by Simon Archer
I looked at the faces of the surrounding people, and along with the fear, I saw resolve. They looked like soldiers getting ready to take an impossible hill. Right on cue, a booming bass voice started singing one of the battle songs I'd heard the night before. I turned to see the voice was coming from my reserved young guide, Nuuto. Other voices joined in, from sturdy baritones to soaring sopranos to piping children. With no one directing them, the whole village formed into a column two abreast, and together, we marched through the gate.
I had decided I'd begin my work on the left-hand wall of my planned wedge, work my way to the point, and then come back toward the village to make the other wall. I took a few seconds to reorient myself as the villagers moved to a new battle song, this one including percussive hand claps and foot stomps. I knelt with my hand on the ground like I usually did when using earth magic, but I felt like I needed more of a connection, so I sat on the ground, cross-legged like some crunchy tree-hugger yogi, which I guess was more on-the-mark than I would have liked to admit.
I spread my Auric Sense out across the forest floor, for fifty feet or so in front of me. I probed deep under the surface, taking note of the major roots of the trees. Every time I found a pocket of earth that wasn't of vital importance to any tree, I basically took an Aura highlighter to it. Not surprisingly, there wasn't a whole lot of vacant real estate. Fortunately, trees don't have much use for rocks, and as I'd guessed from the plentiful boulders that dotted the forest, there was a lot of rock mixed with the soil. As I searched deeper, there were fewer roots and more stones, until my Sense was hitting broken bedrock.
"Yeah," I grunted to myself, "that's the stuff."
Now came the tricky part. I needed to get slabs of bedrock out from under the trees and out through those vacant patches that I'd highlighted so I wouldn't do any more damage than necessary to the trees. Oh, and I needed to remove the slabs in such a way that I didn't cause the towering trees above them to topple over. No big deal, I was just playing Jenga with a fucking skyscraper on top of my tower and then moving on to the next tower, and the next, and so on.
Fortunately, I kicked ass at Jenga when I was a kid.
I started small with just a puny little slab about three feet square and seven feet long. It was underneath some interlocked chunks, so I could afford to leave the cavity for now. As the ground started to vibrate, Nuuto switched to a ballad with a slower tempo. I think the harmony resonated with the earth, or maybe the opposite of resonating, because the tremor diminished, and it felt like the rock I was moving was sliding on a pool of butter. I swear I wasn't even pushing, just steering it a little to guide it to the gap between tree roots. A slow, steady fountain of soil poured out of the earth, and then from the center of that fountain arose the first piece of my Diplodocus-diverting wedge-wall.
It looked like a big stone hard-on, but that was probably just me. I said the same thing when I saw Stonehenge for the first time. Mine wasn't as long as those, but I was just getting started.
There was a pause in the singing for a few cheers, but Nuuto got everyone focused again, and that got me focused again. I kept working at the bedrock under the same tree my first one had been under, shifting one piece of rock to brace a corner of the slab above it so I could slide the third one out, then choosing a slightly smaller boulder and lowering the slab above a few inches. The tree wobbled precariously a couple of times, but when I was done, the entire root system was intact. It was just four inches or so lower than it had been.
On to the next Jenga tree, excavating the bedrock beneath it. I summoned a half-dozen ants and set them to work doing the finicky work of bracing the beginning of my wall while I moved on down the line. Just as I began to feel the fatigue from the effort I was expending, I got a message that I'd never expected to see.
You have learned the skill Auric Construction. Increasing your skill will increase your ability to create structures by manipulating the world itself.
I stared at it for a good several minutes. So far, what I had been doing was sort of mimicking a Geomancer skill I’d used before in Terra Forma. First, I’d created a framework using Aura, like I’d started to do when I was terraforming Ares, then using my title ‘of the Cold and Dark’ which gave me control over earth magic to fill it in with the earth. Only now, I had gotten a skill designed for just that, and what’s more, it didn’t seem to require the title anymore, though it did make things easier, a fact I learned by looking at the Aura requirements with it both equipped and unequipped. Now, I could just roll my skill and whatnot against the medium at hand. Sweet.
Which was made even sweeter because I’d stored up a shitload of skill points, and I immediately dumped them all into Auric Construction. After that, things got a lot easier
I don't know if the villagers were leveling up on singing or if they'd been sneaking tahn-fruit, but they never faltered. Denno and three other guys belted out something with a refrain that reminded me of an a cappella version of Queen's "We Will Rock You," and I just about knocked over a megalith of chert because how fucking appropriate is that?
I reached the tip of my planned wedge about halfway through the morning, judging from the angle of the sun. I tried not to worry about time running out, reminding myself that I was moving faster as I went along, so, in theory, the second wall would take less time.
But I was nervous. A group of scouts reported in, saying that the Diplodocus were definitely running and running this way.
Also, the fires were moving closer along with the dinosaurs. Apparently, the Saurians or Orange clan or whoever it was, they were following the Diplodocus and setting new fires as they went, which meant the dinosaurs were going to stay spooked. The added bonus was that the new fires would probably steer the herd, making the chances of them veering away from us pretty fucking slim.
