What greeted me was a bit of a shock as I walked outside into the crisp morning air. Johnny, Reeanth, Meliad, Lyra, Everest, Spot and Fuzzy were all relaxing either in the clearing in front of the Hole or in the spaces between the trees ringing the clearing. Acantha was at the center of the gathering, animatedly talking as a floating hologram made up of different colored flames morphed in front of everyone.
“My lord!”
“Master!”
“Guar-dian.”
Spot’s excited greeting slammed me into the ground, drowning out the rest of the surprised greetings. By the time I’d gotten my mutt off of me and he flopped on the ground to deign to allow me to give him tummy rubs, the rest of the crew started peppering me with questions. The one that grabbed my attention first was from Johnny.
“Dude! Have you ever seen a zombie fortress before?!”
Ignoring the rest of the questions, I honed in on my cultivator friend. I didn’t like the look of wonder in his eyes. It clashed with the ‘zombie fortress’ part. Those two things don’t go together. “Uh . . . what?”
My eyes came to rest on the flaming hologram floating above Acantha’s hand. Her ice blue flames formed a pretty good visual of the windswept Arctic landscape, but the scary parts were what towered over the miles of ice. Deeper blue flames skewed upwards in a mad twist of architecture that almost hurt to look at, hooks and spires and sheer walls that jutted out without logic formed a horrifying palace of ice and death. Skulls and bones were either carved or grown out of the ice making up the fortress and there were even small yellow flame incarnations of zombies. As I stared at the hologram, Acantha noticed me trying to parse out the details and zoomed in. Every horizontal surface was covered in frozen undead, everything from human to polar bear and even some skeletal structures that I didn’t recognize.
“Are those?” I stuttered, peering even closer. “Are those dragons? Skeletal dragons and fuckin’ dinosaurs too? And what are those?”
“Bone-topi! What octopi would be like if they had bones and were alive again!” I couldn’t stand the look of excitement on Johnny’s face. “And look! Zombie giants and zombie wolves! Holy cow! Your new hottie can make her fire look like anything!”
Acantha blushed at Johnny’s gushing, even as he didn’t realize that he was giving her a compliment. “Where did you get this? Is this accurate, as in real time or a snapshot of a while ago?”
“I did prepare for this. Sybella told me of your goals and I gathered sufficient intelligence to assist you. My affinities were part of the reason that I was chosen to be a suitable stand-in for your brother and my preparations were what clinched it. The undead fear fire for its purifying nature and I have that in abundance.” Taking a deep breath, Acantha waved her hand through the floating flames. “This was current as of two of your weeks ago, and that fortress is like nothing this planet has ever seen before. It’s at least four times larger than the pyramid structures in Egypt and made directly from the glacial ice and frozen bedrock of the Arctic. Assaulting such a position without a team of fire drakes or fire elementals would be the definition of insanity.”
I raised one eyebrow. “What about an army of sunstone golems with the power of a desert at their beck and call?”
“I, uh, what? You mean to say that-”
“Yup. I have an army of sunstone golems out in the desert.” I couldn’t help but gloat a bit. “And I can make a couple more armies in a month or two. To clarify, when I say ‘armies’, I mean thousands of massive, solid, crystalline golems capable of fighting rabid elephants and winning.”
“It’s too dangerous, master! You can’t go! The forest needs you here!” Lyra and Meliad were almost in sync with their plea. Everest reached forward and gently pulled them back. His massive hand was an inevitable force.
“Hun-gry. Ones. Need. To. Die.”
“Thank you Everest for that stony endorsement.”
The tension in the air became a bit strained. The forest ladies were instinctively scared of the Hungry Ones even as Everest understood and shared the rock solid determination I had to get rid of them. Johnny could barely hold his excitement in and Reeanth was still frowning, which hadn’t changed from our conversation earlier about the clone body, and Acantha simply looked intrigued. My guess is that she was wondering what the hell she’d gotten herself into and at the same time, did the crazy sorcerer with a hidden golem army stand a chance against this?
“Since the fuckin’ cat is out of the bag, might as well get this planning session started. Acantha, you have the floor. Tell us everything you know.” Taking a step back, I walked over and propped myself up against Spot who moved his head so that I could scratch behind his ears. Fuzzy-butt lay next to us and nudged me with his nose, wanting some attention as well, which I obliged with a muzzle scratch.
