Chương 3: Proof

Wes walked him back toward the smeared chalk circle and raised the crystal lens.

"Here. Take this and look through it." Mark reached for it, missed by an inch, then corrected and took it on the second attempt. Through the crystal, Mark saw patterns of light and energy blaze into visibility over the air above the circle of candles. What looked like ancient runes burned in layers of blue, gold, and violet. It was beautiful but he had no idea what the pretty colors were supposed to tell him.

"See those?" Wes pointed through the lens at a bright symbol repeated around the circle.

"That's called a creation sigil." He pointed at another strange rune that honestly reminded Mark of McDonald's Golden Arches.

"This one is a formation matrix. Together, they create the standard magical residue for construct generation. Textbook perfect, if I do say so myself." His hand trembled slightly, but he had a large grin on his face as if he was relieved to see what he did.

"If I'd somehow summoned you, the magical signatures would be completely different. You would see translocation anchors and dimensional bridges all over the place." He met Mark's eyes. Worry flickered beneath the excitement.

"None of those are present. This is pure construction magic. You were created here, in this circle just a few minutes ago."

"I don't know anything about magic. For all I know those things you call sigils and matrices could be proving that I'm right! Those shapes could be anything." Wes straightened and glared down at him, frustration finally breaking through.

"I followed Venwick's modified ritual exactly. Every component, every symbol, every incantation matched his recommendations with my boss helping me procure everything. The ritual worked as designed. You're a construct. Likely an exceptionally intelligent one from everything I've seen, but a construct nonetheless.

"You didn't exist before you woke up in this room. You are magic that coalesced into a kobold's body and became alive. You must accept this." The bond apparently didn't extend to thought because even though Wes had told him to accept this, Mark had not felt compelled to think differently.

"There's a term for false beliefs that persist despite contradicting evidence. Delusions." Mark chose each word with precision.

"Sounds like a useful term."

"It is, but here's the thing about delusions. From inside one, it's indistinguishable from reality. The person experiencing it has complete conviction. They can't see it as false because their brain presents it as absolutely true." Mark held his gaze.

"If I'm a delusional kobold with false memories, I'd feel exactly like I feel right now. Absolutely certain my memories are real, unable to accept they're false." Wes nodded.

"Exactly. Which is why..."

"But the same logic applies to you." Wes stopped.

"If you performed interdimensional soul theft, you'd rationalize it away. You'd find justification for every doubt I raise. You need me to be a construct because…" Mark cut himself off when he noticed his tail sweeping erratic arcs behind him. He forced it still.

"As I was saying… You need me to be a construct because accepting the alternative means confronting that you kidnapped an innocent man from his family." Wes's jaw clenched.

"I'm not a monster. I followed Professor Venwick's ritual exactly. It is only because of me that you exist."

"You sound very certain."

"I am certain!" Wes snapped. His wand sparked, producing a small plume of smoke. Then he stopped, drew a slow breath. Wes's expression shifted, calculating.

"Tell me what you were doing the day I brought you here. Name one person you healed that day." Mark opened his mouth. Names surfaced readily enough. He could recite dozens of patients from memory, their diagnoses, their medications, the particular cadences of their suffering. He reached for his last clear memory and found only fog where the edges should have been. Everything recent blurred into a single undifferentiated mass he couldn't sequence.

"My wife and I are planning a trip to Yellowstone next month," he said, buying time.

"I've seen Mrs. McKinster twice this month due to adjusting her Lamictal dosage. There's a man I've been treating for OCD whose rituals have been escalating since his mother passed."

"But was this yesterday?" Mark was deflecting. He could not locate the answer. He could not find the morning before he woke here, or the night before that, or organize the last several days into anything resembling a sequence. It was not absence exactly. More like a deck of cards dropped and shuffled, the order lost without the cards themselves disappearing. Worse, he recalled how when he first opened his eyes, he had not remembered any of his life at all.

"I'm in shock," he said, which was true. Wes said nothing, but Mark swore he saw his eyebrow raise slightly.

"The timeline being disrupted doesn't prove anything," Mark said.

"Trauma affects memory consolidation. If something forcibly extracted my consciousness from one reality and deposited it in another, it makes sense I would not remember everything perfectly initially. It's consistent with what I'm describing, not evidence against it."

"Professor Venwick notes that ritual-generated memories are often disorganized. You don't remember them in the right sequence because there was no sequence." Wes swallowed.

"They appear as fragments at first, then strong and vivid and over time they fade. Eventually you'll either forget them or recognize they were never true."

"Fine," Mark said.

"Then humor me. Why don't we alert the proper authorities? Tell them I remember being human and let them investigate. If they say you're right, there's no harm to you." Wes's face drained of color.

"You can't."

