I heard that. I freaking heard a woof. My body flew on its own, around the stone table, threw the runed tunnel door, down the softly lit tunnel itself, toenail scratching sounds speeding my steps as I reached the door to the under-river bolt hole hurling it open. “SPOT!!!” I screamed with sheer joy as I saw my gigantic mutt for the first time in what felt like years. I couldn’t stop my eyeballs from leaking as I jumped on his head that was easily big enough to fit three of me. But, he wasn’t comfy. I slid off his head to give him a good look. “Back up and sit,” I commanded as I pulled out a runed lightstone from my pocket. “Fucking hell dog, you trying to commit copyright infringement?” I muttered to myself. “You look like Clifford the big red dog had a threesome with Skeletor and a dragon!”
My big dog was red, and not just red, but the scaly kind of red. Every bit of fur that a dog usually has was replaced with large red scales, his eyebrows had bulges of bone armor that seemed to form a smooth helmet specifically made for ramming or headbutts. His fluffy tail was now a thick whip of scale-covered muscle, ridges of bone curved down his back and adorned his knees. This armored pseudo dragon of a dog with more raw mana packed into his frame than a freaking bomb sat in front of me like a proud puppy, his tongue lolling out and bits of drool hitting the floor and sizzling.
A soft whine escaped his humongous jaw and I caught a glimpse of teeth that were way too big to fit in there comfortably. “Shit dog,” I said in wonder as I examined his teeth. Looking down, normal toenails were now ebony-esque claws that cracked the solid stone floor. A fermented smell wafted up to my nose, drawing my attention over to the corner of the cavern. Besides the old broken open cocoon, a large pile of brown material lay there steaming.
“You better be worth it,” I grumbled as I gave my pup a hug. “Let’s get you and this place cleaned up huh?”
Several hours later, Spot and I sat on the bank of the Rappahannock river enjoying the evening sun. It had been a total pain in the ass to excavate the dog poo and the now much larger dog from the cavern. I also moved Reeanth to a chair in the under-tree bolthole and used a bit of flesh sorcery to put her in a deeper sleep. The sight of the angel didn’t have as good an effect on her. I remember stories about angels from when I was a kid when my parents took me to church. Angels were either associated with giving good news or passing judgment. The Bible talked about whole crowds of people falling over themselves, weeping, or fearing for their lives when they saw an angel. I mean, they’re pretty much the self-guided nukes of the Big Guy, so I didn’t blame her. Better passing out than risking another Sodom and Gomorrah.
For the first time in a long while, I felt a measure of peace. Having Spot back was one worry that I didn’t have to think about anymore, but what really did it was the divine reassurance that my wife Sarah is ok. I felt like I could finally let go, exhale for once. This whole time I’d been running around while holding my breath, not knowing shit, and trying to punch way outside of my weight class. But now, I could breathe. Sarah was fine, is fine, and is going to be ok. The sun dipped down a bit lower, crowning the mountains not too far off in the distance. They used to be hills, and that waterfall didn’t use to be there either. How much more of this mudball is magic going to change. I already freaked out three times on the short walk to the river from my house because floating islands are a thing.
Spot thought the floating islands were closer than what they were, bouncing and jumping as high up as he could. The reverberating booms of his landing scared off all nearby wildlife, which was good as it lead to a few solid hours of actual peace. No monsters, no craziness, no magic, and no worries. Spot lay down and coiled his big heat exuding body around me forming a living wall. In comfort, I passed out.
******
Chirping birds, the morning sun, and the incredible, all powerful, undying primal desire to pee woke me up. I posted one arm on Spot’s tail and vaulted in a hurry to the nearest tree to relieve myself. Pure bliss. Looking around after finishing my business, I saw that Spot was still passed out in a giant red ball of snoring. I conjured a small ball of water and washed myself with it, then banished it. My stomach rumbled but I silenced it with a flew of magic. Sitting next to Spot and leaning on him, I started to consider where to go from here. One part of me was chewing over the events of the past day and the other part was arguing with it. My emotions were happy and pleased that the angel confirmed that Sarah was ok, but my logic was railing at me for wasting an angelic favor like that. The emotional side argued back in the manner of, “How could you say such a thing?” while the logical side reasoned that with our mix of sorceries we would have figured out that Sarah was just fine if we stopped once to do a super in-depth examination.
The in-charge part of my mind told the other bits to shut the hell up because none of it matters because it’s already over. The curious side of me spoke up though, so, what about Gungnir, how come we didn’t wish for our family back, is the Big Guy even real or could I use the World Tree to magic my way into one of the heavens? The in-charge part again said shut up and addressed the only concern that I could. The angel said that I was now whole, and a whole bunch of things were going to be better because of it. What better time to do a dive than right now? Spot will keep away anything too hungry for its own good.
