Gods of the Flame Sea

by Jean Johnson

  He was not a natural healer. He had no affinity for this type of animadjic. What the teenager was, was stubborn, determined, and curious enough to try. Experimenting gave him a certain level of satisfaction whenever he got something right. A sort of private praise feeling.

  Of course, part of his urge to experiment on living flesh was that it was the best way to use up the anima in a particular area. First, he drew the living magic out of the local stones and plants and sands around him, guiding it into his body to collect it. Because he was half Fae, holding and storing and keeping it changed him subtly inside, a change he had been told by his mother’s family should be avoided instead of sought.

  Naturally, he sought that change actively, though subtly, secretly. Even the stuffiest of his mother’s kin, Éfan-taje, admitted that change was inevitable, and guided change best. So Udrin pulled in sparkling spheres of energy drawn from everything around him, and carefully held it inside. Breathed it, let his blood and his flesh and his bones bathe in it. Once it had been given enough time to make yet another incremental alteration to his nature—an evolution toward a superior form—only then did Udrin push much of it back out of his own body and into the bodies of the beasts he had made. Two adults, four offspring.

  The creature’s characteristics had come to him in a dream. Some might have called that dream a nightmare, but not Udrin. He liked the idea of a large insect-thing that could swim through the sand, sneak up on sleeping creatures, stab them with a paralytic toxin, and inject them with eggs so its young could have something to eat. The whole concept was a challenge. He had already experimented with changing the color of snake scales, reshaping butterfly wings, and trying to remake bees that made blue honey, not golden, the latter idea also coming from a dream.

  That last one had failed horribly, with the bees dying every single time he tried, all without even getting close to making the honey blue, yet edible. Could he change the color of the honey at all? Yes. If he wanted black and bitter, yes. Red and tangy-sweet, yes. Green and toxic, oh yes. That had been a bit awkward, trying to strip the poison from his body without having to seek out another healer. But blue? No. So much for turning that dream into reality.

  This experiment had progressed a lot better. A lot further. The first obstacle had been picking out creatures with the right sorts of features. Trap-spiders, to be able to swim in the sand. Scorpions, for their venomous barbed tails. Wasps, for the paralytic toxin and the habit of laying eggs in the flesh of their victims. And since smaller creatures had paradoxically been harder for Udrin to figure out and reshape, he hadn’t bothered to remove much in the way of mass for the creatures, so the nameless thing had instead been made bigger, as big as a spread hand.

  He guessed the greater mass of tissues allowed the creatures to still function even if their structures had small flaws he hadn’t yet found and corrected. Tiny creatures simply had less of a chance to survive those flaws. Again, he was no animadj healer. But what he learned even from his mistakes, oh yes, that could be applied to experimental changes of his own nature. His carnelian eyes came from his father’s side of his family, his golden skin from his mother, his hair a blend between auburn and gold, but more orange than copper or ginger—visibly more of his father’s kin than his mother’s. A blend of half Fae and half Efrijt, on the outside. On the inside, however, Udrin worked slowly to change himself into something . . . better. Superior.

  For now, the nameless beasties crawled and scuttled around in a big, sand-filled basin he had hollowed out of the local stone. Making behavioral changes was easier than physical changes, so as soon as he had made three of the things that lived through the amalgamation process, he had given all of them an aversion to open air and to hard surfaces, and a strong preference for hiding in loose, dry sand. He didn’t want them escaping this little pocket valley simply because he could not always be here to keep an eye on his experiments, and the amalgamation spells took a great deal of his own energy out of him, not just whatever anima he could dredge out of this world.

  If he kept them close, confined them to their sand-pool, he would not have to start from scratch all over again. Successful reproduction had been achieved, after all, and that had taken more than fifty amalgamation attempts. Each one drained him to the bone, leaving him tired and hungry instead of rejuvenated. Full-blooded Fae could live on the local anima alone, but surely not even Taje Jintaya-ul could have done that while creating an entirely new species, and he was only half Fae. Well, slightly more. For now.