Expanding the hologram made out of her own flames, Acantha stood proudly as she gathered herself like a well prepared young college professor giving her favorite lecture. “The undead known as the Hungry Ones come in as many flavors as the Hive. The most basic of them are simply reanimated corpses fused with mana and a hunger that drives them to attack anything with a pulse. Some of the usual favorites used as shock troops are the larger creatures who’s bulk is advantageous for battering rams or to disrupt formations. It’s important to note that the undead do NOT tire and they do NOT need to rest. They also operate on what is called ‘mana-vision’. Their eyes don’t work like living eyes but they can sense life, warmth, and mana without error.”
“Do they do crazy shit like Left for Dead?” Johnny asked. “We got like spitters and banshees and shit? Or are they the useless Walking Dead zombies that can’t run for nothin’?”
Acantha’s puzzled look prompted me. “Ignore him. It’s a video game from before.”
“If I understand correctly,” she mused. “You’re asking if there are special kinds of undead?” When we both nodded, she laughed. “Of course! The vilest of the bunch are completely rotten on the inside and split apart easily when attacked, spraying disease and corruption from every orifice and wound. Some of them are experiments like devourers, who eat fresh bodies and spew spiked bones from eye sockets or mouths, growing new limbs to fight from all directions. My least favorite are the bone warriors, magically enhanced skeletons that are infused with incredible amounts of mana. As they do not have any form of soft organics such as muscles or tendons to assist with movement, the vast amounts of mana do the work.”
“Which means that the skeletons will be nigh indestructible, hard to burn and even harder to break,” Reeanth added with a scowl. “If left alone for a couple centuries, it is said that some skeleton warriors may even gather enough mana to become sentient, growing in power to be skeleton mages, wielders of death and raisers of the dead.”
“That is correct, my fellow vassal,” Acantha agreed with a smile. “Now what your Norse mythology called ‘Draugr’, we call ‘Draugen’ but the differences are minor. They are not as hardy as bone warriors but they are more powerful overall. Think of them as empowered zombies but without being as fleshy. They are mummified corpses of warriors imbued with spirits of the dead that hate the living. Equipped with the skills that the body had while it was alive, Draugen can go toe to toe with Centauri warriors without tiring. The dead skin left on their bodies have two functions: one, because the skin is as tough as leather, it acts as a layer of armor. And two, the dead skin functions as a half-decent mana storage device as well.”
Each part of the lecture came to life or maybe unlife thanks to Acantha’s skill with her flames, flashing between ghosts, poltergeists, exploding skeleton bird bombs, zombie behemoths, and liches. Every new picture made my butthole pucker just a bit tighter as I kept mentally adding how many damn sunstone golems I’d need to make to freaking annihilate what I’m now calling the Northern Fortress. So far, my internal plans have gotten up to at least a thousand basic soldier golems which means twenty elemental sergeants to command them, which comes out to about another two months of prep . . .
“Hey!” Johnny called out, interrupting my calculation. “You’re missing the best part!”
The flaming hologram was no longer rotating, standing still to outline the worst part. A long dark flame showed a massive portal darker than Satan’s butthole, carved out of a stone so black that it appeared to suck in all of the light around it. Green wispy light that evoked the feeling of sickness radiated from the outside of the portal around its frame and was pulled into the blackness.
“The key to the hordes lies with their very own portal system that allows for constant reinforcements. Any assault on the area will result in this becoming active and spewing uncounted enemies to drown attackers with sheer numbers. We believe that it is drawing power from the Aurora Borealis which is active every twelve hours. From what we’ve detected, the Aurora Borealis is even more active now that the Veil is rent and mana with Chaos from outside the atmosphere is battling with Earth’s natural magnetosphere and ionosphere.” The pretty northern lights simulacrum exploded into existence over the holographic portal, which sucked it in and spewed out the flaming mini-zombies for us to see. Acantha continued as the lights vanished. “This means our best shot of a successful assault would be right as the power supply for the portal is waning.”
