It began to hit me that I was becoming less like a human as the days rolled by. My waning innocence stripped away through violence and betrayal. Kindness removed by loss and pain. Trust eroded by power. Is that what it takes to survive in a world touched by mana, monsters and deities?
Don’t get me wrong, these abilities are beyond awesome in every sense of the word, but everything has consequences. It takes a toll on your spirit. I may have already paid the costs but I sure as hell didn’t look at the receipt.
My soul is weary. The loss of mental energy combined with the exhausting effort of crafting Svalinn left me vulnerable to the more despondent side of humanity. That, or my blood sugar was low.
Kicking back and taking a bit of time, I wolfed down a can of clam chowder and sipped some ice water. It helped some, but I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about the radical changes that this planet has gone through, and what I have gone through because of that. I even put my feet up and wished for some whiskey to fall outta the sky as I contemplated this entire situation. I sat in stone shaped to be comfortable with fine sand to fill in the seat of the chair so my butt had something less hard to sit on.
“YO!” Gungnir mentally blasted at the walls of my mind. “Knock it off and get yo fat butt up! We have bridges to burn and bitches to get!”
I just stared at the wall but I couldn’t stop my face from twitching. A smirk eked out as the profanity of the floating orb put a quick stop to the downward spiral of introspective darkness. The chuckle turned into a laugh, which rocked into full-blown belly laughing.
“I’m not kidding! We have gates to find and close, creatures to hunt and aliens to run off! Man, the list just keeps on getting bigger! Can’t forget about the goddamn goblins!” Gungnir ranted. “While you’re sulking they’re out there fuckin’! Good luck to ya. Maybe find some leftover humans and bring them here, then be king! SORCERER KING!”
Leftover humans huh? I like that idea . . . but not the ruling part. People are trouble, too much trouble, which I don’t want to deal with. I’d rather kill goblins.
“Yes, people are trouble.” Gungnir continued. “But you are people too, and that comes with a sex drive and a need for company. I think y’all are more related to cows than monkeys but that’s just me.”
“I can tone down or turn off my sex drive with Sorcery.” I snapped, not wanting to get into the gruesome details with a magical weapon that completely lacks the necessary parts for said activities. “Besides, that’s when we men do stupid things, when we’re horny and there’s some hot-chick in distress. Mute that sex drive and suddenly I have forty more IQ points than normal. Besides, I’m taken, remember?” I gestured in the general direction of Yggdrasil’s main Earth sapling.
Laughing at my answer, Gungnir shot back. “Four THOUSAND years, remember? That’s a long time to wait for one woman.”
Damn orb had a point. I don’t like it, but it still has a point.
Gathering my beleaguered mental faculties around me once more, I banished my tiredness with Flesh Sorcery and checked all of my gear. Not sure when the bill’s coming due for constantly putting off exhaustion but until then I’ll abuse Flesh Sorcery for every bit of free energy I can.
I shuffled around for a moment testing out my mobility. In my mind, I felt like a tank, a human tank with big armored arms. Svalinn was awesome, even though maybe a little on the clunky side. As the little complaints made themselves known, the heavy dual shield-gauntlets reacted to my feelings and began to creep up on the top of my shoulders, moving mass around until they connected around my neck, covering the upper parts of my back and chest.
“There we go.” I grunted as the weight shifted from being only around my arms to being centered on my core. Halfway sentient magical gear is awesome. I conjured water on the fingertips of my right hand and combined the five drops into one, spinning it with a flick of my will. The right-half of Svalinn glowed a soft blue, the runes themselves a mix of white and sapphire.
“Oh, forgot to tell you,” Gungnir said, making a sound as if he smacked himself in the head like an absent minded child. “Svalinn also stores energy from the environment and any excess power you give off. The dragon soul energy in there also will keep it powered for probably the next decade or so.”
Right on. I checked on Spot one last time with my senses, hoping for a crack in that petrified exterior. No change as of yet. I patted his stony head and set off, intent on finding out what’s become of Norn.
