The next morning brought all the promise of a new day but all the looming perils of the apocalypse with it. Most of my early morning was spent finishing drawing the temporary tattoos for my companions and making some canned soup for breakfast. When the other two woke, I had steaming bowls of mushroom soup for them with a stone tablet next to each bowl. The tablets were full of my scribblings, erm, runic carvings, and I gotta say, Earth Sorcery makes carving so easy.
“Look, I know it doesn’t go together, but it’s what I got right now.”
Johnny looked at me, Reeanth, then at the soup next to a hot cup of coffee. “Hard times for farmers huh?”
“Yeah man,” I answered, “But we’re hunting off the land from here on out. Most of the other cans of food are spoiled. It seems methods of preservation that don’t involve magic might be out the door.”
Reeanth sniffed as she methodically ate the humble breakfast. “Yes my lord, higher levels of mana simultaneously do and do not accelerate the overall decay rate.”
“Huh?” Johnny mumbled through a big mouthful of soup. He didn’t even bother to taste it.
“Preserved foods in the presence of mana deteriorate faster.” Reeanth clarified. “The same goes for dried meats. Most people or mundanes use nullification or stasis boxes for food preservation. Standard sigil-tech is taught to the masses for basic needs. It is by far the most energy efficient technology for food.”
“Huh?”
I looked at Johnny. “Magic dude, magic.”
“Oh.”
Rolling my eyes, I turned back to Reeanth. “So, take a look at that tablet there, those hold the blueprints for the melanin tattoos I was gonna do for you if you want. They’ll only last a couple months but they may just save your life. Also,” I paused to pull out a belt. “This goes with it too. It functions as a kinetic energy distributor hitched to an extra mana storage unit.”
“Looks like a belt, man.”
“Yes Johnny.” I said. “It is a belt. It’s an enchanted belt.”
“Oh.”
“So this does what, my lord?”
I tapped her tablet with my spoon as I explained. “The runes over here go on your sternum, back, and all four limbs. Those ones distribute kinetic energy across your whole body instead of just one point, so bullets shouldn’t be a problem for you. It spreads out any sort of piercing effect. And, if the energy is too much for your entire body to handle, the belt will handle the bleed off while storing the excess for later.”
Continuing on as my companions just nodded along, I said, “The best part is that the belt itself can store an incredible amount of energy. Plus, you can use what you’ve stored to power your suit or heal or whatever you want. These ones over there, are minor-effect regeneration runes. They’ll help your body deal with extra lactic acid or carbon dioxide so your stamina should just be ridiculous. And lastly, these ones are rune channels so that your nano-tech suit can draw or push excess mana up and down them.”
Her jaw dropped. “Thought you might like that.” I smirked. “And, I also took the liberty of implanting kinetic and transfer runes on your mana-maul. There’s a small diamond in there too just in case you need some extra oomph.”
Reeanth’s eyes got even bigger. Her hands shook as she put down her bowl. “I’m not worthy, my lord! War runes are not for one such as I? Only landed vassals may have such things, and that’s after graduating from the Poly-Arcane Institute of War and Research!” Reeanth gushed, her eyes huge as she took a step back from the table.
My eyes narrowed just a bit from curiosity. “What uh, why don’t you tell me a bit about that?” I asked lightly. “You know, as a bit of thanks for the generous gift?”
Yup, I was totally fishing.
“Only the richest and most powerful go there my lord. I would be considered a noble now that I have sorcery, but I haven’t been recognized by the Centauri ranks as a sorcerer yet. The shortest education at that institution you can receive is a decade long. Your ancestor Merlin helped to found it but it has greatly changed in the last few millennia.”
After lodging that tidbit of knowledge away in my brain, I turned to Johnny as I kept on like crazy info wasn’t being thrown my way. “Want a tattoo man? It’s not permanent but it’ll help you kick ass.”
“Fugmph yeah!” He mumbled through his last bite, scraping the bowl clean. “Let’s do this! As long as you let me show the monkey king who’s boss when we get back.”
