Mother of Magic

The Storm

Stephanie woke.

She did not immediately open her eyes. She needed to take inventory. Get her mind working. It felt disjointed.

Everything was wrong. This feeling of wrongness upon awakening was becoming old to her.

This time was not like when she woke up in this world.

Not completely.

There were similarities to the last time she woke up and things were off kilter. Strong ones. Primarily one of place. Also, her skin felt wrong. No... That was not right. Her clothes felt wrong. That was similar but not the same. When Stephanie came to this Earth she had started naked on her Earth. Here she ended up clothed. It was not only that the clothes Ava had put her in were as nothing she had ever worn before. She went from naked to dressed. This time she started dressed in clothes she had made here to match her tastes. Now what she had on felt wrong against her skin.

Stephanie's face hurt where she had impacted the ground. That was new and different.

There was a decidedly unpleasant feeling that her access to magic was being messed with somehow. A sense she never had before coming to this world, but that she had been learning to master ever since. Stephanie did not have Ava's fine-tuned abilities in this regard. She did have some. She could feel magic flow. Especially at what Le would call a 'higher energy level'. Over time that touch to level of power had fine-tuned itself. The amount of energy required to create Steel I-beams or toothpicks of any act of creating something from nothing dialed down. Using magic sensitized her to it. Ava assured the couple that this would continue. To be able to fly with magic required sensitivity to be honed. Neither Stephanie nor Le was there yet. Not at Ava's level or near it. Ava is — or at least was — a Reverend Mother. Ava is about power but also a world-class master of control. She could create things, but also fly, and heal. Fine-grained control of a force that could manifest something like the parts that built their cabin. Stephanie is an absolute novice relative to Ava. Ava was a good teacher, and their alignment gave Stephanie and Le a jump start. The pair could feel how Ava did things.

In the same way that baseball had always been intuitive for her, Stephanie could feel everything magic about her was being messed with. A brand new sixth sense that was suddenly in alert and ringing in her mind.

Not that magic was wrong, but her sense of it was different. An image of Silena's armor came unbidden to her mind's eye. A sudden memory of things felt. An association in the same way a scent evokes a memory.

Stephanie opened her eyes. She was lying on her back. The ceiling she could see was weird. It was crusted with yellow rocks. It reminded Stephanie of science experiments when she was a kid, making super-saturated with sugar or salt solutions and then letting them cool. Having the crust form in random crystals. These were yell and coated the roof.

There should not even be a ceiling. Stephanie was outside before she lost consciousness. There should be her yard. The gazebo and the view of the surrounding Rocky Mountains. Laying on her back as she was, there she be sky. Trees and the side of her house in her peripheral vision.

The back of her neck hurt. Stephanie probed it lightly. Found a large welt on her skin to the right of her spine. A mosquito bite if the insect had been the size of a sparrow.

Pushing herself upright, Stephanie looked around at her new situation. She was on a bed. A bunk of sorts. It was suspended from a yellow-rock-encrusted wall by angled chains.

"Namber." Stephanie muttered to herself. The way magic felt now clear.

Le was on a similar bed on the side of her. He was wearing new clothes. Barefoot. Linen or something like it pants. Ill-fitting and loose. A similar shirt. Striped in black and wide: cartoon prisonerwear.