There's no more thorough form of humiliation than being forced to watch yourself be an idiot in slow motion.

My body - and my ghost - were standing there thinking about how strange everyone was acting while Katrin bled out and Errod's hand seized control of the rest of him to try and save us. Under other circumstances I could maybe take some solace in the fact that both of my friends were affected by the robotic monstrosity attacking us, but in this case it was all my fault. I was supposed to be the one with mental defenses, and I had designed those defenses badly. When I first got magic, I was very clear that I needed to avoid shit like the monster from Nusos that had made me think I was about to drink some delicious cold beverage rather than tentacle juice. But when the time had come to actually acquire protection did I do that?

Nope!

Now to be fair to myself, I didn't have a lot of spare potential and my more direct concern was people forcing themselves into my head or fucking with my memories. The more subtle active manipulation of my thoughts possibly should have been on the list too, but I don't know if I could have protected myself from both with the same ability. Still, after that I considered it a solved issue and never once thought about going back and beefing up my defenses further. I knew there were other angles of attack. I knew I was only 'safe' from certain types of threats. But I had other shit I wanted.

And at the time, it felt like my other abilities might cover for it. Someone making me see things? No problem, use divination instead. Someone trying to mess with my thoughts? Retreat to my memory palace and pilot my body remotely! But now, this motherfucker had so thoroughly convinced my body and ghost that nothing was wrong that I was having a hell of a time overriding it. I'd gotten a few attacks in, but it was hard when the other half of me was directly piloting the body. I'd yelled at it to fight or to retreat to the memory palace, and it had sluggishly thought that it should discuss the matter with Katrin and Errod once they were no longer occupied with being fucking murdered.

I'd slowed down time in the memory palace, but the extra room to think wasn't giving me a lot of ideas. I stalked around our enemy, getting a good look at it - it was metal, with simple ball and socket joints and no visible means of moving them. So basically, a golem of some kind. No muscles, no organs, no vitals at all. Just two body segments, each with three limbs; currently, it was upright and using two bottom limbs as legs while all of the top ones and the remaining bottom one tried to disarm or disembowel Errod, but it looked like it could drop down and run around lengthwise if it wanted to. My body had tackled it at a moment where it was balanced on only one of its legs, but it had rolled and come up again instantly - just the other side up.

It had to be a deadshell. They'd been in the second book, Jake Ross and the Sword of Destiny, and Thanatos had used them as assassins because they could kill someone and just walk away before anyone could take notice. In the books they'd been suits of armor with the soul of the former knight trapped inside for all eternity, but this thing didn't look remotely like actual armor. I blazed DEADSHELL across my body's vision with arrows and flashing lights for what little good it would do, and then tried to assess the situation.

A close examination showed that my knives had, in fact, done some damage - but only in the technical sense. It was scratched and chipped and couldn't possibly care. Errod's attacks were better and while the super slo-mo view made it hard to say I was pretty sure he was focusing on a single joint and making progress. He was also, maybe, looking more... focused. He'd certainly been confused when he started hitting, but there was something shifting in his facial expression. That was encouraging. Still, it had too many limbs all covered in nasty claws and I didn't think it was going to be enough.

How had Jake Ross beaten them? Hmm. It had mostly been a team effort with his companions, of which he had several by that point in the books. Algie had grappled it, going into some sort of zen state where he was so focused on his wrestling instincts that he didn't care what he was actually grappling with. Yelrick or Dorin or someone - no, it was Ulmot, he could feel the vibrations it was making or something and so he got some hits in. Everyone just dogpiled, basically, and wore it down. By the end of the book Jake had had the titular sword of destiny, and was killing them no problem.

None of that helped me.

I couldn't sense vibrations, and I suspected that even if I could I would also dismiss those as unimportant. I couldn't wrestle this thing. I didn't have an ancestral blade that could cut through anything. I had... what? Hmm. I summoned my duplicate, who came in and saluted sarcastically before realizing just how bad things were.

"Fuck! What the shit is this?"

