The wild ride was over before I knew it. One second I was swirling down the nature drain and the next thing I know I’m in a tree, or what passes for the living room of a tree that can or maybe will have a dryad in the future.
“Yo, what gives?” I said, looking around. There were no lights that I could see, and yet I actually could see everything around me. The bare room seemed to be made for someone at least several feet taller than me, and the wood that made up the walls was moving, inhaling and exhaling from the looks of it.
“Is this alive, like in the sentient sense, or the ‘can be’ sense? Leafy?” I questioned, turning to take everything in, not that there was much to take in.
“Master, of course it’s alive, all trees are alive.”
I looked down at the squeaky voice down by my feet, but the rapidly growing figure of Lyra was pointing at the far wall. “See, there, that’s how we get out. Just touch it like you did the Mother and done.”
Squinting didn’t really work. It wasn’t until I switched to my magical senses that I saw the knot of power that looked like an actual doorknob complete with a keyhole.
“You’re kidding right?” I said, turning to Lyra. “That’s kind of an odd shape to be here naturally without pre-existing intelligence huh?” With a flick of power, I summoned all of my gear including Gungnir and Svalinn and then slammed the dryad up against the inner wall of the tree with Gungnir’s knifepoint at her throat. I didn’t really trust Lyra and my suspicions were driving my paranoid self just a bit crazy.
“This stinks Leafy,” I growled, “And it ain’t just the tree. Don’t make me rip it out of you. This blade hasn’t been fed in quite a while.”
Lyra’s eyes went white with fear, sweat burst out of her as if she were a sponge that I squeezed. “It’s not a trap master! It’s not! All dryads have such doors!”
My magical senses flooded the area, laying everything bare. I can’t believe that I was this wound up, but something just didn’t seem to add up to me. Forming two tendrils out of mental energy, I sent them straight into her forehead. She didn’t like me from the outset, and I honestly didn’t really like her. The fact that I tolerated the stupid dryad in the first place is because I was way further up on the totem pole than she would ever be, that and the fact that my blend of sorceries literally made her my bitch.
“The truth, now!” Gungnir’s blade pricked her throat just enough for a bead of greenish blood to ooze out. My nature sorcery held her completely still as my mind sorcery forced her to be honest. Her mind connected to mine and it all came tumbling out. She was trying to help, but there were ulterior motives, jealousy at not being picked to be the guardian of my grove, rage at Meliad for always one-upping her, planned helpfulness to get me to look at her in a better light, and so much greed. Greed for the power she gained traveling through the World Tree while shielded by me.
Grasping the thread of that last thought, I pulled more information from her. Apparently if she had tried that stunt without my protection, she would have been completely subsumed by Yggdrasil. Using me as a filter, she gained enough power to start several groves of her own and bargain with an earth elemental to become a treant. People are selfish, it’s the inherent concept that drives them, and apparently dryads are close enough to humans to have the same flaws. Keeping her still, I conjured a small battery crystal etched with the proper runes and placed it on her chest.
“Push the power into this crystal until I tell you to stop,” I ordered, my blade pushing just a cinch deeper into her neck. “Nobody uses me. Honesty is the best policy bitch, especially with me.”
Not even having the room to gulp, Lyra pushed the power from her overstuffed core into the battery, tears leaking out as half of everything she gained left before I cut it off.
“There, you can keep some,” I said slowly, far less angry now that I figured out that this wasn’t malicious towards me. I can understand wanting to move up in the world and doing whatever it takes to get there, in fact, I respect it. This would have been far darker if she meant to harm me in any way. I continued after putting Gungnir away and healing her neck, “It's definitely more than you deserve but it’s not as much as Meliad can hold. I’ll let you keep that much for showing me how to travel via tree.”
Storing the now dryad-centric power battery in Gungnir, I walked over to the door knob knot of power and simply turned it with my magic while touching it with my hand. Sunlight hit me instantly. Yup, I was certainly not in Fredericksburg anymore. Hopping back into the tree, I made Lyra shrink down again and tree-travelled back home, all the while making sure that she didn’t get any extra power.
“Whew, that was fun,” I said to myself, mentally checking off one experiment off my list. With a bit of magic and coaxing, I managed to get a bit of rootwood from our neighborhood Yggdrasil and shape it into a ball. In that softball sized portion was several drops of sap and a tiny bit of heart wood. Using nature sorcery, I split it into two identical pieces and then made the bark form runes of stasis. Chuckling to myself, I pulled out the battery that I kept Lyra’s stolen power in and very carefully split that into two pieces as well, gently forcing the Yggdrasil seeds to accept the foreign substance. With my seeds complete for transplant, I stored those away.
Going back to the Lab, I set out the seeds of Yggdrasil and went back over my plans. “Ok, so I can tree walk, great,” I muttered, “But I’m forgetting something . . . AHA!”
