Germination 3

July 24th, 2032.

“Curious, it seems the ten-glyph kaba array can serve as a potent power generator and storage medium.” I wrote down my notes. Watching Hakim do his part in making our dreams a reality. “The geometric structure of a crystal is an especially good medium for storing power.”

He was carving a clear quartz crystal using his own elemental magic. Shaping it into a smooth sphere.

He was flapping his hands, flitting like a butterfly as he did his part. “It’s amazing, most magical power sources use infused materials or forms of materialized magic. But this glyph array collects the energy around us and stores it into whatever medium it’s carved into it. We could power anything with this!”

“Yep, and even better. The larger the glyph, the greater the power output. We can power some big stuff with the right engineering.” Just a glyph array around my wrist let me summon fireballs that could blow up rocks. Or lift multiple tons using void energy.

What could a much larger array do?

“I’m also interested in how your world doesn’t use the Bazemore process anymore,” he mentioned the suspiciously named creator of steel in their world. “And that you did it all without magic is amazing too.”

“Well technological advancement does happen, though the open-hearth process was complementary to the Bessemer process. Think of a brick oven the size of a building, charge it with light scrap steel together with pig iron. Then heat it up, and once it’s all melted add limestone or other slag agents. To get the carbon out, add iron oxide to burn out that shit.”

“Sounds slow.” Hakim said honestly as he worked on the crystal.

“It was, but it also made it easier to control and sample for quality assessment. And you can stop burning the carbon at any time to get what you want. And you can pump hot gasses into brick chambers, then reverse the flow to get it even hotter.”

Hakim nodded. “I guess it makes sense when your people can’t melt steel with fire magic. We just don’t have that much scrap steel to spare.”

“It’s weird your production of iron and steel is so low, a million tons a year is rather tiny. But then my country produces over a hundred million tons of the stuff so…”

Hakim stared at me, his already pale face growing paler. “A hundred million tons?”

“We peaked at over two hundred million tons back in 73’ I think. But that was almost sixty years ago.”

“How do you produce so much… stuff? How is that possible?” Hakim sounded like he was awed by it.

“It’s mostly that you haven’t figured out industrialized mass production yet, because you’re too small to have the resources for it. The average taifa has about ninety thousand people. But while your people are kinda united, you’re rather consistently at each other’s throats. Magic can compensate for it, but only so much.”

“Oh, so it’s a matter of not knowing certain techniques?” Hakim asked with a curious look.

“Correct, mass production is a delicate discipline with a lot of moving parts. I couldn’t begin to tell you what you would or wouldn’t need.” I shrugged my shoulders as I thought about their technology. “You’ve got all the needed machinery. And know some of the principles like with printing presses, clocks and watches. It’s all about interchangeability, standard parts and components. Division of labor. Lines of assembly.”

Hakim hummed curiously. “Sounds productive.”

“Mhmm, just be careful if you decide to figure that out. The advent of flow production came with a lot of growing pains, as well as human rights abuse.”

Hakim looked disturbed. “I… won’t like the answer if I ask, do I?”

“Nope. There’s lots of benefits in perceiving production as a machine… until you consider people as cogs in that machine.”

Hakim swallowed. “Oh.”

I rolled my bare shoulders with a sigh, having exchanged my usual outfit for a white tank top and baggy work pants. “Right, so now that I’m thinking about it, what’s with the skull over there?”

Hakim startled as his gaze followed my accusatory finger to a large vaguely reptilian head. “Oh, that’s an old dragon fossil my imma found. She says it was dated to at least one hundred twenty million years ago.”

“Can I take a closer look?” I asked nicely. He nodded as he worked on what we were planning to call a magic core.

The skull was long and narrow, over two feet long. I was very careful with my inspection of the skull, gently touching the ancient bone. It felt… not brittle so much as light, thin but dense. Like touching chicken bones but scaled up.

Dragons have pneumatic bones don’t they? Postcranial even, unlike mammals and more like dinosaurs and pterosaurs.

There were other odd differences however. Ones I couldn’t ignore with my love of paleontology.

The temporal fenestra was a big clue, diapsids have two holes posteriorly above and below the eye. This skull had only one opening… as did some marine reptiles. But the placement was the key proof in the figgy pudding, all ‘Euryapsida’ had one high opening. But the dragon skull had a single low opening, just like humans, like mammals.

