“Is this the area you decided on?” Luka asked, eyeing the trees, bushes, and… more trees. To be honest, this area of the forest looked precisely the same as all the others.
“Yeah,” Annie replied, pointing to a rock bulging from the ground. “My surveying came up relatively clear, except for that big guy right there.”
One use of Annie’s magic was that she could feel the ground in about a thirty-meter diameter. While she didn’t know how many stones there were in the dirt or roots twisting deep, she could guestimate. And here, there weren’t many small pebbles—just one big rock.
“Alrighty then,” Luka said, taking a step forward. With a flicker of concentration and a willingness to bend the world around him, he attached his strands of magic onto the rock and pulled.
Well, sort of. The rock shuddered under the foreign force before melting into a wad of rock-clay. Entirely still rock, only the material’s properties changed. From hardness to liquidity, it molded and churned, purging itself of all its impurities. Dirt fell away, as did the sandy particulate hidden within shallow pockets. The rock then rose into the air, Luka’s magic straining under the weight.
“Wow!” Franky boomed a few paces back. “Look at the size of that thing!”
And he was right. The rock protruding from the ground was more akin to a glacier hidden below the surface of the water. Stone just kept emerging, routing into three separate flows. Luka’s magic could do many amazing things, but he had yet to fully grasp just what he could do. Recently, he had the epiphany that he could manipulate anything, including the air. But what he did currently was a timid step beyond.
The best explanation of his magic that he had found was the term fabrication—he could create things from something. But that wasn’t correct, not really. In reality, he could take things that have already been made and reshape them into something new. Transmutation? Reshaping? Reforging? The words all worked, yet Luka knew he was still missing something.
His magic flattened the rock out, splitting them. He pushed and pulled, manipulating the swirl of the grain structure. He could make the stone brittle; he could make it harder. He could transform it into a different type of rock—sort of. Geology wasn’t his specialty, but he took a class in college. One thing that stuck out in his mind was minerals and their relationship with rocks.
Two rocks could be vastly different rocks yet be made from the same minerals. The only difference would be the ratio of minerals, how densely packed they are, and how they were formed. In the case of Luka and his magic, he could manipulate each of these variables independently.
So, he did. The stone flowed like water, splitting apart into its most basic minerals. Emberwood Village had plenty of red sandstone around it. This rock was no different. In moments, piles of stuff sat on the ground, most of which was red, grainy sand.
Luka swayed on his feet when all was said and done. Eve rushed to him, holding him still. “Wow,” she said quietly.
He strained to stand, blinking away terrible volleys of magical hair from his vision. Everyone saw magic differently. For Eve, she saw birds—hence her tattoos—Annie saw living black shadows—a side effect from Vale’s influence on her—and Luka saw hair… or “strands,” when he didn’t want to sound crazy.
Back then, he had been out of it. Reincarnation does that to a person. In fact, he was out of it just like he was now. Magical strain also did that to a person. Magic had many parallels.
Annie stomped over to the piles of sediment, dirt falling from her toes. “Okay… but why?”
Luka overexerting himself with his magic was nothing new. It seemed everywhere he strained himself, attempting to push the limits of what he could do. Today was no different, and the others knew it.
“Because,” he said, winded, “I wanted to see if I could.”
Annie pursed her lips and shrugged. “Learn anything important?”
“I learned I could separate incredibly small parts of something bigger.”
She scoffed. “That’s cool and all, but talk to me when you can do that with atoms themselves.”
Luka understood she meant it as a joke, so he wasn’t going to tell her that was his ultimate plan. Instead, he smiled and said, “I could really use a root beer float right about now.”
“In a minute,” Annie idly said, walking forward a bit. The others all took a step back. “Are we sure this is the place we want?”
Eve and Franky shared a glance, the former answering, “Yeah. Mrs. Leafsong said the trees in this area were looking forward to having new scenery. So, we’re good there.”
Mrs. Leafsong was the lone adult dryad of the village. She was a woman made of sticks, leaves, bark, and moss. She could commune with the trees and loved to paint. She rarely left the forest and was also the concept artist for the park.
Luka nodded along. “Then we’re good to go.” He stepped up beside her and whispered, “Don’t strain yourself. We can pay someone to move the trees if we have to.”
