Skyclad (Fate's Anvil Book 1)

by Scott Browder

  Chapter 7: Aspect Locked

  Morgan Mackenzie was having a very dreary day. By all she could tell, it was only going to get worse. She’d been startled awake, not by notifications in her mind, but by ground-shaking thunderclaps and flashes of lightning from outside her magically excavated burrow. Her fire had gone out, and she’d braved a very quick jaunt outside to handle a brief bathroom situation and gather some more firewood. She was currently sitting on her makeshift stone bed wringing her hair out while she poured Mana into her fireplace [Candleflame Rune]. The closest wood had been the dead tree, and it was quite soggy from a night of heavy rains.

  She was glad she’d gone outside when she did. Before her firewood even began to dry, the storm outside picked up again. The howling winds tore at the tops of the giant trees and swirled sprays of raindrops well into the sloped entrance to her cave. A mere handful of minutes outside had left her hair a matted mess, and Lulu was currently on top of her head, working some sort of scrubby magic. Somehow the puffball was able to draw her hair up, untangle it, and leave it clean and silky, and Morgan was not complaining. “Lulu, we could be millionaires in a month if we opened up a salon back home…”

  Calling the rain a downpour was an extreme understatement. She was certainly glad for the decision to slope the cave entrance down and away, or she would’ve already been flooded out. With the weather curtailing any chance of exploring for the time being, Morgan set herself to practicing magic again.

  Using the lessons she’d picked up from delving into the Fire element, she drew up the water that had pooled on the floor after wringing out her hair. Water wasn’t as nebulous as Fire, but not as firm as Earth. It took more effort to get it to change direction, but it happily kept moving once she got it going in a circle, and a few minutes of making it dance in different sized spirals and loops rewarded her with [Water Affinity].

  Several dozen tries later, she succeeded in sending a compressed teardrop-shaped globule of water zipping across her tiny abode. It hit the far wall with enough force to turn the water to a misty spray, and the notification for the [Water Bolt] spell was enough to ratchet up her smug levels immensely.

  Over an hour later, her smugness was taking a beating, as she’d failed to make any progress with the Air Element. Forming a hardened or thicker layer of air was just about all she could manage, and while she thought there was potential for things like barriers or shields with that, no epiphanies or sudden spell rewards presented themselves. She gave up on it for the moment and went back to Lightning. She’d acted on instinct the first time she’d used it and gained the [Lightning Bolt] spell before any kind of affinity or experimentation with it.

  Not wanting to risk hurting herself with an explosion in a confined space again, she settled for sending smaller bolts zipping out the entrance to her cave. She always got burned by the lightning when it formed within the flesh of her hand, so she tried—with mixed success—to keep that from happening. With the tiniest trickle of Mana, it was possible to form a spark a hair’s breadth away from the tip of her finger.

  “It just doesn’t want to stay in one place, Lulu!” She harrumphed in frustration. The scrubby had backed away to the far side of the burrow once she’d started playing with Lightning again. It gave a rather bored wurble in response and resumed scrubbling across the far wall. She returned to playing with the element, letting it arc back and forth between her hands. Finally, by keeping a swirl of Elemental Lightning flowing between her palms, she was able to hold a steady spark of violet incandescence without burning herself. The notification for [Lightning Affinity] was quick to follow, making it easier for her to sense exactly how the charge was flowing.

  She bounced in excitement on her mossy bed, letting out a laugh of triumph as lightning arced between her hands. “Affinities make this so much easier!” The lapse in attention left her with singed and tingling hands, but that didn’t dampen her mood in the slightest. She was beginning to think this world might not be so bad after all, if she could just figure out the clothing issue and her Aspect. Satisfied with her newly learned Affinities, she set herself to actually testing out the [Naked Affinity] Aspect.

  “How can I test my Aspect, Lulu?” she asked. The scrubby simply wurbled at her softly and continued scrubbling its way across the wall. “I suppose I can make a piece of armor or jewelry with Earth magic. Does jewelry count against nakedness? Is it just clothes, or anything I try to wear?” She was rambling nervously because of the details of the enhanced Aspect, and so she shook her head and decided to get on with it.

