Shade of the Umbracorpus

This is... a shockingly good item to run into in such an early-game dungeon! You can hardly believe your eyes when you see the stat bonuses; nothing you’ve collected for any class comes even close! Seeing its level requirement may explain such boons, but hardly explains the location you find it in. You’re barely in the double-digits yourself, and every other piece of loot you’ve found reflects that. So what is such a powerful item doing, lying around in such an easily accessible place?

You glance over the effects – namely the curse. Oddly convenient, certainly, that you don’t need to meet any of its lofty requirements, but what could it possibly do to you to “adapt”? How dramatic could the changes be, and would it be worth it if you couldn’t take it off – or at least not remove it for a significantly long time?

That said, literally everything about this hat could make the levelling experience significantly less of a struggle. Not to mention the classic wide-brim wizard hat is hard to refuse on an aesthetic level.

You don’t need a moment longer to make your decision. You sit the hat on your crown, happily accepting the boost of power it offers, consequences be damned.

Those consequences – naturally – are quick to rear their head.

A cap made of cloth and a few leather straps would certainly feel light in your hands, but strangely, it starts to feel heavy. Gradually, a pressure builds upon the top of your head, growing more and more with each moment. You can’t fathom how it can feel so physically imposing. Perhaps it’s a psychic force imposed by the sheer magical energy within the hat? But it’s starting to bog you down. Your legs quiver beneath you. You can’t take another step – not without toppling over. Your balance won’t last forever like this.

A drop of something dark drools in front of your eyes. A panic begins to build in your mind, bouncing around the walls of your skull as that drop is accompanied by another, and two more, and whatever black fluid it is start to seep down from your forehead. Your hand waves through it, trying to catch some of it, just to ascertain what it feels like, but you only feel air. Whatever strand of pitch you could’ve grasped dances through your fingers, coating them. You stare at your shaking arm, stained black now, and slowly turning darker too.

More of the miasma spews from under the hat, drenching you further with each moment. You can see it happening, but even as it splashes off of your limbs and chest and core, your nerves only tell you of a slight chill in the room. You feel just a touch colder, and colder as more of your body becomes covered.

It’s only when you are completely coated – from head to toe – that you realize the familiarity of the sensation: this is not unlike the shade under an oak tree. You’re coated in shadows.

Perhaps your epiphany was well-timed, but as you think it, you can feel the weight above your head dissipate. It feels light again – lighter than air, almost. Perhaps out of relief, you collapse back onto your backside, legs no longer feeling the struggle they held moments ago. But your collision with the ground is queer; you have a soft rump, but you barely felt any impact from the cobble beneath you at all. Almost as if there was nothing to feel a force beneath you...

An answer comes to mind right away – but not one you yourself would’ve thought moments ago. You have to test for yourself the musings in your head. Lifting your arms up, you observe them, turning them in front of you. Pitch black, opaque, and they at least appear solid. Yet, when you cut one hand through your other forearm, you don’t smack against it as you would expect. Your hand simply passes through, and you see the formless black mist for what it is, even as your arm reshapes itself in haste.

Of course that’s what would happen, you reason, and yet there’s a morbid curiosity to see more, itching quietly now in the back of your head. You know the placement of a dusty, abandoned mirror in this dungeon, though, and find no difficulty in seeking it out. You peer over your form. There’s a strangeness in your perception, in spite of all you see before you. Is anything truly out of the ordinary...?

You are a thing of reason, though, so all you can do to quell your concerns is to confirm all is right with you. Your hat sits upon your brow, large and imposing on your stature – though any being might be dwarfed by a headpiece of this grandeur. Beneath is your form of choice: a humanoid. Of course, you would look out of place among mortals: no mortal is forged of shadows as you are, after all. Perhaps your lack of clothing is what feels abnormal? Your crown of cloth is the only article you truly need to wear, though – though you certainly can entertain a further imitation of the human body, you have no use for the dangling parts on their groins they use to copulate, so you rarely form them in your figure.

You peer at the eyes on the other side of the mirror, those two beady flecks of light – bright stars on a night sky canvas. For just a moment, you can unravel your uncertainty. In the back of your mind, a tale has been woven of a mortal that had donned your hat before. That mortal never stared at these eyes before, never sculpted their body out of the darkness surrounding them, never embodied the hidden, frightening depths of magic beyond mortal comprehension. Curiously, you have dreamed that you were once a fragile mortal mage, that made a poor decision to wear a hat that held secrets beyond their control.

Before you know it, that dream fades. Better that it does, of course; you are a thing of arcane magic, capable of bending the secrets of the universe to your will. What purpose is there in dreaming you were mortal?