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Nate
Waking up to a new day brought with it all the promise of a fresh start even though time was running out. I had a semblance of a family again for two weeks which hit me right at my core, and even worse, though I hadn't explained very much to anyone, today was Andy’s birthday, I think? Hard to tell with his own time dilation issues conflicting the un-Veiled Earth and me not having a solid calendar but fuck it! Pulling my much larger but still younger brother down to the Lab, I shoved some fresh coffee into his hands as I turned on a couple well-placed sunstones, illuminating the high-tech spread of gear I’d made for him. Seeing that his responses were too laggy as Andy also was not a morning person, I slapped a bit of wake-up flesh sorcery into him to perk him up.
Happy Birthday!” Shivering the dregs of sleep out of his body, Andy looked over the laid out armor.
“But I already have armor?”
“This is for when your big bro ain’t around and you’re gettin’ your ass kicked,” I said, crossing my arms. “Look, the plate armor is light but can shrug off the equivalent of tank rounds, drain and absorb directed or ambient magic, and it covers every part of you like a turtle shell. Your Centauri nanotech is great but it can be your last hidden layer.”
“And the wands?”
“Fine, skip to the end part,” I said gruffly as Andy was ruining the presentation. “Those are for you at the college. Everything I’ve read and researched says that normal wizards need wands and staves to be effective. So, I gave you two wands, but if you end up needing a staff, feed one of the wands blood and mana everyday through the base and it will grow to be a staff.”
Not seeing a reaction, I continued on. “Here’s your upgraded rifle that can take out a pack of wyverns or horde of minotaurs on its own by firing all kinds of munitions. The classic tower shield was upgraded along the lines of what I learned from the dwarves I killed, extra platinum to divert magic, batteries for extra power and energy absorption . . .” Still no change in facial expression.
“AND OVER HERE! Dude? What the fuck is your problem?” Seriously. All kinds of epic goodies from a badass sorcerer that happens to be his brother and nothin’? With another scan of flesh sorcery, I checked to make sure he wasn’t having a stroke or something.
“Nate . . . where’s Sarah?” Andy asked, finally looking at me. “Did y’all break up or did she also get taken away? I looked through our databases and couldn’t find her anywhere the same as when I was looking for you.”
That hit harder than any blow. I had gotten so wrapped up in movement and action and planning and fighting that I hadn’t even told my own brother what happened to my woman. For a split second I froze, then put my hands on the table as I took a deep breath. Swallowing my thick queasy ball of pain and guilt, I looked at Andy. “She’s uh, well, not dead but she’s also not really alive either.”
“I don’t understand.”
Quickly grabbing my memories, I packaged up the sight of her being forcibly morphed by Chaos into a tree, the memory of planting Yggdrasil and the root of it connecting to her tree form as an influx of mana wrapped her in a cocoon, the talk I had with a deity telling me that she was going to be okay and probably outlive me. The weave of emotions running through me as I fought goblins and night things to keep them away from my vulnerable woman, the raging heat of anger tempering my determination to be there when she woke up in a few millennia, all of it I put into that memory packet, quickly conjuring a small bit of perfectly aligned quartz and sticking the memories into it.
“I can’t talk about right now,” I said, slowly rubbing the small gem between my palms. “It’s all in here but do it later.” Pulling my mind from the unfathomable darkness that lurked at the edge of my psyche, the little place that whispered all the horrible, nasty things I would do to stay alive and make sure that I survived, I turned back around to the table before me. “What was I saying? Oh yes, the birthday presents . . . over here if you look inside the helmet, I stuck an enhancement circlet for you and your resident A.I. which is full of goodies and these over here,” I said, gesturing to the flat disc of quartz with a carved symbol of Yggdrasil on it.
“That plate is more than enough to get you started on making and designing your own runic tattoos as it holds lessons on designs as well as a basic, and I mean basic, dictionary for runes, which leads me to this, your very own mini flesh-golem!” Pointing at the sack above the armor, I grabbed it and dumped the contents into my hand. “His name is Fleshy, which is stupid but I suck at naming things. This guy will probably save your life down the road. Feed him meat of any kind to make him bigger and stick him on a wound and he’ll fix it. Broken bones, missing eyes or fingers, wicked scars, none of that will pose an issue. He can also change the melanin of your skin to make perfectly natural tattoos or give you an epic tan if you want.”
A set of arms wrapped me up in a hug lifting me off the ground. Quickly setting me back down, Andy looked away as he wiped a tear from his eye. “I get it. I’ve lost plenty of people, good people. Never gets easier.”
