A liquid voice from off to the side startled the freaking crap outta me. Instantly, I engaged Svalinn, shifting its form from gauntlet to weaponized blade-shield. All of my Sorcery blossomed to the forefront of my mind as I turned to the unwelcome distraction from my well-earned wallowing. I had planned on working in the cavern for a couple hours all alone but the last time this shit happened, it was something well above my paygrade.
An absolute vision of loveliness was draped on the petrified body of Spot, using the upwardly curved stone neck of my dog as a Lazyboy. Her golden hair did not obscure the idealization of feminine perfection that was her heart shaped face. Her leisurely sprawl showed off curves that would drive anyone wild, man or woman.
“When my brother whispered in my ear about you, I had no idea that you’d be so… creative.”
I gulped. Even my Flesh Sorcery was working overtime to mute the wild animal urges that were bleating in the back of my mind, I found that I actually couldn’t make my eyes focus on her face as it kept seamlessly shifting between the idealized features of my fiance and some celebrity, always seeking to show the perfection that mortals can never attain. Her attire was not a robe but rather light body armor that skillfully showed skin and no weapons were in sight. Returning Svalinn to gauntlets took but a moment. It took far longer for me to marshall my will and calm my mind.
“Forgive me,” I said, swallowing the lump in my throat and opening my hands towards her but still holding my magic at the ready. “You startled me. And your brother is . . ?” I kind of already knew based on past encounters, but he wasn’t too forthcoming with information making it hard to distinguish between fiction and reality.
“Hmph, well can’t you guess who I am?” She asked with a raised eyebrow, her smile devastating my focus. “Your legends clearly provide some context.”
“The male visitor I had was either Mercury or Hermes.” I replied as I took a slow step back. Distance barely made throttling my animal urges a bit easier. “Which makes you either Aphrodite or Venus,” I coughed. “But I’m not really sure how that works. The myths or legends either make you out to be separate deities, or facets of the same one, like different personalities.”
“Be grateful it is I instead of the Muses,” my intruder said, pointedly ignoring my questioning statement. “They wanted to meet you, and they would definitely have never let you go. It’s always, ‘hero this’, and ‘we need the story’, and ‘oh how tragic’, with them.” She clearly pantomimed a whine paired with a lazy wave of her hand she had heard many times before. “I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about. My brother found you intriguing, but the goddess of victory simply cannot establish good odds without meeting a candidate first.”
“Odds? Candidate?” I said, sliding another step back. [Gungnir!] I screamed mentally through our link. [GET YOUR ASS BACK HERE!] If I could just get off another few steps, I’d have the main cavern generator at my back. No sudden moves to set off the goddess.
“My sincerest apologies but I believe you may have the wrong idea,” I delayed, pushing for every second. I did not like where this was going.
“Oh come now . . .” She soothed, sliding down off of Spot and landing far too gracefully. “The Forest Folk have established themselves in what your world named the Amazon Rainforest, and the Hegemony has claimed the new continent in the Pacific.” She slinked closer to me like a cat stalking a mouse. “The Wyrms are ravaging the delicious continent of Asia as we speak and the Hungry Ones have laid claim to the empty white wastes in the North and South.”
My back bumped into the generator and I connected to the flow, its mana filling me with more power as Svalinn began to hum softly. “What about the rest? Europe? South and North America? Africa?” My voice barely kept a steady pitch as it threatened to crack.
Her chuckle was disturbing. Every dulcet tone was molded from velvet and tugged at my mind the way chocolate sings to hyperactive children. Scintillating eyes threatened to drown my sanity in beauty no mortal man was meant to see.
“Europe burns as the Infernal Horde vents their wrath from their imprisonment, and Africa is controlled by the Shifters. And what you call the Americas - well, that’s up to you.” Her finger poking my chest only served to emphasize those words. I didn’t even see her cross the forty-feet from where she was to being too much in my personal space. She was shorter than I expected, or taller? It was hard to tell with all the shifting of her form. Subtle mists played around her form.
“Honestly,” I whispered, forcing down a gulp. “I don’t know what any of that means. I can guess, but am definitely not sure.”
“Your race has forgotten more than you’ll ever know,” she whispered, her smooth tones making me feel suddenly a lot less secure than just a moment ago. “The Elder races certainly had the right idea.”
“Which was?” I dared to ask.
“They ran.”
*******
Her sudden vanishing was the best part of my day. In the time it took for me to blink my eyes, she disappeared leaving me a hell of a lot more than just shaken.
