Acantha made talking easy, no, not in the sappy kind of way, but in the way that time passes by without anyone even noticing. Spot ranged far and wide doing his doggy duty, literally and figuratively, all across the desert as my newest vassal and I traded stories as we monitored Kraken painstakingly creating new additions to my army. I told her my life story which wasn’t that interesting up till the apocalypse kicked off and she told me about her ordeals with her Coven. Turns out, her fire wasn’t something she was born with, rather it was a result of a wild magic experiment that was trying to create something called True Fire. Several dragons, three devils, two fire elementals, and an efreet carrying four phoenix feathers were involved with ritual that had a bit of magical Greek fire in the center. Two explosions and one crazy woman trying to put it out resulted in Acantha being stripped of all of the power she’d gained for the past seventy years but it gave her FIRE. From what she’d gathered so far from her own testing, with her Coven’s approval, was that any kind of flame simply loved her and if she encountered a new kind of fire then hers would eat it and she’d get stronger.
Whereas my gifts were the result of the intervention of mindless Chaos which was simply less cool than her experience. As we got to talking, I even told her about Sarah and my struggles for the first two months trying to defend the cocoon of my woman, and then the Yggdrasil seed incident where my fiance went from tree lady to THE TREE LADY, from a humble oak to the living spine of the universe, leaving me behind to contend with the rest of this fucking planet. I was rather impressed that I managed to not shed a tear at all but even my flesh sorcery had a hard time with that. What impressed Acantha was the unconscious casual way that I proudly showed off my creations out here in the desert, my desert-ified willow tree overtop the underground cave hideout being powered by the kinetic flow of the Colorado River, the layers of dense solar-powered batteries with the gold and crystal ritual circles concentrating the power of the desert sun.
Since Acantha’s discretion and loyalty were assured by the power of her own bloodfire, I didn’t even have a problem telling her that I was a sorcerer of not just one, but multiple elements. I even took the time to fix a glaring error in my Sunstone Castle planning. If this position were to ever be assaulted and I had living beings stationed here, then they’d be shit outta luck if I didn’t put a flesh golem here. A quick trip back home allowed me to get to my main flesh golem and separate a fist sized piece of it containing all of the DNA sequences I’d gathered so far. Coming back to the castle, Acantha and I hunted up some bison-sized lizards and had Spot drag them back so I could use the bodies as fuel for the flesh golem.
“Anything? Just stick your hand on it and change anything I want? It’s that easy?”
“Yup.” My answer seemed to barely move the mountain of skepticism that Acantha was workin’ with, even after I’d shown her the process of the mini-flesh golem devouring the lizards to grow to a decent size. The golem, now truck sized, sat there very still even as I could tell that it was converting the dead lizard tissue to blank but full of energy stem cells. “All changes are painless unless you want them to be. We got a bunch of different creatures up in there but there are some limits. I cannot make creatures with intact souls or minds from this thing and the universe is still full of animals I haven’t encountered yet,” I continued, smacking the dull grey flesh with my hand. “For instance, I’d like to get my hands on a water and an earth dragon but that’s gonna take a while, but I do have fire dragon DNA in there.”
She just stood there, silent. Her gaze looked like it was going to burn a hole into my golem which made me snap my fingers. “Wha? Hey!”
“Sorry princess,” I replied. “Can’t have you lightin’ this baby on fire. Let’s say someone gets pulled off a battlefield with no limbs or face AND is still breathing. All I have to do is shove him onto the golem and less than a minute later he’d be fine. Dead tissue and foreign objects removed and missing pieces put back on with his own DNA sequence so there’s no chance for rejection.”
“You could save so many lives . . .”
“I know. I could also end so many. I have a Doomsday protocol in every single one of these that’s only answerable to me. I call it, Operation Blob.” Assuming she hadn’t seen the really old movie, I described the terror that could ensue if an amorphous flesh devouring monster with no real weaknesses and a plethora of time and food got loose.
“That’s not real but your people came up with that? Why?” Acantha exclaimed. “Slimes are real and golems are real. I know, we’ve lost plenty of people in battlefield cleanups due to things feeding on the corpses.”
Laughing out loud, I quickly stifled it as she glared at me. “What? Magic has been real to us for like eight months now. Forgive me if we newbies have wild imaginations. We’ve also thought up artificial intelligences that take over people’s brains, hungry zombies and thirsty vampires, god-like mummies bringing plagues, the craziness goes on and that was before the Ripples hit the fan.”
“But those are real.” Her body was giving off a slight heat now and not the intense kind of happy or sexual kind. It was a pressure cooker building up some steam.
