Roughly following the expanse of land between the meandering coastline and the long continuous valley that used to be Interstate 95, Tuki and I, to my best guess, arrived at what I approximated to be the great land of Florida. The vegetation clearly became more tropical as our journey took us south and the sporadic rivers and ocean shore had no shortage of reptilian life as the temperature steadily rose as we traveled south. It’s almost like the Amazon rainforest decided to spawn in a different part of the world.
The sights along the way were unexplainable. I gaped and kept my head down for most of the trip, using my connection with Tuki to look through his eyes as they were immune to the constant wind.
Tuki skirted around three floating islands that moved like lumbering giants, bobbing in the wind as they orbited each other. I wanted to explore them but knew I shouldn’t even though they were definitely, probably the coolest things I saw. Spots along the way that caught my eye were things like groups of broken down brick buildings that the Ripples hadn’t fully decomposed and the remnants of human civilization. Even though I had seen aliens and fought all kinds of non-native creatures, I was still shocked to see at least three cities in various states of construction full of green and yellow humanoids bustling with activity. We flew really high to avoid being noticed by one large port city that looked like something out of a science fiction novel. Smooth silvery spiral skyscrapers with no sharp edges jutting out of the earth near incredibly wide boats that looked to be portable piers as well. We passed that place real quick because I didn't have time to figure that out.
Intelligently using my Consciousness Sorcery for once and combining its utility with Tuki’s experience as a bird and his natural migratory instincts, I created a rough map in my head that updated as a constant background process, keeping track of the landmarks and cities and rivers. The floating islands were marked and I included mental notes of directional arrows roughly declaring the path in which they were floating. One of them, a new one, bigger than the rest, was floating in a geosynchronous orbit, straight north, which I noted for later.
I took the time to record anything of interest, including areas of super-concentrated forest because they possessed unfamiliar characteristics. Imagine a super dense rainforest that was enormously tall and super wide, but also had a border around it that was so clean that it almost looked manmade. There were a bunch of these ‘patches’ where it looked as if a giant hand took a lawn mower and went around the forest as if the entire forest were a bush to be trimmed.
Off in the distance, west of the Atlantic ocean, the Appalachian Mountain Range was still visible as if it had grown south. I don’t remember them extending this far south, or even this far East. Landscape variability had definitely changed with the Ripples, as standalone mountains weren’t uncommon. Some of them were small, like a bump in the middle of a plane, but I flew over a river, and in that river was a random giant mountain that the river flowed around both sides of it. I was happy to also not have run into any sort of aerial predator. With curved, razor sharp talons the size of short swords, Tuki could probably take down most things, but I knew that dragons were real.
Killing one gave me a real appreciation for their power. And that bitch almost got ME. Can’t forget that Rath was also weakened at the time.
My main travel goal for today’s flight was to get near to where Miami used to be and I knew from a few spring break trips that Miami was right along the Atlantic coast but not all the way down the panhandle. The note from Merlin said that my brother was alive and well in ‘what you humans called Miami’, according to him, but he also said that the Centauri ruled or claimed the area. This didn’t give me too much in the way of details but it did give me a place to start hunting. Hopefully, getting in the vicinity of old-time Miami would be good enough.
Part of me was glad that it was just me and Tuki up here. I kept imagining, daydreaming of how this whole thing would go. I didn’t know what to expect. I really didn’t want Reeanth to be here for the start because diplomacy was actually my first option, and scorched earth being the second. From what I’d learned from Reeanth’s cloned vat-brain, her type of vow was highly frowned upon by her society and I wouldn’t want to start off on the wrong foot.
Late afternoon was heralded by the sun casting its golden rays across the calm ocean when I spotted a whole bunch of structures and a couple little mini-islands just off the coast. Never having been there before, I couldn’t be sure that this is where I wanted to be but what really dominated the landscape was a skeleton bigger than anything I’d ever seen before.
At least as long as a skyscraper is tall, the bleached white monstrosity must have been incredible when it was alive and beyond fucking scary to behold. Not a bit of flesh was left on it. Its massively thick ribs looked like they were serving as support beams for some kind of building. There were people in there, working with machines to turn that pile of gargantuan bones into a building.