“I’m back! I’m back! I’m back! What the hell is going on?! I got a whole army of beasties behind me but Kong won’t stop fondling his ax . . “
“Stop,” I commanded. “Gungnir, just, stop.” Gaining control of my breathing should have been easy with Flesh Sorcery, but not even my magic wanted to cooperate at this point, let alone my lower anatomy. I sent a mental packet of the past couple minutes to Gungnir.
Ancient and powerful deities were way too common at this point for me to ever relax again.
“Oh crap.” Gunginr coughed. “Yeah, I’d run too.”
I looked up sharply. “What the hell do you mean ‘you’d run too’?” I shouted while waving my arms all around me. “From what? From who? To where? You’re attached to me, Mr. Piece-of-my-soul that’s in a weapon that I crafted. Where would’ya go?”
Bobbing like an apple in a water-filled bucket evading a drunken fool at the carnival, Gungnir snapped. “You have a World Tree! Anywhere you want, duh. Wouldn’t take you long, but you can go wherever the hell you want as soon as you figure it out.”
Gungnir flew around the cavern. “Oh, and we definitely want to run from the Hungry Ones. They are no fun at all. At least with the wyrms you could establish a territory and be left alone, or in the Hegemony you buy your way to the top.”
“Explain more!” I fumed, the earth around me shaking in shifting as my emotions twisted with barely controlled mana. “You’re doing the same shit that goddess was doing. And explain her too! And how the fuck did you get the, wait . . .” I said, coming to an obvious conclusion. “You’ve already learned some things from Rath’s brain haven’t you?”
“And the boss gets a cookie!” Gungnir celebrated, pulsing rave lights from its core. I turned on a heel towards my shelf of food, muttering dark imaginings and wishing dreadful things towards Gungnir.
“I heard that!” It chirped behind me. Opening a can of vegetable beef soup and sipping it slowly, I sat down in a scavenged recliner from the break room of a 7-Eleven that I had saved before the last Ripple.
“Spill.” I said. “With details. No beating around the bush. Assume I don’t know jack shit.”
Through our mental link, Gungnir began showing me the bits of information it had started gleaning from our reptilian database.
“The Hungry Ones are the undead and everything associated with them. They are located primarily in the North and South Pole, as well as the upper parts of Canada and Russia, basically anywhere that is ridiculously cold where their bodies won’t rot away. Pretty much zombies and all kinds of other nasty things that avoid areas of sun.”
“So, what’s gonna happen when it’s permanent daytime up there for six months?” I asked, shuddering as fear ran down my spine.
“Well, they can dig nonstop, and they have some magic users that can construct castles or caves out of ice or snow or stone. But they also have some kind of darkness cloud magic that can block out the sun. That’s their long term plan.”
“And the worms, wyrms, however the hell you say it?” I continued, gesturing for Gungnir to continue.
“Those are dragons, or dragon-esque things, sort of like drakes and lizards, most kinds of kobolds along with snakes and dragoons and dragonians of all kinds,” Gungnir answered. “Reptile based creatures from all kinds of lore are pretty much king in the Asian area. That’s just barely safer than the territory of the Hungry Ones. Now remember, the really powerful things on all sides aren’t here yet, we still have two Ripples to go before the mana here is dense enough for things like Lichs or Mountain Eaters or True Elementals to start throwing their weight around. I mean, the mana here is still low enough that I wouldn’t be able to be here, or function properly, if it weren’t for the generator you stuck in me.”
“Are you telling me that they’re already here?” I yelped, almost spitting out my soup.
“Maybe, but if so they’ll be like Rath not too long ago, either in a weaker form to save their energy, or just outside of a gate waiting to come in,” Gungnir answered. “Besides, you didn’t seem to pick this little tidbit up - a new continent! That means one of your oceans probably spit up another landmass, and why did neither of you discuss Australia? Wonder what happened down there?” Gungnir rambled on.
“There’s too many unknowns right now to even contemplate that one,” I said, chewing through the tasteless bits in the soup. “What are the Forest Folk, the Hegemony, and the Horde? And what did she mean that North and South America are up to me?”
“The Forest Folk are Aelves. Human-like beings with pointy ears and powerful magic, generally accompanied by an incredible skill with swords.”
“Not bows?” I asked. “Really?”
Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
“Not according to Rath’s brain.” Gungnir said. “Only their children use bows, the adults use magic of some nature alignment to close the distance and powerful swords crafted from magic steel to cut through anything. Apparently these dudes are beyond fast. Man, your legends are really out of whack with reality. Oh, and they hate the Hegemony, which is pretty much a kind of warlike bureaucracy. Think mercenary without mercy and a penchant for bureaucracy. The only thing they love more than conquering other areas is making them submit to endless regulations and committees.”
