by Ian Rodgers
HURRY UP! Gaelin wrote into the ground, gesturing furiously at Dora while also staring fearfully at the oncoming wall of doom. Dora responded by throwing an apple at his head. It bounced off, but prompted the halberdier to put his helmet back on.
A shrill screech brought my attention to another portion of the sky, just a short way behind us. Dozens of strange, winged women were flying around some of the rocky spires that were in the path of the Eternal Storm, just like our little grassy patch of floating soil was.
‘Harpies,’ I guessed, never having seen them before. I could feel the distaste boiling out of Gaelin as he took caught wind of the half-human avian monsters. He gripped his halberd tight, and his cape spread out and formed cloth wings.
I immediately reached over and tugged on his shoulder, pulling his attention back to me.
WE NEED TO RUN NOT FIGHT, I signed at him, and he glared at me for a bit before nodding reluctantly. A green, white, and brown blur shot past us, and we watched, impressed, as Dora zoomed around the island, showing off her newly acquired skills on the Witch’s Staff.
I DID IT! Dora wrote out gleefully on the bark of the apple tree with a dagger while still mounted on the Witch’s Staff.
LET’S GO THEN! I replied, and both of them nodded. I hopped onto Gaelin’s left shoulder. I didn’t know how to silently cast the Fly spell yet, and I didn’t want to risk it while trying to escape a deadly storm, so sticking to Gaelin was the best option.
Shortly after that, we rose up into the air, and ascended to a height that was above the top of the apple tree.
‘Only way away from the storm is through the Harpy Islands,’ I thought. Dora’s grim expression and Gaelin’s stiff body language told me they too realized where we’d have to flee if we wanted shelter from the island obliterating storm.
FOLLOW MY DIRECTIONS! I signed, and the duo shared a look before nodding.
‘Huh, I thought I’d have to try harder to get them to follow my lead,’ I thought to myself. I quickly put that train of thought in the back of my mind. ‘Now’s not the time for that! Now is the time for fleeing!’
After scolding myself for getting distracted, I generated a large pseudopod and shaped it into the form of an arrow, pointing out the direction Dora and Gaelin needed to fly. Said direction just so happened to be directly towards the harpies’ domain.
As the sky darkened further, I had to change the composition of my pseudopod so that it glowed with bioluminescent gel. It was extraordinarily uncomfortable. Using chemicals to light up rather than magic itched like a hive of ants burrowing through the limb in question. I did not like it. But it was a neat trick, and every advantage helped while unable to vocalize.
The Eternal Storm was closer than ever, and I could feel the wind tugging and pulling at me. Dora’s robes and hair were caught the worst by it, flapping about madly and slowing down her broom’s flight. At one point, the string holding Dora’s ponytail back snapped off, leaving her blonde hair to flow out behind her.
It was an impressive sight, her hair billowing in the dark, her determined expression lit up by flashes of lightning.
Gaelin certainly thought so, as I had to slap his helmet to get him to stop staring at the Healer and keep following my glowing, pointing limb.
The great rocky cliffs of the harpies’ nests loomed ahead, and the islands in the sky were rife with dancing avians of all sorts. Fighting, pecking, and scratching at each other, all of them trying to secure a spot in their jagged mountain halls that would let them last out the Eternal Storm’s passage.
Dora shot me a concerned look as we drew closer, and Gaelin began to shake with suppressed emotions as he spotted the countless bickering birds.
THERE, I signed, making sure my limbs were bioluminescent when I did so, in order for my companions to read, pointing out the center of the Harpy Islands. HIDE THERE, I added, the glow from my body starting to attract attention.
The sky island I pointed out was the largest of the clustered floating structures, and stabbed into the heavens like a lance.
‘The Eternal Storm is big enough to shred smaller islands to pieces when it passes through,’ I thought. ‘And even larger islands can be tossed around like pebbles before a hurricane! Thus, the only place to escape to and wait out this mess is that mountain right there! It’s large enough not to be torn apart or thrown around. Too much, that is.’
