Studying was never my strong suit in school. I got by on copying the smart chick’s notes and using my excellent short term memory to get a solid ‘B’ because getting an ‘A’ and making my parents proud was just too much damn work. So when I had nothing to do except for cudgel my brain into learning magic without my cheat Sorceries, I felt like the hyperactive eight year old who just wanted to explore the wood standing in front of the devouring mother holding two full bottles of Ritalin to medicate my ass into zombie-like obedience.

“Kraken!” I yelled from the comfort of the large sled being dragged by the last line of golems in the procession. “Are we there yet?!”

Reeanth hauled off and smacked me in the head. “This is the fifth time in the last hour! You know we have two more to go.”

Acantha glared at me, holding a small fireball that flickered between a deep orange and a searing blue.

I threw my head back lightly enough that it thunked against the crystalline sled we were sitting in but not hard enough to actually hurt. Muttering aloud to myself, I drummed my fingers against the closed Grimoire in my lap.

“All of my Sorceries are basically closed off to me so I can’t cheat my way through this middle school studying bullshit.” I glared at the unending tunnel ceiling with its boring shades of brown and black. Sunny did such a good job making the tunnel solid and solid that not even little roots stuck through the sides of the walls. “Can’t instantly memorize the stuff via Consciousness Sorcery, can’t instantly comprehend with Mana Sorcery, it can’t be this pointless!”

A squelching sound behind me caught my attention and I sat up and turned. In doing so, I saw Splashy bouncing around and out of the corner of my eye I saw my forgotten mini flesh golem.

“Eureka!” I yelped, snatching the beautiful ball of bland gray flesh off my shoulder. “I can cheat!” Giving the basketball sized lump of magically infused flesh a tight hug, I stood up and yelled, “KRAKEN!”

My familiar reluctantly opened up our mind-link. [WHAT? I have many golems to separate into two with Sunny and then regrow into distinct units. This is your plan, why are you interrupting me?]

I tamped down on my irritation as he did have a point. [I just needed a quick sanity check. All of my sorceries are on the fritz thanks to Merlin.]

[Duh.]

[But I can use my Flesh Golem and Splashy to automate my body, keep me hydrated, and mess with my hormones so I can concentrate as if I had full on autism.]

[Offensive but still not technically incorrect.]

I snickered at my own joke but continued on. [And then, I can put myself in a partial comatose state where all I do is read the book, memorize material, and simultaneously meditate to force my conscious and unconscious to work together so I can learn on the go.]

[Can’t you just study? Like a normal human? Read the damn book, work through the runic structures until they’re familiar and then practice until you get it?]

I could feel his exasperation through our link and I marveled at Kraken’s talent with multi-tasking. In the background of his mind, I could feel him juggling multiple projects, moderating the intake flow of excess mana from Yggdrasil’s roots to charge the golems but also keeping the consumption low enough to not hurt the anchor of the World Tree. At the same time, he was directing Sunny on how to most efficiently shear the golems into two component parts and then rebuild them WHILE programming in the basics to follow orders. Further in the back of his mind, Kraken had already memorized most of the contents of my Grimoire even though he didn’t actually have the content deciphered yet, which is what that part of his mind was working on.

Trying to keep my self-esteem from falling off a steep cliff, I peeked even further back and caught a glimpse of the most important project, Kraken himself studying and learning as much as possible from the block of information that came from the portal tome and its accompanying map of coordinates.

I sat down immediately and opened my Grimoire. “You’re right, I’m a lazy fuck. Not sure how you do it but I’m going to chemical romance my way to victory here.” Slapping my Flesh Golem with one hand, I hummed as I gave it instructions, carefully tailoring my commands to monitor my state and adjust my hormones along with an auto-reset function every three hours. It took me a minute to log all the commands but I didn’t activate the script just yet.

Acantha leaned back right after kicking my foot hard enough to bang my knee into the side of the sled. “I’m trying to meditate, my lord.” She said with a mocking smirk in Reeanth’s direction.

