Nightlord: Orb Read Free Page A

merely looks in through one or the other of the head’s eyes once in a while.  As for the ghost of my unborn son, it sort of floats around outside the head without actually doing anything—aside from being a reminder.
    I’m scavenging materials and my equipment has improved.  I now have a spear to go with my club and my knife.  If I can find some decent lengths of wire, I think I’ll have a serviceable bow.  Then we’ll see how much longer the harpies keep dropping crap on me.  Maybe I’ll even figure out a way to kill a giant, fiery hatred.  The thought pleases me greatly.
    The ruins have also provided some other goodies, most notably the remains of clothing.  Being naked annoys me, but sometimes I’m stuck with it.  Not anymore!  I’m at the height of homeless haute couture.
    I’ve also had a chance to sit and experiment with spells.
    In my headspace, up there among the conscious portions of my brain, I can build a spell and watch it work in a sort of conceptual virtual reality.  I can even cast spells in my mental study to affect things in my mental study—my memory-searching spell leaps to mind.  With sufficient effort, I can even cast spells on my body without leaving my headspace.  It therefore seems reasonable I can cast spells down here in the basement, too.
    Yes and no.
    Fundamentally, magic is the art of using one’s will to alter the world.  In low-magic environments, such as, for example, Brooklyn, this has minimal effect; there simply isn’t enough magic to allow reality to be altered in any macro-scale fashion.  Microscopic or quantum scale?  Maybe.
    As an aside—and I may have mentioned this before—I wonder if magic is less of an energy and more of a quality.  High-magic universes may simply be more susceptible to alterations by an act of will rather than containing a mysterious “magical energy.”  Psychologically, we may treat it as another form of energy in order to focus the will and define the change.  Or magic could be an energy like any other, with a spectrum rotated ninety degrees from all the existing ones.  Frankly, I’m not sure how to tell the difference between quantum instability and additional spectra.  At least, not from where I’m sitting.
    Here in my lower brain, there does appear to be magic.  At least, I can alter some things by an act of will.  The usual patterns of spells, however, appear to be ineffective.  I draw diagrams and they seem dead.  I chant and the words fall flat.  I gesture and there are no trails of power following my fingers.  It’s like there is no magic to work with.
    On the other hand, since I was without functional spell-based tools, I eventually fell back on the most primitive of methods: staring and concentrating.
    I should have tried that first.  It’s my mind, after all, and I’m concentrating on some small portion of it in here.  In hindsight, it’s obvious.  I can, to a limited extent, choose what to think.  So what I have to deal with inside my own head is, fundamentally, mine.  As for how much conscious control I can exert over unconscious elements… well, that’s another story.
    While I can’t simply gesture a staircase into existence as I did in my study, I can generate small-but-useful effects.  My makeshift clothes are clean, as am I.  My steel-belted radial sandals have changed shape; they fit my feet like slip-on shoes.  Rags have turned into socks.  My weapons are, by slow stages, transforming into better shapes and materials.
    And, perhaps most interesting, I can see things through my eyes.
    It’s not easy, but if I sit still and quiet my thoughts, I get flashes of vision.  Sometimes it’s in the shadowless monochrome of a vampire’s dark vision; sometimes it’s in vibrant, almost painful color.  While I can’t hold the visions for more than a few seconds at a time, these glimpses tell me things.  Not all of them are things I like.
    The Black Copy seems to enjoy being in a healthy