We set up camp at the bottom of the mountain and took shifts guarding the camp. I was poked awake by Karian with a stick. She said to me as I took the stick from her “Let’s go hunting for one of those magical creatures.”

“With all due respect, why?”

“The radio and battery died last night, if we find an electric rabbit or something we might be able to recharge it.”

I stood up “May I take a look?”

She grabbed her pack and pulled out the radio and battery. “Attach the radio to the battery, see if it charges, there’s no damage to the battery, it died.”

I did so and I checked over the battery when the radio didn’t charge. I sighed and she ordered me to grab my stuff and set up snares. I grabbed my knife, and thinking back on the scout training I had, I made the snares. Karian and I set up the snares along rabbit trails. I was setting up a snare when I stepped to the side and a part of the ground gave way, leaving Karian to catch me. She pulled me back as the branches and bits of shrubbery fell to the bottom and made a loud thud accompanied by the loud cracking of branches. We started to move away, but we were cornered by two wolves who converged on our position. Both were oddly colored, one was almost albino white, and the other was blue. As Karian and I prepared our weapons the blue one arced lightning between its teeth before releasing a charge onto the ground, kicking up dust in the process.

The two of them disappeared, I could see some of the grass around us being disturbed as if something was walking on or through it.

“Karian, Look!” I cried out pointing at the movement, the two of us prepared and aimed our weapons. Karian shot at one of the wolves before me, she missed. I aimed and took a shot at the other disturbance and the blood spatter told me I hit it. Karian cried out something I couldn’t make out before I was hit by a bolt of electricity from the side, knocking me down. Karian fired several times and tried to drag me away before getting hit by a beam of light. I sat up and another bolt of electricity hit me in the chest, and I shot in the general direction it came from, my vision blurring. Karian got hit by something and the last thing I heard was “I’ve been blinded!” from Karian before she hit the ground, and I blacked out.

I woke up back at camp, Titus was cooking some sort of stew. It smelled too sweet and I felt like I had to vomit again. Karian was groaning in pain next to me, I felt butterflies in my stomach. My vision flipped between 20/20 and 20/200, and I tried to ask Titus “What happened” but it only came out as a slurred mess. He somehow understood and I had to fight to decipher his words. “As a result of your body not being..’adequate’ for a sphere to make its home you’re suffering a stroke as it makes its augmentations.”

“Aumentaons?”

“You’re growing more neurons and nerves leading to your brain, in about a day you’re going to hear a small voice in your head that isn’t your conscience. It will fill you in on everything. Just when you feel like you can move, I highly recommend reading something or playing a brain training game. Like Solitaire for instance, and start an exercise regimen.”

“An’ Kari?”

“She’s blind as a bat right now and is undergoing the most severe migraine she’ll probably ever have.I stuffed her ears with cotton so it doesn’t get worse. Though for her I recommend sunbathing or just being out in the light in general.”

I dry heaved as I was going to ask him a question, after dry heaving for what felt like aeons he gave me some water and I blacked out again.

I have no idea how long I was out. Throughout the unconsciousness, and as I woke up, all I can remember is hearing ‘wake up, wake up’. The voice sounded similar to mine though as if I was talking through a fan. I felt a new sensation I hadn’t felt since my days in training, starvation. I looked around to see Titus roasting a boar on the campfire. The look on my face, or something else must have given away my hunger as Titus cut me a massive chunk of meat off of the beast. At first I hesitated, but something forced me to take the food he offered, and nothing could have tasted better. As I ate I noticed electricity arcing between myself and the plate, but I didn’t feel pain from getting shocked.

I asked Titus after I finished eating “Why is electricity arcing off of me? And I heard a voice when I woke up, do you have any idea what that was?”

He responded while playing with the fox pup. “Like I said, it's a sphere, in layman’s terms, the wolf fried you so thoroughly elemental energy was added to your soul. Which allows you to cast elemental magic, in this case electricity.”

“Uh… uh-huh.”

“It's an easy form of magic, in your case just focus, exercise, and get shocked in order to fully manifest your sphere. Also,” he tossed a small pouch at me and I caught it “this is from the animals you caught in your snares.”

I looked inside and there was a collection of gold coins and a collection of strangely colored pearls, of purple, green, yellow, blue and red.

I asked him, knowing well I was breaking protocol but curiosity got the better of me. “Ever since I was young, I was told stories about the natives of this planet, some from the two or three elves that lived down here, and the rest through old records. The stories and records paint the image of a planet, or more specifically a continent full of backwards, primitive, violent, overambitious, and self-destructive savages who default to superstition rather than logic and research. How..accurate is that assessment?”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Disregarding the several hundred thousand exceptions, rather accurate on a broad scale. There are a lot of overambitious people, especially sphere casters. We, on a planetary scale are technologically primitive, however magically speaking we could do basically whatever we want. For instance this lush green forest was a large hate filled desert once upon a time.”

