2,376 A.R. (After the Ripple) - (4,396 A.D.) - Distant Future

I can’t believe that I’m on the run like some common miscreant or a small-town thief madly planning an escape from the fat sheriff who knows all of my hiding spots. How in the name of my giant, testosterone fueled ballsack did I not see this shit coming? There it was, my body, bleeding out on my very nice hardwood floors. At least my small red carpet wasn’t irreparably stained. But blood is such a bitch to clean up.

Yes. Once upon a time I saved Illium’s life. Yes. I also knew that I was ultimately the reason for his side of his former clan not being in line with the throne. But that was at least two hundred years ago! Did I know at the beginning that me cleaning that side of the house THAT HAD CLEARLY GONE FULL ON EVIL would generate some serious consequences?

Duh. But that was the point of wiping out that fucking clan. Disgusting. My own investigation revealed sex trafficking, slavery, ruinous mining companies, trading innocents for hell-cursed bargains. That’s why I wiped them out.

But did I think that the youngest uncle of my long-dead third wife would be the one to raise a child with the sole purpose of stabbing me in the back with a cursed knife?

WHO WOULD HAVE SEEN THAT COMING? How did I know some of them were cultivators who were squirreled away in some forgotten dimension braving a trial of some long-forgotten spiritual master?

I swear, youngins these days! I saved Illium’s forty year old self(which in elf years would make him an extremely young adult) from sheer destitution, saved him from being press-ganged into a pseudo-military and sent him off to TWO Arcane Universities so he could be whatever the hell he wanted to be. Debt free too, I might add. And I was touched when he returned, telling me that he wanted to be part of my life and learn how to control his own sorceries from the feet of a master. Oh the praise felt good and being needed was soooo nice. I haven’t had an apprentice in centuries. But nooooo. My elderly ass longed for good company and it turned out to be my downfall.

But Death and I are old friends. Mainly because we’ve modeled our relationship after Wily Coyote and the Roadrunner. We’re frenemies. It’s mostly antagonistic but she has sent a few of her Apostles my way. The scythe-wielding bastard keeps chasing my non-wrinkled ass (gotta love Flesh Sorcery keeping me young) and I keep finding ways to squirm out of her grip. Even as my soul floated around in the room of my latest death, I forced the phylactery keys to hold on for a few more minutes. I didn’t want them to engage, kick starting the resurrection process just yet.

Death’s minders, Abigail and Renault floated near me. Their classic scythes were longer than the usual tool of a peasant, the tip wickedly slender and the blade sharp enough to wick a sleeping soul from an unconscious body without causing a sigh. Renault had it out for me. He’s been on my case the longest. His red eyes glared at me, not wavering in the slightest. Abigail smirked. She found my situation funny. But I didn’t like the way her attentive gaze stared at my most successful project yet, the one that allowed me to keep slithering out of Death’s clutches.

Seven emerald and crimson runic keys, each one shaped like a triple helix, began to take on a slight glow in my disembodied soul as the cooling corpse of my previous body began to vent tons of mana into the room’s atmosphere. I could only hold this state for a while due to my Soul Sorcery giving me complete control over my spirit. In order to figure out the exact process and uncover the secret over, I made it a point to find, torture, and ultimately destroy the greatest masters of undeath in the growing empire of the Hungry Ones. Gungnir holds twelve notches in its wooden haft where I marked my greatest and most difficult kills. Nine of which are liches.

But I had to know. I had to know more, had to see it for myself. Illium proudly marched into my living room with someone I hadn’t seen in a very long time.

Qe’noelle.

Not wasting a single second, I activated the resurrection keys. Their magic flared, yanking my soul into Gungnir and separating it into seven different parts. As my active consciousness began to fade, I watched my estranged second wife look up and see the process take place. She screamed unintelligibly, pointing a hooked finger at me. I laughed and waved as each disembodied soul fragment shimmered before flaring out of this dimension.

“How do I breeeeeathe . . . withouuuut yooouuuu! I’ll neevaaahh knoooow!”

The seven splinters of my soul guided by the seven runic keys coalesced in the guidance pylon set underneath Mt. Everest. To date, it was the largest cavern that I’d personally constructed. My resurrection rituals were all preset and I had seven of them scattered around the globe. Not sure what it is about the number seven, but it didn’t just appeal to me. Something magical happened, something mystical. It took me the longest time that not all magic has a basis in science, sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. Mysticism, shamanism, voodooism, the various arms of manipulating magic are all equally valid and have myriad uses beyond my pale understanding. But that doesn’t mean that they’re beyond Kraken.

