******

Being done was great. The feeling that I had accomplished something was definitely reinforced by the dopamine dump in my brain, until my favorite hateful familiar chimed in right as I was taking the final tour of the fortress after finally planting Yggdrasil and setting up my very carefully pre-planned runic growth schematics. The fortress was beautiful, complete with eight mounted magitech gatling guns, reinforced anti-undead walls, layers of underground siege batteries, AND a freaking army of giant armored golems commanded by earthen elementals. All I had to do now was take the time to very carefully coax my tree to grow exactly how I want it to and step two of my plan would be complete, EXCEPT, Kraken had to go and ruin my good mood.

[All right, job well done, now there’s some loose ends to tie up before we go much further.]

“What?” I said, my grumpiness bleeding into my voice. “What now, seriously? This is good news! I’m a badass mutha’fuckin sorcerer ready to kick some zombie ass!”

[Well, there’s a bunch of things here you’ve forgotten about in your one-track mind. Let’s start from the beginning, whatever happened to the kid necromancer who’s ass you kicked when the whole apocalypse kicked off? What happened to the rest of the people there?And, did you know that you have a whole white light-based sorcery stone of Chaos back home somewhere? How about the fact that somewhere in your forest there are random ass Chaos stones spread around from when a goddess blew up your home?]

Whipping around in a panic, my jaw hit the floor. “How did you, wha?”

[Your memories dumbass! And that’s not all! This shiny memory over here is of a particular ancestor telling you that you’re gonna need Johnny and you left him in Florida?! Or how about the fact that the Hungry Ones are sentient and maybe can be reasoned or negotiated with? You’ve set up a whole goddamn plan with an army to wipe them out and you haven’t even verified the claims given to you in YOUR IGNORANCE!]

My sputtering got worse as Kraken handed me my ass. [And let’s not forget that you’re already dead set on wiping out the Centauri because of what they did to your family when you haven’t considered the fact that they are the main reason humanity isn’t wiped out as a whole. It’s not just undead and demons you have to worry about, it’s the freakin Hive! Or did you forget about them too? And the Djinn you sealed, that was a smart thing to do in the heat of the moment but you weren’t able to grab the coin prison cause you passed out. Now let’s be clear, Djinn are immortal! He won’t forget what you did. You’re gonna need to get some kind of countermeasure for him too.]

I rocked back on my heels, all of the other things, the consequences, the bits of information I didn’t want to face were now all up in my face. With Kraken laying them bare, I could see that my consciousness sorcery went along with the wishes of my unconscious, the desire to not face some uncomfortable facts, the desire to accomplish something when everything is going to hell. I had done what any messed up workaholic would, pushed it all down to a place where I could ignore it. I had more problems than I knew what to do with.

[And that’s not all buckaroo. What about Tommy, Sally, Billy or Jimmy? You haven’t once thought about them? Why not help them get to that settlement you helped make? Are they even alive? No thanks to you, I put the directions to both that place and the Centauri base in the crystal you gave to Remy and Fernando, sheesh, at least give them a chance to survive.]

My arms felt weak, my head light. “I hadn’t even thought .”

[You’re right! You hadn’t ‘THOUGHT’! How much thinking have you been doing lately? None! You can’t keep working like this without thinking about all the other things going on. You have a kind of power that unfortunately makes some pretty damn big waves.]

He was right. Fuck, Kraken is right. But not completely. I hadn’t fucked everything up. I had done a lot of good with what time I’ve had so far, with what I’ve known so far. Putting a bit of stiffness in my backbone, I turned and glared at my familiar. “Fine. I get it. There’s plenty I haven’t done and the list of things I need to attend to has only gotten longer, but you cannot deny that I haven’t done a lot of damn good things that I really didn’t have to do. Reeanth is alive because of me, the hicks are most likely alive because of me, that settlement is doing damn fine because of me, and my shitty younger brother, well, I do need to go set some things straight there.”

