to see magic and essences completely...'

A hiss resounded at the end of the hallway behind me. Wet plopping noises began to also echo from the direction also. Another hiss, hundreds of voices combining into a choir of barely whispered screams. I contemplated if my hackles were raised currently before abandoning the stray thought, searching what I could use about my eyes.

'Shit! Um, um, um... It was created because of a merge of Dunamancy and Time Magic. This created a physique which then merged with the Amulet's gift.' I narrowed my eyes, a tug on my brain calling forth hundreds of bits of data. How I had used it, what the system had said it was capable of. 

"HssSSssssSSSssss...HssSSssssSSSssss... HssSSssssSSSssssHssSSssssSSSssss... HssSSssssSSSssssHssSSssssSSSssssHssSSssssSSSssss... HssSSssssSSSssss..."

Hundreds of voices soon bloated to thousands. Images of people I had killed floating to the surface of my mind. Friends killed in combat in my last life, experiences I had seen from the hiding place of an assassin. Watching entire city blocks be smothered in gore as macro-canons decimated entire sky-scrapers. AA shot stealth-fighters from the sky which landed in the middle of rigorous trench warfare in the main city streets. Plasma Rockets melted entire floors of buildings, dust and bricks dropping from hundreds of metres onto the heads of soldiers...

My entire mind twitched as my thought process came back to my eyes. 

'The eyes said they could look into the future but Morgan said it was dangerous or at least I took it as implied. Is that what he wants me to explore? Time magic, in this scenario!?'

"HssSSssssSSSssssHssSSssssSSSssssHssSSssssSSSssss... Ssss-Iii-lviana, help usss... you could have helped usssSSS!"

A being of pure chaos and madness slowly trudged ,with hundreds of feet below it, towards me. I made a quick guess from first looks and immediately calculated that it had to have over 2000 eyes. The feet were all disjointed, broken, twisted at weird angles. Its movements were disjointed, unnatural, almost like the Ring girl from that one horror movie. A siren's call of madness flashed into my mind once more, my epiphany disrupted as my consciousness was taken back to war. 

"SILVIANA! GET DOWN...!"

Romero from my company jumped in front of me, pushing me over as a sloppy noise soon followed. On top of me now was the innards of my friend, blood drenching my clothes, the smell putrid and metallic. Crimson soaked into all of my clothes and weapons as not a single part of me was free of gore. An explosion rocked the entire trench as screams from women and men in equal part soared through the battlefield. Chunks of enemy soldiers and our own were splattered through everything surrounding the battlefield. A macabre street art that had none of the vibrancy and all of the dark connotations. 

Light flashed through my mind as the creature was now a few paces closer to me. Although my mana was not active I knew that I could call upon my eyes. I don't know why I could tell that I could use it, it was simply a feeling that insidiously weaved into the recesses of my neural pathways. Hissing expanded outwards once more but dropped in tones and pitch, the movements of the creature slowing to a snails' pace... Even worse, it was almost completely still within my perception.

Lines of glowing runes launched from my eyes. Unnerved, that is how I felt at this moment. The creature that Raistlin had no doubt let in here with me was perfectly still. Malevolence and madness moving within the monstrous maw of the monstrosity despite the effect that time seemingly had imposed upon it. Runes fluttered throughout the hallway before gradually gliding down to cover my eyes. Light blinded my eyes in seconds as once more a flash sundered my mind... It was different this time though.

Concepts. Hundreds, thousands, all just floating in my mind. No movement was seen amongst these concepts but still they stayed there. 'Gazing' in on one I felt the stoppage of time, the so called stagnation of time. Another, the flow of time, the forwards progression of time. Looping of time, fragmentation of time streams, echoes of time... There were so many, from basic concepts or ideas associated with time, to abstract words that sounded more esoteric and vague. Time was insignificant here, there was no such thing within my mind currently. What was time to an element of time itself?

