Waking up to silence was disturbing in its own way. No explosions or monster attacks to freak out and respond to was almost making me paranoid. After my morning ablutions and a breakfast of almost-burnt deer steak, I set my eyes on a project that never seemed to end.
It had only been a couple of days since I had made my armor but I’d learned so much in that time. So I checked each piece carefully before I put it on. It was a great second attempt at epic armor complementary to my abilities, and it had stood up decently well since I’d made it. Meh, only one piece needed adjustment and that was the helmet. Since making my armor, I hadn’t even realized that mental combat was a serious possibility until I fought Kong for control of his own mind.
Sitting on my less than luxurious bed of grown wood and leaves with the rest of my armor on, I took the helmet with both hands and passed my senses through the enchantments woven into it. There was plenty of room for improvement. I conjured a small flat diamond the size of a silver dollar and grew a rune of will inside a rune of defense, a clenched fist within a Roman tower shield.
I then picked up the World Tree disk from next to my bed and pushed mana into it, coaxing it to make it grow a casing which I gently peeled off and used to cover the entire gem. Using Earth and Flesh Sorcery to peel back the outer layers of metal and bone from the helmet, I got to the base bone layer and implanted the new diamond into it while weaving it into the enchantments that were already there. I reset the iron and diamond layers with the runes crafted in silver so that the diamond couldn’t be seen.
My mental abilities were indirectly linked to my sorceries, instead of directly, as bonding with Norn is what brought them about. This made mind-based abilities my weak point and the diamond was my answer for this. Functionally, it would serve as an ever present detection ward and shield for my mind and also hopefully be present for any mental battles that came my way. It soaked up extra ‘mental energy’ to bolster my mind any time that I needed it. The other insurance I had was Gungnir, as the bound spear was also part of me since it had a tiny piece of my soul in it. Chances are I could probably take it into mental combat with him if I needed it.
Gungnir bobbed over and sighed. “It must be nice to sleep. Floating around while you lay there unconscious is pretty boring.”
“I mean, you do have things you could be doing.” I replied, cracking my neck while ticking off my fingers. “Like draining Rath’s soul of energy so he’s pliable, figuring out ways to make me over-powered, working on the viability of our long term plans, ya know, useful things?” A note of exasperation tinged my voice.
“That’s already on the wall over there.” Gungnir said. “See? I carved it while practicing creating a fire-laser.”
I don’t believe it. Between caveman drawings of our battles with Rath and Kong and the Centauri humans on the ceiling were lists of plans complete with checkmarks and x’s all around.
I rubbed my eyes in disbelief before looking them over. “I meant in an organized fashion.” Standing up to crack my back, I walked over to the wall to examine the mostly unintelligible scrabble. “I need more light.” Gungnir obliged. “Well, what’cha got?”
Gungnir’s glowing hue changed as it spoke. “First, I’ve checked on the stony dog every hour to keep tabs on’em, no changes that I can see. Also, draining energy from the stubborn dragon is hard. Probably going to take a month before his soul is down to a manageable strength. I’ve also been perusing the brain crystal we got, and that is not organized at all, which is going to take a year’s worth of nights to sort through as he’s lived for over six millenia. And that’s with factoring out multi-century naps that dragon’s like to do.”
“Six thousand years?” I gasped. “How in the fucking world did we beat him? Don’t dragons get more powerful the older they are?”
“Uhm, luck? Maybe also the fact that he was arrogant and careless as you are a baby sorcerer? AND, you DROWNED a FIRE dragon!” Gungnir explained very slowly, as if I were a child. “He decided to fight you, and you changed the terrain to match your strengths to his weaknesses. Side note, it’s also entirely possible that he was seriously weakened by two things: One, the bomb blast from the kamikazee child deity took away his free ride of sipping from the mana-tap. This seriously slowed down his anticipated rate of growth. Two, the fact that Chaotic mana has only recently come to this world and he didn’t have much to recover with, or the time required to do so. All complete guesses by the way. Conjecture is all we have to work off of.”
