— “Aha! The real beginning! Here’s where it really started . . .” —
*******
The first end of the world happened at the best time . . . sorta. We were already almost drunk, wasted really. The Irish call it ‘gloriously inebriated’ but the devil’s not in the details here. Last night hadn’t technically ended thanks to excessive coffee and redbull and I had just plowed through four loaded vodka tonics on the beginnings of a fine Saturday afternoon just to keep the party goin’. Nothing like hair of the dog and zero sleep to keep the hangover at bay.
Can you really experience the downsides of drinking if you don’t actually stop drinking? Alcohol, both the cause and solution of most of your problems.
The Pulse Rippling through the thick skein of reality shattered my thoughts and violently interrupted me and my girlfriend's very chill early afternoon of drinks and epic shark attack movie marathoning. Serious progress had been made on working my way through my favorite buffalo chicken dip when that mythic Ripple from outside our dimension carried an unrecognizable voice in a language that had too many grunts and clicks to be familiar, yet my girlfriend and I both somehow understood the gist of it.
"ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE" reverberated throughout the collective psyche of the entire human race. Most of us missed the emotional undertones that simultaneously conveyed a darker message interwoven with the first.
"BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR.”
Even more missed the softer instinctual undergirding.
"Life as you know it, is over."
Sticky bits of leftover meaning flooded through the alcoholic haze, hissing.
“Arcane power is yours for the taking.”
To be fair to the circumstances at that exact moment, I'm not really sure how much of that multi-layered Ripple I understood that day but my girlfriend Elizabeth sure grasped the Surface layer of meaning. Without spilling a drop of her Jack and Coke, her tipsy hippy ass looked up, staggered off the couch and fell back down while managing to giggle out, "I want to be one with nature!”
Mind-bending horror froze me to my seat as I stared in sheer disbelief at the grotesque sight that unfolded right in front of me. My girlfriend’s beautiful Irish skin tone darkened into a mahogany brown and her smooth skin turned craggy while her delicate violinist fingers stretched out unnaturally thin and long like wispy tips of willow tree branches. I couldn’t even drop my drink as her digits sprouted thick bunches of leaves in all directions while her shapely legs joined together with bark as the mortar, gnarling and pushing into the floor of our house. The sectional couch we were sitting on split under the violently growing roots.
My ability to move was stolen from me as I helplessly watched her delicately complexioned face darken and turn upward, her hair and body growing to fit her new state of being. Less than a minute went by and my soon to be fiancé was an young tree, in our living room, in our fucking house.
Minutes passed.
I still couldn’t believe it.
I couldn’t make myself believe it. Elizabeth looked like the younger, hotter version of the talking grandma tree from Pocahontas. The tortilla chip loaded with buffalo chicken dip halfway to my mouth had lost its earlier sense of priority, but my hand couldn’t relax enough to let it go even though I was shaking like a leaf. Tidal waves of esoteric meaning and insane sensory overload not meant for the human mind staggered my brain as agonizing pressure built behind my eyes, the alcohol seeking to both dull the pain and haze the pounding message.
[FUCK!] I thought as I struggled to put a semblance of rational thinking together. I leaned closer to try and work through the image my uncooperative eyes were showing me. Still unwilling or unable to put my drink and snack down, I inched my foot closer to my woman’s foot/root. It did look like oddly fleshy bark contorted in the shape of a foot. I could see the bump where the ankle was and the groove where the legs joined together. Even as a tree she still had a rockin body.
Irrational thoughts blazed through the fog in my brain as sanity warred with reality. [That’s the last fucking time I date a god-damned hippy. Kinda wish . . . WAIT!]
I painstakingly brought my thoughts to heel, forcing them away from that particular word.
[Does this mean I have one question that will be answered if I use the “W” word?].
My inebriated thoughts and I miserly communed as the fog of Jameson fought with the new reality. Half of me wanted to test the limits of this new reality and the other half was desperately clawing at my disbelieving soul to face it and prepare. Stiffly turning my head, I looked at the silent old MacBook; it was no longer on and the screen had a nasty crack spidering across its width. My phone sitting next to the computer also had a large crack bisecting it.