“Titles of respect earned through should not be denigrated by childishness.” Reeanth snapped primly, keeping her own face serene as she meditated like she’d mastered the exercise in her early years. Her breathing was calm, even like the steady ocean waves breaking on the surf. The outer wisps of her hair lifted up and to the side while her hands glowed with bluish-purple aura.

My wayward mentee snorted before copying Reeanth’s position. Within two minutes, small hungry flames licked up and down Acantha’s arms in time with her own breath that was in counterstep to Reeanths. It was odd for me to watch because Reeanth was doing two counts for inhaling and four counts for exhaling, but Acantha was doing the same thing but two counts off from Reeanth.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

[What they’re doing is a joint training technique,] Kraken commented. [It’s in one of the later sections on Centauri mana-expansion methods. First, learn to sync your breathing with a friend or training partner so that you both maintain the rhythm. After mastering the basics, one person maintains the exact same meditation process but one breathing step off from the other. This forces them to manage their breathing on their own without relying on someone else if they lose their focus. Humans naturally sync up, be it sleep cycles, women’s hormonal cycle, cultural progression cycles, it’s all part of the same frequency. Breaking that frequency and being strong enough to maintain your own is extremely difficult.]

[So, they’re rubbing it in.]

[Exactly.]

I turned my attention back to my mini Flesh Golem. “Automated breathing exercises input . . . exceptions made for coughing, sneezing, choking, bodily harm. Overriding backup command, reset to normal function if disturbed . . . speed up metabolism to boost natural mana regeneration rates as well . . . set up an automated funnel of excess power into Gungnir . . . looks good.” I took another look at my favorite weapon, running my weakened senses through it for a moment before carefully shaping the belt-knife into a staff. “And this bad boy will be an antennae absorbing extra ambient mana that we miss.”

*******

The days passed by in a fugue state of bastardized meditation and chemically enhanced study sessions. With me basically out of commission and my team members coordinating with Kraken to keep us on the straight and narrow, our roughly two week timeframe to accomplish the mission proceeded without a hitch.

Three days were spent filling up the stores of power for all of the golems plus the pylon using the vast emissions of ambient mana from Yggdrasil’s alder thicket and splitting and regrowing the sunstone golems to boost our numbers didn’t interfere with that at all. On the flip side of that coin, the extra mana did wonders for my mediation as it served as a foil for my mental focus. The deep thrumming of the cosmic energy gave me an obstacle that I had to work hard to overcome. Using my brain for once, I worked on multitasking, cludging my brain into diverting all of my excess power and whatever ambient mana I could get my grubby hands on into Gungnir and Svalinn.

Even though most of the offensive and defensive features of my spear and shield were offline, they still functioned as powerful mana capacitors. Why not fill them when the opportunity arises? Unlike the massive pylon, they however could not be filled in such a short amount of time. But that’s not the point. Kraken was managing the army and its giant battery and their goal was to first get to the undead fortress and break that bitch open. My goal was to survive, cut a burning swatch into said fortress, and shut its ugly portal down for good without tossing witch nukes through it.

Easier said than done.

More than once over the next eight days of constant travel, Kraken pulled the procession to a halt and power down in order to avoid roving gangs of undead braving the inhospitable cold thirty feet above us. The temperature underground is relatively stable, much warmer than the blistering arctic winds that would be scouring the exposed ground above us. All I could think about is ‘how the freaking fuck do the zombies actually move around up there? Don’t corpses freeze solid too?’

Nobody wanted to answer my questions as that would take away from my horrendously boring task of studying but I shouldn’t complain. The kind of progress I was able to achieve was nothing short of extraordinary. I did have to give some credit to Kraken. During our ten minute breaks every five hours or so, my familiar would float over to my Grimoire, extend one tentacle and unlock another portion of the books stored within. I watched in wonder as random sections of the texts across the fourteen books would translate into English for me complete with notes and cross-references for later.