My consciousness flickered in and out, more strongly ‘in’ than ‘out’ as my essence became stronger. Kraken’s off key singing made me wish that this process would be a helluva lot faster.

“Aaannnndd teeeeellll meeee nooow!? How do I liiiiiiveeee, without yooouuu?”

Each sigil rotated, seemingly attached and yet floating apart from where they were impressed into the outer shell of the pylon. They burned with different meaning, gathering the parts of me, calling to every iota of the very building blocks that created my mind. The sympathetic ritual worked as a relay, calling the runes etched into my soul, automatically pulling them in when they were freed from my mortal shell.

Underneath the pylon sat a vat carved from a massive alder root. The bottom of the vat reached deep into the earth, its tangled roots gently wrapping around a ley line, only drinking in tiny sips of power to maintain the Flesh Golem held in stasis. As my soul finally fit together to become a whole piece of the puzzle, the pylon funneled me down into the vat where I took over the spiritless Flesh Golem.

I woke to Kraken jamming to an entirely new genre of music.

“WHAT’S ONE LESS THIRTY AUGHT SIX TO A REDNECK!”

My mouth didn’t work, in fact, it hadn’t even been formed yet. Grimacing at the foul taste the Flesh Golem body created in the depths of my soul, the gray body formed into a rough caricature of a human body. Two pasty arms extend from boneless shoulders and legs that were too thick extended from the overly round truck. Flailing like a sunflower caught in a windstorm, I didn’t have the musculature to catch myself. I flopped bonelessly to the ground like a ball of wet putty.

As teeth began to form and eyes popped out of my misshapen skull, Kraken popped out of the pylon. His ethereal form floated in front of me. My misspaced irritation drove me to further refine the body even faster. Soon, I had a tongue, an actual working jaw, and a tongue to form sentences but as I tried to shout, nothing came out.

“You forgot the lungs again, didn’t you!”

Mentally cursing a blue streak, the Flesh Golem that my new body was being born from pulled the extraneous multi-layered fragment DNA implanted skin from me. I searched through the hyper-complex information storage system that was the DNA and pulled my own unique strand out.

“YOU’RE NOT A GODDAMN REDNECK!” Sputtering with indignation, Kraken crossed his tentacles in front of me as if he were a two year old throwing a tantrum. Before he could respond, I flopped to the ground, forgetting to turn off the nascent pain receptors in the growing nervous system. Growing bones from stem cells is pure agony. Growing a new body from a Flesh Golem is a lesson in torture unbeknownst to most intelligent life. It’s why babies scream when they pop forth from the womb, the first portal of life. That shit HURTS!

My Flesh and Soul sorceries finally established full control over the new body, imbuing it with muscle memory and aging it to the most proper of ages, twenty-eight. Even though I had established contact with the Alpha Centauri version of human, I just couldn’t get behind the classic ‘I’m a nine foot tall giant with huge muscles that is better than you in every way’ mentality. They sound like children, erroneously choosing to have two cookies now when they could have a lifetime supply of cookies if they had just waited for twenty four hours.

Without me feeling it, Gungnir was suddenly in my hand and Svalinn appeared on my forearms. I didn’t even have to check to see if my soul-bound instruments were there. Setan Kober had long bonded itself to my right calf as an emergency weapon and Poseidon’s Trident was still there on my left forearm. It still left me with the predicament of being naked but I had gotten over that a few hundred years ago. I can adjust anything about me whenever I want.

Speaking of adjustment, I sharpened my wavery vision to see Abigail and Renault step out into the soft light provided by the arcanely enhanced mushrooms scattered across the ceilings.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

I smirked, conjuring a full suit of armor from my latest artifact acquisition that hung around my neck. It too was bonded to my soul. One extraordinarily rare fragment of True Ice hung from my neck in a thick chain crafted from black rhodium. The two Reapers floated across the floor, their usual casual nature perturbed at the exactness of my preparations.

“If you both can’t step in to harvest the liches until their phylacteries are destroyed, then my methods protect me to the same extent.” Laughing because I know they could hear me but I wouldn’t be able to hear them, I turned a full three-sixty to take in my environment. Little did they know that the true key, the unfailing guide to save my soul from a Reaper’s inevitable grasp were still locked away in Gungnir. The two glowing angelic blades still pulsed a clean holy light that repelled all attempts at nabbing me during my spiritual journey from one pseudo-death to one of my seven pre-set resurrection locations.

