Dawn came not nearly fast enough for me. I estimated that I had been awake since just before five in the morning and my usual wake up is just after seven am. Unfortunately, it resulted in at least three hours of me silently freaking out, just praying my preparations were enough for the thing I could not see. Elizabeth was even less of a comfort than I hoped she would be. Not that I really expected anything else. Her cold barky exterior yielded zero reassurance. My magic told me nothing had changed with her condition, and my gut was telling me that time was the only thing she needed.
The last hour of me waiting for the sun was quiet. No scratching or shrieking.
The forced and painful anticipation of a horrible death eventually turned into a form of quiet acceptance the longer I kept my vigil. Steady breathing eventually calmed me down, or at least wrangled my nerves down to a manageable level.
[Breathe in, breathe out]. My mantra gave a bit of peace to my acceptance that I was probably going to die a horrible death. But I wasn’t going to go down like a bitch, I’m going down fighting.
Shaking the fear out of my stiffened back, I went and got my acorns from the basement. They shone with an intense inner light, absolutely full to the brim with magical energy. Almost too hot to hold in my hand. When the morning sun beamed through the windows in its full glory, I crept outside armed to the teeth to check for zombies or whatever passed for weird invisible scratching monsters.
Raw fear nibbled at my insides as I carefully stalked around my house several times, my trusty AR-15 leading the way as I cautiously checked every part of my house that I could easily see and reach. Not even the dirt escaped my notice as I ran my magic across every surface. The rational part of my brain was telling me that nothing was out to get me but I know how my hindbrain interpreted those piercing screeches and window scratches last night. It was like a sadistic fox playing with a chicken locked in a coop, playfully dragging its claws against the wire to freak the animal out, hoping to draw prey from safety.
Finally figuring that I’d done all I could do in checking out my small suburban property, I turned my attention to my actual plan for the day; acorn planting. What a freaking way to spend the morning. Fearing for my life and then planting some dumb seeds.
Last night’s ominous events weighed heavily on me as I cautiously peered through every window and eventually opened the front door. Each step was carefully placed and I scanned every angle. My .45 led the way while my left hand gripped my K-bar way too hard. I circled my house twice before I determined that I was safe. There was no sign of strange tracks as far as I could see.
Finally figuring that I might as well get it over with, I stuck an acorn at each of the four corners of the house. The faded white paint of the house was covered in my stone-reinforcement enchantment and even my roof was covered in solid granite. Looking back down at my acorns sitting on top of the lawn, I pushed with my magic. Earth Sorcery made burying the acorns exactly where I wanted them a piece of cake, and Water Sorcery made them plenty wet. I could’ve made a fortune in gardening just a year ago with powers like this. A flick of power and imagination transmuted the soil around the acorns from thick, orange, Virginia clay into a perfect black loam.
After one last long look around, I set my shoulders. I couldn’t hear anything but the soft wind playing through the leafy trees. Still no hints of a car grinding through the neighborhood or a wheeze from the annoying fat lady across the street and her posse of cats. The last comforts of civilization near me stood in silent watchfulness in the form of abandoned houses. I shook my head, resigned to the fact that everything had changed. And after last night, I was far less inclined to go from house to house and check on the neighbors.
Walking back inside my own house, I made my way downstairs to the basement double checking each window and door for security. I stood in front of the generator on the right and paused, taking the time to get my mind right. Careful and controlled exhalations relaxed every part of me as I focused on the next part of my scheme. This was the hard part.
Figuring that I’d take a lesson from modern civilization, I conjured four long coils of thick copper and set them at the four corners of the house. Using Earth Sorcery, I opened a hole in the corner of my house and then fed the copper wire up until it touched the soil just underneath the buried acorn. Doing this three more times, I then walked back over to the generator and turned it off.
“And just because I can!” I sang to myself as I worked. “Let’s shape the ends ova’ here . . . to be electrical plugs.” My Earth Sorcery shaped the copper wire ends near the planted acorns into the shape of the three-pronged wire plugins just for the hell of it. “Bringing tech back!”
After confirming that safety concerns were taken care of, I unraveled the other end of the copper coils and connected them to the base of the generator. Taking my time, I covered each line of wire that was sitting on top of the floor with conjured stone so that I wouldn’t step on a live wire. Blocking out every distraction and worry one by one, I solely focused on the nigh-unending source of power in front of me. Calmly switching to a higher output, I carefully grabbed hold of the stream of pure mana and split the energy into four streams, directing the outflow of power one at a time down into the floor through the wire, through the walls of the house and outside into each of the prepared acorns where they sat with unrealized capacity.