******
Stepping outside is always a strange shock, being a human from a period in our technological advancement where a time-telling device was ever present. Without a clock telling me the exact time, I came to realize that my internal clock was nowhere near as accurate as I used to think. The dimming light shining through the forest canopy told me that I had roughly less than an hour before dusk and here I was ready to go hiking for an adventure. Damn it, I wanted my freaking bird.
Creating another hoverboard, since I lost the last one, took about fifteen minutes. Hopping on, I turned towards where my thinning mental link told me what direction Norn was, and began strengthening the lift enchantment. I got up to about fifty-feet in elevation before common sense smacked me, reminding me that these old pre-Ripple trees were the size of redwoods now. Zipping over trees on a hoverboard just doesn’t work anymore - the higher up I go, the less I get out of the anti-gravity enchantment, which pushes against the ground for thrust and levitation.
[Learn from mistakes!] I thought, admonishing the wasted time. [I actually need to learn from my mistakes and APPLY the lessons.] Darkness and night in post-Ripple Earth are not safe places for soft humans, such as myself. I did still have the link to Norn, however thin it was now. Maybe I could still use it?
“What do big eagle-crows like?” I muttered, depowering the hoverboard. When I got close enough to the ground, I let the hoverboard land on the ground and I leaned against the hollow tree entrance to my tunnel.
“Birdseed and bitches!” Gungnir crowed.
“Mention bitches one more time and I’m removing your ability to say that particular word.” I growled. I heard the mental equivalent of Gungnir taking a deep breath to spew a diatribe of synonyms when it hit me. I already had a thug ready to do my dirty work.
I slowly conjured a ruby the size of my head, put a few enchantments on it and summoned Kong with my mental link. Turns out the great ape lizard was sleeping right above me and not very happy about the sudden wakeup. He dropped down heavily to the ground in front of me and let out a roar that shook the earth. Bits of saliva slammed into me. Cleaning myself off with an annoyed grunt and a blast of conjured water, I looked the angry lizard-gorilla straight in the eye.
“When you get back from this errand, I’m teaching you how to clean your mouth out.” I said, turning off my sense of smell with Flesh Sorcery. “And you can do this tomorrow instead of tonight, cause I’m not a douche. Take this stone, don’t drop it or forget it. It will lead you to a big bird named Norn. Touch him with this stone and return home quickly. It will make him want to follow you. Got it?” I said as I tossed the ape the stone.
I might want to rethink that thought of not having people around to do my mundane crap for me. I mean, if I could get a giant battle-gorilla to do my bidding, how hard would it be?
After Kong left, I crawled into my bed of stone, sand, and gathered soft vines under the World Tree bolthole and put myself to sleep with Flesh Sorcery after crafting a much better, softer bed.
*********
Soup is great . . . but it’s not really a breakfast food. Waking up to corn chowder did not inspire great thoughts of magnanimous action towards my environment, but it did wake me up. I grumped my way down to the cavern and checked on Spot who hadn’t stirred from his magically-induced hibernation. My magical senses didn’t alert me of any change, and after going over the runes carved into the cavern walls for an hour or two, I was bored.
Very bored. The smart thing to do would be to hunker down and prep the three areas around my hideouts for the new circumstances, but I reasoned my way out of that bit of intelligent thinking because fortifying the areas would mitigate their best feature: Not being noticeable in the first place.
Besides, Gungnir’s nightly tasks, while I got my beauty sleep, were to alter and update the runes so that the structural integrity of the hideouts would be in perfect shape, and also so that they would be unnoticed as much as possible. Part of this was me banking on the fact that the intense energy presence of the nearby ley lines and the Yggdrasil tree would serve to mask what and where my living area was.
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So what’s a bored sorcerer to do with a wide open day full of promises and opportunities, as well as no guiding force? Go visit my treant girlfriend? Make armor for my familiars? Train? Or… Build an army. Gungnir popped out from whatever dark corner it was hiding in.
“AN ARMY?!” Gungnir screamed out loud like a child who discovered drums for the first time, while simultaneously playing death metal for all the world to hear. “HELL YEAH! Finally a plan worthy of us!”
