Leaving was a relief albeit a sad one.

The children were an absolute joy to be around as their innocence gave them no preconceptions on how to ‘properly’ use magic. I got to watch as several of them called out for friends in the woods one random ass day and had freaking animal familiars gladly accept their innocent calls for friendship. By my count, three mountain lions, a lizard-spider, and two big ass birds bonded to the children much to their guardians’ shock. I might have also contributed a bit to the overall level of chaos by making a few more plant, water, and earth wands for the kids and swearing them to secrecy. Before I actually left via hoverboard down the river, I saw little clusters of stone castles instead of sandcastles on the riverbank and a couple tiny treehouses hidden pretty well unless you had vision in the magical spectrum to do all the hard work.

Getting home was a breeze though, surfing just above the waves without a cloud in sight. Gungnir was out as I hadn’t forgotten about the harpies’ tendencies to send freaking wyverns as a welcome party, but the overall mood was good. I had done my good deed for the year. Whistling, that’s something I don’t recommend when traveling eighty miles an hour down the river. The wind just rips it right out of your mouth but damn I tried.

Finally arriving at the clearing in front of the Hole, I hopped off my board and yelled out, “Hey Everest! Is Meliad out yet?”

A grunt I took to mean ‘no’ rumbled out. “Well fuck,” I muttered, taking out a meal cube and downing it.

[Hey, before you get started on some more projects we need to get some schooling done,] Kraken said just as I sat down in the soft grass. [This’ll be quicker and easier if you just join me. I got questions for you too.]

Closing my eyes, I dropped off into a meditative state to join Kraken in my upgraded soul space. “Education for what?” I asked, looking around. There were more TVs here than last time and the space was a bit bigger with various holographic statues decorating the place. “And what the hell are those?”

“These, my good friend, are possible runic tattoos for Glyph Blades and some for you as well, and over there are my latest incarnations of your armor. Over there we have some viable long term and short term plans we need to discuss but most importantly, your enemies. We need to talk about them, but first I have some questions,” My spirit familiar’s tentacles crossed like a teacher dealing with a smart but lazy student.

I waved for him to go on.

“Fine,” Kraken said. “What the HELL were you thinking? Giving all those humans so much goddamn shit?! Weapons, I understand, and maybe some solar panels but all the other stuff too?”

I looked him in his big watery eye. “Damn it Kraken, I’m an over-gifter, and I get that that’s no excuse but come on man, there were kids there!” I looked to the sky and then sighed. A wave of emotion crashed through me. Sticking my finger in Kraken’s eye, I raised my voice. “KIDS! Children are the future, and yes, now they have more than what they need to survive, but I don’t want them to just survive. I want them to thrive!”

Kraken started to speak but I cut him off. “I am a sorcerer. A powerful one too. It didn’t really cost me anything other than time to do what I did. And time is something which we both know I have plenty of.”

Kraken huffed at me, conceding the point. “I don’t understand the fleshy attachment to one’s young. Absolutely preposterous that they can’t function without a maternal unit for years. Fine, well, if that’s the way humans do things then who am I to gainsay such inanity?”

Shaking his head, Kraken puffed himself up. “I have basic information that you seem to lack on the other subject, due to you growing up in a magic-less environment. As such, I’ll assume you don’t know much. Let’s start with your greatest long term threats as of now. To be clear, it’s not the deities you’ve tangled with before due to the Angelic cloaking runes hiding you from their sight. We’re gonna talk about Liches.”

Conjuring up a footrest as I was inside of my own head, because why not, I leaned back. “Aren’t those undead wizards that live forever and build zombie armies? I asked.

“Well yes, but you completely missed the most important word in your own sentence, ‘wizard’. Liches are undead ‘wizards’,” Kraken stressed. “They are not sorcerers, they do not have the instinctive command over elements that sorcerers do. Why are Liches the way they are?”

I shrugged. “Dude, I don’t know, I just need to know how to kill them, right?”

“Wrong, it does matter. Liches are wizards that willingly hang on after death, usually by a necromantic ritual that binds their soul to a crystal or set of crystals called a phylactery. They also may keep their original body, using magic to strengthen it far beyond what any normal living body would be able to tolerate. Now, Liches usually become Liches because they’ve run out of time. They couldn’t get to their dream of either eternal life or incredible power before death.” Kraken lectured, waving one tentacle and bringing several holograms of Liches into view.