I shaped a stone bench from out of the floor and chuffed just a little. “Huh, I did do that whole thing rather well, didn’t I? Fought a traitorous dragon and won. Beat up King Kong’s little brother, and now he’s my angry forest patrol with an armored-car of a dog to keep him in line. Well, I'm gonna have to wait on the doggie marshall for a bit. Spot looks real out of it.”
I let out a bark of laughter, giddy with success and the impossibility of my survival so far. I strolled to the wall under where Gungnir had carved its attempts at art and I used Earth Sorcery to write in the wall in fancy lettering: dragon slayer, keeper of Yggdrasil, sorcerer, defender of Earth, builder of epic forts, crafter of weapons and enchantments, dominator of beasts.
I smiled as wide as my face would allow. This was for me, my list of accomplishments. I needed to learn that I was actually capable of doing incredible things; feats of power and strength and will that would not have been possible before. I needed to internalize this before moving forward. I can’t be a timid, bumbling idiot.
Suddenly, the future didn’t seem so dark, as if a small light were pushing back the cloying darkness that had threatened my psyche since the First Ripple. [I can do this], I thought, holding the smooth disk of the World Tree, rubbing the grain of the wood with my thumb. [I might actually be able to do this].
I glanced over to the haphazard writing on the wall and sighed. Gungnir was right, exploring the area after the Change was a priority, definitely more of a priority than what he wrote above that, {Find a woman}.
Definitely not important right now.
“Definitely is important!” Gungnir disagreed vehemently as it saw me shake my head while reading its notes. “Your woman is GONE for at least the next couple millenia, as in GONE with all capital letters. So you do get a bit of license to try out some alien chick. Maybe some of them super tall and ripped Centauri ladies, hmmm? They’re human, kinda. I mean, one of them ladies could manhandle you. Are you into that? There’s a memory of yours in here that feels familiar . . .”
I smacked the annoying floating orb away with my armored gauntlet. “Knock it off!” I said. “We are crafting me a weapon and exploring, safely, especially while Spot is incubating. Kong will be the one on guard.”
“Just take Norn, if you can find him.”
I cursed at my momentary thoughtlessness. The damn orb was right, in more than one way. Norn would be a better option to scout the area, but I could feel that he was really far away and I didn’t know how the last Ripple had changed him. It might have broken down our mental bond to the point where he wouldn’t listen to me.
[That’s another thing on my list of shit to do today.]
Grumbling at the number of items on my self-imposed list, I walked down the tunnel to the cavern and spent time making everything all nice again, putting it back the way it was before I flooded it in a desperate bid to survive. I gathered up the scattered and dirty crafting materials from before and put them together in a neat stack next to the generator. Bars of gold, silver, stone and iron all sat next to each other by the crafting plate and generator. Next to the crafting plate, I made another stone plate with a different purpose. This one was big, serving as a preservation plate about the size of a dining room table, complete with runes of freshness and semi-stasis for flesh and life, so that the next task would be more manageable.
I banished the disk of bone that I was fiddling with and went to the freezer where Rath’s body lay. Opening the giant walk-in freezer gave me chills - the headless and tailless body still exuded an aura of power of flame and death that scared me on an instinctual level, even though I was the one who chopped his head off. The brainless head sat next to the body and I slid that out of the freezer and wrangled it up onto the preservation plate.
After closing the freezer to keep the body fresh, I used a combination of magic, muscle, and Gungnir to dismantle the head. After laying out all the teeth, cutting out the tongue, removing the jawbone and eyes and gently peeling off each individual scale, I surveyed the gruesome work. The first thing I wanted to do with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity was take advantage of it.
I took the tongue and went to the kitchen where I used Gungnir in butcher-knife form to chop that long appendage up into small, bite-sized pieces and then carefully removed the top layer of flesh. It had the ‘fur’ on the top similar to a beef tongue. After trimming the meat down to right where I wanted it, I then lightly seared each piece on my magical hotplate. The tongue was way too big for one sitting, so I conjured a stone box for the leftovers and put it in the freezer.
The rest of the tongue bits sizzled on a stone plate in front of me, where I sat at my table. It smelled good, a bit on the spicy side even though I hadn’t added anything to it. Part of me balked at the thought of eating my former housemate. This was my friend not too long ago, or acquaintance really. It really struck me how different life was now. I am eating a sentient being, a thinking creature. That thought didn’t hinder me from shoving the first bite in . . . which I promptly spat out.
