8 May 2021 - Day 1

  Ditching the mental word vomit, I grabbed Sandra by the arm and we trotted home side by side with our eyes wide open. Getting home was uneventful, something we didn’t expect but the sun was beginning to go down and my instincts started howling at me again. Darkness was always a time that mankind feared, especially considering we lived under its rule for most of human history. Before fire, we did not occupy the top of the hierarchy, the primordial food chain. We were below bears, dinosaurs, wolves, and the like, and it wasn’t until fire came to be that we humans clawed, thought, and burned our way to the top. With fire, we beat back the edges of the night even though it mercilessly returned at the end of every day.

  With magic coming back, the oppressive veil of night regained its significance and triggered the genetically built in instincts that our hindbrain harbored, the ones we suppressed with electric lighting and Netflix, the lingering fears we repressed and pushed away. My own hackles raised unconsciously making me look around more and more as my hands gripped their tools harder and harder. Sandra was worse, she started floating and unconsciously generated and dissipating shields over and over as she continuously scanned the area.

  [Why do I feel this way?] She asked through our mental link.

  [I think the reasons we used to be scared of the dark are returning.] I answered, my head on a swivel. [I haven’t felt this way when I was six and my older brother scared me so badly in the middle of the night that I peed myself. I never trusted a closet ever again. Evil looking raggedy Ann doll in the closet with just enough light from the hallway to make it look like a demon coming to eat me. Hated that doll.]

  Arriving home provided the barest bit of comfort. I hauled in firewood while Sandra got it going. She also got out bunches of candles and lit those around the main floor of the house. I also started bringing in everything from the shed and putting it in the basement.

  “What are you doing babe?” Sandra asked as she fed the fire.

  “What I should have been doing all day, making this house a bit more durable.” I went outside and got to work, hustling as fast as I could. For the small windows in the basement, I used earth magic to pull up dirt and cover them up, compressing the handfuls of dirt into stone so that nothing would tunnel through. It looked like I was playing with play-doh, shaping the dirt with my magic to form protection for the windows. I watched with childlike wonder as it took only little bits of energy to actually watch in real time as the dirt hardened and compressed into solid stone.

  After that, I covered up the crappy side door of the house with more transmuted stone and then brought in a bunch of scavenged steel from cars around the neighborhood as well as a bunch of stone that filled up most of the living room space. All the dirt that I used, I pulled up from the yard in front of the abandoned house to the left. I used the time to experiment, transmuting the dirt into stone kettlebells and weights of different make and sizes for easy carrying. By the time I had gotten enough, it looked like I was digging a new foundation for somebody else.

  “A bit much huh?” Sandra asked incredulously, using her telekinesis to move stuff around to give me room to work.

  “We’ll see.” I grunted, hefting a column of stone with the handles built into the core like one of those strongmen log press bars.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Sorry babe, I think this is on me,” I grunted. “You’ll be doing a lot more tomorrow, trust me.” Each hunk of stone was put next to the inner wall of the house and then shaped to form a second wall at least an inch thick to reinforce the mostly wood construction of our home. I did this over and over, making many trips outside and reinforcing the house, using the steel to cover up the windows.

  Sandra kept me fueled up, handing me sandwiches or snacks. I ate like a starving man between trips, wolfing down food to help keep up my energy levels. The steel plates I shaped took a bit of time as I had to embed them into the edges in the stone forming the wall’s second layer. By the time the first floor was complete, I was exhausted. My pool of magic had been emptied and refilled over and over and I was gassed out. Night had fallen two hours ago but my eyes were closing on their own.

  Sandra put yet another plate of food in front of me, leftover pot roast. “I heated it up by the fire,” she said with a smile. Her eyes showed me how grateful she was that I took our safety seriously. “When you’re done, let me know. I have a pot filled with warm water so we can get clean.

  Hunger levered my eyes back open as I reached forward, forcing myself to eat slow. The next ten minutes were a blur of me barely being able to take off my armor, getting myself a halfhearted wipedown bath, and then passing out. More than once, I’m pretty sure my wife used her telekinesis to ‘assist’ me and even adjust me once I crashed into bed.