“Fine.” I had to keep my laughter to myself. The thought of Johnny facing down Kong almost made me snort mushroom soup out my nose.
Taking my time after breakfast to use flesh sorcery to make tattoos was not as involved as I anticipated. My abilities were more than happy to darken melanin however I wanted in whatever shape I desired. Reeanth’s flesh almost leaped at my touch, bending to my magic like a willing worker who is obviously overpaid. Her body took to the runes as if they were meant to be there all along.
Johnny however, something about his body rejected all but the most basic runes. The mana storage runes barely worked with any sort of efficiency but the kinetic absorption took to his skin as if they were made for it. It’s as if his body knew that it was meant for only movement and combat.
The regeneration runes I put on Johnny’s skin also wouldn’t link to the mana storage runes or the rune channels to a mana storage gauntlet I’d made for him. They only worked if I made them draw from his body’s internal stores of power. I figured that it had something to do with his dependence on a different kind of energy than what I was using.
I finally got irritated enough to voice my frustrations. “Johnny, what kind of power do you use?” I asked, my voice growling as I glared at his non-functioning tattoos. “I use mana, but your body uses something different, what is it and how do you picture it?”
“Hell if I know the name of it. I just call it power. And it works best when I’m at peace.”
“Peace huh?” I muttered to myself, wiping off all the mana storage runes from his skinny bare chest. Taking a moment to picture something that’s completely alien to me, I carefully opened myself fully to my flesh and Mana Sorcery, taking in every detail of Johnny’s inner workings. As I watched his heart beat and his blood pulse, I mapped out in my head piece by piece every biological system and their connections. Tracing the glowing pulses of power as they worked through his system, I lost myself in the complex network of unearthly energy.
[There, there, over there, and . . . . some right there, weird,] I thought to myself. [There’s little holes that exist metaphysically all over him. There’s even some metaphysical veins that halfway line up with existing biological systems.]
My Consciousness Sorcery joined the mix to open up my senses to his soul, and that’s where information really started flooding in. Certain points on Johnny’s body, many points in fact, seemed to emit a kind of suction, but I couldn’t see what the point was exactly until I saw his soul. Johnny’s literal soul was tied to his body at well over a hundred different points that looked like little tiny marbles that were a cross between an anchor with extra spikes and a whirlpool. And those anchors were sucking up some kind of energy that was invisible to me but I could tell they were there as his soul rippled with every pulse of inward suction.
Tracing the flows of power, I saw the largest point, the big one sitting in the middle of his forehead. Even more strange, but the big one seemed to be exhibiting less suction force than the rest of his points that were clearly much smaller. Taking a small leap of logic, I put my finger on his forehead. No change in the odd suction. I couldn’t even feel it, physically or meta-physically, as if I existed on a different wavelength than the energy Johnny needed to survive. Coaxing my flesh sorcery, I started to coax the skin on his forehead to darken and my unconscious pinged me. Pulling my magic back for a moment, I retreated into my mind as waves, no, flashes of memories and information rocked my head.
“You ok man? What’s goin on?” Johnny’s concern was nice, but it didn’t help the raging headache that came from nowhere.
“Nah man, my head hurts,” I said, trying to keep the information I’d just been bombarded with from the forefront of my brain. Quickly shifting back to his skin, I reworked the most basic runes back into flesh and then gave the first lie I could think of.
“You know, maybe I overdid it the past couple days.” I said, rubbing my forehead. “Anyways, you’re good to go, have fun.”
Standing up, I hurried back to the under-river bolthole and locked it down. I didn’t look at anyone or anything until I knew I was totally alone. Suddenly, my chest started heaving and feeling heavy. Using flesh sorcery, I forced my body to calm down, but something I had unconsciously learned was freaking out the part of my brain that no human normally gets to meet. Shakily forcing myself to sit down, I scooted over to the center of the cavern where one of the giant matter-to-mana generators quietly pulsed. Putting my back against it, I tried to relax and let my mind play through the information.