‘Odds are it’ll be full of monsters, as well as the most powerful and vicious harpies. Clearing out a space to hide in is going to be a chore,’ I sighed to myself. ‘At least I have companions to help.’
Said companions were currently silently cursing the storm, Celbrem, and everything in between as the first sheets of rain and hail began to fall upon us, drenching and pummeling us.
‘OW!’ I griped as a hailstone the size of a fist smacked into me. Another one, slightly larger, pinged off of Gaelin helmet with an echoing ring. Dora winced as she was pelted with smaller chunks of ice. Then a gust of wind swept in, bathing us in freezing cold rain. I shuddered, and did not envy Dora for her lack of gear.
‘Come on, just a bit further!’ I pleaded with the duo. They might not be able to hear me, but that didn’t stop me from silently urging them onwards.
Neither of them stopped for anything. They evaded scraping claws and vicious beaks, dodged divebombs, and ignored the shrill cries of challenge that continued to boom out alongside the thunder.
THERE! I hastily signed out, and pointed my glowing arrow-shaped pseudopod at a cave halfway up the mountain’s side. As far as I could tell, it was inhabited by only a small number of harpies. Easy enough to deal with between the three of us.
Gaelin dove into the cave, swinging his halberd upwards just in time to counter a harpy who tried to pounce on him from above. I hopped off of his shoulder and glanced around the interior.
‘Three… four… five harpies in total! Piece of cake!’ I thought to myself as I counted the number of half-women creatures inhabiting our new hidey hole.
I also got a good look at the harpies from up close. They resembled a grotesque fusion of humanoid women and various breeds of avian. Their upper torso and head resembled human females, but their lower halves were avian, and where arms should have been, wings sprouted. Though even their faces had inhuman features. The eyes were too sharp and bulbous, and their hair was matted and unkept. The harpy’s mouths were full of razor-sharp teeth, and from the bones scattered about the floor of the cave, their diet was obvious.
Despite some resemblance to humans, they lacked any kind of intellect that would mark them as more than monsters. Some could use tools in a crude fashion, but then again so could monkeys and no one considered them to be sapient.
Two of the creatures in the cave had bird parts resembling seagulls, while the other three had pidgeon-esque avian features. All of them were squawking indignantly at our invasion of their home.
I stretched out a tendril and filled it with potent acid, spraying it all over the face of a harpy that tried to grab onto me with her talons. Its scream of fury turned into one of pain, before its head melted away completely.
Gaelin swung his halberd, splitting his own opponent in twain. The harpy fell, her two halves twitching wetly before going still. He then pointed his halberd at another of the avian monsters in a challenge.
Shrieking like the damned, it hurled itself at him, only to be impaled when the halberd suddenly extended several feet, the polearm piercing its chest. As he finished that one off, I wrapped another acid slicked tendril around the waist of the fourth harpy and yanked, slicing it in half as my potent fluids ate through its skin and bones without issue.
The fifth and final harpy had enough sense to try and run. Oddly enough though, instead of trying to flee through the opening we’d come in through, it attempted to fly deeper into the cave, which I was only starting to sense was bigger on the inside than I’d first thought. But Dora refused to let it escape and potentially warn other monsters of our position, and finished it off by ramming it fro
m behind with her broom and jamming her dagger through the back of its head.
The battle was ours, and the cave’s floor and walls were stained red with blood and littered with bits and pieces of harpy. I helped clean it all up by devouring the corpses. As for the blood, the Eternal Storm was getting close enough that the rain would wash it off the stones for us.
‘Tastes a lot like chicken,’ I mused to myself as I dragged another clawed foot into my body. ‘Not bad, though. The Wind Element mana in their bodies tastes like mayonnaise for some reason.’
I noticed Dora looking at me with a grossed-out expression as I ate, and even Gaelin, with his bizarre hatred for birds, was avoiding looking at me. Belatedly, I realized that maybe eating something with superficial resemblances to humans was a bad idea.
‘Probably just melt the rest of them,’ I decided, secreting a potent acid all over the remains, and reducing them to slurry. I then melted grooves in the floor that led towards the entrance so the soupified harpies dribbled out of the cave.
