No, I wasn’t going to die. If the universe wanted me dead, it was going to have to come kill me itself.
“This is going to look strange,” I told Roddie.
As the universe spat rain and threw wind at me, I performed a series of stances. A backward C. My palms out, like a beggar. Arms raised, knees bent, as if calling out to the heavens but appearing humble.
On and on I went. Cycle after cycle of the stances I had memorized so well.
I heard dozens of pawsteps circling around me, getting closer now. They were ready to take their final risk and come for me.
I applied a little technique of my own as I did them. Mindfulness.
I tuned out the cold, the rain, the wind. I focused on my breaths.
More steps. Did I just see fur?
Focus on your breaths.
Soon, I didn’t even need to do that. Each new stance took control of my thoughts, the sensation growing stronger as I flexed my arms, tensed my muscles. As I balanced, turned, twisted.
A glow began to spread through me.
Words whispered into my ear, quiet but almost as if they were rushing to get to the end, the sound like having a seashell against my ear.
Hrr-chare, said the voice.
More stances.
Deeper I went. Deeper into my mind. The glow spread from my palms to my wrist.
And now a wolf broke out from the darkness, and I saw it charging at me.
Hrr-chare. Hrr-chare.
I was completely outside of myself now, in someplace bathed in light, so bright I couldn’t see anything, and all I could hear was hrr-chare, hrr-chare chanted over and over again.
Energy thrummed in my shoulders, my arms, concentrating in my palms.
The wolf leapt toward me, its mouth open, teeth shining white, moonlight glinting off its green eyes.
And then a voice spoke louder than the rest.
It was my voice, shouting out the words.
“Hrr-chare!”
All the energy I had built up rushed to my fingers and made my hand tremble violently as if I was holding a pneumatic drill. With a great rushing sound and then a spark of light, a sphere of flames shot from my hand.
It smashed into the kindling dead center and immediately began devouring them, crackling over the twigs and pieces of wood.
The wolf stopped, skidded, and then reared onto its hind legs in surprise. It backed away, staring at me, and then the fire. The sound of footsteps in the nearby darkness stopped, and now I saw a dozen pairs of eyes staring at me.
Roddie leaped backward so that his ass was against the wall.
“It’s okay,” I told him.
But this was better than okay.
The wolves wouldn’t come close with the fire burning. As long as this beautiful flame kept flickering, I was okay.
I was so filled with adrenaline I felt dizzy now, but I couldn’t lose the fire. I took the rest of the logs from my bag and I started piling them on the fire, the smaller ones first and then getting bigger as the fire got stronger. I needed to feed it, but too much wood too quickly would snuff it out.
When I was done and the fire had some timber to chew through, I sat by it. I patted the ground next to me, and Roddie walked over, and we both sat in the glow of the fire and started to feel warm for the first time that day.
Soon, I heard the sound of paws again. The wolves were moving but this time, they weren’t getting closer. I peered into the darkness and just barely caught sight of one wolf’s tail as the creature and its pack left.
I felt such a sense of relief. It was so strong that it made my eyes tear up.
As I watched the fire, I couldn’t believe that I had made it. Not with firelighters, but using my hands. Using…I don’t know what the hell I used. Magic? Sure. But what was it really? Everything needed fuel, and what fueled the magic?
Ah, yes. The elemental I got from killing the hellcat.
I was proud of my fire. Proud of how big and strong it was growing as it ate through the wood. It was like watching my kid grow big and tough.
No, that was weird.
At any rate, I was unbelievably relieved that I had done it.
A few days ago I had woken up here with my hands and my ankles tied up, and the local mage dudes thought I was so useless they wouldn’t even let me travel with them.
Now I was shooting fire from my hands. I was a human flamethrower!
CHAPTER 9 – Warmth
Roddie and I enjoyed the fire and started to warm up, and I couldn’t believe how great it felt. I understood something, right then; there are few things better in life that satisfying a deep need.
When you feed your empty belly, it is a glorious sensation. When you chug water to sate your thirst, there’s nothing quite like it.
And when you start a fire to heat up your poor, freezing body, it feels glorious. It felt even greater to me, because when I stared into the flames I saw them as the fruits of my hard work.
The glow spread from my fingertips and my toes and swam through my body.
Fire elemental depleted!
Spell learned: Chare
[Casts a fireball from the mage’s hand. A low-level spell usually learned by toddler fire mages. Favored as a teaching device by the Lonehill clan, thanks to its ease of learning and its usefulness.]
[Fire] discipline improved by 1%!
Rank: Grey 1.00%
Spells:
Chare [Cost: 1 fire elemental]
This was a lot to take in at first, especially in my exhausted state. I had to read it a few times before the words really started sinking in, and then I saw that some of the message confirmed what I’d already thought.
I needed to unpack all this. Get things straight in my head. Once I fully understood how things worked, I could start improving on them.
First, casting the chare spell depleted the fire elemental I had looted from the dead hellcat. Given that my new spell had a cost of [1 fire elemental], it made sense that I wouldn’t be able to cast another yet.
Elementals fueled spells.