"Deadshell. The ghost is in charge of the body, and is totally enthralled. It's convinced that everything is fine, and we don't need to be doing or worrying about anything right now. I got her to attack some through brute force, but she seems to be getting more apathetic by the second. If this keeps up, she's going to just roll over and die once it's done with Errod. Katrin is... probably saveable? It got right up to her and wormed a claw inside her jacket before just... doing jazz hands until her stomach was shredded. Still, we've got potions and stuff. If we kill it, she'll survive."

"Errod has taken some hits. How long have they been fighting?"

"Barely started, at this rate he's not going to win. That's where you come in. This... might kill you."

"Fuck. Okay. Merge first, so I'm... I don't know, backed up."

We did, and then there was that horrible moment of realization for the duplicate as she figured out which one she was. "Sorry. Okay, here goes. Apathy thingy is target one."

"Duh, I was just you. Fucking do it, let's go."

I reached out and grabbed the body as best I could. I screamed at myself, drowning the ghost in commands without synching up time so it would be all she could think about. I blocked out everything in her vision except for the deadshell, eliminating the whole tunnel and Katrin and Errod and even herself. Everything but that motherfucking monster was just red light, streaming towards it endlessly like a million overlapping arrows.

HERE, I yelled. DO IT NOW.

And slowly I felt magic begin to flow through my body, through my Dumines, through my lutore. A thread formed, and snapped into place on the deadshell - the other end snaked across planes into Ematse, and connected to my duplicate who... vanished? Well that wasn't supposed to happen. I felt shock flow through our connection as the apathy field dropped, then it was immediately dulled again. It flickered on and off, like children were fighting over a lightswitch. I dropped the visual impairments and thankfully my body was responding, finally processing the DEADSHELL message that still blazed over the construct's form. She charged forward, slashes glancing off her jacket for now, and a spectral hand shot forward into the metal.

It came back out holding a squirming, shrieking animal.

It was a spirit, clearly, translucent and grotesque. It had mouths at both ends and articulated spikes in-between, and it was furious. It snapped at the ghost, contorting around and clamping one of its mouths on - I felt pain through the connection, an awful burning that radiated through my ghost and threatened to unmake it. And then Katrin was sitting up, one hand clutching her stomach, and lightning arced out through the abomination. It convulsed, but didn't release. I could see now that there was a thread running from it to the metal body, still tethering it and seeming to pull at the spirit like it was reeling it back in. Every time my ghost's grip slipped a little, it slid back towards the multi-limbed golem.

Katrin fired again, and this time the spirit gave one final twitch and fell still. The thread snapped, and as everyone watched the spirit lost coherence and melted away into nothingness. The metal body put all its arms up and backed away defensively, then started frantically gesturing with one arm - pointing at itself, then me, then itself again. Ah. Well, that would be where my duplicate went. Threat over for the moment, I lined up my consciousness better with my ghost so we were the same person once more.

"Hang on, hang on, don't hit it. Just - get Katrin - oh never mind I guess." She'd cast her shitty battlefield healing spell to seal up the worst of things, and was already pulling a potion out to get properly repaired. "Good. Great. Uh. Sorry, I was... I split my mind there in case the apathy field could spread or something and it's strange when I have to re-integrate memories after the fact. I'm good though. The body is on our side now, assuming... yeah, the thread is still intact. That's a copy of me in there, and clearly it can turn the apathy field off so we don't have to worry about sitting around and dying of starvation or something."

Errod was examining Katrin, but she was just tired and embarrassed. She'd known she was dying, and it just hadn't been important enough to do anything about. We rested for a bit while my duplicate tried to figure out how to walk properly, and I did my best to explain what we'd been fighting. "I knew a lot of constructs were empowered by spirits, and in the books it had been a ghost so it seemed like if there was even a little truth to it there was probably a spirit in there somewhere. And I had a spirit on hand, so I tethered it in there and it was able to wrestle for control enough to turn off the mental numbness thing. And now... I have a buddy that can help us fight, I guess."