By now, the Eternal Storm had almost touched down. In the distance, I caught a glimpse of one of the smaller islands at the edge of the floating archipelago get shorn in two and then the halves hurled off into the distance.
‘That is worrisome,’ I mused, before sliding backwards deeper into the cave. ‘And this is bigger than I thought.’
Peering into the darkness with my magical echolocation, I detected a system of tunnels that led into the depths of the mountain. Some weren’t large enough for my human-sized companions, but two did seem to be large enough to accommodate both of them, as well as their weapons if a fight broke out.
Of course, any tunnel that large had to have something equally as big within it somewhere, and I had a feeling that maybe it wasn’t just avians that had made a home in this place.
BE ON LOOKOUT LARGE TUNNELS BACK HERE, my tendrils signed out, and I made sure to use the bioluminescence trick so they could see what I was ‘saying.’
Dora and Gaelin both tried to see what I was looking at, but it was too dark for them. Frustrated, Dora let out a wordless growl and plopped down onto the ground and began to stare at the palms of her hands.
Mana began circulating through her, and I saw with my magical vision that she was shoving her magic into her hands, trying to bend the energy to her will in the process.
‘Must be trying to learn how to cast a spell silently,’ I mused. ‘I better do the same. I don’t want to be stuck to Gaelin’s shoulder again and be a burden.’
The armored young man in question also seemed to be interested in learning how to channel mana without the need for spells, if the ripples of energy I could feel coming from him were any evidence. He seemed to have barely enough mana to cast a Level Four spell, however, which I thought was odd. Could he even use magic? Had he made it this far on pure physical prowess, skill and talent?
Diving inwards into my soul, I began to work on what I knew of magic to start with. It was a fundamental force in the Multiverse. All realms and realities had it, though in some far-flung reaches of Reality some universes were not able to wield it as the amounts were too small, too rare, or too difficult to access.
Still, magic was energy, and energy was life. Where there was life, where there was the soul, there was magic.
If it has a soul, it had magic. Simple as that. But not everything that has magic has souls. Oozes, for instance, are pure magical energy, congealed into existence on the Material Plane when mana pools together in large amounts.
Now, normally, as an Ooze, I couldn’t really use magic. We had magical abilities and effects, like a Healing Ooze secreting injury mending juices, or a Stone Ooze creating a cement-like substance after eating and dissolving earth and rocks. But that was all natural. A byproduct of the body, not a conscious effort of the mind.
And that was the issue I was currently working on. Without an incantation to shape the mana inside my body and outside of it, I was relying on pure willpower to shape the power as I needed it. And that was a potentially lethal process. Miscasting a spell could be dangerous. Like, ‘summoning a fireball inside the caster’s own chest cavity’ dangerous. It’s why humans – and elves, dwarves, and other things with souls – developed spells and incantations in the first place, and wands and staves to channel the energy. They were tools to help visualize what a caster wanted and to ensure failed attempts shattered a replaceable stick of wood, not the body of the caster.
‘No, no,’ I sighed to myself. ‘Stop worrying about the cost of failure! What matters is succeeding! If I think I’ll fail, I will! I cannot – will not! – fail this task!’
Settling down, I entered a state of meditation. Gradually, my awareness of the howling wind died down as I shut myself off from the outside world, and focused on the ephemeral realm of magic within me. I drifted into my Mindscape, my inner world where the essence of who – and what – I was lay.
Peering inside myself, I beheld my soul. Silver and purple, and as round and squishy as I was. Nestled within it, almost like a core, was a large green knotted mass that resembled a tangled mess of vines. I ‘looked’ at it closely, for it was a mystery to me. Gaea, the Four-Faced Mother of Nature, had gifted it to me some time ago.
It was a spell, I knew that much. What it was meant to do, I had no idea. But it was important. My soul ached with that knowledge. Yet at the moment, I was not so engrossed in its purpose or function, as I was on its design.
This was the only example I had of a spell. When I looked at other people casting spells, they tended to be too distant to see the way their mana worked. And if I was close to them, for some reason my magical vision turned blurry when I tried to look at a spell as it was being formed. Therefore, this abstract knot was the closest I had to a representation of a spell.