At the base of the power link and inside of each seed, I put a slow-release growth limiter, a sort of catch-all kink in the flow that could tamp down on the release of power. This way, when the acorns sprout I wouldn’t have to worry about their growth being literally explosive. I could feel the little acorns quivering with my nature magic already, bursting at the seams with unfettered potential as the power slowly pressed against the teeny carved runes of a clock smooshing a large oak tree.
My mental imagery for runes doesn’t always make perfect sense, but it matters that it did to me at the time. With great care and patience, I wove a structural enchantment in my head for the acorns and linked that to a web of intent - a veritable diagram in my head of what I wanted these acorns to do, a sort of magic-based architectural design plan. The 3D image in my head contained symbols that outlined the states of growth and the speeds at which it would happen. Half-forgotten knowledge of middle school algebra determined most of those symbols.
The planted trees would grow out and then up the corners of my house like the corner defensive towers on a medieval castle, and then branches would spider out from each tree along the walls of the house towards the center of the roof to connect to the other tree trunks. Eventually, the four trees and all of the connecting branches would overlap to form a giant wooden house with a magical living shell made up of four solid oak trees.
I gulped with anticipation. “Showtime.”
I triggered the structural enchantment in the base of the powerfeed and let it flow to the prepared acorns. I could see the process starting to work. The acorn shells split and tiny roots began to make the soil their own.
“That was a good idea.” I said, keeping a mental hand on the operation. “That growth limiter is seriously doing a good job right now.”
While the growth limiter was mainly there for my peace of mind, it would still allow me the opportunity to alter the plants if something went wrong while they were small.
By my estimation of how slow the process was going, it should take around a week or so for this to become a reality and I can work with that. Now, I’m just one acorn short for the next step of my plan.
Getting said missing acorn was easy. In the last two days, I had made great strides with my magic and I was feeling pretty confident especially since the sun was out and my gun was in my hand. If anything, handling a few zombies and coked up nerdy necro finally served to boost my confidence.
I walked across the street after not spotting any zombies, leisurely selected a fat acorn, and walked my butt back to my front porch and sat in my rocking chair. I was still geared up and armed to the teeth but felt comfortable enough that there wasn’t an issue with chilling on my front porch. I even took the time to lazily get up and get a soda from the fridge.
I felt a bit silly as I cracked a cold Pepsi. No one and nothing was outside. There were no threats as far as the eye could. The street looked abandoned. I could almost picture a damn tumbleweed flipping down the street. Aside from the broken windows and abandoned toys in yards, it might as well be a lazy Tuesday.
Day three of the new Ripple reality and there is nothing here. My nerves had actually caught up to what I could see and that seemed to be the tipping point for my new confidence. Perfect.
I rolled the fat acorn in my hand and looked it over. Using my own personal well of power and then a bit of mana from one of my battery packs, I conjured a nickel-sized marble of iron on top of my palm and then did the same but with silver and gold. Looking at my three orbs made out of different metals, I rolled them around each other and let my imagination go.
“What does every magic user need?” I wondered aloud, fully realizing that there was nobody to talk to out here. It was a habit of mine, although generally Elizabeth would chill with me on the porch as we bounced ideas off of each other. I pushed away the sadness as I played both sides of the argument.
“A magical weapon.” I joked with a high pitched voice.
“Well duh,” I countered. “And if I narrow that down at all then I need to ask a better question. What does every good wizard or badass sorcerer have?”
I waited, still making sure that Elizabeth wouldn’t come walking out the door on her own two feet to argue with me. Sighing, I answered for her. “A magical staff. All the magical badasses have one. Merlin. Dresden. Gandalf. Jafar. Not Potter, fuck that wanker. Dude couldn’t fight his own battles if his life depended on it.”
I laughed, making sure that I squinted like a man so that no tears escaped my eyes. Pushing my thoughts back to the here and now, I concentrated on something that could actually help me control magic beyond my normal means so I didn’t focus on the sadness that hid just out of sight.
Gotta stay busy.
Taking another sip of my drink, my thoughts wandered as I trawled my memories and ideas for possible combinations of magic and technology. I figured that I’d need some sort of an amplifier or controller or possibly a mixture of the two. Basically, I could step up my game if I had an antenna for my magic.
On the philosophical and maybe metaphorical side, magic appears to be a tool with an unlimited number of uses. Not that you’d want to call someone a ‘tool’, but it’s the ‘quantum physics’ equivalent of having a Home Depot in my personal shed. And using the said tool with the right tools all put together could hopefully give me more range, more power, more versatility, anything and everything an enterprising yet lonely man could want.
