Princess stumbled forward, unbalanced by the lack of resistance in my smoky forearm. And then, when she realized that I’d succeeded, she capered around in girlish--well, for a six-foot-tall spider monster--glee, congratulating herself for training me.
It took another five minutes of sparring before I replicated the feat, but that time I turned the lower half of my right leg to smoke ... and promptly topped over.
“Right,” I said, rubbing my ass, which felt the impact even in the dream. “I can’t support myself with smoke.”
“Yet,” Princess said. “Well, what happens if you transform a central section of your thorax into vapor?”
“You mean, will putting a hole in my chest make all the blood pour out?”
“Goodness, no! Of course it won’t! When you turned your forelimb to smoke, the, er, ‘stump,’ if you’ll excuse my language, didn’t bleed. I’m simply wondering what might happen, as the capability strikes me as very useful indeed.”
So I tried. And tried. And tried. I couldn’t to turn any interior part of myself to smoke, though. I couldn’t, like, create a vaporous hole in myself, it only worked with my extremities.
At least, as Princess said, so far.
Still, as we practiced, I managed to turn my limbs smoky more easily. Mostly my arms, though occasionally I’d transform a leg if I was balanced and prepared. Never my head, sadly. I thought that would be awesome, becoming a smoke-headed hatchetman who could see in every direction, because my gaseousness offered three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision. My mind simply refused to make myself headless, though.
So I focused on my arms. They’d shift into vapor for two heartbeats. Usually. Well, sometimes. I only succeeded every four or five attempts, yet I felt myself getting more comfortable with the ability.
“You’re improving faster than I’d expected,” Princess said. “No doubt due to my excellent tuition.”
“No doubt,” I said. “If we keep this up every time I sleep, I’ll beat that asshole--sorry--twin into a thick white paste the next time we fight.”
“Oh, you won’t visit me like this every night,” she told me. “It takes a certain confluence of events, at least for now. However, you might eventually learn to join me here. In any case, I’m not sure that focusing on fighting in such a brute manner is your wisest course, by which I mean I am sure that it isn’t.”
“Why not?”
She twitched a pedipalp at me.“Because you’re an arch-mage, Alexrinicus, not an arch-warrior or an arch-knight. You only prefer fighting physically because magic is so strange to you.”
“Also because I’m getting pretty good at it. I just need to add some points to speed or agility and--“
“You need to add points to mana. To spirit. Magic is a far greater power than mere strength.”
“I guess,” I grumbled.
“Well I do not guess, my lack-legged champion. I am certain. You’ve only unlocked the most basic capacities of your gem. You will discover more. Many more. Perhaps those you encountered in the tombyard, perhaps others. Yes, I know that doesn’t precisely narrow it down. Yet what did that notification say? Upon attaining ten levels, you’ll discover another facet of your gem?”
“Something like that,” I told her. “But right now, we have to work with what we’ve got. If we want to survive.”
So I turned the entire top half of my body vaporous for a moment, took two steps to the left, and returned to my flesh to poke her in the abdomen.
At least I tried. Her awareness of the space around herself was uncanny; the same webtouched alertness that she granted me, though my bracelet. Well, and through her fangs, which were still embedded in my flesh. And I guess through my circulatory system, which shared her blood. Hm. I considered asking about that; like, was she drinking my blood? But I didn’t want to embarrass her.
Shut up. I knew how dumb that sounded. Still, I didn’t want to mention it.
Anyway!
She dodged, using her awareness, and I pursued, also using her awareness, and we continued to spar. She was right about magic, but I’d really started enjoying brawling. After a time, I turned one arm to smoke and then the other immediately thereafter. The ballroom started quaking ...
* * *
The floor shifted beneath me, and everything ached. For a second, I thought I was on fire and my skin was burning, but then I realized no, I was just covered in cuts and bruises.
Health: 20/55
And deeper wounds, too.
When I opened one swollen eye slightly, dim daylight crept in. The ‘quaking’ resolved in the familiar swaying of a wagon rolling along. Oh! The dream ballroom wasn’t shaking, I was lying on my side on the roof of the front wagon, the fancy wagon, the lord’s wagon. My hands were tied behind my back and encased in something stiff. My ankles were bound together. My neck was tied, too, with a tight noose of rope that was anchored the roof so I couldn’t lift my head more than a few inches.