Gungnir, the conscious bit of my soul that was stuffed back into my head by Gav’riel had brought new information with it when it spliced back to the rest of my soul. Some of the stuff was the surface information from the copy of Reeanth’s brain, but a large portion of it was the organized stuff that Gungnir had retrieved from Rath’s brain.
The spur of the moment idea that I had that I was going to experiment with was apparently dangerous, the way that a literal dragon would view it as life-threatening. Since the mana containment and mana siphon runes wouldn’t work for a cultivator, I wanted to see if I could make runes that would let him draw in his own kind of power. Going with the stereotype, the Eastern religion thing, I pictured the image for Yin and Yang, somehow feeling in my gut that I would probably get the job done for him. In that exact moment as I was peering at Johnny’s network of power, memories from Rath retrieved by Gungnir kicked my subconscious into action. Memories that weren’t my own played through my mind like the bloodiest rendition of every horror movie at once.
Screaming images of weeping sorcerers in chains, painting scripts and vile runes in their own blood while cultivators lashed them with crackling whips covered in hooked blades. Burning snapshots of dragon nests dashed to pieces while cultivators ripped eggs apart with a blissful smile. Flashes of wizard towers torn down by groups of cultivators maniacally laughing as they danced through the skies. The pictures stopped as suddenly as they had started, but one phrase came to the fore, You know not what has been unleashed.
********
Where do we draw the line between trusting ourselves and our own senses versus what someone else tells us? Inconsistent trickles of convoluted but relevant information kept coming to me at times when I wasn’t actively pondering something like flashes of a dream. Rath’s knowledge broken down by long-gone splinter-Gungnir fed into my brain as we flew down the remnant of Interstate 95 South. The road itself, the asphalt and cement, were gone, but the new version of the interstate formed a rough valley ridged by hills and mountains on a north to south bend. This was nature’s highway now.
My view was great from up here. Three giant mutated avians a little smarter than dolphins had agreed this morning to let Johnny and Reeanth and I ride on them in exchange for letting them roost in the high branches of the World Tree. They seemed to hold Norn in high regard and eagerly displayed their willingness to his master with gifts of shiny scrap metal. The hardest part of our multi-species conversation was the translation issues but Lyra was more than happy to be our mediator when I used Gungnir to ‘persuade’ her.
Something about my ‘squawk’ was highly appealing to the giant avians, that and the way me and my gear constantly put off ‘squawking’ mana. Birdbrains. I was all for supplying guardians for my wife-tree, but it seemed that too many people or things as of late just wanted to be near her. That’s one mystery I’ll have to table for later.
The simple hamadryad was also confused as to why I made deals with the flock instead of simply enslaving them like I clearly had the power to do to her with my nature sorcery, but the thought of doing that left a bad taste in my mouth. I clearly remembered Kong’s pure hatred for me after he was free, and I know for a fact that a community of some kind is key to long-term survival. My community now isn’t entirely human but I was determined to make it work. Besides, giant crowlike eagles are excellent air support.
Spot’s whine brought me back to the present as the wind whipped us with almost frozen air. The collar I had made for him included small abilities that Rath had been able to do naturally, most convenient of which was the ability to change size and constantly generate heat. I know I didn’t put either of those magical effects in the collar, but the resonance between the materials and the genetics of the part dragon-canine must have triggered it.
As we were right about to leave, obviously my tank of a dog wouldn’t fit up on the bird so we planned on going away without him. To which Spot responded by sprinting around the clearing in a frenzy, shrinking with each lap until he was the size of a great dane. With a furious bound of proud authority, Spot took his rightful place on that up bird with me and stared in the direction I was planning on going. Unbounded loyalty combined with magic produces the weirdest things.
The trip took us south past what used to be the city of Richmond, the capital of Virginia. The sight was a total drag, nothing more than a bombed out giant crater that magically invigorated nature was doing its best to reclaim. It was enough to distract me from the memory flashes from lives that were not my own. I gazed in horrified wonder at humanoid forms somewhat larger than my golem back home fought around gigantic bonfires. All throughout the crater, misshapen dinosaurs paced in humongous pens constructed from fallen trees and boulders.