Closing my eyes, I started with consciously regulating my breathing, because what the hell do I know about self-examination? After a few minutes, I started consciously feeling out my magic, going through the tendrils of colors woven into my soul. I couldn’t feel my soul itself, but I knew that sorcery was somehow related to it, which meant that I could work back. I kind of pictured it like a human tree, like the first tree version of Sarah, but with my face and body. My energies are all spur of the moment, but with enough foresight that they worked together. Earth and water, nature and flesh, the basic elements linked together with the sorcery of magic itself acting as a glue, it formed a naturally beautiful but a literally ugly picture in my head. My feet showed as compacted dirt while my toes were long spears of stone gripping the earth itself, water twisted up my wooden legs while leaves of pure magic sprouted out of the fleshy torso. Underneath my feet ran thick streamers of pure energy that I interpreted as ley lines while my arms and head were unattached translucent bodies of consciousness.
As I sat there concentrating on the freaky personification of my magic, the details became clearer as my pulse slowed just a bit more and I focused on the arms and head. They were literally separate from the rest of the body of sorceries, floating about four inches away from each spot where they were supposed to be attached. My heart slowed a bit more as my will walked closer to the tree-mee. Nothing, there was a barrier of nothing severing the blobs of consciousness. My body looked like a partial stump of a tree. The blood jar! Fuck me! I left it in the damn tree hideout! No wonder, I had acquired the mixed bag sorcery of will/life/consciousness, but I hadn’t actually used it. Damn I’m an idiot sometimes.
Shaking my head out of internal examination, I kicked Spot awake, yes he’s so big and tough that it takes a kick from a normal human to wake the damn dog, and rode him back home. Carefully but quickly gaining entrance to my hideout, I saw that Reeanth was still passed out on the chair and the precious blood jar was sitting on the stone table. Weird, I don’t remember actually putting it down. I pulsed out my magic making sure that no intruders were around, and I looked back at Spot who was laying down facing the door from the outside, his big head taking up most of the doorway. No growls or signs that I should be uncomfortable. Walking up to the jar, I saw that a note filled with almost doctor-level handwriting was underneath it. Moving the jar to the side, I took about ten minutes to decode that horrible handwriting.
Yes you dummy, you forgot all about the jar because you’re an idiot with no sense of priorities, so I, in my wild graciousness, decided to keep it safe and out of sight from Flemel and the Foghorn, that’s the angel in case you couldn’t figure that out. People can do some freaky shit to you if they get ahold of something like this. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone since time doesn’t matter to me, but I may show up again or I may not. Enjoy the fruits of your sneaky universe-cheating labor. Don’t worry about Flamel, he’s going bonkers testing some zombie spices a couple octaves away. Your lady is fine, which trumpet boy told you, but what he didn’t tell you was that your magic making rock is powering her up in such a way that it would take a colliding planet to harm her, literally. So, you’re basically off the hook for the next couple thousand years. Go on, have fun, use magic, conquer shit, that kinda thing. Your weapon ball still works, but the piece of your soul animating it is back inside of you, so have fun being alone. Also, no, you can’t magic your way into heaven through Yggdrasil, tried that and they weren’t too happy about it, something about how I “didn’t earn it” and “didn’t have anything resembling faith”. Lame. Oh, and sorry about your liquor, I drank it all as payment for all my good deeds. Now, the last bit of advice that I can get away with, not all of your family is gone.
That’s it. Seriously? No more, just a little bit of fuckery at the end, something to send me on my way with? Which family member? Where are they? How many? As my hands shook, a bit of light from the door caught the back of the paper showing smudges. Carefully, I turned the paper over and read the rest.
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
HAHAHA! Just kidding, we old people gotta have fun sometimes! I mean, I’m not really kidding but I’m not gonna leave ya hanging like that. Your next youngest brother is alive and well, roughly a thousand miles south of here, in what you humans called “Miami”. Oh yeah, the Centauri have also claimed that area, so have fun! P.S. There’s a dude about forty miles east of you who might help, but you’ll have to help him first.
Equal parts relief and worry caused my hands to split the note just a bit at the top. Shards of various instinctive plans bounced around in my head like frantic pinballs loaded up on some high quality cocaine. “Some dude forty miles away and my brother a thousand miles away? Uhm, recapture Norn and fly him around? Go after that fucking gator and take the coast then head on down? Maybe ride Kong and make a giant animal army to storm the area? How about an earthquake, can I even make my own earthquake?”