I was naked except for a light tunic, and I almost turned immediately to smoke to escape, but stopped myself in time. Instead I lay there, feigning unconscious, and groping for a sense of my surroundings. The ‘dim daylight’ was actually firelight in a new campground. The sky was dark overhead. The horses were unhitched from the wagons, the tents were pitched, and most of the soldiers were gathered around the campfire.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I’d been out for hours.
The wagon wasn’t moving, so why had I felt the floor shift? I turned my head slightly and opened my other eye and saw the infenti twin--the uninjured one--climbing down from the wagon. Ah. I’d felt my guard leaving the rooftop, maybe taking a break for dinner. Though I was so well-tied that I didn’t know why they’d need a guard.
Unless they knew about my powers. Well, they’d definitely realized that I was gemmed, but which powers had they seen? Some of them might’ve noticed me blipping my hatchets from my domain, and they’d certainly seen my hatchets turn to smoke and return to my hands.
But they’d never seen me turn to smoke.
I thought about that for a while, then heard a moan. The noose-rope scratched my neck when I turned my head, which meant it wasn’t rope. No regular rope could scratch my skin anymore. It was closer to razorwire. Wonderful. I guess they kept it around for crachen or ollie prisoners who would just break through normal rope.
A fainter moan sounded, followed by a gasping. I squinted and realized that the dark, striped shape beside me on the wagon roof was Erdinand. Lying there, just two feet away, tied to the same iron ring as my ankle bonds. His jade-green shell looked almost black in the darkness, and the stripes ...
The stripes were bloody cracks in his carapace.
“Erd!” I whispered. “Erdinand?”
The shape moved, and the rhythm of breathing changed, but he didn’t speak. He probably couldn’t. The sight of his cracked carapace made me sick.
INTUIT: Crachen, Level 4 (dying)
Fuck! Now that goddamn thing diagnosed health? Where had that come from, and how ... how was Erdinand dying?
“Okay, listen to me,” I whispered to him. “You’ll be okay, I have a pearl bead, that’ll help.”
Except it wouldn’t help. Pearl beads only healed the gemmed. I needed a gold bead, and I didn’t have one of those, unless ...
Domain
3 bowls spiced chicken stew
4 loaves rye bread
1 waterskin (full)
1 guava
5 lamb’s ear fungus
2 slipsaw bark
1 skillet
1 backpack with assorted contents
4 rocks
7 gel beads
8 foam beads
12 pearl beads
1 tadpole
The last entry surprised me for a second, before I remember that I’d tucked two tadpoles into my domain back at the stream, to see if animals would survive in there. I’d withdrawn one immediately and it had been dead. I’d forgotten about the other one. I’d expected them to live in my domain, because the fruit hadn’t seemed to age much in there, so ...
Well, that wasn’t important at the moment.
Twelve pearl beads meant I had a pretty good chance of making a gold bead and saving Erdinand’s life. If I could get it into his mouth. So I focused on my right hand. My wrists were bound, and a cold, hard surface surrounded my fingers. A hard metal surface with fingers and all. A gauntlet? Yeah, felt like a gauntlet, which was weird.
Oh! They must’ve tied my hands inside a gauntlet because they knew I could recall my hatchets, and they didn’t want me to be able to get a gripon the hafts. Yeah, that made sense.
My hatchets weren’t in my domain, though. I’d been zapped unconscious by Kathina’s shield before I’d tucked them away. Which frightened me for a moment, but I had bigger, scarier problems, like my friend dying beside me. I exhaled to calm myself then used my webtouched awareness to feel the placement of my hands against my back, against the wagon roof, inside my bonds and inside the gauntlets. I thought for a second, then rolled onto my back. Which hurt, pressing my full weight onto my bound arms and grinding my neck against that razorwire rope.
Still, once I’d done that, I was confident that I’d locked my arms in place.
Then I turned my right arm to smoke.