[Look,] Kraken said, his exasperation with me clear in his voice. [I’m your spirit familiar. Keeping you alive is my job, because if you die then it really sucks for me. You’ve done great, really, but marching off with all of this unfinished business just isn’t smart and your sorceries do leave you with some glaring long-term weaknesses. Can’t you tell? They amplify parts of you. Because of your earth sorcery, you use earth when fighting, so you tend to bury your enemies and get hyper-focused on gear. Your water sorcery makes you really uncomfortable to be away from water and drowning your enemies is another go-to strategy. And that’s another thing, whatcha gonna do with the dwarves and minotaurs you have in storage, huh?]

“Fuck!” I cursed. “There’s not enough me to go around and do everything.” Taking a deep breath and focusing inward, I channeled my will into my mental sorcery and began reevaluating my actions and my thoughts. Everything Kraken had brought up was correct, I did have pressing concerns that I’d put off and with my mind based sorcery obeying my unconscious will those concerns had almost been walled off to the far back of my mind. The outside perspective of Kraken really was a godsend, what kind of hole could I have easily avoided if I had consciously decided to remember my problems instead of blindly pushing through from one objective to the next?

“Ok Kraken, you’re right. Put together a plan for me to review, something I can follow to wrap up all of those concerns. Right now I still need to get this tree going till it’s mature and doesn’t need my direction but that shouldn’t be too long.”

The next week was spent carefully guiding growth of Yggdrasil’s newest root as it was combined with a baobab seed. The roots were persuaded to dive deep and wrap around the interconnected battery layers and then several roots were sent off in the direction of the river for constant access. The runes I had put inside the layered seed were now spreading and multiplying as the tree trunk itself grew up and out, almost completely taking up the inside of Sunstone castle. Kraken made sure to include reminders for me to eat a meal cube and drink water as I also meditated and focused on making mental subroutines to help strengthen my mind against the brain-altering tendencies of my sorceries.

Along with the reminders, my familiar and I had gone back and forth on deciding how best to go about wrapping up loose ends. In the end, we decided that after this base building goal was complete, the best course of action would be to scour my forest in Fredericksburg for any sign of human life and then persuade them to relocate with the settlement west of my original home. Then, download copies of the brains of the dwarves and the minotaur shamans and keep them for myself to see if I could get any information out of then and then set them free, using a bit of mind sorcery to keep them docile and friendly towards me. Once that was accomplished, the next step would be to put them on a boat and take them down to Florida and see if they could maybe mesh in with the Centaur and form a whole new settlement. At that point, I should have enough info to know if the Hungry Ones were truly the threat I was led to believe they were. If so, then I’d pick up Johnny and Reeanth and bounce my way up North and kick off the end of the Zombie pre-apocalypse.

Our biggest disagreement was on what to do with the Chaos stone with the light sorcery. Kraken was all for making some kind of tool with it as from my memories the stone was really small and didn’t have enough juice in it to give a whole new kind of sorcery on the same level as my others. I didn’t really like that suggestion as I had more than enough tools, which led me to my other weakness, the fact that I’m generally alone. My next suggestion was giving it to someone to help forge a close tie, like maybe giving it to Reeanth to help her gain another sorcery, or maybe to Scott from the settlement so they could have at least one champion to keep the peace there. The suggestion to make a light-based nuke with Chaotic light sorcery to wipe out the North was tabled for later as I wasn’t exactly sure how to do that.

My last two days in Arizona were spent growing furniture and making amenities for both my home and Sunstone castle. Beds, dressers, chairs, tables, bars, light fixtures, the whole kit and kaboodle had to be done before I left as I wanted this place to be livable just in case. My paranoia wouldn’t let me have it any other way. Yggdrasil’s newest root required much less supervision as it reached the tail end of its growth freeing me up to do other things, but I still had to stick around just to make sure that I hadn’t overlooked anything stupidly small that might cause unintended problems.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

[You did good, it’s done, all of it. Go home, get a good night’s sleep and relax for a second. The plan is going away any time soon.]

Heeding my familiar’s wise words, I put my hand on Yggrasil’s trunk and warped back to good ol’ Fredericksburg.

“You should tell him!”

“I didn’t do it, you should tell him!”

“Me? I wasn’t even awake when it happened! It’s not my fault!”

“Is too! You wilted flower!”

“Dried up fruit!”

“Bark-less wonder!”

“Useless weed!”

