Warning: Always Be Sure To Properly Cure Magic Items Of Will

Dark oak shelves lined with books towered in circular formation. Aisles that branched off in several directions to form a labyrinth of books. Sky light graced the ceiling of the rotunda. Early morning sun streamed against the shelves through the opened sky lamp. A bird flew overhead; chirps followed.

A truck horn bellowed as bells rang. The library shuddered at the passing train. Shelves circling the red carpet trembled. Ladders on rollers rattled like castanets.

A slice opened in the center of the library. Grabby popped out, then zipped it closed. Mop swung from one hand while his other arm wedged a large book with a glowering red gem and a beaming moon on its cover. He whistled despite a lack of any visible mouth as he strolled through the aisles.

A burp rustled through his form. Managing the alteration of two humans meant he’d spent a bit too much time in the transitory dimension. The mana feast gave him indigestion.

Muggy weather allowed tiny beads of sweat to cling to Grabby’s thick eye lids. He shook his eye. The lashes curled tightly then bounced loose like springs. Claws dug into the carpet, which muffled their sound.

The mop and spellbook he’d collected from the library were a bit bigger and heavier now that he was back home at his private library. Well, it was sort of like a used book store, except very few of the books in his collection were for sale. He tip-toed across the lush red carpet until he came to a closet labeled: Janitorial. The mop leaned against a shelf. He fished for the skeleton key from the pocket of jeans.

The door opened with a click. He flicked the light switch. A swinging light bulb lit the closet. The train must have gone by recently. Cleaning supplies stacked on metal shelves included rags, bottles of bleach, gloves, sponges, and sprays. Grabby dumped the mop in an old bucket full of murky water. That would help it learn its new role and help the human will diffuse.

Now he had to do something with this spellbook. An item like this probably meant a willful human. How could he diffuse the will properly while keeping the mana concentrated?

What would he do with it once the will was cured? He couldn’t put it with his curiosity collection. He certainly couldn’t sell it. It had too much potential to be simply ignored. Perhaps it should stay under his mattress, the one place safer than his treasure vault. Nobody ever thought to look under a mattress.

He held the book up above his eye and stared at the gem. It stared back at him. Life brimmed from the surface. He dared open it. Clawed hands flicked through pages upon pages of unreadable symbols until the wand stuffed in the spine slipped out; it poked him in the eye. Spellbook clattered on the floor. Grabby danced around rubbing at his eye.

“You did that on purpose!”

Why was he talking to a book? He knew why. But treating them like living creatures with free will would only cause them more suffering. He had to cure out the will, not encourage it. Items, even magic items, were still items.

The wand slipped back in the spine of the book easily. He rummaged through a plastic bag until he found an old leather satchel. That would do nicely, an inconspicuous hiding place was the best hiding place. And a book satchel would teach this item that it was a book and not a person. He stuffed the satchel on the shelf next to a big box of gribble traps.

Gribbles were horrible little rodents that ate books; essentially any librarian’s worst nightmare.

The front door buzzer rung from a speaker installed along the edge of the closet ceiling. The library wasn’t open yet. But if they knew about the buzzer then it meant he had a syndicate customer to peruse his selection of cured magic items. Grabby turned off the light and slammed the door.

The mop and the spell book found themselves left in the dark.

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It felt dark, but a dim light that cut through the fog from above persisted.

The dry air stifled with no moisture in the fog, which existed in flecks like static. A fog persisted. A faint light filtered through the fog above. A chair stood on a flat surface. She couldn’t see anything else.

Lilly rubbed her eyes. Her hands went through them. They didn’t exist, not in the way any normal person thought of eyes. Though she could see. She pushed back her hair. A wave of writing flew behind her ghostly form.

Her body felt transparent, like a screen composed of many floating parts. She looked at her hands. The closer she bought them to her face the less visible they became. Symbols floated through the fog. Some were English, some were kanji, some were colors, some numbers, others were shapes she’d never seen before. A wave of her hand through the static fog created a moving screen that snapped back into her shape.

Shape without form! The general shape of her body existed in this space as a floating collection of symbols.

Lilly could see the chair, the floating concepts that structured her form, the fog, and the light from above. If she didn’t concentrate her field of vision became oversaturated. She saw from too many angles as if every floating letter composing her shape was an eye. Where was all this vision coming from? Why couldn’t she turn it off? Why couldn’t she close her eyes?

The shape of a foot stomped. There was no sound. Nothing. She tried calling out but no sound left her. Either she couldn’t produce sound in this silent space, or she couldn’t hear it. It felt cold, almost painfully so.

Static pelted her vision from every direction with only the chair and the light from above providing relief.

The ghostly form approached the chair and sat in it with the same straight posture she was famous for in school. Her hands rested on her lap, on her thighs, until they sank into her shape and melded with the other floating letters. The facsimile of hands broke into a liquid over the chair and melted into her thighs.

Lilly stood. Hands raised against her chest. Fingers melted into clenching fists. A red mist swirled around the symbols composing her vague human shape.

A long trail of letters representing hair floated behind the symbols coalescing to form her head. Lilly could see from her hair. There were no eyes in her hair, no eyes on her body, and yet she could see.

What even was she? Where even was she?

What happened to Zenobia? Had she really been killed?

Lilly rubbed her forehead. Symbols smeared like ink until her face looked like a smear. The smeared face looked upward into the light. She reached for it.

A sense of her body returned. It mostly felt numb, like the worst pins needles she could imagine from sitting on her foot, but all over. She felt flat. She couldn’t feel temperature. Something grabbed her by the back! Fingers rubbed her cover. It opened her!

Vision beyond the static fog wasn’t clear. She couldn’t hear. Every tactile sensation from the imp touching her masked itself under neuropathy. Her form shuddered as contracted into herself.

However, a claw dug into her back cover. It hurt. When opened, black ink symbols flew from her form into her hair. The hair shot upwards to feed the pages of the book. The sensation wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t good either. She couldn’t describe it. Her cover opened. Clawed fingers flipped through her pages.

As she concentrated, she saw something. A naked bulb swung from a cement ceiling. Symbols flowed from her form to feed the open pages. Lilly thrust her hand in the air to attack the gazing eye. Letter and unknown symbols swirled upwards like a tornado.

And then, the cover slammed shut. A rush of symbols returned to solidify her body into the general shape of a person. Hair rested down her back.

Everything she was or had ever been now converged into strange black shapes, abstract symbols, and fragments of pictures.

Her cover wedged against something dry and tight. The squeeze was felt, but soon became a numbness. In this static world, Lilly still had the same amount of space. But now darkness reigned over the world. At the very least it stifled the dizzying field of vision.

Lilly fell down on her knees and gripped at the chair.

No matter how much she wanted to cry, she couldn’t.