by A. Omukai
The voices inside the back of her mind slowed down, too, and what had seemed like a crowd murmuring, all simultaneously, now appeared to be one individual.
She felt the eight cloud chasers above her more than she could see them. She didn’t know when they had appeared, but now, they were above her, whirling in circles in breathtaking speed. Outside her bubble, their dance would look like slow motion but from her point of view, it was hard to even distinguish them as individual lights. They slowed down though, and after a short while, stood still in the air, not even a metre above her head.
Before she realized it, her point of view flipped, and she looked down on her body, standing completely still below her. Then the picture changed, and she raced over the surface of Gliese 667 Cc by day, much similar to her dream a while ago, but at a higher speed.
Valleys and mountain ranges flew by, and she rushed directly over a blackened plateau that looked as though it had been hit by whatever would hammer the planet again soon.
Deirdre did not know where this idea had come from.
The landscape kept changing as she flew over it at high speed. There, another blackened area, the side of a mountain, and rocks drifting slowly skyward, dissolving on their way. Her flight accelerated, she moved faster and faster, along a river that kept growing in breadth as she followed it, passing two more black spots on her way. Time was no concern anymore, it didn’t exist right now. All there was, was she and her seven companions, cloud chasers, flying in formation with her, as if she was one of them, part of their hexagon.
The scenery changed again, and this time, she was back in the grotto, sank down on the monolith, then penetrated it. She swam against the stream now, following the magical energy flow backward. The friction she expected to feel didn’t happen. She glided through the soil as if she was a ghost, not living matter. In a certain sense, this was true. It wasn’t her diving deeper into the crust of the planet; it was the sense she had gained when the channelling succeeded and the spell took shape.
There it was, a glowing net, spread out below the ground, the total opposite of a centre of power. The magical field of the planet was present wherever there were roots. The magic didn’t originate within the celestial body; it was the product of the mushrooms spanning it, enveloping it almost completely.
‘They’ were not one ecosystem, ‘they’ were one life form. It.
One gigantic organism, and part of it was inside her, turning her lungs into bio trash and driving her body temperature up. Not with ill intent though, she realized, but out of desperation, out of need. The planet, it, tried to communicate, and had partially achieved its goal when it had sent her dreams and fever visions, but it had also failed when she hadn’t understood those messages. She didn’t quite understand it even now, but it got closer this time.
She saw herself, standing on the small island, next to the monolith, eyes closed. Ailbhe just a few steps away, tension in her body, as if she was ready to pounce. The magical energy flew into her body from below, entering her body through her feet, ascending through her legs, torso, all the way up into her head, from where it didn’t leave her body. She couldn’t see exactly where the power went, but she could feel the form the magical field around her took on.
It looked nothing like any spell she had ever woven.
She wasn’t even sure some patterns she saw were possible with the runes of the Ogham which formed the foundation of druidic magic. The spell surrounded her, but it wasn’t she who channelled it. Her body worked as a catalyst and medium, but the power flowing into her from all directions took on shapes too complex to describe.
Yeah, this was not her doing — and she felt a sensation expressing agreement.
Maybe this was the planet, using the power to build the spell.
Agreement, again.
Was this the voice of the humongous life form below her feet?
Yes.
No voice, no words, just the feeling of being in tune, of riding the same wavelength. A universal way to express agreement without need for words.
She saw something else. Cailean, standing next to her, with her hand on his head. He, too, stood inside the circle, and his eyes were closed.
It was this last vision that made her understand what she needed to do.
The connection petered out and the flow of magical energy ran dry, slowly, until the last trickle stopped. Unlike last time, she didn’t lose her consciousness. Deirdre was wide awake now, and ready to conduct one more ritual. The ritual that would restore the balance and heal the planet. But she would need rest first. She almost reached her physical limits. Going through this not even very long ritual had drained her, and she needed a meal, some sleep, and Cailean by her side.
30
Last Preparations
She had put on the suit again, because she didn’t want to carry it under her arm, and because it provided at least some warmth. It wasn’t until she had ended her ritual that she had felt the cold, and when she did, her fingers had already taken on a blue tint. Surely her toes didn’t look any better. She laughed a dry laugh and coughed.
“Can you walk?”
Could she? Her feet were numb, and now that she realized it, the strength escaped her legs, and she sunk to the ground.
“No worries,” she said.
The marine frowned, and she gave a lopsided grin. “Give me a few minutes, I’m good.”
“What’s your plan now?”
“First of all, let’s go back to the Wisp. I have a hunch I’ll need all my strength to fix this planet.”
“Who’s going to fix you?”
Deirdre shrugged. She hadn’t even thought about that yet.
