Seed 6

June 7th, 2032.

I blinked at the destruction I had wrought by complete accident, where a spell had shorn through stone and metal with terrifying ease. I had been studying the mechanics and flexible uses of sifra and had found every aspect enjoyable over the last two days.

“Pull, utilizes a direct kinetic transfer to force an object to be pulled closer. Kick is the inverse, shoving an immense inertial mass to send a target flying. Barrier creates a field of inertial stillness, stopping its own element and kinetic attacks. Oddly enough the element of water can bypass it. This spell I like to call warpfire is a layered field of sifra energy shifted back and forth across a target, disrupting the structure of whatever it touches.” I wrote it all down in my notes with glee and just a little bit of terror.

With this spell… flesh melts, metal deforms, plastics melt, and energy fields drain all their energy attempting to maintain their structure. It was incredibly difficult to form the right mental picture and gesture to map a spell onto.

I also figured out how to weigh down my hands and feet to strike with added mass at the point of impact. Adding about fifty pounds to my fist let me send people flying across a room, adding three hundred pounds to a kick… would probably break through steel.

I haven't tested it yet.

My barrier spell had proven to be incredibly helpful when it came to experimenting with my magic. Protecting me from explosions, and some of my higher energy spells when experimenting with katas and mental mnemonics.

But… right now I was having some fun with my magic, lessening the gravity on my target in the form of Arali. The kid was swimming through the air, seamlessly moving through it with a chirp of joy.

Arali was a brilliant, devious, but sweet kid with an interest in the macabre and darker things. It was actually kinda refreshing. He proved an excellent audience for my many little factoids that often disturbed more queasy people. From how assassin bugs wore the corpses of their ant prey as both armor and camouflage to the tongue-eating louse doing exactly that.

“Finally, the skies are mine to explore, all the knowledge of the universe will be mine!” With a smirk I let the lift spell run out of energy, and with a yelp, he dropped like a stone from fifteen feet up.

He left a small depression where his dense body had smashed into the ground. I giggled when he walked it off. Arali was a tough kid, he liked playing rough, so it had taken me some time to get used to his weirdness.

He released a rolling click of rage and anger. “Meanie! You don't let me do that to you!”

I giggled again, crossing my arms over my bust. “That’s because I'm a squishy little human and you're a strong little demon spawn.” He huffed cutely, stomping his feet with disdain toward me.

“I am, and you better respect that while under Ultima’s roof.” He pointed his claws at me with narrowed serpentine eyes.

I nodded, unable to help the soft grin I was sporting on my face. Arali was crazy, and a scholar on all things from army tactics to politics and local biology. So I enjoyed listening to his rants and he enjoyed listening to mine.

“So you had a theory on how Cyfrinic and glyphs, well one glyph so far might be connected?” It felt weird to say Cyfrinic, as their y was closer to a French y, I basically had to pronounce e while my lips were shaped to say an English u sound, with the rules for syllables being similar to Spanish.

It was incredibly frustrating to learn the language, though at least the simpler words weren't far off from Spanish. Arali didn't let me sink into my brain, poking me in the thigh with his claws as he began his rant.

“Sifra is a major root word in Cyfrinic, it means void,” I flinched, recalling that faint blur of a dream. “And from what I know, there's stories about how certain words of the Old Tongue are special, passed down from a greater language. If the glyphs are this greater language, we might be able to find the names of glyphs by looking towards the oldest and most widespread root words!”

“Any examples?” I had only found sifra as the name for my first glyph, and I knew there had to be more.

Arali perked up with a sweet chirp, like chiptunes and brass. “Well your glyph seems to be commanding elemental magic, void I'm guessing,” he rubbed his chin, odd eyes blinking slowly. “So I looked into the words for the known elements, air, water, earth, fire. Saru, engua, erset, and frazo.”

I nodded, those words were ancient, they were among the oldest root words in the Old Tongue, so that was a clue there. It was one of the oldest languages in the Isles, at least as old as Latin is on Earth, and had served as both a lingua franca and the sole language of magic on the Isles.

