Future Present Day - 2020 A.D. (0 A.R.) - March - Virginia
Not sure why I was scared of the portal. It just sat there. Floating two feet above the ground and almost touching the ceiling in my living room. I knew that it knew where I was. One night when I got up to pee, I almost walked through it as it put itself in the doorway of the freaking bathroom. I was so pissed that I went and peed outside that night and was forced to fight my way back home in the dark when I got jumped by a swarm of cantaloupe sized vampire bats. Those things gave me the heebie jeebies, screaming at me with bad European accents, telling me that my blood will allow them to bring hell on Earth.
The weirdness never stops. And that was a week ago but nobody cares about my struggles. On the other end of the spectrum, the dryads have been all up in my business, pleading with me to stay, insinuating that anything was on the table if I would just be here.
But I didn’t have a choice, regardless of how incredibly tempting that was. I had to face the fear that my unconscious mind kept bringing up, grab my life by the swollen testicles, and sack up. This damn portal shouldn’t make me feel this way but the closer I got the more my butthole puckered.
[Do you need a push?] Kraken whispered, yanking on our mental link. [I can get Susan to motivate you through. One swift, solid kick to the kiester would do you good anyhow.”
“Dude, shut up!” I growled, mentally going through the checklist of stuff. I kept most of my irritation to myself but I couldn’t fool my familiar. He was linked to my soul, intrinsically bound by an honest to God angel to my fundamental being. So he could feel my true feelings. The slick greasy fingers of doubt worming their way into me, fear’s subtle acid marring the confidence I had carefully cultivated through hard work and weeks of study. So Kraken didn’t deserve the words that I wanted to say, so I kept them to myself.
Reaffirming that I had done all the necessary prep work, I double-checked my list. My gear was good to good. I was full up on power and mana batteries. I had gotten in plenty of practice using my draconian enhanced body. I had a real plan to get shit done. Sunstone Castle is and has been in high gear out in Arizona, churning out more and more sunstone golems for my army, including massive hammers and axes and shields. New Richmond was on good terms with the bustling Sun Aelven community not far away. I had successfully, I think, postponed any sort of Aelven princess trying to lock me down. I had learned most of the Centauri rune-script and gotten the basics down for the Dwarven block-rune language. I had a decent list of highly variable spells under my belt and knowledge of a dozen more that I could pull out if I had time.
Feeling the undercurrent of emotional unrest, Kraken did something nice for a change. Through our link, he sent still-shot memory snaps of the past month. The crafty bastard was playing on my heart, showing me laughing with the kids as they fished with bamboo fishing poles I had scrounged up. He showed me holding the first baby born in New Richmond, little Mark Jr. with his full head of blonde hair and green eyes. Kraken played a slideshow of Cassandra and Lovera teaching me various bits of wizardry, laughing with me at my many failures but also celebrating my successes. Memories replayed of drinking with the guys and sparring with the Aelven men as they taught all who were interested in their martial arts. Last but not least, Kraken pulled up a memory of little Sheila telling me that I better hurry back and ‘kick those monsta’ butts’. She said it so serious too, little finger pointed right at my nose with her other hand on her hip, as if she were a parent admonishing a child.
Gathering up the fear, the doubt, the mistrust and shame, I banished them from my mind. Those negative emotions weren’t worthy of me. I hadn’t earned them. They did not have a place in my mind unless I let them have a place.
I had traveled through portals before even though most wouldn’t agree with me that that’s what they were. Yggdrasil’s roots are in fact portals, the biggest, most intricate set of portals in the known multiverse. Each root is a superhighway of ALL of the things, the elements, the energies required to sustain life, both the mundane and the supernatural. It is the heartbeat of all Creation. Even most of the deities and messenger creatures use Yggdrasil or its adjacent rivers to travel. The key to using Yggdrasil is to either be a higher being and walk/fly/swim down or across its manifested roots or limbs. Or if you’re an enterprising wizard, wrap yourself in a super-dense shield of pure mana, aspect it to match the frequency of the realm you want to go to and let the World Tree move you there.
But I didn’t have to do any of that. My Mana Sorcery allowed me to perfectly navigate the twisting nature of the scrabbled roots where any unplanned turn could put you into a random dimension whose very nature might be inimical to your own. My Nature Sorcery played a key role, giving me the appearance that I belonged wherever I moved within Yggdrasil’s wide nutrient gathering system. At any point in time, I could not be noticed because not only did my presence look like a part of the tree, but Yggdrasil’s energy signature emitted so much power all the time that my presence was always washed out. You won’t notice a dim flashlight at noon in the desert when everything is hot and bright and every bit of your attention is focused on getting a drink of water.
Kraken cut in, shaking Gungnir from the inside. [You’re stalling again!]