A secondary palate was also present, but that was found in plenty of reptiles, crocodiles and birds. Birds are dinosaurs are reptiles/diapsids.

“The teeth though… very mammal-like, perhaps cynodont-like might be more accurate though?” Fully differentiated teeth predated mammals after all. “The dentary-squamosal joint is even more striking… that’s a trait unique to mammals and our close relatives.”

Were… dragons some type of weird offshoot of synapsids? Were they possibly actual mammals even? But split even further back than monotremes?

“Mammal? Are you sure about that?” Hakim spoke up with a curious blink. “I don’t know that much honestly, but my imma used to say they were pretty mysterious. But they showed traits in common with birds and reptiles, though she had theories.”

“I would say the same, but these traits are suspiciously identical to the traits of stem mammals. A highly divergent lineage mind you, but that changes little. Are there any groups of animals that share traits with dragons, hollow bones, jaw structure, mixtures of reptilian and mammalian traits?”

His brows drew in. “Coelotherians? Like the chimera? They’re said to be mammals but really… divergent.” He looked excited. “My mom has some theories on that.”

“How so?” I asked.

“A lot of them don’t have pinnae. Some are covered in scales or wrinkly thick skin. But they do have fur.” Hakim added, rubbing his bare chin. “Dragons also produce milk.”

“Obviously,” I snarked as I thought about Dinah’s boobs. “Though I suspect their milk is more like nutrient rich sweat patches, am I right?”

“…yes.”

“I’m no expert, this is more… it’s easy to read up on this stuff back home,” I shook my head as I slid away from the large skull. “The distinguishing features of mammals is their dentary jaw joint, the middle ear, prismatic enamel, and occipital condyles.”

“Dragons have those.” A voice cut through the air. I let out a quiet shocked gasp as someone slid into my awareness.

“Miss Kraft?”

The woman in question laughed quietly. She was a ghoul like her son, sharing the same sandy skin color. Along with flecks of pink and red and purple freckles, with dark stripes around her arms. She wore a thick pair of glasses, and an outfit like a way sexier Indiana Jones. She pushed back her glasses with a sharp grin.

“I see you agree with my theory on crown mammals. I suspect your fossil record is more complete without gigantic god corpses muddying the issue.”

“Time is still a big problem, but we have genetic analysis to fill in some gaps,” I then clarified at her expression. “Studying the tiny bits inside cells that act as the recipe for life. I’m not actually sure whether or not you’ve discovered DNA yet.”

“We have, your world has a lot of things that leak into our world. Though we can’t read it quite as well as your world can.”

“We’ve got a century and more of work to thank for that, if I had the right equipment I’d love to analyze the DNA of stuff on this side.”

Miss Kraft’s dark scarlet eyes gleamed. “Oh I’d love that, but not right now. I’ve got an errand for the two of you, if you don’t mind helping out Celia.”

“An errand?” I asked.

“I’ve been mapping out some vestiges… echoes of events, we call them phantoms. They’re the impressions left behind by powerful events in history. I specialize in viewing events from ancient times. Documenting the evolutionary history of Calafia.”

I beamed. “That’s cool.”

She smiled back. “Thought so. The thing is there’s a site I need you two to take a look at with some fresh eyes. It’ll involve some echoes so…”

I slammed my hand on a nearby table. “Done! I’ll do it!”

Hakim snorted.

Shut up.

“So that’s a yes?” Hakim’s mom slid her hand up to cover her laugh.

I felt my face heat. “Yes…”

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A human, a griffin and a ghoul walked into a ruin…

I couldn’t think of a good joke here, being funny wasn’t a talent for me. But it did distract me from the… the strange air of this place. Reyna didn’t like it, talons splayed out as she stalked.

Hakim was twitching, his eyes glowing faintly with scarlet and carmine. “We’re closer to the Gulgulta here, the ghost realm. Imma says it’s both grave and testament, where ghosts and immaterial forces break down, and where their memories lay to rest for a second time.”

I furrowed my eyebrows. “Second time?”

Hakim grinned slightly. “Most ghosts and echoes aren’t souls… they’re memories. Souls find their ways to the Sea of Souls and are stripped of memories, while spirits fall down there naturally.”

