Germination 7

August 2nd, 2032.

Fire boomed.

Retreating and evading.

A sweep of dark-clad arms and a wave of stone slammed where I had been standing seconds ago. I swept air into a swirling storm, while I negated my mass down to a tenth of what it should be.

“You've made progress when it comes to using your own energy, now you've got a chance of keeping up.” Ultima sounded proud, even while she twisted the elements to her whims.

I took deep breaths, feeling the quiet burn in my muscles. “Yeah well, being able to run as fast as a lion is… exhausting.” I could triple that speed by reducing my mass with the void.

The witch smiled. “Still got a ways to go until you can outrun a cheetah with pure muscle power.”

I struck in an instant, unleashing a directed explosion spell. There was a sound like broken glass, glamour tearing itself to pieces. The image of a smiling Ultima was gone, and I jumped. Narrowly avoided a spear of kinetic light.

“You caught my illusion without using the Feel?” Ultima asked, and I shrugged.

“Instinct, I've seen your skill with faerie magic. Using the stuff of the Dreaming to shape and fuel your spells.” Stories given shape and purpose by her will, fragile lies, yet lies so powerful they deceive reality.

The Feel was the overall label for the ability to sense magic and its workings since it could manifest in many forms. Sight, smell, touch, hearing, even taste, and other more esoteric senses.

Don't get distracted.

Glamour was powerful but fragile, it could be torn apart by brute force or a good enough challenge to its existence. It was to void, to spirit what diamond was to carbon. Just one of its many forms, allotropes of the same spiritual element.

I clenched my fists as I rooted myself to the ground, feeling the vibrant energy of Earth under my feet. I drew strength from the earth, and with void I pulled from mass itself. Then directed my arms into a violent strike.

Columns of stone touched with a hint of silver rose, and accelerated like bullets. Blocks the size of cars and houses, and I almost blinked.

How did I—

The columns exploded apart with a single kick from Ultima, twisting around her person as she shunted her influence into the earth.

I grimaced but didn't pause for a second, as I pushed out the energy from myself and my spell focuses. Deep down into the earth… like delicate fingers, and pulled at the roots and seeds of life itself.

Please, help me. Grow, Bloom, Attack.

There was a delicate prod of assent, and the ground rippled as hundreds of plants bloomed in an instant. They lashed out like whips and Ultima let out a sound of bewilderment.

Erset was my channel to the Green, so I used it as intended. I reached for the White next, to the purity of light itself. I surrounded myself in the shroud, cloaking myself in light.

Reflection, light, illusion.

I took a quiet breath as I was cast in false light, and reached for the element of air, the highest Violet flooding my lungs as I cast away sounds. I jumped a dozen meters in a single bound, landing onto a gentle bed of dirt.

Ultima’s ears twitched as she took a predatory stance, her aura radiating outwards. Like my own shroud, but pushing out from her body rather than my bracelets. Which pulled in energy from all around me, and weaved it into a similar natural shroud.

I kept moving, because not doing so was utterly moronic. My mentor was a master of all the base elements and their derivative elements. She could sense through the earth, and even so, I was concerned about her sense of the air.

I had weaved together flows of violet and white for my illusion spell, fleshing it out. I didn't need to concentrate on it, simply fueling it with an initial charge of magical energy.

I curled my hand, pulling air towards myself as I spun around my opponent. Both the bodily gesture and my mental swirling gathered more air into my palm.

The air wavered and quivered as I slowed it down, until it resembled pale blue pudding. I circled around, accelerating the congealed mass of air and shaping it into a blunt hammer.

I tossed the hammer of compressed air, adding a sizable inertial mass with a touch of void. She lashed out with radiating claws, pale silver flashing in my eyes and unraveling the spell.

“There’s a good reason I earned the name The Wandering Abyss, kiddo.” Ultima walked with casual confidence, and reached deeper into the true Black of her soul.

She made a finger gun and fired.

The radiating ball of black and blue slammed into me like a heat seeking missile despite my invisibility. It did no damage, though it did disrupt my illusion.

