Carefully guiding the growth of Yggdrasil’s newest root with this variation being combined with a baobab seed took just over a week of intermittent yet intensely concentrated work. Time was required to persuade the roots to dive deep and wrap around the interconnected battery layers. Even more work was required to guide several branches of roots to be sent off in the direction of the river for constant access. The runes I had put inside the layered seed were now spreading and multiplying as the tree trunk itself grew up and out, almost completely taking up the inside of Sunstone castle. Kraken made sure to include reminders for me to eat a meal cube and drink water as I also meditated and focused on making mental subroutines to help strengthen my mind against the brain-altering tendencies of my sorceries.
Along with the reminders, my familiar and I had gone back and forth on deciding how best to go about wrapping up loose ends. In the end, we decided that after this desert base building project was complete, the best course of action would be to scour my forest in Fredericksburg and the nearby area for any sign of human life and then persuade them to relocate with the settlement west of my original home. Then, download copies of the brains of the dwarves and the minotaur shamans and keep them for myself to see if I could get any information out of them. Once I had plundered the minds in stasis, I wouldn’t have any qualms about setting them free. The tricky part would be using a bit of Mind Sorcery to keep them docile and friendly towards me after the fact.
Once that bit of magic was accomplished, the next stage of the plan would be to put the former captives on a boat and take them down to Florida and see if they could maybe mesh in with the Centauri and form a whole new settlement. Down there. Far away from me. At that point, I should have enough info to know if the Hungry Ones were truly the threat I was led to believe they were. If so, then I’d pick up Johnny and Reeanth and bounce my way up North and kick off the end of the Zombie pre or post apocalypse.
Using a large piece of upright slate as our contemplation board, Kraken and I argued over our biggest disagreement.
“More. More sorceries are better. Aways. Period.” Kraken undulated as he floated in the dimming light of the Arizona sunset. “And since you’re the anomaly and you have too damn many, just think of all the things you could make with it!”
The small Chaos stone from before, the one filled with Light Sorcery. In our efforts to get things going and meeting my brother and then the ensuing insanity, we’d effectively forgotten all about it.
I frowned at the list of to-do items up on the slate plinth. “Sure, I get it, but do you really think that another Gungnir or Svalinn is what I need? I’m barely using them to their fullest extent as it is. I’m not even trained to use a spear or a shield. I know how to use a gun, I’ll probably be using this bad boy more in the future.”
Patting the futuristic alien firearm that sat on a table to my right, I ran my hands over the piles of ammo I’d been crafting. “And even then, the possibilities of what I already have are endless, so that brings us right back to the beginning. What the fuck do I do with a small shard of Light Sorcery?”
“Don’t say it.”
The next item on the list almost wrote itself as I smirked. In bright black letters, the next bullet point read: MAKE FRIENDS, USE CHAOS STONE AS A GIFT.
“Don’t do it!”
The sub-points underneath filled in:
GIVE TO BROTHER TO REPAIR RELATIONSHIP
OR REEANTH FOR GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVICE
OR SCOTT AT NEW COLONY
“I’m running out of insults for you.”
I mean, it’s not a bad set of ideas. The most reliable method for a desirable result would be to bolster Reeanth with another shard of Sorcery. Who knows what kind of epic shit she’d be able to do. If Mana Sight Sorcery gave her the ability to see any and all magic and from there she’d be able to decode it or build it, hot damn!
Then again, it might be just what I need to fix the unwitting damage done to my relationship with my little brother. It couldn’t hurt. Although it does it stand a serious chance of not working. Pushing my finger into the slate plinth and using it as an eraser, I took my frustration out on the board, wiping it clean.
“Just wish there was an easy answer to this.” Grumbling yet again, I got busy doing stuff that really mattered, like making my second home away from home more comfortable. Also, studiously ignoring the WMD, weapons of mass destruction, option that my Consciousness Sorcery graciously supplied to me.
There is zero need to begin research on how to construct a magical nuclear bomb enhanced with Chaotic Light Sorcery and augmented with Nephilim water to wipe out the North. First off, I wasn’t exactly sure how to do that.
Also, I didn’t want to figure it out. So I went back to making life comfortable in the desert. I enjoyed my last two days in Arizona, spending them growing furniture and making amenities for both my home and Sunstone castle. Beds, dressers, chairs, tables, bars, light fixtures, the whole kit and kaboodle had to be done before I left as I wanted this place to be livable just in case. My paranoia wouldn’t let me have it any other way. Yggdrasil’s newest root required much less supervision from me as it reached the tail end of its growth, freeing my time up to do other things. I still had to stick around just to make sure that I hadn’t overlooked anything stupidly small that might cause unintended problems.
