And off I went, cruising away in my hoverboard straight towards the disparate coolness of the Colorado river. I couldn’t really help myself as I deliberately headed there way too freaking fast, pulling up and shooting in the sky at an angle as I unfurled the metal wings on my back to get a bit more air. Turning around in midair, I executed two flips and halfway belly flopped down into the river.
I took the rest of the day to relax and hoverboard around, returning to the river each time to cool off from the oppressive heat. Kraken’s work was slowly, but steadily growing as he didn’t need sleep at all but I slept like a baby on top of the river, nestled out in the middle of it supported by my Water Sorcery.
The morning greeted me with all the glaring shine of the American Midwest, mainly West more than Mid at this point, but it was grand nonetheless. Conferring with Kraken to make sure everything was on schedule, I skated across the river’s surface and up onto the bank. While my familiar was working on a building that had an emphasis on fortification, I figured that I would build a house closer to the river but this one would be based on comfort. I looked around and saw the barest bit of ritually-grown sunstone peaking out just above the surface of the earth near Gungnir, the particular nature of that magical rock would also allow for an incredible intake of power as a parallel to the solar panels at the edges of the crystal circles.
My home though, the home away from home, now that was going to be marble.
The first thing I did was set up two more solar panels, the first on a rock sticking out of the river, which I shaped the top of the rock to hold the panel a bit better, and the other panel was just off to the side near me up past the sandy part of the bank. After activating both of them, I forged a loose channel with each of them so that they would just constantly pour the mana straight into my own personal reserves of power.
“Desert home, home in the desert,” I muttered, looking over the sad stretch of land that was to be transformed into a little paradise. With the river close by, nothing was out of reach comfort-wise.
First, I began banishing the dirt around my feet with my Earth Sorcery, forming a big pit. When I was little, my parents took me to the Luray Caverns in Virginia in the middle of the summer and I couldn’t help but wonder with my small child brain why in the world it was so cool down there when it was almost a hundred degrees at the mouth of the cave. My father told me that the earth is the best insulator, especially when you give it some distance to work.
So I formed my own pit, the basis for a Hobbit home. The next hour or two rounded out the general design, basically a buried yurt-shaped structure made out of stone with layers and layers of dirt covering the top of it for insulation. The next two hours were spent carefully designing an underground channel cut into the bedrock so that when I opened the dam, the river would flow into my home, form a fresh pool of constantly circulating water, and then flow out. This would give me a place to sleep, the ultimate water bed with my Water Sorcery, but a quick way to escape if I ever needed it. Few things could match me in the water.
For the luxury requirements for a home of comfort, I got busy with the runes of water and cooling. They decorated the inside of my home, but were especially clustered along with a kinetic current converter rune placed at the bottom of the carved river channel. Using a braid of conjured silver, I linked the magical hydroelectric generator to a couple sunstones for light which were placed around. A flex of will would brighten up the room or darken it whenever I wanted. Ten minutes of conjuring and shaping stone gave me a nice set of stairs runed to always be cool even with the desert heat, the stairs leading to the thick stone doorway.
Kraken spat down our mental link as I relaxed for the first time in a few weeks. [Or you could be making weapons, or golem bodies, or something useful instead of having me do all of this shit! Gracious heavens, it doesn’t even look comfortable in there yet!]
[What would you rather be doing?] I sent back, a bit of sarcasm letting Kraken know how I felt about his objections. We had agreed on this particular plan as he, a spirit, would not mess up any of the delicate measurements that might compromise the conjured structure that he was building. [I need a place where the heat won’t eventually kill me. And that fort won’t have the cooling rune work in it until the very end, right now, it’s a straight up heat trap.]
[I know what I said, what I’m saying now is that it’s BORING!]
[Look, I’ll help you out when Spot gets here, and at the pace that dog can run, it should be in about three days at the most unless he gets distracted.]
A grunt of begrudging affirmation was all I got, which I took to mean that maybe I could get some work done in peace. Downing a meal cube and a bit of conjured water, I threw myself into my work. The sun had set for at least an hour before I had my bachelor pad ready. The magical water bed, a bunch of mini fruit and veggie plants tastefully hanging on the walls with runes that routinely conjured the right amount of water above them. Up on the wall off to the right, I had drawn out a couple possible plans that I could easily accomplish here in the desert, which I thought about long into the night.
*******
Kraken was still at it when I woke up which I had to double check as it didn’t look like there was much or any progress until he sent me a mental screenshot of the progress from the below-ground view of things. Several of the big batteries in the first layer were done and the crystal rings connecting the solar panels were sprouting gold wires to tie the inner and outer circles together at different points. He sent me another screenshot of the bird’s eye view where the gold wire was also going to be layered in such a way that it actually formed a giant rune of life. The rune itself was buried under the first so as to not draw attention from above but soon the sunstone fortress would do that all on its own.
