Carefully, oh so carefully, I unsuccessfully tip-toed in my boots all the way to the stairs, clearing every corner. I leaned over the banister to check the stairs, all good. I wanted to do a shock and awe entrance to storm the living room, but the liquid courage wasn’t there anymore. I served in the Army Reserve for a few years, but I’ll admit it. I was a desk jockey. We shot weapons once a year and did physical fitness tests. I did a couple training schools during the summers when I had the opportunity but I had never deployed, never seen real combat for myself. The elementary school dodgeball was the closest I had ever been to an actual firefight. And that one time I punched a bully out probably didn’t count.
I was not cut out for this, yet.
Shaking my head, I forced myself to focus. Couldn’t forget that my fiance was a freaking tree in my living room and that dead cats vanished from my bedroom just a few minutes after I killed them for eating parts of me while I took the crystal-acid trip of a lifetime. Fumbling at my magic, I gathered it and let the awareness of it spread through my whole body. I felt more in touch with my skin and oddly enough, my sense of balance. I felt like a trained dancer. Still couldn’t tip-toe quietly in boots though.
I slowly walked down the stairs, and checked every room of the house on the main floor. No cats. Seriously, this is why I am a dog person. I bet a dead dog wouldn’t get up and walk away. He would have been a good boy and stayed dead. I noticed that most of the windows in my house were broken. Walking up to the large ones in my living room, I thought about how to fix this glaring strategic deficiency. I didn’t have glass.
“I could either get some boards from my shed and hammer them across the windows,” I grunted aloud, scratching my chin on my shoulder. “Or, I could do this the New Age way, with magic!”
Checking on my tree lady one more time to make sure she was still intact, I looked around as I pondered a halfway decent solution. A glint of light caught my eye from the open doorway to my bedroom.
“Quartz.” I said, seeing half of a translucent purplish geode that Elizabeth got from her mother for Earth day last year sitting on my dresser. “That’ll work! But that means I need earth magic.”
Striding into the bedroom, I picked up the geode in one hand as I took out one of the wish-power crystals, taking the time to examine them both. The quartz geode simply sat there in my hand, glints of purple, blue, and white light playing off the sharp edges of the quartz crystal as the sun filtered through the blinds. The outer covering was made up of plain shale rock, smooth to the touch.
The other one though, the wish crystal, that one sang to me. Its sweet siren song pulled at me in a way that wasn’t physical, it was spiritual. It sang sweet lures of pure unadulterated power. Power of a kind that few dream of, let alone reach for. In fact, the more I looked into its twinkling depths the more I saw splintered possibilities that faded and cracked into new ones.
“Freaking Chaos,” I breathed, tearing my gaze away. “This has to be some kind of crystallized Chaos, untouched potential.” I don’t know why I said that but it felt right. My soul thrummed with agreement.
Figuring that I’d spent enough time philosophizing, I envisioned the next step. Taking a second to think, I grabbed the steel bottle opener that was stuck to the fridge and held it in the same hand holding the geode before quickly snatching a chunk of granite out of the drawer that had broken off from the countertop years ago. My thought process was a bit strange. My first sorcery, Mana Sorcery, enhanced my soul to be able to do magic and Flesh Sorcery used my body as the platform to embody the proper concepts. So Earth Sorcery had to work in a similar fashion.
Gritting my teeth, I put the Chaos crystal on my chest and then covered it with my other hand full of stuff, slowly applying pressure as I pictured what I could envision as the concept of Earth Sorcery.
I tasted pebbles, dirt, stone, metal and crystal while visions of traveling through the core of the earth rocked me. Volcanoes bled the bubbling molten sap of the world while tectonic plates rumbled in their eternal games of tag. The concept of Earth grafted onto the already present fundamental nature of mana present in my soul, forming an intersect of naturally present magic, ley lines. Veins of power flowing across the earth like a web of rivers.
My inner self cracked and flowed back together as my other magics engendered a hospitable environment, the Sorcery of flesh serving as the flexible base capable of growing with and around new stimuli while the Sorcery of magic itself welcomed a new yet very familiar concept.
Humans come from the earth, bound by the immense pull of gravity. It serves as our Mother, providing the very land we walk on and when Father Time has had enough of us we go back into her womb. Both the geode and the Chaos crystal vanished as I formed the concepts of earthen power, of shaping dirt and rocks and soil. The metal bottle opener disintegrated as the infused concept graciously accepted the molded elements related to rock and dirt. Images of conjuring and banishing various elements of earth flowed through my mind even as my inner self pictured me floating a few feet above the earth defying gravity on a whim.