“How can a desert of all things feel any emotion, especially hate. It’s a landmass.”

“When the desert becomes a minor deity and decides to hate most of the people living on it, and decides to play into a thousand year old gag. It learns to feel. From what my father told me, one Romelian legate decided to learn rune smithing and make magical objects to terraform the desert. Though this was after an apocalypse glassed it. If you go north you’ll still find some glass that didn’t get turned into soil.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You don’t believe me at all, do you?”

“It's just folklore. First off, a desert being a ‘deity’ and having the intelligence to feel any sort of emotion, is plain absurd. The ability for someone to use runesmithing to terraform a portion of a continent in any reasonable amount of time, is complete fabrication. The amount of mana needed for such a project would be impossible to obtain, without distorting reality itself. Even then, where would someone even get the source of all of that mana, considering no one can tap into Lay Nexi.”

He only held a cocky smile as he said a phrase in a completely foreign tongue and snapped his fingers. The trees near us began to fall, hundreds of leaves fell on my face and disintegrated as they landed, many of which fed the flame and made it burn brighter. With my surroundings illuminated, I could see the once mighty oaks,pines and juniper trees around us shriveled into mere parodies of what they once were.

Titus laughed as he took a look at my shocked expression before containing himself.

“It takes a lot less energy than you think. For instance, that legate, Draculus terraformed this massive stretch of land with the same amount of energy as you would need to power a city for a year. That wasn’t his crowning achievement either, he stopped a cycle of apocalypses and achieved apotheosis. He did this by tapping into a lay nexus…..setting up a massive runic circuit…..and created a field that reaches into The Pool and trapped a god in the plane, cutting him off from his believers, forcing him to leave this dimension entirely. I can show you one of Draculus’ workshops if you don’t believe me, and have you look through some of his more mundane notes. The field or ‘dome’ cost 2 pocket dimensions, and something like 100 psionic creatures as well as a good portion of the lay nexus’ stored energy. That wasn’t enough to distort reality either.”

“You don’t sound too convinced in that story.”

“I promise you. It's all true! It's just that saying it out loud in a very condensed form, makes it sound... improbable.”

“Or... It's just a folk tale, spread around by your ‘people’ to create some semblance of a culture.”

He looked at me with a look of what could only be described as pity, before saying “tomorrow we’ll go into town, and I’ll prove you wrong.”

“It's nothing but superstition made to keep a bunch of loosely related people together. No matter what ‘evidence’ you may have, it’s not going to convince me otherwise.”

“Keep that sentiment to yourself when we get to town, we’ll be there for a day before hitch-hiking our way northward. For now I recommend that you start exercising, and getting acquainted with your new sphere. There’s a creek a few hundred feet behind me where you can be left alone.”

“I’d rather stay here.”

“Suit yourself.”

I started to take a look at the radio and tried to charge it using my new found ‘magic’. It sprung to life, briefly playing music before dying again.

The voice spoke up again “We need to become more powerful before jumpstarting the..radio.”

I thought I was going insane before I remembered what Titus said about a small voice. I thought to myself “I’m assuming you’re the ‘sphere’ I have?”

The voice responded with “Yes and my name is Electra. And I should make myself clearer, at our current state we need more electricity to start generating more of our own. The easiest way to do this would be to fight another electrical creature, head on.”

“Seriously? I’m not going to fight another electric wolf, or whatever animal and risk dying. Especially when Karian can’t finish the mission on her own.”

“The other choice available to you is to ask that man over there to hit you with a blast of electricity.”

“That’d call attention to our position.”

“And a bunch of trees falling around us didn’t?”

“It’d kill me!”

“It won’t, I’ll absorb most of the energy. Besides, it would help you blend in and you really need to shorten your name. Emil might work when introducing yourself.”

“..Have you been rooting through my memories?”

“I’m stuck in your mind, what else can I do? Before you go and deny me my manifestation, think for a minute. You get to have real,flexible magic. You’ll have an answer to a lot of the stuff locals down here are doing,while keeping you and Karian safe. And if that’s not enough, you could get rapid promotions,be a major asset on the battlefield, and get some stories to tell everyone back at base! Everything you ever wanted, and more.”

I mulled it over, the more I thought about the possibilities the more clouded by ambition I became. I stood up quickly, which startled Titus and asked him a simple question, trying my best to keep my tone and voice as emotionally neutral as possible.

“Titus, can you create electricity?”

“Yes,I’m guessing you want me to shock you. I must warn you it’s not terribly efficient.”

I nodded

He started to do a bunch of hand gestures, before pointing at me and releasing a massive bolt of lightning at me. My body froze as I was hit, I stood there completely fine and was told by electra.

“Not enough, you’re going to need to be struck by lightning all night at this rate.”

“Then I shall.”

And so I was.