  *******

  Monday - Day 2 - 9 May 2021

  My eyes sprang open with ideas that only a night of truly devastating REM sleep could produce. The unconscious part of my brain had chewed the cud so much over Earl’s words that I still heard a grinding sound. Diagonal slits shaped into the metal covering the window still allowed enough light through to allow me to deduce that morning had arrived but the usual warmth next to me was gone.

  “Babe? Babe!” I yelled, looking around before jumping out of bed. Not having her next to me freaked me out as I sort of thought it was all a crazy dream. My gear lying next to the bed and the new steel shades covering the window disabused me of that notion though. The smallest, most childish part of me cried out for me to return to bed and ignore the shift of reality.

  “Full status.” I called out softly, watching the translucent blue screen appear in front of me.

  “Uhg, yup. Still the apocalypse.” Part of me kept picking at the floating breakdown, the representation of me that boiled down to a simple set of tables. Nothing had updated, nothing had changed . . . “WAIT!”

  The little piece that annoyed me the most HAD updated . . . my Dexterity went up by ‘.1’ as my overweight percentage went down by ‘1%’. I hopped up and raced to the bathroom, shaping the steel shades to let in a bit more light so I could look in the mirror. The small excesses around my midline were a bit smaller and my jawline was a hair sharper. “It’s either due to constantly working and then losing a lot of water weight yesterday OR it’s mostly due to my magic pulling from my stores of fat for energy,” I wondered aloud, poking at the lessened pudge covering what should be washboard abs. “If this is true, then we’re going to need to seriously bulk up on calories.”

  That doesn’t mean that I was magically in shape though. I could still easily grab some fat off my body, more than I should. There’s a big difference between ‘overweight’ and ‘in shape’ due to a whole range of ‘average’ being between the two. Remembering the body fat percentage scales off the top of my head wasn’t that important but what was important was that I could lose a percent of my body weight in fat in twenty four hours if I worked my ass off.

  That revelation meant three things: Sandra needed to jumpstart the garden today specifically with potatoes for the high caloric potential, I needed to see if there were farmable or hunt-able animals around at all, and we needed to hardcore scavenge and loot. Tapping the WaterBob in the tub, I drank my fill and then finished the half-hearted wipedown with a washcloth to get clean. Brushing my teeth with water to save a bit on toothpaste, I cracked my neck and then started examining my armor. It looked to be a little dirty but not actually damaged. Gathering it all up while still in just my boxers, I took it downstairs to my Alchemy ritual circle and put all the gear in there. “I dub thee, my new washer and dryer!”

  In less than a minute, the Alchemic working had removed all the extra grit and dried blood from yesterday, turning it to dried dust and setting it off to the side. Since I didn’t really change anything substantial about my armor, it didn’t really cost me anything to do that.

  “Nice,” I said, putting my gear on. “This will really cut down on my water bill.” Laughing a bit at my own stupid joke, I started hunting around the house. “Sandra! Babe! Where you at?” Stopping because I knew how dumb I really was, I probed the recesses of my mind until I found what I was looking for. Once I got a hold of that tenuous connection, I pinged down our mental link.

  [Hey, where’d you go?] I asked, feeling dumb but excited all at the same time. It’s like having a cell phone in your head, minus all the cool widgets and games.

  A picture filled my brain coming from her side of the connection. I couldn’t believe it at first. Our humble little garden had grown to become a chest high jungle. It was disorienting to see it from her perspective. I had to see it with my own two eyes. Double checking my gear to make sure I was armored up took just over a minute and then I sprinted out the back door.

  “Look!”

  Luscious tomato plants canvassed the side of the stone fence all along the left side of the yard as the main portion of the garden boasted a split between onion shoots reaching three feet high and the potato bushes towering over those by another foot! I barely recognized what I was looking at due to everything being much bigger than it was supposed to be.

  Carrot greens sprouted between the leaves of lettuce as beans grew up the other side of our fence. The back side of our fence served as a support for the immature squash plants that leaned up against them and my wife lazily floated in the middle of everything on a platform of blue energy. Light green motes were falling out of her hands slowly as if she were spreading very fine grain fertilizer.

  The blissful smile on her face showed a kind of peace that wasn’t possible with the stresses of modern life. My gorgeous wife turned that million watt smile on me and waved, gesturing at her entire garden. “There was a whole bunch of seeds in the shed from last year and some my mom gave me so I went ahead and planted them! Check it out! I can grow anything!”