“Interesting.” I said honestly, gently sweeping my hand through the thick air. I could See the magic in the air, a pale pallor to existence. Along with flashes of another world pushing into this one.

What an interesting view isn’t it?

I rubbed my nose with a snort as I examined the site, it was a flat plane of rock and stone littered with boulders and pillars of… semi-metallic fungus?

“What the hell is that?”

Hakim blinked at my reaction. “Oh… those are destruent rigids, they’re a lot like fungus. Denters like them sort of break stuff down, extracting metals and the materials rigids are made of.”

“What are rigids made of?” I knew they were inorganic, self-replicating patterns of metal and crystal.

“It kind of depends? Carbon, silicon, germanium and aluminum are pretty important for their memory and thinking parts? They use those for their bodies along with ceramics and other metals. Iron, copper, nickel, magnesium and chromium, vanadium, manganese. Titanium, tungsten and boron too.”

“I imagine some are used more as dopants and in alloys.” I rubbed my chin, and blanched when I realized rigids ate metal and minerals and electricity.

The very foundation of human civilization.

Rigids were literally machine life, and I now wanted samples to study how they work. They had to have some way of working at the molecular scale to be able to break down matter like this…

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“I only know as much as I do because of ma, and because I work in the forge.” Hakim shrugged his shoulders. His ears flicked and he frowned. “We get a lot of our best metals from Silverlands, so…”

“Makes sense.”

The Silverlands weren’t a single place, they were more a biosphere type, where rigid life dominated. A land of silver and steel.

There was a tug on the back of my mind, and I caught the subtle shift in the void.

“You can feel it too?” Hakim whispered, claws sliding out. “Like walking over a grave.” There was an odd hunger in his eyes. I finally remembered that ghouls were different from humans.

They feasted on death, drawing power from it. Balancing the scales if you would. But I wasn’t scared.

“The void is warning me.” I replied back, feeling that tug and the faint whiff of ozone in the air.

I could feel the void. A bubbling foam hissing and popping with rarefied violence and exalted harmony.

We walked silently, stepping lightly to not disturb the loose and flaky stone and rock ground. Then—

Oh.

Black, black everywhere.

Hakim looked ill, turning an even paler complexion. “Everything burned here, down to the bedrock, sand, glass, metal, gravel and stone, even the ashes burned. It hurts.”

I swallowed my nerves. “That… that shouldn’t be possible. Not with most kinds of fires.” With one exception I knew off the top of my head.

Chlorine trifluoride.

It could ignite glass, asbestos, noble metals and was toxic to boot both on its own and while burning. Then… had someone or something made a fire spell with similar properties?

The entire clearing was covered in that fine blackness, like someone had carved a burning knife into the world. We took another step forward, right at the edge of the ashes and…

The world fades.

Grass waved around our feet, oddly chill. Silent ranks of silver ringed us in the mist. The landscape had changed, a cold misty place surrounded by decaying stone and trees and life. It was scenes looping on scenes, echo-matter making up this world.

The echo rippled with the energies of the void, but it had faded, from gray to a dark tarnished black.

The figures surrounding us were made of clear metal, standing on bouncy limbs ending in blunt two-toed feet. They looked unsettlingly soft and smooth, organic even. They were impossibly thin, almost raptorial. Like a semi-humanoid bird without feathers, instead covered in smooth swooping plating. Their head was perched on a long neck painted black as twilight. They bore a single massive cyclopean eye surrounded by two pairs of smaller optics.

They had split jaws covered in odd serrations which looked like they were made of silicon carbide… oh boy. Hakim was deathly quiet, pupils constricted, fangs exposed.

I could hear something odd, an odd pressure in my ears, like crystal, like radio static. The rigids were singing, walking in unison, in formation, in a pattern like unfolding flowers.

“Child of Earth.” All fourteen machine life forms spoke as a legion and I took a step back in shock. “You should not be here.”

“What?” I shouted, alarm rising.

Hakim stared at me in bewilderment. “You understand them?”

I blinked. “You don’t?”

“The darkness must not be breached,” they spoke again, and I felt my head pulse with pain. “The light must not be reached.”

“I don’t…”

“Forget.”