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All this bestowed power or arcane potential translates to leverage, and leverage is how anyone gets what they want. Following that simple train of monkey-proof logic, magic acts like a lever. With my particular blend of magics, my sorceries will be the kind of superpowered lever that will allow me to move ridiculous obstacles.
Me caveman. Me use magic stick for magic things, ugg.
[Stupid primitive brain!] I snarled internally. [Think like a man with nothing to lose.]
Hard to argue with myself about getting in gear with my feet propped up on a gorgeous day like this. Not a cloud in the sky nor a zombie in sight. Not even the usual orange neighborhood tabbies were out soaking up the UV rays in their favorite spots.
Working my brain over for possibilities that were genuinely within my reach, I came to the only conclusion that made sense with my self-imposed time frame. In short, I decided that I need my very own dragon slaying stick. The excitement crystallized the idea in my mind. That’s exactly what I was going to make. And I was going to invest everything I had into it. If I did it right, then this staff would be more powerful than I.
I downed my soda and burped out some joy while I sat my butt in my front lawn. This whole ‘implanted instinct’ thing was pretty freaking cool too. It felt like there was a part of my brain saddled with a foreign packet of information, like an old memory that was slowly coming back to me. I could think about what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to do it, and I’d get a good or bad feeling to go along with it. The gut feelings even chimed in my head if I just meditated on a concept, which is how this new ley line stuff came to be.
The more I thought about what I wanted or dreamed about, the more I got grainy pictures in my head. Extending my earth senses to the max, I searched for ley lines. If I understood what my implanted instincts were telling me, ley lines were natural rivers of magic that flowed through the planet like veins and arteries of life-giving energy flowing through the body. They could be tapped for use or serve as a kind of natural gateway or barrier towards various entities. I wanted to see if I could use this to my advantage as a kind of a magical forge or natural conduit for making my staff. My instincts again glowed with approval letting me know that I was on the right mental path.
I was also looking for a certain kind of ley line. My meditation revealed to me through slivers of feelings and foreign memories that not all ley lines are the same. Some of these natural energy rivers run underneath and through volcanoes were aspected to both fire and earth, but there were different kinds all over the place. As I extended myself, I felt a pull behind me near the direction in which the closest river lay.
The Rappahannock River cuts through the northern part of the city of Fredericksburg and is only about a 20-minute walk away. I could feel the pulse of a solid blue-green flow of energy following the natural path of the river. Standing up and wiping the grass off my pants, I double checked my getup and then got walking. I halted dead in my tracks as I saw my car.
“Shit!” I cursed, my thoughts yanking at what I’d completely forgotten. “I can’t believe I didn’t check!” Running back inside, I grabbed my car keys and Elizabeth’s too. I had a crappy piece of junk for too many years, an old dingy white station wagon with bad gas mileage and run down tires.
The car was so ugly that I never locked it so I never had to worry about it getting broken into. To be fair, I also never left anything valuable in there. Opening the door, I stuck the key in the ignite and gave a bit of a turn. No lights turned on in the dashboard and the radio stayed dead. I gave a full turn. Nothing. Cursing again, I slammed the door and ran to Elizabeth’s Volkswagen Bug. Same results.
“Great. All electronics with screens are dead. Cars don’t work. I replaced both batteries last month too.” I complained, hurling the keys onto the porch. “Freaking useless!”
I continued muttering under my breath as I continued with my original plan. I passed two neighborhoods on my way to the river. At the far end of one of the side roads going past the local church, I saw some houses that looked derelict. Two houses were burned down and I kinda took it in stride until a block later when I passed an old guy with long hair angrily working on his truck. His cursing was colorful and entertaining as he chucked oil soaked rags to the ground and kicked the tires.
I called out. “‘Scuse me sir - what’s uh, what’s going on with it?” As if I knew shit about cars.
“Damn thing won’t start!” He sputtered without even turning to look at me. He wiped his big forehead with a grease rag “Neither will the generator or wind-up radio. Whole damn town’s gone dark!”
So I wasn’t the only one. I figured that would be the case, but it wasn’t the relief I thought it was. I thought finding more people would make me feel better but this old dude simply confirmed some of my fears. Shit ain’t workin’.
“Nothing? Nothing at all?” I asked, looking around.
“Nothin’!” He growled back, putting his whole upper body in the guts of the truck to yank at something. He kept yelling. “Even my damn magnetic turning wheel won’t light up a perfectly good lightbulb!”
Figuring that I’d stay out of a cranky old man’s way, I kept walking. I saw a firearm sticking out of his butt pocket, which I took to mean he didn’t really want visitors around. Other than the old guy, I didn’t pass anyone else as I kept walking deep in my thoughts. The famous quote from one of my favorite Marvel movies kept coming back to me but with a far darker connotation, “with great power comes great responsibility”. I didn’t want to be more powerful than everyone else, mainly because I didn’t want to take care of everyone. But the feeling that this wasn’t the end just wouldn’t go away.