“That’s downright evil.” I shivered.
“I know, which is why I said you could probably buy your way up the Hegemony ladder. They do love gold which an Earth Sorcerer can easily find. Duh. And money always greases the government wheel. The Horde, now they’re nasty. They are the things imprisoned from the Gate under what used to be the Vatican. The closest translation in English is daemon, or hell-infected. There’s a kind of blood-magic mixed with black- and fire- magic that turns more things into the Horde. Imagine a living horde of zombies that retain their intelligence and breathe fire, while using weapons.”
“That sounds worse than the Hungry Ones.” I interjected.
“Yeah, until you find out that the Hungry Ones are pretty much your weakness. They eat magic like yours for breakfast and never get tired. They’re freaky strong and infectious. You have no inherent fire or holy magic to fight them, but the Horde could be turned away or dominated by your Flesh Sorcery. You at least have a clear answer against them.” Gungnir answered. “And besides, you could always run, you have the World Tree.”
“What happens if the zombie horde reaches the World Tree sapling?” I asked, “Elizabeth is in there for a couple thousand years, wouldn’t they love to eat that tree? It’s chock full of magic.”
Gungnir shook its orb, mimicking a human ‘no’. “Yeah, no, that former sapling is pretty much set.” Gungnir clarified. “It has the generator you gave it for a magical boost and the elements of purity that you enchanted into it back when it was a seed. Nothing undead or unclean is going to make any headway on that. Once it fully connects to the main trunk of Yggdrasil, it’ll be unkillable. A literal vein of the spine of the Universe where your house used to be, also guarded by the Valkyries. But that may take some time.”
I banished the empty aluminum can of soup after staring at it for a minute. “So, I don’t get to leave,” I whispered. “Not yet.” Looking back up at Gungnir, I asked, “Ok, what’s in America then? What do I actually have to contend with here first?”
“Animals. Beasts. A good variety of them.” Gungnir answered. “Most of the humans are gone, but there are little pockets of them here or there. It’s mainly animals that have just gone wild since the Ripples. The zoos were unattended. The wolves, the tigers and all of the other cuddly predators from around the world are not the same as they were before.”
I hunched over, glaring at my weapon. “How the freaking hell do you know all this? That’s not something Rath should’ve known.”
“I pulled info from Norn who’s been flying around. Other birds are chock full of info too and I just cross-referenced that with your own memories!” Gungnir said, bubbling with laughter. “Check this craziness out! Migrating birds have been full of good stuff. The Evergreens are a piranha and alligator paradise while the plains of the Midwest are home to giant packs of feuding wolves and lions. All of the mountains are now home to humongous tigers and bears. The redwoods in California almost put the World Tree sapling to shame and are populated by birds of prey bigger than airliners. Even the buffalo and deer are freaking dangerous now. Half of them play around with lightning or wind magic. The weirdest ones are the fish from the zoos that mutated and are now amphibious monsters that are just downright ugly. Remember, America used to be weird. This continent, due to the crazy oil millionaires, had personal zoos chock full of African and Asian animals that aren’t natural to this area.”
“Animals aren’t a problem for me,” I waved off, discounting that particular threat.
“Yeah, not till the Hungry Ones get down here!” Gungnir rebutted. “Most worlds either have a purge when they find out the undead are here, or else they get consumed. The more powerful you are when you die, the better addition you are to them. You become one of them, but an uglier, smellier, never-full kind of them. The undead hungry horde will simply add another horde of beasts to their number. And their ultimate goal is to cover the world with darkness so they can roam freely and eat everything.”
“Fuck me.”
“Might wanna go try and make nice with those paladins huh.”
“FUCK me!”
******
Later that night I had issues processing my day of revelations. Of all the things I did not want to think about, being invaded by a gigantic horde of insane and hungry undead magic eaters was definitely one of them. The only comfort was that I made Gungnir do further research in a frantic hurry, which revealed that it would probably take hundreds of years before the undead could make any headway towards the equator with their cloud of magical darkness.
Small comfort.
The sun’s rays are just too strong near the equator for the Hungry Ones to extend their power that far. What that means for the Temperate Zones, thankfully, is that I shouldn’t see them for quite some time. Apparently the zombies I had killed so far weren’t the “Hungry Ones”, because they came from a different kind of magic, one less evil than the other, even though I didn’t understand Gungnir’s attempts to explain.
Honestly, I really didn’t care to take the time to figure that out right now. According to what we pulled out of Rath, this has happened before on other planets and planes the dragon has lived on. The funniest thing Gungnir pulled out of the lizard’s brain was a memory of the undead invading a desert planet that had an ocean of magma covering a decent chunk of surface area. Needless to say, that invasion didn’t last long.
