Mara nodded. “That makes sense.” She turned toward the distant camping spot and narrowed her eyes. A pile of gear appeared in a flash of light. Pivoting to face the opposite side of the clearing, she again concentrated and another set of packs appeared.
“Cool. See? That’s much better than hauling that stuff around all day,” Sam said. “Although couldn’t you have popped the tents here already pitched?”
“Don’t push your luck,” Mara said.
“Sam and I will pitch the tents while you and Mr. Ping gather some wood for the fire. Take Ginger with you. If you get lost, she’ll lead you back to us,” Diana said.
Mara glanced around the clearing and saw no sign of the chobodon. “Where is she?” Mara asked. Raising her voice, she yelled into the trees toward the road, “Ginger! Come here, girl!”
In the distance they heard the cracking and swishing of branches and leaves, shortly thereafter followed by snorts of eagerness. The sounds got louder and closer. Then a plaintive squeal reverberated around them.
Looking confused, Mara turned toward Diana. “What does that mean?”
“She’s confused. Call her again.”
“Ginger. We’re over here,” Mara yelled.
Thrashing sounds continued, and a moment later the large plated pig vaulted through a tangle of vines and landed inside the edge of the clearing. Squealing with delight, the creature shook and twisted her body, flinging mud into the air.
“Gross. She’s covered in muck,” Sam said.
Ginger snorted and rolled across the grassy clearing, eventually rubbing the remaining grime from her pink and gray flanks. After she was done, she sidled up to Sam for a scratch behind the ears.
“How did she get to be such a mess?” he asked.
“Beyond the trail and a few other spots, the ground is fairly soaked and soft,” Diana said. “It is a swamp, after all. You should keep that in mind while you’re looking for firewood.”
CHAPTER 17
By the time they had finished dinner, the sun had dropped well below the horizon, and the swampy jungle turned pitch black. Not even shadows of nearby foliage could be seen, despite the small campfires that now danced next to the two tents on opposite ends of the clearing—even though all four of them were gathered together around one camp and its fire. Mara thought it was like camping in space without any stars, and the thought made her look up. There were stars, but the moonless night sky lacked the wattage to illuminate the planet.
Wattage. A gadget geek’s word. It had seemed forever since her most challenging problem was a broken bowling-ball shiner.
“If you think about it, it’s amazing the four of us have come together at this time in this place,” Diana said, sitting across the campfire from Mara.
Snapping out of her reverie, Mara gazed over the flames. “What do you mean?”
“Each one of us comes from a different realm. Yet here we are together, working toward a common purpose. Don’t you think that is remarkable?” she asked.
“When you put it that way, I suppose it is,” Mara said. “Though I tend to forget that Sam and Ping aren’t from the realm where we live. We’ve been together so long and have been through so much.”
“We haven’t been together that long,” Sam pointed out. “It’s only been like three months. The plane crash was the first week of September, and it’s not quite Christmas yet.”
“Plane crash?” Diana asked.
“It’s a long story,” Ping cut in. “Sam, why don’t you tell your mother about it while Mara and I review some concepts from Elements of Magic?”
Sam nodded. “Yeah, and I can tell you all the stuff that’s happened to us since. You’ll love the part where my mom, the version of you from my realm, crossed over and possessed the body of Mara’s mom, her version of you.”
Diana laughed. “Sounds good. Confusing, but good. Don’t forget I want to have a little time with my Sam as well.”
“We can do both at the same time. Your Sam is curious about who I am and where I came from, so we can kill two birds with one stone.”
“Sounds like a plan for the evening,” Mara said, standing and brushing off her backside. “Ginger? Are you coming with us or staying?”
The chobodon napped on the ground with her back pressed against the side of Sam’s leg. She opened one eye and snorted, then closed it again.
“I guess that means she’s staying,” Ping said as he stood and joined Mara.
As they walked away from one campfire to the other, Sam began to tell his stories, and Mara listened to Diana ooh and aah until they were far enough away that their voices faded to a distant hum.
“Do you wonder if we are doing the right thing by letting Mom communicate with her dead son so much while we are here?” Mara asked.
They approached the second campsite, and Ping picked up a stick to stir the fire in front of the domed two-person tent. “Why do you ask?”
“It just strikes me that it will be painful when we leave. It’ll be like losing her son all over again. This time it might even be worse. In a way, she’ll be losing two sons.”
“Diana strikes me as someone who realizes the cost of talking to her son again, and it’s a price that she’s willing to pay. What would you do in her shoes?” Ping asked. He pointed to the mats on the ground next to the fire, and they took a seat.
“I suppose I would do the same thing, talk to my child while I had the opportunity.” Mara glanced around. “Where’s the book and your props for the lesson? I don’t see any bowls of dirt or glasses of water.”