Nudging Tuki with my mind to climb higher, we got a good bird’s eye view of the city, or what used to be the old city. Regardless of the human tradition of simply building a new city on top of an old one, this particular iteration of construction was literally building on top of and with skeletons.
There were more skeletons and they were everywhere. From up here they were obviously crocodile bones. The first big one we saw was already fleshless, but nearby, two more corpses were in various states of butchery. One alien butchery device was going to town on a humongous gator tail, a slim metal man with blades for hands that towered over the dead body. I watched for a long while as the metallic butcher casually flipped long strips of hide and flesh into steaming piles while being far more careful to remove the bones and clean them.
Hovering vehicles darted around, picking up house sized chunks of meat and viscera and carting the bloody loads towards a building that could only be described as a futuristic Costco’s wet dream. The warehouse loomed tall and rectangular with giant windows to show off the massive shelves studded with a whole bunch of futuristic technology.
I didn’t even know where to start, but using my mental sorcery, I looked through Tuki’s much better eyes and took mental screenshots of the entire area. We scouted for an hour, circling the area in greater and greater circles to gather as much information as possible. I didn’t see any kind of alien or magical race, just humans that could have been Centauri or normal ones; it was hard to tell being so high up.
The area was patrolled by all kinds of fantastical machines whose forms shifted every time you looked at them. Some were clearly different kinds of construction mechanoids and then others were obviously some security ones. The latter hefted oversized axes and thick shields. The off-putting feeling I had though centered on groups of longhouse looking vehicles that studded the area. They were in groups of five, were jet black with no wheels, but floated above the ground in a rough pentagon formation. No one went in or out of those, they didn’t emit any kind of magical signature that I could tell, and even the area as a whole, minus the gator remains, was rather low in ambient magical energy.
But those curved remnants, the ribs that speared into the ground, those were shining bright in the magical spectrum. But even that was nothing compared to the upper plate part of the giant snout of the main massive skeleton. Even from way up here, that one piece of bone shone like a little star, floating above a million tiny stars, which I figured out to be the creature’s teeth. If I had to guess, they were somehow using the bones of the crocodile as a huge mana battery.
The great part about using my mind as a camera to take mental screenshots, is that with my consciousness Sorcery, I could take my time and overlay anything I saw in both the magical and mundane spectrum and filter them easily for information.
The human unconscious tends to hold onto far more information than people realize simply because easy access to said unconscious doesn’t exist for most people. After scouting out the area, I turned Tuki around and flew thirty or so miles back the way we came to a large flat plain nestled up against a mountain where I set up a temporary camp.
Taking a cue from me, my avian friend went off in search of food while Spot stood guard as I meditated, creating a detailed three-dimensional mental diagram of everything that I had seen. Every bit of detail didn’t escape the notice of my mental sorcery, and I noted patterns of guard rotations in the hour I scouted as well as the general routes of where the workers traveled. Peeling back layer upon layer of magical energy, I hunted my diagram through and through, parsing between the layers stuffed full of extrapolated data for some sign that my brother was down there.
I hadn’t seen him for at least a month before the Ripples started, so knowing his magical signature was impossible, but I knew what his face looked like. I also wasn’t dumb enough to take Merlin’s word of ‘alive and well’ at face value. That could have meant, oh your brother was turned into a newt and is living his best life in an aquarium’ for all I knew. The actual state of his existence was never explained, and that fact clawed at my sorcery-induced peace. Eagerness, impetuousness, whatever you want to call it, some part of me wanted to take Spot and cowboy our way in to rescue my blood, my brother.
Another little part stewed over something Reeanth said a while back about sorcerers, something about being a ‘noble’ or ‘royalty’, some status bullshit that I hadn’t really paid attention to. My powers in that moment offered up a nice little option, to go in my mind and relive that moment, but I pushed it aside. It didn’t matter. All that matters is that I get him back. The entire shock and awe part of this probably wouldn’t work either as I had taken careful steps to mask my magical presence just a day or two earlier. As I chewed over this problem while waiting for Tuki to return, I noticed a little sparrow flitting around his body, and a few more of them flying around in the sky.
