My staff. Now this fucker I had to straighten out; just too much potential in a ley-line formed ironwood staff with fragments of who knows what in it. This was supposed to be my answer to magic bigger than myself, and targets I can’t get to. My magics of Nature, flesh, earth and water don’t lend themselves to the latter, but I might be able to change that. What is Chaos really, but change, or the possibility of change, or even the personification of chance. If it could make me more than what I was, and do that in weird ways to other things, then the only thing to do is to say, fuck it. I pulled out a piece of paper from the kitchen drawer and began sketching on it with a marker. An ugly bonfire, a lit candle, a tornado, a lightning bolt, anything I could think of magically based that could wreck someone’s day from a hundred yards away. These would be my first sketches of runes for the concepts I needed to hold in my head if I was going to make this work. There are three stones in the staff, but this did not mean that had to be the end of it. Cursing myself for sealing the other Chaos crystals, I spent 30 minutes working to get back into that damn box. Connecting its wards to the house made it like trying to break into your own when you forgot the key.

  Finally pulling one out, I set about relocking that box. Now, a wizard’s staff is awesome. Everyone knows that. But what about a wizard’s spear? I might have been going about this the wrong way. My concepts shifted. I sat on the ground in the kitchen with my staff laying in front of me, the crystal studded head pointed at me, my feet holding it still. Cupping my hands, I thought about the runes I had sketched, and I tried to merge them in my head with how they actually looked. The first was the lit candle, pure potential. Candles burn. Candles illuminate. Candles are also seeds. The greatest wildfires start with one idiot lighting a flame. Channeling a third of the energy from my battery vest into my cupped hands while creating a spell matrix of flaming intent was fucking hard, it kept wanting to grow, to feast, to live! Keeping it compressed, I grabbed all the mana I could from my vest and forced it into the first stone. Absolutely anti-climactic. The stone just sucked it right down. Sweat dripped from my nose, falling on the newly minted stone of chaos and fire. There, in the streak made from two drops, I could see something different. I shined the stone with my sleeve. There was a rune there, a small rune that looked like a candle, and it was moving in slow motion.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

  With my initial proof of concept down, I had to prepare for the other parts. Fire, down. What compliments fire? Air. And then lightning would be the final piece to the generating aspects of the staff. What was getting me excited was the spearpoint, the Shard of Chaos. At the end of the whole process, I would be able to have a spear that would also function as a staff and be able to manipulate the energy that I had no affinity for. But I was not ready for this, my battery was empty, and my stomach was reminding me that I was still definitely human. Dinner was two cans of tuna with some mayo and pepper. Just enough to keep me going. I took my staff and the future spear point and went to the basement. I may not be able to hold the excessive amount of energy I need, but who cares? I have generators. I went to battery focused generator and turned it on, and then I cranked it up to max flow. With this amount of energy flowing through me, the next steps of imparting the essence of a lightning bolt and a windstorm was cake. Each of the little stones had a rune on it, slowly shifting as you focused on it.