“What the hell am I supposed to do about it, huh?”
My complaining from the back of the vine giant was irritating the shit out of Lyra but I really didn’t care. My plant-based monstrosity was dragging the consolidated weapons and bodies from my rift fighting bonanza while the water elementals made sure that the entire ice block chest slid along the forest floor on the way back to the Hole.
“Whatever you want, whatever you desire my -”
“And children? With freaking young ass mothers looking scared as shit clutching their babies and their pearls?” I ranted from atop my seat, gesturing wildly as I fought my conscience rearing its ugly head yet again. “I don’t have time for this. Experiments to run, so I can get some zombie killin’ done, and then my smoothie jungle . . .”
“But Lord Sorcerer, you don’t need to-”
“For the love of all that is magic and awesome, there were other magic users that didn’t do anything except stand there lookin’ dumb!” My rant continued as my irritation built. “And then, not only did a whole bunch of humans show up, but they show up AFTER all the shit went down. Did they help with the dwarves and minotaurs, and where were they when the nephilim were coming for me with their glowy weapons? Oh, no, they just hadn’t arrived yet, as in they showed up when all the hard work was already done. Fuckin figures.”
My grumbling had more to do with the fact that I really didn’t know what to do with women and children, I mean, I really didn’t want the responsibility of managing a bunch of humans where actual risk to children might be involved. Damn my own genetics ya know? It’s how Nature or God designed us to function. The very makeup of being a human male on the biological level entails that we fall for women, who use us to protect and provide for them so that they can produce us children that carry on our family line. It’s the circle of life that I’d been conveniently avoiding simply because my wife is a freaking tree.
I had read way too many books about wizardly overlords, or mayors with magic, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I like things the way they are, me playing with my magic and doing all kinds of awesome experiments while blowing shit up and taking on the new world. Companionship is cool, but drinking beer while playing darts is just not on the menu for the foreseeable future. I have the potential to live for thousands of years and I need to adjust my thinking because of it.
Humans as a whole live eighty years, and in those eighty years, we grow old, we have families, we fuck and we fight and we feast and then we raise the next generation to do the exact same thing. So what? It’s probably why humans are great overall. Our spark burns brightly because it’s so brief, so what can happen if we just give that spark a lot more fuel?
Shaking away my introspection that I recognized might be a downward mental spiral, I oh so carefully stashed my feelings away like any good man would. I was honestly a bit mortified at my reaction to seeing my own kind. This was not something I was used to, just the constant irritation of what I saw popping up in my head. I’d always wanted to be a dad and I knew I’d make a great one, I even had my life planned out with my fiance with how many kids we were gonna have and where we were going to live. The domestic bliss is, was, something I wanted and was looking forward to, until the world ended.
But what do you do?
What do you do when all you can picture in your head is the attractive, vulnerable blonde mother looking around, clutching her small child as if another monster is going to come out of the woodwork and pluck it from her grasping hands? The dried tears on her face, the tears in her clothes, the dirt on the baby that was too tired, too hungry to cry, what do you do? And it wasn’t just one mom, there were at least ten of them there in that crowd, and then worse was their slightly older children standing near them. Their shell-shocked faces and dull eyes looking around, as if death was something they were used to, expecting. Can’t forget the obvious bloodstains on their garments either. Their little chubby hands listlessly holding on to a scrap of clothing so they knew by touch where their mother was, but forgotten by the parent in the moment as the baby was the most vulnerable.
It explained the hostility of the men with rifles, and the sheer terror of everyone else. What did everyone look like at the end of the Trail of Tears, the infamous death march that Native Americans were forced to take by the US government? I never saw the old photos but I heard the stories and I imagine they looked somewhat like this group, this lost displaced cadre of fearful humans.
“AAAAAHHHHH!” I yelled into my hands, wrestling with the scraps of my conscience forcing its way to the center of my attention, demanding action, crying for assuagement, promising no sleep if I didn’t. By the time I had decided on a course of action, albeit reluctantly, Lyra, Spot and I had returned to the clearing in front of the Hole with my giant ice box of bodies and alien tech.