“Fuck—URK!” Nausea and bile rose up in my stomach and throat, along with dizziness that forced me down onto my knees. “Hijo de puta! Maldita bruja!” I cursed at my fucking bitch of a teacher.

Oh god oh god, nausea sucks Jesus…

“Well, it seems like your barrier spell doesn't do so well against curses!” Ultima shook her head at my misery.

“EAT SHIT AND DIE!” More bile spilled from my lips, stomach churning with agony.

“Gotta make you the most powerful witch in Calafia first kiddo.”

All of my hate!

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“So why are we heading to this village again?” I asked Ultima from the air as I guided Reyna. The griffin was excited to fly with me, riding the constant whirling thermals over the boiling sea.

Griffins apparently enjoyed riding the terrifying storms that were fueled by the seas, which could extend to the upper stratosphere. The hypercanes were ideal hunting grounds, as swarms of millions of atmospheric beasts dove into the storm to feed on its energy.

Storms like this were gold mines for life, using piezoelectric processes to feed on kinetic forces. Plasts and rigids and pliants. Life of plastic polymers, of inorganic alloys and lattice bonds, of life made of organic compounds and molecules.

“This time of year is when Aadhar is opening their fish market, they've got great deals on silverfin tuna, and puncher-prawns.”

“Puncher-prawn?” That felt familiar. But there were way too many species to note off the top of my head

“Like your mantis shrimp but tastier and as big as a person, tasty suckers.” Ultima explained. “And they try to eat us right back, a two hundred sixty kilometer punch without using khi makes for a lethal foe.”

I blanched at the idea, that was a level of power that would tear most people to pieces. “So just a shopping trip to their market?”

Ultimate nodded as she flew on her staff. “Yep. I think Reyna likes the idea too.” She pointed out, and I looked down to see Reyna had rounded eyes, clearly begging for snacks.

I gently patted my animal companion. “Of course you’ll get your fair share, you’re teaching me how to tap into the Violet. And flying me, and being a grand buddy.”

Reyna let out a soft croon, shifting her wings and weaving the wind into a constant updraft of air. A wingspan of eight meters was great for keeping six hundred forty pounds of dinosaur and girl in the air.

“I do wonder how the hell this planet supports such a wide diversity of life.”

“Having orders of magnitude more biomass helps a lot Celia,” Ultima explained with a warm crooked grin. “Remember we live on a corpse the size of a small continent, literal petatons worth of biomass. And while most Titan corpses are the size of islands, the mainland is made of thousands of them. Plus there's plenty of species that are really good at making biomass even among pliants.”

I made a quiet sound of realization. “Oh. Right, a lot of organisms on Ersete are bio-terrestrial.” It was why dragons could grow to immense scales. Their bones were reinforced with goethite fibers in a matrix over three times stronger than tungsten.

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Ultima laughed. “Oh it's way more than that, beings here can feast on almost anything. Light, ionizing radiation, chemicals, heat and kinetic energy from the crust and the mantle and the atmosphere. They even tap into the boundless energy of magic to feed.”

Chemotrophic, radiotrophic, thermotrophic, electrotrophic, magitrophic.

Ersete really did have a far more complex ecosystem then Earth huh?

I was suddenly thrown for a loop when Reyna bucked in the air. I gripped tightly onto her skin as I let out a shocked gasp.

“Woah, girl! What's wrong?” I could almost taste the fear and concern she was emitting, feathers ruffled as she thrust herself higher into the air.

I brushed the top of her head, and—

Remember.

A brush of wind, of autumn touching at the edge of my memories, the song of the eternal blue sky. Memories of wings and claws and the wild wind blowing where it may. Lessons, truths unveiled, screaming threaded things raining down from the sky, violence and rage and terror and hunger eager to devour all life.

I blink, releasing a pained breath as I was pulled out of the shared memory.

“Celia!” Ultima had drifted over, her eyes gone round and full of concern and worry.

“I’m fine but… I think something is really wrong, Reyna is afraid and showed me something.”

