Pig Farmer

Kalen could have asked so many more questions. But it wasn’t worth the risk. The pixie might change her mind about helping him, or there could be an unknown time limit on his return, or Nanu or Lander might come to check on him and find his body…unconscious? Stumbling around mindlessly? Dead?

So as soon as Lutcha proffered the Disc, he reached for it with both hands.

Later, he would wonder about a lot of things. What exactly had the mysterious artifact done to him? How long had it taken? Where had he been in the time between making contact with it and the moment he became aware of his own body again?

From his perspective, nothing at all happened. He had no sensation of movement, no instant of darkness as if he’d blinked. He was in the tree with Lutcha and her astral kitten, and then he was himself again.

All of himself.

He hadn’t realized how much he’d left behind. It all crashed into him at once. Physical sensation, the bulk of his emotions, the whole of the tangible world.

It was agony.

Everything, everything hurt him. The smooth stone beneath his cheek felt like shards of broken glass. The rain drenching him pierced like icy needles. Even the dim gray light of the stormy day stabbed his eyes.

Kalen slammed them shut and lay trembling and helpless against the onslaught of physical sensation. And his confused, screaming emotions were making everything worse.

He was angry. Ashamed.

Scared.

He was so afraid it nearly eclipsed everything else, and even a few minutes later, when his senses had finally settled enough for him to understand that physically he was fine—just a little cold, a lot wet, and sore from lying motionless on the stone—the fear remained undulled.

His heart raced. He breathed too fast. Like a young child hiding from terrors in the night, he couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes.

You baby, he chided himself. Calm down. You survived. You’re back on your rock. What’s there to be afraid of?

As if the question had given his thoughts permission to sort themselves out, an entire catalogue of petrifying things sprang to mind.

Something powerful from a place he hadn’t even known existed wanted his body and soul for its own. Lutcha’s assurance that he was a wrong-shaped lock for the sylph now was barely a comfort.

After all, Lutcha herself was alien, mercurial, and morally disturbed. Kalen was surprised she hadn’t tried to feed him to her cat.

He thought the pixie was probably right and probably had been honest with him. But given the seriousness of the threat, the knowledge that his safety was merely probable didn’t take the edge off his terror.

On top of that, there was the final confirmation of his own origins. He wasn’t a person. Not in the right, simple way everyone else got to be. He was an amalgam made by magic. The nine hundred and forty-third lizard’s tail. A number, a decoy, a cobbled-together creation made for a use instead of a life.

He’d thought it was the case, but knowing for sure was different. More serious. Now, he couldn’t look away from it.

Well...does it matter?

Kalen didn’t actually care much that he’d been made by a wizarn family using magical arts that were surely blasphemous. It was weird and disturbing, of course, but he didn’t feel inhuman. He didn’t think he was dark or dirty.

But he was certain other people—most people even—would believe him to be all those things if they found out. That was what really scared him.

Zevnie had told him that they burned a girl on her island just for having gills.

What would people do to Kalen? To his family? Would they think his father and mother were guilty of harboring a monster? Would they hurt Fanna, too, even though she was only a baby?

He clenched his hands into fists, feeling his knuckles scrape against the rock. No one can know. Nobody can ever know.

The thought of his family reminded him that he couldn’t afford to lie here shivering and scared witless.

Someone could see him. They could suspect something was wrong with him. He had to act normal. He had to be normal every minute of every hour of every day of his life so that he would never be discovered.

The clarity he’d been looking for ever since Zevnie left the island had finally come to him. It was all so simple really.

He would throw his books into the ocean, give up on magic, and curse the aurora whenever it appeared! He would take a proper interest in pigs besides Sleepynerth and seriously focus on hog farming.

It wasn’t like he hated it. It was only a little tiresome. And he enjoyed working with his father. Jorn would be happy. Shelba would be happy. It would be easier for everyone in the family, and in the village, and Fanna would be safe.

If he was only a hog farmer from an isolated island, nobody would care about his past. It was a blessing that he hadn’t made something of himself as a practitioner before he came to his senses. Lander said Kalen’s magic was deadly boring, and thank goodness. Ten years from now, nobody in the village would even remember it as anything but a childish phase.

I’ll start being unremarkable right now. This minute. I’ll go straight home and clean out my room.

