Tag: the real thing

Thank God, it’s finished. Finally gelled at the last moments. Up on Patreon later.

On the other side, there was… well, it was once a man. There were still fragments of clothes on its long, splayed-forward arms and torso, and the withered wisps of what must have once been a full beard and head of hair. Its fingers were stretched forward, impossibly long, and I didn’t need magical senses to feel the closed circuit of sorcerous energy that flowed between it and the corruption, sustaining both, and neither.

I did need those magical senses to taste the flavor of the magic involved. I nodded, once. “Mage’s Alliance.”

The figure heard me. It couldn’t move its head, but its eyes swung towards us. It even managed to talk, after a fashion. “Another mage! Quick, help me destroy this filth–”

That’s when I interrupted it. “You’re on the wrong side of the river,” I told it calmly, and slammed the tip of my staff straight through its earhole, and out the other side. That probably would have done the job, but I let loose a little magic through the staff anyway. Better safe than sorry.

Exasperation!

The road was called ‘78’ — the Old Americans had the most boring street names of any people, any place, any time — and it clearly wanted to be plowing straight through a heavily forested area. As we kept walking east, though, the forest grew sicklier and sicklier. Within a mile, the trees weren’t sick; they were dead. The grass had long since withered away, and even the lichen and fungi had vanished.

It was about then that I started feeling the pressure on my improvised (but well-improvised) charm. The sensation wasn’t unbearable. In fact, it was easy to get used to. It was still a reminder that we weren’t anywhere safe.Lost Atlanta was pretty flat, so it wasn’t until we had reached one of the old maglev lines — okay, quick digression. Those weren’t magical. Yes, I know they look magical. Yes, I know that ‘lev’ is short for ‘levitation.’ But ‘mag’ was short for ‘magnetic,’ not ‘magic.’ It was all done mundanely, which admittedly sounds insane. The Old Americans were just really good with mechanical things, and I don’t care what those Ancient Mystical Tradition writers from the Second Republic are telling you. Books like those will rot your mind — right, sorry, ranting.

Lost Atlanta! …It’s horrible.

I’ve never seen a ruin as pitilessly bare as Lost Atlanta. Never. It had all the terrible purity and horror of a skull caught in its final death rictus. Even the air felt dead. Then again, it was.

It’s not that I haven’t seen ruins. The East Coast has a fraction of the population it once had, even in the Second Republic and the Kentucky Free State. My own Kingdom of Virginia is a land of empty towns and fallen ruins. But there’s still life in plenty to be found. Trees, grasses, bamboo, the animals that feed on those things, the animals that feed on those — there’s plenty of creatures that breathed a huge sigh of relief when their human neighbors went away, leaving behind all those lovely abandoned buildings to den in.

That wasn’t true here. The former lawns and planter pots now only grew hard, rocky clay, with a brown crust that must have once been grass or trees. There were a few surviving shrubs, mostly under some of the covered walkways. But even then they didn’t really survive. They were just… shriveled and shrunken, so dry that leaves and even branches puffed into nothingness if you breathed on them. Nothing was alive, except us. Even the cracks in the ground revealed no crabgrass or moss.

But there were bones, though. Bones I recognized, from the riverbank and the earlier fight. And far too many of them.

Fights!

“Grab those ropes tight!” ‘Bob’ shouted. “I need them taut!” 

For a second, it didn’t register — but then my eyes snapped in his direction. I could feel my face congeal with horror as I realized that he really was swinging the Old American fire ax at the ancient, writhing cables. The live cables, the ones full of electricity. 

I couldn’t intervene. My own hands were filled with spells to push back the other eruptions of plastic, wiry death. It was also too late to scream “STOP!” but I tried anyway, if only to let myself feel better later. ‘Bob’ heard me, but he didn’t even try to hesitate as he buried the ax into the tangle of wires trying to drag Nellas away by the throat. Its metal edge dug deep into the mass, cleaving cables in two…

…and nothing else happened. Well, obviously the cables were cut off from the central mass. But there were no sparks, no St. Elmo’s Fire, no grotesque last Galvanic Gavotte from the legends. Just a spray of cables, and fragments of decaying plastic through the air. Nellas even looked like he was getting more air.

“NEVER MIND!” I screamed again, and immediately changed tactics.

I finally blocked out the rest of the damned story. It’s like pulling teeth, this summer.

Finglas, Elanor, and I all hissed, “Hold!” at the same time. Perforce, the entire group stopped. Any one of us would have been enough to get them to stop, but all three? I’m surprised they didn’t take a few steps back. I’m surprised I didn’t.

“Lifebane,” I asked/commented to the other two. “Vitalism drain. I have a spell watching for it.”

Elanor nodded, and showed a blackened vial of goo. “Special fungus. Does the same thing as your spell. Doesn’t say what kind, though.”

Finglas grunted. “Air just smells bad here. Dead, but the wrong kind of dead. Dry-dead, not new-dead.”

“That’d be all the invisible demons in the air being killed,” I observed, then grimaced. “Sorry: all the bacteria. Good news if any of us get a cut, bad news if we go too much farther without protection. Elanor, you’ve got stuff for lifebane, right?”