After the presentation from hell, I grabbed Acantha and Spot and took all three of us to Sunstone Castle. Spot petulantly shrunk, not wanting to become his smaller form but doing it because I asked him too. He kept a mournful gaze in the direction of the small town and let out pathetic whines. It wasn’t until the desert sun hit him that he cheered up. After telling Spot to go check in on what I assumed was his litter, I gave my new partner the grand tour in the blazing sun that seemed to eerily emit zero heat. My castle soaked it up and transmuted it into pure mana allowing myself and my guest to experience seventy degree weather in the middle of the unforgiving landscape of America’s west. Kraken assisted me in the background, pointing out various enchantments and systems we had in place so I could elaborate for her.
Placing Gungnir with Kraken inside the golem pedestal, I checked in on the giant batteries buried below the fortifications. The overall charge was hovering around eighty percent at the moment which was good enough for now since I had Kraken devote all of the available resources towards making the additions to the golem army. Setting aside enough basic soldier golems to make up the required number of commanding elementals, I got busy summoning earth elementals and placing them inside their sunstone bodies. I reminded Kraken to overlay the basic set of instructions into the crystalline matrices which he easily set into the sunstone bodies.
“This is INCREDIBLE!” Acantha gasped, running around and looking at everything. “Are these runes INSIDE of the bricks themselves? And it’s not even hot in here even though this is the desert and you’re harnessing heat and light for power?!” Turning to me, she saw me point out one of the windows. Rushing over, she watched with her mouth wide open as sunstone golems were slowly grown out of the rocky landscape by the dozen, each body part slowly coming into view as the castle via Kraken was directing the growth and conjuration process. “You’re conjuring them? Growing them? As if they are borne of sunlight and stone? Are you a sorcerer? But what kind of a sorcerer would be able to do this? Not just an earth sorcerer . . .”
[Might as well come clean. She’s gonna figure it out eventually but you should have her take an oath to protect yourself.] Heeding my spirit familiar’s advice, I waited until Acantha was done talking to herself.
“My secrets are worth more than your life,” I said softly as Acantha turned to bombard me with more questions. Gungnir glowed brightly in its pedestal as I reached over and gripped it, power pouring into me as I joined the circuit. “I will need a magically binding oath that you will not ever betray to your clan what you learn from me or about me while you’re here.”
Acantha shivered as she looked around at the majesty of the Yggdrasil baobab tree. It brimmed with raw power. Even those without magic would be able to feel the bone deep hum of the arcane solar panel rune work keeping the condensed heat and light at bay. And anyone would stare in wonder at the increasing number of golems being grown piece by conjured piece, complete with giant stone axes and hammers at their blocky feet.
“I would give my life to learn secrets such as this.” Pulling an athame from her calf sheath, she lightly cut her palm, smearing it once across her forehead, once across her neck, and twice across the bare skin of her barely exposed chest. “May my flames burn the knowledge from my head and the secrets from my heart if I ever betray what I learn from you. May my fire carve out my throat if I dare utter betrayal in voice or spirit. May my lungs be naught but ash if I breathe what I have learned.”
A rope of crimson fire erupted from the smeared blood as it ran down the streaks across her head, neck, and chest. The flames increased in intensity as they moved downwards, evaporating the blood until the only spot burning was the point just above her sternum. For a moment, it looked like she was going to be drilled through by her own flames and then they abruptly went out and in its place was a small blood red tattoo of a flaming knife pointing upwards at her neck. Fainting where she stood, I was so surprised that I didn’t even catch her.
[I’d say that’s pretty binding, boss,] Kraken remarked as Acantha flopped bonelessly to the ground. [Her magic is now actually linked to her brain, throat, heart, and lungs and one wrong action will cause her to go up in some pretty hellish flames. Shit.]
“Maybe I should’ve gone to school and let Andy mind Earth for a while,” I muttered, kneeling down to examine Acantha’s prone form. Poking her with a finger, she groaned and sat up, cursing under her breath. “None of that now,” I assured her, pushing her back down as I forced a bit of healing magic into her to block the pain. “Your oath is plenty good enough for me, a bit over enthusiastic but I’ll take it.”
“How, how did you do this? All of this?”
“Well, it all started about the time magic came to town.”
