I am an idiot. But to be fair, I am the smartest of all the idiots. Trust me, I checked. At least nobody was around to disagree with me.
After Gungnir let all the animals out of the cavern and sealed the vaulted stone door big enough to let them all out, I went back there as soon as it was empty and began crafting like a maniac after cleaning up. I started experimenting with the different stones that were warped by Chaos.
I also couldn’t help but play around with the altered trees that were suddenly hungry after their encounter with a dead god’s death throes. It was beautiful, my very own trip to a childhood fantasy for a few hours.
The only ‘cloud in the sky’ was the fact that Spot was still stone. The one change I did notice however is that it did appear that the crack in the petrified exterior had some normal dog hairs poking out. My magic didn’t reveal too much but some kind of metamorphosis was going on there. I put Gungnir on full time organization of the dead dragon’s brain while I carefully examined the changed gems and trees.
“Ok, gold mixed with Chaos seems to have some kind of incredible power storage material. Got a few bars of that stuff here,” I muttered to myself, standing over the collection of gems. I used Svalinn’s bladed edge to move the materials around. “Might want to consider making personalized uber batteries out of this. Man, hope it’s a magical equivalent to a superconductor!” I kept sorting them, using Earth Sorcery to feel out the differences between them.
“Silver, huh, feels kind of alive.” I kept on, poking that one with my finger as I took mental notes. “Almost seems to respond to my thoughts. Maybe I could make a true artificial intelligence and stick it in a staff to control the spells. Gungnir 3.0.” The whole talking to myself definitely wasn’t helping my own view of my sanity, but it did allow me to organize my thoughts.
“I heard that!” Gungnir screamed from its docking station in the crystal vault holding the brain. “No stinkin staff is gonna replace me! I am you! Or, a piece of you. You know what? Screw you!”
“Calm down. I’m just kidding, sheesh.” I retorted, holding back a snicker. “Besides, I got enough on my plate. Keeping track of one crazy magical orb is enough.” I turned back to the layout of jewels. “The ruby, huh, that one’s got its own glow.” I said as I reached out to touch it. I quickly pulled my finger back, the ruby putting out enough heat to actually burn me. “What the friggin’ hell!? It’s like uh, eating mana from the other gems to produce heat!” The strangest part of all of this was that the crystal shards seemed soft somehow, like a pliable shell or a seed with fruit inside.
I spent the next three days cataloging all the changes in the stones, tending the tree nursery, and eating the bare minimum of canned food to keep me going. The more I learned about the gems and trees, the more a special idea took hold. Looking up from where I was wolfing down a can of soup, the adolescent trees thirty-feet away from me were emitting some kind of psychic whine that my Nature Sorcery barely picked up. The damn things were hungry.
Very tentatively, I extended a tendril of Nature Sorcery towards them and felt the primitive thoughts make themselves known. Now, all trees are pretty much after the same things, water, sunlight, soil, but these ones wanted a bit more iron in their diet in a form I didn’t really want to provide. Blood. They wanted blood. Actually, they wanted my blood, something about the magic in my blood just made it smell better to them. It was honestly starting to get a little creepy.
Turning my attention back to the gems, I picked up a changed sapphire in one hand and then hefted a smaller sapphire that I had covered in gold. The first one seemed to be completely different from the latter. The naked sapphire was full of energy, but in a watery kind of way, whereas the gold covered one was filled with water aspected by the Sorcery itself. I shook the gold covered crystal, hearing a rattling inside. I started to shake.
“Holy shit! Gungnir! Get over here and check this out!” I yelled, “I might have actually done it!”
“You yelled at me yesterday for leaving Rath’s brain, and now you’re telling me to leave the brain?” Gungnir complained. “I ain’t no fool! Besides, I bet what I found is much better than what you did!”
“Fuckin doubt it,” I said breathlessly, moving on to check the other crystals. The same results seemed to bear out across the gems. The naked ruby held fire energy, but the gold covered ruby felt alive, like Fire Sorcery. The granite held earth energy, but the gold covered granite held Earth Sorcery. The odd ones were the pure quartz and diamonds, seeming to hold the purest energy, but the gold covered quartz and diamond crystals seemed to have a tiny piece of rapidly shifting Chaos inside of it - a solid piece!
“Dude, trust me, I’m totally right.” Gungnir called out, the mental smirk carried over our link as it interrupted me. “I know how to use the World Tree sapling to travel like a gate. Rath’s brain showed me that nature, water, and earth dragons regularly use it to find new realms or worlds to nest in. And since your Sorcery is right along those lines, shouldn’t be too hard for you to go wherever the hell you want!”
I coughed. “Uhm, anywhere? Really?”
