Earth - Friday - Day 13 - 20 May 2021

  POV: GRANT

  Sandra hadn’t come back. I knew she was alive. Every once in a while, I would feel a flicker in that hole our mind link left. Just enough to tease me, reminding me that she was gone.

  With that feathery touch, other than the fact that she was alive, all I could feel was her dread.

  And there was nothing I could do about it. I felt burnt out. Hollow. Even that incandescent rage that consumed me had sputtered into lonely embers. My drive to do flickered, replaced by a ghostlike dread that made even standing still feel pointless. Life was simply going through the motions right now but I was tired of it.

  Why fortify my house?

  Why go out and kill monsters?

  What’s the freaking point of finding more people?

  Why the FUCK do I give a shit!?

  I don’t. Really. Besides, I have ‘employees’ to do that for me. Ever since Paul woke up yesterday fit as a fiddle, he’s been non-stop working like a dog with Elvis, Thomas and Eli. Between the three of them, they’ve rescued tons of people hiding out or fleeing monsters. I gave them all updated suits of armor and weaponry Alchemically crafted to their desires and let them loose. Without a second thought, they’ve become an adventurer team roving the land and doing good.

  It made me sick. How helpful they were. Defiant kindness at its best. Not one complaint. Their enthusiasm even surprised the dwarves. Eli dove into healing with a passion. His First-Aid kit empowered him to keep going, reviving smashed fingers from digging accidents, alleviating bruising and healing cuts from fighting monsters. I marveled at his incredible ability to purify anything. Infected bite wounds didn’t stand a chance. He even completely purified a humongous tank of water with one of his plucked angel feathers. I noticed that sick people improved faster just by being around him, like he had a halo of health he just projected out.

  The rest of the team did all the truly hard work, explaining to a bunch of scared humans that living here with the dwarves that they could NOT understand was in fact the best place for them. It did help that the dwarves were understanding and were available with food and shelter.

  A lot of my time was spent partnering with a new dwarf, a young mage who told me that he was an apprentice enchanter who lost his master in the Labyrinth. It caught my attention, his description of the Labyrinth and the battles they fought there to get to their new homeland. He was a talker, Dinder the young mage. Between his middling knowledge and my Alchemy, we were able to slowly churn out more translation medallions for people.

  He loved the entire process from start to finish, taking notes as I worked about all the ways that Alchemy could revolutionize the Minexo suits. Keeping him on task was hard, Dinder loved humans.

  We fascinated him. Our culture, our politics, even our evolving views on religion and truth and how the internet messed everything up.

  I would’ve been more involved if I weren’t so distracted. For the last few hours, I’d felt wavery flickers of horrific fear from Sandra. Try as I might, I couldn’t truly push it away.

  “I need more silver.” I said, my voice an impatient growl.

  “Yes, but explain the internet again and how Gordon Ramsey was so key in its expansion and relevance?” His large eyes were bright with curiosity and zest for knowledge. “And everyone had access to this internet? Even the children or those with no technical skills?”

  “Dinder! I’ll answer all your questions when we knock this out, man.” I snarled, rubbing my face. “The ritual is giving me serious feedback. I need more silver and your actual attention and focus to do this.”

  He put his very clean hands on the outer edge of the ritual circle, mana flowing gently down into the boundary.

  “The fact that it doubled as a mating selection mechanism is troubling and intriguing! How did the elders of your race even approve the match? How were the families vetted? Were there many feuds?”

  “Dinder!”

  “Apologies Stone Warden!”

  “Stop calling me that!”

  I rolled my eyes, returning my focus to the ritual. What should’ve been absolutely fascinating for me was in fact an exercise in frustration. I could see what he was doing, what I strived to do, but was unable to do. My Alchemy allowed me to reshape, rearrange matter into whatever I visualized and even change its state of being. But Dinder was imbuing magic into the matter. There was no real reason that a circle of precious metal would allow a person to suddenly understand a completely different language.

  And yet, here I was able to understand Dwarvish and he was completely unbothered listening to me get onto his case in English. It made zero sense to me. Something about a precious stone infused with mana is capable of understanding intent and that plus the many lines of teeny runes on the medallion produced the translation effect.