  On his last visit, he had brought a cavy with him, a high mountain rodent-thing that the locals liked to breed and eat. Two of the beasties, sensing prey bigger than a beetle, fought each other for a few moments, trying to keep their rival away from the meal while the pika froze in fear in its wicker cage. The third, smallest beastie had swung around wide, dug under the sand, and stabbed up into the creature from below, paralyzing it. Getting in close enough to lay eggs through the bars had been a little tricky, but now Udrin had a bleached, sun-dried carcass of little more than tufts of fur, sinew, and bone . . . and four smallish beasties no bigger across than his finger was long.

  One of the two bigger adults had died in the week since his last visit, however. From the looks of the shell, the others had swarmed and eaten their kin. They needed more food sources. Beetles and ants would not be enough to satiate their needs, now that he had a half dozen. Luckily for them, they had a parent who was determined to create an entire species, not just a handful of experimental subjects.

  This time, he had brought four cages of painstakingly caught desert hares.

  Those sat off to the side on solid ground, of course, yards from the sand pit. Now was not the time to allow his pets to feed. Instead, he focused the magic streaming from his fingertips in a fine mist-like beam on each of the little creatures, painstakingly sensing and correcting flaws in ligaments and musculature, adjusting a joint here and there. Slight changes from one to the next, of course; as a hermaphroditic species, they would interbreed, but the mix of differences would drive some to be better, faster, stronger, though perhaps not smarter. Something the size of a spread hand didn’t have much of a brain, after all.

  When he had fixed a handful of flaws in each of them, small changes meant to keep the creatures from dying from biological shock, Udrin left the edge of the pit and centered himself on a boulder overlooking the grainy basin. Resting for a few minutes, he chewed on a honey-pressed lump of grain and fruit, sticky-sweet and a delicious treat. The local humans who worked for his father’s kin used them for quick energy.

  These bars had a fine red dust coating them. Vermillion, the dust that came out of cinnabar mining. The natives called it crazy rock and considered the food spoiled, because it would poison them. His father’s kin, however, deliberately dusted the travel bars with the stuff. To them, it was not a slow descent into madness, neurological disintegration, and death. To an Efrijt, mercury served as both a longevity draught and a recreational drug.

  Being Dai-Efrijt as well as Dai-Fae as he was, even just this little bit of vermillion powder gave Udrin a rush of euphoria. A sense of boosted intellect to his thoughts. His limbs twitched—the stuff poisoned his mother’s kin like it did the pathetic humans—but he considered the twitches, the stabbing static pain of pins and needles to be an adequate price in exchange for the soaring clarity of his thoughts, the swift intensity of his awareness of everything around him.

  Rested and refreshed, even a little giddy, Udrin drew again upon the anima beneath him. Not the kind held in the plants growing at the base of the boulder, for they would need their remaining energies to feed the hares, but the slow-gathering magics that the stones of this world generated. Deep stones, this time, from far below his folded legs. Three slow, deep breaths summoned more of the shimmering gray-white balls of energy. They floated up toward him out of the ground and angled in from the box canyon’s walls almost as fast as they would have approached one of his
mother’s kin, drifting straight and true from their source points to his body.

  Each impact warmed him in a way that neither the sun nor a hearthfire could manage. On his fourth slow breath, he absorbed the first dozen spheres, blending them into his personal energies, altering his body ever so slightly more toward that forbidden state that his mother’s kin feared. Three more deep breaths summoned more power, and the fourth absorbed and blended what he drew.

  Because of the fear the Fae had for the immediate, obvious changes the local magics wrought in their physiology, they had failed to see what Udrin realized. If someone of Fae blood drank in enough anima energies—full or even just half-breed such as himself, so long as they were not one of those whose bloodlines were sullied by human flesh—and incorporated those energies into their very bones . . . eventually, they could merge with the anima.

