Some time later . . .
Brainworms. I finally remembered what it was called. That stupid song that gets stuck in your head for days on end, like when ‘Golddigger’ was my best friend seven months in at college and nothing would get it out. Still remember whistling the “She gives me money!” part as I walked down the main avenue just rocking out in my own head. Right now, my current brain worm was a sing-songy old favorite of my hippy fiance when she would get home from work and complain about her horrible boss, “Fuck you, fuck you very very muuuuuch!”. I couldn’t even stop myself from singing it under my breath as I followed the stupid tracking orb I had made to find Reeanth. Pain in my ass and all I could think about was tearing that bitch a new one.
Describing what I am feeling is rather hard at this moment, because it’s so much more than just tension. Just think about being at the zoo checking out the tigers, and everything is great, and then you look over and you realize that the door is unlocked, that the door KEEPING THE TIGER AWAY is UNLOCKED. Now that bodily reaction, that oh shit split second of a freeze, take it and stretch that out. Stretch that tension out until you begin to voluntarily let it inside of you, where it can nest and feast on your peace. This nice little nature walk to go find Reeanth before the big bad Ripple comes is turning into some kind of sick mind game that reality is playing with my head. Nothing is out right now and I am a badass sorcerer but I feel that the door to the freakin tigers is open and they are going to jump out at any second.
[What if, and hear me out, what if, it’s not weak?]
I know what Gungnir meant. The Ripple, the last one, supposedly the weakest one.
[I’m starting to feel it now too,] Gungnir continued, [The mana feels, electrified, like it’s about to pour down rain.] I just let it go on. [I mean, death throes are a thing, why would a deity be any different? What’s to say that this last Ripple won’t be the mother of all Ripples? The freaking tidal wave? The gasping spasm of a god of chaos, wouldn’t that be epically catastrophic? I mean, I’m just spitballin’ here.]
My pace picked up. Fuck you Murphy’s Law. If you could take all the possible strings of Fate and organize them from best to worst, I bet there are plenty of times that my name shows up bright and clear in the frayed strands near the bottom. I passed trees as orb-form Gungnir floated a foot above my right shoulder, keeping perfect pace as the tracker ball rolled on. A thought I hadn’t considered pulled me up short, what the freaking hell am I doing? Why am I chasing after some giant magical alien female when every remaining instinct I have is screaming “DANGER”? The tracking ball rolled on, and I just watched it as it crested over the hill and vanished from sight.
“Yeah,” I muttered, “Fuck you, fuck you very very much.” Turning, I looked at the trail behind me, then back to the hill in front of me. “Eh, just one more hill,” I said, “Gungnir. If we get to the top of that hill and we don’t see her, we’re going back.”
A mental confirmation clicked down our link. Reeanth had started to grow on me, but I had other priorities, namely, my own ass, so sticking my neck out far wasn’t in the cards. Jogging up the steep hill littered with leaves, I pondered my earlier thoughts. Why the hell was I running after Reeanth? She has an epic suit of magical nano-tech armor that self-repairs and has plenty of weapons, that grown woman can take care of herself. I mean, she looks like she could tear a normal human in half with her bare hands. Out of all my instincts, I for some reason decided to go with the dumbest one, the pack instinct. Humans are herd animals like sheep, and that doesn’t speak well of how we work as groups. One of these days I’m going to have to do a deep dive in my instincts and see what I can do in there.
Reaching the top, I took a breath and looked around. “Waste of fucking time,” I sighed.
“Totally,” Gungnir agreed, adopting a surfer dude accent, “But, that alien butt is righteous. I’d run after it too.”
“Uhm, except I’m two feet too short and one wife too many. Besides, she ain’t right in the head. Btw, just to reiterate for my peace of mind, you don’t go further than two feet away from me. When this Ripple hits, I need to first, protect me, and then second, capture as much as you can if possible.”
“Already on top of it. Got a few three dimensional runes that I pulled out of Rath’s brain a couple days back and I think they are geared towards energy imprisonment and stasis. It’s like the dragon’s internal mechanism to store energy that isn’t compatible with their body at that time, but still allowing them to hold on to it if they can manage overpower or merge with it over time.”
“I cannot wait until I actually have a conversation that I leave with more answers than questions.”
“Hey, is that her?” Gungnir asked, shooting a small harmless beam of light off into the distance. “Looks like she’s in the middle of a, what do you call those, a crop circle?”