“Don’t say a goddamn word Lyra,” I ordered as I hopped down to face my usually grumpy dryad who was now looking at me with a sly expression. “You are going to take this vine giant along with Spot here and guard that group of humans. You will do it in such a way that they will never know you’re there. The only thing you will do that they might find suspicious is put something I’m going to make in the path that their group is taking, got it? Just nod, good.”
Turning around before I even saw her affirmation, I walked over to a birch tree at the edge of the clearing and coaxed the tree to grow a large sheet of birch bark that stuck out like a misplaced wing. Using Nature Sorcery, I took my time and reviewed my memories of flying on Tuki’s and Norn’s back, gathering a complete mental map of the entire area. I started with the Rappahannock River and laid out where it fed into the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and then the new valleys to the south and plains with random mountains to the west. After finding an ideal spot southwest of my location, I made sure to circle it and then on the back of my map quickly carve a message into it for the human survivors.
I know you don’t know me and I’m ok with that. I am human, mostly, or at least I used to be before the world ended. What matters is that I have made a life out here and you can as well, all of you. Follow the map. You will be safe. This valley will be safe. Rest easy.
Making sure to mark a route that avoided the area claimed by Kong, I handed the map to Lyra. “Wait,” I said as she turned to leave. “One minute, hold on.” I knew the people may not trust the map, so I had to give them some kind of olive branch.
Conjuring a disk of stone, I carved in big letters on one side with Earth Sorcery ‘healing stone’, and then placed a healing enchantment on the other side. Making sure to keep it simple, I designed it so that it would heal their wounds when placed anywhere on their body, but would draw on their own energy to do so. This allowed the enchantment itself to be long-lasting as the energy wasn’t coming from my healing stone but from the person using it. The beauty of it was the fact that it was so simple, it pretty much just quickened their own natural healing to the point where it would be noticeably faster.
Grabbing the map again, I quickly scrawled a note detailing how to use the healing enchantment and then tossed both to Lyra. “Put that in their path, make it obvious, but don’t be seen,” I instructed. Still not saying a word, Lyra vanished into the forest with Spot who padded softly after her.
As I was left alone for what felt like forever, I went over all of my hard won gains. I had a whole bunch of minotaurs in ice-bound stasis, a good chunk of dwarves that were still holding on, and all of their tools. The nephilim weapons and severed bits needed to be taken care of, but all that stuff was probably safe where I put it.
“I don’t get it,” I grumbled under my breath as I worked. “Why are the minotaurs alive? And how did the dwarves survive? I know, I know I ripped the life from them at the end there. They should be dead.”
Kraken popped out of Gungnir. “Remember, the minotaurs were linked via the shaman network, so unless you tore out every single bit of lifeforce, then what was leftover got shared between them. And you were working as fast as you could during that fight. So chances are you missed some. It’s technically very difficult to extract lifeforce. And the dwarves used their backup vitality stones to put them in a stasis so it appeared like they were dead.”
“Huh,” I said, putting my lack of raw creativity to work. Communicating mentally to my water elementals, I had them shift the giant ice block full of living things off into the woods a good two hundred yards away from the Hole and not in a place that would be near the Lab either. Using Earth Sorcery, I began clearing a space big enough to sink the ice. As I was getting my plans together, I noticed that there seems to be some odd thing I have with burying shit. Who cares, it works. Taking the ice coffin and positioning it pretty much perfect, I then separated out the block that had the gear and set that off to the side. In about thirty minutes of carefully applying earth magic, I had the entire block of ice twenty yards deep underground. Taking another hour, I transmuted the dirt into stone and carved stasis runes into each side, making sure that they drew the minimal power they needed from the life force of the prisoners inside.
“So I didn’t kill all of them,” I concluded, still mulling it over in my head. “I just thought I did. Well lucky for them. Cause now I’m gonna keep’em alive. So I’ll just put a solar panel on that so it doesn’t drain them dry,” I muttered, jogging over to the weapons cache. “One headache down for now, too many to go.”
