“How is a crystal supposed to be your weapon, anyway?” I asked Fallon, scowling at the abundance of geometric gems surrounding us just as much as I did the one in her grip. “I mean, yes, I stabbed a couple monsters with a crystal, but I don’t think that was ideal.”

  “It wasn’t,” Fallon admitted, “but it was brave anyways, so I’ll let it go.”

  “Stop dodging the question.”

  “Stop being so suspicious,” she told me dismissively. “And I don’t think it’s supposed to be a weapon. Not like that, at least. Like I said, it’s a focus for my spells. It’s literally called ‘Crystalline Focus.’”

  My eyes lit up at the reminder. “Right! You said you can cast spells now! What’ve you got?”

  “Well, it is just level one,” Fallon said, blushing a little at my excitement. “All I’ve got is Heal and Shine.”

  “Shine?” I asked. Heal was fairly obvious, but the other could’ve been almost anything to do with light, which seemed like it was the whole thing with crystals.

  “Seems like a simple attack spell,” Fallon said with a shrug. “The description even says ‘low-powered.’”

  “Look, it’s ranged at least, right?” Fallon nodded. “Good. Anything that lets you attack our weird shadow friends upstairs without getting near them is a good thing, right?” I told her. My arms and legs weren’t badly marked up by my early struggles, but the scrapes left behind by the weird lizard monsters were still a perpetual discomfort.

  Fallon gasped. “Right! I forgot that you got hurt!”

  A quick pair of steps took the girl well within my personal space, and I felt a blush reaching up my cheeks as she grabbed my arm, ignoring the dagger I still clutched to look over my wounds. As if the lizard-shadow hadn’t been solid enough to have defined claws, the marks it had left behind were more like especially bad scrapes, since scabbed over–even if my little display of amateur knifeplay had broken a few of them open, letting them weep a thin sheen of blood.

  “Let’s see how this works…” Fallon muttered. “Heal.”

  Fallon managed that spell as well with an ease completely at odds with my fumbling attempts to conjure my dagger. The crystal she held in one hand began to glow more brightly, the light somehow soothing despite its radiance, and I felt the magic quickly go to work. It was a cool sensation, like an ephemeral ointment being applied by an immaterial brush. It quickly began to grow in intensity, not just on the arm Fallon was holding, but on all of my limbs at once. Soon, the feeling of the spell had turned to an almost numbing tingle, before it finally and suddenly faded away, in time with the light of Fallon’s crystal.

  Fallon and I both inspected my body with interest, her fascination more than a minor distraction from my own. The scars, and even the scabs themselves, were gone, but my arms weren’t just healed to perfect skin either. The lingering twist of freshly healed skin was left behind, the look of a cut a couple weeks old that was in its last stage of healing. I did a few stretches, and felt only the slightest tightness in my skin.

  “It worked,” I told Fallon, noting absently the breathlessness in my tone. She watched my movements with wide eyes that inevitably met mine, and for a moment, we both froze. This wasn’t the pause of that morning, or whenever it was that we had woken up. There was no thrumming intensity in our stare this time. There was only realization, as my successfully healed wounds did what shadow monsters, glowing crystals, invisible screens, and conjured items failed to do.

  I had been hurt, and in a bare few moments, Fallon had healed me, as if my struggles with the shadow-lizards above had been weeks ago. I was healed. My skin had been knit back together, my wound repaired, my blood, both dried and fresh, washed away.

  She had used magic, and she had healed me. By comparison, a particularly geological light and a fancy dagger didn’t bear any particular merit.

  Fallon had magic. I had magic.

  Magic was real, and we had it.

  I suddenly found myself sitting down. Fallon still stood above me, but her eyes were still on me, still stunned. And I couldn’t help it. I started laughing, unable to help myself, at the sheer, insensate, insanity of it all.

  We had magic! We had died, and found our way to another world, a place of monsters and caves and magic, which we now had!

  My laugh was like the first crack in a layer of wax, and Fallon’s face suddenly transformed into a look of pure, disbelieving joy.

  “I healed you!”

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  “You did!”

  “With magic!”

  “Your magic!”

  “This… this…” Fallon looked down at her hands, at her focus, and the look on her face was a sight to see.

  I threw my arms up in a loud cheer. “MAGIC!”

  I needed to try more, to see more. I reached for that same knot of energy–of magic–and pulled again, thinking of the light armor that my equipment had promised.

