Germination 9

August 5th, 2032.

I chewed on my lip as I read up on some of the local wildlife of Ersete, each of them exotic, incredible and terrifying.

Devorasaurus, the Devouring Tyrant. The Green Devil. One of the greatest super-predator species of the Known World. A beast so powerful even the dragons of old respect their ferocity and might. Devorasaurus is an apex predator, generally reaching forty to fifty meters in length, and two hundred fifty tons to five hundred tons. Though exceptionally large individuals can reach sixty meters and eight hundred sixty four tons.

These bio-terrestrial saurians are tough, brutish and yet cunning beasts. Like most of Ersete’s Great Beasts, their biology has become suffused with minerals. Their armored hide is completely covered with overlapping scales of carborundum over a layer of silica-rich collagen. Bones and teeth and claws are infused with iron.

Devorasaurs are armed with a brutal arsenal of weapons, powerful jaws capable of cracking even the strongest of enchanted steels, jaws which they often use to toss their prey dozens of meters into the air. They developed tremendous muscle mass in their tails to lean on it for powerful kicks capable of sundering small warships. A combination of their tail and legs are used to power lunging leaps of half their body length. Their most potent weapon lies in their khi burst, transferring it into their own bodies and releasing it instantaneously, as well as using their potent connection to the Red to channel lightning as both a barrier and a dangerous wave of deadly force.

I stopped reading then, as I glanced at the actual image of the strange otherkind animal. It resembled a tyrannosaur… if a tyrannosaur was stretched out, and covered in a green-black lattice of crystallized scales. Sharp osteoderms raked down the neck and body of the dinosaur, with the tail ending in a spear point of black bone.

Devorasaurus had a few stances drawn out, one in a high posture like old inaccurate depictions, lashing out with a kick. Another in a horizontal posture, grappling with prey, or lashing out with the tail to release an arc of khi and lightning. Which was honestly both awesome and scary, a tyrannosaur larger than a blue fucking whale.

“Celia. You’re getting distracted, aren’t you supposed to show us around?” Althea’s voice murmured in my ear.

I flinched back from her. “Oh. Right. I got a little distracted reading up on Calafian fauna.” I traced the markings of my necklace, noted the patterns weaved into stone and metal, subtle etches.

They were despicably small, tiny etches smaller than a human hair, fractal recursive carvings. I could only tell because I was used to checking for even the tiniest imperfections in things I built. There was also the flow of magic, countless threads of fine khi following the path set for them.

I had brought Althea and Hakim to the human world, because I needed to investigate this side of the world too. With people I could trust to watch my back.

“Your mom is nice, if a bit intense.” Althea commented as she tugged on my sleeve. Hakim was just bouncing all over the place like a squirrel on crack, looking at everything with wide eyes. “Asking about my intentions.”

I snorted. “Makes sense, mom was a real heartbreaker in her old school. Those poor, poor teenagers. She’s probably worried I’d somehow manage that same feat. Doubtful. I don’t have charisma.” Apparently my mom was like catnip to nascent lesbians, as well as guys… and anyone else of any gender who would be interested.

Althea scoffed. “I’m sure the spirits will totally agree.”

My eyebrows furrowed. “What does that mean?”

She patted my shoulder. “Just keep being you.” Althea turned away, picking at the mirage stone. It was a common enchanted item. Its aura was a vortex of light and shadow, a medium to enable basic illusion arts.

Illusion magic was powerful, it could fool senses and sight, even mess with the weave of connections itself, they could even twist memories, altering one’s perception of Reality.

Mirage stones were carved crystal orbs imbued with high concentrations of illusion magic. Albite was an optimal stone for casting illusion magic, so mirage stones tended to be Albite. I could see how illusions curled around my friends, flowing around to hide claws and fangs and tapered ears.

“We’re going to meet up with an acquaintance of mine, she’s got a stake in this too.”

Althea’s eyebrows lifted up. “You mean… her right? The vampire?” She still sounded a little shocked.

Which made sense, most forms of blood magic and the vampires who invented it had been destroyed. It had been chilling how clinical their genocide had been described when I read their textbooks. Wielder of lawless, flawed magic. The gifts of the Others tainted and misused by evil.

“Yes. Maddie is odd but I have no reason for distrust.” It was a matter of intuition, a matter of the heart more than the mind. “Good vibes.”

Althea blinked as if confused. “I suppose? What’s Maddie like?”

“Ruthless, tough, aggressive, smug. A tad vain. But nice enough.”

“Is that what you think of me?” I blinked as someone emerged from the Shadows.

Maddie looks… different.

With the obvious answer being the fact Maddie was now a guy, instead of a girl. Which was more a question of how than why, coming from someone who was unapologetically trans.