I ordered the elementals to shift the gear all the way down into the Lab where I could break it down at the proper time and not when there were too many unknowns at my proverbial door. Using a good hit of Flesh Sorcery to keep me fresh, I sprinted back and skidded to a stop just outside the area of this morning’s combat. The majority of the group of wayward humans was gone but the robed magic users were standing in a circle directly overtop where I buried the nephilim stuff and arguing back and forth.
“Cassandra, we’ve been over this. We need to go.” The oldest looking one not only had a wizard’s staff, but at least three wands in her belt. The younger lady she was arguing with had an oversized book balanced in one hand while holding a feathery wand in the other, a small bird perched on her shoulder.
“Mother, you felt it too! The kind of power he had, it was leashed, hidden somehow. We need to find him, or it; he can help us!” She was pretty, a slender brunette with way too much attitude. I definitely pitied the mother in this instance, trying to parent in the apocalypse can’t be easy, especially with magic thrown in the midst.
“No, and that’s final. There’s safety in numbers and Percy has flown around enough to know that something big and hungry prowls these woods. It’s eaten or chased off everything else!”
I kept my snicker to myself. Spot is too good, well, for his own good. “I can’t be around Mark and his group anymore, they keep staring at me like I’m a piece of meat!” Cassandra’s little bird chirped in agreement.
The older woman smirked, “As if a well placed fireball or freezing curse can’t fix that issue? A woman having magic is like us having concealed carry. Most of the old world problems women faced stemmed from being physically weaker than men, but the great equalizer of power prevents that now.”
Before she could say anything else, a gaggle of teenagers broke into the clearing all talking at the same time. All I could make out was, ‘Come on’ and ‘it’s time to go’ and a bit of ‘show us some magic on the way’. One of the older guys in full camo stepped out of the woods behind them, scolding them for breaking off from the main group. His glare let Cassandra and her mother know that he meant it for their edification as well.
I kept waiting nearby just out of their line of sight, patiently keeping still as the smaller group joined the larger and moved on. Keeping my paranoia happy, I waited for at least another twenty minutes before I unfurled my magical senses to examine the nearby area. Yup, all clear. Summoning my water elementals, I called Gungnir to my hand and drew on its stores of power to unearth my spoils of war. Three sets of nephilim weapons encased in stone and all of their bodily bits in separate containers nice and neat greeted me as the earth pushed them all out.
“Sweet,” I said, kneeling over everything and taking a good look at it. To my senses, each piece of unearthly weaponry shone brighter than the sun. “So glad I had Reeanth help me figure some of this out a-ways back,” I said softly, not minding how it looked as I talked to myself. Picking each encased piece up one by one, I slowly conjured the thinnest sheet of platinum over each one and inscribed runes of stasis into them, triple-checking to make sure the magical signature faded to almost nothing.
“Good enough,” I muttered, setting the last one down in the pile. I kept the weapons separate from the bodies and then the bodies themselves were separated by general regions, so all the heads were together, and the hands and the feet, just so that by some messed up chance the bodies wouldn’t just magically come back together.
My water elementals covered the piles in ice and then formed giant ice balls out of them, rolling them all the way back to the Lab as I jogged behind them. “Runnin’ through the jungle with a dead body!” I sang, copying the old Marine Corps running cadence. “I’m a real mean wizard with no company! Sound off!” Switching to the Army cadence I knew, I tweaked it and kept chanting, “Down by the river! Took a little walk, ran into aliens, had a little talk. I pushed’em, I shot’em, I THREW THEM IN THE RIVER!”
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[For the love of, shit, you kill some small fry and you think you’re all big huh?] Kraken scoffed from his seat in Gungnir. [It’s bad enough that I have to live with you, but your singing is just godawful.]
Just for that, I took a deep breath and switched to Toby Keith, “And we’ll put a boot in your ASS, IT’S THE AMERICAN WAY!”
*********
I did my best to stay away, but the social instinct was just too strong. Even my Consciousness Sorcery kept forcing me to wonder about the bedraggled group instead of focusing on deciphering the dwarven tech. The way they instilled an odd resonance that boosted energy efficiency was just somehow not interesting enough compared to freaking people, uhg. Taking a step back from my work bench, I looked around the Lab.
