Okay.

I know for a goddamn fact that I had been checking my surroundings like a paranoid schizo for the past ten minutes AND my magic senses were maxed out.

WHO? HOW?

What in the world could’ve gotten past me? Commanding my frozen muscles to obey, I slowly finished the turn, looking at my porch. An eight-foot tall slim golden statue of a man in a well-cut Italian suit with long platinum curls that any chick would die for was chilling on my rocking chair, right behind me.

“Hello?” I eked out, coughing to try and hide my surprise as I rambled like a scared lunatic. “So, I take it this means you are an illusion? A figment of my PTSD zonked mind? Or perhaps something more fitting of the times like an immortal perhaps?”

The being raised one bold eyebrow.

“Er, a, a deity perhaps? Some angel sent from above willing to fix all this shit?” I announced, waving around at the yard. “Finally someone to take me away to wherever the hell everyone else went?” My brain-vomit was a response to my overwhelming shock. The man’s laugh was musical, off-putting in a holier-than-thou kind of way.

I assessed my magical stores of energy with my senses, just over a quarter full and going up all the time with the pocket generator. The stranger didn’t even resonate to my senses, merely presenting as a contained featureless void that defied my infantile attempts of unmasking.

“I was never a fan of honorifics or ridiculous abasement from the younger races, but they certainly do excel at brewing fantastic drinks.” His confident smirk ticked me off and the easy way he downed my pilfered liquor in front of me hinted at a power beyond my meager scraps. Doctor Weed’s infused vodka had sat on my shelf for the better part of two years because it was nasty but we weren’t willing throw it away. “And their capacity to play the jester is always appreciated.”

“Is this yours?” He continued, swirling the empty glass. Rainbow colored eyes narrowed as I felt an alien sense scan me down tighter than MRI. “I hope you don’t mind, I took the liberty of purloining it from your stores.” Setting the cup down, he pulled a pack of cigarettes out, offering out the open carton. I didn’t move. I was watching every sinuous twitch he made, all the while gathering as much energy as I could and concentrating it, molding it into a formless mass, ready to react at the slightest hint of a threat.

“Come come, I mean no harm, scouts honor.” He chuckled, playing with a lighter that shifted back and forth from formless light to embossed silver. Carved on the lighter’s face was a set of beautiful angel wings attached to a Nike shoe. I recognized enough of that for my butthole to get real tight.

[Shit. Shiiiiiit.]

He laughed again, lighting his cigarette. “Ah, the rusty wheels begin to turn. Let me illuminate this fine twilight you find yourself missing.”

“What ‘twilight’, exactly, did I miss?” I asked politely. I didn't stop gathering enough magical energy to blow us all to kingdom come but I did stop pointing my spear at him. Easing back, my eyes glanced all around. “I mean, I got the message from the first time, kinda how I am what I am now. That second one though, that one was messed up, almost killed me. What burns people but nothing else in the area? That’s not normal.”

His golden eyes narrowed. “You weren’t actually supposed to be here still. A most caustic oversight, indeed. The vast majority of humanity is gone, some picked up by the Elder races to be brought to the light, others taken for their fantastic potential. More still, the children were saved by the distant strains of man. Whatever shred of your race of human remains is simply an oversight.” His calm demeanor as he dragged on that cigarette made my heart plummet. “What drew my eye was the simple fact that you utterly destroyed a Night Stalker. By hook or by crook, that garners its own attention.”

“So that’s what it was.” I mused staring back at the street. Turning back around only reaffirmed that I was way over my head. I felt a serious amount of danger radiating off the unearthly figure in front of me. “How about you tell me that story in the comfort of my house . . .” I offered, furiously trying to work an angle, anything to grasp more knowledge. “I’ll make you another drink, several in fact.”

A dark chuckle shook the leaves on the nearby bushes. “Are you inviting me in as a guest mortal? None have done so since well before the Great Rending.”

Just when I thought the pucker factor couldn’t tighten any further. “I certainly am,” I cheesed out with a big grin on my face, forcing my spine to straighten as I grabbed the dregs of my courage. “Especially if you would deign to impart what passes as general knowledge for your kind.” This was my shot, maybe my only shot to figure what the fucking hell was going on. All I had going for me was a pure hunch based on chancy speculation.

The Man’s offered handshake was mountainous, completely enveloping my own the way a trash can lid covers a plate. This ant got to shake hands with the boot. Healing the bruise on my hand after freeing it, I politely opened the front door and invited him in.

In about seven minutes, because my still healing ass was beyond sore from my fight, I maneuvered the old English bar cart from the dining room to the living room, ladled with all of mine and Elizabeth’s favorite drinks. I presented an array of Jack and Coke, Jameson and Ginger, Vodka martinis and an Epic Screwdriver. I also had a 24-pack of Guinness, just in case. Setting a nicer atmosphere, one fit for a guest, I lit the candles lining the windowsills and got the fireplace roaring for the first time in a year.