The words rang in my head, again and again. Anywhere. The World Tree could take me anywhere. What nerd doesn’t want to see the universe? What Star Wars or Star Trek lover wouldn’t give their soul for this opportunity? What star-gazing layman wouldn’t trade their left-nut for the barest close-up glimpse of an alien system? Gungnir may be right, this might be cooler than holding literal Sorcery in my hands. Because not only can I go anywhere I want with Yggdrasil as my house, but I can pop in anywhere the World Tree touches.
“So what’cha got, huh? What beats vacationing in Nirvana?” Gungnir teased. “Maybe a quick stop in one of the Seventh Heavens?”
“Uh, well, the possibility of more sorceries?”
“Shut up.” Gungnir deadpanned. “That’s not funny.”
“I’m serious, but I’m not really sure what I’m looking at exactly.” I said while gently putting down the strange creations. “These things don’t look like what I thought they would.”
“And how would you know?” Gungnir said, exasperated at my obvious ignorance, “You’re a baby Sorcerer on the World Stage with no knowledge in your brain or information in your bones. Let me see that.”
Gungnir undocked from the crystal vat and bobbed over, peering at the carefully laid out experiments. Beams of red played over the assorted gemstones and precious metals.
“Crap, crap, double crap, useless crap, worthless to you crap, ooooh! Wait, still crap.” Gungnir spun in a circle and said, “All of this is crap to you, except for that one over there.”
A soft beam of green light illuminated a small silver covered shard of quartz off to my left. “I don’t know why, but there is some kind of solidified pure Chaos in that one. Might be useful for getting a light-based magic, but the others,” Gungnir paused for a second, “the others are different. They’re a kind of self-recharging battery for different kinds of preset magics. You could set it up to run on its own while you’re out.”
“WHAT?” I yelled. “All that effort, a damn animal revolution, and I get stuck with shit I can’t even use?”
“You can use it.” Gungnir clarified. “Just not for what you wanted. Those aren’t Sorceries, those are crystals for holding purified elements. The Chaos inside of them is minute. Tiny. The only purpose it serves is to change ‘wasted’ energy into whatever type it is.”
“English man. Not following.” My glare showed the orb I meant business.
“Think about it this way. Make a flamethrower that runs off of magic. Stick that fire stone in there. Works like a battery. When it runs out of power, it will self-recharge from the ambient energy - energy that you can’t use or feel in the environment. It only feels like Sorcery to you because you’re hypersensitive to Chaos and these gems only have the smallest hint of it.”
The light bulb slowly sputtered on. “I’m so glad all the crystal lovin’ hippies are gone.” I muttered. “They’d be insufferable if they know that their beloved crystal shit is worth something now. Freaking rechargable magic flamethrowers! Finally, something cool!”
“But wait, there’s more!” Gungnir said, adopting the voice of Billy Mays. “You could use these crystals to create all kinds of things. Rechargeable weapons, that’s for kids.”
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My sentient weapon levitated to about six-feet off the ground, sending out beams of light to create holographic projections on the walls around us. “Giants of magic and steel that grind our foes to dust!” Gungnir announced as images of five story tall machines wrecked a modern city. “Living flames to ravage wastes of the Undead!” A fast-forwarded segment of the old show Game of Thrones played on the wall, where a dragon blazed a zombie horde to ashes. “Or bring the gods to their knees with a cleverly crafted trap!” Dizzying images of various rituals scrawled in blood and parchment flashed by, ancient and powerful things pouding at the bars of their cages, howling for release and murder.
“You don’t have everything you want here.” Gungnir whispered ominously. “But you do have everything you need.”
Those words stopped me cold. The images flashing across the wall stilled, as if a giant hand stopped the ticking of time itself. “For what, exactly?” I said coldly, narrowing my eyes as my hands clenched so hard that knuckles began popping on their own.
“I have many needs,” I said, my voice steadily growing louder as anger flooded my soul. “Stop the eventual flood of the Hungry Ones at the northern border of the continent? Survive the last freaking Ripple? Figure out how to actually claim this continent so the Elder Races leave me alone? Learn how to use my power to its fullest potential? Kill a goddess?!”
Sweat dripped down my face, my bottled up anger unconsciously using my own Water Sorcery to banish the irritation. “Or maybe,” I said, my voice dropping down to just above a whisper. “A way to stop my own abilities from altering my mind?”
People often associate the feeling of anger with a raging fire. A careless spark or unattended campfire which leads to devastating consequences, a landscape consuming fire, incredibly hot and wrathful, devouring every living thing in its path. The machinations of man contrived since the beginning of time to create a controlled flame, such as the concentrated power of a blowtorch which cuts through the hardest steel.