Thoughts swam up to me through the link that basically translated to "until I go insane or lose the imprint of you or something, and in the meantime I can't talk and this is freaking me out". I sent back what reassurance I could, and as we started traveling again I had one mind focus on trying to synch up with the duplicate. It was different than before, something had changed there, but we did manage it after a while which meant it shouldn't be able to go insane from isolation. The memories filtering back in weren't very pleasant though; it wasn't a comfortable body.

I shunted my ghost back to Ematse, which took way more effort than when it had just been my mind. With my body being only remotely piloted, I was pretty sure I'd be immune to further mental attacks - although I was mainly hoping we just wouldn't run into any more deadshells. "We really need to figure out a plan for that kind of thing," I said, "because one of the head assholes from Halenvar might be here and she has a similar ability. I should be good now, but for you two... I don't know, maybe we need to get some sort of anti-fuckery helmets." Like Magneto, I resisted saying. I'd tried hard to not use too many random cultural references.

I found myself thinking about how I would make a device like that. Setting the wearer of the item - it wouldn't actually need to be a helmet - would be easy. Influence as a branch of Imperial magic had its own definitions, so I could do a broad ward against those maybe, but the more generic it was the worse it worked in practice - otherwise people would have just had anti-magic wards up all over the place. The real problem was that I couldn't remember a way to define the different kinds of attacks. There were runes for almost everything, but how was this specific one defined? Apathy didn't seem right, it was more aggressive than that. It actively told me there was nothing important there.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Wait, I could just check. I pinged the duplicate, and sure enough she could see runes carved all over the inside of the metal shell. After tweaking our connection, I was able to skim through while the other mind piloted the body and I started reproducing the code on a summoned whiteboard. It was... complicated. And tiny. The more you developed your Dumine the smaller you could make runes and have them still work, and even at my best the smallest I'd been able to make would never have let me cram all this code into one construct. Now, with all that being burned out of my Dumine...

Wait.

"Hey Katrin, I uh... I remember how to make runes. From the bit of me that was Connie. I just realized I didn't know that shit before."

She perked up. "Can you make them?"

A fair question. I didn't have the right materials for it, that was for sure. In a perfect world, I'd have a pen filled with liquid metal to write with. In a pinch, I should be able to carve the runes into a wall - but I didn't want to ruin my knives, and it was possible there was already some sort of magic going on with these walls that would make it a bad idea regardless. I kept an eye out though, and eventually we came across a metal sign whose paint had long since flaked away. I pulled it free and tried making a simple self-activating light rune, but... nothing. Was I doing it wrong? Was I just unable to ignite it?

I tried a few more times with the same results, and finally flipped the sign over and tried on the back by making the largest rune I could in the space available. It flickered to life, casting a dim glow that was subsumed by Katrin's light orbs. Huh. "Okay, so I can do it but my size limit is somewhere between this one and this one," I said, indicating the largest one that hadn't worked. "Even if that other one was almost big enough, that's way too shitty to do a lot with them. I could make a lamp, or a frying pan that heats itself, or... yeah, those are the only things that come to mind. There's probably more, but it's not worth playing with much right now."

I'd earned my new surname of 'Runelighter', anyway. Probably it had been a profession name like Carpenter or, well, Smith. Someone that went around re-powering runes maybe? I asked Katrin and she said that while that was probably right, it wasn't a common name or - as far as she knew - a current profession. She suspected it was from before the Clockmaker, before Dumineres, when magic worked differently for each language.

"Lute was telling me that in Erathik, since wild magic isn't outlawed, they have a school of magic where the casters all dance instead of speaking. I hadn't thought about the fact that dancing could be a language - but the different movements can mean things in the same way Patic handspeak does."

"Yeah, and it's not like I can hear you when you cast spells - I see your jaw or mouth moving, but you're not yelling out anything anyway."

Errod looked back over his shoulder. "She was embarrassed when people said they could see that, and then after you left with Hammersmith she paid to get some tutoring from someone and they started the lesson by telling her that if she practiced very hard, in twelve years or so she would be able to cast spells without audibly saying anything. Twelve years."