"Why not? If I'm kidnapped from my reality, we need to know. Someone may be able to send me back. You wouldn't face consequences. Maybe Venwick would, if his ritual steals minds from other worlds, but I believe you didn't do this intentionally."

"This could destroy both our lives." Wes's voice cracked.

"If anyone believed you, if they thought I'd performed soul theft, they would execute me. Or worse, bind me as a familiar myself."

"Worse," Mark said. Wes blinked.

"What?"

"You said worse." Mark's claws curled against his palms.

"Even you think being made into a familiar is worse than death."

"That's different," Wes said.

"Because it would be happening to you?" Wes looked away.

"I didn't mean it like that."

"Yes, you did." Mark's voice shook, but it held.

"That may be the first honest thing you've said since I woke up." Color rose in Wes's face. Shame, anger, fear, or some combination of the three. For one sharp second Mark thought Wes might argue. Instead the apprentice swallowed hard and pressed both hands flat against the edge of his desk, as if the furniture could keep him upright. When he spoke again it was in a soft tone.

"It doesn't change the problem. Even if you were right. Even if everything you believe is true. Where would they send you? This is the only world anyone knows about. There are madmen who claim other worlds exist, and philosophers who like to argue over it after too much wine, but no one has proof." Mark winced at the term madmen, but this was not the moment to correct Wes. Wes continued, "Summoning rituals move things from one place in this world to another. A different reality is not a place.

There are no coordinates you could create with a ritual to send someone to another reality." His hands had started shaking again.

"If they believed you were a human transformed unlawfully, they would dissolve you to prevent your suffering. They would call it mercy."

"By law, I have one week to evaluate a newly created familiar." Wes swallowed.

"If you're malfunctioning or unmanageable, I'm allowed to dissolve you when we go before the registry board. I don't want that. With the intelligence you've shown, you're everything I hoped for. But if you stand there and accuse me of soul theft, I don't know how to protect either of us."

"You mean you don't know how to protect yourself." Wes looked away.

"So you're threatening to kill me?" Mark's gravelly voice rose, the words scraping higher with distress.

"I'm explaining reality." Wes's voice dropped.

"Even if they didn't believe you enough to execute me, they might still decide you were malfunctioning. You're in obvious distress. They could declare me an unsuitable master, unbind you, and attempt to transfer the bond."

"Then I'd tell the next wizard the same thing." Wes's jaw worked.

"You wouldn't get the chance." Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. Mark went still.

"No wizard would accept you. Not after that. You'd be seen as fundamentally broken, and without a master..." He stopped.

"Without a master, what?"

"Within a day, maybe less, the magic binding your consciousness would dissipate." Wes could no longer hold his eyes.

"You would dissolve."

"Dissolve?" Mark's voice climbed higher. The hiss in the word came out sharp and wet.

"You mean I'd disappear?"

"Your body is a construct, and constructs need a magical source. Constructs who are powerful in citizen magic can sustain themselves, but you don't have the ability to sustain your own magic. Right now the bond is feeding you." Wes's face twisted as if he hated the sound of his own explanation.

"Without it, you would return to the magical substrate."

"Return to substrate," Mark repeated. The words were too clean for death.

"So even if I'm right… even if you stole me from my family, from my daughter, I can't tell anyone? Or we could both die?" Mark's voice dropped.

"Yes. I could be executed, and you could be forcibly unbound and dissolved." Wes whispered the last word.

"You may not want to believe it, but you have to accept that you're a construct with false memories. I swear I'll treat you well."

"You still haven't given me proof I can verify! Just magical residue I can't read." Mark's hands shook.

"You're asking me to accept that everything I believe is false, and that I should be fine because you'll be a benevolent master. How the hell am I supposed to accept that?" Wes's jaw tightened.

"Fine, we can settle this easily. Every citizen and familiar has a status page with quantifiable attributes. However it also tells familiars what type of familiar you are. It would say transformed human if you were a human, wild if you were a natural born kobold, or magical construct if I just made you. All you have to do is focus inward and think 'Status.'" Mark's eyes narrowed.

"A status page? What is this, a video game?"

"What's a video game?" Wes's frown deepened.

"Status pages are fundamental. Everyone has one. Just try it. If you're truly from another world, you may not have one. That would be remarkable data." Mark closed his eyes. His whole body buzzed with that persistent restless energy, but he was able to focus on that one word… Status. Text blazed into his vision, floating, opaque. Just one more thing that could not be explained.