Gungnir hovered behind me, bobbing and jamming to his rendition of Disturbed as I exited the river-bottom hideout through the escape hatch. I took my time popping my head out, using Water Sorcery to breathe, as I looked around the murkier bottom of the river. I could feel the current around me and the creatures aligned with this wonderfully wet element, and my Flesh Sorcery could detect their hunger.
A giant set of jaws from a crocodile bigger than Spot swiveled around and began picking up speed towards me. I yanked myself back into the escape hatch sealing it shut, then went back down into the cavern.
“Fuck me!” I gasped, emerging back down into the cavern and heading down the stairs.
“Hell no,” Gungnir said, bobbing next to me. I muttered to myself the entire way down the tunnel to the Yggdrasil’s root. “I heard that, ya know.” Gungnir said, only making me say even more vile things under my breath.
I pivoted and glared at Gungnir as I reached the stone door at the end of the tunnel. “Is everything growing? And where did a crocodile come from? They’re not native to Virginia.”
My weapon sent me a mental shrug and then an image of me peeking out the door like a mouse listening for an ever-watchful barn cat. I used magic to check the immediate vicinity for anything that could reasonably eat me. I also took that moment to check my mental link to Kong.
[Fat bastard left not too long ago.] I thought, straining my mind down the mental link that was taut with resentment. Which didn’t bother me. Any disobedience towards my commands and I could do any one of several nasty things to him from afar.
Glancing around the place that used to be my front lawn, the calm suburb with an asphalt street in front of it surrounded by more neighborhoods with white picket fenced-in houses. This was no longer that idyllic picture. It was a different one, a more natural one. The scene of the neighborhood where children used to run around and play and dinky cars chugged along small roads was now a remote wilderness with pretty much all traces of human progress wiped away.
I felt along the earth with my magic, searching ten feet in front of me where it used to be, thinking that the street would still be there in some form. I figured that maybe it was just covered in dirt. A minute of examination with my senses revealed that all hints of the asphalt street were gone.
“The Ripple of Chaos probably just broke it down to its component parts,” Gungnir postulated. “Don’t you remember cars rusting at a far higher speed than anything you’ve seen before? And the Ripple also conceivably superpowered up some of the plants and animals which had their own magically induced feeding frenzy. Just wait till you find some bugs, gonna be some B-horror movie madness!” The excitement in its tone did not inspire the same for me.
“The plan is for you to fly high and find something I can dominate, like I did with Kong,” I whispered, my head on a swivel. “And we use whatever that is to do it again, and again, until the woods within a couple miles of the hideout are relatively safe.”
The orb took off, squealing with happiness. “QUIETLY!” I yelled after it. A soft hiss above me stopped me cold for the barest half second as Gungnir was already well away from me. Diving forward was all that saved me from an explosive impact. The spray of dirt sent me tumbling even further and I used that momentum to roll past the immediate danger zone. Svalinn came alive forming two bladed shields along my arms as I pulled out of the tumble and turned partly in mid-air.
A quick mental message to Gungnir is all I had time for as some kind of mutated snake pulled itself out of the crater with muscular spider-esque arms gripping the crumbled rim of dirt. Its slit pupils had a rounded point in the center that wasn’t the same color as the rest of the eye. Green and blue stripes flared across a head the size of a country boy’s four wheeler and two sets of small black feathered wings flared out from the base of its skull.
Just perfect.
I hopped backwards while conjuring water and channeling it through Svalinn, turning a normal blast of water into a firehose that froze on contact with the twisted snake. It was all I could think of in the moment as reptiles are cold-blooded so they’re big fans of extreme temperatures. My younger brother used to keep reptiles and I remembered him blathering on about how turning off the sunlamp in a dark room made them lethargic without the heat.
Not liking my cordial welcome, the spider-snake shook itself, breaking the first layer of ice and reared back, searching for the meal that fought back.
A scream of “Tally Hooo!” accompanied a blast of lightning from the sky as Gungnir dive bombed right in. The animal caught the javelin of heaven’s wrath square on its soaked head and I swore the spider-snake creature snickered. I kept up repeating blasts of ice water that froze while running backwards. I saw that the metallic tip of the snake’s tail was shoved into the Earth.
