The tale of a schema

Let me tell you a story. A fairy tale of sorts.

Long ago, there was a young lady. She grew up in a village on the edge of a great forest and although the village folk would enter those woods, they never strayed far.

"The deep forest is dangerous." They'd say.

"Don't stray from our comfort." They'd plead.

But as much as everyone else was content to remain in their small village, the young lady wanted more.

On the horizon she could see it. Deep in the forest, far from their safe and small community, there was a region where the trees grew taller and their beautiful green leaves seemed to sparkle under the sun.

The girl looked to the distance each day with wanderlust deep within her heart as she etched that emerald canopy deep in her memory.

"One day." She said. "One day, I'll leave these confines and see the beauty of the world."

The village folk disregarded her words. They were the ramblings of a girl who had far too many hopes and dreams. Surely as she grew older, she would come to appreciate the smaller things and stop dreaming so big.

They expected her to settle down, but never did they expect her to leave.

One day, that young lady followed her dreams and hiked through the forest to the beautiful paradise that taunted her for her whole life.

She would go, she would explore, and it would be wonderful.

[Part 1: The Enticing Emerald Forest]

As the young woman made her way through the woods, after what felt like ages, she had arrived at her destination. It wasn't just a fable, myth, or legend. It was real.

As she finally encountered the forest she had so desperately wanted to see all her life, the wonder the girl felt was astounding. The trees were far broader than anything she had imaging with trunks that spanned metres in diameter.

The surrounding plants were lush, beautiful, and full of unyielding life.

It was a heaven on earth. A place with boundless beauty and vitality.

Here the underbrush grew lush and thick.

Here the trees reached unending to the sky.

Flowers bloomed and it was difficult to decide where to look. Amidst the flourishing growth, flecks of sunlight and pretty flowers always have something to distract the eye. There was always a new intrigue just around the corner.

If it weren't for small natural paths, it would be hard to navigate, but instead the entire wood seemed to welcome the young lady, inviting her deeper in.

Between new points of interest and these simple forest trails, the girl walked and walked, always staring in awe and wonder at the mountain like trees.

This living fantasy was so wondrous and captivating, that it took far too long for her to notice that her surroundings had begun to change.

[Part 2: The Wood of Endless Night]

The young lady caught on far too late that the paths she had followed had brought her to a different part of the forest.

Although the trees still were marvellous in scale, more than thick trunks what now was impressive were the canopies. The vibrant emerald green leaves that scattered sunlight before were now replaced with a dense, dark green shadowy canopy.

Here, flecks of sunlight filtered through these dense leaves and hardly illuminated the path. Through their filter, the sunrays looked closer to stars than anything else.

The forest had grown dense and unwelcoming as well. Where before the underbrush was lush and vibrant, now the space between trees was filled with densely packed vines and thorns. The few paths she could find wound, twisted, and misled. To keep one's bearing in such a twisted place was difficult to say the least.

As roots, thorns, branches, and vines pulled and snagged at the girl, the faint rays of sun seemed to bounce oddly. Shapes in the dense undergrowth formed that shouldn't have been there and be it the wind or something else, sounds could always be heard nearby, as if the woods themselves were watching. Waiting.

The girl tried to back track. To return to her lovely green glen. But no. The forest had now claimed her and there would be no escape. The paths seemed to control her. To direct her. As time went on, she only found herself deeper and deeper, and then. Finally. She admitted it. As the sun began to set, she came to truly understand how lost she was.

[Part 3: Lost and Alone]

It was dark.

So dark.

The forest that hardly gave the sun quarter seemed to grow its presence as night fell. Where once there may have been starlight that filtered through, now there was nothing.

And nothing was how the young lady felt.

Where was she?

Nowhere.

Who would find her?

No one.

Where before she tried to escape under that starlight like light, now there was no hope. Her emotions ran wild and her sense of direction had long since left her.

The underbrush was no longer a concern. After all, she had given up. With no clarity of direction. No resolve to move forward, and no light to guide her, the girl gave in to the dark.

This forest had set its claim on her the moment she entered, and she would no longer fight that fate.