The first hologram looked mostly normal, a human but with skin colored a mottled gray instead of normal peachy color and the eyes were black. The middle rendition looked more ugly, a corpse that had spent some time in the sun, the flesh drawn tight and it looked like it wouldn’t be winning any flexibility contests. The hunched over posture and gnarled hand spoke of years getting used to being undead. The last one was definitely the scariest, a black cloak hiding a mainly bone skeleton with bits of tied flesh adorning the joints, blue orbs of fire where the eyes should be and odd growths of bones sprouting in random places.

“Liches are wizards,” Kraken said promptly as I took in the disgusting sights. “And . . . the reason that matters is because wizards, for lack of a better term, are what you would call OCD. They are obsessive. They are compulsive in their wants and thoughts. And they are diseased in the head. Or is it a disorder? Moving on, Liches obsess over power or how things work beyond reason, following their compulsions methodically until it becomes the only goal that matters. Wizards plan, and when an OCD wizard hasn’t reached their goal, they hang on and make the decision to become a Lich. And what happens when an obsessive wizard becomes a Lich with infinite amounts of time? They can plan and achieve pretty much anything at this point.”

“So you’re telling me,” I said, trying to make sure that I got the picture from this fragmented explanation. “Liches are wizards who couldn’t reach some goal in their life and decided to pursue that goal into the next life as well? And also that because their compulsive need to reach their goal was so strong, they willingly became one of the undead just so they could reach it?”

“And?” Kraken said as I worked through the implications.

“And . . . once they become a Lich, they turn their OCD, which initially led them to become a Lich, into strength which they channel into learning magic far better than any mortal wizard simply due to the amount of time they can practice it.” I kept talking as I followed the unfolding logic. “So comparatively, a Lich could work on a spell for a hundred years to perfectly understand it in every scenario because he’s immortal so who cares about a hundred years. But a normal wizard will just learn how to cast a fireball and be content?”

“Exactly!” Kraken said, conjuring a pointer stick and poking his hologram. “Liches are not just feared, they’re also respected. They more often than not are the forerunners of magical research because they have the time to take the time to do the research. Most of the entire discipline of alchemy was pioneered by one Lich, Eugen the Poisoner. He wasn’t nearly as bad as most Liches, he didn’t really make undead hordes and prey on the living. Eugen simply worked in a private hospital and experimented for two millennia to make the most insane discoveries!”

“Huh,” I grunted. “So this means that I have to either plan like a Lich, which isn’t probable, or fight like a meteor sent from God if I want to win?”

“Exactly,” agreed my familiar. “You probably won’t win the planning battle. They tend to plan decades in advance. Short of nuking the area, victory will be out of reach for you.”

“So what do Liches fear then? I imagine with all that time on their hands, they’d have spells to shield them from sunlight and pretty much any kind of magic.”

Kraken’s eyelids for his single eye creased up like a smile as he didn’t actually have a mouth. “I’m so glad you asked. That’s the exact right question. What do Liches fear? The answer is nothing. Liches are still technically mortal, which means that angels don’t get to mess with them unless they start summoning demon princes, which has happened before. But other than some kind of angelic intervention, wytchfire and dragonfire and maybe some seriously packed holy water would have an effect on a Lich.”

“Huh,” I grunted, taking in the conversation and pairing with the generalized holograms in front of me. “Got it, Liches, bad news, yup. But you said, ‘enemies’. What else am I supposed to be worried about?”

“Short term, not much other than that,” Kraken answered, waving his arm and replacing the holograms with a new set of images. “Long term, warlocks.”

“Bet I’m not going to like this answer either.”

The three images were now instead showing two, one normal looking male with long hair with some pretty wicked tattoos and the very stereotypical demon towering over him from behind. The demon red scales, curving bull horns protruding from his forehead, and a sickly red and green fire burning in his aura.

Kraken pointed at the human first. “This is a warlock. Generally speaking, they start out as someone who has just enough magical talent to be dangerous to normal beings but not enough to threaten someone like you without a lot of planning or backup. And next to him, is an example of a standard demon.”

“So we put the two together which makes a warlock right?” Putting some of the pieces together wasn’t really hard but nothing is ever easy nowadays.