I couldn’t do it slowly. I had to do it like a cold plunge. Jump in. Zero thinking. Just dive right in. My brain kept playing day-mares of the portal snapping shut on me while I’m halfway through. That, that would be all of the world’s bad luck congregating on that moment and I couldn’t allow that sliver of possibility to ever come true.
I dove straight in with my eyes wide open.
Future Past Day - 2020 A.D. (0 A.R.) - February - Greenland
Merlin’s portal spat me out at the top of a hill. I barely even got to glance around as the tube keeping time stream in stasis destabilized the moment I jumped in. The waves of it disintegrating around me hurled me forward faster than I could even comprehend. Nothing but streams of light, strange shapes that dissolved into nothing, and blackness for less than two seconds and I hit the ground straight on my back.
It hit me right then as I stared into the sky, forcing my diaphragm to expand and override the shock of the cosmic body slam.
Today’s the fucking day! Cold. Bright. Morning. The wind barely whispered, wafting the scent of sickening death on the northern breeze. Not even the salty air brought in from the ocean could combat the stench of decay. That alone told me that Merlin’s portal played me for a fool, depositing me nowhere close to my freaking beach fortification or my Yggdrasil portal spot in the thicket of living alder trees. Someone twisted my destination for me, but not in my interests.
I sat up, brushing the snow and ice off of me. A frozen landscape greeted me, foreboding white openness as far as the eye could see. Well, except for the alien Stonehenge I found myself in. I could see how they would blend into the landscape. I stood up and ran my hands down the mostly translucent stone that gained shades of white and blue the closer you got to it.
“Kraken, do you know what this is?” I asked, about to pull Svalinn back a bit from my fingers so I could touch it.
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[STOP!]
I froze less than an inch away.
[DON’T EVEN TOUCH IT WITH YOUR MAGIC!] Kraken apparated out of Gungnir, waving his pseudopods in my face. [BACK AWAY SLOWLY! AND DON’T TOUCH THE OTHERS!]
Deciding to behave for once, I put my hands by my side and retreated to the middle of this weird ass Stonehenge. As the clouds further unveiled the sun, I began to understand the nature of what was in front of me. They were large, formerly rectangular columns marred by magic older than this world. It wasn’t that they were stone columns, they were ice columns that had captured stone and dirt along the way, growing up instead of spreading out the way glaciers do when they grind across the landscape, scouring the top layer of soil from the earth. I retreated to the center of the circle and patiently waited for Kraken.
My familiar bobbed from one magical plinth to another, not daring to make his usual noises that he usually spouts while thinking. I didn’t hear one ‘um’, ‘ah’, or ‘hmmmm’. Just dead silence from a spirit that I can never get to shut up. And that’s nothing compared to when he happens upon a good song. My memories of sea shanties were enough to make him burst into song.
After twenty minutes of intense examination, Kraken extended one slim tentacle out of the bounds of the rough circle. Sighing with relief, he turned to me. “Hop to it. Come out of there, let’s put some distance between us and this circle of death.”
I quickly walked between the pillars and didn’t look back until I was a football field away. “You wanna explain to me what those are?” I asked, turning to make sure I didn’t see anymore. “What are they and why did you freak out?”
Kraken flew back into Gungnir, getting comfortable before answering. [Those were pillars of True Ice. That’s reason enough to get the hell out of here. Or ‘the fuck outta dodge’ as you say. True Ice is an extremely dangerous primordial material powerful enough to freeze an ancient fire dragon AND his soul. You need to leave. Don’t touch that stuff, and don’t even think about it until you’ve hit your first millennium.”
I veered south, determined to put some distance between me and that deathtrap. “Why would-”
[Don’t know!] Kraken said, cutting me off. [It doesn’t matter. It can’t help. And honestly, you don’t want to know. In fact, it’s probably why the Hungry Ones are here in the first place. That stuff is a beacon, primal enough in nature to call to anything and everything that you don’t want near you. I am now firmly on Merlin’s side. Go shut that damn portal down. That, or leave this planet behind.]
Kraken doesn’t fight this hard about anything. I chose to leave it alone for once. If it’s enough to get him to freak out, even a little, then I’m more than a little inclined to go along with the plan. I bet it has something to do with the nature of the material itself. Kraken said it would kill a dragon’s soul, so it stands to reason that it’s one of the few things capable of permanently harming a Scion of Order, aka my familiar.
It’s only through the use of the ‘Monocle’ spell that I was able to make out a few hills in the distance and lonely mountains further in the distance. Before the Veil fell, Greenland was shaped like a smushed ice cream cone, an upside down triangle with the pseudo-continent’s tip pointing south. The northern chunk of Greenland was a mish-mashed bumpy ice cream scoop that ballooned out in the eastern side. By weaving in a few more lines of rune-script to the outer edges of my spell, the ‘Monocle’ glowed a light green color when I faced south.
