A Moment
Time was both a constant and yet meaningless.
It was the ultimate, universal irony: he understood time, could see it in a way he couldn't as a corporeal being stuck within its flow, and yet now that he possessed that understanding, it meant nothing to him. He wasn't trapped by it anymore, his physical body had ceased existing the moment he'd ascended. No, that wasn't right. His physical body had ceased existing past that moment. It was frozen within its final moment, while the rest of the universe continued on.
It should've been a strange feeling. Except that nothing really felt strange. It just felt... real. True.
Like the stones of the castle around him. He could feel their time, their passage through it and the marks it had left on them, invisible to the naked, mortal eye. They carried within them remnants of the earth they'd been mined from and vibrated with the energy they'd soaked up over time. He could see it within each stone, like gentle waves of multi-coloured light – though the colour wasn't really visible, only imagined – the energy that had been used in crafting them, in putting them into place. The force that had been used to create this mighty structure from a flat of land and a pile of stone.
Yes, a force. That was a better word for it, he realized. Words were unnecessary for him now, but he just couldn't drop the habit. He still sought ways to explain what he understood and for that he needed words.
He could see this force around him, soaked into the stones, into the tapestries that hung on the walls, and see how it permeated further down into the foundations and the earth. How it vibrated through the normal, visible world, creating waves that lapped against the smaller waves of the particles of the universe around it. It was beautiful.
Time had no meaning, and so his wanderings around the castle took both hours and seconds.
He saw a grand main hall with banners hangings along the walls – a on red, a badger on yellow, a raven on blue and a snake on green – with four long tables running its length and a smaller table on a raised platform at its head. And a ceiling that looked like it wasn't there, as though the hall was completely open to the night sky. At first, he assumed it was a hologram. Then, he looked and realized that it wasn't.
It was that same force, the one that vibrated in the stones. But here it wasn't imbibed into anything. No, here it was... enchanted.
"Magic," he whispered, finally giving voice to what he was seeing.
And he really could see it. Molecule, by molecule, he could see the spell's construction, the way it expanded into the spaces beyond the visible world and pulled from energies of the universe around it. He stared at the ceiling, mesmerized by the harmony of energies, of the way the waves interacted and weaved a tapestry made up of millions, billions of tiny waves moving many times faster than light.
"Daniel."
He smiled and turned to face his friend. "Morgana," he said. "This castle is made of magic, isn't it?"
She smiled kindly, indulgently. "It was constructed using what mortals would call magic, yes, and coated in even more, for protection among other things."
"Why? What is this place?"
"It's a school."
Daniel looked around and nodded his understanding. Then he turned to her impishly. "Does that mean there's a library?"
She laughed, a musical sound that was as beautiful as it was rare. Then she motioned for him to follow her and he did.