The somewhat smaller city of Petersburg just a bit further south was in a similar situation, but the crater was instead ringed with black walls at least eight stories high. A very skinny silver spire dominated the center of the crater while an inky darkness obfuscated the view of the surrounding area of the spire from view. Thick smoke randomly billowed up from the darkness scraping away our feathery rides who pushed themselves to climb higher than the smoke.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
Not having to fight traffic or air control did wonders for our travel time. We hit right around where South Carolina was before we landed for the night. I studiously ignored the glares from my human companions as they sprinted off to do their business while I conjured and shaped earth to form a temporary shelter roughly the size of a doublewide trailer. Birds one through three took off to find themselves some food as Spot grew to his normal size and followed on foot.
Reeanth stormed towards me as I finished up getting our camp ready.
“Just because you can use flesh sorcery to manage your body does NOT mean the rest of us can ignore HAVING TO PEE!”
Holding one hand in front of my eyes to ward off the glare of light coming from hers, I chuckled. “I’m sorry, seriously, I totally forgot. This ability is too convenient.”
“And water too man? Where the hell do you keep pulling it from?” Johnny asked, joining Reeanth in tearing me a new one as he returned from the treeline. “Kind of a dick move to not share summa’ dat. Little thirsty here!” With a quick pull of his hands, he finished zipping his pants up.
“You do that out there,” Reeanth said to him, rolling her eyes. “No one wants to see what you lack.”
“What I lack?! Bitch! All that height and no titties? Who’s lackin now?” Johnny fired back, raising his hands in a mock boxing stance. “Tall girls aren’t worth climbing unless they got fruit up there, and trust me, I see no fruit.”
One of Reeanth’s long legs whipped out, punting Johnny back into the woods. Reeanth followed Johnny’s momentarily airborne form, screaming the whole time.
“Guess no one wants water, or to help me set up the fucking camp,” I grumbled, turning back to the camp. They could protect themselves. I figured that I’d do grunt work. My magic made it too easy. I casually dug a firepit with my will and then fashioned an in-ground pool with stone blocks at the bottom and lining the sides to form stairs. With a flex of power, I conjured enough water to fill it up.
“One more step and hot tub, here we come!” I celebrated, dancing a small jig as I finished looking over everything. The sunlight was fading fast, encouraging me to give in just a bit to my hermit instincts. Using my Earth Sorcery again, I walked around our camp conjuring up a three foot thick, ten foot tall stone wall with a smooth glass-like exterior that grew out of a solid marble foundation. Leaving one opening in the direction of where my companions were duking it out, I conjured three piles about the size of a twin mattress each of the softest sand my earth magic could make in three separate rooms. The temporary house had more than enough room for the three of us, and each pile of soft sand went to a respective room.
Obsessing over security, I formed the doorways but then shaped them to be skinnier than anyone would normally think to do. Most doorways in a house are at least three feet and change wide to allow a normal person to walk through comfortably but I formed mine to be as tall as Reeanth with only a foot in width. This way, I wouldn’t have to go through the problems of making hinges or sealing people in so that I would have to get out. Also, large predators generally wouldn’t be able to squeeze through the slender opening, and if the smaller ones were able to take care of my companions, then I chose poorly for this trip. Walking out the entrance to the camp wall, I held up a stone I enchanted to give off a beacon of light and looked around.
“Bring back firewood when you’re done!” I yelled, scanning the woods. Not hearing any sounds of acknowledgement, only yells and screams and booms, I stuck the light stone I was holding into the wall and quickly made another. Holding the second one in my fist, I summoned Gungnir and started walking towards the woods. “You better be fighting each other and not something stupidly big and dangerous ya hear!”
With a flash of light, Johnny sprinted out of the darkness and slammed into me, bouncing off my magical shield.
