My breath keeps hitching. Curled, I sit against the stone wall, my hands shaking. The nails of my right hand run up and down my left wrist, leaving lines of harsh red against the white of my skin for brief instants before the damage fades away. I can't stop it.

Time itself runs on without any way of keeping track of it. The heat of my flight, of my desperate escape from that unknown monster, leaves me with just the cold dampness of my sweat-laden clothes sticking to my skin. The back of my skull clicks against the stone wall as I begin to settle.

"I had almost thought I couldn't feel that anymore," I mutter, staring up at the light.

Time waits for no one, least of all me. Long after my breathing has relaxed, long after I have wrestled my hands to stillness, the door to the chamber opens. Wind from the open air outside blows in a gale, filling the stone chamber at the bottom of Faeth, whipping my crimson hair about my face to stick to my sweaty skin. Kedrick kicks the door closed with the back of his foot. He is a golain, a kind of person who can easily be mistaken for an earthspeaker at first glance, with their skin appearing to be made of gray slate. Only, every golain I have seen(three so far) stands at least nine feet in height and has eyes that sparkle like they are made of cut geode.

"You alright, Nightmare?" he asks, looking me up and down.

Annoyance spikes at the moniker, but I can't help but smirk at my own feelings. Ever since that first day when I went hunting for fire affix, none of the rank threes sitting around the airwell made any mention about my rank, but that doesn't stop them from treating me like a little sister. It is nice, in a way, but far more frustrating in others.

They started calling me Nightmare a week and a half ago. Apparently, Dea Malis, the woman who runs the reception for the fishing well, is to blame for the moniker. After the first time I used the well to hunt for monsters with the fire affix, a few of the local adventurers asked the woman to look into me. The first thing she found, of course, was extensive reports of the battle in Danfalla. The Adventurer's League is a stickler for making thorough reports about monster attacks. Following the battle, representatives from the league carried out extensive interviews with the citizens, asking them about monsters they had seen. Dozens spoke of seeing a literal nightmare flying over the city. The league came to understand that the people were talking about me in the middle of my fight against Ferro; to them, I was the monster there, the nightmare. All it took was for the league investigators to tag me as being the nightmare the people were referring to, and for that label to be carried on into the various summaries of the events, for it to stick. It was almost exactly like what happened to Jor'Mari.

"I think I will be fine," I say to Kedrick. "Just ran into something big."

"It's no game out there," the huge man says, nodding back to the closed door. He leaves it at that, nodding to me before walking off to exit out the stairs on the other side of the room.

"No," I agree. "No, it is not."

The walk back to the penthouse gives me some time to take stock. I focus on my breathing, holding myself present as well as I am able until I make it home. The stillness in the top-floor apartments let me know that Dovik is out. He has been going out more and more often as of late, working on his own projects and securing funds for them in his own way. Not once has he asked me for money, not that I have all that much to lend. All of the coin I can scrape together has gone into my project.

The door to my laboratory opens, and I walk numbly to the table. A device scrapes against the wood, new marks on the tabletop joining so many others already there. I grab a disc of silver, pushing fire mana into the temporary medium. The end of the probe touches the metal, and I hiss out a breath between clenched teeth.

"Ninety-eight percent," Galea says over my shoulder.

"Dammit!" The disc of silver flies across the room, thudding against the wall before rolling to a stop on the floor.

Two days, I only have two days left before the tests at the academy are set to begin. The rest of today and tomorrow were meant to be used hunting monsters around the rim of the volcano. Hopefully, that by itself would be enough to bring my fire affix to a usable purity. Without it, the entire enchantment won't work.

"You can still use the treasures, Mistress," Galea reminds me.

"Yes…Yes, I know." I force myself to still, to reclaim control. It takes a lot more effort than I would like to admit. That thing, that monster made of shadows and serpents, still has me shaking. I push that aside, don't allow myself to feel the fear and anxiety that it pushed into me. All I am left with is a feeling of inadequacy. I can't bring myself to laugh at my own stupidity. Somewhere along the way, I started to feel invincible, like I could tackle anything the world below could throw my way. Corinth warned me about how strong some of the monsters there might be. I just didn't listen.

I force out all emotion, everything I am feeling, and retrieve the silver disc from the floor. Tossing it back onto the table, I resign myself to what has to be done. The fire affix is the most important component of the gauntlets I am trying to make. Without a sufficiently pure source of fire mana, the entire array won't function properly. With a sigh, I make my way to a clear corner of the room and pour out all of the fire-affixed natural treasures I have collected over the past weeks. Moreover, I remove all of the monster meat that carries even a trace of the right mana as well.