My theory was simple: If tying together threads of mana created a spell, I could also do the same! No need for incantations. All I needed was visualization, intent, and willpower.
Easier said than done!
Trying to draw forth only a tiny amount of mana at a time was not something I was used to. Shameful as it might be to admit, I was never really the best when it came to magic and casting spells. Because I had so much raw magical power inside my body due to being a Royal Ooze, I generally got away with overcharging my spells with extra mana to compensate for any mistakes I might have made. Plus, I rarely made use of the more nuanced and complex spells.
‘This isn’t working,’ I grumbled, glaring at my soul as I tried to tease a single thread of mana out of it, instead of a large clump like usual. I did not succeed, and was soon in possession of a lump of silver colored mana. ‘Surely there is a better way?’
‘Hmm, what if I do this?’ I mused, ‘grasping’ the mana and slowly molding it into a vague shape. It was tricky, turning the mass of mana into a thinner, stringier form, but I treated it as if it were clay, and slowly, a noodle of mana was my reward.
‘Okay! I’ve flattened out the mana, now to reshape it into a knot,’ I thought. Carefully, I tucked the tube-shaped mana into a loop, then tied that loop up with another loop. Voila! A pretzel shaped knot of mana!
‘Let’s see what this does!’ I wondered excitedly, and carefully exited my Mindscape where I’d been playing with my soul. I made sure to keep as tight a hold on the silvery pretzel as I could with my thoughts.
The cave was now dark, almost completely pitch black if not for the faint silver glow that surrounded Dora and Gaelin as they meditated, and the random flashes of lightning, courtesy of the Eternal Storm.
I winced as I was able to hear the screaming of the wind once more, and shivered at how chilly our refuge had become thanks to the constant rain and hail battering the mountain. A creaking groan echoed through the mountain, and for a moment I was afraid it was unable to hold up to the raging might of the Eternal Storm. But the stone held, and the mountain endured.
Sighing in relief, I decided to turn my attention to other matters. Namely, seeing what this silver pretzel woul
d do when I cast it!
‘Go!’ I thought loudly, pushing the spell-knot out of my body. For a brief moment, nothing happened. And then I was blinded as I’d apparently managed to cast Dancing Lights right in front of my ‘face.’
‘Okay, so that particular shape makes a Dancing Light appear,’ I said to myself, pleased with the result. A bubble of silvery light now hovered above my head, providing a decent amount of illumination to the cave. It popped a few seconds later, but for a first try, it was a decent attempt in my humble opinion!
Neither of my companions noticed the sudden brightness, so engrossed in their own studies they were. Which was nice. None of them saw my failure.
Gaelin stood up all of sudden, and I turned to him, curious. He held out his halberd and settled into a combat stance.
‘What is he doing?’ I wondered.
My question was soon answered as his cape began to shift forms. Wings, a pair of large hands, a giant foot, a sword, a fist… all sorts of shapes appeared, one after the other. Then, with exaggerated slowness, Gaelin went through a series of combat maneuvers with his polearm. It began to glow white with mana, as he channeled his power through it. Seconds later, he cast Magic Edge on his halberd, the blade shining fiercely with silver energy. It was smoothly done, and to my magic vision, Gaelin had cast the spell both silently and perfectly!
He dissipated the spell shortly afterwards, and finished his routine before sitting back down on the ground. His helmeted head turned my way, and I waved at him with a tendril while suppressing a tingle of envy at his success. His head bobbed soundlessly as he waved back.
DID YOU DO IT? I signed at him, tendrils glowing a cherry pink in the dark, and Gaelin nodded. He shrunk his halberd down until it fit in the palm of his hand, and he proceeded to use the divine weapon as a stylus, cutting words into the stone floor.
IT WAS NOT HARD, he wrote out to me. CHANNELING MAGIC WORDLESS IS SOMETHING I ALREADY KNEW HOW TO DO THANKS TO MY SHAPELESS RAIMENT.
His cape fluttered as if in glee at the praise and Gaelin pet it fondly.