Chapter 18: Grounded

Landar

I stood in the forest, next to my father, as the sun slowly crawled up to noon. It was still early morning, but every time I looked up, I desperately hoped it had moved. And every time I was disappointed.

“You’re sure you don’t want me, I don’t know, picking up sticks or something?” I asked as my father ignored me and stared into the woods. Watching the various groups of children who gathered roots, berries, wood, and other useful items from the area.

“Yes. Your mother said you’re grounded. That means doing nothing but chores. I remember when I was a kid, this was when I got into all kinds of trouble. So no, you stand by me and do nothing. Maybe by watching these kids do their work all day, you’ll learn to attend to your duty, and forget the worries of those older than you.”

He tried to glare at me, but I could sense he was secretly proud of my actions. Hell, if my daughter had done it, I’d feel the same way. Torn between needing to punish her foolishness and wanting to praise her bravery. And if she had said something as stupid as ‘I want power because it’s the only way to protect our family’, I’d probably think I was putting too much pressure on her, too. You want your kids to know about the practical side of family struggles, but they also need to be kids.

It was a hard line for parents to walk.

I amused myself by trying to keep track of the older kids as they ventured through the denser and further parts of the forest. I watched the trees and bushes move as they passed under or through them, and listened for the sounds of their feet.

Eventually, a patrol passed us by, and the six men saluted my father, who only waved back. He was out of uniform in a volunteer position, not conducting actual guard work. Saluting would be inappropriate. At least that’s what he said when I asked him about it.

“The men are just being respectful. They don’t need to be doing that kind of thing.”

My father carried his cudgel, but he had left his spear in the guardhouse. “It’s part of the armory. I don’t own it. But this? Well, it was a gift from your grandfather.”

“Can I see it?” I asked as we sat down for lunch. I was desperate for something to do, and the other kids were gathered together in a glade within easy view. Besides that, the noon patrols were out watching the area. It was safe, as safe as anyone could make it.

But still my father hesitated. Then, as if thinking better of his good parenting decision not to allow his disobedient child to handle a deadly weapon, he pulled out the club and handed it over.

It was studded with beads along the haft. Up close, it looked more like a mace than a simple stone headed club. At the head, however, was a large rock shaped to be a proper weapon, and held in place by thick cords of rope.

My fingers ran over the rope and stone head, feeling the weapons’ contours. It had a slight pulsing that came from the wood, and I could tell it was made from something rarer than the common trees in the area.

“What’s it made of, father?”

“Your grandfather told me he found this log among the remains of a Sweet Palm Tree that had been burned in a forest fire when he was a child. At first, he used it as a walking staff. But when I became a guard instead of a drudge foreman like he was, he had it turned into a club for me. Paid a decent amount of coin to have it done, too.”

I stared at it for a long moment, as I ran my hands over the grain in the wood and stone. A few things came to mind, ways I might improve it. My experiments with the oil had given me some insight into how mana could be infused into things like this. And, well, I had a lot of time on my hands that morning to think.

“I think I can make it better. Can I?” I felt a slight call of the magical wood in my hands. There was room, for lack of a better word, for more magic inside it. At least that’s what it felt like to me.

“If you think you can do it without breaking it, then I trust you. Just don’t tell your mother, or we’ll both be in trouble.” He glared at me, despite his words, and I took a deep, steadying breath.

Then, I infused the wood with mana.

I started at the base, simply adding more mana into it than had been there before. The wood slowly grew denser, harder, and heavier. As if the tree it had been made from was older than it had been. I don’t know why I was given that impression, but I listened to my intuition when it came to magic.

It had served me well so far.

I let the magic travel up the shaft of the wood, up and into the metal studs. The metal received the magic like the iron had on the forge. It became more malleable. So much so that my fingers could shape the metal beads.

My fingers bled slightly as I pinched each of the metal studs into sharp points. For some reason, I got the impression that was what they had originally been. Wickedly sharp. But my father’s strength, the hardness of the weapons’ targets, coupled with the sheer weight of time, slowly eroded them into simple studs.

When the magic reached the stone head, things went a little differently.

The rock wouldn’t absorb the mana. At all. It was a piece of hard river rock, smooth and shaped to be nearly a perfect sphere. I guessed it was made of granite, and adding mana to it was like trying to mix oil and water.

Not impossible, but extremely difficult.

When the rock finally accepted just a trickle of mana, it started vibrating. Then shaking, then rattling in its ties like something in a cage.

“Duck!” I yelled, as I stood up and tossed it into the trees away from anyone else. A moment later, the rock exploded into dozens of pieces of hardened and hot shrapnel.