My goal for today was something I hadn’t tried before. Today was a day of experimentation in a new direction. From what I know, and I made sure to run through my memories with Consciousness Sorcery just to be sure, there are trees that actually thrive in the desert.
The American desert is rife with small thorny bushes and big cacti, but the big trees such as the baobab trees live in Africa and Australia. That tree would be perfect for my purposes, but I need another tree as well, a hybrid one actually. Willow trees, if left alone, can become gigantic, but they tend to do best near a river. I wanted to see if I could merge a willow tree with its cousin the desert willow and then plant it on top of my nice bachelor pad. The nearness of the river would give it what it would need to survive and the hybrid characteristics of the desert willow would give it the chops to survive the harsh climate of Arizona.
But first, I had to test out my Nature Sorcery. Conjuring stone and water was second nature to me now, but I mainly used my Nature Sorcery as a way to shape and manipulate plants. I hadn’t gone full mad scientist with this facet yet as I simply hadn’t had the time. Now, one of the things that I had noticed is that the efficiency of magic goes up the more you know about it, and that extends to sorcery as well albeit in a lesser manner. But knowing stuff about water and stone as well as having a general education on it definitely allowed me to manipulate it more with less of a strain on my personal mana reserves.
Plants, I’ve never been really good with plants.
Sitting in my underground house, I held a simple acorn in my hand. Now, it definitely is not the plant I wanted, but I needed to start somewhere familiar. Fully diving into my Nature Sorcery, I groped around for my instincts, trying to find out the limits of what I could easily do.
Could I just straight up conjure another acorn? With one in front of me, turns out the answer is yes, and it didn’t really cost much energy either. Taking another breath, I focused on a willow seed. I spent about nine years of my childhood in North Carolina and the house across the street had a monstrous willow tree with branches that stretched out shading the entire property on which it stood. Many hours were spent climbing up and down that beast as I slew dragons and fought pirates. The hanging tendrils of the willow tree were covered in little seeds, sometimes I can still smell the freshness of it after a rain. Latching on to that image, I pulled with my Nature Sorcery, a small pop heralding the arrival of a freshly conjured willow seed.
“Score!” I yelled, jumping up, tightly yet gently clutching the fragile seed. Carefully setting it off to the side near a sunstone lamp, I sat down again and channeled my excitement, carefully picturing the baobab tree. Now, I had never been near one, never climbed up its thick trunk or eaten its fruit. All I had ever seen were pictures of it on the internet, heard videos on Youtube about chains of people linking arms to wrap themselves around the tree all the while gasping at the age of the baobab tree. Some of them can live up to over two thousand years. My knowledge, although bereft of personal ties and experience, gave my Nature Sorcery enough of a limb to work with. The energy cost was much, much higher as the tree itself is most likely a rarity but I did remember my uncle telling me that some crazy gardener in California was known for tending some baobab trees.
A small pop and a little multi-colored nugget of a seed appeared in my hand. “Holy shit! It worked!”
The little kernel of a seed just a bit hair smaller than a child’s marble rolled around in my hand. Feelings of grand potential and long sought after majesty wafted off the prized embodiment of what could be thousands of years of stored potential life. It was almost too small in its stature for me to believe that some of the oldest and thickest of trees get their start from such a humble beginning.
Closing my hand around the seed, I gently let my Nature Sorcery permeate through it, carefully taking the measure of the seed. The little ball of stored potentiality opened its nature to me, different general shapes of growth and patterns appearing to my mind, varieties of traits making themselves known. Gently sorting through them, I pulled the hardiest traits to the fore as well as the biggest while pushing my own vision of what I desired. The little seed was more than happy to conform to my wishes, combining all the different traits I wanted while discarding the unneeded ones, sacrificing those potential growth paths to power the ones I desired.
As my power sank into the seed and the image of its future self, I concentrated on different runes and associated feelings with them, trying to push them as well into the seed and match growth tendencies with runic capabilities. For basic growth, I thought of runes for mana storage as well as life force storage, and for the bark I pushed the idea of malleable hardness while the heartwood I concentrated on unwavering strength and possessing a core of solid vitality. Uncurling my fist, the little seed marble rolled around in the palm of my hand glowing with mana and just a bit of my hopes and dreams.
Kraken’s surprise reverberated through our telepathic link. [I in awe, my fleshy companion. First, congratulations on your success. I rode shotgun on your experience WOW! That, is an EPIC idea! I’ve known that Nature Sorcerers can work nigh-miraclaes but this . . . this can be game changing!]