“The Old Tongue was said to be a gift from our Titan, borne from Calafia’s voice, given a connection to the heart of magic and life.” He explained gladly, and offered enticing tidbits and answers to some of my questions.

The why of things, the questions no one seemed to be asking anymore. Why was Cyfrinic magical while the other languages that also existed both here and on Earth were not?

Words shouldn't inherently have power… but magic was also technology. Which was something created by toolmakers. Language was technology too, so what if in ancient times… they had created a means to connect their language with magic, or had been given the means?

It wasn't hard for me to imagine, their language was the input to a machine of incredible complexity and power.

“So many mysteries to uncover, so much to learn.” I felt my neck tingle and knew Ultima was here.

Guess our field trip was finally coming up.

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I leaned against Ultima as she flew us across the entire damn state of California. I felt the strange tendrils, patterns, the flow of existence shifting to the whims of my Mentor.

“What are you doing exactly?” I asked her, swallowing the gut sensation at the slick feel of the magic in the air.

“I'm messing with the connections of the world,” Ultima spoke quietly, silver eyes flashing white. “The bonds between people and objects, subtle and overt. Social, physical, and metaphysical. This is a connection block, drawn out with my energies, an entire plane of people could look me right in the eye and not see that I'm there. Even satellites will have a hard time latching on. Not foolproof, but good enough for us.”

“So it's a more overt version of the defenses of your house?” I asked carefully, legs dangling under me, and feet slicing through air.

Ultima just winked. “Of course, how else do you think I've gotten away with being a witch in a realm of humans.”

That explains a lot.

“Better question is why exactly are we moving six or seven hundred miles on Earth of all places.” I didn't cross my arms, not wanting to loosen my grip on my teacher. Falling a thousand feet was not my idea of a good time.

“Two reasons. one I want to teach you about crossroads, spaces where two or more realms overlap, two there’s some friends of mine who live in what was it called…? The Shasta-Trinity forest.” She snapped her fingers with a gentle grin, and I stared.

I looked below and with a blank stare, finally noted we were dropping in elevation. Heading right towards the park in question. We were heading towards the foothills surrounding Shasta Lake. Forests and woodlands being dominated by several species of pine tree, oak and Douglas fir, and plenty of underbrush and shrubs.

“I thought crossroads existed solely in your realm?” I had heard such places mentioned in books. Realms or Bubbles are subsections of the Spirit World, flowing within its endless ocean like islands. Crossroads were boundaries between such places, forming little realms of their own.

Ultima shook her head, adjusting Arali sitting in front of her with a soft grin. “Not at all, remember everything is contained within the Spirit World. The mortal worlds are just the largest, and the realms I’ve told you about are sort of like… extra rooms, extensions to the mortal worlds of sorts, layered on top of it, making it bigger than it should be.”

Bigger on the inside…

“Earth doesn’t have many places like that, your area of the Spirit is desolate and empty, sleeping, dreaming,” Ultima had a haunted expression. “Realms can only form in your world when there’s overlap between our worlds, allowing for a locally active Spirit World. There might be maybe a few dozen such places on Earth at best.”

“That’s… kind of disturbing,” I lifted one hand to scratch my cheek as we descended. “That our two worlds are so different, despite being connected.”

“It’s one of the great mysteries, my student, along with why the umano and humans are so similar.”

“Umano or wichelen right, that's what your species is called right? The ‘baseline’ hominid from which almost all other hominids split off?” It was mostly rhetorical but that didn’t mean it wasn’t good to ask.

“Yep, the new guys on the block,” Arali started with a chirp. “The Titans have been dead for ages. At least two hundred million years, based on psychometric dating methods. Intelligent otherkind only started showing up a few million years ago, and the Umano showed up around the time humans did.”

“Humans as in Homo sapiens or as in our genus?”

“Maybe three hundred thousand years ago?” He added clarification and I could hear Ultima chuckling at us.