Traveling via tree was definitely possible, as I proved by moving myself with magic, which then meant that moving energy the same way is most likely possible as well. In fact, it may even be easier or more efficient! Peering into Gungnir, I saw with my magical senses that all of the things that I had stored in there were perfectly organized in what looked to be a white room with nice stone shelves. The Centauri food was nicely placed at the bottom of the shelves in their boxes while the weapons were beautifully displayed on the wall, and all of my gems and stones and bullets were organized off to the side in individualized crates. There were even two pedestals with indentations on them that perfectly fit the Yggdrasil seeds I’d made.
Above the pedestals for the seeds was something I didn’t know how to process. Two blazing swords, one crackling with white lightning and the other burning with a fire so blue it was almost white were crossed into an ‘X’ and where they intersected was a clear glass ball with a tiny fire that glowed like the sun. Trust me, I didn’t do that. I just used magic to shove things I wanted near Gungnir and the damn weapon sort of just made it vanish. My mind sorcery shot me a quick memory of the last interaction I had with Maalik the Fallen.
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“Holy Canoli BATMAN!” I screamed. Is this what grief and trauma do and adrenaline do? Do they make you forget, do they make you freaking forget that Gungnir stored away the answers to all of my goddamn problems and didn’t tell me?! AND, just to twist the knife a bit more, Maalik said he left a ‘familiar spirit’ for me in Gungnir as well. Mentally willing Gungnir to change its shape, it flowed to become a smooth foot-long shaft of wood with a multi-colored sphere on top.
“Come on out dude!” I called out to my weapon both out loud and mentally. “You’re gonna have to forgive my human flaws, because even though my memory is ‘magically perfect’, it still ain’t.”
What came out wasn’t a dude, in the literal sense of the word, but I meant it more in the California sense of the word where it refers to anyone or anything. It was a white and purple orb of light that flashed and sparked like an angry lava lamp on crack. Like any good sorcerer who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, I put my hand out for it to land on. I mean, if an angel gave it to you it can’t be all bad right? Wrong. Maalik was a ‘fallen’ angel, maybe not his decision or his desire, but he was running outta Grace when I saw him.
I couldn’t resist. “Oh great Spirit of the Spear!” I said pompously with a horrible English accent, waving my arms as if in religious rapture. “Soul of Sky’s Fallen Swords! Speaker of the Staff!” Every irreverent word made the orb pulse a shade brighter. When the core of the orb finally became apparent through the vibrating light, it was definitely not what I expected.
“Orrrrr, Cyclopian Squid of the Spear?” I’m not kidding. The shape inside of the glowing orb from Heaven’s fallen soldier was a damn underwater-looking thing with one big ass eye and a whole bunch of tentacles. It was even speaking in bubbles! Right around a foot tall now, the miniature cephalopod undulated as it floated closer, bubbles rapidly frothing and bursting between its tentacles. Finally, it plopped on top of the spherical crystal part of Gungnir and just stared at me. A questing tendril of mental magic from the creature gently knocked three times on my forehead.
Since the knock was so kind, I answered with my own strand of mental energy while at the same time pouring some serious magical power into my mind shields. The deepest voice devoid of any accent sounded, [Greeting mortal sorcerer. To your implement I am bound, to your will I am not.]
I didn’t really know how to take that. [It’s uh, nice to meet you too. So you’re the reason that everything is super organized in Gungnir?]
A feeling of rank disgust and smug superiority stank up the mental connection we had going on.
[A weapon of the gods? This pitiful excuse for a sorcerer’s staff?] I heard it sniff even though it clearly had no nose. [As a Scion of Order, it was simply beneath one such as I to reside in a dimension of such disarray.]
[I did not know that it was such a mess in there, I haven’t had it long.]
It’s inaudible mental grunt showed me that it really didn’t care about my sufficient time to tidy up. But, seeing as it was a literal gift from an angel, I decided to cut it some slack instead of letting loose some beautiful insults.
[Well thank you so much for being so kind. Is there something I can do to help or make your day better?] When in doubt, pour on the good old southern charm, that is, until I remembered something missing from my storage space. [Where, by chance, good sir, are the piles of full crystal batteries that I put there?!]
[A sorcerer who doesn’t deign to organize his possessions doesn’t deserve to have a say in how they’re used.]
My eye started twitching. Fuck southern hospitality. [Listen here you slimy ass piece of worn out sushi. Where the fuck is my stuff?]
It’s one eyeball looked off to the side, almost as if it were ashamed, or lying. [I was hungry. You hadn’t seen fit to feed your own Spirit of Knowledge nor had you even thought to rearrange anything in your space so that your possessions wouldn’t react improperly in the demi-dimension. Besides, the space you had was far too small for any magic user worth their salt, so I expanded it.]