  I looked around in wonder, simply floored by the way her magic encouraged everything to live in harmony. Sandra twirled her finger, telling me to look behind me. I did and underneath the deck in the shade sat wet mushroom logs that we had been planning on giving to some hippy friends of ours. I shook my head in disbelief. I took a step back and I could see apple trees growing up the side of the house.

  “Honey, I really don’t know what to say!” I gasped, wonder making my voice catch in my throat. “Half of these plants should be choking out the others, how did you manage to do all this? This shouldn’t be possible!”

  Sandra smiled and shrugged. “They listened.” I squinted at her and then gave her a mental poke through our connection, demanding a better explanation. She chuckled. “I had a hard time sleeping last night so as soon as the damn sun popped up I was up. I couldn’t wake you so I came out here to practice my plant magic.” Floating over to me, my beautiful wife hopped off the platform as it dissipated into nothing. “The more I meditated the more energy I noticed going towards things we didn’t need, so I redirected a lot of the ambient power, or what do you call it, mana?” I nodded with a shrug. “Mana then. I directed the life and mana out of the grass and weeds I didn’t need and funneled all of it into the seeds. As soon as that happened, I gave my own energy to the plants and then I started absorbing the mana from the air and the sun and the earth and that went into the plants too!”

  “Holy shit, you’re a druid!” I grabbed her by the hands, my mind racing. “Babe! That thing you did where you pulled in mana and redirected it, can you only do it with plants or can you do it with other things too? Maybe like me for example?”

  She looked uncertain but I nodded with excitement for her to keep going. “Uh, not sure. I know that in order for it to start, I have to be perfectly still in my mind and then once I’m in the right state I can move but very slowly. It’s a slow process too, like this took me all morning.” Sandra frowned at me a little. “You know it’s almost noon right?”

  “What?! No!” I looked as the sun wouldn’t lie to me and sure enough, the blazing life giving orb was almost directly overhead. “Crap, yesterday must have wiped more out than I thought.”

  She rubbed my shoulder. “That’s why I let you sleep in. You need your rest.” Looking around at the fantastic garden, she scratched her chin. “What are you planning on doing again?”

  I took a deep breath. “I really have too much to do today. There are a few things we’re going to need to do together first though, and they’re a bit less than legal. Although I’m sure that ‘legal’ isn’t a term we need to worry about for the foreseeable future.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as . . .” I started, holding up my hand so I could count off my fingers. “We need to find and raid a pharmacy or two for a couple reasons, medicine and then getting the supplies needed for an alchemical experiment that may just revolutionize modern medicine. Two, we need to loot a gas station because there’s a very small chance that I might be able to get gas working, and then I need to see if I can use my Alchemy to get firearms working again. I just need a lot of different kinds of things and then a lot of time for experimentation.” I couldn’t tell if Sandra was looking at me like I was nuts, a genius, or a mix of the two.

  “That’s a lot to take in . . .” She said, frowning that cute thinking frown of hers. It’s why I could never stay mad at her. “Do you really think you can do all those things?”

  “That’s what I’m going to find out, but first, I had some seriously crazy dreams that were probably left over from that first infusion of magic insanity and I’m going to try them out.” I scratched my head for a second. “Honestly, it feels like there’s more in my head related to my new abilities than I currently have access to. Weird.”

  Twenty minutes later, I knew for a fact that my wife thought I had gone completely insane. I just couldn’t get the stupid idea from my crazy ass dream out of my head. I was working with mere half-remembered flickers that were fading way too fast. In my dream, I had an Alchemic circle all set up and a giant tree towering over it filled with fruit that glowed like a rainbow in a bottle. Of course the dream cut off before I could eat the damn fruit but there were piles of random items that I remember vanishing just before the tree came to life.

  In the backyard, I had gathered up a bunch of things from the house and laid them out in the ritual Alchemy circle. It was like something else was pushing me in this direction, like a half remembered instinct driving me to accomplish something just out of the reach of an old memory.

  I looked again at what I’d gathered. A half geode filled with a pretty crystal called agate that was a mix of bluish and purplish colors sat in the very center, the core and focus of this entire experiment. Around it, but still within the ritual circle, I placed a travel solar panel device that I bought from Amazon mainly used to charge phones while camping, a few old spare panes of glass underneath the portable solar panel and two truck batteries I nicked from the abandoned vehicles on our street stacked on top of each other. To top it all off, I carefully placed a small apple seedling with some fruiting buds still on it that Sandra grew with her plant magic along with several of Sandra’s earrings made of sterling silver.