I could tell the villagers were nervous, too. The battle songs and bar-room anthems were now interspersed with songs about their gods, who were apparently sometimes benevolent and sometimes irrational assholes. I didn't know whether this planet actually had a patron god or gods or not, but if it did, I vowed to come back with my god powers, as soon as they extended past my own solar system, and knee a deity or two in the nads, if they had any. For now, I channeled that anger into my work.
I caught a break halfway through the second wall when I passed through an area with a dead tree. Dead trees don't give a shit if you disturb their rotting roots, so I just shoved a big-ass oval of dirt to the side, tree and all. The hardest part was controlling the tree's descent so that it didn't fuck up my wall, or the villagers, or crash into a neighboring tree and cause a domino effect. That didn't involve earth magic, so I couldn't manage it from a distance.
The only idea that came to me at the moment was to stand under it with the Sword of the Destroyer King raised above my head, point facing upward, and propel Aura Infusion pulses one after the other up through the sword. I wanted to just Smash the bastard, but I was pretty sure the woody shrapnel would end up injuring people, so instead, I let each Infusion pulse break the trunk's fall a little. Picture Charlie Chaplin falling off a skyscraper and hitting awning after awning after awning.
Finally, it was safely on the forest floor, and the only thing that kept my body from collapsing like an abandoned puppet was my ego. Didn't want the villagers to see that. So, I slumped against a boulder and waited for the window to appear in my vision, telling me I'd leveled up again. It didn't come.
Fuck. Apparently, I hadn't done anything different enough from anything I'd done before, and lowering a log two hundred fucking feet long and wide enough to drive a tank through wasn't impressive enough to warrant a new level. Whoever wrote the rules of this world that wasn't a game could fuck themselves.
Then I realized I'd gotten two hundred feet of wall right. It wasn't stone, but as one long piece, even a whole herd of Diplodocus couldn't just knock it down and crash through. It just needed to be moved into place, and I had minions that could do that. My Aura was seriously depleted from my maximum
, but that still left me enough to summon a shitload of ants and golems, and Pooh, my dire bear, partly just because I hadn't seen him for a while. The villagers ooh'd and ahh'd when Pooh appeared, but it turned out they were just impressed with his fur. After all, he was kind of puny compared to the creatures on this planet, but being covered with something other than scales or feathers was new and exotic.
I took a few minutes to regenerate my Aura while my summons moved the tree trunk into position. Then I went back to pulling menhirs out of the crater left by the tree's roots. Holy shit, was it easier than what I'd been doing. No maneuvering stone around stone or slab from under slab, no worrying about balancing shit, just focus my Aura on whatever big rock was easiest to get to, lift it through loose gravel and dirt, drag it into place, move on to the next.
Once I'd depleted my crater, my wall extended a few yards past the village. I was planning to end it another fifty feet farther on, enough that if a Diplodocus took a right turn at the end of my barrier, they would still be far enough beyond the village that we'd be okay. Unless they reversed direction completely, but that didn't seem likely.
I looked around to see if there was another dead tree I could salvage because even though bringing the first one down safely had sucked, it seemed like the effort had paid off in the end. The singers ended a song and took a quick break while I pondered. That's when we all felt it. The ground beneath us was trembling with the pounding of Diplodocus feet.
29
Titania
I leaned against the tree with my head low. I wasn’t going to take any chances of getting caught out here. The hood I was wearing drooped slightly over my eyes, which was upsetting because the forest was lovely.
I used to love coming here, believe it or not, with Mab. It’s sort of cruel that we started out close, but that’s a forgotten age. I was here for one thing and one thing only, Garrett Andrews. I knew that if I could either subdue or destroy him, Mab would be forced to come out and face me. She had left me for dead once, that’s really who she was. But, because of her violation of the Accords, I would be justified in ending her once and for all. I knew my brother Erlking was just using me for his own gain, but I didn’t care because I wanted to face Mab more than anything.
One of the many advantages of this world was that I could use the terrain, tribal politics, and dinosaurs to fell my prey. If I was lucky, I would be able to just be an administrator, like my brother had thought himself in our little exchange, and would not actually have to step in. If I did, that would be most bothersome. I sighed angrily. The stupid Accords made it so that if I were to face Mab’s chosen one-on-one, I would have to reduce my powers to a level on par with his, and that was something I did not want to do if I could help it.
I couldn’t shake this weird feeling, though. It was odd, and I couldn’t articulate it perfectly, but I almost felt as though this human Garrett had sensed something was amiss. As though he felt danger or my presence in the air. On one level, I didn’t understand this because I was sure I was much more powerful than him.
Although I only stood four feet tall, I packed some juice. I was a fairy queen, after all, the scion of a race that was far superior to humans.
Still, something felt a little amiss, and I didn’t like the idea that my presence could already be known. This was why I would first try to strike from a distance, I would go the administrator route. I waited and waited, leaning patiently against the tree. Nobody or nothing within sight, just the peaceful sounds of a planet with life. I pegged my odds at about sixty percent that this was going to work. In fact, I almost hoped he would succeed because if he didn’t, this would have turned out to have been far too easy given the effort involved.
That said, I didn’t know how Garret would be able to stop the rampaging Diplodocus once I set them upon him.