That song warped and sped towards my mind like a spear, and I hissed. My hands flicked, and void energies burst out in a whirling storm. The song screeched in pain and agony, and I let out a scream of my own.

I formed a chaotic matrix of push and pull, void fields raking through existence. I breathed in and out as the ghost rigids launched forward, electricity sparking from their bodies.

I saw the tarnished silver strands twist around my hands, rather than the kinetic violet. Void was an element of its own, the manifestation of its own source just like air, water, earth and fire.

Void didn’t control kinetic forces like I thought, that was the domain of the Violet.

It created mass. Because the void was what everything came from.

So I pushed and pulled the strands of inertial mass until the air caught on fire, until the very seams twisted with violence. One rigid was warped apart, immaterial fluff caught within the hungry maw of the void. Hakim moved next, and dozens of tons of earth and stone surged in waves.

A second rigid moved like a dancer, air streaming around it like a serpent.

In a blink, the very real ghost lashed out with claws sharp as diamond. Pain bloomed across my face, and Hakim let out a piercing yowl.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, it hurts it hurts—

I surrounded myself in a shield of void, cursing at myself for my own carelessness. Half my vision was red with blood, stinging my left eye. Had I…

No… the slash had gone down my temple, head wound, hurts.

A flutter of wings and feathers followed. Reyna cut through the air, and a rigid let out a violent electric shriek as it was torn in half. Her eyes flashed with potent magic, and she cast out a blast of wind.

To my eyes it was twisting knots of periwinkle, bent into whirls and circles, pulling at the air itself. It compressed, and the air warped into a blade. I cast out the same shape, and turned on my heels to catch the wind.

I exploded forward, the ground blurring around me as I cast the cutting arc of compressed air. Hakim faded into a swarm of ghostly intangibility, bending echo-matter to his will.

The ghost robots faded. Walking right through the wind but I couldn’t say the same for Hakim. He ignited the ghostly energy in his hands, fire shifting from yellow-red to chilling blue and silver.

He thrust his hands forward, and a stream of ghost-fire melted two rigids who couldn’t turn fast enough. Four down.

There were still ten.

All ten spun around one another, twisting with their flexible frames to surround us.

Something about that pattern, like a dance, like a…

“Stop them they’re going to—”

All ten were connected in a circle, and reality pulsed.

“If you will not forget… then suffer.”

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I breathed in ashes, watching a horizon of patchwork scenes, nightmares and terrors buried deep.

From the west came great storms. I saw floods spreading for hundreds of miles, cities drowning in rivers of water ten to twenty feet deep. Atmospheric rivers painted the sky gray, as wind battered millions, and landslides buried buildings, broke roads and paths and people.

To the east of that flood was the eye of a hurricane so vast it was the sky, so vast it shattered entire regions in its wake, drowning nineteen states as it was fed by oceanic engines.

Together those two disasters took up the west, themselves only the tip of the iceberg. Of the disasters plaguing the world… so from the east…

Came storms of ash and sand and dust, droughts and fires and wars and terror. Then… then, then.

There’s a bright flash, brighter than the sun, brighter than anything I’ve ever seen.

I don’t want to remember this, please… don’t let me remember this…

Agony and despair and grief flared through my veins, through my blood and soul.

Not again, not again, not again, not again…

A dark shape glitches out of the storm line, hoisting up a silver figure with unyielding strength.

It’s… someone I should know. It wears clothes, with dark, curling hair, and eyes of pure burning white and yet… yet I knew this being. Knew this star.

Where there should be a body there was nothing. A flat black void, scattered with stars and nebula in all the colors of the light. Who was this? Why didn’t I remember?

“Stars.” I breathed.

She… they revealed a smile made of shards of neutron stars. “Stars indeed. Don’t you remember me?”

Chara.

“Oh. I remember you.” It was scraps of memory, buried deep in the recesses of my mind. But it was there and real. “How are you here?”

Chara smiled eerily. “I’m not, you’re dreaming again.”

I stared, not understanding.

In a blink she was inches from my face, impossible fractals scattering across my vision. The distance between things expanded and contracted from glance to glance, reality extending into more than three spatial dimensions.

“Wake up.”

She booped my nose with a giggle and reality broke.

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An electric scream cut through the ruins. I coughed, swiping away the trickles of blood from my temple. The silver rigid shuddered, then sloughed away into ghostly matter. Hakim wasn’t moving, and neither was Reyna, held within the strange magic of the ghost machines.