  It was easier this time, though it took significantly longer. The light didn’t just collect in my hand–it surrounded me, a gray light with the faintest hint of magenta and even a dark green traced through it. I felt a tugging in my mind, as if I was providing something I wasn’t quite aware of the magic, and the light began to take shape, my clothing blending seamlessly with it as it was reshaped into something different, something more.

  My shirt was gone, though I could still feel the comfortable tightness of some sort of support, like a bandeau, around my chest. In its place was a long jacket of a dark green material that split the difference between leather and the weird clothing I had woken up with–thicker, slightly heavier, but comfortable in its weight. Buttoned from my collar bone down to the bottom of my ribs, it showed off a tantalizing slice of my smooth, powerful stomach, revealing, even to me, that I had abs now. Or at least an ab, which was still a big step forward.

  My pants were less changed, by comparison, though several strips of the same material and color as my new coat stood out, offering protection over my knees and thighs while keeping my knees free to bend. Finally, a pair of long, fingerless gloves of flexible black cloth covered my hands. They nearly reached my elbows, a fact revealed by my coat’s complete lack of arms, and matched the high-topped boots that had appeared on my feet.

  The gear felt right in a way it was hard to describe. The weight of it was reassuring, not a fraction of an ounce too heavy at any point. I moved again, and the gear didn’t pull at me in any uncomfortable ways, offering my improved body its full range of motion.

  “Fuck me,” Fallon breathed.

  I looked at her, so taken off-guard that I didn’t even shoot back the obvious response. Her eyes were roaming over my body, seemingly unable to choose any place to focus on, and the heat in them was both clear and direct.

  “You think so?” I finally asked. I held out my arms and did a little spin, feeling the long tail of my jack move with it.

  “You look really good.”

  “I look like I walked out of an anime.”

  “I stand by my point.”

  I couldn’t help a laugh that I refused to call a giggle slipping out. “How does the green look with my hair?” I asked, flipping my free hand at my acid-green tips.

  “Good,” she repeated. I was starting to think she wasn’t a reliable judge, but unless one of these crystals wanted to dim enough to be reflective, she was the best I was going to get. “You’re like a butch video game character.”

  “You said you didn’t get an armor conjuration?”

  “No,” Fallon replied, slightly petulant.

  “That’s too bad,” I told her. “But at least I still get to look at you in that dress.”

  “Perv.”

  I winked, having noticed her wandering eyes just as much as she noticed mine. “Right back at ya.”

  #

  Somehow, even after everything, that damn altar wasn’t out of goodies to give us. While I conjured a second dagger, fitting both into convenient sheathes that were part of my pants, and tucked the remaining identity crystals into a couple pockets of my jacket, Fallon examined the last two crystals.

  Both were large, uneven, and absolutely incredible. The first was, according to Fallon’s action log, a supply crystal. It somehow had a storage inside of it, one that was easy enough for both of us to access, and it was full of, of all things, sandwiches.

  The bread was oddly dry, the meat a little too soft, the green slice of unidentifiable produce on it a little too chewy. We both ate two without stopping to breathe.

  The last crystal was a cryst-key, an oddly abbreviated name that the others had lacked. Though we were unsure of what to do with it at first, Fallon had a hunch, and brought it back to the pool and the slick, slide-like tunnel we had come down.

  After a moment's delay, a point of light shot out of either end of the cryst-key, vanishing into the wall at two nondescript points. For a long moment, nothing happened, and I had just opened my mouth to say “Now what?” when the tunnel started rumbling.

  I took a cautious step closer to Fallon, but the rumbling quickly stopped, even as the slide finished somehow converting itself into an extremely long staircase.

  “Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to be nearly as fun going up as it was coming down.”

  Fallon gave me an oblique look. “Dani, you have a dream body and literal magic. Are you really that upset over some cardio?”

  “I mean… a little bit, yeah.”

  “Have another sandwich,” she told me heartlessly, making for the stairs.

  I followed her and, just to spite her, did just as she suggested, pulling out a sandwich and chewing it as loudly as humanly possible. The winding, echoing staircase turned the noises into a whole chorus of obnoxious chewing Dani’s.

  Fallon looked back at me, and I waved the sandwich at her innocently.

  “Please let us find a way out of here soon,” she muttered.

  “Hey!”