This story is a tragedy. There is no happy ending. The conclusion is the girl's passing, lost and alone in that great and wondrous forest that had so long been her dream.

There was no room for celebration.

However.

There was someone who did celebrate.

There was a girl who found salvation in this story.

Dahlia, who had for so long struggled with the specifier of her schema, found an answer in this tale. To understand, one must know its origin though.

A few days back, when Dahlia's eyes were still poor and Bessie was just beginning to help her with her magic, Dahlia had shown her maid her grimoire. There she laid out the diagrams she had made and explained how they were meant to overlap. While she had plenty of diagrams with their geometric patterns, she could only get three to overlap perfectly, and these were what she brought out.

There were a couple options. Different sets of three that could work, but she had never exceeded that number even after years of desperately trying. With this in mind, she had set out the main set of three that she had been considering and waited for Bessie's input.

What Dahlia had expected was either a 'wow, that's impressive!' or 'Hmmm, I don't really get it…' What she got instead was,

"It looks kinda like a math-y version of one of those three part paintings. You know what I mean? Like, it's all shapes and stuff, so I don't get it, but it's like some weird constellations spread across one of those painting sets."

And at that, Dahlia blinked. A triptych? It wasn't an idea that had ever occurred to her. To be fair, she had never laid them out for presentation in the way she had done for her maid, but even still, her brain just didn't let her see it as art. However… perhaps now was the time she should start changing how she thought.

These diagrams laid out on the floor were only part of the final product. Eventually she would need to add imagery to them as well in order to better channel and direct her mana. It had always been part of the plan, but she never gave it much thought.

While she was comfortable with the math, the actual imagery was something to be generated from her mind with the help of an arcane tattoo relic. Rather naively, she decided to set the problem aside and think that she'd spontaneously create something suitable. Now though, Bessie had introduced something.

At the thought of a set of paintings, Dahlia began to find her perception of her schema changing. Killing two birds with one stone, what if she assigned meaning to her tattoos' imagery and then, by extension, applied meaning to her schema. Where before it was purely functional and pragmatic, now there was something more.

Just as a typical triptych would use three images to express a theme or tell a story, Dahlia had the desire to turn her own tattoos into a story. A story of three parts and each centralised on what the geometric patterns would focus on and emphasise in her aspect.

And so together with Bessie, the two began forming their story. Was it perfect? No, not at all. Far from it in fact. But it worked for Dahlia. Unlike so many other specifiers, she actually understood this. Where the mnemonics other casters used flew over her head, using a story as the foundation for both imagery and output made intuitive sense to her.

And so, after multiple days of work and making sure each part suited her different geometric patterns, the two women finally let out sighs of relief. They had done something absurd and created a schema based on an entire made up story. It was bizarre, but it was theirs, and they both took pride in what they made.

'Triptych of a lost soul'. That was the name of the specifier. A three part painting ingrained in her own flesh, with each piece telling a different part of a tale, and each part relating to a different part of her aspect. From this point forward, this would be the origin of all Dahlia's magic to come.

Now, a few days later, Dahlia was going over that story all over again. Again and again she went over it. While her grimoire had been memorised like the back of her hand, she still lacked confidence in her story.

After a few repetitions though, she began to calm down. Without even noticing it, she had started to shake like a leaf in the wind, but as she reassured herself, Dahlia finally began to calm down.

Approaching things with a precise grace, Dahlia began the process like a master surgeon performing their craft. Every movement had a practised purpose behind it from years she spent dreaming of this moment.

The brocade box was opened and the arcane tattoo relic was retrieved. It was a set of objects, almost looking like a brazier and a set of chopsticks. Each chopstick-like piece, of which there were seven, had different sygaldry and runes etched into their sides and each tip ended differently.

Where the main shaft looked like an ornate magic chopstick, the tip of each looked like a torture instrument. Some curved and hooked while others had thin needle-like spikes. Each had a purpose, but it was not for Dahlia to determine that. Although she was to use them, she would not direct them.

Instead, she cut her palm and dripped her blood into the brazier-like object, only for a sudden turquoise flame to erupt within. Placing a cap onto the relic and then leaving her injured hand on top, a connection was formed between herself and the object, and suddenly those seven little torture devices began to float in the air around her.