“Yup, but the magic user makes a contract with the demon, and it is that act that makes a warlock. They can bargain for power, sorcery, teachings, meldings, life, pretty much anything that the demon has and the magic user does not. And because there are so many kinds of demons, not all of which are diametrically opposed to humanity, there’s no telling what kinds of contracts you’ll run into.”

I held a hand up, stopping the conversation for a moment. “Let’s focus on the short term now, what can you tell me about harpies? I mean, I already know how to kill’em, but where can I find them? Other than a few mountain peaks around here there’s really nowhere for them to-”

I smacked myself in the head. “FUCKING FLOATING ISLANDS HUH?”

“Got it in one.”

Taking a deep breath, mentally since I was already inside of my own head, I had Gungnir pull up a map of the area as far as we had recorded. Norn and Tuki along with his smaller friends had helped to contribute navigation data for the maps. From what we could tell, there were several floating islands in the area by which I mean at least four. The closest one was fifty miles away and several dotted red lines criss-crossed the sky of my map.

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“Lemme guess, predicted flight patterns of moving floating islands? How’d you get that info?”

Kraken looked at me smugly. “There are trees up on those islands, so I used your Nature Sorcery to tap into Yggdrasil and got a pretty good picture of any area with flora. Apparently floating islands count too! Wanna know the weirdest part? Some floating islands have actual rivers running through them! The water just evaporates at the edge of the island as if it’s not fully a part of this world! Which leads the islands to having their own magically contained weather systems!”

“That’s too cool for me to blow up, which means I have to find the exact right island and invade it. Troublesome.”

The holograms changed again, this time to show me harpies. I recoiled at the sight as Kraken happily got to the explanation. “The ugly looking one on the left here is the typical harpy. Observe the avian features, a beak for a mouth, the arms have full wing function while maintaining the required dexterity for the hands, the hunchback for extra muscle used for carrying off heavy prey, and the grunginess to just complete the nasty image.”

“Well what’s with the hot one?” I asked, pointing at the other image. “It’s like night and day, ugly ass feral looking monster over here and the supermodel angel version over there!”

“The harpy on the right is the magic user,” Kraken chuckled. “You know it’s not an angel because its presence doesn’t actually burn mortals and they don’t rant about hunting demons 24/7, but this particular version or evolution of harpy can use magic. Control of air and light are typical while the less common ones are full-on Storm Riders. We’re not sure if they’re attractive due to being able to weave illusions or if that is how they actually look.”

“I’m not gonna get close enough to a damn harpy to find out,” I declared, looking back and forth between the two. “Most likely a trap used to lure in unsuspecting idiots. And I assume when you say ‘Storm Rider’ that means those harpies are weather manipulators?”

“Yup.”

“Fuck.”

We spent the rest of the afternoon discussing different kinds of enemies that I might possibly run into. All of this data was pulled from the parts of Rath’s brain that Kraken had been able to decipher so far; there’s a lot of good information still in there but that hunk of brain matter was its own bestiary. The funniest part about it was that the list of creatures in there was divided up into two categories: tasty and yucky, because that’s how dragons apparently view the world.

What ended up pissing me off about the information that Kraken had deciphered after the main discussion was the bit that he skimmed over because he thought it ‘wasn’t important’. The little bitch had information about wizard towers! And the more I learned about them and their capabilities the more I freaking wanted one which led to another argument. Ideas clicked together in my head as if they were made for each other, just missing that one crucial puzzle piece that Kraken had held onto.

“You don’t need it! You’re a sorcerer with genuine Chaos bona fides! What in the world would you need with an overcomplicated wizard’s tower!”

“Every kid wants a wizard's tower! Correction, every MAN wants a freaking wizard’s tower! How the hell did you not know this?” I screamed, dancing around. “AND, I already know the PERFECT FUCKING PLACE FOR IT!”

As I was still inside of my mind/soul space with Kraken, I grabbed the mental fabric generating the scenery and twisted it. Blazing heat hit the both of us like a Saharan sandstorm, the sun so bright that it hurt to look around even though the rushing river cutting through the dry rocky landscape begged for someone to jump in it.

I stood in the mentally projected scenery and grinned, grabbing Kraken and forcing him to look around. “Welcome to the ass end of Arizona! Where the Colorado river makes the arid piece of shit land just bearable enough to make the fishing worth it!”

“Uhg, I hate it,” Kraken grumbled, shielding his eye from the brutal sunlight. “Why did you bring us here? Out of all places?”