A few minutes of jogging later, Gungnir and I made it to where Reeanth was furiously digging runes in a small clearing with her maul. “What in the world are you doing?” I asked, surveying the strange scene before me. Glancing at me with a crazed look in her eye, she continued to dig. “Reeanth!”
“It’s coming!” she huffed, almost out of breath with her exertions, “It’s almost here and I’m going to die!” She could only mean one thing. The Ripple.
“So what if it’s coming, how’s it going to kill you? It’s the death cry of a dead god right, so didn’t it hit the entire universe?” I asked, puzzled. “This doesn’t make sense, doesn’t that mean that all wizards or Centauri are going to die?”
“What, no?” she answered, her face scrunched incredulously as if I asked a stupid question.
“Don’t give me that, I literally don’t know shit. A god of chaos died and I became a sorcerer from it.”
“It’s not the cry itself that will kill me, it’s the mana differential of the environment reacting to the tsunami of power.”
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Rubbing my temples, I ground my teeth, “That’s not a fucking answer.”
“I get it!” Gungnir said, “That explains so much.”
“Any time now man.”
“Think about it this way, throw a rock in the ocean and it makes a wave, but that wave doesn’t hurt anything. Because a wave in the ocean doesn’t mean anything because a wave is water that’s already in the water, but it’s just moving. That’s the Ripple in the areas other than Earth; it added magic to magic that was already there, like throwing a bucket of water into an ocean. Now, the Earth has no magic, or almost none compared to the rest of the Cosmos, so when you add magic to it, it’s like a tsunami hitting the little beach town. Way different results.”
Working through this hurt, because how the hell are we supposed to survive a magical tsunami?
“Hey!” Gungnir interrupted my train of thought, “You’re literally thinking of dumb questions. In the beginning, you had no magic, so when the water, or the magic hit, you were the sand that absorbed the wave. Now that you have magic, you’re basically the rock formation getting pounded by the wave. It’ll hurt, but you’ll live. Besides, I’m your shield, which’ll help a lot.”
“Then what is she doing?” I asked, pointing at Reeanth.
“Uhm, got me there. Woman! What are you doing exactly?”
“That’s a rune of containment within a Greater rune of diversion,” she said, pointing at the squarish one within a squiggly in front of her. “And the two here,” she pointed to the ones to her right and left, “Are the directional siphoning circuits to bleed off what the first doesn’t handle. The last . . “ as she pointed behind herself to a crude rune with a glass bottle in the center. It was filled almost halfway with a thick red substance. “That one is intent substitution diversion with a desire-based thought matrix.”
“A what and a huh?” I’m a smart guy, but I’m having an inadequacy problem at the moment.
“I don’t have time for this!” she screamed, hopping out of the crude circle of runes and placing her hand on Gungnir. She closed her eyes for a second, and then hopped back to her work.
“Oh, that’s ambitious,” Gungnir said, “Insane, but it might actually work.” I could hear the obvious respect in the orb’s tone.
The crystal eye of the orb turned to me and caught me glaring at it. “Oh, right, shit, uhm, didn’t mean to leave you out of that,” it stuttered through like a five-year old that got caught stealing candy. “She just allowed me to download her plan. Ok, so this whole thing is for protection, mainly. The Ripple hits the circle she’s standing in, which acts as a kind of magical shield, and the runes direct the flow to protect her. The tricky one is the one behind her, it’s her blood, which she put a single rune containing a thought or want inside of it, the desire for sorcery.”
I raised one eyebrow and motioned for Gungnir to continue.
“Well, it will serve as a distraction, because magic, pure magic, is almost sentient. It kind of just acts if left to its own devices, like wild magic, very dangerous stuff. So, the blood jar will serve to function as bait, so the wave will hit the rune circle, and if it’s not enough, will be diverted to the other runes, protecting Reeanth inside the main circle, and then direct the chaos towards unprotected bait, the blood jar, which may also have a tiny chance of capturing a sorcery if all goes well.”
“Huh. So, why’s she freaking out?” I asked as her digging picked up the pace.
“Something to do with the lack of proper ritual materials. The image in her head that she sent me was a seriously elaborate ritual complete with focus crystals and storage gems and silver/gold rune inlays with a blooded inlay.” The orb floated a little closer to Reeanth, as if to get a better look.
“Hey!” I shouted, grabbing it with my hands and pulling it back. “No sir. You stay near me. Besides, I might be able to help.” With Gungnir showing me mentally what Reeanth had in her mind, I began to use my earth sorcery to smooth out the rough edges of the dirt circle and transmuted it into granite with two inch channels connecting the Cardinal directions. Walking to the top rune, I slowly conjured a quartz crystal in the shape of the rune and placed it in the dug-up slot, and then did the same for the left and right runes. “This is pretty easy,” I said jokingly, “What’s all the fuss?”