“They’re real now. You know who I’m really afraid of?” I asked, even as I looked away and examined Kraken’s latest work. “I’m afraid of the nerds, ya know, the dudes who worked for Microsoft, Apple, or Tesla and then got magic. Those dudes have an IQ, that combined with magic, would wreck some actual hell if they were in my position. My Earth had groups of people that fantasized day in and day out about magic and what it could do. We dreamed of raising the dead or battling monsters with magical lasers or arcane firepower. Now, they can. And THAT’S scary.”
Taking a deep breath, I began moving the flesh golem to the spot where I actually wanted it to be. With a hint of will, it turned its skin touching the floor into a slick membrane that allowed me to push it into place. The center of Sunstone Castle was a large courtyard featuring my altered Yggdrasil baobab tree and in front of it was the control pedestal where Gungnir went. The batteries were underground but the solar panels were on the ritual circle outside the Castle and few up on top of the walls at cardinal points. The golem, I moved that to the back of the castle courtyard where I set up a basic stone building big enough to fit the golem and two large vans. Very basic stone beds lined the walls and there were wooden boxes attached to the walls that were as of yet unfilled. Ideally, I’d have Centauri meal cubes in there along with weapons and armor as medical supplies wouldn’t be needed due to the golem.
Acantha took the opportunity to steer the conversation in a different direction than native Earth nerds. “What’s the real purpose of the golem? If you have flesh sorcery, you can heal anyone anytime you want, but this seems a bit altruistic for someone on a mission. Was it an experiment that simply went better than you expected or was it for the children of that city . . . New Richmond?”
“Both,” I grumbled. “It’s basically a convenient and complete hospital that doesn’t get tired. Feed it and it can do anything you want it too, which means alterations or upgrades are on the menu too if you have the required pound of flesh so to speak. It started as something to help me upgrade my own body but apparently a fire dragon and a sorcerer with water do not mix.”
“The sorcerers of old never did anything like this,” she whispered, still staring at the golem in wonder. “Tales say they ruled their sectors with an iron fist sheathed in power. Guilds ruled entire galaxies and their only foes were dragons and cultivators. Magic users of all kinds sought them for their power, as children from sorcerers almost certainly gained most if not all of their sorceries. That’s all we know as the accounts from that far back are locked up in the Coven’s Archives.”
“You mean your ancestral memories, right?” I grinned. Acantha whipped around, not even bothering to hide her shock. “Oh I know about them but there’s a cost right? The mind isn’t meant to hold so many lifetimes. The soul can only bear so much weight before it gives out. Maybe that’s the reason you jumped into that ritual fire, not to put it out but to get it over with?” My pointed prodding revealed the shame in her eyes even as she turned away, her hands shaking even as she gripped the loose folds of her pants.
“I did wonder about the downsides of internally bearing generations worth of skills and knowledge but fuckin’ hell dude, suicide?” Sometimes, I hate being right. What makes it worse is that we weren’t even drinking, no liquor to take the edge off the sudden rawness of the conversation. What makes it worse was that I was able to see the signs too easily, the slight bit of sick joy coming out in her eyes when she told me about the ritual exploding, that hint of sadness when she mentioned surviving as an afterthought even after gaining god-like control over fire. Before the Ripples, I saw too many of my Army buddies have the same ticks and signs, and even though I was never called to combat, I saw what came home. They weren’t the same guys that left.
What it boiled down to was that Sybella gave me a ticking time bomb of a witch, maybe not intentionally or spitefully, but the simple fact remains that Acantha is unstable. I don’t really care if it’s her fault or not but as my vassal, my partner, and my ward, I have to at least attempt to keep her in good shape for a couple years. Mentally communicating with Kraken, I had him finish up the golems that were still in-progress and dissolve those that had just started. I figured that I was taking one liberty too many but I couldn’t have my or my team’s safety in jeopardy, which meant sudden and overbearing force was required. Reaching forward, I poked her right in the back of her head with a finger infused with flesh and mind magic, instantly knocking her unconscious.
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[Seems a little low]. Ignoring Kraken, I caught Acantha and carried her over to Gungnir where I began drawing on the consolidated power of Sunstone Castle. [You can’t fix crazy! I’ve seen all the rom-coms you have in your memories and crazy is the one thing you can’t fix! Well, maybe put stupid in that list too but crazy is worse!]
[Stupid is always worse than crazy,] I retorted. [But think about it from my perspective. What if she is nuts, certifiably? AND, what if it isn’t her fault? So, if it is from the memories, then it’s possible that I can fix it. I’m picturing her memories like a river that’s been dammed up but there’s either a crack in the dam or the spout where they should be coming through calmly is open a bit too wide. So I need to stem the tide by sealing the crack or screwing the opening to be a bit smaller so she can handle it. But I need to see it to figure it out.]
