The rest of my day was very uneventful. I explored the terrain around my hideouts with Reeanth and nothing bothered us, and I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t the stone ax I conjured for Reeanth that scared them away. I think it was me. Sorcery is part of my soul, and emotions flow from the soul, which means that my abilities are intrinsically linked to the state of my emotions.
And I was angry.
Every dirt path in front of me warped to be smooth on its own, pebbles crumbled to dust and scattered while the ground where I was staring became soft and pliable. Nearby plants pulled back out of my way as if running from my presence. As we neared the river, the current of the now giant Rappahanock picked up and twisted as if it were dancing in a storm.
My family.
There was a really good chance that my family was conscripted to fight in a war they never had a stake in.
Reeanth explained to me before we left Yggdrasil that the Centauri Empire had a longstanding pact with the Orion Conglomerate to split up Earth whenever it rejoined the rest of the galaxy, and apparently they meant that in every way except the most literal. The Conglomerate were pure mercantilists, a nice way of saying enterprising slavers, and uninitiated humans would be the newest fad for the rich and powerful of the universe. All they cared about was money. The Centauri were the peacekeepers, the almost fanatical warlords with Justice as their god. Their mission for the last eighteen hundred years was to contain the scourge of the Hive, and before that, their main enemy were the Hungry Ones.
Her further explanations of galactic politics didn’t help my anger, and neither did her attempts to soothe me by telling me that non-magical humans were the perfect basis for her Empire’s shock troopers. Our lack of mana-exposure meant that we were incredibly versatile for genetic re-engineering and augmentation in ways that her enhanced, warlike race were not. The only bright side I gathered was that they had the technology to cure my little brother of his epilepsy, but I immediately got even angrier because they did that just so he could be another spear-thrower for them.
“You know, you never answered my question about how you got here.” I said to Reeanth as I looked across the turgid river. I breathed in the fresh air, thick with moisture that heralded a coming storm.
“I came through a gate, a different one actually. The first time I came to Earth was with my team but the next two times, the times I’ve seen you, I used something else.” She answered, her voice coming from behind me. “An unsanctioned gate.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, tossing a stray stick into the water. I watched as the current yanked it out of sight. “Seriously, if it’s a question one of the people y’all captured would ask, assume I would ask it as well and just explain what you mean.”
“All gates are manned and operated by space mages. The Teleporter’s union has a process to make a wizard into a space mage, and then control the gates for most of the galaxy. They are the most powerful force we know of, but largely unnoticed as they don’t care who they transport as long as you pay their fees.”
“I feel like the more I ask questions, the more questions I have, but I don’t want to stop asking as that makes me willfully ignorant. And I’ve dealt with enough of those kinds of people in my life.” I didn’t turn around, instead I stayed facing the river as the clouds darkened overhead. My initial feelings of anger were being lost to the mid-summer storm as it rolled in gracefully, streaking the evening sky and bowing the trees. “They ‘made’ a mage? Gates are controlled, so does that mean you don’t use spaceships to get around? And if the Teleporter’s Union is the real power, how come they haven’t stopped the Hive?”
I didn’t like her answer.
“They’re completely neutral, our version of what you call Switzerland. The large space gates can be used by anyone that provides enough mana for transport. And mages can be made, but that process is guarded carefully by the Union. Space mages are some of the most powerful entities in the universe. Mages of other elemental types happen in rare cases or strange circumstances, and are highly coveted by whatever race they belong to. It’s enough to establish a mighty clan if done correctly.”
Reeanth took a deep breath. “And yes, all space-faring creatures use spaceships, but traveling between the vast emptiness is pointless when we can use a gate that portals to a destination. Some portals are one way and don’t need a space mage, and some are gigantic, and can change destinations when needed.”
Rain began to pelt the surface of the river. Soon, uncountable ripples added to the flowing rage of the current. “I love storms. I always have.” I said, turning my face upward and feeling the water stream down my face. “For some reason, the raw beauty of nature’s fury calms me. A movie put on by Mother Nature herself.” Using my Water Sorcery, I pushed the water away from myself and created a dome around me of dryness. “And now,” I said as I raised my hands to touch the ethereal boundary of magic between wet and dry. “It’s not enough. My magic resonates with this masterpiece.”