[USED? FEED? The fu . . . wait, hold up. Explain that to me. You expanded the spatial storage? As in you made it bigger? How big is it? And what in the world do you eat?]
[Higher beings subsist on the material making up the universe, what you call mana. Your purified dense collections of it were quite satisfying, so much so that I even did you the favor of expanding the tiny box that was my home.]
[I see . . . ] I thought at the creature, figuring this out a little more. [You thought that your home was too small, not that my storage space is too small. This was all about you! You know the whole thing is mine right? That weapon, I made it, enchanted it, fed it, it’s mine through and through and you’re just an add-on. Besides, if you want more crystal batteries to eat then you’re shit outta luck dude. I found out that I’m the only one in the universe who can make those.]
A wave of sadness and submission drove through our mental link. [You wouldn’t deprive your own gifted familiar of sustenance would you?]
[Given to or cursed with? Seriously man, which is it? What the hell are you and what can you do? I really don’t wanna make a new weapon but if you’re some kind of alien parasite then we’re gonna have problems.]
The small spirit puffed up in anger. [I am NOT a curse! I collect knowledge and organize data! The library of Alexandria was managed by spirits of knowledge such as myself. In fact, we were the curators of the Atlantean Arcaneum! We Scions are noble spirits of the Ethereal Constants.]
[Uh huh . . . right . . . . So you’re basically an OCD librarian?]
[It is NOT a COMPULSION! It is ORDER!]
I couldn’t help but tease the poor off putting creature. I could feel through our mindlink its need to prove itself and its ocean of insecurity, both of which are marks of being very young. This creature may be the descendant of something that works in the library of Alexandria or whatever the hell the Atlantean Arcaneum is, but it doesn’t have that kind of knowledge or it wouldn’t be here.
[All right, all right, calm your squiggles dude, haha. I’m just messing with you. So, I can’t really let you off the hook for eating all my crystal batteries, but you did do me a huge favor. So how about we call it even and start fresh?]
It’s lone eye turned back towards me. [Fine], it sent sheepishly.
[Great, let’s begin. Hello, my name is Nate, what’s your name? I’d like us to be friends. I’m a sorcerer with multiple elements and epic amounts of power. I lack training and knowledge but I’m doing all right on my own so far. I have a dragonized dog named Spot and a whole bunch of cool gardeners who happen to be dryads.]
It felt like platonic speed-dating but as long as it opened the doors then I’ll take it.
[You can call me Kraxin’eldra as my full name should never be given.] The amount of noise between the syllable’s of its name could not be pronounced properly by a human mouth. Shove a bunch of popping bubbles and crashes waves and then a dolphin call and you’re almost there.
[I’ll call you Kraken then just to keep it easy. Nate is my nickname and I won’t give you my full name for the same reason.]
With a quiet pop, Kraken vanished back into Gungnir but our mental link did not.
[And don’t you eat anything else in there! If you need something to eat just let me know! I’m gonna make some more batteries but those are for me!]
Grudging acceptance traveled down our link as I started a long day of remaking my emergency power banks. Two days worth of careful conjuration and crafting later, I had made a whole bunch of crystal batteries roughly the shape of a Lego brick but scaled up to a normal brick size. My three magical solar panels pumped my pile of bricks full of converted mana and I popped them into Gungnir. Kraken and I had worked out a pretty good deal. He, yes it’s a he because I asked, organizes everything I put in there and will consult me before expanding the storage space if need be.
Also, he’ll work with me in decrypting and managing all of the magical knowledge that I have to include Reeanth’s and Rath’s brain. It was interesting to find out that the Scion is basically an immortal creature or spirit, they’re really kind of both, but they don’t grow up based on time like humans do. Scions grow when exposed to power, of which I had more than enough. My pure generated mana from the generators and converted solar panels is exactly what the little thing needs to grow but I need that just as much as he does. I made it easy and made his own solar panel converter in the clearing of the Hole. Putting a larger than normal power bank there wasn’t a problem and when it’s full he can come out at any time and suck the thing dry.
Kraken was so grateful about the basically infinite over time mana supply that he even offered to help me complete a round of upgrades on all of my gear. Through our mental link, I directly shared all of my knowledge, from the magics I had to my less than great public school education and my ideas for the future, and Kraken organized and compiled it into a mental database. After finishing that, he did the same thing with Reeanth’s brain and added all of it to his storage and then began on the dead dragon’s brain. We had complete schematics of all of my gear in a mental framework, but working with it and Kraken at the same time was like watching a sci-fi movie. Everything, because it’s all in our heads, was like when Tony Stark had Jarvis rework his Iron Man suit. Waving my hands made bad parts go away and another wave added runes to particular pieces. The next two weeks were an exercise in creative bliss.