*******
Acantha made talking easy, no, not in the sappy kind of way, but in the way that time passes by without anyone even noticing. Spot ranged far and wide doing his doggy duty, literally and figuratively, all across the desert as my newest vassal and I traded stories while monitoring Kraken painstakingly creating new additions to my army. I told her my life story which wasn’t that interesting up till the apocalypse kicked off and she in turn told me about her ordeals with her Coven.
Turns out, her fire wasn’t something she was born with, rather it was a result of a wild magic experiment that was trying to create something called True Fire. Several dragons, three devils, two fire elementals, and an efreet carrying four phoenix feathers were involved with a ritual that had a bit of magical Greek fire in the center. Two explosions and one crazy elder witch trying to put it out resulted in Acantha being stripped of all of the power she’d gained for the past seventy years but it gave her FIRE. Fire in all of its myriad forms. From what she’d gathered so far from her own testing, with her Coven’s approval, was that any kind of flame simply loved her and if she encountered a new kind of fire then hers would eat it and she’d get stronger. It would allow her to grow over time into a fearsome master of FLAME.
Whereas my gifts were the result of the intervention of mindless whimsy and injectING myself with crystals filled with Chaos. I was forced to admit that my infusion of sorcery was simply less cool than her experience. As we got to talking, I found myself opening up. I told her about Elizabeth and my struggles for the first two months trying to defend the cocoon of my woman, and then the Yggdrasil seed incident where my fiance went from tree lady to THE TREE LADY, from a humble oak to the living spine of the universe, leaving me behind to contend with the rest of this fucking planet. I was rather impressed that I managed to not shed a tear at all but even my Flesh Sorcery had a hard time with that. What impressed Acantha was the unconscious casual way that I proudly showed off my creations out here in the desert, my desert-ified willow tree overtop the underground cave hideout being powered by the kinetic flow of the Colorado River, the layers of dense solar-powered batteries with the gold and crystal ritual circles concentrating the power of the desert sun.
Since Acantha’s discretion and loyalty were assured by the power of her own bloodfire, I didn’t even have a problem telling her that I was a sorcerer of not just one, but multiple elements. I even took the time to fix a glaring error in my Sunstone Castle planning. If this position were to ever be assaulted and I had living beings stationed here, then they’d be shit outta luck if I didn’t put a flesh golem here. A quick trip back home allowed me to get to my main flesh golem and separate a fist sized piece of it containing all of the DNA sequences I’d gathered so far. Coming back to the castle, Acantha and I hunted up some bison-sized lizards and had Spot drag them back so I could use the bodies as bio-fuel for the flesh golem.
Acantha eyed the still blob of the body making up the newest Flesh Golem. The smooth misshapen orb sat there like a stone, its outer covering more akin to leather than actual skin. She looked it up and down before turning to me. “Anything? Just stick your hand on it and change anything I want? It’s that easy?”
“Yup.” My answer seemed to barely move the mountain of skepticism that Acantha was workin’ with, even after I’d shown her the process of the mini-flesh golem devouring the lizards to grow to a decent size. The golem, now truck sized, sat there very still even as I could tell that it was converting the dead lizard tissue to blank but full of energy stem cells. “All changes are painless unless you want them to be, which you’d have to be a psycho to want that. We got a bunch of different creatures up in there but there are some limits.” I looked her dead in the eye as I pointed at the magical golem that could revolutionize healthcare as we knew it.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“I cannot make creatures with intact souls or minds from this thing and the universe is still full of animals I haven’t encountered yet,” I said, smacking the dull gray flesh with my hand. “For instance, I’d like to get my hands on a water and an earth dragon but that’s gonna take a while, but I do have fire dragon DNA in there.”
She just stood there, silent. Her gaze looked like it was going to burn a hole into my golem which made me snap my fingers. After a moment, my skin actually started to heat up. “Wha? Hey!”
“Sorry princess,” I replied, turning her head with a finger. “Can’t have you lightin’ this baby on fire. No heat vision on the goods here.” Getting back to my lesson, I took a step back and conjured a small person-like toy out of clay. I used my finger to mess up the face and then picked off the arms and legs before showing it to her. In my other hand, I conjured a simple ball of clay. “Let’s say someone gets pulled off a battlefield with no limbs or face AND is still breathing. All I have to do is shove him onto the golem,” I shoved the toy into the orb and pulled it back out perfectly whole, “and less than a minute later he’d be fine. Dead tissue and foreign objects removed and missing pieces put back on with his own DNA sequence so there’s no chance for rejection.”