Pulling a flask I stole from Scott out of my pocket, I took a swig and handed it to him. “Here. Dwarven stuff, hits like a kiss of fire.”
“It’s too early to be drinking,” Andy said, pushing it back towards me.
“This ain’t the Bible belt anymore! It’s for self-fortification, and I don’t have much time to get drunk so this is just to put myself back on the right path, the focused one.” The look on his face still had a bit of judgement so I wearily put away the flask, after taking another hit of course. “Anyways! Happy birthday you wet blanket. You have three days to get used to it before we start sparing. Gotta know how it feels so you can fight in it. We go full Spartan in a week.”
Andy put the armor and gathered up the rifle, shield, and all the rest of the stuff and headed down the tunnel to the Hole to show Johnny and Reeanth as I stayed by the table. For a full minute I let myself feel all of the things I had been putting off to the side, allowing my consciousness sorcery to take the lead and wash my soul in the emotions that I had simply worked through by being too busy to actually address. The anger I felt at being alone and the unreasonable irritating thought that I didn’t have to be as I knew Sarah would be ok if I maybe continued on with my life as she was a hundred percent dedicated to be a tree right now. The jealousy of her being completely at peace pricked at my heart while my frustration at being so goddamn busy all the time stabbed from the other side. Sadness of my family being forcibly taken flooded through me and left leading the way for a tidal wave of uncertainty to crash through.
Am I right? Is the course of action that I’m currently invested in, the myriad plans and decisions to shoulder the burden of basically de-worming my planet of Undead the correct one? Should it even be my burden or should I let the Centauri discover and do it themselves with a bit of help from the witches? I can’t be the only person invested in the existential threat hitting planet Earth from the North and South poles? Can I?
Reminding myself of my accomplishments so far, I then went over the things that I needed to do which I’ve reviewed many times and am making great progress on. Shit, I even made a freaking fortress out of sunstone, gave it its own army and then demolished an underwater army with it in the past month! That’s not even counting the fact that I’ve saved my brother from a witch-borne mind parasite that could kill him, upgraded him with an A.I. and seriously boosted all of his armor and weapons. Breathe in, breathe out. I’ve come so far and now is not the time to start doubting myself. Letting myself sink back into a focused frame of mind, I used flesh sorcery to reset my hormone levels back to normal and wipe away the traces of exhaustion that emotional trauma can have on a body.
Emerging from the Hole into the clearing, I saw Johnny and Andy cutting loose and this time Andy was giving Johnny a run for his money. The new armor was easily shrugging off Johnny’s cannon-like attacks. Every smack of the silver snake staff looked like it slipped off of the plate armor as if it had a thick layer of oil on it, causing Johnny to swing harder and faster but yielding the exact same result. I could see Reeanth across the clearing, keeping a close eye on the fighting and taking notes as usual even though she was smiling at the cultivator curse up a storm in his frustration.
Hopping back twenty feet, Johnny struck a pose, one leg forward and the other behind him bet, giving the impression of spring ready to loose. Johnny held his staff parallel to the earth at ear level, the silvery wood held lightly in the middle by his left hand and tightly at the end furthest from Andy. For a moment, every noise vanished before a soft hiss ventured forth, the warning of a hidden snake about to strike. Johnny closed his eyes and whispered something I couldn’t hear.
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I didn’t even see what happened next. All I saw was the aftermath and a quickly fading afterimage. My eyes kept showing me an ethereal snake with Johnny inside of it striking at Andy, the blunt edge of its snout that was Johnny’s staff slamming into Andy’s chest plate and retreating, but the clearing showed no evidence of movement. There were no footprints or disturbances in the grass to show the twenty feet of grass that had to be cleared to make physical contact. I know Johnny could leap that distance but he wouldn’t fly back and land in the exact same position he started in without me seeing it.
Clearing my head, I focused my senses on Andy and his armor. The batteries meant to absorb the kinetic energy made from impacts were completely full, shining like suns to my magical senses. From what I could tell, there were no injuries or bruises which showed that my armor was well made and perfectly designed but my brother looked to be in shock. A slow clap rang out.
“Well done Johnny,” Reeanth said, leaving the tree she was leaning up against. “You learned from the last session. If the enemy is strong of body . . .”
“Then attack the mind,” Johnny finished. Leaving his pose, Johnny walked over to Andy and poked him in the forehead, releasing Andy from his stupor.
“Wanna fill me in?” I asked, looking back and forth between Johnny and Reeanth.