A bolt of lightning cut the angry sky. Thunder boomed after. “Nothing I’ve heard so far eases this inner cloud of seething rage I feel.”
“This isn’t safe anymore,” Reeanth said as she lightly stepped into the dome. Putting her hand on my shoulder, she persisted. “My lord, look up! It isn’t safe! Elementals are behind this storm!” Her stone ax had a spear point between the ax blades, and it was pointing up at the storm where the bulk of an ominous purple cloud touched the mountain top across the river.
I’ll never get over the fact that the Ripples changed this world in such a way. Mountains didn’t use to be in Fredericksburg, Virginia. And this river used to be so shallow you could walk across it. But now, it looked like an untouched primal wilderness picked up from some alien world and set down here. And behold, bigger than ever.
My gaze followed where she pointed. Small balls of rapidly changing light were dancing in the wind, chasing each other. Some looked silvery while others were flashing yellow, crackling with sparks on its edges. The wind brought in the storm like a blacksmith’s hammer. Rain pounded and the wind pushed and shoved everything in its way. Bolts of light whimsically cracked the night sky as a huge one split off and blasted the surface of the water twenty-feet in front of me.
The cynical part of me, the everlasting fountain of sarcasm and nihilism, wanted to joke about the preposterous nature of my current experience. The animal side, the oh so very tightly wound instinctive side, wanted me to get the hell outta there. I am not proud of which side won.
“No! Fuck you!” I screamed at the sky, using my command over Svalinn to turn the left gauntlet into a shield while the right gauntlet extended a wickedly sharp, three-foot blade that glowed with power. All I could think of at that moment was the once great Toby Keith singing loud and proud in my head, or was that Gungnir?
‘I’ll put a boot in your ass! It’s the American way!’, which I screamed with no regard to being in tune. I mean, I was never confused where the damn orb got its annoying tendencies from.
My body was set. My feet sat solid and stable with my Earth Sorcery making my stance as unflinching as the planet’s bedrock. My Water Sorcery kept the rain off of me but pooled the accumulation into four giant blobs of water each the size of a small car each. They writhed around me in the storm. Normal humans stay inside during storms like these, and those that get caught out in them get inside as quickly as they can. My magic told me that there were no living creatures in the vicinity, and logic dictated that all intelligent life had already found shelter.
“My lord Sorcerer!” The shrill tone of her voice let me know that in that moment, she realized that maybe I was a little less than sane. Another bolt of lightning streaked down, caressing the upheld arm holding Svalinn.
It, was, incredible. The rush. I knew what Gungnir could do in combat. The orb had been tested in multiple ways in many different situations. But this, this was different. My enchanted shield didn’t block the lightning, it ate it. I could see the lightning, the raw energy itself, be converted into pure magical energy, mana, and sink into the shield. Shallow runes became visible as the power rushed through the shield, and the excess drained into me where the other half of Svalinn, the bladed gauntlet, pulled the rest of the mana into itself. This split second of wonder was interrupted by a hailstorm of lightning bolts, each one being eaten and processed, but more and more excess power was being handed off to me by shield-Svalinn and siphoned by blade-Svalinn.
Withdrawing the blade, I connected the two halves of my shield together and they formed a large tower shield and it all stopped. The pounding static discharges, I couldn’t feel them anymore.
“The whisper on the winds never lies.”
“How many more before the Sorcerer dies.”
Reeanth gripped my shoulder as she crouched behind me. “They speak,” she said breathlessly. “They’re not supposed to speak.”
“They who, woman?”
“The elementals!” She answered. At the oblivious expression on my face, she sighed. “Of course you don’t know. They’re the equivalent of magical royalty. All races are beneath them in their view as we are hindered by our bodies from being ‘true magic’. Essentially, they are the purest power, the most clean expression of elemental magic given life.”