The Wisp waited where they had left it. All three suns had reared their heads over the horizon, and the vehicle’s shadow was long and reached their feet the moment they left the cove. Walking over there still took Deirdre several minutes. Her numbness had subsided with a good massage, but the gravity was merciless, and the events of these last days, and the infection had taken their toll.
Only when she stood in the airlock, chemicals swirling all around her and ultraviolet light showering her body, she felt the exhaustion set in with all its force. It didn’t just drag her down, like the gravity of Gliese 667 Cc, it squashed her and made her feel like a wrung out wash cloth.
She tumbled inside, took her helmet off and dropped it carelessly while sinking on the bench. Hungry. Sleepy. She was a human still, not an inexhaustible machine running day and night. If the planet collapsed tonight, too bad. She’d be unavailable until she had a good night’s sleep, and who cared if the next twelve hours would be one slow motion dawn. Come back tomorrow.
She yawned as she brushed her unruly hair out of her face and unzipped her suit. It was cold, even though the thermometer showed twenty-four degrees Celsius. She turned it up and continued to disrobe while simultaneously giving instructions to her AI to prepare a warm meal. A sudden alarm made her furrow her eyebrows. What was it again?
“Body temperature thirty-nine point five degrees Celsius,” the synthetic voice of her AI said, and she could have sworn the damn computer put an admonishing undertone in just to ruin her meal.
She didn’t feel feverish, just tired and ravenous. The med system would have to get in line and wait its damn turn. She wiped the notification off her system’s UI and got up to grab her food, which had just popped. It objectively wasn’t any better than anything she had gotten since she had left Earth, but it sure looked great, and the smell made her salivate.
“Your temperature is worrying me.”
Deirdre looked up from her yet untouched plate.
“Let’s be honest. The Tuatha De Danann has no functional boats to pick us up. I blew the last pine wood and can’t open an escape route for us anymore. Mushrooms are growing inside my lungs, and the planet is slowly eating through the walls of the Wisp. We’re fucked. Fever really isn’t on my list of things that worry me right now.”
She turned her attention back to
her meal.
Wolfing it down, she thought about the ritual she had just finished and wondered what she had actually learned there.
If all her delusions of the last days had been failed communication attempts, things had turned out pretty well in the end. Piece by piece, the puzzle had formed in her head and produced a somewhat shaky picture, describing what she had to do.
Would she go with Brilann’s idea and soak up all the energy, then release it into a powerful barrier? What would she need Cailean for? Not that she didn’t miss him. She’d sure give a lot to know him by her side. Wasn’t she about to take a big step back to where she had come from, going in with a general sense of what to do, but resolved to improvise it in the end?
She had been playing with the last bean on her plate for who knew how long. Lost in thought, she hadn’t paid too much attention to the meal, no matter how good it had smelled, and probably tasted.
Deirdre would take a nap, then send one more message back to the Tuatha De Danann. She needed to let Brilann know what her situation was, and what she intended to do.
“I’m sorry, I was harsh earlier. Especially since we’re both in this together.”
The marine turned her head towards her and her silhouette reappeared where she had been sitting since they had come back.
“Don’t worry about that. How are you feeling now?”
“Tired. I’ll need some rest, then do the ritual to fix the problem on this planet. Are you coming with me?”
“I’d come even if you didn’t want me by your side.”
This was the first time Deirdre heard the Ghillie Dhu laugh. It sounded like the rustling of leaves in the wind.
“Thank you.”
When she opened her eyes, several hours had passed, but the three suns still hung close above the horizon. Gliese 667 Cc always looked like during a sunrise back home, but during its actual dawn, it set the sky and clouds in flames like nothing she had ever seen on Earth. Dusk had been a busy time for her, and she had paid little attention to it. She did now, conscious of the fact that this might be her last sunrise, on any planet, but not feeling anything in particular.
It was just a reality she had accepted a while ago, and that was that.
“So the next ritual will be my last here, and I’ll make it a success. The plan is to use Beithe, Dair and Ailm to negate the flow of magical energy. I’ll channel Gwyar to achieve the change. This should do the trick, and if not, I’ll try to improvise. I know I’ve been relying on my intuition too much and not paying enough attention to the craft, and I can’t fix what’s in the past, but I’ll do better this time. If I can, I’ll get in touch again afterwards. The infection has reached my right arm now and is climbing up my shoulder, so I might not have enough time left. Please hurry up and take Ailbhe back on board. No idea how long the Wisp will survive.”
She stopped the recording right here and didn’t add a last greeting. If this really was her last message, then she had said what she had intended to, and nothing needed to be added. She sent it without further delay and reached for her suit.
31
Ritual of Balance
A gentle breeze swept through the grotto. Where did it come from? Maybe there was a natural chimney somewhere above. She hadn’t thought of scanning the location, and wouldn’t put her helmet back on just to do it now.