“Hey, you might wanna take a look at this,” Gungnir said, interrupting my train of thought. “My generator ain’t working the same right now.”
I took the floating orb in my hands and pushed my magical senses into it, reaching inside with my magic and pulling out the matter-to-mana generator and setting it in front of me. Gungnir was right, something was screwed up. The enchantments holding the process together weren’t handling the energy flow properly, almost as if they simply weren’t strong enough. It appeared weaker, like if someone had replaced a steel strut in a car with wood.
“What the hell did you do?” I asked Gungnir, tossing it back into the air while I examined the giant rock.
“It wasn’t me, honest.” Gungnir answered. “I mean, yours ain’t doing too hot either.”
“Shit!” I exclaimed, pulling off my personal generator. The emergency shut-off hadn’t activated, but the entire enchantment was wearing down on all sides. If this keeps up, my endless supply of power concept will cripple some of my long-term plans.
[Hold up a second], I thought to myself. Shutting off the personal generator and the one I took out of Gungnir, I ran to the main generator in the center of the cavern scanning it very carefully with my magical senses. This one wasn’t breaking down or wearing out.
“My mana, my beautiful mana,” Gungnir whined, pulsing pink and purple lights while playing creepy soft violin music. “You gotta fix it!”
“When the hell have you been able to play music?” I asked, spinning around bewildered by the strange new ability. I didn’t stop scanning the generators with my senses but I just had to know where the hell this new ability came from.
“Well, I copied all the music from your mind, in the correct key cause you can’t sing, and then the rest of it from Rath’s mind. Did you know he spent one hundred years just on the other side of a Gate in Louisiana, listening to music from a bar? That lizard has heard everything!” Gungnir rambled on. “And Bon Jovi and Def Leppard - wow, what a time to be alive?! Can’t believe we missed all of that!”
Gungnir is also a jukebox now. Great. And the fact that the stupid orb didn’t get tired meant that it was a 24-hour jukebox, randomly switching between Bayou Beats and classic rock with interjections of Bach to my pain and pleasure.
I spent the next two days holed up in my under-river home working on the damn generators, trying to get them figured out. The answer finally hit me the morning of the sixth Ripple when I just got pissed at Gungnir and out of anger made its former generator grow to a huge size just so it wouldn’t fit inside of Gungnir’s storage space anymore. But really, Gungnir pointed it out.
“DUDE! LOOK!” Gungnir screamed, shooting a beam of red light at the generator like some kind of laser pointer. Our mental communication happened faster than words but my magical senses revealed to me what was going on after he pointed it out. My fit of anger actually solved the problem.
Making the stone matter to mana generator itself bigger stabilized the process. The issue wasn’t that the enchantments weren’t stable enough, it’s that their base materials weren’t big enough, they couldn’t hold up under the “current” or “flow” of mana that was being generated. The ‘frame’ was too small. The generator itself had to be bigger.
As magic enters our Earth, saturating everything, the level of prevalent energy rises. Imagine the mana from the generator as a little river with a little dam, then now that the Ripples have begun strengthening and changing every magical process (and the density of energy available in matter), that little river quickly became a big river, which needs a bigger dam.
Now, it’s being flooded with mana and a dam needs to be rebuilt to contain or channel the constantly growing outlet. That was my problem. The generators could be small in the beginning because Earth wasn’t fully integrated with the rest of the Universe, where the mana levels are exponentially higher. This probably means that I’m going to have to find another portable source of mana. Small generators aren’t insulated enough or strong enough to handle the ‘higher pressure’ from the outside. And what’s worse is that the water itself, or the mana in this case, is somehow denser than before.
Crap.
“So size does matter!”
“Shut it Gungnir,” I snapped. “This screws you over just as much as it does me. We’re gonna have to find something else. Big generators are perfect for the cavern and Yggdrasil’s sapling as they’re shielded in their own environment down here, and tapping the kinetic flow of the river works great for the runes of the cavern, but none of that is portable. Dig around in Rath’s head and see what works the best at holding raw energy.”
“Fine, fine, such a pansy,” Gungnir whined, bobbing just out of reach. “It’s not like you couldn’t easily fix yourself to carry more mana or generate more. Or hell, even walk along a ley line to fill up on it.”
*******
2,374 A.R (After the Ripple) - (4,394 A.D)
The sheer amount of blood required to manifest a semi-sentient worker clone is obscene. Not only is the disgustingly liquid drone incapable of not making a mess, the damn thing runs off of blood, so you have to bleed even more just to keep it functioning. It doesn’t function well off of pure mana like a barely sentient creation should. Ignore the fact that it can barely think, barely hold anything with weight, or is creepier than a coked-up kid’s nightmare.