Ultima’s dark skin paled. “Spirits, you're going to give me a heart attack one of these days. But if that's the case, keep your magic at the ready. Things could be dicey.”

I didn't disagree. “Got it, the village shouldn't be too far away right?”

“It should be coming up in another few seconds…” Her voice trailed off, with a strong note of growing horror.

I turned my head and found I couldn't immediately comprehend what I was looking at.

And then I did it with a horrible gut-wrenching clarity.

The village… was littered with bodies as the town was torn apart by an endless swarm of strange entities. It was a rain of sterile black-white threads, dozens of wispy coiling tendrils around central bodies of pulsating red flesh.

I could hear people screaming.

“Kid, Celia, look away.” I felt my lip tremble as I saw the walking horrors devour everything in their path. Trees, crops, animals, buildings and people, filaments carving apart flesh like precision knives. Energy threaded around them, delicate threads of tainted khi reaching into souls and spirits and consuming the web of their mind.

The creatures were singing. A dirge, pain and agony and hatred like sour yellow notes and songs of painful black rage screaming in my mind.

Everyone was screaming.

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Flesh was torn asunder by cutting blades of wind, griffin wings acting more like swords. The twisted ones let out vicious radio static screams, even as they burst apart under pressure and force.

The… entities were deceptively fast, elastic limbs launching them a hundred feet or more in single bounds. Lethal mobility when their tendrils could cut cleanly through flesh and bone.

I landed on top of the pack of monsters, casting out my hand to launch a twisting matrix of degenerate void fields. Their flesh melted then boiled apart under my grasp, milky-white fluid poured out from what remained.

I held back the urge to throw up, as I watched the trembling form curled up in a bloodied alley. A dogfolk kid, vaguely reminding me of a bipedal dingo, clothing torn and scuffed. But alive, alive, alive.

“Hey, c’mon. Let’s get you out of here, yeah.” I stepped over the bodies, doing my best not to connect the bodies with the kid.

For no reason that I wanted to think about at the moment. I picked up the small child with ease, muscles tensing as I watched Reyna send out dozens of whirling slices of hardened air.

Dozens of the whirling threads were torn in half, reduced to flailing masses of limbs as dying nerves fired their last signals.

I braced myself and jumped two stories, then adding a gust of wind to keep us aloft. We moved quickly towards the docks, where a single tattered airship was floating. The number of survivors out of a settlement of some one hundred people was… low.

We had found fifteen people, most of the bodies were missing. I still recalled how the tendriled things had torn into the very essence of their soul. A keen sense of horror didn’t fail to rise in my mind.

Suppress. Put it in the vault with everything else.

Most of them were kids, and teenagers, their parents dying in the process of protecting them. There was a single older minotaur, shielding himself in stone and rock and keeping the ship safe.

I had coated the entire airship in a void barrier, shaping the infinities between spaces. It was the only other thing that kept the ship from being torn apart by the endless threads raining down from the sky.

The minotaur (his name was David) took the kid into his arms, guiding him into the airship. There was a tremor as Ultima fought to the fullest extent of her power.

I knew she was supposed to be one of the strongest witches in Calafia, but this… this was beyond what I had expected.

A firestorm surrounded my mentor, moving and flowing like water. The flames had turned an unearthly black, fed by the Black in her blood. They spread, hunted, devouring everything in their path.

The Black was the logic of the sword.

This was my teacher’s Nature, and it was a bloody thing to behold. She held her staff, a chitinous blade forming at the tip. She flashed her fangs as she lashed out with her blade-tipped staff. It rippled with silence, deafness and darkness. The shockwave struck in a widespread barrage.

Silence negated sound while deafness damaged the senses of the threaded ones, and the darkness blinded them. Their flesh sizzled as the ravenous darkness devoured them.

Hostile binding, like fire-spirits being drowned by water.

Little ‘elements’ were areas of focus, I saw it in how she unleashed their power. Incarnated silence and deafness, violet bleeding into black. The tendriled ones died as the darkness snuffed their light. If I could draw on the sources, I could tap into all the concepts of the world.