"I was hoping to sell this," I tell Galea. "I never realized how expensive enchanting was."

"You can always find more," she replies.

I don't know about that. After today, the idea of going down to the world below and running into something like that shadow monster brings me up short. But I can't stop. My soul presence flares off my skin, enveloping the pile of valuable treasure in front of me. With a snap, the treasure disintegrates, turning into black dust that settles to the floor.

While the action in the outside world is subdued, what happens inside my soulspace is anything but. All at once, a torrent of burning magic pours into me, flooding through my energy channels, racing toward the index adhered to my soul. Burning fire pours into me so fast that I almost lose consciousness. My skin turns red, almost cooking at the sudden deluge of heat.

Like a blazing star, a familiar symbol appears on the face of my soul index, the brand of fire. Power pours into the run, heating it up, making it grow brighter and brighter until even my mental avatar inside the soul space can't make out its shape. In the physical world, I stumble to a chair in the room, falling into it as it becomes more and more difficult to use my body. The strain of holding the power in my soul space is simply too great.

In my inner realm, my mental projection looms over the index and my constantly churning soul like a giant. The hands of a giant made from mist and vapor stretch forward, the left sinking into the index and wrapping around the burning rune, the right grabbing onto the surface of my soul. I strain with all of my mental fortitude, and the universe itself fights against me. My two hands inch toward one another, the force repelling both growing with every passing second. Never before have I tried to integrate this much raw power into my soul, but my determination never wavers. If my mental avatar could sweat, it would; if it could bleed as I bite my lip, it would. An eternity seems to pass as I force the two together, and with a final clap that shatters space, my hands meet, and the world turns white.

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I blink, slowly coming back to myself. The air around me smells of burning, and the surface of the chair I sit in is charred black from an oppressive heat. Something has happened. Even with the timelessness of the fight to integrate the affix into my soul, I have lost time. The blurry world slowly begins to come into focus in front of my eyes, and I see Galea floating in the air before me.

"How long?" I ask, my throat hoarse from dehydration.

"Three hours," she replies.

I stare at the spirit, trying to wrap my mind around that. How could I have lost so much time? As I pull some water from my vault, using it to wash the pain out of my sore throat, I turn my attention inward. There, like a star, the fire rune on my soul burns with unrestrained power. More, one of the stars orbiting my soul, the essentia long since integrated into my very being, throws off waves of magical power. No, that isn't my essentia, it is my conflux, the emperor conflux. My soul feels rung out, like I have just been through a crucible that I can't remember. Something happened in those three hours, but I have no memory of it.

My first step from the chair is hesitant, but I find my feet firm beneath me. I take another swig of water before marching to the table, grabbing an uninfused disc of silver from the table, and pouring magic into it. The fire mana comes easier than before, far easier than it ever has. In less than a second, the entire disc is filled to the brim with magical potency. I steel myself as I grab hold of the probe. If this doesn't return at least ninety-nine percent purity, then this enchantment will fail.

"One hundred percent pure," Galea reads, looking at the fraction displayed by the device.

"That's…that isn't possible." I grab another blank silver disc and fill it with fire-affixed mana as well. Again, the device reads that the mana contained within is absolutely pure. I fill another three discs with mana before I stop; they all read one hundred percent pure fire affixed mana. "Either this probe is broken," I say. "Or I have done something that should be impossible."

From everything I have read, after I discovered that my mana wasn't pure enough to use in real enchanting, a magician producing purely affixed mana should be impossible. The mana that a magician produces comes from the infinite potential of the divine realm. When this magic encounters the soul, it is like light being poured through a lens; no matter how well the glass is tempered, some infinitesimal part of that light will be lost in the process. For a person to generate pure and concepted mana is not something that can be done, at least not to my knowledge.

"A new mystery," I mutter. It feels like I am accumulating questions far faster than answers. Shaking my head, I pull the unsleeved gauntlets to myself. One by one, the mediums that I have purchased come out of my vault and are aligned neatly on the table in front of me. The actual infusion of mana into the array that I have spent the past weeks creating is the least time-consuming part of the process. Engraving the runes and creating the array of infusible metal has taken up the vast majority of my efforts over the past few weeks. Still, being this close to the end, the thought of something going wrong now is almost enough to stop me. Almost.

For four hours, I check and recheck every rune that I have etched, every line of infusable metal in the array, especially the anchoring runes where the mediums connect to the heavy metal of the gauntlets, the runes that will give life to the entire enchantment. I lose myself in the work, letting the hours slip past as I check every single part of the enchantment until I can't find a reason to check again. The first medium, a thick cord of silver holding steel-affixed mana, slides toward me as I steady myself. Once I start, there won't be any turning back. Yet, I find peace with that. The thought of having to keep moving forward until I am done is somehow fulfilling. I lift the cord, place the blocking pieces on the metal inside the array to prevent the affixed mana from leaking into the rest, and begin the process of transferring the magic.