Glaring at me, Reeanth snapped, “Sorcery makes everything easy!” Her eyes softened just a bit, “But thank you. This will hopefully make my chances better of surviving. Your hideouts didn’t have the right runes or anything to prevent the Ripple from making tangible contact. That’s why I started making this, for a piece of a chance at survival.”
“Gungnir could have easily protected both of us dummy,” I said, derision lightly tingeing my voice. “You didn’t need to do any of this,” I continued as I gestured at the circle. “But, the blood jar, that can capture sorcery? I’ve been trying to do that crystals and I barely got any results, except for a maybe that I need to test out.”
“Worry about that later!” she said, waving her hands in my face, “We don’t have much time, at least finish what you started.”
“So ungrateful,” I grumbled as I kept on conjuring crystals and smoothing out the runes and turning the dirt into stone. “Do this, conjure that, fucking princess.” Within ten minutes, the crude dirt drawing had been transformed into an almost respectable ritual. An inner and outer circle were carved into beautiful marbled granite with shiny quartz crystals studding the Cardinal directions, and Reeanth was in the middle, shaking with fear, or anticipation. I couldn’t really tell. The blood jar was sitting on its own platform at the Southern point. “Does that one need a rune, and where the hell did you get a fucking glass jar?”
“My suit’s nanites and sand,” she answered, “And they also carved all the necessary runes at the molecular level, so this is the most reliable part of this entire ritual.”
“Well shit,” I said quietly to myself as I looked around, “Why the fuck not?” I inspected Reeanth’s setup one more time and then found myself some room about forty feet away. “My turn bitches!” I crowed, using my earth sorcery to make a much more tidy version than what Reeanth originally had. I conjured a granite platform with disk shaped slots at the cardinal directions, and then put in the same runes in the same places, but this time I filled in the circuit lines with copper, as that was much quicker to conjured than gold due to how common it is. Then, using Gungnir as a memory bank, I conjured the quartz version of the blood jar, complete with runes, and stuck it in its place. Using flesh sorcery, I nicked open a vein on my left arm and bled into the jar and then continued to bleed while directing the flow to cover the copper wire circuitry. With a quick flex of will, I healed myself, replenished the lost blood and stood in the middle of my much better ritual circle.
“My lord, please, we don’t have much time before it arrives,” Reeanth said, with a pleading look on her face. “These channels won’t do anything, they need some kind of metal to act as a circuit.”
“Seriously?” I groaned, walking back over to her. I conjured copper to fill in the channels and looked her in the eye. “Anything else?” She shook her head no. “Good,” I said, walking back to my own circle.
Sitting down indian style in the center, I faced my blood jar and stuck my finger on the outside, lightly resting it at the lip. [Breathe in, breathe out]. Calming myself was harder than I hoped in that moment, I couldn’t afford to mess this up. I really didn’t know if this would work, but the possibility existed that I could get another sorcery. What would work best? Man, my current power set is awesome, but kind of limiting in some ways. It lends itself to long-term survival and fortifications as well as healing and defensive power, but that very same combo prevents me from being compatible with other kinds of sorcery, like fire or death or void.
My elements are earth, water, nature, flesh, and mana/enchantment. Fire is antithetical to my core, and lightning is a purified expression of fire. Energy would be cool, but severely limited with the odd restrictions. The only way I even came to that conclusion was when I tried to ingest Rath and his power, the fire dragon from not too long ago. That encounter made me realize that the harmony of my capabilities is almost more important than the abilities themselves. Sorcery is inherent to the soul, and a powerful soul is required to even have it. I have several sorceries, and if I had opposing kinds, then the disharmony wouldn’t allow me to have more than a set of two. But the fact that everything I have literally works together in the world, the synergy allows for me to possess more than I should. So what would work with what I have?
The hair on the back of my neck stood on end right as Reeanth let out an oddly pitched screech. “My lord! Prepare yourself!”
Looking over at her without moving my hand, I saw her body start to shake just a little harder than the shiver from five minutes ago. Her head tilted up and I followed her line of sight. A smorgasbord of oil-slicked rainbow colors streaked across the sky, making the sun and the barely visible moon Ripple. The clouds followed suit as reality bore the weight of change on its shoulders. It had arrived.