“Get outta my way fool!” Johnny’s yell accompanied his mad scramble to get back to his feet. Dirt sprayed from where his feet kicked off as he tore off in the direction of camp. Using Earth Sorcery, I turned the ground to quicksand and watched him epically flop into it.
“Where the fuck are you going? She’s not that scary, man.”
“Yeah, but the bear is! And it ain’t fuckin normal!”
Using the quicksand as a giant hand, I had it push Johnny up and back towards me. “What did you do?” I hissed, the light from the pebble pulsing and making my face look like a creepy mask.
“It didn’t look like a bear! I thought it was a rock, so I peed on it, ya know, doin what dudes do in the woods, and holy shit did that rock get angry. So we need to haul ass, like now!”
I turned back towards the woods just in time to see Reeanth get blasted out of the woods. Landing at my feet in a bloody mess, I saw nasty claw marks healing before my eyes as she grasped her mana-maul. Between the torn links in her nano-armor, I could see her regen runes glowing, my mana-sight confirming to me that my experiment worked. A loud crack interrupted my thoughts as her ribs rearranged themselves just right.
“What kind of bear did you piss off, or on?” I asked incredulously, frantically scanning the deepening darkness of the edge of the woods. A loud but short roar quickly boomed, almost as if answering me.
“Fuckin hell! That’s definitely way too close for comfort” I muttered, dropping the light stone to my feet as I activated Svalinn. The gauntlets came alive as metal on both arms grew out to form mini shields, the smaller-twins of the giant mana shields that snapped into existence five feet out from me. The swirling blue light with streaks of red captured the overpowered shields from my gauntlets. “Yeah baby!” I yelled, stabbing Gungnir’s base into the dirt between my feet. “Don’t get to take you out for a spin too often!”
Using my Consciousness Sorcery, I activated a runic subroutine that I had duplicated on the inside crystalline strata of Gungnir and on the inner side of the two parts of Svalinn, the energy resonance diagram. This was my most ambitious project to date as it began to combine some of the lessons that had bruised my pride in the past. The gravity compactor I made for Johnny incorporated the idea of using multiples of runes at the correct location to create a more powerful, more focused effect, while my consciousness sorceries showed me more clearly how to link magical objects together.
Also, my Consciousness Sorcery also showed me a memory from a while ago that I hadn’t gone over in too much detail. When fighting those teenage idiot paladins what felt like forever ago, I hadn’t noticed at the time, but all of their magical gear was somehow in sync. It’s weird how smart our brains are separate from our conscious minds. My brain had held on to that memory with far more detail than I ever dreamed possible.
Using my mental talents, I was able to go back and take another look, and pick up on the fact that their armor was combined with many small but synchronous runic effects that came together to form a more powerful whole. It was like using several glass lenses to focus light over and over until it became a laster.
But I got to put some of those concepts to use. The copies of the diagram I carved into my tools allowed them to easily share their more individual characteristics. Their split stores of energy could now flow back and forth and the fire nature in Svalinn that came from Rath’s soul could now be channeled by Gungnir while Svalinn could tap into the projection nature of Gungnir to not only make shields but push them out, simulating someone getting hit by a truck of magical force.
My excitement somehow got the better of me, clearly ignoring the valid danger that kicked the crap out of a baby cultivator and a Centauri battle wizard. I took an old hunter’s trick and sang at the top of my lungs.
“Come on, shake your body baby, do the conga, I know you can't control yourself any longer!” I let the words of the probably dead singer Gloria Estefan ring out as I waggled my hips just a tiny bit. Couldn’t help myself. If you hear that song, somethins’ gotta move.
The out of tune answering roar heralded a bear bigger who at the shoulder was as tall as Kong, but it’s almost an insult to call it a simple bear. My woodsman’s trick didn’t work. Bears usually avoid singing idiots as long as you don’t go near their cubs. The dim light from my enchanted stone flickered off long fangs that looked like they were carved from speckled granite, shoulders that boulders were jealous of, and even its long fur had a gritty quality to it. My Earth Sorcery and mana-sight showed me that this bear was as in touch with the earth itself as I was. Marble shards were in its bones, obsidian covered its claws and there was a kind of flesh-stone amalgamation of body armor just under its fur functioning as natural kevlar.