  It did require changing himself subtly to be more and more Fae-like with each absorption. Not externally, of course; he needed to remain looking like himself. Both sides would be upset if he changed his outward appearance, so he carefully kept the reddish hair and red eyes of his Efrijt father, and the golden skin, pointed ears, and lack of lower tusks from his Fae mother. But internally, he needed to be more Fae than Efrijt in order to achieve his ultimate plan.

  The more a Fae-blood merged with the anima-magic of this world, the easier it became to do increasingly complex things with that anima. Five years ago, Udrin had failed at flesh-shaping even something as simple as an earthworm, which when cut in half could usually survive. Three years ago, he couldn’t even keep a stupid honeybee alive. Last year, he had finally made a beautiful butterfly change colors and grow extra limbs, with six wings in brilliant, iridescent shades of white and gold and blue.

  But now? Now, he had created life where life did not exist. Viable life, that could breed independently of his help. Well, at least a first generation. He really needed them to breed several generations so that he could study each iteration for flaws in need of correcting.

  He felt like a god, looking down at the six lumps under the beige sand. Almost a god. He only had six of them, and their pit was too small for multiple generations. Thankfully, shaping nonliving things came quite easily to him.

  Filling himself with a bit more of the slow-gathering stone energy, he swept out his hand to his right. The stone basin expanded in that direction, dipping down a few feet into the plain brownish gray rock that striated the local landscape. A fist followed by spreading fingers opened up cracks in the earth. Sand hissed up out of cracks from the depths. Dark and yet glittering, almost polished in appearance, crushed basalt filled the basin in granular gray. To amuse himself, he brought up glittering, crushed granite next, striping the small “lake” of sand in rippling waves of pale gray.

  It took about a quarter hour to fill the basin. When he finished, Udrin frowned at what he had made. The smallish beige blot of the original pool looked ugly by comparison. He almost just shoved it down into the cracks to bury and hide it in the depths of the earth, but caught himself; his babies were in there. His beasties. His precious, important experiment. So he focused, and stretched out his other hand.

  Six squirming, wriggling bodies lifted up out of that ugly, plebian sand, held aloft by his will. Once the multi-legged, crab-like creatures were safe, his right hand clenched and squeezed the unwanted grains, shoving them down into cracks in the basin. A flash of amusement crossed his mind. Instead of drawing up more basalt or even granite, Udrin called up a stream of reddish orange sand instead, pulverized from rocks rich in iron oxides. That made the original basin look like a bloodred sun rising up out of the grasses, sending waves of pale granite light streaking off through the basalt-dark night.

  The visual pleased him. It would also give him an idea of how his beasties “swam” through the sand when he returned, by tracing how the three different colors got pushed around. However, the sand was still a bit hot, so he held his creations aloft, and even played around with swooping them through the air. No doubt the maneuvers traumatized them a little, but having to wait for the sand to cool after its long, friction-filled journey to the surface bored the young male.

  Thankfully, he could see with his Efrijt-red eyes when the heat-shimmers eased to a level that wouldn’t kill anything. Lowering his beasties to the red patch, he let them scuttle around, exploring a bit, until they decided they had been exposed long enough, and dug their way down into the sand with little shimmies and scrapes of their many legs.

  Watching them for a little bit while they wiggled and kicked sand over their mottled beige shells, working to hide their little bodies, Udrin turned his attention to the rest of the pocket valley. Hares needed water and greenery to eat. So he lowered part of the untouched valley just a little—since he didn’t want the water to get the sand wet and make it more suitable for growing plants than staying barren—and brought a wellspring up to the surface.

  Not a big one. Just enough to wet the valley floor. Aunt Parren—not an actual blood relation, but still one of his mother’s kin—had showed him years ago how to gently slope a terrain, guiding the water where he wanted it to go. He remembered being about seven or eight at the time, obedient and dutiful. Before he realized he was meant to be so much more than the half-breed pawn in the territorial games his two kin-sides played with him. Given that each camp had picked desert climates to live in, conserving and manipulating water with care and economy were important lessons to retain, so Udrin held them carefully in mind.