Still not letting go of the chip, I used my pinky finger to hit the center button on the bottom of the dead smartphone to see if it would light up. Nothing. Turning back to Elizabeth showed me what I didn’t want to see. Her face was locked upwards in a woody expression of painful joy.
Now I wasn’t a true blue prepper like some of my crazy family, but my former less-foresty lady and I had jokingly halfway prepared for apocalypses of various kinds, and this entire mindfuck was making my paranoid instincts tingle like a fire alarm screwing an air-raid siren. We had often laughed our way through zombie or weather apocalypse movies and bought items from Amazon that might come in handy. Several guns which were gifts from my estranged marine corps dad, were in the house along with some throwing axes, canned food, winter coats and a bug-out bag and other miscellaneous camping crap.
Schlaaap!
The wet, fleshy sound shattered my reverie. Looking up, I saw an orange, screaming neighborhood cat peeling itself off of our window. Its slitted red eyes promised death even though its promised threat was comically at odds with its diminutive size. The slender cracks in the window sill weren’t enough for its claws to grip.
[Screw it.] I thought, shoving the last bite of heaven in my mouth and running my hands over the feminine tree to force my mind to believe my eyes. Confirming that Elizabeth was in fact, a freaking tree, and did not seem to be conscious in any way that I could tell, AND was actually made out of solid wood, I sprinted up to our bedroom, slamming the door behind me. My drunken haze was leaving faster than it had ever done before even while it was providing an unsteady drive to do something.
Clumsily tearing the room apart, I threw on thick black work jeans, my old Army boots, slung a pistol holster on my belt, shoved my Smith and Wesson .45 in it, and grabbed the two spare magazines. Each magazine held seven rounds. I checked, twice. Grabbing my thick leather jacket and AR-15 rifle out of the closet, I stuck the throwing ax and KA-BAR knife in my various pockets and put on some thick leather gloves.
“Alexa!” I half-jokingly and half-freaking out yelled as I put myself together. “Anything I should know about?”
No response from the friendly resident AI.
A heavy feeling of imminent doom grew in my stomach as I turned to look at the annoying household A.I. over by the large screen tv Elizabeth gave me last Christmas. A large crack that wasn’t there an hour ago splintered through the flatscreen. Everything electronic that I had seen so far was broken. Every screen was covered in cracks or completely shattered. I couldn’t turn anything on.
Nothing worked.
The sound of shattering glass downstairs jolted me out of my disbelief. Quickly scanning the room to further confirm my theory, I noticed that the digital clock was off and the little glass screen was cracked. My girlfriend’s old phone we forgot to return was off and broken as well. I cracked open the bedroom door to the hallway. The slight movement coincided with a vicious and small cat howl. The neighborhood stray cat had gotten in and was tearing in my direction like an insane bat escaping from the depths of hell.
I had gloves but trying to manhandle a demented cat didn’t seem like the brightest idea. Something deep in my gut told me that this cat meant business. It was coming after me like it thought that I was legitimate prey even though I was definitely still way bigger than it.
Figuring that I should let its own enthusiasm be its undoing. I opened the door just a little more to let its head in as the demon cat ravaged the door with its claws. The situation would almost be funny if not for the incredibly weird sight in front of me.
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
My plan was to smash the door onto its head as it tried to come in, but its little dagger-like claws were making good headway on the door as if the solid pine door were made out of cheese. A red glow emanated from its eyes and claws as the tabby slowly and successfully began to carve its way in. Shavings of wood began to cover the floor of the hallway.
Freaking out, I pulled my .45 and shot the cat while it was somewhat stuck in the door, one paw reaching for me. As it fell, the strange red glow slowly faded from the sharp extremities of the cat. Giving the door a solid slam to its head to make sure it was dead, I kicked the corpse back into the hallway and stared at it.
“What the ever-living fuck?” I breathed, holstering my firearm.
[Okay . . ] I thought furiously, parsing the sanity from the remnants of the alcohol. [Time to put the last of my drunken courage to use. Obviously, things are NOT normal.] I counted off crazy shit in my head.
[One. Stray cats going insane with the ability to claw through wooden doors, so . . . check. Two. Girlfriend is a new tree, also check. Fuck it, my turn.]