I chuckled at Kraken’s intrusion. [What?] He sputtered. [I’m beyond bored over here, might as well peek in on what you’re doing. I’ve seen through the experiences of my betters and the memories of their companions. Wizards stick by the practice of carving the runes in a plant after it's grown or while it’s in the process of growing, but to implant it in the seed itself, genius!]
[That’s the plan.] I replied, explaining the intent of my work. [I can’t have a grandiose magic fortress with a weak ass portal tree in the center. I need something diametrically opposed to the undead here that could augment me if needed. The river bolsters my Water Sorcery, I’m always surrounded by dirt which works for my Earth Sorcery and these two seeds will give me ample plant life to work with for Nature Sorcery.]
I tapped my chin as I put the pieces together for Kraken. [Now combine all that with the magic formations and solar panels pulling in mana and the layers of batteries storing more than I could ever use, then this acre of land will eventually be about as magically dense as the forest back home.] Wiping a bit of sweat out of my eyes that had formed in spite of the cool air from the runes in my new underground home, I pocketed the two seeds and made my way back to where Gungnir was stuck in the ground.
Kraken popped out one of the World Tree seeds that I had stored away in Gungnir’s spatial area as I approached. The very fact that I have Nature Sorcery is really saving my ass right now, effectively Macgyvering my cheating butt through all kinds of impossible obstacles that would have made normal wizards quit by now. Although it was late in the day, the heat was still incredible, especially when you think about the very spot I was standing in.
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My energy formation gathers heat and light, concentrating it and then converting that into mana which is channeled from the solar panels through the gold wires into the crystal circle back into the gold wires and then down into Gungnir which channels the excess into the batteries. Now, the massive flow of power is being used by Kraken to conjure and shape the batteries themselves until we have at least one layer of twenty-four of them, but the sheer magnitude of what’s going on is still mind-boggling.
Realizing that I should probably wait to plant my tree until after this whole thing is done, I figured that tomorrow would be a better day spent doing better things. Besides, the amount of heat here would kill any kind of plant life and the only reason I’m actually still alive from the concentrated heat is because Svalinn was greedily lapping up all the excess heat and mana it could grab. I keep forgetting to feed the damn gauntlet shield. Returning to my much cooler underground house near the river, I tucked in for the night.
After my morning ablutions were taken care of, I greeted the too-bright morning with a customary yawn accompanied by a colorful curse that was mostly unintelligible grumbling about the lack of coffee. Resigning myself to my usual morning practice, I used Flesh Sorcery to instantly perk me up and put my system at full alertness, if not instant perkiness. I’m not going down that rabbit hole. It would be too tempting to use Flesh Sorcery to act as magical heroin.
[Mornin’ sunshine!] Kraken’s greeting was way too fucking happy. [I figured it out! I can get all of this done by the end of the week. Easy! I’ll simply do all the conjuring during the day while the power flow is beyond intense and then do all the rune work at night because that doesn’t require as much power as it does concentration. That’ll give you more than enough time to merge the Yggdrasil seed with the baobab as well as giving Spot enough time to process his treat when he gets here.]
“Nobody should be this happy in the morning,” I growled, wishing for that sweet nectar of coffee. I know I don’t need it, but damn do I miss it sometimes.
Reading my thoughts, Kraken laughed at me. [You could just conjure a freaking coffee plant. What’s the classic insult you humans use for not realizing the obvious?]
I glared at my familiar as he remembered. [Ah, yes! You dumbass!]
I kept glaring at his smug eye. [I JUST realized that!]
Adding coffee seed conjurations to my to-do list for later, I pulled out my baobab seed and my Yggdrasil seed. From what I’ve learned so far from picking Everest’s and Lyra’s brains, the World Tree tends to be very forgiving with the kinds of plant life it associates with, meaning that as long as it's big and healthy then any plant is more than good enough to be added to the World Tree. This particular peculiarity is what is going to allow me to pop in and out of various parts of the world, in essence giving me a way to freely travel incredible distances with the minor cost of setting up the destinations correctly. It would probably come back to bite me in the ass if I didn’t make the area with a Yggdrasil root at least somewhat inhospitable.
The fist-sized Yggdrasil seed was oddly warm against my hand, as if the life inside of it was straining at the woody barrier that was its shell. I could almost picture miniature beams of light bursting forth from it, just begging to be planted. In contrast, the baobab seed was small and cool, seemingly relaxed as if it knew that its time would come whether or not I did anything, giving off the sense of inevitability while the other was exuding over-sized life.