My singing died in my throat as the second verse caught at the sight of this behemoth. Bravado forced my fear to unclench my asshole just a bit as my rebellious sarcasm hollered at me to joke in the face of danger.
“How do you ‘bear’ all that weight you overgrown twat?! How come you get to walk around in ‘bear-feet’ but I get yelled at when I do it? This story will be ‘bear-ly’ believable! I can “bear-ly’ stand cause I’m so FUCKIN SCARED!”
“Fuck the puns, man!” Johnny screamed from somewhere behind me. “Just run!”
A dark part of me wished that I had tripped Johnny, letting the bear do the dirty work that Rath’s memories begged me to do. I hadn’t forgotten what the dragon’s memories had shown me, but doing that to some innocent kid, I’m not sure that I would have been able to live with myself after. And as far as I can tell, he’s got more than enough missing up top to not be a serious threat to me. The other thing keeping him alive is that I honestly like him. He’s dumb and strong and has the potential to live as long as me without my interference, and potential immortals don’t come by every day.
Big Bear’s deafening roar brought me back to the present.
My knees were almost knocking together. The sheer presence of this primal creature was terrifyingly frightening, not just in its size, but in the concept of the absolute truth that this animal was the king of this section of the forest and I was an ant that normally was tolerated simply because I didn’t matter. But now, somehow, this ant and its ant companions had to go and prod a living mountain that could literally step on us with a thought and end our insignificant lives.
And I knew that instinctively, until my flesh and Mind Sorcery hailed from the back of my mind to remind me that I had magic. This was a bear, yes, a big one, but I wasn’t just a human, I am a mother fuckin sorcerer.
Reaching down with one hand, I grabbed Reeanth and dragged her behind me and reset myself mentally, deeply drawing upon my stored energy and infusing that into my brain. Throwing off my fear and reaching out with condensed nuke’s worth of mana, I infused it with the fear that my body had felt and spiked it directly into Big Bear’s brain. The giant animal’s eyes rolled into the back of its head as it collapsed. The earth bucked with its weight, almost making a tiny localized earthquake.
“Did you kill it, did I miss it, how’d you do it?”
Johnny’s chatter irritated Reeanth more than it did me. Dusting herself off, she rounded on him and growled, “Magic.”
“I mean, duh, but . . . ” He sputtered. Johnny’s eyes were wide with awe and for the first time, respect. “I didn’t see shit.”
Taking a few deep breaths to come to grips with the fact that I had fear-factored a mountain of a bear, I turned my suddenly achy body towards Johnny and formed a small sphere of mental energy empowering a rune above my hand. Overdrawing my latest sorcery almost made me vomit but my flesh sorcery kept it down. The wispy mental energy softly glowed to my sight as the figure for mental defense pulsed.
“You don’t see this?” I asked, staring at the space above my outstretched hand as I tried not to vomit from the strain. “I made a rune out of pure mana and empowered it.” A whole minute of him squinting at my hand goes by.
“Nope. Nothin there dude.”
“What about this?” I dispelled the condensed energy and then conjured a bit of pure magic at the point right before it would have conjured earth and held it towards him.
“Dude, there’s nothin’ there.”
I let the potential energy flare in its normal process that usually is a million times faster. The soft earth popped into existence and fell into my hand.
“Now ya got some dirt there. I see that.”
“My lord, we have bigger concerns than his inability to see magic in its purest form.”
Dropping my hand, I looked over at the bear. “Yeah, sooo,” I said slowly, “I’m not actually sure about this. I know what I did, but I'm not sure what that means exactly . . .”
“My lord?”