The first book that got completely translated, oddly enough, was the map book. As a fledgling Scion of Order who was spawned between clashing Higher Realms and kept by a semi-fallen angel for who knows how long, the destinations and journeys within the map book almost seemed to write itself. Even with his notes, most of it didn’t make sense to me. Apparently, Yggdrasil herself doesn’t actually touch every realm. There are heavens above and hells below that are floating free in a stable orbit just beyond the reach of the World Tree’s furthest branches and roots.

Those were places in which magic itself behaved in strange ways, where the very constant laws of the Universe that we take for granted are twisted to the unearthly desires of whatever mad deity desiring separation can envision. I quickly locked those uneasy pages from casual sight so as to not be tempted by untethered madness.

As more and more of the book with the multiversal coordinates was translated into English alongside the thick tome of portal theory, I focused my spare attention on the closest planes of existence that supposedly border our own.

Sidhe’val, the tempting paradigm of the Fae wrought from illusions, dead gods, and the bones of a once thriving world torn from its place in another forgotten galaxy was our closest leaf on the great branch of Yggdrasil. This is where most of our myths and lore come from, the Old Ones and their minions snatching children from their beds or feasting on the delicious nightmares of mortals. They who hunger for True Names but fear the touch of wrought iron and pure dishonesty as they themselves can only speak the truth.

On the other side of the aisle, Earth used to sit perilously close to the twinned realm of Sheol and Elysium who still to this day fight in their Eternal War. That bridge has long been severed but a cunning wizard with the right tools could skip the divide long enough to travel back and forth.

Even more alien realms sit farther away, the paradisiacal homelands of the Aelves living in tune with nature or the stubborn Dwarves eternally mining their way through any planet with a hint of precious metals. Fewer still were conjoined planes of existence where the Laws of space and time melded together just right that instead of being a sphere floating through space, the land was a blob of different worlds smashed together to create an unbelievably large place to live rivaling Jupiter in size yet somehow still maintaining the right kind of gravity so that normal creatures wouldn’t be smashed by their own weight.

“Magic is weird,” I said quietly as I searched. These texts had hints of what I was looking for but not the solution that would solve my problem. Aelves traveled through the sympathetic connection between Nature itself and where it could be found. For other lands more distant in being, the Aelves weren’t above traveling by Sea Portal and in fact preferred it for hauling cargo. Even the Conglomeration wasn’t above contracting their services when need be.

The Centauri preferred two specific methods: large planet-bound stable portal structures that punched through the fabric of space itself by harnessing the power of nearby mana fonts or the wormhole platforms closely orbiting stars. In space, portal travel was simultaneously far more dangerous but far more common. Stars provide more than enough ambient energy to power portals for thousands of years but that kind of energy concentration in artificial forms called to the predators of the void. So while it was easier with power being more available, the risks were consummately higher.

I almost laughed aloud as I compared the Luneks preferring to stabilize and explore Wild Rifts as opposed to the Dwarves obsessively fine tuning their frequency phase shifting technology. For the Luneks, why make a portal when plenty open up at random and some of those can just be kept open and used whenever. And if it’s got good stuff on the other side or leads to a nice place to live, have a shaman put some ward stones down and make it a permanent portal. Like you finding out that touching the back wall of your closet would deposit you in a janitorial closet in the Bahamas. Why not exploit that?

But the Dwarves believed, and proved, that different realms functioned at different frequencies. And by changing your frequency through Earthen magi-tech, you could travel to your desired destination as long as you knew that frequency. The only problem was, that particular method was only obvious to the Dwarves. Nobody else could understand it. Even translated, the shit didn’t make sense. Which means, even if the math makes sense, the tricky jewel lovers were keeping a key piece of information to themselves so as to keep a monopoly on this form of travel.

I flipped through page after page, trying to pull answers from the text. “But HOW? How does it work? What explains the mechanics of this bullshit?”

Reeanth yanked me to my feet, closing my Grimoire with a light slap. “You better figure it out quick, my lord. We’re here.”