  “No time like the present, I guess!” she chirped at Lulu with more enthusiasm than she felt at the idea. “At least nothing’s trying to eat us, so better to get it over with now before that changes…”

  Steeling her anxious nerves, Morgan drew up a small handful of stone with [Earth Sculpt] and shaped it into a simple hoop. It spun slowly in place, floating between her hands. She sat and looked at it with trepidation for several long moments. “How bad can it be, right, Lulu?”

  Before she could change her mind, she slipped her left hand through the loop of Mana-softened stone and let it settle around her wrist. As she let the Mana go, it faded out of the stone, leaving it as hard and solid as natural rock. Almost instantly she felt a full body chill, as if she’d been dunked head-first into freezing water, followed by complete panic as her stats and resource pools were cut nearly in half as fast as a guillotine dropping through her soul. It was worse than any nausea or sensation of dizzy sickness she’d ever felt, and it left her weak and trembling, as the notification slammed into her mind, followed by her altered status menu.

  You have equipped a [Simple Stone Wristband]! One of your Aspects is incompatible with equipping items, and has been locked until a state of compatibility is restored!

  Status Information for: Morgan Mackenzie

  Level - 8

  Primary Class: [Locked]

  Secondary Class: [Locked]

  Health - 130/130

  Stamina - 144/144

  Mana - 112/112

  STR - 11

  AGI - 11

  CON - 10

  VIT - 18

  INT - 14

  Stat points available to distribute: 0

  Current Skills:

  [Naked Instinct] - [Locked]

  [Naked Recovery (Lvl 7)] - [Locked]

  [Naked Camouflage] - [Locked]

  [Naked Resilience] - [Locked]

  -[Pain Resistance (Lvl 9)] - [Locked]

  -[Heat Resistance (Lvl 8)] - [Locked]

  -[Lightning Resistance] - [Locked]

  -[Mana Resistance (Lvl 10/Mastered)] - [Locked]

  [Naked Magic] - [Locked]

  -[Mana Pulse (Lvl 10/Mastered)] - [Locked]

  -[Spell Channeling (Lvl 5)] - [Locked]

  -[Mana Affinity (Lvl 6)] - [Locked]

  [Naked Elementalism] - [Locked]

  -[Fire Affinity] - [Locked]

  -[Water Affinity] - [Locked]

  -[Lightning Affinity] - [Locked]

  -[Earth Affinity (Lvl 2)] - [Locked]

  -[Lightning Bolt] - [Locked]

  -[Water Bolt] - [Locked]

  -[Flame Bolt] - [Locked]

  -[Candleflame] - [Locked]

  -[Earth Sculpt (Lvl 4)] - [Locked]

  -[Earth Wave] - [Locked]

  [Runic Enchantment]

  -[Candleflame Rune]

  Skill Points available: 5

  Titles, Mantles, and Aspects

  [Worldwalker (Title)] - You have travelled through the void between the many worlds! Every world is different, each with its own gifts and dangers. To help you survive strange new places, you gain a slight boost to health and an increased ability to learn new things! (+50 to Health, +50% increased gains to Skill Experience)

  [Blessed of the Guardian Tree (Title)] - Through an offering of the blood of your enemies, you have reawakened the ancient tree! You need never fear its hungry roots! Future offerings or actions that benefit the tree may enhance this Titl
e!

  [Naked Affinity (Aspect)] - Aspect Locked while items are equipped!

  Morgan could barely move, flopping over onto the mossy mattress. Her pain resistance and [Naked Resilience] had been dulling the various discomforts and sensations of being naked in the wilderness, among other effects from her skills and magics. With her skills locked out, she was no longer subconsciously keeping everything her body was trying to tell her neatly partitioned away in an abstract form. Everything slamming back to the forefront of her mind left her reeling from the worst hangover she’d ever experienced.

  In less than two days, Morgan had become well-adjusted to her newfound strength, agility, and mental sharpness, all boosted by this strange world’s system of stats and skills. Having most of that ripped away, including the magic she’d so eagerly embraced, left her feeling truly naked and vulnerable, and it was made even worse because she had finally felt like she was taking back some semblance of control over her life.