“Cultivators are somewhat limited in how they express their abilities my lord until they reach the peak of their abilities,” Reeanth explained. “Martial arts are an extension of internal strength combined with knowledge and understanding to affect the outside world. A simple punch for you and I, while we could alter it or make it deadlier by covering the fist with fire or stone, cultivators can imbue heavier concepts to their abilities. This was a good example. Johnny’s staff is a bonded oak adder whose poison is a well known paralytic. That last strike was mental in nature resulting in an attack that left your brother defenseless.”
“Awesome right?” Johnny crowed excitedly. “Andy wasn’t ready for that one!”
Shaking his head, Andy opened his eyes, coming back to himself. “Gonna need a minute man. That helmet enhancer thing you put in bro, it wasn’t set up yet and amplified his attack. Fuck, this headache is brutal.”
“Whoops,” I said, walking over and healing his headache. “Yeah, you and your A.I. were supposed to get everything set up. I wouldn’t presume to know how you want your mental defenses built so I left that alone, but the armor is ready for the physical kind of combat.”
Grumbling at Andy’s minor oversight, I half-heartedly muttered under my breath walking to Yggdrasil and taking the arboreal Way to Sunstone Castle. Standing in the center of my fortress, I found the control pedestal and gently slid Gungnir into place. Kraken popped out of my trusty weapon and looked around.
“The hell are we doing back here?” he asked. “The army is prepped and ready to go and the batteries below are . . . lemme check, yup, they’re over ninety percent full. The castle walls themselves are at a solid fifty percent and the tree looks better than expected in this nasty climate.”
“We’re upgrading!” I answered, grinning ear to ear.
“Upgrading what?!?”
“Oh come on, with all the stuff we’ve learned? I can reformat the enchantments on the walls so that they mimic the walls in New Miami, giving them a metaphysical current to circulate within themselves. That would give the castle an eighty percent increase in absorption capabilities while staying functional. Also, we could put a kinetic converter in the bottom of the river and link a feed from the river to the castle as a backup power source, and I’m thinking of adding enchanted granite to the flat parts of the sunstone golems like their-”
“Nope. Nope” Kraken interrupted, wildly waving his tentacles. “No! That’s all work for me not for you. Redoing the enchantments to the castle walls is beyond insane! They were inscribed INSIDE of the stones as the conjuration was ongoing. The only way to ‘fix’ it is to take the whole thing down.”
“Fuck. Seriously?”
“Yes. Seriously,” he snapped. “Which I will say again, is INSANE. A better use of your time would be going over the intel you got from the Centauri. There’s some cool stuff in there that might be useful later like, the Irish.”
“What about’em?”
“Well for instance, a bit more of humanity got left behind than we were originally told. The Irish got completely left behind, a large chunk of the Nordic countries did as well and are now mead swilling Vikings again but this time with magic. A few mountainous area were completely skipped over and some island nations. You may not want to, but you might need to put New Miami and New Richmond in touch with everyone else or at least let them know that they’re still around so the whole ‘recolonization’ thing that humans can do can start.”
I didn’t really like that. I’m kind of hitting my cap of human interaction for right now with three of them living in my space. Speaking of, I need to make sure that the high levels of mana aren’t adversely affecting them. I joked about that at New Richmond a while back and used it as an excuse to keep people away but it’s been bugging me and i have to see if it’s true. I know it affects animals in many ways, Kong, Spot, and Norn being classic examples but I can’t be letting my own people mutate uncontrollably.
Not letting my thoughts meander on even more, Kraken interrupted again. “AND, I know your pets have been keeping the forest around your area clean but I do highly recommend doing a few more purging sprees. The goblins you tested your stuff out on, where there’s one there’s a thousand. They breed like rats and are almost universally hated, well, them and orcs, ogres, feral centaurs and the screaming ferlanx too.”
“Do I want to know?” I asked with one raised eyebrow. Kraken shoved an image of a six-legged ferret the size of a horse with the meanness of a rabid squirrel into my head. Kraken made sure to highlight the overlarge teeth and bulging poison sacks behind the jawline as well as the hooked talons on the back of its feet. “So, no, I didn’t want to know.”
My little family and I spent the next two weeks and change fine-tuning Andy and his new gear in brutal training sessions, but I think the greatest help that I was able to give him was the assistance in creating Andy’s own mindscape. The mindscape is that meditative space where you and yourself and anything spiritually connected can go to plan. Mine has the advantage, due to my sorceries, of having the ability to manifest my soul-tree there as well but everyone has to start somewhere. With the assistance of his A.I., my brother’s went from a pale grey void at the beginning to a very bare log cabin with chalkboard on one wall and two chairs. We were still working on the visual manifestation of his A.I. when Kraken reminded me that our deadline was in six hours.