FAMILIAR STATUS Name: [Unnamed — Designation Pending] Species: Kobold (Draconic Ancestry, Latent) Type: Magical Construct Familiar Level: 1 Master: Wes Durum Bond Age: 23 minutes Age: 23 minutes Registry Notice: Board evaluation required by 7 days. Familiar training enrollment class required within 30 days. If no name is registered within 30 days, designation will be assigned automatically. ATTRIBUTES STR: 4 | DEX: 12 | CON: 5 | INT: 18 | WIS: 16 | CHA: 10 Magical Construct.

Those two words sat there with bureaucratic certainty. He'd spent years delivering devastating diagnoses in as compassionate a way as possible, and the universe was returning the favor with all the bedside manner of a DMV form.

"Well?" Wes leaned forward.

"Do you see it? Does it say you're a construct? What are your cognitive attributes?" Mark's throat closed. The words scraped out against his will.

"Magical Construct. It says I'm a Magical Construct." The room tilted as Mark started hyperventilating, and his heart hammered against his ribs. The edges of his vision went dark. His hands had gone numb before he recognized the sensation.

"Are you alright?" Wes's voice came from very far away. No. This status thing just told me everything I believe is false and my life is a lie. How can I be alright? Ground yourself. Five things you can see: Wes's face. Chalk circle. Books. Candle. Amethyst paperweight. Four things you can touch: Stone floor. Scales. Claws. Tail. The wrongness of it crashed over him in waves. Not your body. Not your hands. Grounding was only making this worse because reality was the cause. Box breathing.

Four in, hold four, four out, hold four. He managed one cycle before his breathing stuttered and broke. As he hyperventilated black spots danced in his vision. The floor came up and Wes was there before Mark understood he was falling, one arm braced under his shoulders. Warmth flooded into him where Wes's arm braced his shoulders. If anything it made the anxiety worse.

"I don't understand," Wes said as he caught him.

"What is happening? How do I help?"

"You can't." The words came out distant despite the chaos.

"I know…" His voice broke. The words wouldn't come. His chest squeezed tighter. Wes stared at him.

"Do you know how to help yourself? How do you know?" Of course he knew how to treat this. He'd treated hundreds of patients with panic disorder, taught these exact techniques to patients and residents. However, if reality was the trigger, how would grounding himself help? Mark's psychiatric knowledge did not cover what to do when reality was gaslighting you to show you don't exist. A pretty large omission in the psychiatric curriculum, evidently.

"My job," Mark said. The words came out high and gravelly, like everything else since he woke.

"Your techniques don't seem to be working that well or not enough anyway. I should check your magical stability…" Wes released his hold on Mark too suddenly, leading to Mark's legs giving out. Once on the ground he curled on his side and dragged himself closer to the candles. After Wes's warm-blooded heat, the stone floor bit twice as cold. He drew his knees to his chest which made him feel protected but also warmed him slightly by bringing his legs closer to the candlelight.

Somewhere behind Mark, Wes was moving, drawers opening and closing, the sounds arriving from very far away. Mark had to reframe to make this reality bearable. Theoretically this could still be a dream, coma, or the weirdest afterlife he could imagine but those had slipped behind two uglier explanations. The first was that Wes was right and he was a magical construct less than an hour old, and thirty-five years of accumulated life had been generated during formation.

In that version, he had existed for less time than the chalk had been smeared across the floor. The second option was that his body was a construct but his mind was real, stolen from his world and shoved into this form without his consent. Both seemed impossible, but one had to be true. He needed to find a way to make at least one of them survivable. The panic squeezed tighter, and his whole body shook. Time seemed to stand still.

Wes's voice came and went, worried, uncertain, and suddenly Wes loomed above while holding a strange device. If the body is a construct but the mind is real… Mark's breathing hitched, caught, slowed slightly. Then this could be fixed. Not immediately but theoretically. He forced his breathing to slow. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. Hold for four. His heart still raced, but the rhythm helped. The body is a construct. I have to accept that. The status page and magical signatures said so.

This kobold form was created today in that circle. But the mind... The status page had shown Intelligence 18 and Wisdom 16. He had no idea what those numbers meant in this world, but Wes had earlier mentioned something about how double digits in intelligence would be a good and surprising result, meaning even something as low as 10 may be decent. If Mark's numbers were as remarkable as he suspected, they needed an explanation that even the Venwick ritual couldn't provide. That was evidence worth pursuing.

Wes also had university connections, access to magical research, and a powerful personal investment in believing his ritual had worked correctly. All of that was useful. A research assistant arrangement, temporary and strategic, was a tolerable price for access to those resources. Plus if magic could place a mind into a kobold's body, it could theoretically point toward other realities even if people here may not initially believe it can. If it couldn't, well.

He would cross that particular bridge when he came to it, and by then he'd presumably have had enough time to make peace with being a small reptile with excellent taste in buttons. That was a healthy restructuring of the situation. Mark uncurled slowly. His body still trembled and his heart was still faster than it should be, but the worst of the panic had crested. The button from before lay within reach of where he fell. The urge to take it returned at once.