Annie gave her father a judgmental frown. “And we could also pay a forgemaster to pulverize stone—but here you are, tired and sweating.”
“I didn’t just pulverize—”
“Dad,” she said firmly. “I’ve been practicing. I’ve got this.”
Luka didn’t say his initial, though, nor his second. Instead, he went for his third. “I know you will.” He stepped back beside the others and—for his own sanity—said, “Remember, you’re going for a ‘keychain.’”
Annie gave him a withering glare before turning back to the awaiting grove. And while her internal confidence wasn’t quite the same as what she told her father, she had been practicing. Every day, in fact, since arriving in these strange, strange lands. She knew his worry was warranted. Her magic was strange—Vale, the god-thing who inhabited her, explained it was part of her former divine power, a leftover echo of strength. It might go away one day, used up like a stubby candle, or it may not. Vale didn’t know, the various gods and goddesses didn't know, and Annie certainly didn’t know.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
But that didn’t mean she could ignore magic. It was lifeblood here, it was everything, it was a way of life. Her dad used magic casually, fixing things or creating others, and honestly, it was impressive. On the other hand, Annie had only just learned how to stand on loose soil without falling over.
It was time.
She had only seen this spell done once—and by a god, no less. But Annie remembered it well… well enough to copy, though? There was only one way to find out.
She clapped her hands, and a pulse of magic shot out. It rippled over the trees and grass, brushing them like a powerful wind. She grunted and instantly stopped the spell. Too much power, she thought to herself, retooling her focus. She tried again, clapping just the same.
Magic washed the area this time, coating everything yet pushing nothing. It latched onto the trees, leaves, and dirt, setting in deep. She imagined it like a flowerpot—the grove and all its trees were the flowers inside the soil, and her magic was the clay shell. Everyone’s magic appeared differently to themselves, and Annie was no exception. She saw Vale’s living shadow magic, the very essence that reincarnated her.
Maybe it was trauma, maybe it was that lingering echo, maybe it was simply her subconscious trying to understand something as alien as magic, whatever the case was, she controlled it now. And bent it to her will.
The shadows twisted and flattened, forming into wide open mitts. The toughest, darkest shadows lined where the fingers where be, and the weaker, lighter shadows filled in the webbed fabric. The mitts then moved, scooping into the ground where the clay "pot” would be and pulling out the grove like it was a singular “flower.”
She breathed heavily but stood strong. The hard part was over, which was strange to her because this next part should have been the harder portion of the spell. When God Neb had done this about two months ago, he shrunk the trees he moved into a keychain of sorts. It was a miniature ecosystem, fully sized yet not. Space bent around the grove, shrinking it into something carriable.
Annie did the same.
Like Luka and how his magic wasn’t fabrication but something else, her magic was “terraforming.” It was beyond that, something more akin to reality-forming. Honestly, the name didn’t flow, but it was the best name she had for it.
Her eyes snapped shut, and for a moment, the world drained away. Her shadowy mitts pushed and squeezed, condensing the pot while not upsetting the flower within. Instantly, a tree exploded within, fragmenting into a thousand pieces like a stick of dynamite had just gone off.
Annie cursed, her focus shaking. Condensing the flower wasn’t right; she couldn’t just push everything to be smaller. Her dad had spoken to her about this problem before—she had to think bigger and expand her understanding of what magic could be. It wasn’t physics, it wasn’t mundane. Magic was magic, it was something beyond her understanding, and yet with set rules… magical rules that liked to bend and shift, but rules all the same.
Condensing doesn’t work, but what if I try to just…
Her living shadows warped, bending space—bending reality. She couldn’t shrink the grove, but she could fold it—so she did. Trees opposite each other suddenly found themselves next to each other. Bushes meshed with other bushes, each taking up the same spot in space. She folded the grove again, like a piece of paper, doubling up. Then again, doubling up yet again. Each time she folded, the grove halved in size. She repeated the process again and again, until… she had a keychain.