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Absolutely gross. It hit my tongue and tasted like rotten seaweed mixed with mashed up caterpillars drizzled with a grimy dressing of wombat shit. I instantly turned off my sense of taste with Flesh Sorcery and forced myself to try another bite. It’s a little chewy and weird with no flavor but it went down. I mean, I’ve eaten cow tongue before and that was awesome, so why wasn’t this similar? And on the magical side, my Flesh Sorcery came with a component of incorporating strength to my body by eating or assimilating, but it’s also good at recognizing if what I put into my body will actually do that.
My convulsive vomiting in the next second was more than just my body recognizing that eating a fire dragon was horrible for me - it was my everything rejecting the essence of what I had taken in. My own magic ejected the vile material from my stomach.
As I lurched up, my body hunched over my plate with tears streaming down my face, hands gripping the stone table. My Sorcery instincts were all screaming at me AT FULL VOLUME that a fire dragon was not what my body needed to become more powerful. My instincts turned the volume up to eleven, almost making me seize as my body rejected what I’d put in it. In that moment on a fundamental level, I understood that trying to consume something antithetical with my own nature was completely wrong and diametrically opposed to every iota of my being.
Symbolically and in every school of thought, fire does not mesh with water and nature and flesh - it evaporates and burns and scars on the most basic level.
Great. I had gone through all the trouble of slaying a freaking dragon and I couldn’t even eat it.
I conjured water and drank it while I cleaned up my mess. I gathered up what was left of the tongue, conjured water around it and froze it solid, sticking it back in the freezer. Coughing violently as my body worked to calm down, I cursed. “Damn that hurt.”
My stomach was still in knots as I heated a bowl of thick vegetable soup from a can.
“So, that didn’t go as planned.” Gungnir commented. “Which means there’s a lot of dragon meat you can’t eat, so either Spot or Kong is gonna be real happy when they find out about this.”
“Speaking of not being real happy,” I gagged, trying not to wretch from the memory. “How’s our incorporeal lizard, and did you put the power-governor back on since our tussle with him?”
“Yeah,” Gungnir said sheepishly. “I did and put the flow back down low. No more kaboom for me. Oh! And I crafted some soul runes that shut him up! Blessed silence and peace!” I rolled my eyes, cause I never get either of those. “And, the energy I’m draining from him is so dense that it may take even longer than I previously projected. I need a ruby crystal or something aligned with fire so that I can hold it and purify it. Did you know that your sorceries are incompatible with fire, like completely?”
“That’s what the upchucking meant dude,” I said, grimacing at the bobbing orb as I spooned down more soup. “Although you’d think that the runes and crystals you’re made of would be able to handle that. Anyways, pretty much the only thing I can get out of that body now is crafting material and food for my familiars. We’re also going to see what we can do with that soul of his.”
Taking a few sips of water, I cleared my throat. “You know, Rath said during that fight that sorcerers could be eaten to add to his own power. It may work the other way around too, but I don’t think he was talking about my body specifically. What if he meant eating my soul, or the vessel of my soul, is what would add to his power? If that’s the case, then it's Rath's soul that I would need to eat to gain power.”
“But it's mine!” Gungnir whined, sounding like a petulant child. “I wanna eat it!”
“You are me, dummy!” I reminded my recalcitrant weapon. “You can do everything I can and more, besides that’s if I decide to do this. Fire is great, but I don’t know if that’s what I want. I need something compatible with me specifically, that would enhance what I can do. You can do stuff with fire, air, and lightning that I can't, which is weird if you think about it.” Gungnir gave the mental equivalent of a shrug.
“It’s the Chaos stones.” Gungnir postulated, bobbing and weaving while conjuring little orbs of air, fire, and lightning. “You made me with them. I’m not a living thing, I’m a tool infused with a bit of your soul.”
I sighed at the options closed off to me. “Look, if there’s a fire dragon, then there might be other types of dragons that I could eat, like earth or water - ooooohh, or maybe a storm dragon? That would be awesome!”