[All good points,] Kraken grunted. [But . . . what if she is just plain and simple crazy?]
[I fuckin’ hope not.] With one hand on Gungnir and the other on Acantha’s forehead, I meditated for a moment and then dove inside. The landscape before me was not what I expected. Every time I’ve entered someone else’s mind, there was some form of building that was the structural concept of that person’s inner self, their consciousness. Mine was my soul-tree and Kraken had been drawing up plans to put the Sunstone Castle design around it as a way of fortifying my own spirit. But Acantha, this was simply raw.
Volcanoes. Miles and miles of massive volcanoes as far as the soul could see. Each one spewing lava into the air dispersing ash to blacken the sky. Some had gentle lava flows coming out of the sides but those were few and far between as far as I could see. Although, off in the distance I could barely make out almost a bastardized outline of a city between two Mount Everest sized volcanoes, odd.
“Creepy.” I almost jumped out of my skin as Kraken appeared beside me, surveying the area with a calm eye.
“Where the fuck-”
“Relax. Spirit familiar, remember?” Kraken teased, rolling his eye. “Besides, this is a mindscape here which is the gateway to the soul, so I have every right to be here to help your ass out in HER place of power, dreary as it is.” Surveying the oozing and exploding volcanoes, I wrapped the both of us in a dense shield of mana and cast my senses out, paying the most attention to what my mind sorcery was telling me. These volcanoes weren’t natural, really, they were a mix of the unending flow of memories from Acantha’s ancestors that had combined with the combination of primal energies of the different kinds of fire from the ritual gone wrong, which resulted in her mind becoming this mess.
“Whatcha thinkin? Cause Ima’ thinkin’ there ain’t no fixin’ this.”
Glaring at Kraken for his horrible attempt at a southern accent, he gave a shrug to show he wasn’t sorry for being so bad at it. “I’m thinkin’,” I mocked, “that we can mold what we can’t fix.”
My thought-projection self with Kraken flew over to the nearest volcano, floating just off to the side of the erupting lava. Shaking my head at what I was planning on doing, I shot up into the ashy sky, forcefully shoving aside the massive layer of ash clouds so I could get a decent picture of the whole area. Floating back down after burning the image into my brain, I closed my eyes, gathering my will to reshape this mental reality. As much as I wanted to forcefully wave a wand and make this all go away, the fact of the matter was that my toolbox had a different answer. Sometimes, that with which you are cursed may in fact be a blessing if the right idea comes along.
The first volcano did not like my intervention as I forced the base on opposite sides to split open, venting the lava out to the side. Using my sorcery of the mind, mimicking my earth sorcery was a breeze. For the lava, I dug channels for it to travel outwards until it touched another volcano where I again created large vents in the base and then made more channels to flow.
“Ah, I get it. You’re making a channel connecting the volcanoes to form a river of lava, which will calm down the landscape. Are you going to flatten the volcanoes to ease the landscape, where hopefully that will ease the mental distress?” Kraken questioned.
“Yup.” Moving quickly from one volcano to the next, I followed the image in my brain, connecting the volcanoes as if it were a game of connect the dots, forming a giant rune for meekness. Some people view that word as the modern definition of gentle or soft in personality, but the older meaning is what I was going for. The intent of ‘strength under control’ was the older meaning, the more powerful meaning of the word, which was the powerful intent I was imbuing into the landscape. Inside of the main rune, I connected the inner volcanoes to make two more small runes, one for fire and the other for mind, essentially combining the three to form the concept that the fire of her power with the weight of her ancestor’s memories would be her strength yet completely under her control.
As the rework of Acantha’s mind landscape was completed, almost instantly it settled down. The eruptions of lava were now perfectly channeled off to the sides into the lava river instead of violently exploding into the air. The sky was no longer constantly getting thicker with ash and the air slowly began to clear. Floating through her mind, I altered a few channels here and there to make them deeper and wider to help offset influxes of power, taking great care to shore up the cracks and slowly shape the volcanoes themselves to have extra pressure vents higher up on the cone if need be.
Flying over to her soot-covered cityscape, I set Kraken and myself down right outside the walls. “Come on out! I know you’re in there!” I roared, using magic to make my voice larger than life. The sound shook the city almost literally, the walls and buildings rippling under the force of my power. “Acantha! We can fix this shit right now!”
Ash and soot and fire coalesced in front of me, flashing brightly before exploding into a humanoid shape. “Wha? Who?”
“It’s all right,” I soothed. “It’s all right. I promise, I’m here to help. Your mind right now is in a state of flux or constant change. Your damaged psyche is on the mend but it needs you. Your mind-castle needs to be rejuvenated, healed. I can help you with that but first, picture yourself as here. Listen to my voice, be here with me.”