Big shocker that Katrin was gifted. "Did you tell your tutor you were already better than them and demand your money back?"

"No! She did give me a few pointers on technique that have come in handy, and even when it was something I'd figured out for myself it was good to confirm I was doing things right. But... I didn't pay for a second lesson."

"Back to the dancing though, I thought there was only the one language of wild magic?"

"I do think that's mainly right, there's one that's well known and powerful enough to be useful. The other ones, to the extent they exist, don't have enough people that know them for it to be worth messing around with. Anyone can invent a language, but you need at least some force behind it from the Common Local Understanding. Those dancers can probably do things in Erathik, but chances are they'd have trouble casting if they were in Markonti since it's on the far side of the continent."

"Okay, got it. So then... spellcasting must be basically impossible on Earth even if you know how. Would magic items just... break?"

"High Imperial should work anywhere, in theory. That's how the Clockmaker took over the world."

Something about that wasn't right. "That works because... because he has some sort of copy of himself - maybe like mecha-Callie here - bound up on the plane that magic comes from. Uh, Quebristun. The one that you can only get to on a Grand Alignment. But Earth, that's not on a plane. It's connected a little, maybe, since I saw that little bit of it in Nusos, but clearly it's mostly separate. And there's a ridiculous number of people, orders of magnitude more than on this planet, and none of them know High Imperial."

Katrin didn't reply right away, but I could tell she was thinking it over. "We do think that your memory was wiped while you were on Earth, though, right?"

"Yeah... I've been focused on getting the portal to Brinkmar opened, but now that that's done I should probably think about the Earth stuff more. So... you're pointing out that clearly magic does work on Earth. Which means the question is if Quebristun has enough influence on Earth to make High Imperial a valid language, or if it was another language - if Earth has its own wild magic. Hmm. It would have to be secret, obviously, but also well known enough to work. I don't know, I feel like there's so many people on Earth that do believe in magic that it kinda proves there isn't any."

Errod tilted his head a little, like he was mulling that over. "Say that again but slower."

"There's a ton of people, right now and throughout Earth's history, that believe in magic. But there's also no proof of magic - not good proof anyway. So if you could just make up your own language and have it work..."

Errod nodded and finished the thought. "Then they would have done it already. Yes, that makes sense. But... the Clockmaker just made it the dominant language, he didn't do anything else to make magic possible - he didn't need to. It could have suppressed other languages somewhat, but shouldn't they still have existed?"

"Well, it could also be that most people just don't have mana to work with. They probably have minds and souls, because human Calliope has them. But only probably - it's possible that she got them when she crossed over to this world, or the Sahrger gave them to her to increase mana regeneration so she could help with rituals and shit. I could ask, I guess. But the point is, even if they have them you've told me that people's minds and souls were dormant and didn't do much until something forced them to their respective planes."

"Right," Katrin said, "either you do certain meditation exercises until they find their domains, or you get a Dumine. And if the planes are harder to reach from Earth, the meditations may not work."

"And there's no ambient mana," I continued, "and even if there were it wouldn't matter because there's too many people. So if you're not regenerating any from having your mind and soul stretched across planes, you're going to have this super teeny shriveled little lutore that can't do shit. No way to learn magic, no way to get mana, no way to get stronger."

Errod stopped to lean against the tunnel wall, probably so Katrin would rest. "Would being surrounded by so many people that don't know the language still make it weaker, even with the Clockmaker's reach?"

Katrin shrugged.

"I mean, I could ask, but I don't think he'll answer."

They both stared at me, and Katrin narrowed her eyes. "Ask... who?"

"Uh. I maybe shouldn't have brought this up right now. But... I think maybe the Clockmaker? Not the real one. But like... you know something presents options when you try to learn something new with your Dumine, right? Like it tells you that you can't afford it yet, or offers up a specific ability you're thinking of? Well, there's... there's layers to it but there's a part that for sure is actually designing the abilities and since my shit is all fucked up by having three Dumines I've been sort of kind of talking to it.

