DN - Vertigo Cure

And there I sulk for an embarrassingly long period of time before it occurs to me that I can try to fix this on my own. Looking into the lattice is hard right now, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do it. And I was able to undo a little bit of what was going wrong in Karen’s head. Maybe the magic screwing me up is weaker than that, and I can actually fix this.

Carefully, very carefully, I slide my mind back into the lattice. The world shivers under me, and a new wave of nausea sweeps through me. But I’m in. It doesn’t take long to find the magic. There, in my inner ears, in the fluid chambers that tell me which way is down, there are flitting little yarn tangles of nothingness. Every shift of the fluid is magically enhanced to a great big sloshing, and even when I’m still, the fluids tremble and bounce randomly, teased into motion by the nonsense inputs of the spell.

Very, very slowly, I reach out to the lattice and gently pick at the strands of the charm.

There’s a lot of things I can do with the lattice besides fly and punch things. (Though those are two of my favorite things.) But magic is still more or less an unknown frontier for me. Tweaking the lattice beyond my basic powerset is a dangerous hobby in the best of times, with sprains and broken bones as a constant risk for failure, but this will be worse because I don’t even know how magic actually works. Working on Karen was the first time I tried to counteract magic with my powers, and it nearly gave her an aneurysm. Doing this inside my own head has the feel of digging up an armed landmine with only a bayonet. While drunk. I don’t see that I have much choice, though. I need to be able to fight. Hell, I need to be able to walk.

***

With that pleasant image in my head, I close my eyes and focus on dissolving this magic, one hesitant pull at a time. A little bit, a little bit more. It’s slow going, and I need to stop to take plenty of breaks. A grinding ice-pick feeling has started in one of my sinuses, but the pressure abruptly disappears.

“Danny, your nose is bleeding,” says Sarah. Still in the lattice, I switch my gaze “down” and check it out. Just a burst vessel in my nose, nothing to worry about.

“It’s fine,” I say, keeping my eyes closed. Just a few more, I’m almost there. And then, all at once, I pull on one last strand, and the whole thing springs in on itself and evaporates.

The fluid in my ears begins to settle and the world finally wobbles to a stop. With a sigh of relief I sit up. “Good as new, I think.”

“Are you sure?”

“One way to find out,” I say, swinging my legs off the exam bed. I hop off—and stay hanging in the air. “Yeah, I think I’m good.”

- Sovereign, Chapter 22