Some might call it dreary, I call it homey, in a nice shed kind of way. No rugs covered the floors, no paintings covered the walls. My sunlight contraption kept everything well lit but the hungry plants on the other did give off a bit of a bloodthirsty vibe to the whole thing.
[You’re not a cave troll,] Kraken admonished, even as he worked diligently on the schematics for my next suit of runed armor. [You’re not a cave troll but you act like one. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’d never had a lady in your life before. Sort of believe that you’re making it all up.] My glare at the polished crystal blade of Gungnir where Kraken sat did nothing to shut him up. [Doesn’t work on me anymore. I’m your damn familiar, so you better get used to my company. Besides, now that I’ve watched you fight, I’ve had to start from scratch for this entire project. The amount of power you throw around is obscene! You handle it like a child flinging sand, no art or grace to your technique.]
My glare intensified for a moment. “I need something to do,” I said, standing up suddenly. “This is just going to have to wait.”
[But you haven’t done shit. You just buried the nephilim remains in a stasis box like all of your other problems and now you’re about to run off. What else do you have to do?]
Grabbing Gungnir, I called Kraken out of the storage space. “Do the Hungry Ones ring a bell? That’s a big ass problem that certainly deserves the lion’s share of my attention. What about witches huh? I killed a big one not too long ago, and I’m not dumb enough to think that more won’t come.”
Kraken snorted at me. [Oh get off your high horse, you know you don’t have to worry about the Hungry Ones for at least another century, sheesh. They’ll contend with all of the other big powers in the regions for a while before they manage to actually start extending their cloud cover south. I know you didn’t forget Reeanth telling you about the modus operandi of the Hungry Ones.] Kraken said, doing his version of rolling his eyes which looked rather comical considering he only had one which made his entire body move. [You’ve already got plans figured out, and most of the legwork for the pre-building is already done, so what is your problem, really?]
My blank stare wavered as I looked at nothing. [Oh, your prisoners,] Kraken realized. Squinting at me for a moment, he looked off in the direction of the cemetery for the not so dead dwarves and minotaurs. [Yeah, you’re going to have to make some tough decisions there. You could always end them and feed them to the forest. Lyra would agree that they would make great fertilizer. Or, you could mindwipe them and give them to the human tribe as work slaves. OR, you could be REALLY dumb and set them free.]
I chuckled at the last one. That went out the window when I killed most of the dwarves and their nephilim. The minotaurs, maybe, maybe I could forge an alliance with them. Giving them land and getting them established further south of me might actually work as a sentient-based barrier to really anything trying to come north. I shook my head, discarding that idea because that would be just way too much work.
Grabbing Gungnir, I started to head out before another idea popped into my head. Why not set the minotaurs free but plant the desire to ally with the human group in their heads while they’re in stasis? Then, hopefully, they might form a bigger group, something a bit unconventional but powerful enough that they would serve as a decent distraction for myself. If they build a city or town just the right amount of distance away, nobody would come to my forest looking for me, and with mind magic, none of the minotaurs would even remember me.
[That won’t work dummy,] my familiar said, cutting into my reverie. [Mostly immune to magic, remember?] Fuck, he’s right. [But, they are kind of like cows. If you can convince the bull to head in a certain direction, then the herd will follow.]
“Fine, I got it, convince the shaman cows and the cow people will follow cow instincts, am I getting this right?” I asked sardonically. “I’m talking about sentients like they’re cows, actual cows.”
[It’s because they are! The same way that goblins are the magically perverted union between primordial cave elves and a dwarven descendant of a dragon when a mad wizard decided to do bloodline experiments uncounted millenia ago. Minotaurs are dumb, and not generally, but most. Their shamans literally hog all of their brain cells while the rest of the herd holds all the muscle.]
“Great, my familiar is a specie-ist, is that the right term?”
Now it was Kraken who was glaring at me. [Scions of Order care not for such pathetic distinctions! At least we didn’t go to war because we had different shades of melanin in our skin like you humans! Sheesh, every time, on every planet, you all fight over the dumbest things. The only thing that matters, overall, and don’t you forget this, it’s power. Power matters. Equality as you believe it, only works when you have a roughly equivalent baseline of capability. Humans had that until magic returned, and trust me, dragons don’t give a damn what species you are. They just eat you.]