Kraken joined me in laughing, powering up the nearby portal. Grinning like a cat that caught the neighbor’s hamster, I proudly walked through to visit my personal capital city in Death Valley.

********

Present Day - 2020 A.D. (0 A.R.) - March

Cold waves of panic snaked down my back, twinging every hair on my neck. Quickly jumping in between the New Richmonders and the zombie, I put my arms in the air.

“Don’t shoot Susan!” I yelled, standing firm between the growing. All eyes were on me. Most of them were seriously questioning my competence. “YES! Susan the zombie. I know it’s weird but she’s under my protection right now. Think . . . intel.”

Scott stepped forward, his hand outstretched to me as if he were going to pull me away. “Just come on back now, pardner-”

“Step to the side, Ben.” Mark growled, aiming his rifle right at my crotch which was directly in line with where the lich was sprawled behind me. “We can take care of this reeeall quick like.”

His rifle didn’t budge.

“Damn it Mark.” I stepped forward, conjuring a shield of pure mana through Svalinn. “Listen to me! Yes, she’s ugly, yes, she’s dead. But she’s my only ticket to something I really need. And she’s sworn to do no harm.”

An eerie waspish noise creaked behind me. Acting on instinct, I tore the earth up behind me, using it to cover Susan in a dome that transmuted into solid stone. “I’ll take her out of here soon, not sure how she got here actually but don’t blow her up.”

Mark’s eyes narrowed, flickering back and forth between me, the stone dome behind me, and Scott. Scott’s outstretched hand slowly retracted. I just noticed that his other hand held a dwindling ball of blue fire slowly putting itself out as he retracted his mana.

Jamal pulled both of his buddies back and then after looking me over, pulled Mark and Scott back even further. “You’ve been real good to us lately,” Jamal said slowly. “Given us a bunch of presents.”

The wind picked up as the sun momentarily went behind a cloud. For a split second, Jamal’s face mirrored the temporary darkness. “Never thought you’d bring one of them. Weren’t they what you went out to destroy?”

I slowly put my hands down, letting the mana shield dissolve. “Yeah, I know how it looks. It’s not great but I didn’t exactly plan for all this.” Thinking furiously and arguing with Kraken for a moment, I decided upon a more palatable lie. “I didn’t think it through but I figured that the lich could give the women with magic basic lessons in magic, help them nail down the fundamentals. My bad. I’ll haul her back to my camp. I kinda need her for the same thing.”

Everybody left. At some unspoken signal, they all turned around and left. A sibilant whisper creased around my ear, close enough to how the harpies communicated with me to freak me out.

“Peace warden. I will not harm the settlement or their personage. I will do as you ask, you do hold the terms of our agreement. And staying on Merlin’s good side is far better for me in the long run. It is in my interest to make you as happy as possible, helping you to accomplish whatever allows me to disappear into the darkest corners of the multiverse I can find.”

I sighed, working on forcing my fingers to grip a little less tightly on Gungnir. “So that was you then, making them go away?”

“But a simple task to ease the lesser minds. Routine is the enemy of new.”

I watched Mark, Scott and Jamal keep right on walking down the path up the hill and turn to the left. Baffled, I whipped around towards the entombed undead. “What the fuck does that mean? How did you do that?”

“This is well within your capabilities. You have Consciousness Sorcery, a bastardized concept somewhere between Soul and Mind. It serves you well as a foundation but is not as outwardly powerful or versatile as Psionics. Suggestion tricks serve all manners of social classes but the niche capabilities are best served-”

I cut her off, shaking my head and standing up straight. “It’s too weird that I’m taking lessons from a dead person in her spherical coffin. We’ll do this later.” I buried the sphere with earth magic and then turned to walk down the dirt road. Stopping, I looked back shouting, “Oh! And don’t fucking appear out of nowhere again until I come get you!”

Feeling a slight brush against my mind, the gentle affirmation of the henceforth dubbed ‘Susan’ was good enough for me. She had to worry about Merlin if she fucked up too hard, so keeping me happy was both enough of an incentive to obey. I didn’t know how I felt about Merlin serving as both the carrot and the stick. I felt Kraken poke me through our link. Odd, I figured he’d still be replaying the message from Merlin and making plans.