Exactly how do I go about this, does my brother even want to come back with me? Because I’m ok now with leaving the immediate area for a bit, but my paranoia won’t let me stay gone for too long. What am I gonna do with Reeanth, or the damn hillbillies? I felt strangely responsible for those four knuckleheads, but my priorities took a massive shift in the past three minutes. Looking up at the blood jar and then back down to the note, I carefully folded it and put it in my pocket. No time like the present. Grabbing the contained sorcery, I walked over to Reeanth and nudged her foot with mine while belting out the most annoying good morning children’s song I could think of. “RISE AND SHINE AND GIVE GOD THE GLORY GLORY!” My lovely singing voice in the tone of nasally child woke the sleeping soldier out of a dead magically deepened slumber.
I should have expected the obviously violent reaction to being woken up in such a manner. Luckily for me, I was still decked out in all of my magical gear with every shield activated, so the blast of raw magic just got sucked into Svalinn. Holding my blood jar in front of me with both hands, I shook it just a little. “So, how the hell do I use this thing?” Her gaze followed my own to rest on her blood jar which was tightly clenched in her left hand. She had had a death grip on it since yesterday, which Merlin would have given high praise for. “Don’t tell me I gotta drink my own freaking blood, come on?”
“Coffee,” she grumbled, standing up on shaky legs. “I need coffee.” Stumbling off to the kitchen, she came back a few minutes later carefully holding a pot of coffee with two mugs and her blood jar. Pouring both of us a cup, she sipped her coffee and stared at the crimson depths of her jar. “I never thought I’d be staring at this,” she started, focusing her whole frame on the blood jar, her right hand listlessly holding the coffee. “This, this is pure power.”
My face scrunched just a tiny bit. “Ya know, I never really got the chance to ask you what kind of sorcery you went for,” I said, “Get anythin’ good?”
She seemed to come back to herself after losing herself in thought for a moment. Taking a deep breath, she set the blood jar down. “Sorcery of sight my lord.”
“I’m gonna need a bit more information than that. Clearly you’re not blind, so . . . “
“Sorcerous sight. I’ll be able to see magic, in all its flaws and glory. Most wizards muck their way along, barely feeling the power they hold, like a surgeon blindly performing heart surgery with a blindfold on. They know what they’re supposed to be doing, but without sight to guide them, how crude their constructs must be. With this,” she gestured at the jar, “I’ll be able to wield magic of perfect efficiency, see the kind of magic my enemies use, see magic invisible to most, spot flaws in enchantments and it just goes on.”
“Damn, that’s actually pretty fucking cool, and very insightful.” As I said that, a trace of fear made its way to the surface of her eyes. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to take it from you, sheesh. I mainly want to know how to use the damn thing. See, here’s my jar.” Setting my own in front of hers, I noticed for the first time that they were actually different colors. Yes, they were both red from the blood, but mine was a solid crimson, the deepest of reds, while hers was a lighter, almost watered down red bordering on orange. But while mine was solid, probably due to having the literal focus of me-ness, hers had a rainbow of particles glittering throughout.
“My lord, it is a blood jar. If you properly created it, then all you need to do is put some mana into it and it will form a glass needle which will pump the contents inside of you. Then you will need to internalise this.”
Draining the rest of her coffee that had cooled off in our talk, Reeanth raised her blood jar and poured mana into it until the jar morphed into a sphere, which then proceeded to form a thin point at the bottom part. “For power, for honor, for service,” she intoned, bringing the point down and stabbing it into the meat of her thigh. I watched as the blood jar’s contents drained into her leg. As it emptied, the glass contained shrank perfectly until it was just a needle jutting out of her thigh. With a breath of air, it dissolved away. Slumping over onto the table, I tenderly reached out my hand and set it on her shoulder, letting my magical senses feel out the process. The red glow of power had already sank into her thigh and shot up the veins straight into the heart where it stayed until all of the sorcery gathered, and then shot up again into the brainstem where it pounded away at her brain likes waves on the shores, slowly molding the soft tissue. The weird part was what my own sorcery of magic was telling me, how it the sorcery lost some of its power because it had to flow to where it needed to go instead of being directly input into her brain.
Maybe she could have stuck it in her ear. Looking at the process as a whole, I couldn’t help myself. Reaching inside of her leg with my magical senses, I began to pour mana that was perfectly neutral into it and used it to gather the sight-based sorcery and pushed the missed remnants up to the brain. I had to take it slow as my magic was on the cusp of being rejected by her body. Bits of her sorcery were left in various parts of the veins going to the heart, a third portion overall was in her heart, and another small part was stuck in her neck kinda hanging near her vocal cords.