Acantha stared in wonder. “You could save so many lives . . . improve trillions more!”
I grinned. “I know! I could also end so many. I have a Doomsday protocol in every single one of these that’s only answerable to me. I call it, Operation Blob.” Assuming she hadn’t seen the really old movie, I described the terror that could ensue if an amorphous flesh devouring monster with no real weaknesses and a plethora of time and food got loose.
“That’s not real but your people came up with that? Why?” Acantha exclaimed. “Slimes are real and golems are real. I know, we’ve lost plenty of people in battlefield cleanups due to things feeding on the corpses.”
Laughing out loud, I quickly stifled it as she glared at me. “What? Magic has been real to us for like eight months now. Forgive me if we newbies have wild imaginations. We lower humans have dreamed up all sorts of nightmare fuel, like artificial intelligences that take over people’s brains, hungry zombies and thirsty vampires, god-like mummies bringing plagues, the craziness goes on and that was before the Ripples hit the fan.”
“But those are real.” Her body was giving off a slight heat now and not the intense kind of happy or sexual kind. It was a pressure cooker building up some steam.
“They’re real now. You know who I’m really afraid of?” I asked, even as I looked away and examined Kraken’s latest work. “I’m afraid of the nerds, ya know, the dudes who worked for Microsoft, Apple, or Tesla and then got magic. Those dudes already had an insane IQ, that combined with magic, would wreck some actual hell if they were in my position. My Earth had groups of people that fantasized day in and day out about magic and what it could do. We dreamed of raising the dead or battling monsters with magical lasers or arcane firepower. Now, they can. And THAT’S scary.”
Taking a deep breath, I began moving the flesh golem to the spot where I actually wanted it to be. With a hint of will, it turned its skin touching the floor into a slick membrane that allowed me to push it into place. The center of Sunstone Castle was a large courtyard featuring my altered Yggdrasil baobab tree and in front of the Great Tree sat the control pedestal where Gungnir went.
I could easily feel the humming of the full crystalline batteries underground but their mana signatures still weren’t enough to drown out the solar panels on the ritual circle outside the Castle or the few up on top of the walls at cardinal points. The golem, I rolled that to the back of the castle courtyard where I set up a basic stone building large enough to fit the golem and two large vans. Very basic stone beds lined the walls and there were wooden boxes attached to the walls that were as of yet unfilled. Ideally, I’d have Centauri meal cubes in there along with weapons and armor as medical supplies wouldn’t be needed due to the golem.
Acantha took the opportunity to steer the conversation in a different direction than native Earth nerds. “What’s the real purpose of the golem? If you have Flesh Sorcery, you can heal anyone anytime you want, but this seems a bit altruistic for someone on a mission. Was it an experiment that simply went better than you expected or was it for the children of that city . . . New Richmond?”
“Both,” I grumbled. I scratched my head and then sighed as I parsed out my thought process. “It’s basically a convenient and complete hospital that doesn’t get tired. Feed it and it can do anything you want it too, which means alterations or upgrades are on the menu too if you have the required pound of flesh so to speak. It started as something to help me upgrade my own body but apparently a fire dragon and a sorcerer with water do not mix.”
“The sorcerers of old never did anything like this,” she whispered, still staring at the golem in wonder. “Tales say they ruled their sectors with an iron fist sheathed in power. Guilds ruled entire galaxies and their only foes were dragons and cultivators. Magic users of all kinds sought them for their power, as children from sorcerers almost certainly gained most if not all of their sorceries. That’s all we know as the accounts from that far back are locked up in the Coven’s Archives.”
“You mean your ancestral memories, right?” I grinned. Acantha whipped around, not even bothering to hide her shock. “Oh I know about them but there’s a cost right? The mind isn’t meant to hold so many lifetimes. The soul can only bear so much weight before it gives out. Maybe that’s the reason you jumped into that ritual fire, not to put it out but to get it over with?” My pointed prodding revealed the shame in her eyes even as she turned away, her hands shaking even as she gripped the loose folds of her pants.