[I’m either missing something or this is the foreboding part, just before the tidal wave where the water recedes from the beach.] I thought, keeping a sharp eye out.
I don’t like either of those options.
My leisurely walk turned into a comfortable jog as my unease grew. I reached the river not long after, the streets leading me down past the abandoned bars and restaurants to the unkept bank. The pull of the ley line pulsed more vibrantly the closer I got turning me west towards where the land was rockier. Five more minutes of walking along the river bank wasn’t that bad in the late summer weather. It was actually nice out and the warmth tried to lull me into a relaxed state but I kept my eyes peeled.
A live wire of arcane power coursed through my foot stopping me in my tracks. Magic, thick and dense. It felt like my foot had licked a cold lemon mixed with a nuclear reactor made out of a river of pure life. The flavor was sharp and wet and rocky, an arctic waterfall with salmon battling upwards in their never ending cycle of life. I looked around. I stood on a loamy bank about ten feet from the river, the woods around me completely empty of fauna. The ley line was exactly five feet under me and concentrated in some of the elements that I had Sorcery over: nature, earth and water.
Perfect.
Figuring again that ‘safety first’ is still the mantra to live by, I scouted the surroundings in ever-increasing circles just to make sure that I was, in fact, alone. Each time I made sure to lightly hop over the ley line so as to not get shocked all over again.
From the highest nearby point that I could find, I could see the riverbank just to the north of me on the other side of the Rappahannock where residents would usually set up beach chairs and coolers for a good time. It was the classic summer cool-off spot. Behind me was a wooded area that climbed up a steep, thirty-foot hill topped with a super dense thicket of alders and maple. Down the carved path of the bustling river I could make out the Route 1 bridge.
Finding my spot again, I sat down just next to the ley line and put the ingredients for my staff in front of me. I shaped the small orb of gold around the fat acorn to form a ringed top with a smooth indentation and set it down in the dirt. Now it just looked like a bigger ball of gold but my arcane senses showed to me the condensed bubble of life inside the orb. Then I picked up and put the iron marble on top of the silver one and smooshed them together with my fingers, my magic shaping the blob like putty to cover the bottom part of the acorn.
Next, I played around with my Earth Sorcery, slowly conjuring different kinds of crystal bits and growing them until I got to what my instincts confirmed were diamond. It was kinda fun to play around with the diamonds’ coloring and their shatterpoints that were very evident to my mana vision.
When I got that nailed down to exactly what I wanted, I conjured three small bladed lumps of diamond and placed them in a close triangle formation around the acorn. I then gently pressed the acorn a few inches into the earth. Closing my eyes, I envisioned what I wanted in my head, a beautiful oaken staff standing at about six and a half feet tall with a wide golden ring in the middle where my hand would naturally rest.
My imaginary staff was topped with a knob of wood crowned with the three crystal pieces layered into the top portion as a backup battery for me and projection platform for casting spells. The iron marble would serve as a symbolic base that was still somewhat aligned with nature and the iron molded unnaturally well with the oak at the smallest level to form a kind of iron-wood to make it exceptionally sturdy. The silver layer covering the iron would form the outermost layer of the cap at the base allowing it to perfectly transfer and ground extra energy if need be. Functionally, it would be perfect in serving as a tap for ley lines when possible.
I held that image, that synergistic process, in my head as detailed as I could and channeled the mental matrix down into the acorn while simultaneously pulling very gently on the energy radiating out from the ley line upwards so as to not fry myself.
With my hands, I pushed the acorn deeper into the ground that I softened with earth magic and then encouraged the seed to drink from the flowing river of magic under it. The bundle of desires, my embedded mental images locked inside the acorn, drank in the overflowing abundance from the ley line as I imagined it growing.
I could barely hold it together.
The spell matrix violently shook and the acorn looked more and more like a grenade of life energy, the lines of power fraying at the seams as it shook.
“Grow dammit! You want to grow. Exploding is too much work!” I yelled, seizing the encapsulated mana, my will as firm as a castle’s foundation.
The ley line energy spiked upwards in a barely controlled geyer of energy, soaking up through the silver and iron, lancing into the seed and filling up the golden control ring.
BOOM!
Through my senses, I watched the acorn explode down and out, sprouting a root system to put any grown tree to shame.