Lyra was in the clearing arguing with an incredibly beautiful dryad, but one that looked way too human to actually be a dryad. Her skin barely had a tint of green and hot damn her figure was too distracting in and of itself for this to be pheromones. Turning to me, the drop dead gorgeous woman ran to me and tackled my legs without knocking me over.

“Thank the Mother he’s back!” Lyra grumbled as Meliad cried.

“I’m so sorry master! I didn’t mean it! Please don’t send me away, please!”

Throwing my hands in the area and looking to Lyra for help, she just crossed her arms and frowned, looking away from the pathetic scene in front of her. Doing my best to extricate myself from this situation, my magical senses answered the question that I hadn’t even said out loud yet. This was Meliad.

“Do what? What did you do? And how are you no longer a dryad?” My question sparked a new round of unconscionable wailing. “What did I say?” I looked back over to Lyra who was now glaring at Meliad.

“She ate them.”

“Ate who?”

Her watery eyes looked into mine with all of the sadness that a child who just skinned her knee could muster. “The people! I ate the people!”

Lyra sighed and put her hands on her hips. “Her tree ate the people. Well, several of her trees actually. That area of weakened space about a mile from here opened up again and there was another fight. It happened to break out right as Meliad here was waking from her Ascension slumber and her instincts acted out in accordance with your will. So, she did what any Thorn would do. She fed them to the forest.”

Looking incredulously at Lyra, I didn’t even know what to say, at which point Kraken took over. Popping out of Gungnir, my familiar looked back and forth between the dryads. “Exactly what people did she feed to the forest?”

“Orcs, ogres, goblins, trolls, some baby wyrms and two hydras. It was a mess! But at least the forest will be healthy.” She said sardonically. Huffing loudly, Lyra muttered to herself as she walked away. “And, she gets all the glory!”

Leaning over, I picked Meliad up, forcing her to stand. “Relax Leafy, just don’t eat the humans and we’re good. Also, let’s try and not eat dwarves, aelves, minotaurs, and other things like that unless we’re certain they're hostile. Maybe we can get some allies in the process.”

Wiping away her tears, she sniffed and launched herself into my arms. “I’m just so glad that you’re so kind and nice and sweet! Whatever would we do without your generosity and mercy!”

Pushing her back to arm’s length, I shook off the lovely bits of plant lady snot. “That’s enough waterworks for one day woman. You did good, great even. What happened to you though?”

She stopped sniffling long just long enough to string a couple thoughts together. “I’m not my usual self. I’ve lived as a dryad for several centuries but I’m only a few days old as a Thorn. My treant self is still new. It’s going to a while before my body catches up with my mind and my emotions will be juvenile until that happens.”

For a minute there I thought she had literally eaten the people in my stasis freezer. Slowly backing away as Meliad put herself back together, I waited until she wiped her eyes before I fled to the big outside entrance of the Lab.

[That’s one lady you don’t wanna piss off, especially since she can do earth elemental stuff as well as plant lady stuff.]

Making sure that my gulp wasn’t too audible, I rotated my shoulders to get a bit of stress out, making sure to crack my knuckles as well. “Is it better to find the people that might be in the forest first, or should I make a couple hovercrafts for them to use?”

Kraken popped back out of Gungnir. “I’d say send a couple birds to find the humans if they’re still around. That way you can make the transportation as well as the brain copies you were talking about.”

“Good shit,” I said softly, casting my mind out for the small birds flitting around. After finding a couple sparrows, they agreed to scout for ‘man-things’ in exchange for a meal cube. As they flew away, I got busy making a very basic hovercraft. On the bottom were gravity reflecting runes to make the whole contraption much lighter than it had any right to be. Several rows of quartz crystal alongside the craft were runed to absorb ambient mana and the two parallel joysticks up in the front were carefully inscribed to be the thrust and steering. The last bit I put in were seats that the passengers could channel mana into to make the entire craft go faster if need be. If they chose not to, the hovercraft would go a comfortable thirty or so miles an hour but with a full load it could probably hit up to two hundred.

The next three hours gave me six hovercrafts total. I made sure to include a memory crystal that had the most complete map I could put together, with Kraken’s help of course. It was made from my memories of flying with Norn and Tuki as well as the general knowledge I gained from teleporting through the World Tree. Anybody in the craft could touch the crystal and add to it but I made sure that deleting was not a possibility for them. Any edits would be adding an additional ‘memory’ to the total memory map and users would be able to look at every version of the area.