What felt like an eternity flew by before I came to, picking bits of grit of sand from my eyes. It was the kind of nap where you lay down only expecting to be asleep for twenty minutes but you wake up and two days have gone by. I couldn’t even check a damn clock for the time.
“Ahh!” I freaked, pulling myself off my bed, grateful that I’d fallen to the side instead of straight back or forward. Panic hit me for a split second as I sped through the house to check on Elizabeth. “Oh thank god, you’re still a tree!” I smacked myself in the forehead. “No, not what I meant!” I argued even though I got no response. “It means that I’m not actually crazy! All this shit really did happen! Not that I’m happy it did because, well, you’re a freaking tree! But seriously woman, why a tree? WHY?”
Taking deep breaths and sitting next to her on the couch, I saw that her face still had that worshipful look on it and it was facing up like she was thanking the powers that be that she was actually a fucking tree. Seriously, last time I date a hippie. For some reason, I find the whole ‘natural’ and carefree look and attitude to be sexy but good grief. Glancing around the room, I wiped a few tears from my eyes and counted the windows that were cracked along with the ones that were completely missing panes of glass.
“Gotta figure out this magic shit.” Seeing as Elizabeth is, or was, a hippie, there were plenty of potted plants sitting around the house. Some of them were ferns enjoying the sun next to windows while others were weird lookin’ ones from Lowe’s. Her pride and joy though was a lemon tree that she was growing in the back room.
Slowly walking my way over there with my gun in my hand and my knife in the other, my eyes roved every surface checking for threats. I can’t believe I didn’t lock myself in a room to infuse myself with new magic. How stupid could I be? I almost slapped a hand to my forehead. What else could have easily crawled in to eat me while I just lay there like an unaware idiot?
Vowing to be more intelligent in the future, I continued to check out the house. The back room of the house was Elizabeth’s relaxation room. Our defunct internet router sat there on a stand in the corner and clashed with the rest of the room. Nice paintings covered the walls and a piano on the far side next to the white-painted coils of the radiator. Next to the small closet was a door leading to the outside where our back porch was complete with a dining table and a gas grill. But what I was looking for was next to the window.
Sheathing the knife but keeping the .45, I leaned over and grabbed one of the river rocks in the lemon tree’s pot making sure to get some dirt with that handful. Taking it back to the living room, I sat next to my girlfriend.
“You think this is as easy as bone?” I asked aloud, not expecting any kind of response. “I conjured that with no prob, we’ll see with this.”
Setting the rock and dirt on the glass coffee table, I set the gun down and picked up the river rock. Smooth whorls of gray were beautiful in their own way. While maybe not as vibrant as the geode I used to have, river rocks have their own significance. That’s what I latched onto, the feeling of being a little boy skipping smooth stones across a creek. The touch and feel of that little rock brought back good memories and I used that inspiration to push with my newfound power. Without even so much as a pop, another similar rock was in my hand.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
“Holy shitballs!” I swore, my excitement making this even more fun. I confirmed it was a real rock. Its weight didn’t lie and it made a solid sound when I knocked it against the leg of my tree-girl. My eagerness warred with my curiosity as I wanted to do it again but was also dying to try new things. With one hand, I conjured another river stone and with the other hand I eagerly shaped the first rock like putty. I was a small child discovering Playdoh all over again, I mashed the rocks together, my Earth Sorcery allowing the stone to form a ball of rock that morphed into whatever shape I wanted. I didn’t even have to use my hands, the larger stone molding into a frisbee and then into a bowl and then into every kind of utensil.
Feeling a serious jolt of childish joy, I looked at the windows again. Setting the river rock down, I focused on my hands, conjuring a chunk of almost clear quartz.
“Nice! This should work perfectly!” I had another thought but I discarded it almost as soon as I thought of it. Our countertops were made of marbled granite but marble is too heavy and granite presents the same problems. Neither would serve as a useful window cover. The windows would be super secure but then I wouldn’t be able to see through them. But what I could do is cover the windows in thick but almost transparent quartz.
Walking up to the window, I pressed the chunk of quartz to the window, closed my eyes and started conjuring. Surprisingly enough, the effort was fairly easy at the slow pace I was taking. The energy drain from me was low, and my earth magic was more than happy to make the quartz almost perfectly see through. With new confidence filling me, I ran around the inside of the house and locked every door to the outside of the house taking the time to cover each window with thick, sturdy quartz. By that point, I was more than a little drained and slumped on the couch near my arboreal woman.
Throwing back the last of her abandoned drink, I grumbled just a bit at the burn. She always made her shit way too strong.
“Well babe, what the actual fuck.” Again, I didn’t really expect an answer. I was rambling at this point and she was kind enough to not give one. I pushed my .45 on the table so that the muzzle was pointed at the door and then set my k-bar next to it. With my head in my hands, I forced myself to process everything going on.