Taking my time to unravel the bits of scattered mess, I gathered up the fragments, pieced them together and fed them up through the brainstem to reconnect with the rest of the sorcery, which showed up as bright blood contrasting with the rest of her system. Shit man, maybe I should have gotten some magical sight, cause from what I could tell, mine was like a kid’s crappy microscope and hers was a damn electron microscope. Anyways, I shouldn’t be wondering about her sorcery as I’m trying to fix the faulty delivery system, but I couldn’t really help myself. I noticed through my flesh sorcery that the body of the Centauri soldier had some hidden pieces of technology inside of her. There was a chip in attached to the top part of her heart, and a weird patch made of wires and some nanotech on the inner side of her breastbone, and then some material I couldn’t identify in her tailbone that pulsed in time with the electrical impulses of her heart. I wanted to remove the stuff out of some weird principle that my sorcery was nudging me towards, but the focus of this was to make sure her own sorcery didn’t get fucked up.
The rainbow bonanza of power sat on her brain, and then slowly was absorbed, as if the brain was a sponge. The eyes soaked up most of the magic, the optic nerve getting all the sparkles, and the lighter red magic fluid stuff settled in the rest of the brain and the brain stem with bits filtering down the spine. After ten minutes of monitoring Reeanth after fixing her sorcery assimilation, I felt comfortable enough to extract my own magic from her and plan my own. Obviously the delivery system was built into the blood jar, but the concept of placement mattered a helluva lot more than she thought. Without me there, her sorcery would have had over a thirty percent efficiency loss due to the ill-planned journey.
Given what I’d learned along with the added benefit of my much more powerful Chaos granted abilities, I said fuck it. Breathing in and out for five minutes, I managed to put my mind in the meditative state I reached earlier that morning, where my magical tree body/soul thing was. Using the flesh sorcery to automate my next actions, I focused my attention on the upper body of the tree-soul. My body picked up the blood jar in one hand, put it up and over my head and placed it right on the side of my neck. Oh so carefully, I used flesh sorcery to deaden that section of my neck. Feeding a thin stream of mana into the blood jar, I directed the contents of the jar, the concepts of self/consciousness/me-ness/soul, straight into my neck with a tube of mana sectioned off into two pieces, where sixty percent forked up into my brain while the other forty partitioned off into my heart.
Taking a lucky guess from all the crap fiction I’d read in my life, I figured that a person’s soul wasn’t just one piece of them, but it was a combination of the mind and heart to make the soul. I mean, it makes sense. Plenty of people used to lay in hospital beds, perfectly braindead, just vegetables waiting to go, but some of those people also hung on by a thread for decades. We are more than just brain, or heart, but one without the other is useless.
Suffice to say, it wasn’t pain that I felt, it was agony. Mind opening, mind numbing, brain pain on a level, nay, a dimension yet unrealized. What made it worse was that due to my sorcery induced meditative state, I could feel every gritty piece of glass-like power grid its way through my upper nervous system. The heart part, well, that didn’t hurt worse than losing Sarah so I kinda just powered through that one. Even though the pain was metaphorically blinding, my magical senses allowed me to stay on point and watch the tree personification of my soul made up of different sorceries actually combine with the consciousness one. My separated head and arms broke through whatever that shield of nothingness was and attached to the trunk, sending bright bits of light straight into it. Those bits of light left a glowing trail as they worked their way from my neck and shoulders and connected to the center, where my heart was. Then, after growing in luminescence, the light then traveled down what I assumed were imitations of my veins and arteries as they filtered through my legs/roots.
The whole picture of exactly what I was culminated in a sorcerous whole that actually opened up its eyes and stared at me. Freaky. Holding its hands out with the palms up, it looked down and them, and slowly put its hands to its face. Its eyes lit up with the soft white light of joy and then began to feel around, touching the barky knees and the hips made of solid bone, flexing its stone toes and brown compacted dirt feet. With the innocence of a child, the embodiment of myself began to dance with joy as the dark place we were in began to fill up with different elements as they began to slowly leak out. Instead of standing on nothing, its dance left footprints of dirt and mud. Jumping around left puddles of crystal clear water that sparkled. I was happy, for a few moments, the conjoining of myself and everything that was me, was content.
Coming back to myself, the me that was a literal human body, was a mixture of pain and please. My head and heart were pounding, throbbing as if a migraine and mini-heart attack had a mutant baby, but the rest of my body felt so aware. If I wanted to, I could watch my hand reach and smack Reeanth on the shoulder to wake her up, but the moments between the seconds of neural impulses that physically moved my hand, I felt it. I felt the decision making process that twitched the arm just right so that I would have maximum power to swat her, the tenseness of the forearm as it locked into position, and then the rest of my body saying, maybe this isn’t such a good idea. HAHA! There it was! The voice in my head that speaks up when making a bad decision, that little bitch finally grew a pair and learned how to speak from the gut. Setting my arm down, I casually used flesh sorcery to slowly soothe away the pain. Merely speeding up my healing factor would make sure that I didn’t overwrite any changes to my body that inputting a new sorcery would, and the day had just begun.