Kicking the dead cat further back into the hallway closer to the stairs, I shut the door to the room and shoved the dresser up against it to keep it secure. Closing my eyes, I focused on the memory of the message from the first Ripple.
[Oh god I hope I don’t screw this up.] Sitting with my back to the dresser, I formulated how I wanted to gain a serious advantage, and what better way than magic? My first thought was the typical bullshit, ‘wishing for more wishes’ and ‘god-like power’, but those thoughts skittered through my raw neurons with a painful edge letting my instincts know that instant and fatal peril lay down another step of that path. Each thought along similar lines stabbed my brain deeper and deeper until I relented.
Respecting the pain, I decided to go down the other path, the more viable one. Because what fuckin nerd doesn’t want to be a mother fucking sorcerer? That line of thinking didn’t hurt my brain at all, in fact, it seemed to resonate through me in a way I couldn’t fully comprehend yet I knew it to be true. Going with my gut, I put my nerdy overactive imagination from reading too many books to use and went with the flow because this feeling was definitely too weird and cool to pass up.
My barely educated guess from too much geekiness and fiction overload is that Sorcery is the concept of your soul being given understanding and control of an element like water or fire, to the point where you can use that kind of magic like Dumbledore on crack. Intimate and personal control of an element the way anyone can unconsciously use their arm to do a familiar task.
[Breathe in, breathe out]. But what kind of magic would keep me alive now and allow me to grow later? [Breathe in, breathe out]. What scales with time? Knowledge. Nature. [Man, it's hard to focus. Damn, I don’t have time for this!] Forcing my mouth to say what my mind was scrambling to put together got harder as time inched forward.
“I wish for Sorcery and opportunities to gain more!” I yelled, looking upwards. Space shifted. Time slowed. Five mini explosions occurred simultaneously around me in a circle like a bunch of over-spiked M-80 firecrackers going off. I came to an indeterminate second later with five lacquered crystals the size of a Dasani water bottle laying around me, each in their own smoking crater.
The humming alien crystals generated their own fluorescent mist that rapidly cooled off, and every one of them was doing their best to mimic a dying lava lamp mixed with a disco ball, generating twisty light instead of refracting it like normal crystals. I tentatively reached out and touched one, using the bare bones of logic to reason that it must be connected to my wish. As soon as I picked up the first one, it shocked me through the glove for half a second and then stopped. It felt like sticking a finger in the electrical socket, but this painful prick also sent a message . . .
“A shard for a Sorcery, kind speaks to kind”.
[Fine!] I grumped. [But that doesn’t tell me how it works!]
I quickly gathered up three of them and shoved them in the pocket of my cargo pants, and then held the other two, each in a hand. What would help me out the most? A hundred different improbable scenarios ran through my brain but what stood out the most was that I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, which meant I needed to be able to figure it out. Knowledge is key and we learn by seeing.
Gathering my mind, I began concentrating on the two things I wanted to start with, and then matching what I could conceptualize to what I needed. I could use these crystals for a whole bunch of awesome powers but the fundamentals had to be taken care of first. I focused my entire being on my germinating idea of the stuff that makes magic tick, on mana, the supposed building blocks of magic itself.
“Fundamentals . . .” I muttered, looking around the room. “Magic, gotta know how it works . . right? But that’s the freaking problem, nobody knows how it works. Kind speaks to kind.”
My eyes landed on the cluttered bookshelf on the left side of the room. Elizabeth’s books from her master’s program were mixed in with her tutoring supplies. I gritted my teeth as I took a serious leap of faith. “Kind speaks to kind.” I repeated, turning it over in my head. Tentatively, I grabbed an assortment of textbooks and piled them in front of me. “Introduction to Physics, sure. Algebraic Concepts for Dummies, duh. Scholastic Basics Refresher, yup. Colors and You? Nope.”
As a Hail Mary, I grabbed an old TI-84 calculator and then Elizabeth’s work computer and stacked them on top of the books. “Kind speaks to kind,” I continued, working my delinquent brain cells. “That’s the same as ‘like attracts like. So, magic helps dictate how stuff works and math plus physics are how we define the universe, the language of everything. So . . . magic has a language . . .”
