- The Cave -

Bright, violet blood shimmers on the crystal spider. The young lizard lion desperately kept croaking while it was slowly dragged back to the other side of the cave.

This meant war. I’d just spent however long to figure out how to repopulate my cave, and now this magic crystal was sending out it’s minions to depopulate it again. What for? I’m pretty sure a crystal spider wouldn’t have to eat, and neither would its floating master. But then, why did it do that? Why send its constructs hunting into my domain?

I kept observing the spider as it passed the border where my influence stopped and its master’s began. As soon as it did, a stream of magic formed, flowing from the dying lizard lion into the floating crystal. The magic I had used to raise this creature, now drawn away to empower its killer.

So it was feeding after all, just not on flesh. Could I do that? It seemed like I could, though I didn’t want to kill any of the inhabitants of my garden to test this theory. However, death was common among them anyway, so it didn’t take long for me to find a slug being devoured by one of the land-dwelling tadpoles I had accidentally spawned. As the slug died, I could see how the magic stored in its body was absorbed by its killer. However, a good third of it was spilled, joining the ambient background field. From there, it was slowly drawn to my core, as all the unclaimed ambient mana in my domain was. It didn’t look anything like the stream I had seen coming from the dying lizard, though. That one had been like a river, full of purpose and power, while this was more like the lazy movement of a pond.

At the moment, it didn’t seem to make much of a difference either way. I had more important matters to deal with. The defence of my little garden foremost among them. My creatures had little defences against the crystal’s constructs. Their hearing, smell and whatever other senses they had didn’t seem to recognize them as a threat. Even the young lizard the crystl had slain hadn’t made a move to defend itself before the spider had struck. If things stayed that way, it wouldn't be long before the cave had been hunted empty, and then they might look for other prey.

If the crystal could draw the magic out of living things, it might also be able to draw it out of myself. And since I was pretty sure at this point that I was made out of magic, that wouldn’t go over well for me. So I better not let it come to that.

First of all, I should probably speed along my own spider population’s growth. There were only about a dozen left, by my count. Again, I set out to look for a nest or burrow or wherever these creatures lay their eggs, but this time I didn’t find anything. Apparently, they weren’t in the habit of settling down anywhere permanent. Of the two packs still around, one was currently stalking the slowly recovering wasteland of my first experiment, while the other was resting in the branches of a feather-tree grove. There, I noticed the eggs. They were bound to the abdomen of a female, secured there with threads of faintly violet spider silk.

I’d have loved to be able to take a deep breath before plunging into this, or to take a shower afterwards. The wet shine and slow pulsing of the eggs was truly repugnant. Yet, I dove my attention into them. I studied their make, as well as that of their parents, and once I felt my understanding was deep enough, I started channelling magic into them to hasten their growth along. It was easier with these than with the salamanders. The spider’s bodies relied heavily on magic, as other animals relied on blood to cycle nutrients and air through their system. Yet, their magical aura was faint enough that I could safely work on the eggs while they were stuck to the mother. Either way, their system handled the transportation of resources almost by itself once I expanded and hastened it along, leaving me to concentrate on the workings within their cells.

It didn’t take long, and the first spiderlings began to hatch already. They were small, almost a hundred times smaller than the adults, yet there were many of them. I was unsure whether I should continue working on them after they hatched, considering they would need proper food now that they were born, but that problem solved itself quite handily. Almost immediately after they first smelled the dank air of the cave, they sough to hide away from it once more. To that purpose, they began burrowing into the soft underside of their mother, eating her alive.

Had I still had a stomach, I would have likely emptied it at the sight. But, I would need these creatures as soldiers soon enough, so I set to working once more. With their new source of food, I quickly raised them into adolescence. Their white, transparent carapace hardened into thick, black armour and their jaws grew powerful and fearsome. Fearsome enough to fight back against their crystalline counterparts, I hoped.

With a mental sigh, which wasn’t nearly as satisfying as a physical one, I turned my attention away from the grisly business of raising spiders and let it expand into the whole of my cave. There would definitely be more things I could do to defend my garden against these crystal constructs, but right now I couldn’t think of any. Letting my awareness broaden helped relieve some of the stress I was feeling since the first crystal spider had claimed its victim. Now, it was stalking my garden again already, and a second one had joined it on top. Still, my spiders would need time to grow, and I didn't want to overexert myself again by raising a second batch immediately after. The ast batch had already noticably thinned out my aura, and I couldn't afford to fall unconscious again with a threat so close by.

It was soothing, letting my attention flow with the currents making up my sphere of influence. It also brought my attention, quite literally, to some interesting changes to said flow. My magic was forming small eddies and vortices around my newly raised groves, where it was absorbed and expelled aggain by the feather trees. This hadn’t happened before, I was pretty sure. I had never paid this much attention to the flows, but I think I would have noticed. Especially since there would have been a lot more of these disturbances before I accidentally destroyed most of the plants in the cave. No, before I had helped them grow up, they had only ever used the natural magic seeping out of the ground. But now even the mosses and some of the ferns and flowers growing underneath the feather trees were using my own mana, making them as much part of myself as the feather trees and animal I had raised. It would likely also be easier to work on them if I chose to.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Also, though the plants were absorbing a mixture of natural magic and mine, they only expelled my magic. They were converting the natural magic, somehow, while using it. Or perhaps that happened automatically when natural magic was mixed into a high concentration of mine? Whatever the case, they were helping my aura grow faster and denser than ever before.