“I told you a compass spell-part would come in handy!” I gloated, rubbing Kraken’s face in an old argument. His position was that I didn’t need such banalities, my sorceries should be more than enough for just about any obstacle. I couldn’t really argue with his logic though, the simple claim stood on its own feet, I was using my Mana Sorcery in the same manner as a caveman using a book, poorly. Instead of reading the book, the caveman would use the pages for fire or as a pillow because it was better than a rock. I’ve used my Mana Sorcery to scrape together my own shitty pictographic rune language for enchanting when I could’ve used it to get closer to higher Arcane truths. Apparently, there are concepts out there called, ‘True Runes’, and they’re impossible for people to grasp, let alone use if they don’t have Mana Sorcery.
But that took too much time. Instead, I had people to find, zombies to stomp, and a lonely dog in serious need of pets.
I glared at the snow in front of me, behind me, let’s face it. The damn stuff was all around me. A veritable carpet of white fluff over a foot deep in most places and here I was without a snowmobile. “SAW!” I said, shaking my limbs out. “Let’s get out of here. Time is more important than mana. Do we have enough to fly hundreds of miles south?”
“Request received. Calculating . . . obstacles: lack of heat, lack of direct sunshine for mana conversion. Zero ley-lines detected suitable for recharging. NOTE: quantum variable time rendered higher in the decision strata. RECOMMENDATION: use stores of power to fly. Recharge at previously set up stations. CAUTION: even of conflict - noted to be inevitable.”
“Good enough for me.” I looked around. “Still, it woulda’ been cool if I had my hoverboard for this.” Stifling a laugh, I let my aura, the magical cloak of power emitted by my soul that I usually kept under tight wraps, connect fully with my artifacts. Launching myself in the air with my powerful legs, enhanced by my draconian DNA, SAW flared out the nanotech wings. Pulses of mana ran through the propulsion runes until I was high enough to catch the wind. Gungnir morphed into a small knife and I laid it against my back as if I were sheathing a sword. The egregiously large stores of power connected directly from the Chaos crystal storing a veritable mountain of mana batteries to the runic pathways of my Centauri suit.
******
I’m glad I took the SAW Express. My wings and the wind somewhat cooperating with me while burning tons of mana, it still took me over five hours to reach the southern part of Greenland. In that time, it was still a mostly white wasteland. And I mean ‘mostly’. As the wind knocked me further west, I saw the strangest thing. Blue and white tunnels of pure ice that began to criss-cross the entire island. They weren’t small. They were massive constructions built underneath the ice but they also covered the tops with ice and snow and dirt so that nobody would be able to tell the number of troops or how fast they could move.
The tunnels mainly got bigger the more inland they were but little spines or off ramps of exit tunnels petered out as they got closer to the coastline. Ice and snow covered all of Greenland except for the coastline where there would either be bare rock or the hardiest forest for a hundred miles. And that’s the area where my camps could be without fear of unending reprisal, or so I thought. The new tunnels would completely negate that comfort. With those in place, hordes of zombies could barrel down the network day and night without fear of the noon sun getting in the way.
As I got closer to the coast, the hardy vegetation of the inhospitable environment finally had something more than deep ice to cling to. Long, flat boulders that were so big they were almost a part of the ground if they didn’t have deep cracks broke free of the clutches of the continent spanning ice. Then, bits of lichen and moss grew in the cracks where water vapor condensed and the stubborn evergreen trees didn’t begin to grow until you went closer still to the coast. The rock gave way to sand and the sand blended with the meager soil left over from relentless erosion and finally the trees made their homes where the inlets cut their way through the forbidden landscape.
I went further south, closer and closer to where my alder thicket housed Yggdrasil’s latest root system and again further south until I saw my base in the distance. My mana storage pylon with its auto-growth enchantment gleamed like the morning sun. Maybe that wasn’t my smartest idea. Almost the height of a small skyscraper, the golden crystal shone, a beacon to grab the attention of the Hungry Ones.
In front of it, massive walls stood, more impressive in height and width than the great wall of China even though it couldn’t compare in length. Different kinds of stone made the wall stand out even more than its prodigious height and girth. Almost looked like the elemental sergeants had fun with it or they just didn’t care about symmetry when conjuring stone. The top of the wall was lined with hundreds of sunstone golems standing at attention, their own crystal forms shining in unthinking defiance to the undead. I circled the situation from the air, noting that even though there were no undead in sight, the beachhead was completely devastated.
Scorch marks and craters marred where the sandy beach retreated from the bedrock. Most of the forest within half a mile was gone, slagged to bits or melted to ruinous puddles of acid the size of swimming pools. Piles of rubble marked where underground tunnels must have spewed uncountable numbers of undead during the night. All I could think about is the fact that I should have been here.