Looking around, I saw what he was trying to communicate. The dirt road had been completely upturned by Susan’s coffin. Fixing the road took less than two minutes and returning it to a pristine state just a few more. To make it look pretty, I edged the side of the road with smooth white stones the size of my fist and kept it up as I walked towards the center of town. So I kept it going. Any kind of plant life got an infusion of mana to perk it back up, the dirt road compacted, filled out, and then evened while I walked forward. I made the grass greener and the fruit trees blossom. The boulders laying around that had clearly been put to the side after being pulled out of the earth found themselves shaped into classic birdbaths or small fountains with water conjuration enchantments built into the base. As I happily improved the area on my slow walk towards town, a little blonde missile crashed into my leg.

“Magic Man!” Adorable little blonde Sheila hugged my leg as tight as she could. Her little fists tightly gripped the earth and water wands I made her not too long ago. She looked up at me. “I felt your magic! You were doing things! Making uh, uh, uh, making uh, rocks’n stuff!”

I laughed, pointing out a fountain to the left. The top of it was a large frog sitting on a lily pad spitting water up and out. The small stream filled up the first layer, dripping down into the second and then again into the third bowl closer to the ground. “Yup, people can drink out of the top, the birds can bathe in the bowls, and animals of all heights can drink from the rest.”

The prettiest woman New Richmond had to offer hustled into view from a side street. Lovera had a frown on her face and if I’m not mistaken, a baby in her belly. Scolding the wayward wand-wielding child like the children she would soon have, Lovera put her hands on her hips. “Sheila! There you are!”

Sheila’s face fell. “I just wanted to say hi! I missed Ben! He gave me magic and then gave the rest of us magic.” Slyly looking at me, the mischievous brat said quietly. “You missed him too.”

Lovera turned bright red, putting her hand on her rounded belly. I laughed, gently pushing Sheila towards Lovera who whispered in her ear and sent her off back towards the town. I could hear more children in the distance having fun.

“Kids say the darndest’ things, huh?”

The soon to be mother looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “And listen too closely when adults do the same.”

Continuing my work at improving the area, I gestured for Lovera to accompany me. “Don’t worry about it. I see you’re clearly happy AND you have something to look forward to. New life in a new town with new powers? How can life get better?”

Blushing, she tucked a few strands of red hair behind her ear. “Actually, I was hoping you would come by soon. I did have a question.”

I didn’t expect that. I expected what came next even less.

“The father is a Sun Aelf, Felrowan.” My eyebrows went up. “Can you please check on my baby? I know you’re not a doctor but can you at least please check? You’re more familiar with magic than anyone here and we don’t have x-rays or sonograms or any real technology to do routine checks.”

I stuttered, about to take a step back. “Are you sure . . . . I mean, I can if you want. WAIT? Sun Aelves? For real? Y’all like that?”

She rolled her eyes but nodded shyly, turning more towards me with her belly. When I didn’t get the picture, she moved her belly closer to me. I let out an awkward laugh, taking her soft hand in mine. I noticed that the town's clothes were really coming along and I took a note that I might have to acquire some. Her green dress with the blue sash really went well with her pregnancy glow. Shaking my head, I exhaled slowly. “I don’t need to touch your belly or do anything weird. This is pretty easy.”

My confidence put her at ease. My Flesh Sorcery easily allowed me to do this kind of work as long as I had skin to skin contact. Awareness of her body flooded into me as my mind dove down her arm, noting the powerful beat of her heart healthily pumping blood through her veins and arteries. I followed them, using them as a guide moving downwards towards the womb. I almost didn’t need a guide, the vibrant life happily growing in her womb a beacon to my magic.

“This is incredible!” I breathed, astonished as the pureness, the unadulterated nebula of life that I couldn’t find good words to describe. I couldn’t help it, I felt moved to place my hands on her bare rounded belly.

“What what?” Lovera looked stressed, suddenly uncomfortable.

“No, no, this is good! Your baby is fine, more than fine!” I answered, gently keeping my awareness close enough to the baby but far enough away so that I couldn’t do anything to it by accident. “You’re having a baby girl!”

Several tears fell down Lovera’s face, her joy almost as uplifting as what I was observing within her. The sensations of the true beginning of life staggered my mind. It felt almost holy, almost heavenly. This couldn’t be a normal pregnancy. The baby’s soul was an oscillating ball of light in the center of its tiny body, thrumming with mana and some other source of power I couldn’t identify. Lovera stood up straight, grabbed my hand and dragged me towards town.

“Where are we going?” I asked, trying not to stumble along.

“I’m not the only pregnant lady here!”