I couldn’t keep the grin off my face. “Ok! It’s just for shits and giggles, but I want this to be your side project! Picture this!” Waving my hand, I forced the mindscape to bend to my will, a giant tower made out of textured sunstone mixed with runed slate and obsidian bursting from out of the riverbed. Beautifully contoured solar panels extended from the top of the tower like flower petals that had sex with dragon wings, crystal cannons shaped like spears jutting out from every side, and an oddly twisted cactus tree spiking out of the top.

“What in Abominable Hells is that monstrosity?!” Kraken gasped. “It’s HIDEOUS!”

“Oh calm down, it’s just concept art right now!” I said, shaking my familiar while pointing his eye at the various features. My mind raced as I spoke. “I’m thinking sunstone solar panels supported with obsidian and slate ambient heat converters will boost the solar power gathering to the max as Arizona is literally the desert. The cactus plant is the Yggdrasil root that I’ll have to magic up to survive better in the desert. Those are crystal focusing lasers to be my siege defense weaponry and the little satellites in the cracks will be mana sensors or soundwave blasters! And in the base . . .” I continued, waving my hand again so that everything turned into a black and white computer design view. “The base will have the largest crystal battery that I’ll ever make. This can be my jump point or main base to set up for assaulting the poles!”

Kraken waved two of his tentacles, returning the mindscape back into a bachelor pad. “Dude, that was the dumbest shit. Wizard towers are supposed to be hidden fortresses carved into cliff faces or enchanted into the middle of massive trees, not out in the open point blank in your face eyesore!”

Crossing my arms and glaring at my familiar didn’t carry the weight of authority that I hoped it would. Childish, yes, but usually effective. Waving my arms again, I brought the scene back but with some crazy modifications. This time, five stout wizard towers about two stories high and sixty feet across sat in a pentagram formation connected by sandstone looking walls. In the center, connected by rooftop bridges, towered a six story wizard spire with a tree poking out of it that towered above the flat landscape.

“Fine,” I grouched, a bit peeved at the lack of enthusiasm. “You wanna argue? Work on that! A wizard castle! Complete with solar gathering walls in a magic formation and a Yggdrasil core so I can send ARMIES to the North Pole if I wanted to! Whatcha think about that?” Adding some more finishing touches to the blueprint, I made sunstone spikes grow out of the upper parts of the walls while the walls themselves smoothed out so that nothing could get a grip to scale them. More and more rune shapes colored black began to appear on the walls as I mentally wrote ‘durability, solar and heat siphoning, storage’ all across my castle.

“This is a waste of time and resources!”

I genuinely laughed at Kraken. “Come on man, I’m a sorcerer with some pretty good picks for power. The only thing this is going to cost me is time, and I’ve got plenty of that. The sun will provide all the power I need.”

Kraken floated out of my grasp and grumped. “What happened to one portal tree and a small field of solar panels? That plan was nice and simple and above all, EASY!”

I started counting off my fingers. “Yeah, but you forgot to factor in one possibility. What if we simply get our butts kicked? What if we get our asses handed to us and we have to retreat? I’d rather retreat to a tricked-out wizard bunker with enough firepower to level a continent.”

The argument finally came to a close when I bargained to let Kraken use Rath’s brain to help with some of the mental load of designing all the things I wanted to do with the wizard’s tower. The way he explained it made sense, that the more of Rath’s brain that he unlocked and deciphered, the more he could use it as a biological computer. It also hastened the overall decrypting process as the unlocked portions of the brain worked to bring the rest of it into submission. The estimation I got was about another two weeks before we could fully dive in and get everything we needed from it and by that time all of the tower schematics would be done too.

And since I was able to put his lazy spiritual ass to work on the things I wanted done, this allowed me to work on my as of late favorite pastime, experimentation. The flesh golem experiment seemed to be a roaring success once I managed to work out the minor bugs, and the ammo maker for the magic rifles as a proof of concept held up pretty well. This means that automation of magical creation and enchantment is possible. What I didn’t show the residents of that little town is how the creation process actually worked, because honestly, I cheated. Inside of the machine was an example of the finished product, one of each kind of bullet, and then moving the switch put the ‘conjure a copy’ rune pattern over the bullet and turning it on pushed power into the diagram creating another bullet. This would go on until it either ran out of power or someone turned it off.