He tried to leap to his feet, but he was so stiff that he only managed to stagger awkwardly upright. He looked up at the gloomy sky, blinking away raindrops. It’ll be a long walk home in wet clothes.

He took a deep, stabilizing breath. The air smelled unexpectedly wonderful. Like a freshly-cut fir twig. It was a green smell—sappy and full of life.

For a stupid, happy moment, Kalen felt pleased with himself. He’d made a decision that quieted much of his churning fear. Everything’s going to be fine. I can make it fine.

It was only then that he realized a huge patch of the forest was missing.

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Kalen stood on the edge of his rock, fists clenched in his wet hair, and stared out over a scene of devastation. All around the massive stone, the huge pines and fir trees had been destroyed. Most of them lay on the ground. The rest had been snapped in half. The forest floor was almost invisible beneath the carpet of shattered wood, bared roots, broken limbs, and stripped bark.

The disaster had blasted outward from the rock, knocking the trees over in an almost-perfect circle.

Me, he thought. Not a disaster. Me.

Kalen counted as best he could; he thought the impact zone was around twenty trees deep. Beyond that point, the forest was only missing most of its limbs instead of lying flattened.

At first, he felt nothing but numbness and shock. How? How?

I think maybe you are very powerful… hadn’t Nanu said that to him a little over a year ago? And hadn’t Zevnie said almost the same thing in a more obnoxious way?

Kalen hadn’t really believed them.

He had a natural affinity for wind magic. He’d cared a lot about that only a short while ago. And now it was…confirmed. Very confirmed.

“Ha!” said Kalen, his voice shrill. “I’m finally a low magician!”

After all, casting his first aligned spell was the only thing he’d had left to accomplish to move beyond the novice stage. He could check it off his list of things to do.

And then…and then…

I have to hide this. I have to hide it. Nobody can know.

He considered the merits of burning down the forest, but even if he could figure out how to do that in the middle of a rainstorm, it wasn’t like it would make the situation better. He’d seen a burned patch of woods before, and almost all the scorched trees had still been standing.

He shook his head at himself, heart racing again. He was panicking, and panic was making him childish. Some mistakes were so big you couldn’t hide them.

What can I do then?

The only answer that came to mind was go home, tell everyone, apologize, and accept your punishment with maturity.

There were a lot of problems with that answer. The least of them was Kalen’s inability to frame a sane-sounding apology when he’d have to start with, “I’m sorry everybody. I got too eager on my rock and knocked down all the trees.”

It didn’t matter what he said or how he explained it.

Nobody would forget this. Nobody would stay quiet about it. The moment someone saw this, Kalen would be the most famous person on the island.

“SHIT!” Kalen screamed at the sky. “I was going to be normal! I was going to be a pig farmer! It would all have been FINE!”

He swore for a while, practicing words he’d heard his uncle use when he was drunk and prone to telling dirty sailor stories. But he didn’t even get the satisfaction of a grumble of thunder in reply.

When he was all cussed out, he was left with nothing but the dreary rain, a splitting headache, and all the problems he’d made for himself.

#

Not long after that, Kalen began picking his way carefully through the fallen trees, trying not to impale himself on any broken branches. As he went, he forced his reeling brain to invent plans that would help him minimize the damage to himself and his family.

So far, he’d only come up with bad ones, but he was toying with the idea of upgrading the one where he pretended to have had a holy vision to mediocre. He could say that the trees had been knocked over by divine power, and the gods had ordered him to give up his wizarn ways and join the priesthood.

Most people wouldn’t believe him, but maybe enough would that he could get away with it?

I could be a priest of Veila. She doesn't seem like the sort of god who would mind me being a liar. It was a thought.

Every plan, no matter how bad, started with delaying the moment his crime was discovered for as long as possible. That meant he had to leave the rock so that nobody would come there to visit him.

It was a relief when he made it to the part of the forest that didn’t look like it had been hit by a localized hurricane. After walking for an hour, he’d even calmed down enough for a less-pressing worry to make itself known.

His magic was leaking.

It took him a while to notice because he had been avoiding thinking about his pathways. They didn’t feel quite right, but that was only to be expected. He’d blasted more power through them than ever before, and then they’d been assaulted by a being from another plane, and then he’d been yanked apart from them somehow when he traveled to the second world…

He would have to figure out why that was. He was almost positive that the pathways were a spiritual thing more than they were a physical one. You couldn’t cut a person open and see them, after all. Shouldn’t they have gone along with him to the swamp?