  With a herculean effort of will, she pushed herself back up to a sitting position. Her mind felt stuffed full of cotton. She could still feel her Mana, but not in any sort of detail. She tried to push her Mana back into the stone band, but to no avail. It seemed like it wanted to obey her will, but the effort drained her Mana as quickly as trying to catch water with her bare hands. Her skills and abilities were not gone ; not exactly, but it was like sensing everything through a misty shower curtain that muffled sound and touch as well as sight. [Naked Recovery] and [Naked Camouflage] simply refused to activate when she concentrated. They were there, and they were still hers. She simply couldn’t reach them in any effective way.

  She pushed at the stone band on her wrist, trying to get it off, but she’d made a terrible mistake. Letting the stone close so perfectly into a shape contoured to her arm had happened without her even thinking about it beforehand; it had simply felt natural, as the magic had worked toward her basic intent to make a simple bracelet. It wasn’t exactly tight, but it also had no extra room or gap to slide back and forth. There was no hope of squeezing her hand back out of it, not with her thumb and most of her hand bones in the way. A worry formed in the back of her mind that she might have to find a way to break or crush her own hand to get the damned thing off, which was an extremely scary prospect without her pain resistances. Knowing she could heal the damage later when she got her skills back was no comfort at all in the face of such prospective hurts, so she filed that idea away as a possible last resort.

  “Lulu! HELP!”

  Looking around in a panic, she finally spotted the scrubby headed back toward her from its previous location on the far wall. The puffball had wandered back over to investigate her distress. “Oh, thank goodness…” Morgan had seen how the scrubby somehow ate or consumed the grit and grime whenever it cleaned things, and it had dissolved the splinters of bark and wood stuck in her hands and feet from climbing down the Tree the day before. “Can you dissolve the rock, Lulu?” she asked as she held the offending stone band out toward the loofah.

  The scrubby glommed onto her outstretched hand with a plopping smack sound that would have been adorable in any other circumstance. She felt a tingle everywhere her skin was in contact with the loofah as its purring deepened to a pulsing rumble that was felt more than heard. “You know,” she said as she gave Lulu an encouraging pat with her free hand, “you’d be quite the scary little thing if you weren’t so damned cute…”

  After several minutes, the tingling sensation on her skin had developed into a stinging pain and a reddened welt as her scrubby pet tried to exfoliate the stone away. The loofah had wrapped completely around her wrist to encompass the stone band, but it couldn’t get at the stone without also scrubbing away a portion of her skin, as well. It was a sensation like fine grit sandpaper, slowly but constantly rubbing away at her flesh, and she ground her teeth together with a grimace as she endured it.

  When the skin around the stone band went from reddened to actually bleeding, Lulu hopped onto Morgan’s shoulder with an apologetic wurble. The blood made the bracelet a lot easier to slide across her skin, and she hissed as she tried to contort her hand enough to force it off, but to no avail. Beating it against the edge of her stone couch resulted in nothing more than extremely painful bruising; the stone didn’t chip at all.

  Morgan was growing more frantic by the minute. Her sudden changes in circumstances upon finding herself in a new world had been traumatic by any measure of the word, and she’d latched onto the magics as much out of a desire to reassert control as she had for the coolness factor of it. After going through her many trials, losing her hard-earned gains, and so abruptly, wasn’t pleasant at all. “Gotta get it off!” she huffed in frustration while she beat the bracelet against the stone. She’d worked herself into such a frenzy that she’d actually managed to chip the edge of her bed with the bracelet, and was pretty sure she was close to breaking bones in her hand.

  Such was her mental state that she didn’t notice Lulu’s trilling warbles of alarm right in her ear until the dimly lit cave was plunged into deeper darkness around her. She turned, realizing they were no longer alone. Morgan had time to make out a massive, shadowy form with frightening golden eyes before it was upon her, and then all she knew was teeth and snarling panic.

  The close confines of the cave were what saved her. The massive thing simply didn’t have room to maneuver, and as it lunged forward, Morgan dove headfirst off the bed, narrowly avoiding the teeth but failing to completely evade the claws. Ribbons of fiery pain tore down her left side and buttock as she rolled away, and the rusty tang of blood joined the stench of the beast’s breath as it turned to follow. A ripping, feline snarl like a wet chainsaw almost deafened Morgan as she pushed herself up with one hand on the sculpted stone fireplace. The fire had died away, but she felt embers burning her hand as she swung the largest piece into her attacker’s face.