My mind shifted that focus to the crystal in my left hand as the intent deepened, my mind linking the fundamentals of magic with branches consisting of the idea of basic building blocks, Runes, the language of magic and magical engineering.
My eyes almost exploded out of my skull as the left shard vibrated, splitting into four pieces, each silver needle shooting into me, one digging into my heart, the other lancing into my brain and the last two soaking into my eyes. Just before they made contact with my flesh, the shards liquified and soaked through, flaying my nerves as the Sorcery of magic itself settled into me.
I saw the very building blocks of magic come together and explode as my mind opened. It dawned on me at that moment exactly what I wished for. Sorcery. Pure instinctive magic unfolded, complete with the bare bones understanding in using said abilities. Instincts of pure magic flowed from within the liquified crystals as they seared themselves into my brain.
My mind nearly exploded as hieroglyphics exploded in my vision, strange symbols mixed with mathematical symbols streamed past my eyes in the craziest hallucination. A stray thought flickered through as I rode an acid trip down the center of the universe’s soul, seeing magic. A fundamental concept, I need the ability to see extra dimensional energy to know what I was doing and learn more. I didn’t even notice the pile of textbooks and electronics flare up in a burst of magical energy and evaporate in a mist that was drained by the first crystal. After indeterminate moments of my soul expanding, it all came together. It boiled down to the concept of magical manipulation and enhancement, the understanding of how to make the temporary permanent and push the bounds of reality.
The second crystal activated right in the middle of it all with a spare thought of pure desperation that was far less foreign to me. Flesh. Years of public school teaching bolstered my understanding of the human body. My expanding soul, energized by the first crystal, pushed at the concept I had ready to go, the idea of flesh magic and all its wonders.
Humanity stands head and shoulders above the normal Earthen wildlife in terms of apex predation due to brainpower and crazy endurance but our bodies are technically fragile, delicate in the worst of ways. A kneecap can take over two hundred pounds of pressure per square inch on the knee if you come right at it at the exact right angle, but if you hit the knee from the side just a little bit, a toddler can generate enough force to cripple a grown man. A proper deadlift from a trained lifter can pick up a sleeper couch, but you twist wrong and you’re screwed up for life. On a pound for pound basis, chimpanzees can wreck our shit and tigers and bears laugh at how pathetic we are, seeing us as prey. I need to be able to overcome my physical limits, heal from deathly injuries and bounce back from horrible disfigurements.
Ain’t no time like the present.
My splintered mind sought comfort in the familiar as my soul was simultaneously ravaged and reforged by the Sorcery of mana, my unconscious building the flow of what my body did every single day and then matching that what I needed.
Flesh. Blood. Bone.
In order to survive, to thrive, I need to be able to create, conjure, correct and alter everything about that which is me. The more I conceived of what I needed, the closer the second magic shard inched towards my chest as if being drawn by a magnet while its color shifted to a deep red shot through with ivory.
Nerves. Tendons. Cells. The second Shard began slowly morphing into a needle shape and puncturing through my clothes to my sternum.
Pain. Mind. Will. The sinister red glow began to channel bits of white light down the sharp edge, and I intimately felt each one, each concept, each spark, each piece of the whole impact that which was me.
Assimilate. Grow. Consume. Build. Heal. The last bit of the crystal was different from the rest, it wasn’t just the power or ability that flesh Sorcery was made of, it was the instincts and concepts to utilize it, and it kicked like a horse.
Life morphed. Colors assaulted. Bliss and agony ripped through me. Put the craziest acid you can find at an epic rave and then condense it to the size of a pin and throw a solar flare at it. That was me and my soul in that effervescent moment. But I didn’t have time for that either, I had the beginnings of a plan that seared my brain in this compressed eternity of torture, albeit not a very well thought out one. Mana Sorcery to make my soul into something capable of extreme acts of magic and flesh Sorcery to create a solid foundation capable of handling the strain and healing from all injuries.
Pain. Agony. That’s what greeted me back at home. My soul was too big for my body. My skin felt stretched, some of it missing. In fact, some of it felt like it was being ripped off of me right . . . .