“There’s no need. I’ve reviewed all the material from the book,” he said and held out his arms widely, indicating the world around them. “And we have all the elements we need around us.”
“Great. Since our last lesson, I’ve been giving it some thought, and I think we should skip ahead to the parts you think will help us the most if we get into a confrontation with Tran and the Coven.”
Ping shook his head. “I’m not sure skipping ahead would be the best strategy, but I have consolidated the information from the book in order to cover the most material in the least amount of time. We’ll start with applying your abilities to multiple elements simultaneously and then move on to incantations and casting spells. Tomorrow night we’ll take a look at creating autonomous beings, like the bowraiths.”
“You’re the teacher. We’re using multiple elements at a time? Is that like combining Water and Earth to make mud pies?”
“Not quite. Actually you have on many occasions applied your abilities to two or more elements at once without realizing it. For instance, you applied heat, or Fire, to the bowl of dirt to create the green gem during our first lesson.”
“That’s true.”
“In magical terms, that is called transmutation—using one element to alter another. In that case, you used two elements of Perception—Earth and Fire—to create the crystal. You might say you used heat to realign the pixels of the element of Earth. Follow what I’m saying?”
“Got it.”
“Actually, an adept, well-trained pretender could do the same thing, assuming he had an affinity for those two elements. Our goal is to advance beyond those abilities and to apply the elements of Reality—Consciousness, Space, Time and Consequence—something only a progenitor, such as yourself, can accomplish.”
“All right. How do I do that?” Mara asked.
“Let’s begin with Consciousness. Do you recall what that is?”
“It’s the stuff from which everything is made, metaphysically speaking. Right?”
“Yes, and having that knowledge would help you advance your abilities how?”
“I don’t know.”
Ping frowned and rolled his gaze upward, as if trying to access some bit of information that floated above them. After a quiet moment of contemplation, he seemed to have grabbed the data he needed and looked at Mara through the thin smoke of the campfire. “When we were in the dream realm, what substance would you say was anal
ogous to Consciousness?”
Mara gave him a blank look and didn’t reply.
“Remember the Chronicle of Cosms? How it let you travel into microcosms, into the very substance of things? When you entered a substance, what did you find?”
Mara’s eyes widened. “Steam! Everything was made of steam, and I could change the properties of a substance by altering the characteristics of the steam.”
“And in this realm?”
“Everything is made of Consciousness. To change something, all I need to do is alter the properties of its Consciousness to, to—”
“Transmute it into something else,” Ping finished for her.
“So, instead of using Fire to create a gem out of dirt, I could use Consciousness to alter it at its elemental level.”
“Exactly.” Ping smiled.
“But I don’t have a Chronicle of Cosms in this realm.”
“And you don’t need one. Remember, the Chronicles are nothing but talismans, tools to focus your abilities. If I’m correct, the experience you had using the Chronicle of Cosms is similar to what you experience when you are concentrating on a particular object or substance—you sense yourself falling into the substance of the object. Is that not what you experienced during our earlier lessons when you focused on the various elements of Perception?”
“Yes, I suppose.”
Ping used his fire-stirring stick to tap on a baseball-size stone at the edge of the campfire. “Let’s use this rock for a little transmutation practice. Shall we?”
“You want me to turn this rock into something else?”
Ping nodded.
“Like what?”
“Whatever you can imagine. But let’s try something further afield than turning a bit of dirt into a gem. Remember, you are altering it by means of realigning the Consciousness from which it is constructed.”
“Okay,” Mara said, shifting her gaze to the stone and narrowing her eyes in concentration.
Soon she found herself falling into the substance of the rock. On one side, she could feel the absorbed heat from the campfire, on the other, the cool air of the night. Dense gray matter, inert and unmoving, filled her vision. Her first thought was the craving she had just after dinner for something chocolate, specifically chocolate cake.
Might as well.
She focused on that, and the grayness around her shifted and glowed, not with the orange magma heat of dirt turning to crystal but with an inner white light she imagined as energy emitted from the bonds of atoms broken apart as Consciousness rearranged itself. Through the blinding light, she heard a distant laugh.
Sam. Allowing his counterpart to possess him might be a bad idea. Having him here where Tran might hurt him is a bad idea.
“Oh my!” Ping’s voice cut through her thoughts.
Mara blinked, momentarily blinded by the light of the campfire. “What’s wrong?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.
Once her gaze cleared, she focused on Ping, who looked pale and slack-jawed, with an expression Mara rarely saw on his face—total bewilderment. He stared at the end of his fire-stirring stick, which Mara followed his line of sight until she saw a denim-covered knee. She looked up. It was Sam.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
He looked bewildered as well. “I don’t know. I think you brought me here.”
From over her shoulder, Mara heard laughter again—her mother and Sam at the distant campfire. She twisted around and gasped. Then turned again, facing Ping. “What’s happening?”