I breathed outwards, picturing the glyph of the chain, sisilla. I drank from the Gray and a touch of the binding Green. Ethereal chains rippled into existence, adding a touch of stillness with the ice glyph.

A dozen and more chains unraveled as I shaped their course with my mind, freezing a dozen threaded creatures. With my contact… I could feel a hint of their minds, a broken haggard song underlying their hostility.

Pain, hunger, rage.

“Oh.” I reached deeper into the void underlying existence, molding it and pushing it outward into a shockwave. My targets were consumed by the twisted emptiness, their very life force unable to withstand the negation I offered.

Their souls went quietly into the embrace of the void, and my magic chains collapsed without a target and energy to fuel them.

I could still See Ultima as she unleashed the full breadth and depth of her might. She cast a bolt of lightning as wide as her torso, flicking it upwards into a vicious stream of plasma. Hundreds of the thousand-limbed creatures were torn asunder.

She lashed out with her claw wreathed in greens and reds, launching a hundred projectiles of superheated material in rapidfire bursts. Each of them struck head on, bursting apart polymer flesh with ease.

One by one the strange alien monsters fell to Ultima’s magic, the witch dancing a dance of death. Her war dirge pulled at the weave of magic itself, a chord of Gs and D sharps and E flats sang in rumbling overtones.

Manipulation and destruction.

Dozens of threaded ones fell to her song, shuddered one, two, three times. A pattern repeated three times over with three repeats of the same chord.

And then they collapsed and went still, as the deadly melody tore away their life force.

And then it was done.

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The island was quiet and still, with only the lingering scent of death left in the stagnant air. We were guarding the airship from the air, in case more of those odd entities rained down from the sky again.

My hands were trembling.

Reyna purred, trying to comfort me. That battle had been horrible, nothing but bodies and crying children and frightened traumatized teenagers and a single grown man who had lost everything. I had seen Ultima at her most powerful, casting curses and weaving the elements of the world to her will.

I could understand why people were so concerned about someone of her power being outside of their control. It was the aching madness of the dark moon, the scintillating darkness between worlds and stars. Her connection to the Deep was dense, multifaceted, elder things seething under her skin like umber stars.

But then was I any different in being tied to strange and esoteric forces of nature?

I waded through the deep pools and the high clouds of the Outside, the churning energies of the void dripping downwards into this low place.

Low place, why does that make sense?

Magic, the technology of the soul, a craft born of spirit and might. I didn’t understand where and how it was possible, only that it was.

I was rattled, hearing the Void whisper in my ears, telling me those things were Wrong. The very light of their spirit was in agony, burning far too hot, puppets dancing to invisible strings. It wasn’t a matter of how I knew, the void held the answers because it was and was not. Because it was a place where things could be seen from Outside.

I had been afraid, but that fear had become fury, rage, indignation. Those things had been ravaged, whatever they had once been was stolen from them, and now they were stealing life from others.

Two hundred and more people were dead and gone, fifteen people would never be the same. All at the behest of something so very small and petty, and I couldn’t accept it.

“Celia, honey.” Ultima flew next to me, delicate ribbons of magic granting her flight with her staff Currents of high and low wind pressure, pressurized concussive force, altered buoyancy and viscosity, ley line sailing. “I really need to ask how you’re feeling.”

“Angry. Infuriated. Heartbroken. It’s… it’s not fair.” Why did that leave such a bitter taste in my mouth?

“No it isn’t… I thought the Threaded Ones were finally gone.” There was anger there, a faint horror reflected in her silver eyes.

“That’s the old enemy of this taifa? Monsters of the id?” I asked.

“Yes. Which means a lot of people are going to die… and if they’re in your world too…”

That wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right.

But that whining hadn’t done much against horrible disasters that had left thousands of corpses in their wake.

I couldn’t change what had happened, but I could affect what would happen someday.

The world was unfair and cruel, but could I make it fair?