Scratching at my chin, I examined the bear in the magical spectrum. “It’s definitely still alive, I just don’t know in what context. I took a huge spike of mental magic, infused it with the fear I felt when the damn thing roared at me and hurled it into its head. It’s obviously not dead, but is it a vegetable? Did it faint with fright, or did I burn out some neurons, and now we have a literal retarded bear that’s halfway made out of stone? I’m not sure which of these is the worst option.”
“Can I keep it?” Johnny quipped. His hands were in the classic begging position that any three year old knows.
“You certainly may not!”
“Sure.”
********
335 A.R (After the Ripple) - (2325 A.D.) - Not So Distant Future
Stasis is a funny word. It just sounds funny, like it should be filled with more meaning than what it actually contains. Since the internet is gone and I refuse to visit the few Centauri cities here on Earth and access their version of the ‘net’ since it would put me on their radar, I had to guess at the etymology of the word stasis. To me, it sounded like the word ‘stay’ but who the fuck knows what ancient civilization came up with it. But technically, it’s the right word for what I'm working on. Well, one of the things that I’m working on.
The Lab, my under the river home chock, had filled up with too many experiments. Blood-trees decorated the far right wall all the way down the north-eastern tunnel which led down to the Vault where I kept large monuments to my failures. I learned that I had to enshrine my failures in physical form so that I could stare at them in my spare time in order to force my brain to learn the lessons of the past.
Underneath the Vault, I had built an entirely new chamber devoted to ‘Project SecondHand’. It was hidden far below the surface of the earth for multiple reasons, one of which was because it was simply revolting to look at.
Spare bodies. Perfectly cloned bodies, exact DNA replicants of my twenty-five year old self, floated in Flesh and Nature Sorcery chambers. Each red and green chamber had a large, clear window made out of the same clear skin that covers the front of a human eyeball. Ropelike vines sprouting out of the top of each container wound their way up to a large quartz plate that governed the environment so the bodies wouldn’t spoil.
Within the thick governor plate sat my second blood sample from when all of this Ripple craziness first kicked off and a small voodoo doll grown from my own skin that a few turncoat witches helped me to construct. The whole ‘sympathetic magic’ thing, I need to get a handle on that. I’ve seen witches work thaumaturgical rituals that have lured in exotic magical beasts, trapped them in their own minds, and then caused their bodies to render down to squishy, self-contained blobs of composite matter. They then use those very same blocks as crafting materials for all kinds of creepy shit.
Which leads back to one of my failure shrines. Don’t fuck with witches. Thanks to killing a few, which actually started with just one, I’ve had to be a lot more careful. So not only do these clone bodies of mine function as possible replacements for me if I get blown to smithereens, but they act as ritualistic lightning rods.
Woven into each spare body to further act as an enticement for incoming deadly sympathetic magic, think of when a witch stabs a voodoo doll with a knife and kills the real target, I had placed gold antennae fashioned by Helven dwarves. The slim rods served two purposes, to attract incoming magic by providing an open doorway between the magic and the nervous system of the defenseless body, but the rod itself rested in a carefully chosen spot in the spine so that even if the body somehow gained a rogue consciousness it wouldn’t be able physically or magically move the body.
My earth elemental assistant, Deg, stood behind me. I could feel him shaking his head as he struggled to see why I had any struggles of conscience with my experiments. To him, we were all just meat. Why would any hunk of meat matter more than any other hunk of meat? Weren’t we all worthless anyways?
I refrained from glaring into his uncaring eyes, the crude ruby eyes gleaming as I looked further down the hallway at the other sets of pods. Five of them were spare bodies for Spot and in another five floated different versions of bodies for my younger brother. Because I cared, he had choices. The furthest body was an exact copy of his normal teenage self, the one I remembered the clearest. The next body was his Centauri self, plain and simple. The next ones were increasingly decked out in tapestries of skin-runes and magical enhancements just in case he needed to be more powerful in the future.
Besides, who would have thought that the lowest level of education at the premier magical college would require fifty years of education? Praise MAJIK, at least I’m rich.