[You did good, it’s done, all of it. Go home, get a good night’s sleep and relax for a second. The plan is going away any time soon.]
Heeding my familiar’s wise words, I put my hand on Yggrasil’s trunk and warped back to good ol’ Fredericksburg.
“You should tell him!”
“I didn’t do it, you should tell him!”
“Me? I wasn’t even awake when it happened! It’s not my fault!”
“Is too! You wilted flower!”
“Dried up fruit!”
“Bark-less wonder!”
“Useless weed!”
Lyra was in the clearing arguing with an incredibly beautiful dryad, but one that looked way too human to actually be a dryad. Her skin barely had a tint of green and hot damn her figure was too distracting in and of itself for this to be pheromones. Turning to me, the drop dead gorgeous woman ran to me and tackled my legs without knocking me over.
“Thank the Mother he’s back!” Lyra grumbled as the strange dryad cried pitifully, spilling more tears across my calf than was humanly possible.
“I’m so sorry master! I didn’t mean it! Please don’t send me away, please!”
Clumsily trying to extricate myself from the strangeness of the situation and desperately to Lyra for help, the damn dryad just crossed her arms and frowned, looking away from the pathetic scene in front of her. My magical senses answered the question that I hadn’t even said out loud yet.
This was Meliad. Then her words hit me. I stopped, staring down at her tear-streaked face.
“Do what? What did you do? And how are you no longer a dryad?” My question sparked a new round of unconscionable wailing. “What did I say?” I looked back over to Lyra who was now glaring at Meliad.
“She ate them.”
“Ate who?”
Her watery eyes looked into mine with all of the sadness that a child who just skinned her knee could muster. “The people! I ate the people!”
Lyra sighed and put her hands on her hips, her eyes pointing at Meliad. “Her tree ate the people. Well, in truth, several of her trees. That area of weakened space about a mile from here opened up again and there was another fight. It happened to break out right as Meliad here was waking from her Ascension slumber and her instincts acted out in accordance with your will. So, she did what any Thorn would do. She fed them to the forest.”
Looking incredulously at Lyra, I didn’t even know what to say, at which point Kraken took over. Popping out of Gungnir, my familiar looked back and forth between the dryads. “Exactly what people did she feed to the forest?”
“Orcs, ogres, goblins, trolls, some baby wyrms and two hydras. It was a mess! But at least the forest will be healthy.” She said sardonically. Huffing loudly, Lyra muttered to herself as she walked away. “And, she gets all the glory!”
Leaning over, I picked Meliad up, forcing her to stand. “Relax Leafy, just don’t eat the humans and we’re good. Also, let’s try and not eat dwarves, Aelves, minotaurs, and other things like that unless we’re certain they're hostile. Maybe we can get some allies in the process. Redefining the term ‘people’ might be in order as well.”
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
Wiping away her tears, she sniffed and launched herself into my arms. “I’m just so glad that you’re so kind and nice and sweet! Whatever would we do without your generosity and mercy!”
Pushing her back to arm’s length, I shook off the lovely bits of plant lady snot. “That’s enough waterworks for one day, woman. You did good, great even. What happened to you though?”
She stopped sniffling long just long enough to string a couple thoughts together. “I’m not my usual self. I’ve lived as a dryad for several centuries but I’m only a few days old as a Thorn. My treant self is still new. It’s going to be a while before my body catches up with my mind and my emotions will be juvenile until that happens.”
For a minute there I thought she had literally eaten the people in my stasis freezer. Slowly backing away as Meliad put herself back together, I waited until she wiped her eyes before I fled to the big outside entrance of the Lab.
[That’s one lady you don’t wanna piss off, especially since she can do earth elemental stuff as well as plant lady stuff.]
Making sure that my gulp wasn’t too audible, I rotated my shoulders to get a bit of stress out, making sure to crack my knuckles as well. “Is it better to find the people that might be in the forest first, or should I make a couple hovercrafts for them to use?”
Kraken popped back out of Gungnir to answer my question. “I’d say send a couple birds to find the humans if they’re still around. That way you can make the transportation as well as the brain copies you were talking about.”