  “I still don’t get it,” Sandra pouted. “I just grew that tree and you’re using my earrings? Those are the nice nice ones with diamond and sapphire dust to make them extra sparkly!” She ranted before petering out with a sigh. “I trust you, I really do, but this seems, well, unbelievable? Far-fetched?”

  “I get it, I do, trust me for a bit longer.” I soothed, walking away from the ritual circle until I was about ten feet away. “But I need you for two things, probably. The first one is a test, and if that goes well then you’ll be a part of test number two.” I called up a bit of dirt and then shaped it into stone, forming it into another ritual circle albeit a much smaller one than the main one that was ten feet in diameter. Taking a moment to think, I pulled out my notebook and jotted down a few more thoughts.

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  Going off a bit of what Earl said yesterday, I looked down and said, “So, is it easier to give a rod of cast iron the flexibility of a willow stick or is it easier to make a willow stick as strong as cast iron?”

  “I’m not sure there’s really a difference?” Sandra answered as I put a small rod of cast iron and a willow branch into the circle. The slim branch was bent around and tied to itself so that it formed a circle of its own.

  “Me either, but that’s only a part of the experiment, god, there’s so many angles to this.” I waved at the smaller ritual circle with my notebook. “I need to explore every part of this process. We’re going to see if another person can contribute energy to the Alchemic working other than myself.” I held up another finger, ticking them off one by one as I spoke. “We’re seeing if living matter can be messed with and used. And we’re also going to put Earl’s message from an angel to the test. I just need you to get in that state of mind you were talking about earlier when you feel the energy around you and I need you to put your hands on the circle just like me.”

  “Why am I needed?” She asked. “I watched you do this for hours yesterday making armor and weapons and all kinds of things. You’ve got plenty of gas in the tank already.”

  “The energy cost babe,” I pleaded. “If I’m right, then I’ll only need your help for two rituals and then I can pretty much make the world our oyster.”

  “Fine.” She grumbled.

  “Look.” I said, patting my notebook on the ritual circle. “Honestly, yesterday got me thinking and if somebody gave me a message from an ArchAngel, and we’re assuming crazy shit is sane now, then trying out my Alchemy and pushing it to the limit is something I should be doing. And I’ve got some crazy awesome ideas to try.”

  Hoping her faith in me wasn’t misplaced even though I knew her main focus was on figuring out ways to get to our families, my wife did genuinely back all of my crazy ideas. And for better or for worse, they usually worked. With her kneeling down next to me, I put my hands on the border of the ritual circle and focused, filling the border with my mana but no more than that. Sandra hovered her hands over the border but didn’t touch them yet. My patience didn’t need much testing as I could see her skin color actually change the more she meditated. From a lovely pale Irish tone, her arms and face took on a gentle forest green. I watched her breathing deepen and even out over ten minutes until her eyes opened with green light spilling out.

  “Ready.” She said. I nodded without remarking on her change and she mirrored her hands on the circle.

  A calm but inexorable wave of energy rushed out of my wife almost overpowering the calm current of my own power. Forcing the flow of energy to calm, I let part of myself relax in that moment, feeling all of the elements of nature as they mixed in from my wife. Her own power was great and formed the core of what she output but small bright notes of sunshine and pollinated winds and minerals from the earth along with green motes of bright herbal growth saturated the ritual. It was a wonder to see her manage this mixture of her own energy combining with the external magic gathered from the living greenery all around us.

  Not letting the opportunity pass me by, I gathered it all together, spinning the energy faster and faster along the border and at the moment it unified I let it flood into the willow branch and the cast iron rod. Sandra kept up the flow of energy while I focused on the vision of what I wanted, shaping and molding and melting and fusing, all of it rolled into one as a flare of light overtook the circle and then faded out.

  The backwash of the leftover mana flowed into the border where I made sure to push it back into Sandra, replenishing most of her stores. She looked up at me as I let the memory of the experience from my side flow down our tenuous mental link. Closing her eyes, she relived the short but detail dense event from the side of the Alchemist instead of the battery, herself.

  “What a ride! Is that what you feel every time you do it?”

