>>5816085Perhaps it was the influence of the Archmage and her acolytes upon you which made you even consider for a moment moving right onto reckless experimentation, but even then, you were not SO far gone. You could never risk Muffins, or Hershy, or even Zith-Zi. You’d briefly speculated upon the artificial jackalope which you had created, but even then you almost immediately dismissed this possibility—at least until you knew it was safe. That left only…
Yourself.
You’d stayed up almost the whole knight deliberating that, going back and forth as to whether it was worth it—such was your absorption in this research, with so little else going on in your day-to-day life. <Daylight> alone enabled this, though the less time you spent beneath the sun and the moon, the less your body seemed synchronized to their celestial clock. But was that a matter of body, or of mind, or of SOUL?
You needed answers, damnit!
When you first ventured topside again, it had been to see Logan Pearce. Zith-Zi was, admittedly, a fairly entertaining sort once you got past her rough edges, but she was like your father: a man (or woman, or goblin, or WHATEVER) of action, not of complicated thoughts and conflicted feelings. Logan, though, was a man of heart and of mind. Moreover, he knew YOUR heart perhaps better than anyone else. However, perhaps even You did not know your heart as well as you thought, for your feet did not carry you to his classroom… But to izirina Henzler’s. You found yourself standing like a spectre at the portal again, and you must have looked nearly as haunted, for she exchanged a few words with her partner in some exercise or another and swiftly came to see you.
“Are you alright?” she asked quietly. “You look as if you haven’t slept.”
“I haven’t,” you said with a small laugh, which only seemed to worry her more. “Can we speak? After class?”
She nodded, and you’d paced the doorway. Now, with sun shining through the windows, you were revivified… But sleep deprivation took its toll upon you even so. Your mind was scattershot, your thinking disjointed. At times you felt that you were irrational; at other times, that the exhaustion and helped you to break down a door and to make leaps of logic you otherwise would not have been able to. Does an exhausted soul come closer to the realm of the God of Death, to the Dreamscape? Those were other planes, also, weren’t they? Or other dimensions of the material realm? What was the difference—was it absolute, or a matter of degree?
“Slow down,” Izirina cautioned you calmly, as these and more thoughts flowed forth after her class’ conclusion. “You’re not making sense.”