“Good shit,” I said softly, casting my mind out for the small birds flitting around. After finding a couple sparrows, they agreed to scout for ‘man-things’ in exchange for a meal cube. As they flew away in different directions, I got busy making a very basic hovercraft.
In order to make the design more efficient than the barge I’d made back when I was looting the grocery store, I tried to place the sigils in areas that just made sense. With that in mind, I placed the gravity reflecting runes on the bottom of the barge which allowed for the whole contraption to act as if it were much lighter than it had any right to be. Several rows of quartz crystal alongside the sides of the craft were carved to absorb ambient mana and the two parallel joysticks up in the front were carefully inscribed to be in control of the thrust and steering. The last bit of runework that I put in were seats that the passengers could channel mana into to make the entire craft go faster if need be. If they chose not to, the hovercraft would go a comfortable thirty or so miles an hour but with a full load it could probably hit up to two hundred.
By the time I had completed six hovercrafts total, three hours had flown by. My proudest addition, and what ended up taking up most of the time, was the ‘map’ tablet. I constructed a flat sheet of blue quartz and inlaid a bunch of tiny runes along the edges so that it functioned just like Google maps on an old-world cellphone. It contained the most complete map I could put together, with Kraken’s help of course. It was made from my memories of flying with Norn and Tuki as well as the general landscape knowledge I gained from teleporting through the World Tree. Anybody in the craft could touch the crystal and add to it but I made sure that deleting was not a possibility for them. Any edits would be adding an additional ‘memory’ to the total memory map and users would be able to look at every version of the area.
Jogging to the inside of my lab, I decided not to put off the onerous task of brain cloning even though all I wanted to do was hit the hay. Part of me just wanted to do it tomorrow but the mindless nature of the job would just get worse the more I put it off. Grunting and groaning, I felt the pain of work as I watched my water elementals do all the heavy lifting. The massive blocks of ice entombing the bodies were carefully cut in such a way that the individual bodies were still frozen completely in ice but able to be transported via water elementals as they slid across the ground.
Watching someone else work sure makes me sweat, hahaha.
Each brain had to be carefully inspected for damage and then each body was healed back to perfect health before I actually deep-scanned the brain and used Flesh Sorcery to make clone brains in my giant vat.
Like Kraken pointed out before, the shamans were the only useful brains of the minotaurs but the dwarven knowledge is really what I was after. I started with the minotaurs because if I messed up then I wouldn’t lose what I actually wanted. The dwarven stuff had an odd kind of enchantment ‘resonance’ that made their stuff not have any wasted energy.
To put it into perspective, human technology, in regards to solar panels in the year 2020, wasn’t that efficient regarding the energy that could be absorbed. In terms of energy output, solar simply wasn’t as good as the combustive process of fossil fuels. If the sun doesn’t shine then you’re out of luck because humanity’s battery technology also wasn’t up to snuff. Now, yes, one is cleaner than the other but through magic I was able to fix the energy efficiency issue with solar due to magic and magical materials, aka the sunstone. My crystalline batteries, altered and upgraded through my Mana Sorcery, were centuries ahead of the touted efficiency of the lithium ion battery.
I bet if I could get a couple dwarfs to work for me then the kinds of things we could make would simply blow everyone away, the problem being that I didn’t want to give up my secret of magic batteries. Pushing those thoughts into the ‘do-later’ box in my brain, I kept on cloning and copying, taking special care with the dwarven brains.
[Don’t disregard the minotaur shamans’ knowledge too much. There’s a reason the dwarves didn’t hold back in that fight you saw. Shamanic primal blood-links have a lot of utility beyond passing healing and mana back and forth.]
“Yeah,” I answered, thinking it over for a second. “I can see how that would be useful if I had a couple sorcerers or wizards to work with. But I don’t right now. Anyways, the shamans’ minds aren’t encrypted like the dwarven ones are. It’ll take time to crack those like the others.”
Putting them all back into stasis heralded the end of my day allowing me to grab some much needed rest. Properly wrangling my Flesh Sorcery allowed me to pack in half a week's worth of restorative sleep into ten hours. While that was going on, I had my Consciousness Sorcery mapping out memories in a more efficient manner, sort of like ordering my dreams to work for me by planning out scenarios and bringing back things I’d forgotten as well as reliving some bad decisions that I’d made so far. The directed lucid dreams allowed me to go over every mistake, possible outcomes of making better decisions in the moment, reminding myself what I fought for and why, and last but not least, mapping out a long term strategy to actually live out the next four thousand years without dying.