[Think! What would Elizabeth do?] That thought alone made me laugh. She would probably tell me to “Stick it to the man”, whatever that means in this situation. Cheater time. I figured that whatever Deity that decided to alter the fabric of the universe probably doesn’t care about little ole me. And if that’s true, then maybe I can do a little universe altering of my own.
Putting together a bunch of ideas that I’d gotten from too many ‘what-if’ scenarios from books and movies and my own group of way-too-nerdy friends, I theory-crafted a bunch of stuff in my head and decided to run them past my implanted arcane instincts.
First, I felt my way through the twisting branches of magic threading my soul and there was something there that I had to try. Runes. The supposed language of magic. My instincts were telling me that runes and enchantments were linked but mainly in a symbolic way. Enchantments, as far as I can tell, are a way of making magical effects permanent or at least capable of functioning even if I’m not physically there, similar to setting the thermostat on cool and the air conditioner running all day to keep the house just right.
Looking back on the day, at least I think it’s only been a day so far, I ran out of gas conjuring quartz throughout the house, but what if I didn’t have to? Looking at my hands, I conjured a small, flat stone. Then, I concentrated on Einstein’s famous formula. Mass and energy are basically the same thing but in different forms, the same way that ice and water are different versions of the same basic elements.
“What’s the damn formula?” I muttered. “School House rock, don’t let me down . . . uh . . . . so ‘e equals MC squared, right?” I took a few minutes to rummage through Elizabeth’s bookshelf for her tutoring supplies. “Ah ha! Eighth grade science! Perfect! Couple laws of thermodynamics, mass and energy are the same thing. Yup. So, mass times light squared is the relativistic energy formula. But I need to fix this cause magic came outta nowhere. So, for this, substitute mana for energy.”
I think I technically was somewhere in the mathematical ballpark due to the transitive property but damn did high school seem like a long ass time ago. Writing it out on the dry erase board on the fridge, I wrote down exactly what I was thinking.
The formulae mutated in my head as I wrote from m*c^2=e to m*c^2=e=P. Maybe that’s not exactly correct but being in the general vicinity of ‘correct’ is good enough. Matter and energy are technically the same thing, only in different forms, similar to water and ice or sand and glass or wood and sawdust. Matter is just a bunch of really, really, really dense energy. Basically, my clunky enchantment would ‘eat’ the stone to turn it into energy and the whole thing on a super low setting would last for a very long time.
Deducing my way from the basic high-school idiot version of Einstein’s genius realization, I considered how it translated to magic. The big “P” meant power, as in magical energy, mana. The little “e” was the kind of energy I didn’t care about, the nuclear kind, the kind I really didn’t want to mess with. I am definitely not smart enough to play around with that yet. From what I could remember, all matter is made up of energy but it’s in a particular unusable state. Nuclear bombs are simply a particular kind of matter unleashing the energy bound up in the molecular structure all at once. And if we can do that with uranium, then I’m pretty sure I can magic my way into doing something similar on a way smaller scale with what I have.
Holding the entire concept in my brain, I held the simple gray stone in my hands and shaped the m*c^2=e=P formula into it, the symbols showing up on the upward face. As my interpretation of the runes began to light up, I added another thought on top of it, the idea of the energy flowing incredibly slowly off the new energy tap, almost glacially slow. My instincts took over, sinking my perception of the energy matrix formula into the stone and binding it to the laughably crafted runes. I giggled as my ‘runes’ were the formula itself just grown into the rock with a crudely shaped dial encompassing the formula so I could ‘tweak’ the flow. With the ‘power stone’ in my hands, I felt a refreshing wave of power drift off it.
Free mana! Free clean energy! Suck it, environmentalists! Proto-nuclear is the Way! I’m kidding. Magic is literally magicking an out of shape nerd into bypassing the minutiae of energy generation and here I am taking it for granted.
I danced a quick step like a five year old snaggin’ a popsicle at the pool without mama knowin’. Now, the mana-feed wasn’t that great or particularly intense, but it didn’t tire out and it was constant. Feeling the magical exhaustion slowly creep away, I sank my awareness down into the new energy tap and twisted my intent of energy release so that the flow was double the initial drip.
“Oh! Even better!” I sighed, feeling the mana wash away not only the slight headache that had sneaked up on me but my flesh Sorcery was using it to wipe away the little aches and pains of the day. Now, I just needed something to handle the overflow, the excess mana I wasn’t currently using.