The differences were subtle in terms of facial features. But the vampire was certainly rather handsome as a lad. Long lustrous hair, smoky gray eyes and a subtle smirk. He opted to wear a crimson red button-up collared shirt and champagne chino pants.

“Not gonna ask about my new look?” He asked with a smug grin.

“Do you want me too? I’m only really curious how you did it.”

The vampire looked like the cat that swallowed the canary. “As I’ve told you before, blood can be used to fuel and shape magic.”

“Shapeshifting is cool.” I admitted with an easy shrug. “So should I still call you Maddie or…?”

His grin became softer. “My friends call me Mads.”

Althea and Hakim both glanced at one another with… exasperation?

Anyways.

“Then I’ll do exactly that.”

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Mads stepped out from behind the shadow of a utility pole, as the sun scattered reds and pinks and oranges across a fading blue.

“It really is blue.” Hakim looked awed by the sight of the eternal blue sky. “It must be from the lack of dust and aeroplankton.”

Mads raised an eyebrow, folding his arms behind his back. “Huh… I guess you really are from my kin’s old stomping grounds. They always said the reverse side was different.”

“The planet spins backwards too.” I added with a casual glance at my phone, looking over news reports on grisly murders. At least six were dead, with another dozen across the county. All of it centered around my area. “How do you teleport exactly?”

Mads placed his hands on his hips with a grin. “It’s the Gift of the Black running through my veins. I can walk through the darkness, swimming within the shoreline of the Deep.”

“Shoreline.” I stated, curious at the specific response.

“Material beings touch the shoreline of the High Realms whenever they draw upon magic. Spiritual beings swim inside the coastal waters, with the very greatest of them reaching the edge of the continental shelf. Beyond that is the High, the realms light and dark on bedrocks of void.”

“Void huh?”

Mads nodded with a complicated expression. “Now don’t be thinking that being able to touch an element lost for centuries will let you reach the High.”

“I know enough about the fundamental structure of Reality to understand that trying to reach a realm once inhabited by literal dead gods would end… poorly.” I shook my head. “Instead we should be focused on looking into village slaughtering monsters in a world where no one knows they exist.”

“I’d say spirits help us all… if they didn’t need as much help as we do.” Mads snarked.

Althea. “The spirits are… afraid, why are they afraid?” I could see how her eyes had gone foggy, swirling gold cast against white.

“Their world is dying,” Mads shrugged at the horror that statement instilled. “Has been for the last four hundred years. There are very few shamans who even dare to traverse the spirit world. Not when there’s a good chance they’d be torn to shreds.”

“Is that why there are so many more spirits in the Outer Sphere?” Althea asked, adding with a sight deeper than my own. “They can’t live anywhere else?”

“Not unless they want to die.” Was his dry reply. “Which is why I’m not surprised to have monsters from other worlds trying to eat us. We’re barely holding back the tide, the mooring is rotting under our feet, while death bites at our heels. A perfect feeding ground for scavengers, a rotting corpse waiting to be devoured.”

I poked him in the face with a frown. “Stop it. Get some help.”

He wasn’t cold like I expected from previous contact… he felt about as hot as the air—

Oh. That makes sense, vampires were poikilothermic with their whole… being undead. Undead was a complex category of otherkind entity, formed from the dead and dying. From impressions, grudges and the balance of life and death. Forces of death. The difference between the undead and the living was what animated them.

I ran on mundane biochemical processes, they ran on incarnate forces of life and death. Without it, they couldn’t maintain homeostasis, and their bodies would decay and fall apart. Humans and plainfolk witches are omnivores, they get energy from breaking down biological matter. Which in turn becomes the ignition spark for their khi.

The undead like the vampires and the ghouls instead fed on the energy within flesh and spirit directly to ignite and spark their souls. Food was relegated as feedstock, carefully shuttled by the spirits within them to regenerate. Their metabolism rate went up and down with their stores of life and death energies.

In many ways the visceral undead were like lichens. They were composite organisms that emerged from life and death living among the filaments of the dead. The flesh benefited from energy produced by the spirits, and the spirits benefit by having a safe space to feed on what birthed them.

“Did you just call me a fungus?” Mads sounded slightly insulted and I cringed. I had said that aloud hadn’t I?

“Fungus are cool fun guys.” I explained, then paused at what I had just said.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

All three of them were staring at me.

Mads opened his mouth with a shit eating grin. “Didn’t take you for a—”

“Shut up, this never happened.” I rubbed my face with an embarrassed sigh. “Right, so the murders here have mostly occurred in northern Puerta Springs, which is where a lot of the Latino population lives.” Althea tilted her head so I responded. “Ethnic groups, like the Danabians. We share common ancestry, culture, traditions and religion.”

“Danabians don’t all get along. And we can be quite different in culture.” Althea pointed out.