We finally began to land around a particular section of the forest. Dense with trees and shrubs, forming a strange bowl-shaped grove, branches spread wide enough to block us from seeing into the collection of trees. There was a single entrance, oaks and pines bent and twisted strangely, branches twisting around one another to form a gate.

Oh.

“Follow my lead, the mangana can be pretty wary of humans, but since you’re my Apprentice they should accept you.” Ultima whispered as we stepped through the entrance and I felt my stomach flip with vertigo.

The circle of trees had been maybe a hundred meters in diameter, but the forest I was looking at was closer maybe twenty times that in size, and I gaped at the impossible dimensions.

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Bigger on the inside.

I looked up and choked, as I found that the trees were decorated with houses and infrastructure, hollowed out and changed, strange symbols and markings carved into their bark, hesitantly glinting gold with magic and life. Within those houses were… chimps?

No… too big.

They were too large, easily six feet tall. Covered in dark black to dark brown fur occasionally speckled with gray and white. Denser around the arms and legs, with chimp-like faces, spacious cheeks covered with locks of white and gray fur, with a posture midway between human and chimp, so much bigger than they should be.

There were dozens of chi— mangana spread throughout the hidden village, dark eyes staring at me specifically. I didn’t smile, simply offering a gentle and shy wave. There was a single one, a… male I was presuming from the cloth around his waist.

He was two meters tall and had to weigh hundreds of pounds. He held a strange spear in his hand, engraved wood with a metal spear point sparking strange energies.

There was a low rumble from the massive ape, dark eyes peering into my soul.

“So this is the being you have taken on as your Apprentice, who you have decided is worthy of inheriting your knowledge and wisdom?” His voice was deep and unrelenting, full of both suspicion and faint anger.

Ultima placed a hand on my shoulder, lips curling, and ears pinned back with aggression. “She is, is that going to be a problem Malath?”

The newly named Malath tilted his head and stared at me and I kept my vision fresh on his nose rather than his eyes. He simply watched, for half a minute straight before his lips curled into a savage smile.

“No, I see only curiosity in the eyes of your apprentice, no malice, no hate or disgust. She is welcome in our village.”

I sighed in relief.

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I kneaded a ball of… void in the palm of my hand and clarified a question I had. The glyphs ran on ambient magic, lacking on Earth but not in crossroads and in the Woven Realm. There was a lot about the void that I didn't know about, it was more than just gravity and mass manipulation.

It was everything and nothing all at once. I could hear the whisper at the back of my mind, the song of an age, before, here, and after. I remember those strange spirits I had seen, of silver and glory.

“Why did you bring me here, really?” I asked quietly as Ultima leaned against a hut that held the ingredients she was trading with the Mangana. Herbs and natural minerals rich in the energies of Nature itself, as the crossroad was deeply embedded into that conceptual framework.

Ultima sighed. “The reasons I said are true, you need friends on this side too. And here's a place on Earth where you can freely practice magic… just in case of the worst.”

I swallowed. “The Chantry is really more dangerous than you said, isn't it?”

She looked her age, sagging and shrinking into herself, her own light dimming. “The Craft used to be wild and free Celia. Magic flowed freely through the Isles, we respected the spirits and our Titan. Now it's sterile, stifled, contained, and controlled. And I don't mean this in a… progress is bad kinda way.”

“I understand fine, I've seen it with Althea. She's afraid of her own power, that's not progress. And if spirits are alive… then her words are disturbing.” Spirits weren't human no, you could treat them differently than mortal races, but there was a certain respect that was lacking in the treatment of their revered spirits. “You can advance without stealing the lives of others.”

Ultima looked proud and I preened. “You’re right on that front, when I was your age there used to be tens of thousands of ‘lawless’ witches running around. Now we number merely perhaps a thousand at best, either converted or…” she trailed off and I felt a distinct sense of horror at the implications.

“They’re a fallback then?” Someone I could be dumped on just in case?

“They’re friends Celia, and you're mine, and that matters among witches, regardless of origin or creed. I want you to get to know the people I know. If that's what you want, if it's what you need.” Ultima spoke with such sincerity that it made me want to cry.