  I nodded, guiding the end of the ritual so that the bonded item settled down from the Alchemic energization.

  Sandra looked down, staring at the ritual circle in wonder. “It really is about what things mean!” She wheezed. Sandra snatched up the two foot long willow branch. “Bit heavier than I expected,” she grunted, placing both hands and giving it a nice bend. “Weighs a few pounds but it bends just like a willow branch! Success!” She smacked it hard against the ground leaving a two inch divot. She whacked the metal table on the deck making a sharp metallic sound. “And it’s still metal, wow! So what’s the next one?”

  I let her enthusiasm over our first successful trial carry us over to the main circle. Holding my hand out, Sandra dropped our creation into it. “You’re right, it gained some weight and solidity but it still bends.” Bending down, I did my own testing, lightly smacking the main ritual circle with the rod. Another metallic clang rang out. “And it’s as hard as iron, nice.”

  Sandra looked at me with eyes filled with excitement. “And the next one?” She prodded.

  “You tell me,” I chuckled. “Think of what each thing does or could do, and what it means. What is the purpose of each item, what does it symbolize?”

  “Ok, I’ll start here.” Placing her hand on the truck batteries, she looked up at me. “Big batteries you took out of a truck, batteries hold electricity, they power a car, no, they store power from the engine and use it to power the electrical systems of a car. So, the batteries’ purpose is to store and emit power.”

  “Right, but that was the easy one.”

  She cracked her neck, rolling her eyes before pointing at the next item in the circle. “True, ok, and the solar charging device. Its purpose is to convert solar energy into electricity, or power we can use, but I really don’t see what an apple tree or the silver has to do with anything, let alone the crystal in the center there. Did you give that to me for Earth Day last year?”

  “Hehe, yeah, and now it’s going to be more than just a pretty desk ornament,” I cracked my knuckles. “All right, imagine this: all of this combines, and the end product I envision is an agate crystal that can store mana, absorb solar power for mana, and convert other kinds of ambient energy into usable power for us. Also, crystals grow, you can make crystals if you know the right process and I’m betting that magic can facilitate that process, so what do you think the rest of it does then?”

  She looked at me blankly.

  “It’s ok, most of this came from my crazy dream so if you can’t figure it out then this process will probably stay safe.” I took a deep breath, pointing to each item in turn. “To start, the extra glass under the solar panel is simply for extra base material. Now, the tree is for the symbology, the meaning. Trees grow and apple trees produce fruit that is useful and good for many different things. The tree will imbue the ideas of growth and versatility and the general feeling of wholesome life. Also, trees grow and live from both the energy of the sun and the water and minerals it pulls from the soil.”

  “Duh.”

  I gave my wife a quick, nonserious glare but continued on. “Silver is for the concept of conductivity, silver is one of the most conductive metals on earth, which will grant the concept of easily absorbing and emitting energy when required. This will help to absorb the diffuse forms of energy that we’re harvesting as solar energy on the scale that we harvest simply isn’t as dense as propane or gas or nuclear. And the agate, well, that’s the key of this whole thing. Agate is a common crystal but it’s nice to look at, it isn’t see through, and Wiccans liked it because it was for purifying negative energy and keeping a clean mind, which is why I gave it to you. It’s a symbol.”

  “LET’S DO IT!” Sandra freaked. Jumping up and down like an excited toddler, she hopped into my arms. “I’m so freaking stoked! You’re basically going to make a perfectly green energy source that anyone can use!”

  “That’s the plan!” I smiled, even more ecstatic because my wife was actually enthused about something nerdy like this. “And the reason I need you babe is because I need you in that state of mind where you have all of that extra energy. Something that will be able to do what we’re planning on it being able to do is going to cost a lot.”

  My wife’s enthusiasm was infectious, and a little distracting. Her bouncing around really caught my eye. “Hold on, hold on!” I cautioned, bringing my hormones back in line as I set her down. “Before we do this, we need to fuel up. We need to eat as much as we can and then also have that ready for right after. We might be starving if we miscalculate how much energy we need.”

  “Easy, there’s a big stew pot in the fridge from three days ago. Beef heart and tongue stew.”

  Weird as hell name but always a super delicious meal. Cow tongue and heart is dirt cheap but absolutely one of the best meals I’ve ever had and it’s cooked for hours with noodles and gravy all in it so everything comes out tender as sin. That meal alone can make a human gain twenty extra pounds. I’m going to miss that butcher shop just a few streets away.