So I did what any enterprising mad scientist/sorcerer would do, I smashed them together. And when I say smashed, I mean skillfully used my Nature Sorcery to push the smaller baobab seed into the very core of the Yggdrasil seed and merge them together. A burst of energy started to flare up as the inner layers of the Yggdrasil seed openly welcomed the intruder, doing its best to explosively grow in that exact moment.
“Shit, fuck, damn, FUCK!” I yelled, wrestling the energy back to a dormant state. “It’s not growing time yet!” It was like wrestling a small child that didn’t want a diaper change. You knew eventually that you were going to win, but it was definitely a messy process. Every arc of energy that started to burst forth I had to squish, gently, back into the seed. What tipped the fight in my favor was setting a multi-tasking process to lightly carve stasis runes in the outer seed covering with my Mental Sorcery, allowing me to tame one rebellious region of the seed at a time.
Leaning back against the cool stone wall, I set a final condition for the stasis runes to disappear when I actually bury the seed. Placing it on the table, I sat up and stretched just in time for Kraken to start screaming in my head.
[DINOSAURS! Are those ZOMBIE dinosaurs?! Get your ass out here!] Knowing that I wouldn’t believe him out of sheer incredulity, Kraken sent me an accompanying image in my head which really kickstarted my adrenaline. The Mad Max version of The Land Before Time’s nightmare was charging towards my very unfinished fortress and I had nothing prepped, I didn’t even have Spot here to serve as my frontline.
Sprinting out of my dark new home into the brightness of the desert morning, I turned on a dime and hauled ass towards Gungnir, my only saving grace. [Cut it off or pause it Kraken! I need Gungnir more than the damn fortress does right now.]
[Already done, keep moving!]
My hoverboard allowed me to reach Gungnir in five seconds flat, giving me at least ten seconds to set up some semblance of defense. Kraken had done good with the little time we had. Speeding up my mind with Mental Sorcery, I double checked to make sure that everything below me was stable and then quickly forged a link between the entire power gathering ritual and Gungnir, making sure to include the batteries as needed.
Pulling my spear out of the ritual in the ground, I whirled my faithful weapon and slammed the butt back in the hole where the blade was just a second ago. One arm was on Gungnir while my rifle was at the ready in the other. Svalinn roared to life, extending out like bladed shields from the gauntlets at each arm. A pulsing flaming hunger enveloped me, asking, begging me to rip my enemies limb from limb and feast on their blood.
[Whoa there! Might wanna rein that back a bit! Here, lemme help.] Kraken reached out with my Earth Sorcery, making the outer layer of solar panels fold up and sink into the earth where they’d be safe. Flicking out a burst of power, he turned the inner circle of solar panels to full gather and then ran power along the crystal circle. [Hallelujah! You can thank me later. I got a basic shield inscription running along the inner circle and it’s got plenty of juice for now.]
“I’ll thank you now,” I said through gritted teeth, doing my best not to growl as I fought Svalinn’s hunger, forcing it to heel. SAW, my nano/magitech armor, also came to life.
Severe existential threat detected. Engaging all physical enhancement systems. Influx siphons set to max capacity. Link established with named Norse artifacts. Gungnir detected. Svalinn detected. Offensive and defensive measures rendered irrelevant by Norse artifacts. Sensory and reaction enhancements engaged. Emergency measures, prepared.
Silver lines of liquid metal ran up and down the length of Gungnir as other tendrils extended from my arms to wrap around Svalinn, giving them both the appearance that they had metallic veins. Not having time to ponder what SAW called my main gear, I braced myself in the earth with my sorcery making me as steady as a mountain. The ground shook from the pounding feet of creatures long dead, their size and weight giving them power and momentum while their undead nature gave them unending stamina turning them into giant meat missiles.
Two Triceratops flanked a charging T-rex as smaller dinosaurs that looked to be Velociraptors playfully skipped and ran at their heels. I had to cut down on my conscious monitoring of Kraken’s information feed, relegating it to passively absorbing it by diverting the data to my unconscious mind. Even though I’d pushed the data feed off to the side, Kraken’s disgust for the approaching sickly magic clawed at my focus.
[I can make out riders on top of them,] Kraken said at the speed of thought. [And those are definitely zombie dinosaurs. Someone is controlling them. And the dinosaurs are definitely dead, chunks of flesh are missing from their bodies. And I believe I can make out ragtag sheets of metal bolted to their scales.] Sending me a zoomed in picture of the stampede, I was able to make out an androgynous female with long black hair on top of the T-rex and the triceratops were carrying one male each, one black and the other mixed, couldn’t really tell what though. [Don’t get cocky, each one is packing some serious firepower.]