I grabbed the three crystals of diamond from off the ground and held them over the sprouting tree as it climbed towards the sky. It grew in an upward direction just like I expected but the rate of growth was phenomenal. At roughly two inches a second, it was like watching one of the time lapse videos where they condense years into seconds. The growing staff thickened right in front of my eyes. Nearby trees withered and died as their own life force was drained by my experiment
As the knob formed on the top, I placed the crystals where I wanted to and held them there delicately so the wood grew around them, my Nature Sorcery coaxing the staff to accept the gems as part of its natural structure. The wood smoothly accepted the diamonds the way roots casually grow around or envelope a stubborn rock in the ground.
As the staff finished growing, I grabbed it around the golden control ring with my other hand. A feeling of completeness washed through my arm and the staff snapped off at the base. I looked down. The remaining stump started to grow again. I stumbled back holding my staff, happy that what I wanted was actually here in my hand, but confused at the rest of the continuing process that had taken on a life of its own.
Now that I had removed the trunk, the former roots of my staff were still truckin’, happily pumping out another core of a tree. The rapidly filling in stump was like a pressurized rain barrel with the plug taken out and the ley line was an endless source of water pumping out without stopping. The grass around the stump withered as trees further away also shed their bark and dropped withered limbs.
“Shit!” I backed up a few steps and dove into the ground with my magical senses. The golden control ring that had guided the initial growth was on my staff but this new tree had no such controlling conduit. I reached into its base with my power to see what these changes could mean. I didn’t want to be responsible for accidentally unleashing a tree monster or something that would drain life from the land forever causing a blight.
Soaking my new staff in my hands from my own well of power, I could feel the living striations of silver and iron running through it and the crystals with their molecular bond to the magical wood. The golden ring was at the perfect height for my hand to rest while walking with it. Through the warm metal, I could feel the power and versatility of my new tool.
I don’t even know what my new staff was capable of but there was no better time to test it out. The tree in front of me kept right on growing as I took half a minute to examine my staff with my magical senses and see how it responded to my will. The new tree in front of me was already taller than a house at this point, growing like a runaway weed. I lifted my staff like Gandalf and stabbed it into the earth between the rapidly growing roots. Through it, I felt the tree lapping up the ley line.
Thinking fast, I crafted a 3D image, my intent enchantment of a plug stoppering up a dam, and forced the mental image full of mana down the veins of my staff and into the tree sending it directly into the heartwood. The tree vibrated as my enchantment clashed with the growing intake of barely contained power. The webs of magic from my enchantment lanced out like barbed fingers, tamping down and tying off the uncapped leyline as I convinced the former stump that it was done growing.
Oddly enough, this tree took a lot of convincing to make it understand that it's nearing the end of its maturation and no longer needed the energy provided by the ley line. I watched as the roots finally stopped their frantic growing and settled down before I yanked my staff out.
[Holeee Crap! One possible disaster averted!] I thought as I cracked my back looking up at the clear blue sky. I laughed wearily as I fell on my butt with exhaustion.
[I bet I was bout’ thirty minutes away from making an epic tree monster though! Shit. Consequences, consequences, try to think of the consequences!]
One thing stuck out to me about this experience as I stretched out on the dirt on my back. I barely had to touch any of the extra energy I was carrying around this whole time. The ley line provided most of the ambient power. For my own future reference, it means that if I’m away from home I could find places to recharge my batteries or even build places to function off the overflow from ley lines. Travel along the ley lines would keep me full up on power at any point in time.
Turning my head, I looked at my staff. This was a fantastic start. My inner paranoia reminded me that I still had a lot left to do. Grumbling to myself, I picked my ass up and climbed up the nearby knoll. Even after all that there wasn’t anything coming after me. Fine with me. I turned and surveyed my work area before groaning. A wide patch of land looked completely dead except for the large tree in the center of it.
“Crap!”
Cleaning up the mess I’d inadvertently caused took some time. The dead grass had to be tilled under and regrown while the drained trees in the immediate vicinity were sunk beneath the earth, hiding my shame. When the landscape was restored, I decided to head home. The drudging walk back home wasn’t painful due to my healing amulet but it didn’t help the strain on my mind. It’s like I had a whole 'nother muscle to worry about now. Handling that kind of energy straight from the source is draining. It also carried a kind of emotion with it, a kind of whimsical peace balanced by solid gravity barely holding back an animalistic hunger to grow. All that to say this, it was mentally heavy. Like my brain did a brutal workout.
The mana my amulet generates is different, sterile almost. I want to say cleaner, but that didn’t feel quite right either. Maybe ‘lighter’ is a better way to describe it. My gut tells me that the mana from ley lines is aspected in some way due to its very nature, carrying around flavors of power from whatever is around it. And I don’t really know what that means, but my Sorcery confirmed that my suspicions were at least on the right path.