Now!
Cruel reality yanked me back from the out of body trip to the here and now. Opening my eyes and seeing a few mangy stray cats stripping bites of flesh from my limbs and nose with their glowing teeth and claws was not the best way to finish a journey from the birthplace of the universe itself. Magic roared out of me as I sat up.
Instincts that weren’t there before manifested. I grabbed the large tomcat contentedly eating my nose with my hands sheathed in a gauntlet of bone and crushed its skull. Blood, my own blood pouring out of the open wound in my own thigh hardened and speared the other cat lunching on my arm. The sheer agony, I couldn’t think. As the tidal wave of pain crested, my soul finished integrating with my body, the pain recalibrating my very being.
I sprang up in a fit of torturous shock and slammed the dead tomcat into the other one, knocking it away. My fear gave me strength as I battered every yowling feline in the room over and over into the ground, stomping on them just to make sure they were dead. Roaring in pain, I committed cat-tricide on a level that would have had PETA all over my ass.
Stumbling to the bathroom, I could help but weep at the sight of my face let alone the sheer agony shooting through me. The edges of my cheek and nose were bleeding profusely with pulsing black crud shooting through the sides of the wound. Gripping the sink with my bone covered hands cracked the porcelain even as I hyperventilated. My heart pulsed and a wave of flesh magic rippled out. I blame the pain. I didn’t know what to do, but my newly infused body with magically implanted instincts did.
I grabbed healing for this very reason. I floundered about for a minute with my magic before I was able to put in a pain block on my entire body as my flesh wriggled almost independently from my conscious control. Foreign objects and filth expelled out of my wounds as the skin knit back together. Once that was done, the bleeding became my next priority. Threat assessment came second. I peeked out of the bathroom. No cats. No dogs. Nothing but a bloody room.
I frantically scanned the room with growing horror. [Where the fuck did the dead cats go?]
Barely able to focus, I froze as I slowly processed my thoughts. [So, do I have to consciously heal or does the magic work automatically?] I clumsily fumbled with my instincts as the onset of adrenaline hit. Shutting the door to the bathroom, I looked at the mirror again. I noticed that part of my nose was slowly regrowing. Checking my leg, the raw cat bites were no longer gushing blood, in fact, they also were slowly growing back. Regeneration, check. I focused on my face and tenderly pushed the magic there. The pain block was on, but it still didn’t feel good watching my nose regrow. After doing the same to my leg, I carefully removed the pain block.
More or less ok. Ravenous hunger struck me but the smell of blood was doing its best to curb that. Through my flesh magic, I scanned my body from head to toe checking each section of my body, making sure that I had no torn muscles or open wounds or internal bruising. Disease was my main concern at the moment but my magic informed me that that nastiness was already expelled. My outfit actually did a lot to discourage the cats from eating some of the more delicate parts, thank god. Once that was done, it was time to secure my house.
I took a few deep breaths and poked around with my instincts for a few minutes trying to remember the feeling of making bone gauntlets out of thin air. Seems like the results require will or pure desire, which makes this part of it fairly easy. Picturing what I wanted, I conjured thin bone armor to cover my forearms and shins and then did the same to my chest and back. I did one jumping jack to make sure it wasn’t too heavy and that I could actually move.
Storming back into the bedroom, I checked every inch of it to see where the cat corpses went. [What the fuck?!] I cursed internally, grimacing at the scene. [Shit just got real scary.] The trail of blood leading to the shattered window above the roof let me know where they probably went. I sat still for about 10 seconds, just listening for anything out of the ordinary. With nothing else in the top floor of my house, I was ready.
[Breathe in, breathe out]. I moved the dresser back from the door, banished the bone on my hands, drew my .45 in my right hand and carried the K-bar in my left. I shook my back so my slung AR-15 rested perfectly against it and wouldn’t hit anything as I moved. Slowly opening the door of the bedroom, I peeked out to check the hallway leading towards the stairs. No cats. No bodies. Wiggling my hips a bit, I felt the remaining crystals jingle a bit in my pockets. Secure in the knowledge that I had my epic magic power granting stones, I cracked my neck.
“Go time bitches.”