  “Perfect.” Bringing it outside, we both wolfed down a cold bowl of stew each, putting the big stew pot on the table on the deck.

  Patting my full stomach, I cracked my neck. “I really hope this works,” I muttered. “Hey, see if you can sync up with me through that mental link you set up,” I said a bit louder. “Maybe us doing this in tandem can make this easier, ya know, grasping at any straw I can.”

  “Sure.”

  Our mental connection opened a bit as both knelt down with our hands on the ritual circle. She picked hers back up as she meditated, getting back into that ‘one with nature’ mindset that allowed her to tap into all that extra power. It felt similar though, as if I had done it before, like how I had felt just before last night when I was hauling tons of dirt and shaping it into stone. My legs and my body were so deep in the dirt that I felt something resonate inside of me, like I was able to unconsciously tap into a trickle of power that kept me going. Lifting my own hands up, I sank from my knees down into the dirt, pushing my awareness lower. I tried to yank on the energy that I could feel around me but the tighter I gripped the more it slipped away.

  [Easy! Easy . . . relax . . . woosaaaah, just let it come, the way the waves on the beach naturally fill the footprints back in.”

  I took a moment, breathing deeper and deeper, forcing my grip to relax. It took longer than I hoped but as my Terrastria unfurled from my soul, my Mana-Forged trait assisted. The lowest part of my consciousness began to sink into the soil, slowly letting energy seep into me. [Yes, just like that!] Sandra sent mentally. [That’s how mine feels but mine is given by all the plants, the grass included. Don’t force it, just let it fill you.]

  Maintaining the trickle, I set my hands down slowly on the border. I didn’t fill the ritual border with my own energy, I let the overflow of the power drain into the circle, filling it much slower but it didn’t touch my own reserves of energy at all.

  [This will actually help with the energy issue,] I replied. [It would literally take all day though if we don’t use our own stores of power.] I felt a mental nod as my wife set her own hands down, adding her reservoir to the mix.

  Like I did before, I ran our energies through the border, thoroughly mixing them until they formed a unified whole before letting them sift from the border to the inner circle of the ritual stone. This time, I forced it to go slower, relying more on the overflow of energy we were absorbing. The mana filling the ritual circle was an invisible gas until it reached a saturation point and then it liquefied into a visible pool of silver liquid that covered and began to dissolve everything.

  My instincts screamed at me, NOW!

  Sandra felt my urgency and allowed me to dip into her well of power as I also opened up the floodgates to my own.

  Deep brown avalanches of earthen power mixed with bright green flashes of living plant mana, mixing into a symbiotic whole as they strengthened one another for a unified purpose. The dense liquid, the consolidated mana, sought an outlet but my will commanded our joint efforts. The truck batteries absorbed all the mana they could handle and then dissolved, the silver dissolving next and then the solar panel with the extra glass. The apple tree hung on the longest, absorbing more and more power even as the geode dissolved into raw material.

  My vision was perfectly clear, I knew what I wanted this process to create but my newly implanted instincts were changing it. My advent-created Power had given me unconscious tendencies, historical instincts to guide me along the right path with gifted knowledge. Letting the new parts of myself guide my Alchemy, I went with the flow.

  Bright silver mana composed of all the broken down ingredients save the tree and the still accumulating power coated the tree, swirling around it until every bit of bark and root and leaf actually turned burnished silver. The excess mana sank into the tree yet still it demanded more. Sandra willingly relinquished all of her energy plus the extra she was still channeling as I kicked the gates of my reservoir wide open. I knew for a fact that my personal stores of magic were higher than anyone I’d met so far and right now I needed them. My status set my value of Energy at a ‘10’ and Sandra’s at a ‘6’ but that doesn’t help me visualize it.

  Her value of ‘6’ in Energy to me felt like a large storage tank, one three times the size of a water barrel but mine felt like it could hold a legit swimming pool. Not the small kind that you can’t really swim in, but the kind that one rich neighbor gets and all the kids in the area want to play in because it can easily fit twenty plus people.