What the lowered eyes of mankind have failed to see and understand in our limited wisdom is that the true expressions of anger are those exhibited by Mother Nature herself with the elements most needed for life, earth and water. That which is the foundation of life is also the most widespread cause of environmental death.
Victims of truly powerful earthquakes and tsunamis grasp on the most basic level that the number ‘ten’ on the Richter scale isn’t just Mother Earth shaking her fist, it is a total condemnation of what is on her surface. The shockwaves of the indignant Mother reducing the surface to rubble, and then grinding the remnants to dust. Everything we have ever known as humans would be wiped out as we tumble to the floor, suddenly unable to walk as the most steady part of our world acts like jello.
And then, it wouldn’t get better. The follow-up of the initial planetary temper tantrum is a tsunami. Multiple tsunamis that emanate from the core of the outburst. The total and utter obliteration of the remaining structures along the coastline. Mother Earth flips the table while her son, the Sea, the Ocean, hurls his wrath at what he can touch and drags it back to the unconquerable depths of the black abyss.
Anger isn’t hot. It doesn’t burn. My rage exhibited none of the attributes of fire. It cracked and split and tore like the very crust of the earth breaking open. It flooded, and drowned, and washed away the remnants. Realizing that after all of this time, my abilities, my powers, my fragments of a dream that brought wonder to my life, were changing me, altering me in a way I didn’t understand until now.
Not only had my body and soul been crafted to fit something more, but my mind itself was shifting, and I didn’t like it. I wanted to still be me, I am still me, but something about me was not the same. My mind felt like it was tearing in two.
My incalculable rage pushed me to the floor, my knees slowly sinking into the stone. Is this what it takes to achieve my goals? I have to become something different? All I really want to do is survive, and survive long enough to see my fiance again, but at what cost? Humans only live around eighty-years for a reason. Our minds are not built to withstand the test of eternity. The stress of eons of living would kill us. The accumulated weight of the ages is what keeps the majority of us from reaching past the point of our first century, and then twists the knife so that those who do break the first limit are soon dead.
The natural disasters of my anger were twisting inside of me, raging to be let out, loosed upon the uncaring vista of the world. The realization of my own nature combined with the circumstances fought with my soul, my human spirit, the only indomitable part of me. The only piece of me that had a chance in hell of surviving, of enduring. I had done things I wasn’t proud of. Enslaving animals and beasts? I had done that for the sake of surviving, but it wasn’t me, or was it?
The act itself had changed me. It made the next enslavement, the next domination that much easier. Murder? I had done that too. Maybe in self-defense, and maybe it would be considered a reasonable action, but I had still done it. Would it make the next murder incrementally more quick? Would I pull the trigger, push the knife, squeeze the throat as if it were nothing, given enough time? How much change happens before I am no longer me, before I walk up to a mirror and not recognize the face that stares back? Take over my continent? How gigantic my ego must be for me to contemplate that idea?
“Be Kind.”
My fiancé’s favorite phrase echoed in my head. That’s what she always used to tell me every morning before I went to work. Be kind. Sometimes it was irritating. I didn’t want to be kind, I wanted to be tough and direct. Sometimes, it was comforting. There’s love there, a genuine reminder to make the world a better place, one word at a time.
“Be Kind.”
Glancing down at my shaking hands, I saw that they were covered in powdered stone and some of it was wet. In the minutes I took to fully explore my rapid onset of irrational anger and let it run its course through me, my Sorcery had reacted to my emotions, conjuring rock and crushing it to powder, conjuring water and changing its shape to produce rough spikes that whipped around, flailing like a caught octopus struggling to escape its fate.
“Be Kind.”
The words rippled through my soul harder than the throes of a dying god. The memory of my fiancé evoking feelings and thoughts that I had pushed aside, claiming I didn’t have time to deal with them. But I’m not stone. I am not the unforgiving tide washing away the frailty of my humanity. I am not the pounding avalanche crushing my enemies beneath the inexorable weight of my strength.
Yet.
My Flesh Sorcery alerted me that some of my thoughts and feelings were not originally my own. They came from my other Sorceries, which are alien to the natural state of the human soul. Mankind was not meant, not built, to casually hold such power, such control over the elements. Part of me had stepped over the line into ascension and I was now paying the price. I conjured a small pebble in the palm of my hand and studied it.
First, I am me. Rubbing the surface of the slightly pitted stone, I coalesced my thoughts, MY thoughts around what I felt my core to be. I am me. I am a Sorcerer. I control myself, my abilities, my thoughts and my powers. They do not control me. The Sorceries were a part of me, they had been since the day everything changed. Now, I could feel them coming to heel, a well-trained hound sitting at my feet, patiently waiting its owner’s commands.