When the sound of the explosion finished echoing in my ears a few heartbeats later, I went to investigate. My father stood over my shoulder, probably glaring down at me.

The club itself was charred black. The metal studs, though, had maintained their shape. The wood under the char was still good, harder and a better quality if I had to guess. But the rock, well, it was dust. And bits of rock dust coated everything white except the club itself.

“Son?”

“Hold on, I can fix this.” I bent and grabbed the club, then started looking for a rock to replace the one I had just exploded.

“Son. Listen.”

“The river, one second dad and I’ll find one better than that piece of granite, I promise!” Before I could dart towards the river, a rather large and heavy hand gripped my shoulder. It wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t letting go anytime soon.

“Calm down, son. You’re bleeding. Stand still.”

He bent down and wiped the white dust off my leg, revealing a shallow but long gash. “I don’t think you’ll need stitches. This is superficial. But if we don’t clean it, it’ll get infected.”

I didn’t feel a thing. But that was just the adrenaline talking. I knew in a few seconds it’d sting like a mother fu—really badly. “The river’s right there, dad. We can wash my leg, bandage it, and I’ll find you a new river rock.”

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Tomas shook his head sadly as he picked me and the club up with one hand and walked towards the small stream a few yards away. When we got there, he set me gently down on the grass beside the clean stream, then dragged my leg into the water as he waded into it. As he washed my wound, I looked at the rocks dispassionately.

Alright, I told myself. Granite isn’t good for magic. What is?

I remembered a time I had taken my then pre-teen daughter to some hipster street fair in one of our rare trips back stateside. We had spent nearly an hour in some dive book shop that sold crystals, and books on ‘magic’ and all that bullshit. It had taken me nearly a week to dissuade my daughter from the notion that she was a witch who could cure cancer with Quartz she found on her great grandfather’s property.

But what that entire episode gave me was a nearly flawless understanding of what quartz actually was. Wikipedia, thank God for you, I thought as I started looking around. One of the stupid things people said about it was that it had healing properties. Which, according to science, was total bullshit.

What it did have was an ability to conduct electricity and redirect it without losing much to heat loss. Quartz wasn’t a superconductor by any means, but in early computers it had been extremely useful.

But maybe here it’s not? I asked myself as I searched through the stones in the water and found a few smaller rocks that looked similar to quartz.

I ran a trickle of mana through them, and they all glowed like flashlights.

“What are you doing?” My father asked, as he finished wrapping my leg and started pulling me back onto shore. “Another explosion would be bad right about now.”

“Trying something to fix your club. Now give me a second.” Besides the light, they became hot to the touch, and as I moved them around, they became malleable. I stopped running mana through them, and they darkened. Where they were a milky white before, now they were almost black. Where they had felt like crystals, now they felt almost as hard and rough as granite.

“Well, that’s interesting.”

“Son,” Tomas sounded tired again. Not physically, but mentally, almost on a spiritual level. I looked up at him and he was rubbing his face with a hand that was still speckled with my blood. “You have got to be more careful. This is the second time in two days you’ve almost died. Probably more, but I only know of two.”

“I’m sorry, father. I didn’t know granite wasn’t magically reactive. I’ll be more careful.”

“Yes, that’s good. But, you also need to be better with other people’s things, Landar. My father, your grandfather, gave me that club. They pulled the stone at its head from the ground that they buried your grandmother in.”

So it was special. And I had just exploded it like a grenade. Damn.

“Look. Do what you’ve got to do to make it work again. I’ll be grateful. I really will. But now I’m going to miss my club. The way it used to be. I trusted you with this, so I’m not actually mad at you. But, well, this isn’t what I thought it’d be, son.”

He walked back to where we had been, observing the clearing where the other children were finishing up their noon meal before getting ready to head back into town.

I sighed, stood up, and waded into the shallow stream, looking for more quartz. When I felt a stabbing sensation in my arm, I rooted around in my shirt and produced a long, thin, sharp piece of granite, and got an idea.

***

“Landar, Landar, where are you? It’s time to head back home.” Tomas’s voice came from behind me as I sat there, trying to hold the strange construct I had made together. The problem wasn’t the materials, the problem was that I was trying to find the right shape in the quartz to hold the sharpened pieces of granite I had collected in place.

“Landar!” he shouted, and I knew he would come to get me in just a few seconds. I was so close!

The quartz crystals finally melded together, and I lifted my hands away from them. They turned from glowing white to a dark obsidian black. The gray granite pieces were held in place, providing light gray accents to the fist sized ball of death.

A hand gripped my shoulder. “Landar. Did you not hear me?”

I lifted the ball of Quartz and Granite up for my father to see and he gently took it out of my hands. I stood as he scrutinized it, holding it in one palm as he rotated it around.