[It’s grounded! Or insulated! Don’t remember which! ] I mentally shouted to Gungnir, who was sending bolt after bolt of lightning at the snake. [Knock that off till it isn’t.] I watched as the lightning coursed down the blue stripes all along the metallic lines on the outside of the spider-snakes body, lessening as the extra charge bled into the dirt. Its three pronged tail that glinted in the flashing light was stabbed into the earth, diverting the most of the lightning damage away from its vital organs and into the ground. Some of the spider-snake's spinal ridges were glowing brighter and brighter with each lightning bolt, gathering up the bleed off of extra power from the electricity.
I kept walking backwards conjuring blasts of water hoping the snake would get angry enough to follow me, but it kept flexing its coils to break the newly formed ice. I started only using one arm to blast water while holding out my other arm, which Gungnir flew into in spear form. A quick mental back and forth changed the whole plan. Stopping the water conjuring completely, I lined up a shot, and hurled Gungnir, who guided my aim, straight into the grounded tail of the beast.
Momentarily pinned, Gungnir began channeling my Flesh Sorcery, attacking the snake from the inside. I felt it using the caged soul remnants of Rath to establish a struggle for dominance as I took up the freezing blasts of water again. As the water pooled around the snake, I began drawing on the vast amounts of energy in Svalinn, and conjured a huge ball of water with chunks of rock in it above my head which I hurled at the snake. My impression of an unforgiving waterfall smashed the snake into the tree behind it, where I began spraying it again and freezing every bit of water near it. I split my focus and made the earth underneath the grounded tail force it up.
[Now!] I sent to Gungnir. Flaming sparks of electrified mana formed a crackling spasm that seized up the muscles in the snake's body, its two spidery front legs twitching, a beautiful dance that I’ll never tire of.
“I got it! I got it!” Gungnir screamed aloud. “Quick, dominate it! Rath’s soul and the current made it vulnerable, get in here!”
I formed stone over the creature to trap it, then put my hand on its wide head. Drops of blood were slowly leaking out of the corner of its eyes while its tongue hung limply from the side of its mouth. I conjured ice with one hand around its jaw to force its mouth shut, and with the other hand on its forehead I shoved my focus into the snake.
Despite my expectations, I wasn’t drawn into a immaterial battle like I was with Kong: the creature proved too simple to fight me on a mental level.
Using Flesh Sorcery, I bound its simple but fragmented will to mine and sculpted runes of domination on the scale plate protecting its forehead. Following that up with a rune of enslavement on the bones in its skull made me feel a bit dirty, but I knuckled down on my conscience.
[So weird.] I thought, extracting my mind from its own but not fully withdrawing my senses. My Flesh Sorcery highlighted to me that this twisted snake wasn’t just one creature, but in fact several creatures mashed together, not just physically, but mentally as well. Bits of scattered thoughts and memory fragments clashed with angry instincts at odds with itself. I dug around the creature’s mismatched body and mind, finding not just a snake, but several other things as well - some kind of big spider, a raven, and, even weirder, a ferret.
As far as I could tell, these creatures had been fighting in pairs during one Ripple and had combined to form two sets, the snake and ferret, and the raven with the spider. And then during the next Ripple, combined the conjoined critters to form this chimera.
What I really wanted to know was how in the world, on the mental level, the ferret part was still alive. I could clearly see in this thing’s brain how the translucent ferret piece was scampering around the spider and its web while dodging the dive bombing raven and pissing off the snake. I reached in and grabbed each translucent mental fragment of the creatures one at a time with my will, and jammed them together. Forcing my will to squeeze my hands together, I poured mana into the disparate minds and created something with brand new instincts: my very own sapper.
A sapper is, in short, a sort of combat engineer but one with a focus on offense instead of defense. I planned on twisting this thing even further to be a trap setter. The sneaky nature of the ferret with the creativity and brains of a raven combined with the ambush instincts of the snake and the trap making capabilities of the spider, I had the perfect recipe for an evil sapper.