The same was happening with the animals I had raised. Observing the flow of magic around and through them was trivial now, if I just let my awareness drift through the currents of them. The lizards, for example, were using their feathery magenta manes to absorb and store magic. But they also produced a small field of it around themselves, which they were using to sense their surroundings. By the way that the flows were bent around and through other objects, they could decipher the position and texture of whatever was around them. The bugs did a similar thing with a pair of feathery antenna, though to a much smaller degree, and even the spiders had tiny hairs on the ends of their legsthat extended their senses into the ground around them.

As I let my attention wander on, I noticed movement in the air. A single moth was dancing above the scorched wasteland. I had completely forgotten about them after the disastrous experiment. Largely because I hadn’t seen any. They must have been very exposed to the heat and fire, their delicate wings burning like paper in the open air. Looking a tittle further, I found another handful, but most were injured to some extent, sitting on isolated patches of purple moss on the far walls from the explosion. The white flowers there held eggs, though. On the undersides of their petals sat hundreds of them, and looking inside I saw the makings of larvae. Funnelling my magic once more, I brought them to hatch, and continued to speed along their growth until they began spinning cocoons.

At that point, I stopped for fear of another incident like with the tadpoles. The balloon-like variety that had escaped the tumultuous pond into the air were still hovering around the cave. They had continued to feed on my ambient magic and changed further while my attention had been elsewhere. A ball of violet magic could now be seen through their transparent skin, swirling in the centre of the air sack that kept them buoyant. Their flipper had shortened and stretched around to form a plane around the equator of their body, moving in waves that let them swim through the air, and tiny stubs could be seen where they were growing their legs.

Inside the water, the large ones had remained mostly unchanged, peasefully living alongside the tiny fish. More or less peacefully, I corrected, as I watched one swallow a handful of the tiny fished. These pond leviathans had started to feed by simply opening their mouths wide and swallowing everything that got trapped inside, and their neighbours had yet to adapt to this new danger. To help with their new method of feeding, the leviathans had developed slits along where their gills were, to let the water flow out to the sides of their mouthes, meaning they could just continue swimming open-mouthed forever now. Their tongue had grown wide and thin, splitting into a feathery net in which algea and small bugs got caught, and once there were enough, they simply had to close their mouth and swallow.

Only the land-living tadpoles had developed relatively normally after their hastened escape out of the pond. They were now almost completely normal frogs, just that they had been forced to develop outside of the water to escape the feeding frenzy my experiment had caused.

Now, however heretical creating these new forms of life might have been, the gods had yet to strike me down in righteous fury. So that meant they either didn’t care that much after all, or they couldn’t or wouldn't reach me down here. Either way, I had to admit I was proud of my accidental creations. The leviathans were clearing the pools of the dead debris and algae that had accumulated there after my experiment, while the purple glow of the flying ones reminded me of fire flies at night. And even though I hadn't intended for these variants to develop, the fac that they did had taught me an important lesson about magic. Namely that I had to be more careful with using it. I still didn't know exactly why the tadpoles had reacted like this, but by now I had two main theories. Either, my working had been somehow distorted by the water, which might very well be possibly since I hadn't attempted any working underwater before or since, or it might have been because they of all the species I had worked on underwent the largest changes during their adolescence, making them somehow more vulnerable to such random distortions.

I let my attention wander further once again, mulling these two theories over inside my head. I would have liked to experiment some more to determine which one was closer to the truth, but I probably wouldn't be able to in the near future, since all my magical effort swould have to be spent bolstering my defences. Speaking of, I had enough magic again to raise another batch of creatures. Apparently the second pack of spiders also had a female carrying eggs, so I set aside my disgust and began working once more. To my surprise, the working had become almost trivial after having done in the first time. It was as if the magic was pulling from my experience to figure out the minutia by itself after I set the general intent of my working. Once I had set up the channelling, I found I could even let my attention wander on through the cave and the channeling still kept going as long as I held the intent in the back of my mind.

However, I pulled my attention together when I felt another foreign movement at the edges of my perception. It didn’t come from the crystal fields this time, but rather the opposite end of the cave. While my influence was growing denser in the open air, it was slow to penetrate the surrounding rock. By now, it was only a hand’s span deep into the stone and quickly drew back when I spend too much magic at once. But it was enough for me to feel something move there. There was something tunnelling through the stone. My awareness there was hazy, my influence too faint, but I glimpsed a long form, many legs and sharp pincers carving into rock. It moved, downwards, cutting though rock and root alike, devouring both. Once it reached the floor of my cave, the picture became clearer. It didn’t tunnel through the hand’s pan of soil that covered the floor of the cave, but it remained close to it. My awareness flowed much more easily through the soft soil than the hard rock, so it was almost as strong where the soil met stone as it was where air met stone on the walls and ceilin, so even though the creature stayed at relatively the same depth, my perception of it sharpened.

It was a centipede, but unlike any I had seen before. Tough it was definitely an insect, with insides like any other, its carapace was like polished rock and its pincers like cut diamonds. It burrowed through the stone as easily as a fish swam through water, and I only detected minimal magic involved in doing so.

It was a weapon almost tailor made to fight the crystalline threat facing me on the edge of my influence, and I would have to figure out how to wield it.