So, if killing stuff to find elementals was like pouring gas into a tank, then it followed that the weird stances from the book, and saying hrr-chare was like turning the ignition and releasing the handbrake.
Okay, I was getting somewhere with this. Not far, maybe, but somewhere.
I focused on the next part of the message now.
[Fire] discipline improved by 1%!
Rank: Grey 1.00%
Right. So, it looked like spells were separated into different disciplines. Maybe there were other fire spells out there. Maybe there were ice spells, wind spells, that kind of thing. I didn’t know how I’d find out, but it was something I needed to check.
It looked like I had a rank in the [fire]discipline, too.
Grey. Huh. That must have been the lowest rung on the ladder. And yet, using hrr-chare spell had increased it a little.
What happened when I got it all the way up to 100%? Guess I’d have to find out, but I supposed that my rank would increase, or something.
So, I wasn’t a master mage yet. But at least things were a hell of a lot better than they had been twenty minutes earlier. I was warm, getting dry, and I’d finally, finally, shot fire from my hands.
I was starting to understand how magic worked around here, and how to get better at it.
I mean, it was crazy if I really thought about it. With the help of a weird book, I had taught myself how to shoot fire from my hands! More importantly, it opened the gates. If I had potential to learn one spell, then I could learn more.
Things were looking up. I had food, water, weapons, and a spell. For a guy who woke up here lost and tied up, it was a great upturn in fortune.
Next, I needed to find the Lonehill clan and try and convince them to help rescue the slaves from the ogres. I hadn’t expected to find them cooperative when I had the idea, but maybe that would change now. If I could show Pendras what I’d learned, he might not be so quick to banish me
this time.
To do that, I needed more [fire] elementals.
“Any idea where to find a hellcat?” I asked Roddie.
When Roddie didn’t answer, I decided that talking to my dog and expecting a response was a sure sign that it was time to get some sleep. Even so, I was getting nervous about the fire. It felt a little like a signal to the rest of the wasteland.
“Hey, ogres, trolls, orcs! There’s a human over here! Come pound him to dust!”
It had been a necessity to keep me and Roddie alive, but we were dry now, and it had stopped raining. We would make it through the night without it.
I was going to use one of my jars of stream water to extinguish it, but that would have been a waste. Instead, I used my blunt kitchen knife to dig at the dirt, and I piled handfuls of it onto the fire until the flames died.
A little residual heat came off the charred wood, but the light was gone, and I felt a little safer. Pulling my overcoat over me and Roddie, I went to sleep.
CHAPTER 10 – Everything is Worth Killing
The next morning, I drank half a jar of stream water and I made a cup shape with my hands and let Roddie lap some water out of them. I ate a few berries, a few beans, and a handful of carrot pieces, and I let my pooch friend have some breakfast too.
Things looked a little brighter that day. Not just because the sun was out, but I felt different. Optimistic. Ready to kick some hellcat ass, if I could find them, and then go seek out the Lonehill clan and show them what I had learned.
First things first, then. Find some hellcats.
The problem here was that I had no clue where they lived. The last time I’d seen one, it had just attacked me outta nowhere. Pretty rude.
I thought about heading back to the cottage and seeing if the hellcat that attacked me had left any footprints near the cottage, but it was risky. For all I knew, the ogres had already gone back to claim the village. That was a no-go.
What could I do? Where did hellcats hang out?
Wait a second…
I took my poker out of my bag. The end of it had encrusted blood on it, and a little bit of fur was stuck to the tip which I’d used to beat the feline to death.
And there’s a thought I never imagined I’d have.
I showed the poker to Roddie. I put it right under his nose. His nostrils twitched, and he looked at me as if I was going mad. Maybe I was.
“Can you smell it?” I said. “I need to find more of them.”
He wagged his tail.
“Ata boy! What do you say? Can you track them?”
In answer, Roddie spread out on the overcoat on the ground, wagging his tail and staring at me with his watery, wide eyes.
Damn. I mean, I was happy to have a friend and all, but why couldn’t I have found a bloodhound?
I could just go seek out the clan, I guessed. The longer I left it, the further away they’d get, and it was already going to be tough to track them. I was hoping they would have taken a straight route from where I’d left them, but there were no guarantees.
But if I found them now, without any fire elementals, I couldn’t use the chare spell. Pendras would just shout “Isaac, gae!” at me again, and maybe he’d shoot a fireball at my face or something.
Nope, I needed elementals.
Okay, I had to think rationally about this. Hellcats were weird, sure. They had strange heat coming from their paws, and they had mutated heads. But they were still animals, and they’d have the same drives as anything else.
Food. Shelter. Water.
Wait, did cats made from elemental fire need water?
Whatever. Best to just focus on food and shelter. They’d need a place to sleep at night, and somewhere to hunt or scavenge during the day.
The best thing would be to explore a little. I could start heading back to where I had left the clan, and if I saw anything interesting on the way, I would check it out.
I went to grab my overcoat from the floor, but Roddie just stared at me, unmoving.
“Come on, buddy. We can’t waste the day.”
He didn’t move.
I fished a carrot piece from my bag and teased it in front of him, backing away until he got off my coat.