“I don-, I nee-.”
Channeling a thin thread of power to the nascent form in front of me, I kept it stable as the projection became more solid, taking on the feminine form. Over the course of an hour, Acantha’s feature finally filled out. “There we go, well done.”
“Nate, how did this happen, what did you do?” she questioned fearfully, looking around and covering her nakedness with her hands.
“Relax, just will yourself to have clothes. This is your mind, here, you have all the power. I’m just the bandage right now. None of this will stay if you don’t want it to,” I reassured. “What you need to do is either make it permanent or fix it yourself.”
“Make what permanent? Fix what?”
“Yourself. Turn around, look at your own mind, covered in ash, a desolate burned out wasteland. It needs life again. I put you back in control of your own mind, but you need to take control. I can’t do that for you.”
Almost hyperventilating, Acantha’s eyes went wide as she looked out at her city and then turned to gaze out over the landscape. “See?” I pointed. “The volcanic issue is solved. The memories and fire are combined and channeled in perfect harmony and I’ve made sure that it’s not set in stone unless you want it to be. Here’s your chance. Force, no, will yourself back to yourself. This is your land, your mind, under your power. My work is done.”
Her eyes searched my own, finding the truth in my words. Her shaking slowly gave way to calm strength, the realization that the only thing hurting her now was herself. Raising one hand, she watched in wonder as her mind and her will worked in tandem, fully clothing her. And that simple act was enough to tip off a landslide of progress. Turning around, she blasted herself towards the city wall, slamming her palms into it. A wave of fire radiated outwards, changing the dull grey and black wall to flaming red and then continuing on, completely restoring and reshaping the sad burned-out hulk of a city into a beautiful metropolis of ruby and carved fire. Orange, red, and blue sculptures of mythical creatures adorned the walls and the tops of the buildings, dragons keeping watch over the domain, phoenixes flitting about without a care, efreets faithfully tending their fires.
The wave of changing flame didn’t stop there. It washed out over the volcanic landscape I’d spent hours fixing. Golden flames smashed into the volcanoes transforming them into solid obsidian fixtures of dragons and gargoyles spewing lava. The channels were changed into volcanic rock to better handle the sheer amount of heat although the overall runic shapes were left untouched. Standing up straight, Acantha looked up and made a hard yanking motion, pulling the clouds of ash out of the sky so that it gathered into a small but very dense ball that floated over her outstretched hand. Flinging it outwards, the ash exploded and took the form of a giant diamond amalgamation of a flaming gryphon and fire salamander. Crowing in newborn excitement, the monster looked around and happily dove into the river of lava, splashing like an otter pup experiencing water for the first time.
Color me impressed. Even as I looked around in awe of the changes around me, part of me couldn’t help but wonder if witches in general were as messed up as this. And if that was true, no wonder sorcerers of all kinds were sought after. A mind sorcerer could fix mental issues while a flesh sorcerer could help someone live forever, and the list just freaking goes on. Taking one last look at the expression of unburdened joy on Acantha’s face, I quietly extricated myself from her mind leaving her to a psyche on the road to recovery.
That woman was lights out for the next two days. I did the decent thing and had Kraken hook her up to a minor mana feed as she healed the mental and physical damage she sustained not only from the healing process but also the long term scar tissue from overuse of mana. Checking in every six hours or so, I administered a shot of flesh sorcery to boost the process without overdoing it. Healing the mind takes time, and luckily I had plenty of stuff to do to keep me occupied.
First and foremost, Kraken kept working on beefing up our golem numbers and I took a look at the geographical issues we were going to face such as the fact when everyone said the Hungry Ones were in the ‘North’, they meant to say ‘Greenland’. And of course, ‘Green’ land is a land of ice and snow, mostly devoid of vegetation. From my memories of elementary school education, they colored Greenland ‘white’ because of all the fucking snow. Perfect place for zombies to hole up and wait for a couple centuries for people to forget about them. In the winter, their humongous island of a mini-continent would be even harder to penetrate. The Antarctic was exactly what we were expecting though, hard as fuck to get to which is why it was going to be secondary.
Greenland is located northeast of the North American continent, up past Alaska and Canada and right up Santa’s butthole. It took me three hours of communion with the World Tree to even figure out if there was any flora there and another three to find an area strong enough to host a fledgling World Tree which I could use as a base. The view of the planet is a bit fuzzy in my mind as trees don’t necessarily use English to communicate with us humans. They look at the Earth in terms of fertile soil and nice sunlight, or bad soil and harsh climate. Southern Greenland has just enough of a nature leyline to barely fit my energy-heavy butt and one more person. By the time Acantha came to, I had a plan.