I smiled. “Exactly. It’s a spectrum of a group of humanity, not a rigid box.” Just like magic itself was a spectrum of Light and Dark. “Now again let’s focus. The murders were around here, and it’s likely there might be rifts they’re using to cross over. I’m good with rifts, Althea can feel disturbances in the Spirit, Mads has his shadows and life senses, Hakim has his own enhanced senses and he’s a good Smith. Ultima is close by, we just need to scout.”

Hakim bounced at my compliment, but it was for good reason too. He was good at infusing magic and purpose and will into his creations. Metal and stone and crystal and plastic given power. He had figured out how to forge a rigid tree into a belt carved with void glyphs modified with runes to create an instant kinetic barrier.

The power of the threaded ones lies in pure physical power, agility and resistance to damage. They could go from zero to three hundred in milliseconds, striking with a force comparable to heavy machine guns.

Kinetic barriers blocked their strikes, and shielded us from their crushing embrace.

“This is only a few blocks down from the most recent murder,” I winced at the recollection. It was a young mother. She had been killed but her kid had survived… but not without scars, lacerations and deep cuts.

So I had a job to do.

I took a deep breath, bringing oxygen into my lungs. I could feel the jittery feel of air, the push and pull of water, the solid resonance of earth, and the streaming heat of fire. Ultima had been teaching me how to feel the imprint the elements left on the khi of the world.

Even in this world, the Spirit was suppressed, not gone.

I shifted to the imprint of the void, to feel the substrate of the quantum vacuum, dynamic pure potential. Stray exotic particles flickered around my hands, flickering echoes of sterile neutrinos and pulsating phaetons.

I reached into the void, into the strange points of the aphotic depths. It was a background noise of patterns in the seething sea of dark energy threads. There was a dull aching groan in the very fabric of space-time, boiling off into the world like rippling steam.

Althea sniffed, eyes widening. “Like ozone… you’ve got the trail?”

I nodded. “Follow.” My voice burbled with the screeching maelstrom, a biting edge of static.

I was reaching out not with sight, but feeling. If there was a way to describe what I was doing, it was like extending touch beyond the confines of human skin and flesh. Unfolding fractals twisting and twining to swim along the unreality of the invisible medium.

Althea was murmuring quietly. Likely speaking to the void spirits I apparently conjured whenever I drank from the vacuum. Reaching out with heart and soul to the signals in the fabric, letting my khi suffuse the environment.

Look at what we have here…

There was a hole in the vacuum, a crack in the world I could track. Mags’ aura reached out to people around us, gently pushing them away.

The void was bubbling, and there was the echo of death buzzing between my teeth. All four of us ran towards what I had found.

Was I forgetting something?

Our eclectic group raced down an alleyway to a horror show.

A faint crack in reality floated as a mass of fractured glass and space, light lensing, redshifting and blueshifting.

A dozen threaded ones were covered in viscera, fractured spirits engorged with fragments of stolen lives. They were singing, a painful mournful dirge.

Before I could blink, the portal… screamed with a wave of flesh, as a dozen more threaded ones emerged, rents cut into their polymer skin.

And all two dozen monsters lunged.

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Tendrils lashed out in stuttering gasps, whirring blurs of movement. They slammed uselessly into a barrier of void, whirling limbs failing to penetrate the film of inertial stillness.

I winced at how their souls were literally burning alive, endless Light pouring into their spirit.

The void shields were such a good idea, especially as I noted the innate defenses of the threaded ones. Hakim struck them with shards of glass and whirling buzz saws of sand. They only suffered minor cuts, shrugging off the rapidfire spells.

Althea… had cast a fire down onto the ground and then became it with a whisper of prayer. Her skin had become a golden-scarlet fire whirl, her clothing cloying smoke and ash, her eyes and claws radiating ionic light. A long wolf tail flared from her back, whipping blue fire darkened by smoke.

She cast out tongues of liquid fire, which crawled over flammable surfaces… like the plastic that made up their skin… but it was still slow. There was resistance against the spirit flame.

Plast polymers don’t melt until they reach hundreds of degrees…

It didn’t help that their skin was covered in a flexible layer of long chain polyethylenes that could shrug off knives and bullets.

Void and Darkness was a different story though, Mags’ skin had been exchanged for the twisting darkness, a protean form of many unfolding limbs ending in vicious claws and eyes shining crimson.

The Black in Mags’ soul burbles out into reality, reaching out to attack, to slaughter all in his path.

The Antediluvian seemed to meet the threaded ones in mutual annihilation, shadowy limbs ravaging the strange beings. I simply cast a warp field over my skin, and their skin melted while their blood boiled.

I bared my teeth at the plasts, pulling on the jagged edges of the portal. There was power there, a subtle oiliness to the light. It was a corrupting Light, a sound, a song I turned discordant with a touch of the void.

But I couldn’t dismantle the portal, the Light refused to listen. I didn’t have the right element to counter it—

The song changed pitch, a shrieking orchestra of pain and pitch that forced panic into my veins. Too loud too loud too loud it hurts!