The air felt cool on her skin, but not cold, even though objectively, it was. Last time she had checked, the thermometer had shown minus four degrees Celsius. Maybe it had to do with her fever, which had closed in on forty degrees just before she had removed the suit — way higher than she’d have guessed. Deirdre didn’t feel bad at all. The meal and the brief nap had been enough to recharge her, and she was strong enough to perform the ritual she’d come for without breaking a sweat.
Beithe, birch, was the rune of negation. She looked at the small acorn in which it had been cut. The rune itself looked exactly like a T, the only one that actually could have doubled as a letter of the alphabet.
Dair, the rune for energy, didn’t resemble any letters. It comprised three strokes, two vertical, one horizontal. It looked like a T on its head, with two vertical strokes. It meant and was represented in spell formulas by the oak.
Ailm was the pine tree rune that meant movement, and if she were to describe it, she’d call it “frog’s eye” — a horizontal stroke with a circle in the middle. She had used it for every single spell she had tried on this planet, without fail, and it would be her tool once again.
She was to ‘negate movement of energy’, with a focus on the negation, channelling Gwyar through a piece of birch wood.
All these thoughts were not a coincidence. She would abandon her old ways of flying through the preparations and “getting to the point”. It had led to problem after problem and maybe even caused her defeat last time, although she wasn’t sure about that. Anything at all could have led to a problem and started a failure cascade. This time, she would go back to the roots and confirm every minor detail.
There was only the grove, no guardians of the corners. She didn’t have to search for her essence either, it revealed itself to her while she spoke the mantra, and this time, she located it in her stomach. Again at the fringes of the infection, as if it strolled through her body with its new best friend, showing it all the interesting spots.
She felt nothing. No pain, to cough, all symptoms were gone, except for a tingling sensation, and maybe the fever. She wasn’t sure about the latter.
While she was still in thought, the growth process had begun as if her body acted the ritual out all on its own, not needing her help to perform a simple magic spell, and if she was honest with herself, that might indeed have been the case.
Deirdre had done so many rituals since she joined the druid circle as a young girl. All the routine parts were probably already automatic, and she just hadn’t noticed. What an interesting thought. She’d stay vigilant though and take care of any anomaly the moment it popped up.
Her legs began growing roots the same way they had last time, spread out wide, but not deep, from the legs. So far, so good.
The runes in her hand were warm, an effect caused by body heat, not magic, and while she turned her spiritual body into the same old mushroom again, the piece of wood in her hand seemed to be part of another world, with no place in her grove tonight. Once more, her spirit didn’t even take on the old tree form. It behaved as expected and took on the shape of a mushroom. Stem, cap, scales.
She didn’t stop growing when she filled out the grove either; she kept expanding naturally until she was tempted to abort the ritual.
There she stood, a weird thing, a mushroom without connection to its actual ‘mother body’. Just like her physical body was separated from the Tuatha De Danann.
For all her obsession with following the ritual precisely, she had completely forgotten to connect to the Earth, her attention hijacked by her strange and automatic growth into — whatever she was now. And yet, it didn’t seem to matter. The magical energy below her feet pulsed and gushed around her roots, as if she had established the connection and called for attention.
What little wind there was in the grove caressed her cap, while her stem huddled against the monolith like a lover. It almost disappeared in her spiritual body, as it stretched out wide and high.
From above, a swarm of cloud chasers circled her position, as if they were watching her.
Deirdre now knew that the cloud chasers, too, were not creatures of their own. They were projected like drones, acting like combined cameras and transmitters, normally aimed at the organism that spanned the planet, currently targeting her.
She couldn’t hear them speak. They were transmitting something, but no way to find out what it was. There was no way to interpret what they gave off right now, short of changing the ritual to the same time-bending spell she had used before, to slow their communication down and make the flickering of impressions accessible to her. Not now.
The three runes
on the ground were the matrix she would form now, and as alien as the piece of birch wood felt, it would do its job and call upon the element required to perform this spell, Gwyar.
Deirdre concentrated on the elements of the spell and held the construct together in her mind. She would pour all the energy into the spell she could suck in through her roots, which was impressive in its potential, but when she actually started the transfer, the element didn’t manifest. Gwyar, blood, the element that handled change. Motion, growth and decay, would not take shape and carry out the formula, and without the carrier, there was no magic taking shape in the physical world.
***
What was it this time? Despite not kneeling down and touching the ground to connect with the planet during the beginning stages of the ritual, the flow was active and strong. Her roots took it in and her spiritual body contained the power, grew to hold more, spread out her roots and the cycle continued. This wasn’t sustainable forever. She had to release the spell, but couldn’t without an element as a valve. What would happen if the pressure grew too big, would she just keep growing until she collapsed under her own weight? Rhetorical question, her form had no physical weight, but the principle was the same.