She reminded me of dad, of me. Open and… it hurts.

“What I need huh..." I furrowed my eyebrows at the twitch of her left ear, she was hiding one more trick, wasn't she? “What else?”

“There’s a local Weaver here who has a real keen eye for making excellent threads. You've been here for around two weeks, why did you think I was asking about your favorite colors and measurements, and what you would like in an outfit?”

Oh, I'm stupid, she had been doing that while sending me off to do errands. She gestured over to a nearby hut covered in beautiful cloth and fabric and I gaped.

“Go on.” Ultima said without even a hint of joking in her voice.

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“Oh when I saw the opportunity to weave for a human. I knew I was up for a treat.” The large ape responsible for my new incredible outfit was smug as a peacock as she turned me around towards a mirror of smooth glass, and I gasp.

I now wore a fine black dress shirt under a deep red vest accented with pale white. Both of which had large sleeves built for mobility. I could feel the toughness of the fabric, like silk but denser, backed by something harder. My shirt ended in leather braces, colored like the accents of my vest. The outfit was tied together with black pants and heavy combat steel-toed boots. A golden girdle-belt that held many useful pockets lined with the same protection cyfrins as my experimental belt.

“I look… good.” I had to admit the truth, it fit my frame impossibly well, not too snug around my big hips or too loose. The golden belt brings attention to them, and the outfit fit tightly to my torso, providing optimal comfort and support.

“It does, you are very cute, your Mentor has the last piece.” I flushed when the mangana (Mara?) pinched my cheek, sending me off back to Ultima.

I found her right outside, gnawing on the inside of her cheek, clearly anxious, and yet she had the energy to smile kindly at me. She was holding something, a bundle of cloth I couldn't quite make heads or tails of. But I knew deep down.

“Is that… what I think it is?”

Ultima grinned. “You've been a fine student, so I thought making it official was a good idea.”

She unveiled a cloak, with a base of charcoal gray and an outlined trim of gold, and an interior covered in a shining starscape, clearly marked with the constellations that hung over my town.

“Oh.” I was speechless.

“This is your cloak marking you as my apprentice, heir to my Craft as a free witch, with the proof in the clasp and trim of gold, and the gray signifying being a blank slate. It's made from the finest magic-resistant silk and—”

My body moved faster than my mind and I rammed into Ultima, wrapping my arms around her torso, since she was almost a foot taller than me. “You’re amazing, Ultima.” I said with a blubbery grin, and she simply shook her head.

“No, just someone who's made plenty of mistakes and learned from them, and wanting to teach someone willing to learn my ways. So what say you, Celia Safar Esteban? You who have crossed from a distant world to beg for the teachings of The Wandering Abyss, will you accept her once more?”

I nodded. “I shall.” I said with confidence as she wrapped the cloak around my shoulders, claws extending to grip and shift it as needed.

Hugging Ultima was like hugging fire, warm but it hurt, like the simmering embrace of radiation, like the light of dead suns. It was a tangle of proud-but-sad, of hope-for-student-little-one-cub that made my eyes water. It was knots upon knots of something not human, but alive, alive, alive.

“Then I, Ultima Grimshaw, take Celia Safar Esteban as my charge. Everything I know will be hers to learn and master, the start of a new cycle, a beginning and end, again and again. And one day she will call my home her home, just as it should be.” She finally clasped my cloak, and I saw gold at the edges of my vision as that tangle of emotion burst like a supernova. “Do you accept those terms?”

“I do.” There was a buzz in that tangle, like a connection had been made, formed out of the void and she let me go with a kind motherly smile.

I felt… so very happy about this, but there were questions on my mind even then as I wrapped my cloak tightly around myself.

What kind of enemies could my Mentor have?

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Sitting back on his throne, Azriel Salian listened to the summer winds howling outside the walls of his hold. It was his second summer since becoming King of the Danub. Since he had declared loyalty to the Pale Throne of their most illustrious King of Kings, who had declared himself both prophet and lord.