Annie reached out and took the grove. It was the size of her finger and folded over itself several times. She held it outstretched, the cool dirt grainy against the skin of her palm. It wasn’t heavy, but it also wasn’t light. The weight of the entire grove rested in her hand, yet the spatial volume of the grove manipulated that fact—only a keychain’s worth of weight rested in the instance of space touching her hand. In essence, she had an entire grove’s worth of stuff in her hand, and it only weighed a few grams.
“Congrats!” Luka yelled, stepping over and giving her a side hug. Their relationship had truly rekindled since their days on Earth, and both gladly basked in the moment of intimacy. They were finally a family again, after all these years and countless potential light years.
“Thanks, Dad.” She waved the keychain around, making sure it wasn’t about to break and brutally kill them all in a hail of uprooted trees and mounds of dirt.
Luckily, that didn’t seem to be the case.
“The key was folding,” she continued, peering into the spatial oddity. Through a distorted, multilayer canopy, the grove sat in all its glory. The bushes lived; the leaves rustled with the wind… there was that one exploded tree near the edge…
Annie sighed and gazed upon the scoop of land a few paces before her. A section of the forest was simply gone—a perfect crater of soil, trees, and underbrush sliced from reality by her giant magical shadow hands.
“That really is something,” Luka mumbled as he tossed a rock down the crater. That was when everyone heard fierce, muffled yelling.
“It truly is something,” a newcomer’s voice said. Everyone turned, finding God Neb.
As one of the eldest gods, Neb had long lost his desire for theatrics. He simply appeared where he needed to be, did what he needed to do, and returned to his night sky, playing with his stars and galaxies. He took the form of an elderly man—real creative of him—with a curved back, wrinkles, and a dusty, beaten baseball cap, or rather the closest thing this world had to baseball caps. They were similar enough.
Seeing Neb wasn’t all that odd, even though he had been staying away from the park and in turn Luka, because the other gods called foul play. Apparently, gods weren’t supposed to show mortals favoritism, and he and Tippy absolutely loved Luka—or so the World Walker believed.
“Still arrogant, I see,” Neb said, reading Luka’s mind.
“Still old, I see,” he instantly quipped back. “What’re you doing here? I thought we couldn’t be friends anymore.”
“Luka!” Eve snapped. “Be nice! He’s a god!”
“I might be with Luka on this one, sis,” Franky snarked. “God Neb is old.” Eve turned to him and slugged him on the arm. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
The god smiled softly and bent space. A locker of sorts opened beside him, highlighting the muffled yelling in the air. The locker then opened, and a very annoyed former god-thing stomped out. Vale, in her demonic glory, took the form of a demon, a race of people whose eyes could cause paralyzing fear. Luckily for everyone around, when she created her body from her divine power, she did not add that part.
“Well!” she yelled, spinning on Neb. “You kidnap me without a word and drag me all the way into the forest! I think I deserve an explanation. I was working! Who’s going to greet the guests now!?”
The elderly god sighed and pointed at the grove keychain Annie had just folded. “That. Explain it, please.”
All eyes turned to Annie’s outstretched palm. The grove was as it was a moment ago—still not killing everyone brutally.
Vale sucked in a breath, wishing for the first time since her magic was sealed that she had access to her old power. “Now that is interesting,” she said, delicately taking the keychain. She eyed it all over, even giving it a wicked shake—which everyone beside Neb shied away from—before handing it back to Annie.
“Well?” Neb asked.
“I think Annie’s… unique situation augmented the spell to be permanent.” Vale thought for a moment. “Well, permanent unless she unfolded it herself.”
“My thoughts as well.” He nodded to the space locker. “In you go. You’ve got guests to greet.”
Vale gave him an unamused glare. “I’ll walk, thank you very much.”
Luka ignored their ongoing feud and said, “I’m very confused. What’s going on?”
Neb sighed, suddenly looking tired and frail. “Annie’s odd magic just accidentally created a new souvenir. Guess you’ll be adding shrunken space keychains to all the gift shops.”
Still confused, Luka asked, “Is something wrong with that?”
“No—it’s just that.” He sighed. “I’ve peered into the future and—although it hasn’t happened yet—I’m already annoyed with how many of my priests and priestesses ask me to ‘hook them up’ with a keychain because I know the creator. Everyone who’s anyone will have one.”
Annie then asked, as monotone as she could muster, “Did I just create a designer handbag accessory?”