By noon the next day I had all of the unfrozen but unconscious minotaurs loaded up on three hovercrafts about ten miles south of me and the unfrozen but unconscious dwarves with the same setup but about ten miles east of me. Even though I didn’t speak their language, I left the same barebones memory imprints in each individual to make sure that they felt coming back to this forest was not good for their health and that safety could be found far to the south. I didn’t forget to make sure that they each had a pseudo-memory of how to work the hovercraft along with its map.
Figuring that I wouldn’t be a complete asshole, I left them with very basic weaponry that they could use, spears enchanted to be incredibly sharp and durable shields respective of their size.
[I’m surprised you didn’t just kill’em.] Kraken said as we got back to the clearing. [You saw what feeding them to the forest could do.]
I shuddered when I thought about Lyra filling me in on some details that Meliad left out yesterday. Feeding trees enough mana gave them the possibility that one day a dryad might be birthed from said tree, but feeding that tree with enough sentient lifeforce and dryads of immense power could be conceived. And Meliad had fed enough lifeforce to the trees near my house to birth an army of overpowered dryads, not something that I had in mind. Shaking the foreboding feeling away, I thought about going to see my brother. If I left now via World Tree, I could be there in less than an hour, giving me plenty of time to do what I need to do well before the immigrants that I sent would arrive.
As I started to reach out towards the tree to portal to the Centauri base in Florida, I stopped as something I dreamed the night before came back and hit me. Sprinting back down into the Lab, I scoured the walls, feeling around for the runed safe that I had put there months ago. “Aha! Fuckin found it!” Yanking the safe from the wall, I tore the top of it off, revealing the contents within.
[Found what? To do what exactly?] Pulling the small shimmering quartz crystal from the box, I cupped it gently in my hand.
“I know how I’m going to fix my bro.”
*******
2,374 A.R. (After the Ripple) - (4,394 A.D.) - Distant Future
“What was it like? What were the Goblin Wars like? Was there really a conspiracy between the Corrupted Hives and the Necromancers to overthrow the chokehold of the Orcanin Dominion in the Shattered Realms? OH! OH! Did Atlantis really rise out of the ocean again to be the capital of the Centauri Empire!?”
Illium’s much younger cousin, Nevert, looked at me with all the exuberance of youth itself. Bright shining eyes, barely contained energy that made me think the kid was vibrating in his seat. Even his hands trembled on his tin and sapphire recording crystal as he manipulated the tiny runic plates that governed the three-dimensional picture quality as well as the sound. He didn’t want to miss a word.
For a moment, I just evenly leveled my gaze directly into his own, careful to not let my aura squash the life out of him. Part of me was vaguely insulted but I knew better, even though I cannot believe that I am considered a ‘valid source of history’. I’m so damn old that my descriptions of Earth before the Ripple, before the Veil was torn asunder for the second time, are considered ‘memoirs’. That’s a dirty fucking word.
When I was young, I did the same thing that Nevert is doing right now, learning about memoirs straight from the horses’ mouth. Memoirs were what the crusty grandpas used to write about their World War II experiences. I can still hear my own grandpa’s friend growling over a mug of coffee spiked with whiskey, or was it whiskey spiked with coffee?
“Listen here you ungrateful whippersnapper!” My memory of his rheumy eyes were one of the reasons that I never let myself physically age to that point. I kept my skin and joints at twenty-nine and the rest of myself a physically fit thirty-five. And the old fart would repeat himself over and over because he kept forgetting himself mid-rant or mid-breath.
“Listen here you ungrateful whippersnapper! If it weren’t for me and my men, you’d all be speaking German!”
To which I had to reply with more than enough snark, “Don’t you mean Japanese? The Axis powers were grinding out against Britain at that point. Germany would’ve never gotten to us across the Atlantic!”
And it was right there, old man Lennard would lose his mind to the point that a nurse would come and wheel him away while my grandpa and I laughed and laughed. Then grandpa would sneak a bit of whiskey in his own coffee and slip me back my flask that I only filled up for him.
That was old. They were old. They couldn’t let go of the past because they had no way of affecting the present or the future. Age had ground them down, reducing their once muscular bodies, bodies of former American soldiers, to their weak, elderly forms. And those memories never left me, even as I sat back in my beautifully comfortable chair and recounted my own experiences to Illium’s cousin, Nevert.