“You, you took pieces of the other stone and put it in? Did that help somehow?”

I shrugged. “I have no idea what I’m doing. Maybe. I just, well, I wanted to honor your last club. I’m sorry, dad.”

He shook his head and grinned. “It’s alright. Put it back on the club, then we’ll head home.”

I did as instructed. About ten minutes later, after several dozen failed attempts to coax the stone to morph around the wood, or the wood to grow around the stone, I had resorted to simple rope bindings.

Annoyed, I triple bound the two pieces together, and then covered the rope with a thick leather that I infused with mana. Though I had no idea why, or what effect it had on it. I was hoping it would give the leather greater durability. I was still somewhat flailing in the dark.

When I was done, I held it out for my father to take in. The quasi-circular head had small stone protrusions of granite, but was black as midnight and hard as steel. The studs were sharp and menacing looking, and the wood had hardened and become far denser.

He took it and admired it. “It’s heavier than it was before.”

“Is that a bad thing?” I asked.

It was his turn to shrug. “Not sure. Let me try something.” Tomas went to the nearest tree, one that was maybe a year or two old and about as thick as I was. He pulled back the club like I would have a baseball bat. Then, with both hands, he brought the club over in a sideways swing directly through the middle of his target, every muscle in his body straining with the effort.

A sharp pop filled my ears, and wooden shrapnel filled the air. When the dust and wood cleared, the tree was missing a chunk of itself right out of the middle. “Huh. Hits harder, that’s for sure.”

I stood there wide eyed, as my father held the thing one handed and went in for another swing. This one he put his entire body into stepping into the attack. The tree exploded, and I had to cover my eyes for fear of wood splinters.

Half a second later, powerful hands yanked me out of the way, and I felt tree branches scraping my head and arms as I was pulled through the air. When I was finally in the clear, I stood next to my father, who grinned down at me. “Tree almost had you. Look.”

The tree had fallen exactly where I had been standing. I expected to see it clinging to its base, having been cracked or pushed over. Nope, it was cleanly severed in half, the pieces of the trunk blown out and scattered as fragments of wood littered the ground everywhere in the path of my father’s brutal assault.

“Holy—”

“Watch your mouth, boy. But yes, your father is impressive.” Tomas smirked. “And this helped. A little.” He hefted his new club with pride, then winced. “Sends vibrations right through my arm, though. Don’t know what to do about that.”

“I might have an idea. Can you do some swings, just in the air?” He smiled and swung away, attacking invisible foes as I examined his grip. Tomas shadow-attacked in the air a couple of times. After a few swings, he stopped and had to work the muscles in his arm with his other hand.

“Still numb?” I asked, and he nodded. “I have an idea, but it’ll take some experimenting. Might need to ask the dwarves or the smith for some help with it.”

“I’m happy with her just as she is. I’ll add a few more leather straps and improve my grip. Oswald was always saying I hold it wrong. Maybe there’s a trick to it.”

“So, are you happy with it? For now?” He looked at me and the sheer joy on his face was something I’d rarely seen on any grown man. It was infectious.

“That’s a silly question, son. I think I might be in love. Don’t tell your mother.”

I smiled. Tomas reminded me of so many of the army brats I had grown up with back on Earth. They were smart, hardworking, and loyal. But it didn’t take much to entertain them.

“Dad?” He stopped ogling his new weapon and looked my way. “Can I try?”

He laughed and handed me the weapon. “Try that one.’’ He pointed me towards a small sapling barely thicker than my wrist and I had to fight from rolling my eyes.

“I want to try something interesting.”

My father, had he been paying attention, would have given me at the minimum a suspicious glare. But, giddy with the euphoria of a new and powerful weapon, he just wanted to share the joy.

Alright, mana through the arm, and down the weapon. I thought to myself as I prepared for the Empowered Strike. I hauled back and brought the weapon down one handed on the sapling. Half a heartbeat later it landed, and I learned the new Ability, Empowered Strike.

The world exploded with force as the sapling was pulverized into mulch. My arm stung a bit from the force of the blow, and for a moment I stood triumphant and giddy as my father had been. Until I realized my fingers weren’t stinging, they were numb.

And empty.

The weapon had shot off into the woods. My fingers, unable to grip it properly, had lost hold of it when the blast happened.

“Damn it Landar.” My father marched off in the direction of his new toy. His anger disappeared like vapor when he reemerged a few minutes later, cradling the magical club like a baby. “Skipped off a boulder and embedded in a tree.” Tomas patted me on the back almost hard enough to push me over. “I can’t tell you how proud I am, boy. And you didn’t break my new weapon.”

I was smiling all the way home.