Taking his warning to heart, I looked in the magical spectrum for just a second. The raven haired chick was clearly controlling the zombies, dark purple magic floating off of her in waves and concentrating in the eyes, brains, and bones of the zombies. Her own eyes were blazing orbs of purple fire, obscuring her facial features in the magical spectrum because they were so bright. She wore a thick black circlet on her head that was ringed with red gems and silver chains that draped her crouched figure glowed brightly. Various rings and bracelets glowed with much less power but the sheer number of her enchanted gear was a bit disturbing.
Her dark skinned friend on the triceratops shined almost as bright as Heaven’s Herald, Gav’riel. His power though was concentrated on one medallion half the size of a dinner plate on his chest. The gold chains holding it were overly stuffed with multi-colored mana that was threatening to burst free at any second. The mixed guy on the other side was riding like an Indian, his feet easily keeping time with the gait of the triceratops as he stood, riding it like a surfboard, each hand spread to the side for balance while holding a bat. The metal bat on the left didn’t glow as brightly as the wooden bat in his right hand, but it felt far more dangerous.
They didn’t even stop like I thought they would. The solid barrier of mana shone bright yellow to me even outside of the magical spectrum. The T-rex slowed down as both triceratops sped up, allowing them to make the first charge. The massive dead reptiles slammed their giant horns into the barrier.
I could barely make out the black dude singing his head off, “We came in like a WRECKING BALL!” His medallion shook as power channeled from his mouth into it, expanding and amplifying the twisty mana and sending it at the barrier.
Humongous ripples exploded out from both impacts from the triceratops and the T-rex timed his charge perfectly to slam his head a split second after the other two did most of the work. The bat wielder followed up as the mana barrier wavered, allowing him through as the dinosaurs rebounded. His body skipped across the dirt as the kinetic force of his ride transferred to him only.
“He can do that?” I gasped.
[Structural shields have a weakness, I guess, that singing probably had something to do with it.] Kraken said, his mental voice tense as I almost started firing. I held off as I didn’t want the rounds to bounce back at me from the inside of the shield. Using a bit of my Earth Sorcery, Kraken quickly turned all of the dirt inside the inner crystal circle into quicksand twenty feet deep as my armor started automatically conjuring water, swirling it around me.
“Help!” The bat wielding maniac sank in my quicksand, just slow enough for him to cry out for help before slipping beneath the surface. The gothy chick screamed in rage as her humongous zombies redoubled their efforts, ramming the barrier that grew thinner with each attack.
The black guy switched up his song. Staring lovingly at the goth chick, he started croning, “I knock down the walls for you, cause I need you!” His medallion shot out multi-colored mana that drilled into the barrier causing the shield runes to start smoking as they began to deform.
[That’s song magic! Knock him out now or something! Song magic is a form of directed wild magic, less powerful than Merlin’s mojo but way more predictable and definitely in your league of power!]
The moment I was about to start blasting I heard the goth girl scream, “Louder Remy!” Her singing buddy amped up the volume, completely bringing down the shield. Reacting instinctively in perfect tandem with Kraken, I pulsed the quicksand to make it impossible for them to get close to us while Kraken fired hammer rounds followed by piercing rounds at the knees and skulls of the big three zombies completely taking them out by the joints. The dead flesh slowly sloughed off of the skeletons as they lay partly in the quicksand. The bat wielder was flung up and out of the sand pit, hollerin’ the whole way to the ground.
The three big dinosaurs couldn’t move as their joints were destroyed along with the cores of magic inside of them, but the other smaller dinosaurs, the Velociraptors, used the flailing big bodies as springboards to leap at me. Svalinn projected hovering shields of mana and flame all around me causing the raptors to bounce off and land in the quicksand, sinking to the bottom.
PREY DOES NOT ESCAPE!
Svalinn’s hunger raged through my mind as at least seven of the smaller zombies fell to their earthly prison. Ignoring it for a moment, I let Kraken work on solidifying the sand like concrete as I calmly and methodically fired more crystal rounds into the three big dinosaurs, systematically rendering every joint I could see into mush. Their skeletons tried to tear free of their fleshly prisons but the piercing and hammer rounds systematically pulverized the bones until the corpses finally began to sink. The goth girl had gotten to her feet, her face white with fear. Turning, she began sprinting away, dragging her singing friend away.
PREY DOES NOT ESCAPE!
Gouts of fire exploded forth but doing nothing as they only reached about twenty feet away. Svalinn shook as the rage of the fragmented dragon soul lashed against the prison I had bound it to.
“Prey won’t escape,” I promised grimly, soothing my vicious shield.