That simple concept worked for simple products, but the next step was to add another layer of complexity. I was thinking of making earth elementals composed of diamond and sunstone but held together with basic dirt. The summoning of the elementals themselves would not be part of the automation process, but I could make a machine that would make all of the bodies for me.

To start, I figured that I’d follow the old model in which I make the first body and the machine copies it to make more, but this time there’d be a layering process. I exited my mindspace and headed for the Lab where I etched schematics on the granite workbench.

“Sunstone core with an extra large but portable crystal battery,” I muttered, bringing my vision to life. “Diamond focusing crystals for eyes with sunstone blades hidden in the arms. Can’t forget the binding runes on the core to give the dirt body some cohesion.”

An hour's worth of drawing and conjuring later and I had my first test earth golem, roughly four feet tall and four feet wide, the body resembled a basic cube given limbs. I probably went overboard in the dirt to precious stone ratio but sometimes more is actually more.

Conjuring a small flat crystal square, I began to input a complete picture, a mental matrix of the structure of the golem into it and then set it off to the side. I planned for my conjuration machine to be a 3-D printer and the crystal plate to function as the harddrive with the blueprints of what’s being made. Taking another couple minutes, I made twenty blank crystal plates for later as I thought about all the things I’ve made that can be put on them down the road.

Rubbing my hands together in anticipation, I got to work. First, I conjured a crystal battery block the size of an old school VCR as the first step as this would be the base for the entire production line. Then I placed the sunstone golem template crystal on top and shaped the battery to grow up just enough to form the edges of a slot. On the back side of the crystal, I conjured a coating of silver to function as the governor so that no power surges would blow the entire device and then formed thumb-sized sockets for metal wires that would connect to whatever power source I decided to use.

Using Gungnir as my test battery, I conjured copper and braided it into a thick wire to which I tied one end around the crystal speartip of Gungnir and the other I molded into the socket of the conjuration machine. Realizing that I had a spacing problem because I didn’t have a conveyor belt or an actual place to put all of the conjured golem bodies, I formed somewhat bendable wire arms that extended out to where the conjuration process would actually occur.

When I had finished, Kraken examined my work, did his usual displeased huff and added some more commands to the matrix to automate the process to make five bodies at a time and then move the arms to make five more. As I had never gotten into programming, I was quite happy that he did that for me. Although it did backfire on him when I gave him the mental blueprints for all of my projects and asked him to put them in each one of the crystal records so we could automate things in the future. The only thing we really had a consensus on was that we could probably get Everest or Lyra to do the elemental summoning themselves instead of us as we provided the bodies.

“How is this going to help you again?” Kraken asked, his voice exasperated at my ever evolving requirements for the job.

“You can’t have a freaking sunstone castle without sunstone elementals guarding the damn thing Kraken!” I yelled, as my maniacal plans were coming together. “And if I need an army, then I can just portal them straight to the battlefield, after I make a base out of ice of course. Cause what sorcerer doesn’t want a badass holy water ice fortress huh?”

“You can’t be serious!”

I snickered. Of course I was. Putting aside one container of pulverized Nephilim as a snack for Spot for whenever he decides he needs something a bit more exotic, I drew up even more plans to have a fortress built out of ice and stone to be my first forward operating base up in northern Canada. The general idea was to have my water elementals do most of the heavy lifting for that and the obvious cheat is that I’m going to meld another World Tree seedling with a big ass pinetree. The central part of the plan revolved around using the pinetree version of Yggdrasil as a pipeline of power to siphon energy from the overabundant nature of the sweltering sun from the Arizona desert. The Nephilim bits would be a perfect deterrent against evil undead for obvious reasons and putting that into the very structure of an ice fortress would make the entire building anathema to them!

“He’s insane!” Kraken moaned mostly to himself. “Out of all the new humans that rejoined the universe and I had to get the absolute worst pick of the bunch!”

“I heard that!”

Saving the other half of the Nephilim bits for myself was mainly to cover my own ass. I hadn’t forgotten that the Antarctic stood a solid chance of being an undead stronghold. I wasn’t as worried about that one though as there’s no landbridge to another continent as far as I know, but the Arctic pretty much has its greedy fingers in every damn pie.

After another week of driving Kraken up the wall as we argued, I mean discussed, all of the plans and how to make them perfect, there wasn’t much left to do but the doin’ itself.