Short Little Stories

Stanley Miller had thought, upon awakening, that he would be able to work magic – which just goes to show that even a being of perfect intellect can occasionally be wrong.

He was awake, now, and it was a strange feeling. He had been deep in the depths of his own mind for what apparently was weeks in the physical world. But in his own mind – well, what he had undergone there was not something that could be quantified in time as we understand it. The activity his mind had undergone was on an order of magnitude ranging towards an eternity, but his own personal understanding of it as himself – as the sentience that identified itself as Stanley Miller – had felt the passage of no more than three hours, fifteen minutes and approximately thirty-two seconds.

During that time, he had internalized an understanding of the magic he had seen Tailos weaving – that is, the manipulation of the underlying structure of reality through the application of several forms of energy not categorized in his native world’s scientific lexicon. He had seen precisely how it was done – but upon awakening, could not manipulate that energy himself.

And he did not know why, which considering he had just discovered himself capable of, in theory, understanding anything, was an altogether frustrating sensation.

Frustration was not something Stanley Miller was used to, and so it was that despite tapping into an aspect of himself that was the epitome of logical analysis and objective perception, he also was becoming a bit more human at the same time.

This would – in the distant future, and in a story entirely removed from the one presently at hand – prove to be a Very Important Thing indeed.

For now, it was enough to understand that Stanley Miller was not a mage, nor a sorcerer, nor a spellweaver of any kind.

But he was extremely perceptive, and this was why he was now standing beside Rowen on a raised circular dias, in the center of a shrine that remained remarkably intact for having stood amidst the wilderness for centuries, somehow weathering the touch of time and nature without showing the wear and tear one would expect.

It had, after all, not been built by the hand of man, but instead brought forth by will of a god.

A god whose essence Stanley, alone among the four of them, could perceive slumbering within the shrine – just as he knew exactly what needed to be done to call it out.