“I did wonder about the downsides of internally bearing generations worth of skills and knowledge but fuckin’ hell dude, suicide?”
Sometimes, I hate being right. What makes it worse is that we weren’t even drinking, no liquor to take the edge off the sudden rawness of the conversation. What makes it worse than that was that I was able to see the signs too easily, the slight bit of sick joy coming out in her eyes when she told me about the ritual exploding, that hint of sadness when she mentioned surviving as an afterthought even after gaining god-like control over fire. Before the Ripples, I saw too many of my Army buddies have the same ticks and signs, and even though I was never called to combat, I saw what came home. They weren’t the same guys that left.
I hate that I was right. I could see it. And she was human enough to make it obvious. What it boiled down to was that Sybella had given me a ticking time bomb of a witch, maybe not intentionally or spitefully, but the simple fact remains that Acantha is unstable. Now queue the stupid part.
I like her.
And that made this whole situation even worse, probably my biggest immediate problem. Acantha is easy to talk to and get along with but this revelation of mine washed all that away. And I can’t forget about the wave of regret and guilt that I felt for just a few sweet moments enjoying simple, easy conversation with a real woman again. God how I miss Elizabeth. I don’t really care if it’s Acantha’s fault or not but as my vassal, my partner, and my ward, I have to at least attempt to keep her in good shape for a couple years.
Mentally communicating with Kraken, he updated me on the progress of our plan. He advised me that it would be better to finish up the golems that were still in-progress and dissolve those that had just started to save on time and energy. I figured that I was taking one liberty too many but I couldn’t have my or my team’s safety in jeopardy, which meant sudden and overbearing force was required. I communed with Kraken for a few moments again before smoothly reaching forward with a fingerful of condensed mana. I poked Acantha right in the back of her head with a finger infused with Flesh and Mind magic, instantly knocking her unconscious.
[Seems a little low]. Ignoring Kraken’s quip, I caught Acantha and carried her over to Gungnir where I began drawing on the consolidated power of Sunstone Castle. [You can’t fix crazy! I’ve seen all the rom-coms you have in your memories and crazy is the one thing you can’t fix! Well, maybe put stupid in that list too but crazy is worse!]
[Stupid is always worse than crazy,] I snapped, rolling my eyes. [But think about it from my perspective. What if she is nuts, certifiably? AND, what if it isn’t her fault? So, if it is from the memories, then it’s possible that I can fix it. I’m picturing her memories like a river that’s been dammed up but there’s either a crack in the dam or the spout where they should be coming through calmly is open a bit too wide. So I need to stem the tide by sealing the crack or screwing the opening to be a bit smaller so she can handle it. But I need to see it to figure it out.]
[All good points,] Kraken grunted. [But . . . what if she is just plain and simple crazy?]
[I fuckin’ hope not.] With one hand on Gungnir and the other on Acantha’s forehead, I meditated for a moment and then dove inside. I knew what I was doing was crazy, and almost certainly beyond the pale in terms of acceptable actions to take on another’s behalf. After cramming my screaming conscience into the dark crevices of my mind, I forged a solid channel between Acantha’s mind and my own.
The landscape before me was not what I expected. Every time I’ve entered someone else’s mind, there was some form of building that was the structural concept of that person’s inner self, their consciousness. Kong’s mindscape was blank, new, as if he had just recently gained personal awareness. Mine was my soul-tree in an ever growing environment overflowing with all the elements to support life. Kraken had even been drawing up plans to put the Sunstone Castle design around it as a way of fortifying my own spirit.
But Acantha, this was simply raw.
Volcanoes. Miles and miles of massive volcanoes stretching as far as the soul could see. Each one angrily spewed lava into the air dispersing loads of clumpy ash to blacken the sky. Some volcanoes wept gentle lava flows out of the sides but those were few and far between as far as I could tell. Although, off in the distance I could barely make out almost a bastardized outline of a city between two Mount Everest sized volcanoes. Odd.
“Creepy.” I almost jumped out of my skin as Kraken appeared beside me, surveying the area with a calm eye.