On a whim, I reached out with my mind and Nature Sorcery and gently tapped the little guy on the head, beckoning him to come to me. After a minute of going back and forth with the birdbrain, I managed to get it across that I wouldn’t harm him or feed him to my dog, the little brown sparrow hopped up on my arm. As I softly petted his feathers, I noticed that there were many more of his friends than I had originally spotted and that they connected. Running my mental finger down the strand of magic connecting this little guy to his flock, I found that there were well over fifty individual strands coming off of him. Pulling out a chunk from my opened soup can, I fed it to him while laughing quietly to myself.
I think I just found nature’s intelligence network.
Nature has a power all to itself that encompasses every facet of life from beginning to end. One of the worst parts about this particular sorcery is simply being spoiled for choices. As I ponder the answer to one of my problems and get nowhere, the solution to another problem sorta pelts me in the back of the head going, “I know! I know!” like the annoying girl in grade school who obviously has all the answers but just wants to be an ass about it. That annoying dick is my subconscious. Sometimes, an inconsistent dick, but a useful one nonetheless. While examining the sparrows and banging my head against a wall trying to figure out how to wrap their tiny minds around the concept of James Bond, one of the little dudes landed on my boot and proceeded to do just what birds do when they see a nice new target.
“Asshole.” I muttered, turning my magical senses towards the little miscreant with bowel issues. Turns out he had too many worms for breakfast and was taking it out on me. Worms, because it always starts with worms, great ideas I mean, because in the cycle of things, it ends with worms. And what are the undead but the literal last part of the cycle before being claimed by the worms? Humanity believes that death is the end, the severance of the pumping vitality of life, and undeath was never an option until magic reentered the fray. Following that line of logic, undeath is the optional final phase of death, a sort of hanger-on or last gasp before being claimed by the worms and dirt.
When means . . . . and cue the inner drumroll in my head . . . . finagling ways to kill or give the final rest to the undead is most likely somewhere in my magical wheelhouse, I just have to find it. Memories of me using sunflowers to store and emit real sunlight to repel nighttime invaders weren’t forgotten, and I had also used the symbolic herbs of purity such as sage and lemongrass when making my house for the first time, grasping at any kind of straw from humanity’s splintered lore to fight with a semblance of competence.
Gah! My troubles would be so much easier to handle if I had an actual undead, a zombie or skeleton or whatever the Hungry Ones actually are, to test my theories on. Fire would probably work, all the stories say fire burns, duh, and sunlight probably isn’t their friend, but I don’t really have the unvarnished access to fire like I do to water and the rest of my sorceries. Also, getting into a consciousness fight with something that has experienced one side of death is probably not the smartest idea either. The two best ideas I could come up with, if I had to fight the undead in the next month or so, are complementary in style.
Idea number one would be to remake the sunflowers that harness and store sunlight and release it in the presence of undead things, and then combine that powered-up sunflower with a kind of scavenger thorny vine with earthworm tendencies. Putting that all together would leave me with a finished product of pure anti-zombieness, a UV radiation-emitting flower with thorny vines that would break down dead things that got tangled up in them. This would function as a perfect first and second and third line of defense as well as providing excellent fertilizer which the instincts of my Nature Sorcery wholeheartedly approved of.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Solution number two would be to incorporate some of those concepts into my nature-based allies back home. I don’t actually have to fight every single enemy by myself. Armies exist for a reason. Making a bunch of tiny crystal batteries with some UV conversion runes would be cake for me, and then I could embed them in the outer crust of the golem Everest or in spears or maces for the hamadryads.
Spot obviously doesn’t need any enhancement against the undead, but there's a solid chance that I could get Kong and his horde of monkeys on board. Some sunlight emitting maces would be a huge hit for them and a damn useful buffer for me. I sat in awe of my own momentary genius, picturing an army of beefed up monkeys wielding undead destroying maces that emitted purest sunlight. To be clear, I don’t even know if that would work, which is why I shoved those ideas to the back of my mind as I kept glaring at that fucking sparrow who shit on my boot while trying to solve the issue at hand.