I wolfed down the rest of my soup, the new possibilities racing through my head. Sitting down after taking a quick Water Sorcery shower, I sat down in front of the plot of land in my under-river-bolthole where I had my small experimental trees growing; the rowan, cedar and oak. I used Nature Sorcery to check them over and heal any damage they had taken from being flooded for a while. There was a little spot in the center between the trees where I dug a little hole and buried the World Tree disk. I made a link between it and the cavern’s generator and slowly cranked up the flow, while coaxing the living disk to form roots and a stem.
I laughed as I worked. A little World Tree just for me!
I shaped a thin but tall stone pillar behind the trees and put a special lightstone facing down. It had an enchantment to exude only sunlight and a timed governor so that it would turn on for fourteen hours each day. The hard part was making the enchantment start out dim to mimic the morning sunlight for a few hours and then dimming back down at the end of the day to mimic the setting sun. That alone took me a few hours to figure out. I had to match it almost perfectly to genuine sunlight and then test it against my own skin to see if it could give me a sunburn.
After that, I put a growth limiter enchantment on a few hastily conjured stone statues, gargoyles because why not, embedding them on the edges of the plot but still in the soil so that the trees wouldn’t outgrow my cavern. The little World Tree happily grew me another disk after I fed it some more mana. I detached the new disc and took it to my crafting table, which was next to my preservation table with Rath’s dismantled head on it. I took one of his fangs and used Gungnir in whittling-knife form to carve the tooth into a footlong rod, then did the same to the disk of the World Tree with Nature Sorcery. Next, I grabbed a bar of each of the crafting materials I had laying next to the table and put the gold, silver, stone and iron next to the molded tooth and tree. I summoned Gungnir mentally and relayed my plan to him.
“Nice.” The floating orb chortled. “But you’re missing one piece. That river rock was a stroke of genius when you set this up last time, and now it’s missing. Meaning matters as much as intent when it comes to magic. The greater meaning impacts more than you know.”
I thought it over and my weapon was absolutely correct, the symbology for the Sorcery is what was missing. I ran around the cavern until I found a chunk of river rock that glowed to my mana enhanced sight. The smooth stone thrummed with contained vibrations, leftover energy from the fight I had with Rath here. I took it as a symbol of victory, a survivor of the earth shaking fight between me and a goddamn dragon. Luckily, it was also a result of the merging of my Earth and Water Sorceries. I placed the lonely rock on the plate and linked the cavern’s generator to Rath, then cupped the orb in my hands. Focusing on all of my sorceries, I pushed the magic into all of the ingredients, willing them to combine into the perfectly clear image in my head - the image of my new weapons.
Magic is an incredible force, but Sorcery by itself is just awesome. The raw understanding of the various parts of magic combined with the soul-entrenched authority to make it bend to your will is a drug that will never get old. Using Gungnir - my old weapon that had become my paraclete, my focus - the materials I had gathered in front of me melted before my eyes under the flow of incredible power. I projected my will and the image of what I desired through the powerful flow of mana, using Gungnir as the focus and forklift for the load.
I’m not even gonna lie, the generator is the only reason this attempt was even possible, the bastardized nuclear reactor generating unending waves of pure mana powered the entire process that would have otherwise drained me completely dry.
Gungnir handled most of the channeling itself as it couldn’t harm him at this level. But what my weak body couldn’t do was more than made up by the creativity of my soft brain. Even though my hands were holding the usually talkative orb, I could almost feel ethereal hands of my power grasping the semi-liquid ingredients and shaping them, molding them to the image in my head.
I already had a name picked out, Svalinn. The mythical Norse shield that protects the Earth from the deadliest of our Sun’s rays. A fitting name for that which was forged with dragon bone, precious metals, Sorcery, and the wood of the World Tree.
The lion’s share of the molding process was actually completed by Gungnir. My paraclete took care of the small details and measurements as well as the bonding process while I channeled images of how it would look and function to my mini-souled satellite. I acknowledge that I am weak . . . for now. But I will get stronger. In many ways, I needed something that would serve me a lot longer than a plain staff or weapon. It felt like ten minutes from the time I began sending Gungnir the images of what I wanted to me standing over the glowing masterpiece. The fugue state of creation was hypnotizing.