  As my wife’s soul was completely bared to me in those few seconds, I saw a representation of her power, my mind interpreting the Arcane in a literal form for understanding. The extra mana she held from meditation was like her soul building holding extra propane tanks worth of power. It allowed her to use energy she gathered without touching her own stores but they wouldn’t last. She would have to meditate every day in nature to maintain those extra energy banks. I felt my focus yanked back to the task at hand as the ritual slowed, the demanded energy requirements finally being met.

  Brilliant glowing streams of light faded until only the much bigger apple tree stood proudly in the center of the ritual circle towering over us. Its roots had overgrown the entire stone circle, spreading across the surface and down until it reached the ground. Sadly, my ritual table was split right in half because a main root tunneled down and cracked through the stone to form the main anchor. Every bit of the plant reflected the bright sunlight, calling to anything with eyes to take it in. I wondered at the magnificent silver color and how anything that lived could actually look like that.

  Most of the energy was sucked straight into the tree, as if it were a vortex of power. Those last motes blew away in the wind and I staggered to my feet. Stepping closer, I examined the tree, straining to see the little veins on the leaves and the flaky shards of bark sticking out of the sides of the larger bark pieces. Where apples would normally be on a tree were instead solid pods the size of softballs that shone with a dark oaken luster. The barely mature tree sported ten of these pods. Closer inspection revealed that the fruit pods had a seam dividing the fruit into two halves.

  I just nodded while my brain just made a sort of blank humming sound, nothing going on inside. “This . . . this is not what I had in mind. I wanted a crystal that grew from gathering energy, not a fucking tree.” I growled, chewing the inside of my cheek. I walked around the tree, simply not believing the reality that my eyes were presenting to me. I get it, magic is new and Alchemy is real but that initial vision of what I wanted and what my instincts, influenced by my wife’s help and nature, produced something that was so completely different that I just couldn’t wrap my mind around it. The midday sun made the whole tree glisten and really made the brown pods stand out from the world’s freakiest silver statue. My hands just had to know; I reached forward and poked the tree trunk.

  It felt like bark.

  I grabbed a silvery leaf. Soft with the expected waxy feel.

  Sandra looked at me, her eyes popping out of her head. “What happened?” My voice refused to engage. “This isn’t anything like, uh, anything?!”

  I coughed, still walking around the tree and poking it. “Definitely not . . . what I was expecting . . . but .”

  “But WHAT?”

  “But the purpose didn’t change, I don’t think. It should still do what I want, but the mechanism changed,” I guessed, thinking my way through this one step at a time. “I mean, it didn’t blow up and it didn’t ‘not’ finish so technically we succeeded in completing the ritual.”

  I kept walking around the tree. “Your infusion of mana was obviously needed or we wouldn’t have enough juice to do this, that much I know is true. I’m guessing that the variable we didn’t account for is that your energy was pulled from plants and filtered through you, and I did the same thing but with the earth.”

  Sandra made the motion with her hand for me to talk faster.

  I flicked the trunk of the tree, letting out a deep breath. “So . . . and this is a pure fucking guess, the focus of the ritual shifted to the tree instead of the crystal, but the crystal is still part of it. Everything was reduced, remade, and infused, not into the crystal but the apple tree.”

  Sandra growled at me. “English, Grant, speak English!”

  “Uhg, fine. Think about it this way,” I said, motioning her towards the food on the deck as I walked up there and began spooning generous portions of stew into our bowls. “Remember watching Bob Ross paint and accidentally putting a black smear on his landscape painting? What did he say?”

  She smirked at me for a moment. Then tucking her hair behind her ears and grabbing a bowl, she took a big slurp. “He said, ‘there are no mistakes’, and then he added more black paint to turn the mistake of a smear into a bird.”

  “Right, he used a ‘mistake’ to add more creativity and then arrive at a better result,” I explained. “My gut is telling me that we did the same thing by accident. And because we’re just not exactly sure yet as to the ‘how’, we don’t know how it’ll work. We got to where we wanted to go, but we drove blindfolded and lucked the fuck out but it still counts. So, when you commune with the garden, try and focus on the silver tree and see if you can divine what’s going on with it.” I started shoveling the food in my mouth as my stomach attempted to start a revolt. My stores of energy were very low but in the good kind of way, the way you feel after completing a necessary but physically demanding job.

  “I just don’t get it,” my wife grumbled. “How could it turn out so different? I was in your mind, we were connected and the whole thing went off without a hitch! You even predicted that we’d need more energy and everything!”