I grumbled at the twitchy bird. “Dude, you suck.” Shaking my boot to get the little douche off of me, I felt around on the mental connections that the sparrows had with each until I found the most dominant or intelligent one. It was hard to tell which is which in the mind of a bird, but this little dude was just sitting on a tree branch somewhat above me, staring as if I had all the breadcrumbs. Lifting a finger to make a perch, I whistled gently and nudged his mind. My other hand sifted around in the dirt until my Earth Sorcery kindly pushed up a small worm for me.
“Little worm for a little work, whatcha say?” I said, doing my best to mentally coax him down. A loud squawk from Tuki threw off my concentration. “Jeez dude, come on now.”
Hopping off the tree, Tuki landed in front of me and got real low and put his giant eye real close to my face. A series of images streamed from his mind to my own, but to translate it into human terms, it went something like, “I’m a much better, way bigger and smarter bird than that one, SQWAAK! Want a roost in the Big Tree!” Dropping the worm, I pet Tuki on the beak, reassuring him. “Yeah man, you’re right.”
Unfurling his wings, Tuki jumped and flapped, catapulting his big body upwards. The windblast pressed me against the tree that I was already leaning against, but not hard enough for me to miss Tuki’s beak reaching out and snapping up the little sparrow, a flash of satisfaction coming through our temporary bond.
[Well that takes care of that.] I thought to myself as Tuki’s shape grew smaller in the distance. His mental tone almost sounded insulted, as if I were fostering off his duties, his agreed upon duties, onto a smaller and therefore less capable bird. Another thing to watch out for apparently, differing levels of innate intelligence amongst magically altered or evolved animals. Part of it seemed to encompass a different set of alien values that I wasn’t meant to understand.
If I didn’t take any action other than spying, I could reasonably expect peace and quiet for the next week waiting for my slow landbound allies to arrive. The diplomatic option could begin tomorrow morning depending on how fast Tuki did his thing. Deciding to put that off until I had more information, I set about getting my forward operating base ready.
Scuffing my boot into the dirt to get the bird crap off, I looked around at the nice little area I found myself in. It looked good from way up in the sky, but it would be almost a pointless outpost in the future other than a safe place to bed down. The mountain was huge but not really near anything in the way of resources, in fact, it almost looked like the grasslands part of the Serengeti in Africa. Long grass with a few sparsely placed trees and a truckload of nothing else were all one could see from down here. Digging up my inner optimist, I decided though that this was still not a bad place to be and also the perfect time to try something out that I’d always wanted to do, hollow out a mountain!
Now I’ve done some pretty cool shit here and there since getting my sorcerous abilities, but my childhood imagination was always captured by tales of hearty dwarves feasting in their humongous underground cities that sprawled under mountain ranges, dragons roosting in the heights of the peaks while thunderous waterfalls shrouded the valleys with their fog.
Looking at the mountain in front of me, it’s safe to assume that I won’t realize my dream here, but I sure can practice. Stabbing Gungnir into the base of this mountain, I felt the pull of a ley line but not anywhere close to here, shit. Without the endless overabundance of mana provided by a generator or ley line, draining what I had to whimsically make an under-mountain fortress wasn’t smart. Back home had plenty of leylines to pull from, and the big generators only worked because they were huge and in sealed areas.
This is why I hate traveling, it has none of the comforts of home. Suddenly a bit paranoid now that I’m not near an endless source of power to tap, I checked all of my equipment. The crystal batteries were pretty much full as well as Gungnir and Svalinn, but it felt small compared to the incredible excess that I was used to. The auto-feedback function I had built into my gear, the enchantment that siphoned off energy that I wasn’t using, was keeping everything in tip-top shape, but this kernel of insecurity I felt must be part of why wizards must be so skittish. They don’t have batteries full of power to draw upon, only their inner stores.
This makes me sound like a rich kid who’s only complaint is that ‘the water I drink is too cold and it makes my teeth hurt’.