I could feel something changing, though it was hard to pin down in that moment. It’s that moment several days after a hard workout and your muscles feel just a tiny bit bigger, as if they’re ready for another push, another stretch, that your potential increased by just a tiny bit. I was past that. I was full, and Svalinn was getting there too. The raw power contained in my enchanted shield was almost blinding to my magical sight, but the elementals showed no sign of stopping, just raining down lightning on me as if it were the rain itself.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Rain. Screw it. Using my Water Sorcery, I took the giant blobs of water I had accumulated and pushed a thick dome of water around us. Svalinn retreated into its gauntlet form, almost sighing in pleasure in the back of my mind. The lightning almost immediately stopped.
“Hidden from sight, protected by rain.”
“Flesh is weak and you shall be slain.”
“Come be free of your fleshly chains.”
I turned to Reeanth who was crouched behind me gripping the stone ax so tight that her knuckles were white. “So, the real reason we don’t mess with elementals is because they’re plain creepy, right?”
“Did you not see the sheer amount of power they threw at you?” She gasped, incredulous at my reaction. “They can do that relentlessly! Nothing has more magical power than the elementals. They’re linked to their own plane which supplies them with power, and they play with no concept that their play reshapes planets!”
“It also seems to up the ambient mana levels in the area as well.”
“This isn’t a time for study or experimentation!” She very quietly growled at me, cowering behind me. “We need to go. Those ones were small. We really don’t want to run into the bigger ones.”
Acquiescing to good sense for once, I guided us back to my home as the storm swept past with the elementals in tow.
********
The next couple days sort of flew by, literally. I enchanted a new, beefed-up hoverboard and flew around the Fredericksburg area going as far north as Woodbridge and as far south as Ruther Glen, and then I went east and west on the Rappahannock till I got tired. Reeanth followed behind in my old hoverboard that I linked to my new one, so that she could tag along as backup. Using an old map I had stashed away, I notated all the changes in the landscape as best as my ugly art skills would allow. Every bit of nature was exaggerated in size and in color.
What used to be small bushes were now giant versions of themselves easily bigger than most cars and trees, and they definitely loved the new magical environment. A few of them even swung at me when I wasn’t paying attention. The river upstream was wider and deeper. Small green hills now looked like they were straight out of Switzerland. Animals we saw were bigger and some of the tamer mutations were two-headed whitetail deer with razor-sharp horns, and ants the size of golden retrievers that used cutting magic that glistened on their jaws to carve out their homes. And don’t even get me started on beavers. I saw one bite the tail off a crocodile while its mate went toe-to-toe with the front end of the croc.
And it was all gone.
The mark humanity had left on this world, at least in this part, was gone. The little towns out west near the mountains were swallowed up and the string of apartments was now a treacherous gully where flying critters played. The parts of Earth that did not have magic were now gone, consumed by the wave of change. What made it weird on the instinctual level, was watching the animals as I tried to interact with them.
Before the world went and flipped on our heads, animals used to be afraid of us. Stray cats ran and birds only came close for the food in our hands, and unless they were domesticated after years of selective breeding or conditioning from birth, animals stayed away from humans. This was no longer the case.
Sparrows dive bombed us. Ants spewed glowing acid that I dodged at all costs because I saw the projectiles cut chunks out of trees. A freaking pangolin hurled boulders and shot needles out of its tail, while mountain lions screamed loud enough to blow tree branches off of their trunks and almost threw me off my board. Nature was terrifying already, but magically enhanced nature with a grudge was more than enough for my lizard brain to cry for its mother. By and large, the animals were generally bigger than they were before, but not many were the size of Kong or Spot. I did see a gigantic green snake in the distance sunning itself in what used to be a commuter lot, but like hell was I going to check that out.
Reeanth was quiet during those couple of days, silently eyeing me with distrust and constantly watching over her shoulder. I mean, it does make sense. I had an inordinate amount of power over her life - literally. We did get into a bit of an argument when she found out that the stash of Centauri weapons I took from her and her gang were blown up along with my house by some insane goddess not too long after I kicked Reeanth back to her world. Even though I held her life in my hands, words such as ‘idiot’, ‘moron’, ‘fucking stupid’ and’ batshit crazy’ flew around for a bit. The best part of it all was me telling her to shut up and it worked.