  Keeping the cracks of the wellspring to the tiniest fractures, he let the trickling seep spread out, all the way to the edges of the sand, where he wavered the edge of the colorful pit. To encourage the hares to nibble in that direction, he extended the soil in fingerlike peninsulas into the sandy “sea” and tied life-giving energies into that soil. Working slowly, methodically, thoughtfully, Udrin encouraged the local grasses to send runners in that direction. Even into the sand a bit, since the point of those fingers of soil was to lure the hares close enough to where his beasties could swarm out of the sand, stab them senseless, and eat them alive.

  Mind racing under the effects of the vermillion powder, Udrin worked carefully, trying to consider every angle. Lush grass, he knew, might feel like sufficient cover for his beasties, and they might try to escape and live in the grass. So he spent half an hour shaping a behavioral spell, while the anima caused green blades to sprout up at unnatural rates all around.

  Another erstwhile aunt, Rua-taje, had taught him how animals had certain behaviors and habits embedded in their very nature, in the genes inside their cells. Predators stalked quietly when they saw prey. Prey froze and looked around, then bolted for the nearest cover when sensing a predator on the hunt. Parents usually fed their own children, and could be tricked into feeding others. Or they slaughtered the young sired by other animals, an instinct meant to give their own young less competition.

  Magic tapped into these things, shaping and warping and remaking. So he composed the anima within him to reshape the six beasties, sending a spell-sphere to each one in rippling golds, and holding the beasties still until the anima sank in and reshaped them. It told them how they loathed lingering among anything but soft, nice, granular sand. Gave them an aversion to cutting through grass roots, too, so that they only burrowed where he wanted. They could not dive deep into the sand for fear of asphyxiation, but desert-dwelling grasses tended to send their roots down deep in their quest to find water, so that should form an effective barrier, too.

  It wouldn’t do to let these beasties out of this hidden valley too soon, after all. He still had several modifications to make. He intended to make them impervious to injury on his next trip, since he was still working out how to make them heal fast when cut by blades, but it didn’t work with all metals.

  Iron was the first one he had worked on circumventing, since everyone around here had an iron blade. Steel was another, since that was iron’s superior
cousin. Copper and bronze, those were manageable. Faeshiin, however, that was difficult to counter. It didn’t help that he didn’t have access to the metal, since every scrap was carefully accounted for by his mother’s kin.

  Unfortunately, Udrin couldn’t spend a lot of time out here working on this new form of life, but he had worked on catching flies elsewhere, altering them subtly, and cutting them over and over to see which combination of magics and biology allowed them to regrow lost legs and wings.

  Only to cuts, not to smashing blows, of course; he still needed to kill his altered beasties somehow. A world where flies pestered endlessly was not a happy world. Thankfully, no one in either settlement questioned why flies dropped dead. They did so quite frequently on their own, after all.

  For now, his biggest and most time-consuming task revolved around ensuring that his sand-loving beasties stuck to that sand as much as possible and that they had plenty of food. He had just enough time for one more trip in a week; after that, he would have to leave the mountainous home territory of his Efrijt kin, and travel to the high desert canyons holding his mother’s people.

  Selecting one of the two adults since their lumps were more easily identified, Udrin levitated it up out of its sandy covering and set it down a couple feet into the grass. It froze, hesitantly turned this way, then that, and finally scuttled back into the nearest stretch of grains. With amusing little shimmies and scrabblings, it quickly reburied itself.

  The programming should hold. Udrin had already trained flies to turn at perfect right angles whenever trying to fly anywhere, and teaching earthworms to knot and unknot themselves had become child’s play. Compelling a donkey to bray or a dog to bark every time it saw a specific human had proven amusing for a while. Compelling his creations to stay put within certain parameters meant he didn’t have to worry about them escaping his control.