Jogging to the inside of my lab, I decided not to put off the onerous task of brain cloning even though all I wanted to do was hit the hay. Part of me just wanted to do it tomorrow but the mindless nature of the job would just get worse the more I put it off. Grunting and groaning, I felt the pain of work as I watched my water elementals do all the heavy lifting. Watching someone else work sure makes me sweat, hahaha.

Each brain had to be carefully examined for damage and then each body was healed back to perfect health before I actually scanned the brain and used flesh sorcery to make clone brains in my giant vat. Like Kraken pointed out before, the shamans were the only useful brains of the minotaurs but the dwarven knowledge is really what I was after. Their stuff had an odd kind of enchantment ‘resonance’ that made their stuff not have any wasted energy. To put it into perspective, human technology in regards to solar panels wasn’t that efficient as the energy that could be absorbed wasn’t as much as the combustive process of fossil fuels. Now, yes, one is cleaner than the other but I was able to fix the energy issue with solar due to magic and magical materials, aka the sunstone. I bet if I could get a couple dwarfs to work for me then the kinds of things I could make would simply blow me away, the problem being that I didn’t want to give up my secret of magic batteries. Pushing those thoughts into the ‘do-later’ box in my brain, I kept on cloning and copying, taking special care with the dwarven brains.

[Don’t disregard the minotaur shamans’ knowledge too much. There’s a reason the dwarves didn’t hold back in that fight you saw. Their herd blood-links have a lot of utility beyond passing healing and mana back and forth.]

“Yeah,” I answered, thinking it over for a second. “I can see how that would be useful if I had a couple sorcerers or wizards to work with. But I don’t right now. Anyways, the shamans’ minds aren’t encrypted like the dwarven ones are. It’ll take time to crack those like the others.”

Putting them all back into stasis ended my day allowing me to grab some much needed rest. Properly wrangling my flesh sorcery allowed me to pack in a week's worth of restorative sleep into ten hours. While that was going on, I had my consciousness sorcery sorting out memories in a more efficient manner, sort of like ordering my dreams to work for me by planning out scenarios and bringing back things I’d forgotten as well as reliving some bad decisions that I’d made so far. The directed lucid dreams allowed me to go over every mistake, possible outcomes of making better decisions in the moment, reminding myself what I fought for and why, and last but not least, mapping out a long term strategy to actually live out the next four thousand years without dying.

By noon the next day I had all of the minotaurs loaded up on three hovercrafts about ten miles south of me and the dwarves with the same setup but about ten miles east of me. Even though I didn’t speak their language, I left the same memory imprints in each individual to make sure that they felt coming back to this forest was not good for their health and that safety could be found far to the south. I didn’t forget to make sure that they each had a pseudo-memory of how to work the hovercraft along with its map. I also left them with very basic weaponry that they could use, spears enchanted to be incredibly sharp and durable shields respective of their size.

[I’m surprised you didn’t just kill’em.] Kraken said as we got back to the clearing. [You saw what feeding them to the forest could do.]

I shuddered when I thought about Lyra filling me in on some details that Meliad left out yesterday. Feeding trees enough mana gave them the possibility that one day a dryad might be birthed from said tree, but feeding that tree with enough sentient lifeforce and dryads of immense power could be conceived. And Meliad had fed enough lifeforce to the trees near my house to birth an army of overpowered dryads, not something that I had in mind. Shaking the foreboding feeling away, I thought about going to go see my brother. If I left now via World Tree, I could be there in less than an hour, giving me plenty of time to do what I need to do well before the immigrants that I sent would arrive.

As I started to reach out towards the tree to portal to the Centauri base in Florida, I stopped as something I dreamed the night before came back and hit me. Sprinting back down into the Lab, I scoured the walls, feeling around for the runed safe that I had put there months ago. “Aha! Fuckin found it!” Yanking the safe from the wall, I tore the top of it off, revealing the contents within.

[Found what? To do what exactly?] Pulling the small shimmering quartz crystal from the box, I cupped it gently in my hand.

“I know how I’m going to fix my bro.”