You’ll never see that in the modern world without magic.
I was not an ungrateful sorcerer, I did spend plenty of time making Reeanth some cool new weapons out of the results of my earlier experiments. Since she couldn’t run away or betray me without serious pain or injury, I didn’t hold back making some epic stuff. As I worked with the magical items, I also took the time to work through my own misgivings about her being a ‘slave’. I didn’t really want one, or even need one, but it did impart a feeling of safety having someone watch my back, albeit under duress. And I asked her several times if she minded or cared, but apparently this kind of thing is far more common where she’s from.
Not only did I get a lot of exploring done, but I accomplished a ridiculous amount of fortifying. Using my Earth Sorcery, I fortified the walls of my under-river-hideout and my under-Yggdrasil hideout to over forty-feet thick by transmuting the dirt and soil to solid stone. Then I added runes of hardness and strength mixed with kinetic absorption as the river was now several times bigger than it used to be.
And to the Yggdrasil sapling itself, I made sure that the generator was double its original size, big enough to be stable and not meltdown like the last couple. That part was the trickiest, as there were many pieces of that puzzle to consider.
Is hooking a nuclear mana generator to Yggdrasil going to benefit me in any way? At what point does my over-prepping become enough? Should I create mini-tree minions to guard the square mile area around the tree in case I’m not there? Why am I so goddamn paranoid?
In my so-called-justified paranoia, I also created a stash of weapons at each of my three hideouts; the river-bottom one, the hold-under-the-World-Tree one, and the one inside the World Tree about a hundred yards up. Each cache contained fifty flash-bang pebbles, fifty strobe light pebbles, fifty packs of insta-grow thorny vine seeds, and ten bang batons. Yes, lame names but they work.
The bang batons have three settings, one throws softball size rocks almost as fast as a bullet, one shoots meter long icicles, and the other spits the insta-grow thorny vine seeds. Next to those were the big guns - the storm staffs, for when I have to bring the rain. Those staff / spears had two functions, one was to store power to shoot frisbee shaped mana blasts with mono-molecular edges to cut through just about anything, and the other to act as a leyline finding rod. Anybody could stick the butt end in the ground and light would shine out of the crystal spear tip in the direction of the nearest leyline. Even if all else fails, an idiot normal human with no magic could survive for a while in one of my hideouts.
******
Several days before the last Ripple
Veins popped out of Reeanth’s neck like steel cables as her grip tightened. “Put it down!”
“No!”
“Put the knife down!”
“Woman! This isn’t your call!” My objections went unheeded. How did this bitch get so damn strong?
“This is overridden by my original oath!”
“Fuck you!” I argued, struggling to keep my arm from being pulled out of its socket by Reeanth. It was like fighting a damn ogre with boobs. “I order you to shut the hell up and let me experiment!”
“Doesn’t work.”
“Fuck your interpretation!”
I guess from the outside looking in, it may look bad. I was sitting on the ground in the river-hideout beneath the river kinetic-current mana converter surrounded by various crystals and magical materials that I had gathered. And, oh yeah, I had a wickedly sharp stone dagger poised over my left wrist and I was doing my damndest to stick it in with Reeanth doing her level best to keep me from my goal. Not explaining myself may not have been the smartest thing to do, but who cares, I’m the boss.
“There’s a point to this!”
“That’s what I’m keeping away from you, you most idiotic of Sorcerous lords!”
She was right. I was an idiot. I didn’t need a pitiful knife. I have Flesh Sorcery.
Letting go of the knife, Reeanth stumbled back and fell on her ass, to which I gestured with my right hand and used Earth Sorcery to make the stone beneath her swallow up her lower half. And there we sat, glaring at each other.
“If you die, I die!” She yelled, “And I swore an oath to you and your cause, which means I can’t let you die!”
“Who the fuck said anything about dying? I’m trying to work here.”