Logic!

Best of all, I had managed to get an insight. “Where did the naked lizards come from?” I asked our impromptu grand council.

“You’re the mage,” Finglas pointed out. One of his ears looked pretty ragged, but he had gotten through the fight all right. “I’m sure you can tell us.” 

“Yes, I can.” I pulled out one of the scribbled-on maps we had brought with us. They were our best guesses of the roads around and through Lost Atlanta, and were just accurate enough that we kept using them. “Those things came at us from the north, which is where we think the Chattahoochee River is. They couldn’t have been far from their home hunting grounds, either.”

“Because they’re so thin?” Elanor asked. “Wouldn’t the river have fish in it, though?”

“Maybe,” said Nellas. He had gotten a nasty slash across his arm, but it was healing up well. “Some of these places got cursed or lifebaned pretty hard, back during the Discovery. But even if it does have fish, these creatures aren’t going to be great in the water.” He poked at one of the naked lizards we had cooked up for dinner. “See how these feet and claws move?”

I studied the half-eaten corpse. “Yes,” I finally intoned. “I have no idea what it means, though. You’re the scout, though. I’m sure you can tell us.”

More fights!

And the naked lizards had been whittled down to something almost manageable. Most of them were worrying at the meager flesh of their fallen packmates; the rest had learned wariness, at least. “How smart are these heconnar?” ‘Bob’ snarled as we scrambled past the half-cleared hedge that was our major defense. “Because they don’t act too stupid!”

“How would I know?” I snapped back. Then I paused. “Dammit. They’re not sapient. Their heads are too small and they don’t have hands. These things are here to eat, not think.”

“That sounds like good news!” Either Elanor was mad, or just wanted to get in the spirit of things, because she was being loud, too. “Why is that a problem?”

“It’s not!” I grimaced, and lowered my voice. “It’s not. I just hate it when I have to correct myself. I did know, after all.”

Magic!

I don’t like casting spells outside of the Kingdom. The magic is so slow out here, like I’m running through syrup, and it smells/tastes weak, too. More than one Virginian mage has gotten into a lot of trouble by trying to pull in magic that just wasn’t there, or tough enough to be pulled, so I had to be quick and gentle in absorbing the local the energy… I’m sorry. This makes more sense to mages. Try to imagine that I was pulling a tablecloth off of a table without disturbing the dishes and glasses, only the tablecloth was really tissue paper. You can still do it without everything ripping, but you need to do it right.

I got it right. Mostly. Well enough that the difference didn’t matter. It’s actually no big deal when your nose bleeds. Anything can cause a nosebleed, right? You only really have to worry when it’s your ears or eyes. The important thing was, I had the power I needed by the time I jumped through the ring of fire. So obviously it was time to start using it.

I started out by taking over the flames, fueling them from some of my own gathered power, and the magic still remaining in the area. That wouldn’t last forever, either, but I didn’t need forever. I steadied that spell in one hand while pulling together a cloud spell with the other. It sounds harder than it is; most simple magics can be done one-handed, and we train ourselves to use both, from an early age.

Fights!

The protection spell helped, too. It turned gutting swipes into slashes and bone-splintering chomps into bites, and the party could fight back. You hear stories about elven archers? It turns out they’re all true. ‘Bob’ in particular was a whirling dervish, leaving three knives in three naked lizard eyesockets in four seconds before buckling down to shoot in the suddenly-cleared space around him. He emptied his quiver in moments, but that didn’t matter; I saw him plucking arrows out of the actual air as the archers tumbled and dodged their way around the fight. The elves call it the nurulilte, the Dance of Death, and seeing it made me very glad that Virginia and the Elf-Lands were at peace.

I was doing some cavorting on my own, looking for the team. The fighters were fine on their own; the Carver brothers had lived up to their own name, spraying lizard blood and guts about them as they hewed a way to the fallen archer; and Elanor — dammit, Elanor was in a circle of flame, surrounded by a ring of angry, scorched naked lizards. Worse, the flames were flickering. Alchemy is wonderful, and sometimes even better than magic. It just doesn’t last long.

Anyway, I know a hint when I see one.

Naked lizards! …The horrible kind. Not the weird Skyrim mod kind.

Our best bet was to move west, and track down what the old maps called the Chattahoochee River. 

I have no idea what that word means, by the way. I’m assuming it meant something like ‘hidden,’ because we had spent a day trying to find it, and failing. And it was hot, and it was dry, and the air was also somehow greasy, and every fly and mosquito in Georgia was trying to make our acquaintance.

That last, at least, I could do something about; I used a cantrip from the Second Republic to suck the life force out of every bug that came within twenty feet. It worked fine, but that meant the party had to try to stay within twenty feet of me, too. That made our travel a little crowded, with people jostling each other as they tried to stay in range. I’m not a fan of being crowded, especially when nobody’s bathed enough to suit me, including me. Very much including me.

But it was just as well. If the naked lizard pack had attacked us while we were all spread out, things would have gotten even messier. As it was, three of them had jumped one of the archers and had him down in the dirt screaming as they swept at his body with their red-dripping fighting claws.