After I pulled that arm free from the razor-ropes and gauntlet, I resolidified it and blipped my pearl beads from my domain. Five of them appeared in my right hand, five appeared in my still-bound left hand, and two appeared between my lips, where I’d held them before domaining them--just in case I needed to swallow one during a battle without using my hands.
As the soldiers talked and laughed around the campfire, as Erdinand wheezed beside me, his one uninjured eye tracking my movements at the end of an eyestalk, I spat the two mouth pearls into my free right hand.
Then I brought that hand against my left hand--still in the gauntlet--and drew the left-handed pearls into my domain via my right hand. I wasn’t sure if I could pop items into my domain through a solid obstacle like the domain. but to my relief it worked. Maybe just because another part of my body was touching them?
Finally holding all twelve pearl beads in my right hand, I let a trickle of mana emerge from my palm. I gritted my teeth and said a prayer to all the gods of gold and smoke. This could take thirteen pearls. Hell, it could take fifteen but I needed to try and--
They merged! They pooled into a single gold bead. I gazed at it with gratitude.
INTUIT: Golden bead. Heals up to sixty-six points of damage over the course of two days, though with an immediate effect for the gemmed.
Oh. Huh. I hadn’t known there was a limit to the amount of healing. I hadn’t seen anything about ‘sixty-six points of damage’ the last time I’d looked at a gold bead. Unless I just hadn’t Intuited one? Well, I knew for sure that the notification about Erdinand ‘dying’ was new. Yet again, these strange abilities of mine acted more like approximations than hard-and-fast rules.
Without moving from my awkward position on the now-empty gauntlet, I stretched my free arm toward Erdinand’s horseshoe-crab-shaped head. I knew that his speaking and eating bits were between the two hemisphere of his head-shell. I could see one of his eyestalks, which were in the right general area, but I still wasn’t sure how to find his mouth.
So I held the golden bead between two fingers and kind of ... prodded at the right area. Nothing happened, so I prodded a few inches over, and his mouthparts grabbed the bead, then retracted beyond the edge of his shell.
INTUIT: Crachen, Level 4
Thank god! Thank all the billowers! He’d live, he’d recover. And once he felt better, I’d turn to completely to smoke, free both of us, and we’d run. Not a sophisticated plan, but if we slunk away in the middle of the night, we could pull this off.
So first, I needed to wait for him to recover. That’s why I’d kept that other gauntlet pinned in position beneath me, so they wouldn’t realized I could free myself. I popped a pearl into my mouth, to jump-start my own healing, then took a breath, tried to turn my right arm to smoke--and failed.
I frowned to myself. C’mon, this was no time to mess around.
Erdinand’s breathing changed. Deepened. He made a noise that might’ve been pain and on my third attempt I finally felt my arm become vaporous. I shifted the vapor into place behind me. I used my webtouch to detect the proper placement of my smoky arm, moving it inside my bonds and inside the gauntlet, then I returned it to flesh.
I grimaced as the razor-rope cut me and the gauntlet twisted my fingers, but the pain passed in a minute, and I was locked back in place like I’d never escaped.
“Hey,” Erdinand whispered, his voice weak. “You’re gemmed.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Gemmed. Gemmed like a gemmed person! Do you realize what that means?”
“Yeah, it why they didn’t kill me immediately. They’ll drag me somewhere else to extract my gem while they drill a hole in my skull.”
“Not that,” he said. “It means Big Sid is going to be sooo mad at you!”
He started to giggle, but his giggles turned to sobs. He’d been beaten badly. He would’ve been beaten to death if not for that gold bead. And taking that kind of abuse affected you more than physically. It wounded something inside you.
He cried for a while as I murmured comforting words. When he quieted, I asked, “What happened with those ollie kids?”
“Y-you saved them,” he said.
“They got away?”
“All of them!” He wiped his face-parts with his shoulder. “Every one of them, except that boy who--who Dordor killed. But the rest? They’re on the way to meet their families now. You saved them.”
SUCCESS: You saved them, you absolute unit.
REWARD: Moderate expoi. But more than enough to break through level six.
GOOD JOB: Level up! Enjoy one unassigned, well-deserved point.