I couldn’t break my friends free, not without hurting them. I could See the sickly connections between them and the rigid echoes. Oily and slick magic, stretching out like spiderwebs.

I need help. Please.

I could hear a sound like crackling ice. Cold swept into the ruins as they seemed to fall forever into the underworld beneath our feet. Oddly enough it gave me an idea, and I pulled on the energies streaming from my spell bangles.

I imagined the glyph of water, and saw the complex weave it represented in reality. It was a brilliant blue, like the depths of the sea shaped into mayical energies.

In the mist there were flurries of snowflakes, but they were impossibly still, held in silence, in darkness. They formed a shape in the mist, two circles within a circle. The lower one was blotted out by shadow, by darkness.

Sagua. Ice, cold, stillness.

I spread out the navy blue energy, and it caught all nine rigids in their grasp. My veins were cold, practically stinging like they were frozen solid. The darkness whispered at the back of my mind, ice biting at my skin.

Stop.

The rigids couldn’t move, their wavelength calmed, silenced, stilled. Frozen solid, unable to resist the chilling strike of magic.

Reyna and Hakim gasped as they snapped awake with a hiss and a squawk respectively. Hakim was staring at me with awe, and I smiled despite the stinging cut and building headache.

“I… suggest you leave us alone, whoever you all used to be… attacking us isn’t right when… you could have asked.”

The ghosts rippled silently at my words.

“Imma respects the dead, any site she explores is one she’s been allowed to explore,” Hakim scowled, ears flicking with violent intent. “You made her forget didn’t you? You broke the rules, hurt her.”

The ghosts shuddered once more… and I let them go. They fell to their metal knees, heavy with mass.

“Take it back.” I said with rage, remembering what they had tried to make me remember. “I don’t know what this place is, or why you’re hiding it. But I don’t care, fix this and we’ll leave you alone.”

I touched my forehead, and my hand came away with blood. I clenched it into a fist, feeling the blood course through the lines of my palms. It felt strange, almost alive, pulsing with potential.

“Affirmative.” All nine ghosts spoke in unison. “The Child of Earth… is welcome to the Truth. As repentance, when the time is right.” I heard the promise, the oath spoken in their words.

I nodded, glancing at the blackness which marked this old ruin.

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“Are you two alright?” I let out a puff of air as I was squeezed tightly by Hakim’s mom.

“You’re… crushing me, need air.” I wheezed and was promptly released by the concerned parent.

Miss Kraft smiled warmly. “Sorry, I was just… worried. By the spirits when I remembered I was afraid for your lives. You’re still youths, not even eighteen summers.”

I furrowed my brows. “Youths?”

“Fifteen is the spiritual age of maturity among most Calafians, when they can begin to truly decide their path as witches. It is also when they vote in the Koza, the folkmoot.”

“The people’s assembly?” The Koza was pretty interesting, operating as a sort of democratic legislature. All the free people of a community could attend the Koza presided over by a Lawsinger, a jiucantor. For civil disputes it was a court of three, for criminal cases it was a court of twenty three.

“Yes. But that doesn’t change the fact you were both in danger because of me.”

Hakim shook his head. “It’s not your fault imma, those ghosts made you forget. You thought it was safe.”

She frowned. “I’m your mother, and Celia is your friend. I still feel responsible.”

Hakim didn’t seem to know how to respond, ears pinned back with a sad look.

“I’m not sure there’s much any of us could have done, those ghosts were powerful and clever.”

Miss Kraft huffed. “I’ll see if there’s any useful old texts Celia, and Hakim I’m going to teach you more advanced lessons on necromancy to augment your forging. And there will be no whining, it is my honor, my own self-respect as a mother and a good witch.”

I could feel the conviction in her words, the way her aura flared in bright crimson, twisting like molten sand dunes. Couldn’t argue with that, honor was very important for witches of fire, of the Red.

I gripped my amulet, thumb gently rubbing the smooth black diamond.

It… I remembered my dreams more now, a name at the tip of my tongue. I had made a promise to them that I would help them.

I needed to remember, to know the history that’s been forgotten.

That was the path I was going to follow.

I just hoped it was the right one.