MAGUS INFINITE

I did not go back to the fire that night. I walked out past the picket line, and I sat down with my back to the camp and looked at a sky that was two colours, and I thought about pockets.

That is not a joke. I have found that when a question is too large to hold, the only way through it is to take the smallest part of it and tear that to pieces.

This Loop need not be something whose rules I followed every time. I needed to master it. So how did I do something the Loop may not have been designed for?

If I took apart what happened to me when I died, what was it?

Well, I carried my skills across, all of them, every point of growth, every Law I have understood. My titles cross. Godslayer is sitting in me right now, sealed off and unreachable, and I have not the slightest doubt that it will still be there when I open my eyes in the future.

So the challenge came back to the pockets, and my eyes fell on the Inscription Pen. Perhaps I had unknowingly solved the problem of the pocket already.

∞

I took the pen out and held it up against the two skies. It was warm, and the heat reminded me of the fire from Dorrik’s forge, and when I turned it in my fingers the Law of Sharpness inside it hummed against my palm.

This pen was once a sword, and I argued it into another shape by convincing that Law that the line which divides could also be the mark that declares. Ever since, that transformation had forged a connection with me, and I began to twirl the pen in my fingers and then suddenly snapped them, causing it to vanish, and I could not help but grin.

This pen did not disappear. It was now inside my soul.

I closed my eyes and looked inside me. Before, this was instantaneous, but now it took me almost five minutes to find a way in, and I exhaled in relief, because I did not have to search the landscape of my soul for the pen. It was hovering just behind the crack in the seal.

However, the shape of the pen was not the same as what I knew. It had diffused, and it resembled a golden mist filled with shiny dots like stars. Were these the Law of Sharpness?

This was the first time I saw my soul as a pattern.

I opened my eyes and called my Inscription pen, and it appeared in my palm. I had kept most of my perception inside my soul, so I watched the pen change state from a cloud of Laws to a solid object I could hold.

Immediately I knew that I would not be able to duplicate this process with the compass and the crystal, not unless I understood them as well as I understood my pen, and had them fit to a skill I controlled the same way my Inscription had fit to this pen, making them part of me.

Still, I did not want to do this for every item I came across, because that would be impossible. I could not attune to every single thing I wanted to carry across… I needed a pocket!

A pocket in my soul… so I set out to make one.

∞

I have never built anything inside my own soul before. In fact I had never considered it. The soul was ephemeral, and even mages did not fully understand it, but new discoveries and transformations were the forte of a mage… we struck our own path.

I was sure that creating a pocket in the soul must have been considered by other mages, and I was also sure that most of them would not try this sort of thing, given the risk. I was willing to try it.

It would have been good if I had access to the research notes of mages who had attempted it in the past, but I would just have to make do with what I had, and I may have just gained the key to this puzzle.

I stared at the pen in my hand. What I needed was an enclosed space, attached to something that made the crossing, capable of holding an object that was not part of me and had no interest in becoming part of me.

The last part was the problem.

∞

The journey continued, and now most of the time my focus was placed inside my soul, but I did not fail to note that there were crows in the distance, and their numbers were growing.

They were miles away, and except for Ruggah and Coin, none of the others in the warband had detected them. We sped up, but I knew we could not run far from what was coming… the death of a god was not important, but the crystal I had collected, that was important, and I knew they would be coming for it.

I made many experiments in the days we travelled, and most of them were failures, except two, and I went after the most promising.

The short of it was the realisation that it was impossible for me at this time to make changes to my soul, not even with Inscription, the language of magic. But I could write on the pen.

If I did this correctly, then the pen would be my pocket.

I did this experiment at night, away from the fire, but I knew Ruggah was watching over me.

I called the pen halfway, so it appeared over my palm, half mist and half metal. This maintained its connection with my soul while it was a physical object outside of it, and while it hung there with one foot in each condition, I reached through the crack with my perception and wrote on it.

It hurt… like I was digging into my innards with hot metal, but the pain was not as bad as I expected. I have had worse.

∞

The Script I wrote was not complicated. The difficulty was never the words.

I wrote a Script of holding on the pen’s own edge, where the Law of Sharpness runs. Then I gave it a direction, outward, into the space around itself, and I told it what it was holding, which would be anything I put down.

The Law of Sharpness understood that one immediately, which surprised me, until I thought about it. An edge divides, and a wall is nothing but an edge. I was not asking it to become something new, just to hold a line between inside and outside.

The golden mist moved. I watched it happen with my eyes shut and my teeth clenched. The cloud of small stars pulled itself in, and the space behind the crack in my seal went from being a narrow gap where a pen was hanging to being a space with an edge around it.

It was not large, about the size of a chest, and the walls of it were an edge rather than a substance, so that looking at them made my eyes feel like they were being cut, which, technically, they were.

But it was a pocket, and that was all that mattered.

[Inscription: 132 → 137 (Sovereign)]

[Anomaly: unregistered construct detected within bearer’s soul]

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[Anomaly: no applicable entry]