To top it all off, a plate of Elizabeth’s homemade triple-chocolate fudge brownies with the last of the vanilla ice cream that I had been saving for myself. Couldn’t believe I was going to feed this fucker my absolute favorite dessert.

“Sweet Heavens!” My guest moaned as he sampled everything while laying on the couch, his feet propped up on the thigh of my tree-lady, “This is almost better than Aphrodite’s teat!” He laughed as his mountainous shoulders shook. “It truly has been awhile since I’ve dined on mortal fare. And this new form of mine quite appreciates it.”

Leaving brownie crumbs in his beard, he turned and said, “Well, infant sorcerer, I’ll answer two questions for you. And if I can’t answer it or don’t know, I’ll let you ask a replacement.”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Seeing his feet on my woman made me want to test out my new spear on a god. I was pretty sure that I’d figured out who this dude was; Hermes, or Mercury. The wings on the lighter were my main hint, plus the fact that I could not even sense him. That either meant he was out of phase with this reality or he was so powerful that I didn’t have what it takes to register him. And if our mythology had anything right, he was the god of messengers, basically the intelligence wing of either the Roman or Greek pantheon.

Not somebody I want to fuck with. Time to reel this fly in with honey.

“I am afraid that I’m going to have to plead ignorance as I’m honestly not really sure what to ask,” I replied, sipping on my own meager drink. Enjoying the burn down my throat, I elucidated on my observations. “Most people are gone and I really don’t understand to where or how. The houses are empty and as far as I can tell technology doesn’t work. A few people seem to be out and about but the streets get quieter as time goes by. I also don’t understand what exactly changed with the laws of our universe. I mean, I know that magic is real now and that some creatures who only existed in stories are actually walking around, but the only reason I have any power at all right now is due to my liquid courage at the time of what I’m calling the Ripple. And of course there’s more. I don’t know what you mean by the Great Rending or Elder races.” I was very careful to make statements instead of questions.

He looked at me without saying anything for a long moment. The minutes ticked by as he stared at me, methodically eating and drinking everything in front of him. Without a word, I pushed the iced bottles of Guinness in front of him. The side of his mouth curled up. Downing the last of his drink, he opened the first bottle of Guinness on the table in front of him and took a long pull with a contented sigh.

Giving a prodigious burp, he began to speak. “We have not been able to walk this particular Earth in many thousands of your years. It does feel like yesterday to Us, as time means nothing to Immortals. What is a million of your years . . . when I shall see a million more of those? Ha! It’s also why we hold grudges for eons, because we never go away. Except for here. Here is where magic left, or rather, where your Earth left magic. The greatest sages, shamans and VeilWalkers of your ancestor’s time somehow managed to split this earth from its branch of the multiverse and into its own dimension, shielding it from the Great Flow. Your kind remembers scant stories of before - stories of Us.”

He didn’t even breathe as he spoke. I noticed zero puffs of air from lungs pushing out an exhalation, nothing. Sound came out as his lips moved but there was nothing normal about his speech.

“I suspect that the ‘Ripple’ as you call it, was the death of one of the gods of Change, or was it one of Death’s sons? Certainly one whose Name you aren’t even capable of hearing. The fight that caused the passing happened in an offshoot dimension and the Passing itself sent out waves of pure change and uncharted Chaos, destroying the inverted seal and reverting your Earth and its surrounding bodies to their former state; that is to say, its state of being one with the multiverse. Its original state.”

He finished the Guinness and went for another, deftly popping the top and draining that dry in two pulls. “That’s the easiest way to water it down. Interesting bit of knowledge to hang onto, as power returns to Earth in ever-increasing waves, great arcane workings are easier to perform while the Harmony is being tuned. It won’t last. Anyways, the Meaning you understood from the Ripple is your fractured genetic memory resounding from the return of MAGIK.”

The last word blew my short hair back and knocked several pictures off the wall as a long crack snaked down the brick fireplace. My shield barely held back the shockwave. My right hand slowly inched towards my spear that I had propped up on the wall.

He put his hand up, trying to placate me. “My apologies, I am a guest in your home and you have treated with me well. I meant no harm.” I stilled my hand. “The energy here in your house is raw and pure, unusually so. I did not know the name of Power would react that way.” He set his drink down and sat up facing me directly, his face solemn. “Let me remove the stain from my actions by giving you these.”

Opening his hand revealed a small seed sitting in the center of his massive palm. “This is an acorn from Yggdrasil, the World Tree whose smallest branches and roots again entwine with the soul of this planet, grasping for the holes where its former roots used to dwell. This alone should be a satisfactory recompense for my actions. It does pair fortuitously with your own abilities, does it not?”