“Sucker,” I said, and threw the carrot a few feet away so he’d have to move completely.
Then, wrapped up in my coat, I set off.
We walked for hours, and I saw a little more of this new world. Given that I had already found a village and houses, I knew that there was civilization here somewhere. Or remnants of it at least. If there was a village, there had to be towns and cities someplace.
The problem was, I seemed to have been plonked down in some remote stretch of nothingness, right in the middle of a creeping winter. But I took care to look around me as Roddie and I hiked.
I began to see things. Bridges over rivers and streams, with moss and weeds covering the stonework. I even saw an old, abandoned carriage, minus the horses that must have once pulled it. Nature had reclaimed it, spreading vines and weeds over the metal frame. I checked inside, but I found nothing I could use.
We’d traveled maybe eight or nine miles by the time I saw a building. It was a giant wooden barn, the wooden walls covered in vines and moss. Weather-beaten, full of holes and looking ready to fall down.
Roddie stood to attention then. His tail was arrow straight, and he sniffed the air.
“What is it? Danger? Man, I wish you could talk.”
I approached the barn cautiously, with my poker in my hand. I circled around it, listening for anything inside. For talking, footsteps, anything.
I was about to go in when my caution took hold of me, and I waited ten more minutes, completely still and silent.
It was clear.
I wouldn’t have been able to open the doors by myself because they were just so big, standing twenty feet taller than me. Luckily they were already open a crack, and I was able to slip in.
The inside of the barn smelled of earth and faintly of mold or mildew. Light crept in through broken slats in the roof, casting a pale glow over what I now saw was a whole lot of nothing.
Just an old, rusted wheelbarrow, and a shovel resting against a post, the metal covered in rust.
And then I heard a mewing sound.
Not just one, but several.
I gripped my poker tighter in my hand. I looked around, left, right, up, down. Nothing. My nerves were so on edge I thought I’d snap.
And there it was again, that sound. Weak, low, but there all the same.
I crept forward a few paces, and that was when I saw them.
Five kittens all nestled amongst each other, with overgrown heads that looked so big their necks shouldn't have been able to support them.
When they saw me, they all leaped to their feet as one, and they hissed at me. Their paws began to glow, and faint wisps of smoke rose from beneath their feet.
“Oh, man.”
They were so young that I wasn’t too worried about their claws. I was bigger than them. Smarter. Maybe…just a little, anyway. And they were scared of me.
Made sense, I guessed. Maybe they knew what I already suspected; that I’d killed one of their parents. Cats roamed for miles when they were hunting, and it wasn’t a big leap to think that a cat had left this barn and found its way to the village.
I know what I have to do.
I didn’t want to, wished I didn’t have to, but I knew. This wasn’t the world I had once known. Even if I couldn’t really remember it, I knew I hadn’t come from a place like this.
I’d been left here, alone and defenseless, and the first people I’d seen had known how naïve and powerless I was, and they’d left me for it. This was an unforgiving place. A place where a man’s only duty was to himself.
I had learned how to use spells now. I had learned what fueled spells. If I was going to be self-sufficient in this world, I knew what I would have to do next.
Settling that in my head, I approached the young hellcats.
&nb
sp; “Everything is worth killing. This is a new world. Sorry,” I said.
There’s no need to go into what I did next. The specifics won’t help anyone.
All I knew was that a few minutes later, I sat on the barn floor and I used a quarter of a jar of stream water to wash the blood from my hands and wrists. I wiped the poker on the barn floor and I put it back in my bag.
As I did, words formed in the air.
[Fire] elementals received x5
CHAPTER 11 - Experiments
I had five [fire] elementals now. Let’s not dwell too much on how I got them.
That equated to five casts of chare, and I’d only need one to show Pendras what I could do. That meant that I could experiment on something I’d been thinking about while Roddie and I had walked earlier that day.
The way I saw it, there were four components to casting a spell. The medallion, the circle on my forehead, elementals, and the stances needed to build the spell in my body. I guessed that was what the stances did, anyway.
Now, maybe getting a new medallion would make a spell better. The mages of the Lonehill clan all had shiny ones. Ones of different colors, sizes, shapes. Kaleb, that kind, kind mage, had given me his cast-off medallion. It was crummy and beaten, but I was overwhelmingly grateful to him.
Still, that was a component I couldn’t change yet.
Similarly, I couldn’t do anything about the circle on my head. But more and more, I was certain that the circle was just a representation of a mage’s skills. I didn’t have a mirror handy to check, but I wondered if learning my first spell had changed the circle on my forehead.
Whatever the answer, it was something I couldn’t alter yet.
So, that left elementals and stances.
I had an inkling that there were all kinds of different creatures lurking out there. After all, I’d already seen ogres and weird hellcats.
What if there were bigger fire-based creatures? If I killed one, would I get better quality elementals from it? Or maybe a larger creature would just give me more than one elemental per kill. It was something to find out later, I guessed. I mean, I didn’t want to come across any fire-based creature bigger than a cat right now.
Everything Is Worth Killing- Isaac's Tale Page 7