Searching through the runes for what felt like thirty minutes to me, but could possibly be no time or all of time, I found one concept that called to my current situation. Perception of Time. I had no body within my mind but still I created the mental image of grasping it... Concepts shifted as some faded entirely, a new set of concept-runes emerging.

*FUTURE*

*PAST*

*PRESENT*

*DIMENSIONAL*

*PLANAR*

*!(&^$(&%^!(*

One was blurred beyond my comprehension but I instantly took the future rune anyway. I did not wish to see the past or the present, I only wished to see the possibilities of me exiting this hallway and making it to the space Raistlin had wished for me to head towards.

A flash submerged my mind for a second as a vast majority of the runes that had covered my eyes flooded back into the lattice-work of runes that were emblazoned into my eyes sclera. Two Runes didn't however. Perception of Time, Future... The runes switched places and it now formed the full meaning of what I wished. Future Perception Of Time. Echoes of my brain called out and communicated to me, various thoughts and paths entering into my mind. Illusionary copies of myself moved past the creature and soon found that there was no exit that way, in fact, I would be caught by the creature as it broke out from its time-cage. Forwards, traps of various kinds and varieties were layed out and were like minefields for all of the timeline variants of myself that tried them. Hundreds, thousands of variants tried to move forwards but found themselves wounded, lightly or mortally.

My hope slowly started to fade as the entire scenario showed my failure or the lack of exits. Then, my other selves, who were also hearing, listening and joining in on this endeavour began to change their tactics. Attempting to kill the creature by ripping out its throat, or what looked like it. Calling on other time runes to fracture the entire space... None worked, until, a singular timeline surfaced where instead of doing something they simply sat down and waited. Nothing happened. No movements were made by the creature and no death was had... Then that future faded, not in a slashing of the image or an explosion of force, no, it simply faded into the future further. I didn't trust it and tried to push past that moment in time with my perception. A wall, that is all I met. Calling it a wall would be simplistic and basic but that is essentially what it was.

"So I sit and wait..."

I did exactly as that version of me had done, sitting and waiting for something to change. The air was perfectly frozen, the only exception being when I sucked in oxygen. Minutes, possibly hours, passed as I simply waited. Soon I realised that this tested my patience and how long I could stand to wait within a lack of forward-moving time. The God-mage was not only practically teaching me how to use my eyes he was deviously reinforcing positive attributes, as far as he saw it.

'His evil side is a fucking assh-'

Space-time turned into a mirage of hazy glass before shattering, the creature before me screeching in pain before being vanquished back to its original plane of existence. Magic was there again, taste, touch, smell... All of it was back. The red-robbed Raistlin stepped out from the haze with a large curved grin on his face, that staff of his floating ominously behind him as his hands were interlocked with one another in front of his chest.

"Took longer than I expected. A shame, but you got there eventually, even if it did require you to experience horrors once more."

"Asshole... Why did you need to do it in that way!?"

"Anger is understandable but also extremely child-like. I do not have to teach you, I could abandon you like a sick puppy or a nigh-on-dying child..."

"I..."

My words were lost. How could I respond to that in a manner that would not just show my comparative youth? There wasn't a correct answer and so I did what Romero had always told me he did. Stayed quiet. His smile deepened as a slightly diabolical countenance took over his previous smile. Shadows extended along his face as a red glow compounded behind him from seemingly nowhere, only for all of the theatrics to fall away in an instant as emotionlessness took him over once more.

"You have learned. Satisfying. Now, follow, you shall learn not only the idea of concepts but also the essences that flow, effect and create rules."

I stayed silent as I followed him, my lack of response being taken as acceptance by him as he slowly 'walked' into the distance, his feet walking on solid air.

"It is time for you to learn about White, Black, Blue, Green, Red and Colourless magic."

"How long will this take?"

"No time at all..."

'That was a stupid question...'

"It was."

|It was|

'Yeah, it was.'

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