I gaped at his hand.

My visitor chuckled. “Alas, the second gift is a warning, or more closely aligned to a recommendation. Your next visitors, exterminate them. Any and all of them that you can find. I promise you, it’s for your own good.”

*****

After my visitor left, I stared at the gift for a while even as I turned the warning over in my head. The little acorn weighed a ton in the magical sense of the word but it was even heavier with a sense of historic importance. The energy it contained was dense, compact in a way that made me not want to touch it. The fledgeling supernova marble of swirling power it contained gave off an earthy scent. Gravity itself was still being warped around it, my drink and a pen lifted off the table to join the slowly orbiting empty Guinness bottles. Such a small piece of humongous life that could change everything.

Before my visitor vanished into the night, he warned me that the seed, if planted, could create a gateway for my own use, but if done, would also more deeply connect Earth to the World Tree - letting gateways open far easier than ever. Not that there weren’t a few already, which were spitting otherworldly creatures across the deserted surface. It would generally weaken the skin between realms. His parting words before he vanished were what worried me the most.

As Earth is now mostly abandoned and humanity (about 98% of us) was saved from the coming tumult, he told me, “Earth is up for grabs.” That scared me more than anything.

A new form of warfare was coming to Earth and I am here at ground-fucking-zero.

Other small items that were a bit heavier than the first ones around the living room began to float, one at a time. The strange sight pulled me back to the here and now as pictures began to rattle as if someone was pulling them off the walls while the acorn’s glow strengthened and pulsed. My fatigue was too much, way too tired for this shit.

[This day needs to be over.]

I grabbed for the newest annoyance of my life. As soon as I touched it, its weirdness immediately stopped - the new solar system in my living room falling all around me. Opening my hand revealed (on the strictly visual spectrum) a normal acorn, calm and sleeping. On the magical side of things, the brown chunk of oaken magic was gobbling energy like a starving elephant.

My face soured at the double sided blessing in my palm. [Looks like I don’t have long to decide what to do with this little time bomb, if I wait much longer, it may sprout in my hand and decide that I’m the dirt.]

Shaking that ghastly thought out of my head, I pushed aside the exhaustion nipping at its heels. Even though darkness had fully fallen, I sprinted to the front yard and conjured a stone ladder on the side of the house.

I still had my helmet on and used my magic to make a socket for a lux pebble. Instant miner’s helmet. A shred of an idea had popped into my head and I was frantically trying to come up with the rest of it.

[Think douchebag! Think!]

I had four normal Earth acorns that had barely sprouted, planted at the four corners of my house and a generator with pre-programmed spells ready to go. I can’t forget that my house was already bunkered down with a double layer of energized stone.

[Time to make with the magic.] I thought, shimmying up the ladder. I stood next to the chimney and looked out across the darkness. No street lights. No lit candles. Just the absolute absence of the moon, the stars, and every other light which made me a freaking target up here with my miner helmet.

Cringing at my stupidity, I got to work. Conjuring a two-foot layer of dirt across the entire top of my house to set the stage, I kept my ears and eyes on a swivel. Even though I just wiped out a night-monster-thing and had a nice chat with a spooky visitor with a penchant for liquor, tonight only served to make me believe crazier shit is a comin’.

Knowing that speed is its own kind of safety, I planted the World Tree seed in the center of the newly created plot of dirt on my roof. I cast my mind into the four corner-placed seedlings with their enchantments and connected them to the newest addition, slowly scratching in a rune of willpower into the shell of the acorn, trying to bend this force of nature to my own volition.

[This tree will be mine. It will be my gateway, under my control.]

My magic reached through the straining enchantments down to the generator in the basement that was supporting them. Taking control of the dial function of the enchantment directly, I slowly upped the power flow to about medium and I could feel the seedlings grow up the corners of the house and across the roof at a bit of a faster pace until they looked like vines under the direction of my Nature Sorcery. I really didn’t have the mental energy for this at all, so my plan had a stop-gap. The oak seedling-vines met at the World Seed and grew a small cage around it, then I took the growth-limiter enchantment already present in the seedlings and extended it on the World Seed.

[Good. Now, it will gain energy and life from the generator like a battery.] I thought, examining the interplay of energies. [It should still sit in stasis till the morning when it gets activated by the sun.]

I looked around for the moment. [What a freaking crapshoot of a plan.]

Barely able to stay away, I slid down the ladder and stumbled off to bed, my magic barely able to keep me awake. After locking the door and sealing it with conjured stone, I lay on the couch next to my lady. I used my Flesh Sorcery to put me in the deepest sleep I could muster without tempting death.