  Absolute bullshit.

  The real tragedy is that these medallions didn’t allow us to read Dwarvish, not that they had many books available due to their flight from their homeland. I could listen to them bicker and understand them as if I were a native but their books were full of blocky hieroglyphics that defied my human eyes.

  “Are you frustrated with me, Stone Warden- I mean Sir Grant?”

  “Just Grant. And no. I’m not mad at you, I’m pissed off about how nothing makes sense anymore.” I closed my eyes, forcing away thoughts of my wife. My hands tried to shake, only my iron will forcing them still.

  White light swirled with flecks of gold and steel at the center of the ritual, silhouettes of medallions barely visible through the glow. My material understanding of the medallion’s actual physical makeup was confined to a simple list of ingredients: gold, silver, refined rose steel, and a tiny blue precious stone that my Terrastria told me was lapis lazuli.

  “Dinder, the silver? And more crystal stuff too.”

  “Oh, yes! Here!”

  He set a chunk of the beautiful sapphire-like stone crystal next to the ritual along with a chunk of unrefined silver ore. I had to concentrate on powering down the ritual without completely stopping it. Once the flow of deconstructed matter flickered, I pushed the stone in and the swirl of power resumed its original flow.

  A stab of pain shot through my head, the ritual faltering.

  That wasn’t a warning. That was a scream. I quickly looked down at my arm, expecting blood to be dripping onto the floor. Nothing.

  “What the hell?” I moaned, clutching my head with one hand, trying to keep the ritual from destabilizing. “Sandra? Why? Where the fuck ARE YOU?”

  Wrenching my focus back to the ritual, I killed it as fast as I was able. My entire core drained as every bit of energy transmuted back into its original form.

  “I CAN’T JUST SIT HERE!”

  If I hadn’t been completely empty of mana, the cavern would have come down around me. Even so, the stone walls shook ominously.

  “Are you okay? What happened?”

  Another spike of pain ripped through my skull. My jaw seized and my eyes bulged. But it was clearer this time. It wasn’t me. It was Sandra. Far away. Our connection felt strange, like she was moving even further away but to a place of better reception because I was getting a clearer picture.

  Fast. She was running. Or trying to.

  Worse. I couldn’t tell what direction she was going in.

  This time, I felt the pain again, more crimson than before but flavored with pain-fueled anger.

  “That’s right, babe.” I growled, blinking my eyes, trying to dull the ache behind them. “Give’em hell. I dunno how I’m going to find you. But I will. And when I do. Something is going to die.”

  I worked long into the night at a feverish pace. Every burst of pain or fear that I felt through my mostly severed mental link with Sandra let me know that she was alive but my heart only fell further. Not once did I feel a sense of relief. I begged the universe for her to send triumph or peace. Some indicator of well-being.

  When Eli and Thomas came to bring me food, I shut them out, stone walls rising from the floor to push them away. The walls of my personal room filled out with plans and ideas, thoughts and plots. I rattled my imagination for anything, anything that would allow me to get to her. Darker thoughts turned over on themselves, the noise of civilization and chatter and comradery disturbing the silence I required to think.

  Those thoughts were unworthy of me. My friends did not deserve the blackest of emotions borne out of my own fear, my own dread. I passed out as my personal sunstone began to run out of charge.

  ********

  I sprang to my feet the moment I felt someone’s hand touch my shoulder.

  “Hey, boss? You okay?” It was just Elvis, oddly tentative for someone of his size. “You don’t look so good. Did you sleep at all?”

  Rubbing my eyes to get the crud out of them, I looked around. My mad Earth Magic carvings and imprints in the walls were hard to make out in the dim light.

  “How did the dwarves get here?”

  “H-what?”

  I pointed at the wall until Elvis held up his little sunstone, his eyes widening as he took in what could easily have been the ravings of a madman.