“By summoning a demon?!” Her look of sheer terror convinced me that maybe I overlooked something.
“What, the, fucking, hell, are you talking about? All I’m trying to do is use my Flesh and Earth Sorcery to add some crystalline fibers to my body, and maybe carve some precious metal runes on my bones. I can’t compete pound-for-pound with anything outside these walls without my magic.”
“You truly don’t know?” She asked, her legs and butt and hands still encased in stone. She gestured at the setup which I was currently sitting at the center of. “This is almost exactly how you summon a creature from the Infernal dimension, or protect yourself during a treacherous summoning.”
Maybe I’m not the idiot.
“What part of my actions makes you think that I can, or would want to summon a demon?” I asked, disbelief dripping from my voice. “Your body is fundamentally wired differently than mine with some kind of crystalline fibers, and so I was going to see if I could do a better job, but I need exposed flesh for that. You are just getting in my way.”
Bowing her head, her voice quietly cracked, “But why? You’re a Sorcerer. You don’t need to do that.”
“What am I missing here?” I asked but kept going. “All of the power I have accumulated so far has either been a big success or a ridiculous miss. Enslaving various beasts hasn’t worked because the damn Ripples set them free. My dog ate part of a dragon and now is a lovely statue, my woman is in a tree, and my best weapon now sings all the damn time, OUT OF TUNE BY THE WAY!”
The soft humming in the background quieted.
“And, the only things that have worked or lasted are the things that have to do with me personally, like exercising or experimenting with my abilities, or crafting armor and small enchanted weapons, or my hideouts. It stands to reason that enchanting or enhancing my own body is probably the best way to increase my power permanently. Summoning a demon is not on my list of things to do. I have a distinct feeling that they aren’t fun to work with.”
She huffed imperiously, like a child princess trying to explain something to her wayward puppy. “But my lord, they are easy to work with. They will do anything you ask, but the price is always greater than the gain.” Her gaze met mine, her intensity creeping me out just a little. “I have lost many a friend who has done what I thought you were doing. Some in pursuit of power, and others as suicide soldiers when all seemed lost on the battlefield.”
“Besides all the questions that just popped into my head, let me assure you that I am not going to summon a Ripple-damned demon.”
“My lord.”
“What?”
“Can you let me out please?”
With a wave of my hand, the stone released its hold on her. “Now that you know I’m not going to do anything stupid, are you going to let me work in peace?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Finally.” I muttered, turning my focus back to my wrist.
“My lord.”
“For Pete’s sake, WHAT NOW?” I yelled and turned, my exasperation getting the better of me.
“I feel that it is my duty to tell you that your dog is not a statue, not truly. It isn’t dead. My suit detects most threats and your stone canine is most certainly one of them.”
“I know that.” I replied, waving my hand. “Spot is in some kind of stasis. My Flesh Sorcery showed me that a weird kind of metamorphosis is going on. He’s also not a threat. I gave him a seed of Flesh Sorcery when I bonded with him so that as he ate magical things or creatures he could instinctively take on some aspects of his prey to become stronger. I fed him the tail of a dragon I killed. The same dragon whose brain is in that vat over there. Now, no more questions, please.”
Now, I had an idea of what I wanted to do but two hours of examination later, I concluded that I didn’t have the knowhow to actually do what I wanted to do. The concept was easy enough, blend molecules of graphene which are geometrically aligned carbon atoms, to my cells to make them more durable on the fundamental level, and then do that to every part of me.
But no. I did not possess the necessary knowledge to be able to do that. And, the worst part was that my Flesh Sorcery did not want to help me for some reason in this regard. There was deep-seated unconscious fear every time I tried to merge a red blood cell with the graphene, my Flesh Sorcery rejecting it as anathema.
I leaned on my workbench for a while as I pondered this. [So, if merging doesn’t work for some unknown reason, maybe the runic enchanting will.] I thought, working through what I thought was a simple issue. My sorceries thought otherwise. [But if I’m going to go down this route, I have to figure out a more basic question first. How does my body produce and store magical energy, or is it something that my body takes in from the outside and assimilates?]