This is where the fun began. As the instruments began to infuse themselves with magic and bond themselves to her consciousness, Dahlia took the time to strip, relax, and get prepared for the onslaught that was to come.

It wasn't instantaneous. Although they didn't literally need to warm up, invisible pathways of mana were being woven through the air. Like an invisible spiderweb, each device radiated countless strands of magical energy with all of them converging on Dahlia. She could feel a faint connection to them, but otherwise it was a passive experience.

That all changed though after a few minutes. Suddenly, the energies coursing through the relic changed and Dahlia knew that now was the time. She stopped relaxing and began meditating, focussing all of her mental acuity toward recreating both the story as well as recalling her precise geometric patterns. So long as she could recall both, the relic would do the rest, merging them into depictions best suited to her needs.

When the process began, Dahlia had locked her thoughts away within her meditation. The outside world was nothing to her but a distraction and so she used past training to shut everything else out. That training hadn't been perfect however and Dahlia was, for all intents and purposes, just an ordinary human girl.

She may have had incredible pain tolerance, but what followed wasn't something that could be blocked out. She was familiar with pain and based on the description of 'being cut by a burning knife' she had figured that this would be easy. The issue is that the pain was proportional to magical affinity.

As each tool etched images into her flesh, they forcibly rewrote and redirected her mana paths. Literal magical organs were shifted around below her skin to match the new tattoos. Worst of all, she knew that a similar pain would occur every time she switched between her three different tattoo sets. This suffering was something she would have to get used to.

Despite it being dreadfully painful, little actually occurred during this time. Screams of agony could be heard outside the room and, if it weren't for a noise cancelling barrier, nearly half the castle would have heard her cries. As time went by, her nails dug into her palms and a cloth gag was added to muffle her screams and to prevent her from breaking her teeth.

However, most notably, her body was stained in blood. The arcane tattoos were not a gentle process and beyond literally rearranging some organs, it also cut the skin in order to infuse mana directly and to form permanent channels. Because of this, Dahlia looked like an absolute mess.

It took fifteen hours un uninterrupted torture before the suffering suddenly came to an end. She was struggling to think by then and her legs were trembling so bad that there was no hope for her to walk by herself.

Thankfully, the moment her screams came to an end Bessie came rushing through the door. Valentina was specifically instructed to wait elsewhere for fear of her instincts taking over after hearing the screams and ruining the whole process. It had been a battle, but eventually the vampiress relented.

This left only Bessie to take care of her mistress, and she was once again relieved that Valentina was away. Seeing the girl coated in tears and blood would either set the woman on a rampage or end up enticing her; neither of which would be ideal at the moment.

So the maid gently took care of Dahlia, wiping away the blood and letting her rest on a soft downy bed, but Bessie couldn't help but hesitate. As the blood was removed, what lay beneath was an elaborate, detailed, and honestly stunning tattoo.

It wrapped her body and hugged her curves in a way that was hypnotising to the maid. The dark contrast with her porcelain skin left no room questions. Even if one wasn't attracted to tattoos, it was undeniable that both the body and the tattoo were a complete work of art.

Looking at the girl as she still shook from the residual pain, Bessie felt her heart throb. There was only so much suffering that one soul could handle, yet from everything she could tell, Dahlia seemed to have far more than she ever deserved. The mere fact that the girl was not yet broken by her endless suffering left the maid in awe at her tenacity.

Looking once again at the tattoo, something else washed over her. Affection. That imagery, although based on Dahlia's mathematics and the relic's interpretation of her thoughts, the concept for the story was something that they had both worked together on. It was like she had her presence permanently engraved into the girl, and knowing that she could have so much meaning left her feeling proud.

Placing a blanket on her to keep her warm, Bessie then went to retrieve the Archduchess. Things had finally calmed down to the point that she could be brought in without causing a catastrophe and waiting any longer may just invite her ire anyway. So, casting a gentle look once again at the girl in the bed, the maid walked out at a fast pace, eager to retrieve the Archduchess and return to her mistress' side as soon as possible.