Anyway, Kalen assumed he was magically damaged. Somehow. And he preferred not to look too closely while he was occupied with the dozen other parts of his life he’d ruined.

But the leakage wasn’t really something he had to go looking for. It was obvious. Like that time he’d cast for hours and hours, drunk on the aurora that had brought Sorcerer Arlade and Zevnie to Hemarland. His magic felt loose and sloppy inside him, as if it was oozing beyond the boundaries of its customary tangled shape.

He stopped walking and considered the matter.

Maybe it was best not to ignore it altogether. It would be hard to focus on repairing it, if that was what the situation warranted, when he was around others. So he should at least figure out what he was dealing with.

Exhausted and resigned, Kalen found a comfortable spot under a tree. It was well sheltered by low arching limbs and only a little damp. Since the rain had slowed to more of a misty drizzle, he took off his wet clothes and pulled a dry shirt from his pack.

It smelled like home.

Back resting against the trunk he closed his eyes and began his inspection. His pathways were still there, and to his surprise, they looked intact and correctly shaped despite the abuse he’d put them through.

His nuclei felt more prominent than they had…much more prominent in the case of the wind nucleus. But it was more that his sense of them was far stronger than it had been than that they had actually changed. Kalen knew instinctively that building spell patterns near the wind magic aligned nucleus would now be easier than it had before. If he dared risk it.

Despite the fact that he was miraculously whole, though, he wasn’t wrong about the leakage. His pathways were there, and they were whole, but they were squishy? Or maybe it was better to think of them as porous?

Kalen’s magic was bleeding out into the world around him without him giving it any instruction to do so. And it was a lot more than he’d felt the one other time this had occurred.

It was fine last time. Nothing bad happened because of it, and it fixed itself after a few hours.

It wasn’t even a bad feeling. It was only disturbing because it was out of the ordinary.

Still, Kalen found himself looking around like he had before, trying to figure out what the escaping magic was doing. If it was pure mana, that would be one thing. It would just exist in the world until something absorbed it or influenced it. But technically any mana that had passed through a practitioner’s pathways became magic. Which was like…mana with an opinion.

Plenty of people used the words interchangeably, including Kalen. But he did know that there was a difference. Mana sat around waiting to do something. Magic did things.

Magic that hadn’t been formed into a deliberate spell could be too weak to have an obvious effect, or it could encounter another magic that shifted its nature or even neutralized it, but still…

Kalen was leaking a fairly large amount of magic. He was alone here in the woods. And Hemarland had virtually no magical plant or animal life to counter him. So he should have been able to see or sense an effect.

He paid careful attention. The pine needles rustled over his head. Somewhere nearby, a woodpecker drummed against a tree. Fat water drops spattered onto the forest floor.

It was all so mundane.

But given the experience he’d had today, Kalen felt nervous. He decided he would sit in place and observe. Maybe time would make the effects of the leak more apparent.

Magic could be more dangerous than he’d imagined. He didn’t want to spill a large quantity of it around his family without knowing its nature.

He sat there for an hour, watching and waiting. He made a few cursory attempts to stem the leak, but he didn’t actually know how. He’d never read of a technique for making your pathways more solid; it wasn’t supposed to be an issue. And when he timidly moved his magic through them, ever so careful not to mess around with the wind nucleus, the rate of leakage seemed to increase.

Opening his eyes after his latest attempt, Kalen happened to glance toward the pine branch nearest him. It was a spindly one covered in dark green needles that were beginning to brown.

He frowned. Had the branch been browning before? It looked sick.

He turned his full attention toward it, and after long observation, his worst suspicions were confirmed. Often, the branch rustled as though it had been lightly brushed by a passing hand. Sometimes, mysteriously, it looked longer or shorter than it should have. But most importantly, it was turning ever so slowly browner and browner, as if it were suffering from a long drought.

When Kalen started looking at the area around him with this horrible new insight, he saw more and more evidence that couldn’t be written off as coincidence. There was a dead beetle on the ground by his foot. A patch of moss that should have been green and thriving this time of year was dry and gray. The leaves of a vine that wrapped itself around the neighboring tree were curling and spotted.

Kalen was killing things just by coming into contact with them.