  “I mean, I know they walked but HOW?” I had to get my point across but I could see that he was confused. Shit, maybe I was confused? “Elvis! The dwarves, I know they walked here, but how did they go from Point A to Point B? How did they know where to exit their journey to end up on Earth? Why here? Something had to have led them, right?”

  Elvis stood up straight. “I think you need some sunlight and a good meal, boss.”

  I stood up straight, looking up at him. My finger landed on his armored chest with a thunk. “I am not crazy. There is a point to my questions.”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “And a bath.”

  Taking a deep breath didn’t really help. “Where did Sandra GO?!” I said, punctuating my words by stabbing my finger into the wall. “Her powers! One of them is ‘PlanesWalker’! But how does it work? I think it’s something that lets her walk through the Labyrinth better than normal people, and she kicked it off with her music.”

  My desperate excitement broke through Elvis’ concerned frown right as Thomas maneuvered around Elvis’ bulk blocking the entryway.

  “You think she slipped through, right?”

  “Goddamn right I do.” I said, nodding vigorously. “Dinder might be annoying as fuck but he’s a fountain of knowledge. He said that the dwarves had to find a ‘Door’ to enter and exit from, but he didn’t say anything about vanishing into the Labyrinth. But people have done it, meaning it could’ve happened to her.”

  “I know your wife says you don’t listen-”

  “Oh fuck off.” I growled. “I listen when it matters.”

  Elvis clapped his hands together. “Oh! I know! We just go into the Labyrinth where the dwarves came out of! Right?”

  Glaring at him didn’t help. “Elvis. I want to say ‘duh’ but I’ve been thinking about this since yesterday so I’ll be nicer than that. That’s the start of my plan-”

  “So which way ya gonna go?”

  My hand hit my face. “Yes, bro. I know. There’s gotta be some way to find her, some way to point us in the right direction.”

  I just pointed at the wall, my list vanishing until bullet point remained.

  All of these thoughts are pointless if I don’t know WHERE TO SEARCH.

  Thomas grabbed Elvis by the shoulder. “Come on man. He’s useless when he gets like this.”

  My fingers drummed on the stone table that grew out of the floor. I’d racked my brain for hours last night to no avail. And I had done everything to kickstart my brain. I drew up plans to make an underground fortress complete with booby trapped tunnels, quicksand sinkholes laced with Alchemically enhanced poisons and claymores forged from propane tanks and Earth Magic enhanced diamond tipped iron balls. I thought that forcing my brain to work in other directions would jog something loose but I kept coming back to the original problem.

  I knew what to do, but I didn’t know how to do it.

  How do you track someone who can basically portal anywhere at random?

  I spent the longest time in meditation, staring out in the mental space I’d built with my wife. Day by day it faded. That door that was our connection, it shrank. Her powers were the source of that apartment attached to my mind and without that, it was vanishing as sure as a dream.

  “I can’t do it.”

  My own words felt like a betrayal but it was the cold, hard truth. I let that settle for the first time in days. I’d always know it was the truth. The only real truth of the matter. My own efforts were insufficient to do what I wanted, what I needed. And nobody I knew could do it either. Thomas’ bone and barrier magic, useless. Elvis and all his muscles, useless. Paul with his solar powers, fucking useless.

  This must be what wives feel like when their husbands go off to war. Can’t do shit for shit. All this power at my fingertips but unable to help the one person I want to help.

  What the hell would Sandra tell me to do?

  For the first time in days, I smiled. I know exactly what she would tell me to do.

  “I love you, but get off your ass. Go get some work done and I’ll have a pie ready when you get home.”

  I was no good at making pies, but goddamnit I could work.

  That boulder of anger and resentment rolled off my chest and I took a huge breath, letting it out slowly before doing it over and over. With each controlled exhalation, that weight sloughed off of me. It didn’t mean that I should stop trying to find an answer, but it did mean that uselessly raging at the sky wouldn’t help anyone, least of all my wife.

  I needed a change of scenery . . . and company. Stowing my frustration where it belonged, I carved a path through the tunnels to the outside. The stone walls flowed, smoothing themselves out and widening with every step I took. Dwarves scrambled to get out of my way, my mana leaking through. Stopping at a cook fire with a large iron pot sitting on crackling flames, I breathed in the scent of a delectable chili.