What I wouldn’t give to have Elon Musk’s intellect at this point. He’d probably magic some stuff up that would solve all my problems. Speaking of famous people, I wonder what they’re up to right now? Is J-Lo shakin’ her ass for the aliens now? What is Bill Gates doing now that Earth money doesn't exist and Microsoft is completely obsolete? How hard did the soldiers of the various Earth armies react when the Centauri conscripted them against the Hive and their endless bugs? Would I have even made a difference in that war? And the Orion Conglomerate, Reeanth mentioned them but how much of humanity did they really get? What kind of impact, technological or otherwise could we even bring? Humanity is like the forgotten red-headed stepchild of a negligent father’s third marriage, nobody cares. Still, all the nerds must be having a good ol’ time right now with magic and fantasy being real.
Putting aside my unproductive train of thought, I saw that my hand was playing with a bit of shiny quartz that reflected the sunset beautifully.
Sunset, sunlight, solar power!
That’s it! One of the issues with solar power before magic arrived is that it’s too diffuse, the energy content of sunlight was simply too spread out for humanity to use properly. Our forward progress had also stalled out for a long while due to us not being able to figure out how to get past the lack of efficiency in regards to batteries. Our lithium ion batteries were great, but compared to the energy output of natural coal and gas, disregarding nuclear because we hadn’t even researched it for a solid century yet, all of these technological problems could be solved by magic.
My runed crystal batteries can store energy with almost a hundred percent efficiency, and I could make solar panels that could easily channel extraneous heat and light into conversion runes to make power. Even if I were in some place that literally had no mana but had heat or light, I could use my own stores of energy and craft a device to feed me mana over time.
Using Earth Sorcery to conjure thin sheets of darkened quartz, I used my fingers to trace out two quick runic equations. One side of the sheet attracted the ambient heat and light while the other side took that energy and converted it into pure mana. On the conversion side of the quartz plate, I attached a small crystal battery and then covered up just the battery with a thin layer of platinum. Putting that out in the sun, I watched for twenty minutes as the quartz plate began to heat up and then stay at a steady temperature as the absorption process evened out. Not giving myself time to celebrate, I quickly made four more and then set up the plates as if they were on a five-pointed star. In the middle, I conjured a stone circle the size of a small dinner table and then coated it in with a thin layer of silver in which I inscribed with runes of durability.
Taking time to cover my butt, I put in a control rune to shut off both the channeling function and the absorption/conversion functions as well. Conjuring a few feet of thin gold wire, I connected the silver of the tabletop to the batteries under the solar panels to form five arms, and then connected each plate to the one next to it, threading the gold wire from battery to battery to form a golden pentagram.
As the sun set, the usefulness of this makeshift artifact dropped to zero but if all stayed well, I could test it tomorrow. Carefully, I conjured soft dirt to cover up my unwieldy project from prying eyes and turned the entire thing off. It wasn’t until the entire contraption went dark and cold that I sat back to relax against the mountain.
Part of me enjoyed the cool silence of the evening. Spot’s breathing evened out as he relaxed. The other part of me kept turning over what I’d just accomplished during the latter part of my day. If my experiment worked, then I just solved the ‘energy crisis’ that mankind had been struggling with for more than a few decades. Pollution and energy generation seemed to walk hand in hand, with efficiency being inversely related to how much crap we dumped into the environment. Even our best solar panels had issues, their frames extremely hard to take apart so reusing them was almost not worth the effort. The cost of breaking them down at the end of their life to get to the component parts just wasn’t worth the squeeze or man hours to do so.
Half of the advancements in gathering solar energy hindered our forward progress because the most useful chemical elements in making the ‘solar’ part more efficient were actually toxic to anyone and everyone. It’s the same issue we faced with batteries, the basic chemicals weren’t the kinds of things you can just throw into a river or bury and let Mother Nature take care of it.
Were there better options available? Sure. That doesn’t mean those were the widespread solutions yet. Just like gasoline cars versus electric ones, our technology just wasn’t there yet, but it was getting close. To me, the obvious answer now to both my energy problem and to mankind’s energy problems just a year ago lay in the direction of what hadn’t happened yet, MAGIC!