His succession from his brother, dead some two years on the field of battle. It had been both a boon and warning. His wife, Yuria sat next to him with a narrowed scowl. The head witch of the Circle of Danab stood before him in robes of pure white, with a flat mask of dark gray that designated him as the Circle’s highest authority.

Grand Magister Thorsten was a giant of a man, over seven feet tall with an enormous frame. Under his white robes clearly lay armor of steel and bone, and over that was the thick furred coat of a furred beast, colored of dark silver speckled with gold. His right hand held a hammer of dweorg metal, glinting with the spark of lightning and storm.

Azriel knew that every witch, that every master of the Craft had their implement, the tool that was the focus of their magical power, infusing it with their power. Shaped into a home for their familiar, forming a bond linking soul and spirit and lives.

So he knew the power held within that hammer could crush his castle underfoot.

“Grand Magister Thorsten, what troubles you enough to call for our presence?” He spoke carefully, as the man standing before him was a warrior, a master of the magic of war and death, of the elements.

“The Wandering Abyss remains at large, King of Danab,” His voice was deep, echoing from his throat with the rumble of gravel and the shifting of lightning. “One of the strongest lawless witches. Strong enough to draw all those around her into her hold, and yet she remains free and not under our rule.” Or dead was left unsaid. Lightning-blue eyes glinting from under his mask. Hair red as rust, gold as sunlight spilling down his shoulders.

He swallowed, hiding it behind his arm. “She is an elusive witch, and her power is well known. She is the match of dozens of witches, and her cunning keeps larger numbers from overwhelming her, and she has enough allies to shield her from our warriors.”

“You know the Pale King does not suffer traitors or heathens, Salian.” Azriel ignored the deep, dark stare, the stare of a man who would not care as he slaughtered hundreds. “Do what you must, or I will do so gladly.”

Thorsten turned his back to the King. Azriel let it happen, his wife trembling in suppressed rage, fangs clicking against each other, and claws rending into their ironwood throne.

The resounding boom of the doors to his throne room closing shut echoed in his head. He cradled his head in his hands with a deep shuddering sigh.

“Dear husband,” his lovely wife really was a viper just as much as she was a caretaker, a single tap sending a pulse through the world. “What do you know?”

“My scouts have brought news that could be either our salvation or our destruction, and I know not which. She has taken an Apprentice, someone to pass on her skills and knowledge.” His wife flinched, and he nodded gravely. “Our kingdom is full of unrest. Every one of our vassals fight each other for power, or are seeking the throne. While the Pale King strengthens his hold ever tighter. I know little of this apprentice, aside from a general description and the use of strange magic and rumors of her being human of all things.”

Yuria snorted. “There have been a thousand and one rumors like that in the past decade alone. Humans have not fallen into this world for centuries. If this apprentice is real… then she can either be a great enemy or a potent ally. She is but a girl, and if she is not a noble… she will hold no ambitions to temper her usefulness.”

“Her lineage is unknown, and how do you propose we deal with such a person? To recruit her? If she takes to the teachings of her Mentor, she will not want jewels or gold or pretty lads or maidens, she will be a free spirit. We can not confront her directly.”

Yuria blinked and smiled. “We know the general whereabouts of the Wandering Abyss, in the taifa of Caudalann. Send trusted people to witness, watch and observe, and perhaps offer a gift to her Mentor. The options are myriad, destroy them and save our skins from the wrath of the Pale King and his servants. Or we take them within our aegis and he will offer us a boon… or offer alliance in the shadows, to shield us against the growing might of our Most Holy King.”

Asriel rubbed his beard, fingers gently gliding through thick black fur. “The lords of Caudalann are our cousins, they will help us won't they?”

Yuria. “What are you thinking my dear husband?”

The King sighed. “They are loyal to the teachings of the Chantry, but only just… and my niece, she has potential. Perhaps even enough to usurp that old hag.”

Yuria paused. “That is either a genius plan or a failure in the making.”

Asriel laughed bitterly. “What choice do we have? We all have our part to play, no one gets to choose who they are in this world.”

Yuria sighed. “Then this plan will have to be orchestrated carefully.”