“Where the fuck-”
“Relax. Spirit familiar, remember?” Kraken teased, rolling his eye. “Besides, this is a mindscape here which is the gateway to the soul, so I have every right to be here to help your ass out in HER place of power, dreary as it is.” Surveying the oozing and exploding volcanoes, I wrapped the both of us in a dense shield of mana and cast my senses out, paying the most attention to what my Mind Sorcery was telling me. These volcanoes weren’t natural, really, they were a mix of the unending flow of memories from Acantha’s ancestors that had combined with the combination of primal energies of the different kinds of fire from the ritual gone wrong, which resulted in her mind becoming this mess. Kraken flew down and dipped one pseudopod into the lava to confirm before rejoining me in the air.
“Whatcha thinkin? Cause Ima’ thinkin’ there ain’t no fixin’ this.”
Glaring at Kraken for his horrible attempt at a southern accent, he gave a shrug to show he wasn’t sorry for being so bad at it. “I’m thinkin’,” I mocked, “that we can mold what we can’t fix.”
My thought-projection self with Kraken flew over to the nearest volcano, floating just off to the side of the erupting lava. Shaking my head at what I was planning on doing, I shot up into the ashy sky, forcefully shoving aside the massive layer of ash clouds so I could get a decent picture of the whole area. Floating back down after burning the image into my brain, I closed my eyes, gathering my will to reshape this mental reality. As much as I wanted to forcefully wave a wand and make this all go away, the fact of the matter was that my toolbox had a different answer. Sometimes, that with which you are cursed may in fact be a blessing if the right idea comes along.
The first volcano did not like my intervention as I forced the base on opposite sides to split open, venting the lava out to the side. Using my Sorcery of the Mind, mimicking my Earth Sorcery in this intangible place was a breeze. Nothing was actually real here. It’s a mindscape, a place where the mental-self lives. But we are humans, we are beings of a physical place and belief forges our reality. So in here, our beliefs and our thoughts have tangible power.
Using what I’d learned in the fifth grade about the difference between angry volcanoes and calmer ones, I did my best to mimic that application here. The calmest volcanoes are actually dead but the next calmest ones have vents that serve to relieve the pressure before the volcano can reach a boiling point. Carefully, as I was in someone else's mind uninvited, I dug channels for the lava to travel outwards until it touched another volcano where I again created large vents in the base and then made more channels to flow.
“Ah, I get it. You’re making a channel connecting the volcanoes to form a river of lava, which will calm down the landscape. Are you going to flatten the volcanoes to ease the landscape, where hopefully that will ease the mental distress?” Kraken questioned.
“Yup.” Moving quickly from one volcano to the next, I followed the image in my brain, connecting the volcanoes as if it were a game of connect the dots, forming a giant rune for meekness. Some people view that word as the modern definition of gentle or soft in personality, but the older meaning, the true meaning, is what I was going for.
Meekness isn’t weakness. Meekness is the intent of ‘strength under control’. The older meaning, the more powerful meaning of the word, is the powerful intent I was imbuing into the landscape. I needed Acantha to be in charge of her own strength, not wounded and tortured by its mere presence. Inside of the main rune, I connected the inner volcanoes to make two more small runes, one for fire and the other for mind, essentially combining the three to form the concept that the fire of her power with the weight of her ancestor’s memories would be her strength yet completely under her control.
As the rework of Acantha’s mind landscape was completed, almost instantly it settled down. The eruptions of lava were now perfectly channeled off to the sides into the lava river instead of violently exploding into the air. The sky was no longer constantly getting thicker with ash and smoke; the air slowly began to clear. Floating through her mind, I altered a few channels here and there to make them deeper and wider to help offset influxes of power, taking great care to shore up the cracks and slowly shape the volcanoes themselves to have extra pressure vents higher up on the cone if need be. The land became easier to see as the air clear, allowing a shattered city-scape to come into view.
Flying over to her soot-covered cityscape, I set Kraken and myself down right outside the walls. “Come on out! I know you’re in there!” I roared, using magic to make my voice larger than life. The sound shook the city almost literally, the walls and buildings rippling under the force of my power. “Acantha! We can fix this shit right now!”
Ash and soot and fire coalesced in front of me, flashing brightly before exploding into a humanoid shape. “Wha? Who?”
“It’s all right,” I soothed. “It’s all right. I promise, I’m here to help. Your mind right now is in a state of flux or constant change. Your damaged psyche is on the mend but it needs you. Your mind-castle needs to be rejuvenated, healed. I can help you with that but first, picture yourself here. Listen to my voice, be here with me.”