  A wide, matronly dwarf scowled at me for a second before shoving a thick wooden bowl into my hands.

  “Only one till’uh’ya work, humie!” Her ladle dripped beans as she leveled it at me like a spear. “No lazin’ about’tit.”

  I rubbed at the translation medallion, wondering why she had a serious accent. Shrugging it off as a quirk of magic, I gratefully took the bowl and sipped it down, nodding to appease the keeper of the cauldron. Never piss off a grandma.

  “You’re back among the living!”

  I turned to see Paul with his empty bowl and wide smile.

  “I should be saying that to you, man.” I said, meaning it with every fiber of my being. “How ya doin’? You were messed up there for a while. Eli worked on you night and day and even press-ganged the dwarves into helping.”

  He bowed in the direction of a huddle of dwarves closer to the entrance of the growing cavern dug into the hill. Yeldin and his wife were arguing fiercely with other dwarves but I couldn’t make out the details.

  “I’m sorry about my quee-, I mean, your wife.”

  “I don’t suppose you have some magic to find her, do ya?” I asked reluctantly. “Cause I sure don’t.”

  The sound of a deep horn shook the air, cutting off all conversation. Every dwarf froze for a split second.

  “TO ARMS! TO ARMS!”

  I reached out and grabbed the nearest dwarf who sneakily attempted to abscond with a second bowl of stew.

  “What the hell is going on?” I asked, yanking him closer.

  He desperately tried to get away but the dirt around his feet grew up into stone shackles. He looked at me with a mix of fear and wonder before remembering everyone’s panic.

  “Giants!”

  Paul let out a curse. I nodded in agreement. This explained why Yeldin had begged me to craft those oversized stone darks and also reinforce the tunnels beneath the mountain so much. In hindsight, they knew this was coming. It was chaos, yes, but it was organized chaos. Lids were tossed on top of cauldrons, pre-crafted lifts fit over the cauldron and through the handles so two dwarves could easily pick it up and carry it away. Everything seemed to get packaged up and hauled away in the time it took me to observe the madness.

  Thomas charged through the crowds of dwarves barricading themselves into the hill, Elvis on his heels holding Paul’s massive cleaver. Eli stood on top of a stone platform looking at me for instruction.

  “Get inside!” I ordered, pointing at the entrance to the hill.

  Eli shook his head, cupping his hands to his mouth.

  “They’re tearing your house apart!”

  I squinted at him, his words tumbling through my mind until I caught on.

  “The sunstone and magic tree too!”

  My mind went blank before white-hot rage exploded deep within me. I didn’t have to check to see if my team was following me. I could hear Elvis’ heavy booted feet right behind me and Paul’s dark form grabbed attention in the sunlight. We crossed the few streets from Sunken road to my home to see three giants destroying my property.

  One was on his hands and knees, elbow deep with one arm pushed into my home digging back and forth, his butt in the air. The second one licked his lips as he stared at the sunstone radiating light and warmth, plucking the side bits of it off and eating them like candy. I almost fell to my knees as I watched the third one rip my magical fruit tree out of the ground and take a humongous bite out of the crown.

  They hadn’t noticed us yet.

  “Elvis, kill the one in my house. Paul, you got tree-eater. I got the fucker on the right.”

  I didn’t see Elvis leave the ground but I heard Paul give a heavy grunt. It wasn’t until he was at the apex of the throw that Elvis let out an unintelligible shout. All three giants looked up, squinting to try and see through the glare of the late morning sun.

  Elvis’ warhammer came down like a missile. I heard the splatter but didn’t pay attention. I had my own issues. I wasn’t strong enough to go toe-to-toe with a giant. But I didn’t need to be. I skidded to a stop behind the closest one, pushing my mana deep into the earth. With two blasts of mana, I softened the ground to something slicker than quicksand and then spread it out. The last blast of mana pivoted the ground beneath the giant’s feet, spinning him around and tripping him backwards away from my house. Thomas stood next to me, his glowing shield blocking the debris from hitting us.