It was so peaceful that I began to doze off briefly. This wasn’t the sand, but I felt a certain comfort here that was unusual from most places.
“Ma’am?”
I startled awake and turned my attention toward the cowering villager who stood in front of me.
“Yes?” I asked as I wiped my eyes with the back of one hand.
“He is in the village,” the villager, an orange-colored bird creature, said. “The human you told us about.”
“Good.” I nodded. “I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist lending a helping hand. And the others?”
“Uhhh. Tensions are very high.” He looked at the ground. “They will be more than happy to pick off the remains of the village once the stampede is through.” He bowed his head lower. “Your gift of fire magic was more than enough to secure their assistance.”
“Excellent.” I smiled. “Thank you.”
He must have known he was being dismissed because he quickly disappeared off into the woods.
The orange bird people were another plan I had. After all, if he was killed by dinosaurs and locals, I couldn’t possibly be blamed. Best of all, I wouldn’t be on the front lines. I felt fine subduing him if needed, but I felt the better outcome for me would be if Garret perished. And if I didn’t have to do it either, that would be all the better.
I knelt down and gathered several logs, making a few stacks of wood around me. I then reached down and created a spark that lit the first wood pile up. I then used a stick as a torch and used the fire that was burning that I had just started to light the other ones, and I could smell the crackling of the wood burning in the air.
I walked into the clearing of the forest around me and whistled several times sharply. I waited. And waited and waited. I looked high up at the smoke rising into the sky. And then, I heard it. A loud, loud, really loud rumbling underneath my feet. It was shaking the ground violently as it came towards me. I focused for a second on all the loud noises around me. I thought, I thought, and then I saw it.
A herd of Diplodocus came rumbling out of the forest toward the village. I flew straight up into the air as the massive herd passed underneath me. I watched their long necks and huge bodies thunder along the ground. I watched them charge straight towards the village and Garrett.
“Best of luck to you,” I whispered. “I’m dying to see what happens to you.”
30
"Queenie," I called over our Aura link, "I need some aerial reconnaissance now. Head north of the village and show me what you see."
"I'm on it, master." I watched through her eyes as she flew up above the village. Below her, the wooden village walls lay in an approximate circle, with my stone barriers on either side connecting in the distance. If the village walls were a face, I guess the walls I'd built fit around them like a loose dunce cap pulled down past the imaginary ears. I was hoping that wasn't an omen.
Queenie zoomed north to hover over the tip of my wedge. Yup, there were the Diplodocus, stampeding straight toward the barrier. They looked like I'd always pictured the Loch Ness Monster, enormous bodies that tapered off into a long neck and tiny head on one end and a long thin tail on the other. Their legs were ridiculously short in comparison to their bodies, so they weren't making great time. Then again, tsunamis aren't very fast, either, but they can flatten a village just the same.
Queenie flew higher to get a longer view. One thing that amazed me was the way the dinosaurs threaded their way through a copse of trees that weren't much farther apart than the biggest beasts were wide. Their heads were stretched out in front of them, and from above, they undulated like mega-pythons that had each swallowed a mega-pig.
As they got closer and closer to the barrier, I realized that I was holding my breath. The walls were eight to ten feet thick, but the Diplodocus were even wider. I hoped my theory about their psychology was right, and they'd just go around because I was starting to doubt that the stone structure could take a direct hit. The lead dinosaur closed in, twenty yards, ten yards. Then his head swerved a little to the right of the tip of the wedge, and his body followed, and now, he was lumbering alongside the wall.
The second Diplodocus followed
the first, but the next three went to the left. They didn't seem to follow the ones in front of them. Instead, they just picked random directions. Most ran alongside the wall. A few veered off farther away.
I let out a victory whoop before the villagers could see with their own eyes, but within thirty seconds, the herd was galloping by on either side of the barrier, their heads bobbing high enough to be seen, b they weren't paying us the slightest bit of attention. I could see the people around me screaming and shouting in joy and relief, but I couldn't hear a damn thing except for galloping Diplodocus.
I hadn't directed Queenie to turn and follow them, but she was clever enough to have figured out I'd want her to. From her vantage point, I could see that once they passed the ends of the wall, they instinctively moved back toward one another, coalescing back into a single here, but they continued south away from us. All except the last guy.
He was a comparative runt, so maybe he was younger than the others. He'd gone to the right, and I don't know if his mother was on the other side of the wedge or what, but he darted his head from side to side like he was looking for someone else. In his confusion, he slowed down even more, being left farther behind. He trumpeted shrilly. From the other side of the wall, I heard another dinosaur answer.
The runt passed the wall, and then he did what I'd been hoping none of them would do. He made a right turn, slowed down, went in a half-circle, and completely by accident, he was headed toward the southern section of the village's wooden wall.
I had instinctively started running around the village wall toward the runt as soon as he'd turned. Thera was already right behind me. A half-dozen men and a couple of women were right on her heels, all wielding spears that I hadn't even noticed they'd brought outside the village. I commanded Pooh to join us.
The runt looked a lot bigger from my level than he had from above. He didn't show any sign he even noticed the cluster of humans yelling and waving spears and swords.