But first, food. A search of my disorganized pantry yielded a veritable treasure hoard: chips, dip, some diet soda, a few beers, and a couple cans of tuna. Perfect. I tore through those tuna cans with some mayo and dill, my body needing the raw material to shore up its reserves after the incident of the cats eating part of me. Just thinking about that almost made me hurl. Fat, full and happy, I rejoined my lover on the couch. Maybe talking out loud to her wouldn’t help her, but it sure was helping me.
“So, how long are you going to leaf me like this?”
Uhg, I couldn’t resist. The raw strangeness of the past hours wore on me putting me into an odd state of mind. Grief and disbelieving hilarity played with my mood.
I threw an empty chip bag at her face as I ranted. “Dude, there are a bunch of different ways to be ‘one with nature’ without being a freaking tree. You could have been a druid, a dryad, a woodwitch, a tree spirit. But no, you had to go balls to the wall and be an actual tree.” I leaned on Elizabeth’s upturned arms. “So what now babe. Shall I treat you like Wilson, talk my sanity away as you stare into space?”
Nothin’.
Maybe, maybe she couldn’t talk. Or, maybe she just couldn’t talk out loud. [You know,] I thought as the Chaos crystals lightly clinked against each other in my pocket. [Could one of these fix you?] Taking one out, I set it on her barky thigh. I waited a few moments to see if the crystal hummed the way it did when I touched it with my bare skin.
“Huh, no dice.” Putting my left hand on her shoulder and the other on the crystal itself, I applied a bit of pressure while I fumbled around with my nascent magic.
“Come on,” I snarled, clenching my eyes shut, forcing my will into the visualization of what I wanted. I wanted my woman back. I wanted the crystal to sink into her and Elizabeth to magically come back to flesh life and weather this weird ass experience with me. But the Chaos crystal didn’t do what I expected.
Instead, the jagged edges angrily rejected my desires and instead grew, spearing into my hand like a bloodthirsty vine with an attitude problem as I tried to lurch back. My left hand was stuck to Elizabeth’s shoulder and my right hand was sutured to the points on her thigh where my fingers grasped over the Chaos crystal. Vivid forest green light sank into my hand and formed a circuit between me and her circulating the wild Chaos. The magic itself rejected the very thought of changing her and seemed indignant that I should try to change its purpose.
Desperately, I went with the flow, going through the same process as before as I felt the influx of new yet strange power. Using every bit of will I had in that moment, I latched onto the only viable thought racing through my brain, Nature Sorcery. Instead of allowing this to consume me or turn me into another former-human tree, I fortified my resolve.
The damn vine was trying to consume me like I was some Grade-A fertilizer but as I accepted the fact that these crystals were only for me and that’s it, the inimical pressure slowed down. My panicked thoughts turned to absorbing the power, welcoming it instead of fighting it.
[Think! Connect the dots! Put it together!] I thought furiously, working out the connection between Nature and self. [Humanity comes from the earth, our flesh is our body but it always returns to the cycle. We eat plants and then in turn we serve as fertilizer so that life may continue.] The symbolistic thoughts of the greater wheel of life formed anchor points as the amalgamation of magic and plant-ness combined well with the earth Sorcery to add even more flavors of Power to my soul.
I sank forward with exhaustion as my hands suddenly came free but the leaf-like wounds slowly vanished as I healed at an accelerated rate. “Jesus!” I yelped, noticing the blood from both hands fading from Elizabeth’s bark. Figuring what the hell, I put both hands back on her and felt out with my new senses. “This better do something!”
Since part of my magic was now nature-centric then this could actually work. My hands served as the focused conduit for my senses, mana gently flowing out of me and into her. Green. When I close my eyes, I can feel green energy, cocoon-like. I didn’t sense conscious thought at the normal human level, but there was definitely something there. More information seeped through as the flickering connection strengthened.
Potential. Sleeping potential. New . . . with an egg-like mindscape. The disparate thoughts took on a mind of their own as I relaxed in the face of an alien mindscape. These thoughts were definitely otherworldly, strange, unfamiliar. Humans aren’t sleeping potential, we are potential in motion but this felt like a mother bird chirping well wishes at her egg.
I pulled back. “Well, you’re not dead. And you’re not awake, but you are a tree, therefore, you are alive.” I reasoned, trying to keep my hands from shaking too much. “You can’t really defend yourself, but maybe that’s my job. How hard could it be to keep a tree alive? Don’t worry babe. I got this. Somehow.” My rambling comforted me only a little. The sound of my own voice was the only balm I could afford right now.
The sun cast deepening shadows through the new windows. I wasn’t too sure, but I could guess that it was somewhere around a few hours before dark. Nighttime meant that I was going to need a source of light, and since light sources require power then on to my next idea. Batteries. I took a few minutes to make sure I had all my weaponry either on me or on the table in front of me.