“Are witches hot?” Johnny asked, gleefully bouncing on his toes.
“Doesn’t matter,” I growled for the umpteenth time. “You’re not going. It’s me dropping Andy off and coming back. You and Reeanth are going to meet me at New Richmond by sunset. Bring Spot along and they’ll believe you.” Double checking that my little brother had all of his stuff plus some extras, I nabbed one last satchel of surprises before meeting him at the tree.
“Whazzat?” Andy asked as I exited the Hole.
“Goodies. More seeds than you need for the plan, but if it doesn’t work then it doesn’t work. If it does, we could be rich or trade that stuff for thing we don’t even know we need yet. Second,” I said as I pulled out one more pouch. “This is mini-flashbang grenades and trip-vines. Put a bit of mana into them and in three seconds they’ll do what they sound like. Pour three seconds worth of mana into them and then wait three seconds and the results will be far more lethal, trust me.”
Gingerly taking the bag, Andy stuck it in a leg pocket. “It’s like college all over again. I got the jitters and am hopin’ to heaven they got some hot alien chicks.”
Rolling my eyes as Johnny cheered him on, I shoved Andy into the tree and took us to New Miami. Per our agreement, Sybella met us outside of the city walls at the appointed time. Andy and I arrived underground through the Yggdrasil root and traveled via my earth sorcery. I grew chairs out of the undergrowth and made a nice fire pit with dry branches as Andy lit it with his finger.
“So weird that you’re so damn powerful but you can’t even use fire,” he said, carelessly playing with a floating spark over his palm. “I can’t even touch you in a fight but without a lighter what good are ya?”
Playfully putting out the spark with a quick blast of conjured water, I smirked at him. “What need does the ocean have for the flame? Or a mountain for the sun?”
“Okaaay Confucius.”
I laughed. “No, no, you do have a point. I think Kraken explained it best. Sorcerers tend to be more powerful in the beginning. We get the instinct, the lion’s share of the understanding and the power of our elements, but outside of that we aren’t flexible. You, you’re a wizard. Eventually, you will outscale me. It may take you a long time but it will happen. You’ll be able to do things I won’t, like conjure a windstorm or a flaming tornado, or summon otherworldly creatures to help you out. I’m stuck with what I have.”
“Well put.” The lighter tones of the feminine voice behind us made us both jump up and grab our weapons. “But I didn’t know you were a sorcerer, Nate, or should I say, my lord?”
Andy looked at me. “What? My lord? The fuck is this?”
Sybella turned to look at him. “You’ve served for six years in the Centauri fleet and still don’t know? My, what a disservice you’ve done him.” That last part was aimed at me. “Your great Empire’s original rulers were Sorcerers that were eventually eclipsed by the Wizards and Mages they helped raise up. Sorcerers are still considered royalty in your part of the multiverse, and very useful slaves in other parts.”
“This is not what we discussed,” I snarled, tightening my grip on Gungnir.
“Peace sorcerer. I have dealt with you in good faith and in the best of wishes. Your blood-kin shall go to the institute as promised after a half-years worth of gentle instruction at the hands of my coven. Manners, culture, the political landscape as well as the overarching view of the powers that be shall be included as well as magical tutoring. Your brother shall return with the gift of wytchfire but will not be allowed to teach anyone else its secrets.”
Behind her in the fading light, I could make out an oval of deep purple with black lightning whipping around the edges silently but never leaving. “Without your generous gift, I never would have been able to hold a portal open for that long. It does help that you’ve softened the barriers with another insertion of the Great Vein. A lecture for another time perhaps. Andrew Jones, come.” Without another word, Sybella turned and walked through the portal. Even though she was gone, her words clearly came through from the other side like a whispering wind. “Quickly now, if you don’t come now then I’ll have broken my word.”
Giving my much taller brother a hug, I shoved him forward. Holding his tower shield effortlessly in one hand with his rifle in the other propped up on his shoulder, Andy set his jaw and stalked through the portal. He did in fact cut an imposing figure in his black armor and wicked looking gear. Stopping just outside, he waved at me real quick and then turned, diving through.
[He’s going to raise some hell if he goes to that school looking like that. Sorcerers don’t really make equipment for anyone anymore. People are going to start asking some questions.]
Grinning like a wolf as a shapely figure stepped through the closing portal, I replied to Kraken, “Can’t wait.”