What I am trying to do with these gloves is relatively simple. I am a mage, and I want to create enchantments that will support that, enchantments that will increase my magical potency. Of all the different attribute enhancements, increasing the magic attribute is actually the easiest. Every other attribute requires the enchantment to invoke, to call upon the magical principles governing particular realms, and to make those concepts manifest in the material of the enchantment, the metal of my gauntlets in this circumstance. This is especially difficult with strength and perception enchantments. For magic, however, there is no need to call upon concepts, because calling upon the concept of magic is flatly impossible. The texts I have been reading over the past few weeks theorize as to why this is. They could never guess it is because a jealous deity sits upon the throne of magic, refusing to allow anyone to manifest it directly.

Enchanters, as it turns out, are a resourceful lot. As a workaround to this problem, they shifted toward a new path. Instead of creating a metal, cloth, leather, or material that endows the wielder with the concept of magic to strengthen them, they created a set of runes that lowers the etheric density in an isolated location. Between the divine and material realms, there exists a barrier of ether, thicker in some places and thinner in others. As one grows in power, their soul moves closer to the physical, and they can draw more power from the realm of the divine. That barrier persists, leeching the power drawn. While the density of the barrier can never reach zero, enchantments such as the one I work on now, lower it, effectively increasing the magical potency of the wielder.

The complications with my particular creation come in a pair. Firstly, the material of the gauntlets that I chose to use is horrible for enchanting. I knew this before selecting it, choosing to value the incredible durability and cheapness of the immensely heavy metal. Because of that, I need to use more than a dozen different kinds of mana, playing them off each other, using them to annihilate some aspects while heightening others, just to create a metal that lowers etheric density. The cost of doing this is surprisingly lower than purchasing a simpler metal of similar strength. The second issue is far more personal.

My eyes ache as I finish the final infusion. More than twenty mediums lay discarded on the table in front of me, drained of their magic. The open pair of gauntlets in front of me is a mess of blocking materials, wires, and magically infused metal. The final part is upon me, just one more step before the end.

Taking the time to play around with, to study, my hidden armory, let me uncover something peculiar. The power of the objects I put inside the armory is transferred to me; their enchantments still function, but there is no air in the armory. Without air, the traditional transformers inside the enchantments cannot function; they cannot draw on ambient mana and convert it into magic to power the enchantments. For a few days, as I continued to experiment with the armory, I thought that this was a dead end, that the power would only be minorly useful, as I couldn't put any pieces of equipment that had real power inside. That was until I discovered that there was a kind of mana that infused the armory, fire, my fire mana.

I don't know why fire mana is so available inside. Maybe it is because fire was the only natural affix that I possessed. Maybe it is because I take after Corinth in some way. In either case, it means that every piece of powerful equipment that I place into my armory must be able to transform fire-affixed mana into every other kind of mana. This means that the potency of the equipment that I put in the armory will depend on the purity of my own fire-affix, since that is what will be used to power the enchantments. Today, I managed to solve that…somehow. Those missing hours still worry me. The fact that my fire mana must be used in the enchantments for my equipment means something else as well; I am going to have to make all my equipment myself.

I wait several minutes, pushing out my exhaustion and worry, finding the calm of focus. More than half of the array needs to be filled with my fire mana, and when I set to work, I do so with steady hands. Piece by piece, I fill each line, each thirsty piece of metal with burning magic. I am methodical in my approach, patient, and determined. I hardly recognize the feel of the screw in my hand as I fasten the bolts that hold the sheath of the enchantment in place. I sit back with a sigh, letting the tool fall to the side, looking at the mana blocks lying haphazardly on the tabletop next to drained mediums. The gauntlets thrum with power in my sight, powerful potential ready to be unleashed. There is no hesitation, no feeling of anticipation, as I identify the newly created magical object.

Obsidianate Gauntlets of Magical Potency (Rare): <Armor><Enhancement> Gauntlets created by the novice enchanter Charlene Devardem. These gauntlets, made of obsidianate, boast incredible weight and durability, and thin the film between the realms to bestow magical potency. Enhancement: +117 Magic Armory Bonus: +70 Defense, +30 Magical Defense

I smile to myself. "Better than I could have expected," I say. Touching the gauntlets, they vanish into my armory, and I feel the flood of power wash over me. Only a day and a half until the academy tests remain. "I finished ahead of time."

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