Althea stepped forward, opening her right hand, and demanded.

Paradoxical Darkness, unending hunger, the logic of the sword.

Gear of the Deep.

Dark as night, cold as winter, silent as death, come to my humble bidding.

Set forth upon a mad and pitiful foe.

Where light sparks, smother.

Where light creates and controls, destroy and release!

The Black… surged to her command, Mags letting out a horrific shriek as pieces of his own spirit joined the Calafian shaman. I could see them, motes of darkness, living shadows swirling within her right hand, swimming in the shadow of the light of her fire-flesh.

Darkness whirled into knots upon knots, before striking down like missiles onto the threaded ones. They expanded into fields of darkness, and the plasts released unholy shrieks.

And the song grew louder even over the litanies of the werewolf known as Althea.

The portal was flooded with an outpour of threaded ones, who latched onto the remaining ones. Which was a dozen out of twenty four… when attacked by four witches at a time.

Tendrils latched on like hooks… and to my horror they started to assemble. Forming nets and weaves of limbs, a subtle skeleton of living flesh around more flesh. Knitting together into metaphorical muscles, into skin and cuticle meat. Like a living horror of worms and tongues and rasping tentacles. Of one to two foot wide bodies with tendrils fifteen to twenty times as long.

“I can’t close the portal!” I warned as more and more poured into the shape of the assembly. As many took lethal strikes to defend the assembly organism.

Twelve had become twenty four had become forty eighty had become ninety six.

The body assembly rose ten, eleven, twelve feet in the air. They excreted an odd liquid which hardened into armor plating around vital points.

A limb snapped into action, instantly pulling in a shocked Hakim… and slamming him into the street, battering him and tossing him around. The darkness and shadow spirits attacked relentlessly, but their makeshift armor slowed their decay.

Fuck!

The song was still there, demanding death, demanding vengeance. Strikes of magic and power that could tear through their flesh in half a dozen shots…

Now barely made a dent, as tendrils hardened against every impact. I could see how its aura of light seared into flesh, reinforcing its very existence.

The threaded ones lashed out with the whip crack of the sound barrier breaking, and I choked.

Tendrils wrapped around three necks, and grappled with the bloodied protean entity known as Mads. They probed the defenses of our barriers, and just in case I breathed.

Khi rushed into my body, spreading out like skittering spiders, phantom sensations rushing into my mind as I spread it out. Knots of energy reinforced my flesh, skin, tendons, muscles, organs, down to my own brain.

Magical energy could be used to strengthen one’s own body, but it took time to flood the body. Time that little village didn’t have.

So they had died.

“I…” Tendrils wrapped around my mouth and throat as I felt the raw, unadulterated hatred from the screaming mass of flesh and spirits.

And it crushed, force multiplied by dozens of limbs working in concert. Even Althea was struggling, and I had seen some of her punches leave craters.

I struggled to concentrate, panic coming down like an iron curtain.

My blood roared in my ears, and I cursed my own hubris.

Ultima is going to be so disappointed for not calling this in… for getting ourselves killed like this.

Thunder cracked.

We were dropped like sacks of potatoes, as a hole was blown through the assemblage in a single shot. I couldn’t feel a hint of powerful magic, just a weak flash of the world parting before the attack.

The threaded ones let out rattling sounds of pain, as they tried to fill in the hole the size of my torso in their chest.

The world broke apart with a second bullet, an arm reduced to viscera and burning plastic.

A third cleanly eviscerated a leg, and the swarm monster began to fall apart. Tendrils unlatching from each other as they died and raged.

A fourth bullet struck the ‘stomach’ region, and detonated like a fuel-air bomb. The entire remaining body ignited in a flash of blue.

“What—!” Althea coughed, her body trembling after being choked out by the magical monster.

I could still see the energies of the Darkness, twisting patterns of light through darkness. So much like Light and yet not.

Oh. This is becoming a pattern.

Someone appeared from nowhere, and I paled as I saw it was Ultima.

She looked pissed. “Kid. I like your initiative, but you… are in a lot of trouble.”

“Was that you?” I croaked.

Ultima blinked then saw the steaming pile of bodies. “Huh… that’s… what did this?”

“Who is more accurate?” Mads pointed over to a several story building overlooking the street.

I only saw a flicker image of green robes and glowing eyes and they were gone.

Mads let out a shocked chirp. “They’re… I can’t sense them, how is that possible?!”

…

What?

Ultima pinched the bridge of her nose. “Well that’s going to be a problem isn’t it?”

I nodded mutely. “I… I’m sorry.”

My mentor ruffled my hair with a sad nostalgic grin. “We’ll talk about it later. A long one.”

I didn’t say another word as we picked ourselves off the ground, police alarms ringing across the town.