"Not talking-talking," I clarified, "but I get annoying and demanding about the particulars of what I want and it keeps offering adjustments and eventually sometimes it feels like it's more directly telling me something. Like recently, I tried to convince it that I should be able to use threads to kinda cast spells - like the way you could do it with dancing, why can't I with the thread thingies? Right? I mean they're already made of magic, why can't I make them do gravity shit or something. And it sorta showed me how, but it also told me that I wouldn't be able to handle it and I'd wreck myself. Like, I don't think it could really help itself from showing me how but it went out of its way to warn me that it was a bad idea.

"And my assumption, I guess, is that this is the thing people were talking about when they say the Clockmaker made a copy of himself in Quebristun. Like my mind has its domain, and my soul has one, and now I have this motherfucker," I patted the deadshell and it gave its best impression of a thumbs-up, "and the Clockmaker made a spirit copy of himself - or just his understanding of High Imperial maybe - and planted it in a domain in Quebristun. If that plane has domains. Actually, yeah, now that I think of how it was described maybe it just has one domain as opposed to one for each person and that's why they had to fight over it.

"Also, I am just now realizing that that's also the plot of Jake Ross and the Forgotten Throne. So maybe the Sundered Throne of Brinkmar is also somehow a domain? I don't know if that makes sense, I just thought of it. Anyway. Yeah. I could ask the Clockmaker, or the fragment of the Clockmaker, about how magic on Earth works and see if it answers."

Katrin walked over to me, grabbed me by both shoulders, and got right up in my face. "You have been talking to the embodiment of Imperial magic and you didn't think that was worth mentioning?"

I sensed that I was in very real danger. I had to answer super carefully, or Katrin would literally kill me. "It wasn't what you'd call a conversation, and it didn't answer very clearly until we were already split up. I swear."

Still crushing my shoulders, she leaned even closer. "Try to talk to it. Right now."

"About Earth, or?"

"About anything!" she yelled, and I hastily pulled free and tried to meditate on my Dumines.

There was that headache-inducing tangle of lines, and the glitched Dumine "screens" off the sides of my vision. I tried to formulate a question, and there was nothing. Hmm. I tried, instead, thinking about how I would adjust my abilities to travel to different planes. A shape snapped into existence. It was mostly, I knew, a slight tweak on my existing control and weakening of the planar membrane. I was already most of the way there, really, because it was just my divination thing plus taking one more step and actually making two planes the same. Okay. Now I asked about how to do that, but with Earth.

Something turned inside out.

That's the only way I could describe it, but it was a sixth-dimensional fuckery kind of thing and really I didn't think the words existed. Still, there was a pattern there. I couldn't afford it, and interestingly the base Dumine layer was telling me it wasn't possible. I probed it about how to do magic, and it just showed me the basic development that Katrin had probably been doing this whole time; you get a deeper and deeper understanding of High Imperial, and you can impart more and more meaning into the words. It wasn't big exciting steps like some gifts, just incremental gains that made a big difference over time.

Next, how to do magic on Earth. Nothing changed. No strange inversion, no new thread. Just the same pattern of lines, because magic on Earth was the same as magic anywhere else. Okay, fine, but wouldn't I need something more to get past the Common Local Understanding of billions of people that didn't know High Imperial? No change, but I felt... something. I pressed the issue, insisting that this pattern wasn't right, wasn't sufficient. I demanded an answer as to what, if anything, I would need to do to cast spells on Earth. Was I not asking the right question? Did I need a connection to a particular plane? Did I need more mana? I was supposed to ask for specific abilities, specific developments to my gifts, but I was mentally screaming that I wanted it to just tell me what I should do.

And finally, it answered.

This problem is best solved externally. Planar antipodes already in use should grant basic capability, and even minimal knowledge of High Imperial in a local population will grant sufficient alignment in thought for this system to function.

How minimal, though? Surely even if they couldn't cast it they'd need to know some actual language, or the structure of... and something clicked. I'd seen High Imperial on Earth - I used it to make a Tetris clone.

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