This time, rather than fight it, he reached over and picked it up. No use continuing to fight instincts that aren't harmful, and he'd had collections as a human. A button was a button. Every scratch and imperfection pressed against his scaled palm. The satisfaction was immediate and entirely foreign.

"Are you...?" Wes hovered nearby, uncertain. Wes was now holding a strange pocket-watch device bristling with little metal spines, as if it had mated with a hedgehog, and had it pointing at Mark.

"Better." Mark's voice came out weaker but still too high and gravelly. He pushed himself to sitting, scales scraping against stone. His hands still shook.

"Not perfect, but better."

"Your magic stability never changed, you're at 94% stability. What was that?" Wes asked.

"Some kind of malfunction?"

"Panic attack." Mark leaned back against the wall. His chest still felt too tight, but he could breathe now.

"Acute anxiety response to severe psychological distress. It's quite common in my field of work but I usually treat it rather than have one."

"You seemed to know what to do. You were using techniques, trying to calm yourself." Wes's eyes widened.

"You've existed for less than an hour. It took a while but it seemed to work. How?" Mark had already answered that. He did not owe Wes the comfort of repetition. Instead Mark decided to redirect the conversation.

"The status page," he said.

"You asked about my cognitive attributes before I had a panic attack."

"Yes, what are they?"

"My Intelligence is eighteen and Wisdom is sixteen. Is that good?" Mark watched Wes's face carefully. Wes froze.

"Eighteen?" The word came out barely above a whisper.

"Intelligence eighteen?"

"That's what it said." For several seconds, Wes just stared as if he couldn't comprehend what Mark had told him. Then his expression shifted as enthusiasm flooded in. He was grinning ear to ear.

"That's incredible!" The enthusiasm was making Wes speak as fast as Mark's new baseline.

"I've never heard of a level one familiar scoring that high!"

"Natural kobolds average seven or eight intelligence," Wes said, words tumbling faster.

"Exceptional ones rarely break ten. The modified ritual was supposed to push that higher, but Professor Venwick documented twelve to fifteen as the ceiling under ideal conditions." He paced the narrow room, robes swishing.

"Eighteen is where most wizards test after years of training. And wisdom sixteen alongside it." His voice climbed while he continued to speak.

"Your intelligence is so high that it generated an entire alternate life to satisfy your need for continuity. That has to be it. A kobold mind with wizard-level cognition would need an explanation for how it could exist, so your mind invented one. It decided it must have been human because there is no way a newly created kobold could have memories of that type of intellect and be consistent with reality." Mark's jaw tightened and he had a quick impulse to bare his teeth at that comment.

He did not want to be a kobold. He wanted that fact made extremely clear to the universe. But hearing Wes talk as though kobolds were naturally disqualified from being intelligent did not sit right with his borrowed scales.

"This proves the ritual worked," Wes said, though doubt flickered across his face.

"Professor Venwick documented this phenomenon. Higher intelligence, more elaborate false continuity. Yours is just... more elaborate than expected."

"What's the highest intelligence construct Venwick has created?"

"I think fifteen or sixteen was what I read in his papers." Wes's hands twisted together.

"But that doesn't mean..." He stopped. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter.

"The attributes you have are remarkable. Beyond anything expected." He met Mark's eyes briefly, then looked away.

"We should let your consciousness stabilize. Give the false memories time to fade." Wes's hands kept shaking. The only way those numbers fit his theory was if a third-year student had somehow surpassed his own professor. They both knew it.

"I need to be alone," Mark said, voice steadier now.

"To think."

"Of course." Wes moved quickly, setting the weird spiked pocketwatch down and pulling out a small brown cloth pouch and a wooden wand from a cluttered shelf.

"I have a dimensional familiar space. I can set it to kobold warren. It will be somewhere private to rest, maybe it will help your memories settle." Wes held up the pouch.

"This was created for optimal storage, with temperature control, and adjustable habitat matrices. It's top of the line, or close enough. The pouch cost another month's salary, on top of the ritual components." His smile faltered as he looked down.

"I did think my familiar would be grateful. But with those memories... I understand why you aren't." Wes met his eyes again.

"Professor Venwick's research says false memories typically fade within two to four weeks. Once they do, your consciousness will fully stabilize and integrate with your true nature. I know you won't believe me, but I truly hate that you're suffering right now." Wes consulted his tome and found his page. He raised his wand and his eyes closed. The world blurred at the edges, light swirling, reality bending. The last thing Mark saw was Wes's face, eyes closed, still deep in concentration.

Mark still clutched the button in his hand. It was shiny and now his, and some part of him was unreasonably pleased about that.