  “Predicted is a strong word,” I clarified, taking a sip of water. “My instincts for this are a bit vague, like, I can look at the stuff on my ritual circle and generally tell if I need more material or more energy or if something is off. Besides, with Alchemy, I can always just overcompensate with material quantity as the extra unneeded material can just be put off to the side. The problem is that it’s not super specific. I’m not following a set recipe or anything.”

  “Gimme an example,” Sandra asked. She pointed at her ample chest. “My stuff is pretty simple, my powers I mean. It just comes to me.”

  I smirked. “Exactly, well, kinda,” I said, waving my hand in a ‘so-so’ manner. “Your plant stuff and mind powers seem to come easy to you, but the other two things don’t really seem to have come into play yet,” I pointed out. “Unless that ‘Harmonic’ thing is related to you pulling in mana from the world around you. But, you haven’t portaled anywhere yet. Most of my abilities are freaking easy because they’re simple. Super strength in muscle and a lot of gas in the magical tank, that’s easy. Earth magic where I can shape, play with, and transmute anything related to dirt and stone and metal, also pretty damn basic. But Alchemy, that’s next level shit. If I were an engineer or a physics major, I’m pretty sure I could easily take over the world.”

  Sandra’s eyes narrowed. “You mean like, make magical nuclear bombs and shit.”

  “Roughly, possibly . . .” I theorized, waving my spoon in the air. I took a minute to jot down a few more thoughts in my notebook. “Maybe? I know the basic formula from school, ‘E’ equals ‘mc’ squared, or energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared but that doesn’t mean I understand it. There’s a big difference between hearing something a teacher said and knowing what it actually meant and how it applies, so on and so forth.”

  Shaking my head, I drank some water to clear my throat. “Nobody really grasps how fast light moves or how mass really works. The numbers of the math lose their relevance because our brains are just too small. Is dark matter a thing and how does gravity play into everything? Is it a force or is it governed by a particle? Physicists have been arguing about this for decades at that point. Our brains are just too small. If I played around with forces like that, I could just as easily wipe Virginia off the globe. Better to start small, and see if I can make reusable, rechargeable energy sources. We have all kinds of new energy to play around with, and besides, LOOK at what happens when we try an ‘easy’ experiment. Freaking magic silver tree pops outta nowhere.”

  “It just, I dunno, scares me?” She started, putting her spoon down. “You usually have your feet pretty solidly stuck to the ground, you’re dependable and smart but I know what happens when people get ahold of power.”

  “I’m your husband, babe.” I declared, grabbing her hands. With a light laugh, I gave those small hands a gentle squeeze. “Trust me, you’ll be the scary one when your powers get figured out. Think about it.” She looked up at me with those adorable blue eyes. “If you can portal anywhere, then nobody can stop you. You can chuck a bomb in a president’s bed or kill someone and dump their body on another planet. You can find epic killer plants from another reality and take over anywhere you want. You’ve already found a way to access more energy than your normal limits allow for, you’re the dangerous one. Good lord, just think about the insane ways you could abuse your psychokinetic powers if you get real good with them . . .”

  “I didn’t want any of this.” Sandra sniffed, releasing my hand and pulling away. “You actually look happy about it, this, this crazy situation. I just wanted to start having babies and move to the countryside and raise a family.”

  I raised my hands, gesturing around. “We can do that! Look around you! You can grow anything! Also, there’s no government, no bills to pay, no nothing! I can build anything with my powers, and my Alchemy can probably do the rest!”

  She sniffed a little softer this time but I could see a smile forming. “And!” I continued, grabbing a rock and shaping it into a crude example of a very miniature house. “I can make a nice house wherever you want and whatever size you want. You want a new addition? Easy. You want a bigger nursery? Done.” She smiled at me. “You will have literally any kind of garden you want! And the craziest thing is, did you notice something else crazy about your status window or mine? We actually ‘de-aged’ a bit. We’re in our prime all over again! And if it can be done once, then we can probably do that again!”

  She laughed as my infectious energy made my rant squeaky at the end because I didn’t take a deep breath. “That does make me feel a bit better,” she said, a real smile forming on her pretty face. “So what now? Figure out the tree or loot this town for all it’s worth?”

  I grinned. God, I love my wife.