What else could magic do? What other answers did magic hold just out of our reach? My matter-to-mana (fission) concept worked pretty well for a while there, who’s to say that someone smarter than me couldn’t figure that out? What about the possible implications of my kinetic absorption runes? That could make injuries resulting from car crashes or falling a thing of the past. Simply, slimming down or sidestepping some of the laws of physics would allow humanity to completely revolutionize technology as we know it. I tamped down on my growing excitement so that I could actually work on getting some sleep.
A few sparrows were still up in the tree, clearly already oblivious to the fate of their brother from earlier. I watched as they huddled together for warmth not two feet away from where Tuki had snapped the branch in a whimsical desire for a morsel of food. I laughed as I thought about how the animal kingdom moves on so fast, not even caring that their fates and rhythms are so in touch with the cycle of life and death. Calling Spot over from where he sat patiently, I leaned against his leg and fell asleep.
The morning came bright and early, my built-in wake-up protocol from my Soul/Mind Sorcery more than happy to function as a perfectly polite alarm clock. Memories of lying in a warm bed with my fiance fading as the daybreak continued its inexorable cycle. Tuki’s wing was draped over top of me, a very warm blanket as the rest of me was cushioned by sleeping Spot. Carefully wiggling free, I scurried off to pee on the morning dew and used Water Sorcery to have a quick rinse. Banishing the water after using it, I used Flesh Sorcery to work the kinks out of my joints and jumpstart my brain. That early morning brain fog is no longer a problem as magic operates as my panacea cure-all. Deciding to get on with my day, I curbed the first pangs of hunger and walked over to my solar panels and banished all of the dirt covering up the plates.
Tracing my hand on the center sigil of the main collector, I started up the plates and set them to low, taking a step back so I could keep an eye on it. Tuki and Spot almost looked like a cute couple from here, albeit one of those mismatched ones. My dog was curled up on his side and the bird was clearly using him as a nest and a heat source. The nights out here were a lot colder than I thought they’d be but two giant warmblooded creatures easily kept the chill at bay.
From where they lay ten feet away from me, I almost didn’t want to disturb them. Both had done a lot of work, Spot with his attentive sentry duties and Tuki with his scouting, but the day waits for no one. Reaching out with my mind, I sent feelings of needing to pee to Spot. His back leg kicked out as if I tickled him. Trying a bit harder, I put a little bit more urgency into my sending, causing Spot to kick all of his legs, startling Tuki who woke and squawked and tumbled off to the side. With a yelp, Spot awoke and ran in a circle before running off to take care of business. After fulfilling the role of an overgrown rooster, Tuki stood up and dusted himself off, watching Spot run off and then eyeing me as if he knew that I was the culprit.
“No sir, don’t look at me. Just a little Earth sorcerer makin’ himself a sand castle, that’s all you need to know.” And I was, just not really a castle though. Trying to keep the guilty expression off my face was hard, so I did something constructive instead. Using my will, I began to craft a miniature landscape of what I saw of the Centauri outpost in the dirt, complete with white marble mockups of the skeletons, the giant warehouse looking building and even some little dust soldiers down there too. As I leaned over my creation, Tuki hopped over and eyed my recreation of the Centauri camp. Leaning closer and closer, he very carefully put a big hole in the warehouse and squawked.
“Seriously? That was petty. The hell man?” Using careful applications of mana, I filled in the model of the warehouse and started to add some details as Tuki reached over and this time smashed it down harder and squawked. Sitting on his feet, he lowered his neck, presenting his forehead to me, and then gently bumped me with it. “I’m guessing something changed huh?” I said, reaching out with my mind to connect to his. “Show me what’s up.”
The memory was almost unbelievable, not because the bird’s brain simply has different priorities overall, but because of the scale of difference in what we saw yesterday and what existed when Tuki went back to spy. The warehouse building was still there, but the skeletons of the giant reptiles were taken apart and placed on top of the building in a creepy formation. Rib bones were sticking up from the square roof, almost coming together to form a giant circle. Crackling energy ran up and down the bones as some humanoid robots were carving or welding runes into the calcium structure as others were repairing their obviously broken companions at the foot of the building.
“Shit, that looks like a humongous gate.”