Illium sniffed, his demeanor easily communicating his complete distaste for one of my experiments that hadn’t completely failed. It was just close enough to working that I fell into the trap of ‘oh, maybe it could work if I just-’.
Absolute bullshit. So much time wasted.
“My lord, I could easily fix this for you.” My majordomo’s thick but deft hands quickly put the display of memory crystals back to rights. Two gusts of air slapped the blood drone into the corner. It let out a bubbling mewl.
I glared at Illium even as I banished the drone out of existence. “Owing me your life doesn’t mean you have to clean up my messes. I’ve been doing that crap for thousands of years. What I want is answers!”
Illium’s cleaning continued unabated. Freaking dwarves.
“How do dwarves make memory crystals without blowing them up? How do dwarves make memory crystals without burning out the brains of the people who view them? What’s the goddamn secret?”
Extremely well controlled gusts of wind swept up the ash and powdered glass of yet another failed attempt while I healed the slight burns on my fingertips.
“Huh? Illium?” I yelled. “An answer would be nice. Maybe something like a hint, a little nudge in the right direction? Or are you intentionally trying to be obsequiously obtuse?”
He gave a tired sigh. “You already know that I cannot divulge such information. My former clan controls the Glass Spaceway and the pertinent secrets.”
I wearily sat down at my desk grown from the heartwood of the World Tree. “I seem to recall that you swore a life-debt or some vassal hood bullshit?”
Illium sighed yet again. “And I also recall that you promptly denied my oath of service and banned me from ever trying that again? And that I work near and for you because of my own sense of responsibility? Which means that I don’t have to tell you anything that I don’t want to?”
I slumped in my chair. “Fuck, forgot about that.” I sat forward as I thought of something else. “Fine then, answer me this. Exactly HOW does conjuration actually work? Does sorcery make me god-like, to where I can magically make something out of nothing or is the material coming from somewhere? Why are there so many questions to magic that I don’t know the answer to? Still? I just made assumptions and ran with them without fully doing the research. And why the hell did all the deities in my life suddenly up and disappear after dropping into my life like that?”
As my office/laboratory sparked with new life and smelled like a fresh spring breeze, Illium began refilling and reorganizing my refreshment bar. A strong hint of exotic Orcan coffee filled the room. My self-appointed butler liked to clean and cook, it was his way of slowing down so he could think.
A porcelain mug appeared on the counter as if from nowhere but I knew that the swarthy bastard had hands quicker than a circus magician. “I’ll answer from the latter to the former. From what I’ve gathered from your memoirs that you’ve reiterated for me, the deities left once all of the Chaos shards were gathered and used or disposed of. They didn’t have to worry about any of the Infernals getting their hands on any of that. Too many world-ending weapons could be created from such shards.”
Whipped foam and powdery sugar were frothed into the mug, swirling breezes containing the puffs of steam that tried to leave. “Our gods are much easier to deal with than the deities of humanity. Bilzern the Mighty warned us against dealing with the gods of the humans or Kellvani. And Redgroth the Forge advised us to turn all Chaos shards into powder and mix them with mithril, using the solution as part of the foundation of our Halls of Rebirth.”
I sighed with pleasure as my drink was placed in front of me, the calming waft of strong coffee bringing back more pleasant memories.
“And from what our greatest smith-priests can divine,” Illium continued, mixing his own blend of alcohol, “conjuration of materials greatly depends on the circumstances. In plans of great magical density, more than likely, conjuration pulls common material from nearby plentiful sources of that material and rare material directly from the substance between Chaos and the Void.”
Each sip was heaven, almost enough to distract me from thinking. “So . . . conjuration in a high magic environment means that conjuring water while I’m physically in a desert means that the water itself is a product of mana and extraplanar ectoplasm. But the same place if it were a low magic environment, the water would be tons of mana and a bit of extraplanar ectoplasm.”
“Correct.” Illium agreed. “And the Ripples you endured at the beginning of your memoirs put your entire world in a state of unprecedented flux, which is why your creations and powers worked best in the beginning but declined over time. It’s one of the reasons you were able to craft such artifacts at such high levels of power in the beginning but not later. Gungnir and Svalinn are a product of when your reality was in a state of utter Chaos. Reality was far more forgiving for being bent in such a way. It also explains why conjured materials from low magic environments degrade much faster. The mana breaks down as the ecto-material decays.”
Well, that explains my predicament.
Fuckin’ dwarves. Smartasses. Every last one of them.