Redoing all of my domination runes took some time as I had messed with the mind and soul of this creature, this sapper chimera. Healing its injuries took a bit longer as I had to make sure that all of the non-compatible parts of the creature were taken care of. Chaos didn’t seem to plan when it threw their bodies together, and it's a wonder it had even lived this long.
The internal symmetry was all off and I had to heal the wounds. “Huh, it’s warm blooded, no wonder the ice didn’t work as well as I’d hoped,” I muttered, rooting around magically in its body. “Fixed the defunct spinnerets, grow the wings out some more and make the feathers harder than steel while correcting the mixed up nerves that governed its heat sensing glands.” I huffed with amazement at the sheer potential of the creature I was working on.
“Gungnir, take over.” I said, pulling my hand back from my new trap maker. “It’s mostly done, just needs to know who’s boss. Time to get this army party goin’!”
“My turn to name it!” Gungnir burbled, bouncing around happily, “John! Your name is John! There! That's easy to remember!”
“John is a human name.” I said. “Go with something better, like ‘Arachne’, or ‘Kimerak’.”
“No, you’ve picked stupid names so far. I’m calling it John. It’s short for John the Bomb!”
Shaking my head, I left the nutty weapon to its own devices. And on it went, the whole damn day. We would find some weird looking creature and beat it down with Gungnir, while Gungnir loudly proclaimed their very human names. My weapon kept singing his own version of the ‘Ants Go Marching’ but instead it was the ‘Beasts Go Marching’, adding another line for every animal we added to my cabal.
A beast army at my disposal. Man that felt good. Not really what I wanted, but kinda convenient. When Kong eventually returned with Norn in tow, tossing the gigantic bird in front of me, I had the spider-snake chimera John, a fox-wolf pack about eight strong called Pups (named numbers One through Eight), a dog-sized racoon crossed with a praying mantis named Kimmy, and a couple lizards as big as motorcycles that seemed to eat rocks named Huey, Duey, and Louie. Not as many creatures as I was hoping for, but it would do for now.
“Look what the ape dragged in,” I snarked, eyeing Norn up and down, his feathers now streaked with a bit of gold. I dismissed the other creatures to patrol the forest. Kong huffed at me and scratched at his chest and leg where blood dripped out of long scratches. “The bird do that?” I asked, getting an angry chuff in reply. I put my hand on Kong’s leg, closing up his wounds. “Sorry to do this to you mate,” I said, looking at Norn. “But I can’t have you going anywhere. Kong, sit on him.”
The big ape grinned and smacked Norn so he flattened to the ground, spread eagle, putting his lizard-gorilla ass crack right on top of Norn’s beak while holding Norn’s wings with his hands. Norn squawked and struggled, his eyes going wide as I approached, sending me longing thoughts of freedom and open skies through our thin mental link.
“You know what,” I said, lowering my hand gently to his head as I reconsidered my intentions. “Yeah. That’s fine. Be free but the tree, this tree, consider this tree home.” I said while gesturing to the World Tree. “This tree is home. The forest is home. I am in charge.” I took the idea of the forest around my domain and put it carefully in Norn’s hindbrain, the place where his instincts ruled him, and made the concept of home synonymous with nest. I needed him to be the ‘king of the sky’ for me, the ruler of the creatures in the forest. I needed this giant crow to consider this entire area his land, and make this place his home.
Cracking my neck, I examined the bird from head to toe. He was already almost as big as Kong now. I spent thirty-minutes using flesh magic to imprint runes of domination into his skull, and then put a rune of sky ruler, a crown on top of a cloud, on his breastbone.
I had to heal Norn again as Kong lifted his ass off of Norn’s beak when I was done, the great ape stomping twenty-feet away. “No sir!” I said loudly. “Not done with you. We got one more scumbag to tame before you take a break.”
Kong grunted while scratching his stomach, empty growls resonating through our mental link. “Fine, go eat,” I replied. “But be back when you’re done. We got a croc to catch.”