Mental Anomalies

Kali sits in a chair next to Harry's bed with a worried look on her face. Nanthisk had been here earlier too but, he'd shooed the annoying snake away and ordered it to attend to the slav-*ahem*, servents, and make sure they were doing their jobs properly.

Harry's state was terrible. His body had been utterly ravaged, his mind almost torn apart, his magical cores strained almost to the point of imploding, and his soul... Well, she wasn't exactly sure what'd happened to his soul.

While Kali was more familiar with souls than a regular human magic user might be due to her status as a demon, that didn't mean she was an expert in the subject. Soul magic was a notoriously difficult art to study, the fact that souls had properties that one might call self-preserving, slippery, and difficult to grasp made it difficult to gain any valuable information about them at all.

Demons didn't usually even bother with research on souls in the first place because their first instinct and thought would be to devour them. You wouldn't be able to stop a human from breathing oxygen, for example, which is essentially how demons viewed such things...

Only the most dedicated, analytical, willful, and rational demons could bring themselves to actually research the subject. Which left basically no one, Kali didn't know anyone like that, and she had certainly never befriended anyone like that either.

Which, left her to muddle about to figure out just what'd happened to Harry. Nanthisk had apparently been unconscious for much of the confrontation after the duo was captured in the Lich's library, and had only awoken to see Harry fighting the Lich with an icy shard.

She glances to the bedside table where the Lich's torn shadowy cloak was laying, Harry had held it tightly even as they were escaping... Even as he had seizures, even as he screamed random languages in his sleep.

Kali wanted to delve into his mind and see just what was bothering him, but was fearful of doing permanent harm to her ward... Unfortunately, it looked as if she had no other options, Harry had been unconscious for two days now, so waiting any longer might just exaggerate the problems.

Shaking her head, she straddles the sleeping boy and grips each side of his face with her hands, taking a moment to gently caress his cheek before placing her forehead against his. Employing her mind magics to work.

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In an instant, Kali finds herself standing in an infinite realm that had a bright white floor extending off into the distance as far as the eye could see... In one direction however she noticed a conspicuous grey mist covering everything like a sickly smog.

Figuring that the mist probably had something to do with Harry's current state, she shrugs her shoulders and walks into it, extending her magical might to push the mist away from her as she walks.

From it, she could sense that it wasn't just a 'cloudiness of the mind', but a muddled mess of emotions that Kali was sure didn't belong to Harry.

As she walks further, the mist gets denser and denser. But, eventually, she spots a black silhouette towering above everything else... Wetting her lips, she extends a hand forwards and pushes with her magic, forcing the mist away and revealing a gigantic tree with crimson leaves that looked exactly like the one she and Harry lived in. Aside from the fact that the tree was thousands of times the size of their actual home.

Another thing that was different was the tens of thousands of gravestones circling around the tree, each billowing out grey mist into the sky, like they were each coal-burning plants or something akin to that.

She walks by one and looks at the name on the gravestone, her brow furrowing at the foreign letters that quickly translate themselves thanks to Harry's own mind correcting it for her. "Tochtli?" she wonders aloud but gets surprised when a rotten hand shoots from the grave and grabs her leg.

The creature pulls itself out of the ground, revealing a rotten male face that looks up at her almost imploringly, "F-fre-e... F-rreeeee-" begs, but is stopped as Kali stomps on it, crushing the skull and causing the entire grave to disintegrate into dust, ceasing to exist entirely.

"Hmph, looks like my master has picked up some strays... Or maybe I should call them 'Stray thoughts'?" she hums, thinking about what to do with them.

She could just destroy them all and be done with it, but they also presented an opportunity. There was also the fact that her master may not even want to have these things removed. If used right, they could help power spells or rituals... The emotions generated by these creatures were still energy, and so could still be utilised.

It was like hiring people to work for you, as opposed to chopping wood yourself and trading them for currency.

Nodding to herself, she waves a hand which causes the space of the realm to ripple and shake as things begin to shrink. The graves warp in a nauseating manner as Kali lines them up against one another in an organised fashion, afterwards manifesting a plinth in the middle before cutting her wrist, allowing blood to pool into the shape of a gem, which she hardens and places on the white stone plinth.

Once the crimson gem was atop it, grey mid no longer billowed from the graves, instead, a black splotch appeared within the gem, spreading out as if it was being filled. This would hold all the foreign emotions until Harry was able to control them. Though, the presence of her blood in his mind may cause some side effects... But, she was sure it'd be manageable.

With that, she exits the newly made graveyard and gets to work removing the freely floating grey mist that was still covering a great expanse of Harry's mindscape.