“I don’t need a lecture fuckface, it was a JOKE!” I replied, rolling my eyes and heading out the door. “Good grief, sounds like you hate humans more than you hate each other.”
[I don’t hate humans, they add more to the Arcane Emporium’s store of Knowledge than any race, even the dwarves who are a close second. The Aelves are content with their power and grace and tend not to innovate, especially when they hit their second millenia.]
I took his words with a grain of salt as I kept walking, but what stopped me cold just before I reached the doorway was a vision that came out of nowhere and slammed into my brain. It was over in less time than it takes to blink, but the effects of it shook me.
[You’re restless because there is something unfinished, you just didn’t know exactly what was missing.] Holding Gungnir up to the light of the evening sun, I waited as Kraken popped out and then I grabbed him.
“Explain,” I growled, bringing his singular eye to be two inches in front of my own. Scanning him and myself with magic, I looked for any irregularities. No injuries or anything malicious that I could tell, but the strange vision couldn’t really be described with words, it was more a compact eye-fuckery of feelings. Loss, heartache, indecision, loneliness, unfulfilled searching . . . it was Kraken. Those were his feelings, those were how he felt in the space between Realms without an anchor.
[I’m a Scion of Order, but I am also a spirit-familiar, your spirit-familiar. Maa’lik gave me to you and completed the first part of our bond but it remains unfinished. I can do so much, help so much more, but not the way I am right now.] Kraken explained. [We only exist in the loosest sense in the word without a mortal, a fleshling, or something to keep us here. Even the Knowledge Kings, the first and most powerful of the Scions of Order require a bond to be in the physical realm.]
“Hold up, what are they bonded to to stick around for so long?”
[Dragons, World-Tortoises, phoenixes, Elder Unicorns . . .]
Well shit. This was just weird, almost too weird. And like any good human, I’m inherently distrustful of things that I don’t understand. Pulling out a meal cube from Gungnir, I downed it with some conjured water and walked outside. Standing in the clearing in front of Yggdrasil, I willed Gungnir into spear form and planted the base into the dirt.
“Everest!” I called, outloud and mentally. “Is Meliad awake yet?”
A soft rumbling no that reverberated from all directions was my answer. “Aight, make sure no one disturbs me for at least a full day. I got some internal therapy to do.” I took his silence as a yes. Sitting cross-legged in front of Gungnir, I closed my eyes and took my time calming down the biological rhythms of my body, using a bit of applied magic to cheat the standard meditation progress. Using my blend of power, I brought myself to my mindspace, or soulspace, whatever it is where my visual representation of my soul was.
“Hey soul-tree!” I called, standing in front of the magical visualization of my magic. “How’s SAW treatin’ you? Can’t be bad right? I haven’t gotten and alerts from the alarm protocol.”
My anthropomorphized arcane soul shook his head, stroking the knot of magitech in its chest.
“Pretty cool in here! I’ve never seen a sorcerer’s soul before!” Kraken’s voice scared the crap out of me. This time, I physically heard it instead of mentally. “Of course dummy, I’m a spirit, and you’re communing with your own spirit, so it sounds like hearing me physically instead of mentally.”
Right, the day’s getting weirder.
“Well Squiddy,” I said, gesturing around. “Take a good look. Behold, this is soul-tree me. And that right there in his chest, is my version of Iron Man. It’s some Alpha Centauri magitech that I stole and took. The bonding process is slow because it used to be a sorcerer killer. Once I get this figured out, I’ll have a banging suit of armor and more power than I know what to do with.”
Kraken, who had been flying around my soul-tree, inspecting it, halted and blasted over to me. “YOU HAVE A WHAT IN YOUR SOUL?”
“Relax, it’s harmless,” I said, trying to get him to calm down. “It’s been purged of pretty much all programming since I couldn’t remove the bad stuff piecemeal ya know?”
“I can see that! But that’s not what I meant. I’ve been working your stupid armor trying to get it enhanced with Heavenly rune against scrying and undeath, and you’ve had the perfect material to work with the entire time?! This . . . . this . . . THING is beyond useful and you haven’t even let me touch it?”