  “Do you have a plan?”

  I grit my teeth, my hands in front of me as I pulled down, the giant falling back into the soil that flowed like liquid.

  “Yes, bro. Fucking kill them.”

  We both looked up to see Paul pull his cleaver out of a giant’s back, my fruit tree falling from its massive hand.

  “When did that happen?” Thomas gasped, his shield thickening.

  I let out a strained laugh. “Super strength equals super leaping. Come on man, keep up.”

  But the giants didn’t just roll over and die. The one with the cleaver sticking out of its left shoulder blade smacked Elvis away from the dead one, turning to roar at us. It paused, seeing its other friend sinking into the ground. I couldn’t turn enough of the ground into quicksand soup to sink it fast and that was my downfall. The wounded giant reached down and easily hauled its friend out of the muck by its foot and then stood it up. Paul reared back for another strike but got flung off by the fast twisting of the giant.

  They were unusually quick for something of that size.

  “Shit!” I cursed, pulling more mana from the earth, my legs sinking into the ground. “This is taking too long. We fucked up!”

  “We can take two on three!” My brother yelled, dropping his shield to charge the smaller of the two, the one covered in mud. Bones grew out of his joints to form armor and an even weirder twisted L-shaped contraption grew out of his ankles to form spring legs. He used them to bound forward instead of running.

  I didn’t have time to help him. It was too predictable. Thomas can’t turn in mid-air. The larger giant grinned, its club quickly shifting to the side, swatting my brother into the hill that used to be my home. The club powered through Thomas’ barrier, breaking through but it absorbed most of the kinetic energy. It was more than enough to daze him.

  I couldn’t let the giant focus on my brother who needed a minute to get back into the fight. Spears of hardened stone grew up in front of me. I didn’t know how to properly throw spears, but I didn’t need to. I grasped the top chunk, ripping it off before shaping it into a spiky softball. I waited until the tallest giant straightened up to breathe before HURLING my deadly ammunition into its eyeball. I could hear the gristly splat!

  “That was lucky.” I said, watching as the ground shook, the giant’s slowly dying form teetering back, its skull empty. Gore fell to the ground. I could see my stone spikeball had blown through the back of its brains. But it was like the body didn’t know that it was dead yet. It flailed to the side, trying to land on Elvis who was completely unconscious.

  But it missed.

  “Hold on . . .” I said, stepping forward and hurling another spikeball at it. “They’re shorter than the others, way shorter.”

  Paul removed his cleaver from the chest of his now dead giant, blood dripping down all over him. The red was so dark it was almost black.

  “You are right.” He said, looking around. “This was too easy. My blade went right in.”

  Eli caught up to us, not even stopping to survey the carnage. He sprinted right over to Thomas and hit him with a blast of healing. My brother sat up coughing.

  “You DON’T say that! Never say anything was too easy.”

  I grabbed Thomas by the arm, yanking him so I could smack him in the back.

  “He’s right, Eli. That’s just begging for the Universe to fuck you.”

  My brother straightened up, the white glow of Eli’s energy fading as some bone in his chest cavity snapped into place with a pop.

  “Paul, you good?”

  We watched Paul drag the bodies of the giants next to each other and then count paces next to their corpses.

  “They’re too short!”

  I blanched. “Oh no. No . . . no.”

  We heard booms in the distance. Angry roars echoed off the hills.

  Elvis sat up as Eli’s magic revived him. He coughed out a blood clot and reset his own nose.

  “We gotta get moving.” I said, frantic as I knew what was coming. “Paul, get Elvis back to the dwarves. Eli, you see those apples over there?”

  He nodded quickly, running over and grabbing the five in easy view.

  “Thomas, come with me.”

  I didn’t have time to mourn my house. It was destroyed. As much as I wanted to see my wife, I didn’t want to see her wrath. My Earth Magic flexed, breaking the core of the growing sunstone into sizable pieces that we could actually carry. I quickly shaped handles out of stone and strategically fit them into a carrying log shape so I could fit it on my back.

  The roars grew louder.

  “Run!”