Inexorable will steeled by liquid rage began to reel in the clashing waves of my soul. Bit by bit, flavor by flavor, the swirls of power granted to me by events outside my control began to join and mix. The Sorcery of Flesh commanding the bones of the foundation to accept the filling presence of earth and the nourishing rain of water while filling them both with the caress of nature. The Sorcery of magic itself blanketed everything, fleshing out the cracks and providing a canopy of protection on my soul.
Control. I could feel its tenuous presence again. This is what I’ve been missing for so long. The ability to control every facet of every particle of me. The colored tinges of intentions no longer altered the power of my thoughts. I could feel it. The previous desire I had to dominate the changed beasts of the surrounding area to make it safe for me was no longer forefront in my mind. It had originally only been a side plan, but the Flesh Sorcery unconsciously pushed it to the fore. The Water Sorcery pushed my thoughts of desiring safety into building a base under a river as I sought that which could provide protection. My thoughts, now unhindered, showed the various actions I had taken while literally under the influence.
I didn’t really want to be king of everything I saw, the undisputed ruler of the unpopulated North American continent. My Nature Sorcery drove those thoughts, to be the biggest tree in the forest, the most powerful wolf in the pack. It seemed to have worked in tandem with my Flesh Sorcery to up my aggression levels and need to be the alpha. Don’t get me wrong, it has certainly helped me survive, but a rational human would have run from a dragon instead of trying to drown it. Or made off like the roadrunner when meeting the “genetically altered magical humans from outside our galaxy”.
“You ok there?” Gungnir said, bobbing in front of my face and cutting my introspective journey short. “Don’t wanna alarm you, but the walls were shaking like crazy there for a bit and your skin was literally glowing.”
Shivers ran down my spine. I shook my head, coming to grips with regaining the thinning fringes of my mind. Banishing the evidence of my magical freak out, I looked at Gungnir, the sentient shape-shifting weapon that housed a piece of my soul through pure accident. Another mistake. An overreach by several orders of magnitude. One wrong move by the wrong player and a piece of the most integral part of me could have been destroyed, or even worse, captured. My own psyche cried out during the emotional turmoil about the piece of me that was missing. It was obvious in hindsight.
How could I be stable if I wasn’t even whole?
“Hey buddy.” I said, my tired voice trembling with effort. I lifted my hands. “Come here.”
Gungnir floated slowly down towards my hands, “You’re kinda creepin me out here. I’m not the one you should be angry at. I was just giving you options!”
“It’s not that,” I sighed, taking the orb out of the air and willing it back into spear form. Reaching out with my magic, I felt the inner core of my weapon, where a piece of my soul resided. “I’ve just realized some of the mistakes I’ve made in my ignorance, and having the most vulnerable part of me floating around is not the smartest thing I’ve done.”
I gripped the spear with both hands and flooded my Sorcery into every part of it, and then centered my power on the core crystal blade.
Three loud whumpfs resounded through the room. I paused in disbelief. It sounded like someone knocking on the damn door.
“Hooray! I’ve been rescued!”
“Shut up, Gungnir.” I snapped, my need to secure the piece of myself warring with what sounded like someone knocking on the door or stomping on the earth overhead.
“Open up, Sorcerer! I can feel you down there!” Three more muffled whumpfs sounded and a feminine but powerful voice shouted. “Don’t make me come down there!”
I willed Gungnir into a knife form and secured it to my belt. “No fucking way,” I muttered, turning towards the staircase leading to the opening under the World Tree. “It can’t be.”
Absolute incredulity battered at me as I walked up the stone stairs and put my hands to the marble door, shaping a tiny hole in the stone door so I could peek out. My shock was outperformed by my mouth.
“What the fuck do you want, Reeanth?”
“What is she good fooooor?” Gungnir began to sing, pulsing the beat on my hip. “Absoluuuuuuutely nothin!”
[Not right now.] I growled across our mental link. [Definitely not right now.]
Sweat beaded across my forehead, the anticipation of combat fought my Flesh Sorcery’s innate control over my body. Last time we met, it wasn’t that fun. One mistake and I would have been toast. Dead toast. Toast on the floor with the butter side down. The little hole let me see out just enough to make out parts of her face while her voice definitely confirmed that it was her.
“We don’t have time for this! Open the cursed door!” She screamed, banging on the stone then taking a step back. With a bit of distance, I was able to make out some more detail, the sorry state she was in tugged at the remnants of my human decency. Her silvery battlesuit was torn and shredded along her shoulder, her weapons non-existent. Blood was everywhere, streaming down her arm. At least several bones were broken. I could see a few poking out of her legs.
“By all the gods and nameless Deeps, I swear eternal loyalty if you’ll just let me in!”