My blank look made Kraken turn a deeper shade of purple. “BOND WITH ME YOU IGNORANT HUMAN!” His tone wasn’t really angry, it was exasperation, as if I had had the answers to some test the whole time and didn’t know it. It was the tone of the tired parent telling a know it all child why ice cream is not dinner for the eighth time. And I wasn’t falling for it.
“Reasons Kraken, I need reasons, not emotion. Explain to me why I should. What would that do for me, why should I do it?” My voice got louder as I went on. “This kind of thing is new to me, I didn’t grow up in a world where magic was freaking real, so spit it out.”
Kraken dissolved into small pieces and reconstituted slowly before speaking. It was his way of showing the lack of patience he was currently dealing with. “Magic frays the mind. It’s different across species and individuals, some it drives them mad, and others just a little bonkers. Your Consciousness Sorcery definitely helps you in that department but familiars act as a buffer between the mind and the magic when necessary. No, it doesn’t separate you from it as it is tied to your soul, but you aren’t actually made of magic. Not necessarily, which that fact introduces a sort of spiritual friction,” Kraken explained, propping himself up on the leg root of my soul-tree. “It’s why all of society views magic users as crazy, because to some degree they are. Now tangibly, if we finished our bond, then I could finish your suit of armor by tomorrow morning, regulate and fix your programming for the empty Centauri tech, and even be a solid fountain of ideas for you. I could use your sorceries as starting points and just create a giant list of possible solutions and ideas for you to work with.”
I stroked my chin, noting the sizable beard growth and wondered why in the world that would be something I noticed inside my head. I mean, I’m not really here, or am I, this soul place is weird. Maybe it’s more real, who knows. Refocusing on the matter at hand, Kraken hadn’t even stopped.
“From what I’ve seen from the memories you’ve shown me, I could function as a director of spells from inside Gungnir, forming complicated offensive reactions with SAW, enhance your ability to multi-task to the nth degree, and even work on separate projects while you’re doing something else. Bonding with me will allow me to use your sorceries. I could be making a workforce of earth golems if you put me and this spear next to one of the solar panels while you work on the icebound prisoners. Shoot, I can even act as a second repository for extra mana, the list goes on.”
“So how does it work,” I asked. “And I get that it’s good for me, but what does it do for you?”
“I gain knowledge. I gain power over time. I evolve up into the Scionic hierarchy. I get to live. TO LIVE! Without you, I am cut off. I don’t get to taste or touch or feel anything! Do you know how much that sucks!” he ranted. Generating a hologram of a table covered in platters of fruits, he looked at it longingly and then back at me. “The worst part is, I can remember being solid. I remember what I’m missing. I can’t wait for your jungle of delicacies, the forest of fruits, the symphony of smoothies that awaits!”
This, this I could understand. This was honesty, true desire that had the ringing tone of truth. Everybody is selfish in some way, or maybe a better way of putting it is that everyone has self-interest. It is what keeps us alive, even charity is a form of self-interest as it makes us feel good. The best self-interest is when it lines up with someone else’s, the farmer who needs a shovel and trades his extra produce to someone who’s hungry and doesn’t need the shovel. Self-interest drives everyone, but mutual self-interest builds everything.
“Fine,” I said, a small smile peeking out. “I get it, I accept. Bond with me, as long it doesn’t mean we have to do anything freaky.”
With a whoop of joy, Kraken spun around and dove into the glistening Centauri orb in my soul-tree’s chest. [It’s a perfect fit! You won’t regret this!] The silvery lines began to glow as Kraken sank deeper into the runed recesses. My soul-tree let out a soft sigh, a pressure I hadn’t known but sometimes felt lifted off of me, but that was it, no earth shattering change, no crazy realizations or boosts in power.
Reading my face, Kraken laughed, “Most of the work was done weeks ago when the angel bonded us, and that wasn’t much work to begin with. You just had to actually accept it. Now, I’m going to get used to everything here and I’ll get my own little tattoo that mirrors your soul tree and then we can rock and roll.”
Finally accepting that my life was far beyond the scope of normal, I ate a meal cube and went to bed, resting far better than I had in a long while.