I gazed down at my creation. It was beautiful. The shield was a classic diamond shaped, the sharp outer edges tinged with the dark blue of my Water Sorcery and shot through with solid browns of earth. The blue was embossed with dragon bone and the back was framed with Yggdrasil’s wood. Magically formed runes of gold and silver gleamed from their places on the bone and stone, and the centerpiece of the Shield stood out to the eye, two clenched fists gripping the symbol of eternity that had a blade protruding from each side.
Picking it up almost knocked me over. It looked heavy but it was actually almost weightless. Lifting the shield was almost effortless as it responded to my sorceries like a long lost friend.
The back of the shield was different from a normal shield. It had two arm braces on top of each other instead of one, and they were rotated ninety-degrees further than a normal shield had. Perfect. I put both of my arms in there and pulled them apart. Svalinn easily separated down the middle, the shield splitting to form two half-shields that sat along my forearms. I grinned with childish delight as I watched the light play against the outward edges forming long blades that grew or shrank as dictated by my magic.
Flexing each aspect of my magic in a concerted effort molded the entire structure of the shield, changing the bladed half-shields so that they shrank down to become full-length gauntlets covering me from the top of my shoulder down past my fingertips. As gauntlets, the runes lined up, forming channels where magic could be stored and unleashed by a mere thought. I put my arms together in front of me, as if I were bracing a tower shield and Svalinn manifested in front of me as a whole shield, so smooth that no sound was made from the startling entrance.
“NOW THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!” Gungnir screamed with a sense of victory. “WHO’S THE BEST?! I’M THE BEST! And you don’t even know the best part!”
I flexed my will, Svalinn fluidly morphing back into gauntlets again. “Come on now, I helped make it, what’ja do?” I asked, rolling my eyes at Gungnir’s exuberance.
“I channeled all of Rath’s soul energy and Sorcery into the forging! Who’s so smart?! I’m so smart!”
I turned to the now bouncing orb floating through the air. Its jiggles gave off a ‘cat that caught the mouse’ vibe.
“What the hell does that even mean?” I asked, starting to freak out a little. “You mean to tell me that you put the damn dragon in here?” My voice rose as I shook my Svalinn covered arms. “HE wants to EAT ME, remember? And me trying to eat him made me vomit worse than my first girlfriend’s cooking! Or are you just too drunk on power to think about that??”
Gungnir bobbed around just out of reach. “No, no, not his brain or soul, his soul energy and Sorcery. The soul is still in me but the other parts of him are in there. Dragons eat Sorcery which gets converted to make their own kind even stronger, like Rath’s Fire Sorcery. You tried to eat it but couldn’t because you’re not a dragon! Duh. So, I stuck it in the shield.” Gungnir smugly explained. “And because it’s in the shield, that thing, and by extension you, are immune to fire blasts of any kind! Well, as long as the shield’s in the way. And combined with your Sorcery and the runes in there, that shield can turn into gauntlets with blades, or channel, or protect you from magic way too powerful for you.”
Gungnir spun around in the air so fast that it became a blur. “IT’S PERFECT!”
I blanched. I had just imagined a shield powerful enough to fend off the sun, using the mythology of Svalinn as a focal point for the crafting. Gungnir went about ten-thousand miles past that.
“I mean, I kinda did . . .” Gungnir retorted, reading my thoughts. “I’m not a spear anymore, and you need something else to keep you alive while I float around and blow stuff up.”
I stretched out an arm and channeled a mix of Earth and Water Sorcery through the gauntlet. A reinforced blade of tungsten grew out the front above my knuckles, while spikes of ice grew out of the top of my arm, from the elbow to my shoulder. Just to try it out, I channeled a thread of Nature Sorcery into it. Vines popped out underneath the joining scales forming a braided-whip, with a ball of thorns at the end of it.
“And the other best part, other than being completely fireproof,” Gungnir added. “Is that I left the enchantment tied to your Flesh Sorcery but open in case you learn of something awesome that you want to add.”