“I don-, I nee-.”
Her projected mental self was thin, so translucent that it almost vanished as quickly as it appeared. Channeling a thin thread of power to the nascent form in front of me, I kept it stable as the projection became more solid, taking on the feminine form. Over the course of an hour, Acantha’s feature finally filled out. “There we go, well done.”
“Ben, how did this happen, what did you do?” She questioned fearfully, looking around and covering her nakedness with her hands.
“Relax, just will yourself to have some clothes. This is your mind, here, you have all the power. I’m just the bandage right now. None of this will stay if you don’t want it to,” I reassured her. “What you need to do is either make it permanent or fix it yourself.”
“Make what permanent? Fix what?”
“Yourself. Turn around, look at your own mind, covered in ash, a desolate burned out wasteland. It needs life again. I put you back in control of your own mind, but you need to take control. I can’t do that for you.”
Almost hyperventilating, Acantha’s eyes went wide as she looked out at her city and then turned to gaze out over the landscape. “See?” I pointed. “The volcanic issue is solved. The memories and fire are combined and channeled in almost perfect harmony and I’ve made sure that it’s not set in stone unless you want it to be. Here’s your chance. Force, no, will yourself back to yourself. This is your land, your mind, under your power. My work is done.”
Her eyes searched my own, finding the truth in my words. Her shaking slowly gave way to calm strength, the realization that the only thing hurting her now was herself. Raising one hand, she watched in wonder as her mind and her will worked in tandem, fully clothing her. And that simple act was enough to tip off a landslide of progress.
Turning around, she blasted herself towards the city wall, slamming her palms into it. A wave of fire radiated outwards, changing the dull gray and black wall to flaming red and then continuing on, completely restoring and reshaping the sad burned-out hulk of a city into a beautiful metropolis of ruby and carved fire. Orange, red, and blue sculptures of mythical creatures adorned the walls and the tops of the buildings, dragons keeping watch over the domain, phoenixes flitting about without a care, efreets faithfully tending their fires.
The wave of changing flame didn’t stop there. It washed out over the volcanic landscape I’d spent hours fixing. Golden flames smashed into the volcanoes transforming them into solid obsidian fixtures of dragons and gargoyles spewing lava. The channels were changed into volcanic rock to better handle the sheer amount of heat although the overall runic shapes were left untouched. It gained a sort of hellish beauty, the fiery reds and oranges gleaming off the dark brown and midnight purples making the statues look otherworldly.
Standing up straight, Acantha looked up and made a hard yanking motion, pulling the clouds of ash out of the sky so that it gathered into a small but very dense ball that floated over her outstretched hand. Flinging it outwards, the ash exploded and took the form of a giant diamond amalgamation of a flaming gryphon and fire salamander. Crowing in newborn excitement, the monster looked around and happily dove into the river of lava, splashing like an otter pup experiencing water for the first time.
Color me impressed. Even as I looked around in awe of the changes around me, part of me couldn’t help but wonder if witches in general were as messed up as this. And if that was true, no wonder sorcerers of all kinds were sought after. A mind sorcerer could fix mental issues while a flesh sorcerer could help someone live forever or fix any kind of physical ailment, and the list just freaking goes on. Taking one last look at the expression of unburdened joy on Acantha’s face, I quietly extricated myself from her mind leaving her to a psyche on the road to recovery.
That poor woman was lights out for the next two days. I did the decent thing and had Kraken hook her up to a minor mana feed as she healed the mental and physical damage she sustained not only from the healing process but also the long term scar tissue from overuse of mana. These were old scars, they would require more time to heal but at least I got the process started. A part of me that I couldn’t control was beside itself, worrying about her safety and comfort. I conjured and crafted and did everything I could to make her more comfortable. I grew gallons worth of cotton to make her personally vine-grown bed to be as soft as possible. My guilt forced me to work tirelessly to heal every part of her body that was suffering from the throes of her internal conflict.
Checking in every hour or so, I administered a shot of Flesh Sorcery to boost the process without overdoing it. Healing the mind takes time, and luckily I had plenty of stuff to do to keep me occupied.