  The dried deadwood burst apart on impact with its head, the sudden glare from the shower of sparks illuminating the form of a very large cat with exaggeratedly large, tufted ears and a widened jaw profile. Another ripsaw snarl shook the tiny cave as those jaws opened unbelievably wide, and the cat darted forward yet again. Morgan held up her arm and squeezed her eyes shut just as she saw Lulu hop straight into its mouth with a purbling war-cry, and the teeth slammed shut over both the brave little scrubby and Morgan’s bracelet-bound arm, crushing the bones halfway between wrist and elbow.

  Her arm wasn’t severed; she wasn’t that lucky, and she was dragged along as the oversized cat thrashed back and forth, swinging her into the cave walls with thumps punctuated by her agonized screams. She was dizzy and close to fainting from blood loss, and only barely managing a few feeble kicks against the creature’s chest and body, while she pummeled its nose with her other hand.

  The cat finally managed to pin her down with one massive paw across her torso, extended claws raking her breasts and rib cage as it pushed her down and pulled up with its jaws. She felt a sickening, tearing sensation and a pop as her shoulder dislocated, and then one final, gut-wrenching rip as her left arm gave way a few inches above the wrist.

  And then her magic was back.

  Naked condition restored! Aspect and associated skills no longer locked!

  In an instant, [Naked Recovery] stemmed her bleeding wounds and began to scab over her foreshortened arm. With all her remaining Mana, and every ounce of willpower and rage she could muster, Morgan held her good hand toward her attacker and screamed, “BURN! ”

  And the world around her obeyed.

  Chapter 8: Crystallized

  Morgan Mackenzie was in a very sorry state. She was flat on her back in a crater the size of a small house. A crater that had in fact been her house, even if only for a single night. Cold rain fell in slow, lazy plops that hissed and sizzled into steam once they came into contact with the glowing remnants of molten stone and earth around her. The messages notifying her that [Heat Resistance] had reached mastery level were rather anticlimactic, and redu
ndant as well, seeing as the melted rock had pooled around her, yet only felt uncomfortably warm against her body. Not to mention the fact that the fire and heat that had caused such melting had come from within her own body. She was still alive, partially thanks to [Naked Recovery] and [Heat Resistance], and had also gained [Heat Affinity]. The bit of healing and restoration she’d received upon levelling up from defeating what the notification had called a [Wildlands Shadowlynx] had also helped.

  Alive didn’t necessarily mean in good health, however. Her health pool was stable, although low, at only around a quarter of her total, which Morgan thought was amazing in its own right, as her body was not exactly in pristine condition anymore. The flames had spread out from her bones, burning her flesh on the way out, and her skin was a spiderweb of singed and bloody cracks. For what seemed an eternity, she waited for her Stamina to recover a few dozen points before spending it on another wave of [Naked Recovery]. She was no longer able to ignore what the skill had been trying to show her ever since she’d left the Tree. The damage to her skin extended deep into her muscles and other tissue, and to heal it, she had to look at it with the senses provided by the Skill.

  Her bones had been changed in the aftermath of eating the fruit from the tree, and the changes were disturbing to Morgan on several different levels. What she understood as bones and the stuff that made them up were still there, after a fashion, but they were now interwoven with something else. It was like the solid form of her bone-material was being fused with a riot of various colors of crystals growing out from her very marrow. And she could actually see them, thanks to the stub of fractured bone sticking out from where her left arm ended just before the wrist. Every time her Stamina recovered a few dozen points, she spent it furiously on [Naked Recovery] to bring her health back up and repair the damage. With every wave of healing, she could watch another fraction of an inch of her arm regrow, slivers of crystals like a lattice of needles in twisting, kaleidoscopic patterns rebuilding the bone. It would be beautiful if she weren’t so creeped out by it. And it wasn’t just where the new bone was growing. Her healing skill showed her in full detail how every bit of damage to her skeletal structure, every tiny crack and microfracture, was healing with the same crystalline replacement.