Ping grimaced and glanced at her brother’s duplicate. “It appears you turned the stone into Sam, or some version of Sam, since our Sam remains at the other campfire.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Mara said.
“Not at all. I watched the stone morph into him. It was quite amazing,” Ping said.
“Jeez.” Mara turned to what looked like her brother. “Where exactly are you from? Are you from a different realm? Did I pull you here by accident somehow?”
“No, I think this man is correct. A minute ago, I was a stone, and now I’m this—whatever this is.” He looked at his chest and rubbed his hands up and down his torso. “I’m kind of mushy.” He kneaded his fingers into his stomach.
“How can a stone be aware of being a stone?” Mara asked.
“I wasn’t aware of being a stone until you turned me into this. What exactly am I?” He reached up and tugged the hair on the side of his head.
She asked Ping, “How did this happen?”
“You were attempting to transmute the stone, remember? What were you thinking about just before this happened?” Ping asked.
“Chocolate cake! I wanted chocolate cake. But then I heard Mom and Sam laughing, and that must have distracted me.”
“I would say so.”
Duplicate Sam pulled on the front of his shirt, as if trying to stop if from clinging to him. “I don’t like this. Put me back the way I was.”
Mara nodded. “I think that’s a great idea.” She took a deep breath and concentrated. A moment later, she found herself falling into a red wet environment pulsing with life. Liquids swirled and gurgled around her. The thought that she now existed somehow in the live flesh of her brother brought about some mental gag reflex that nearly overwhelmed her.
Focus on the task at hand.
Shimmering out of the dampness around her, a light emerged and consumed her surroundings and her sight. As the brilliance receded, it revealed the dry grayness of the stone. Mara blinked, and it was gone. Across from her, Ping sat with a smile.
“Excellent,” he said.
“No, not excellent. Stupid. How could something so, so … weird happen? I just turned a rock into a person. Don’t you find that a little disconcerting? I mean, think of the implications of that.”
“I’ve been aware of your abilities for months now. On a theoretical level, I knew they were possible for most of my adult life. What did you expect I meant when I told you that you had the power to alter Reality?”
“I don’t know. Not this. I know we had this same discussion earlier. But again, I was fixated on pixels and biological versus metaphysical to satisfy Mom. I guess a part of me still thinks that creating people was something reserved for God.”
“I’m not sure we have the time to get into a religious or philosophical discussion about the nature of God and his or her role in the creation of people.”
“You’re right. Let’s save that for another time.”
“Take this experience as a reminder to keep your mind on the task at hand. No harm done. However, for future reference, you might want to limit your use of that application of your ability to inanimate objects. At the very least, not to living people. I’m not sure what the implications of a bunch of talking, walking rocks would be. Anyway, let’s move on to applying the element of Time to the stone.” He tapped the rock with his stick.
“Don’t you think that poor rock has been through enough?” Mara asked.
“As long as you don’t make him self-aware again, I don’t think he will mind. Now, what do you think the element of Time could do to the stone?”
“I’m not sure. I suppose if you alter its relationship to Time, you could make it older or younger.”
“Precisely. Why don’t you give it a go?”
Mara frowned, then leaned forward and held her hand over the stone. In the light of the campfire, the shadow of her fingers looked like stripes wrapped around its surface. The shadows shifted and faded. Daylight surrounded her, then darkened into night again. The cycles of an unseen sun repeated again and again. Somehow Mara knew days had passed, then years. Beneath her hand, the stone disintegrated into a pile of pebbles and then into a tiny mound of dirt.
Blinking, she looked to Ping with a questioning expression.
“Erosion. Time turns stones into soil eventually when exposed to the elements,” he said. “Try the reverse.”
Again she held out her hand, and again nights and days passed. Bands of
daylight and darkness strobed across the surface of the mound of dirt, now in the opposite direction, as it coalesced once again into the stone. Mara kept her hand in place, and the stone glowed a bright orange. It melted into a pool of magma, reminding her of the gem she had transmuted earlier. A crust of ash formed over the hot liquid, and more days passed. Soon the light it emitted faded, leaving a scattering of black soil. As Time continued its reversal, the soil shifted along the ground, condensing into a shapeless lump that grew, then morphed into a skeleton. A large bird maybe. Clumps of matter attached itself to the skeleton and a few feathers sprouted. What looked like a head grew out of the formless mass.
Then it hissed and snapped at Mara’s hand.
Startled out of her reverie, she looked her hand, which she now held up. A tiny scratch welled up on her palm. “Ouch. That hurt,” she said.
A whipping sound cut through the night and the soft crackling of the fire.
“Get back!” Ping yelled. He was several feet from the campfire, brandishing his stick like a sword. In front of him stood a two-foot-tall lizard, screeching and jutting, aggressively moving in his direction. “Mara, a little help here would be appreciated.”
The creature lunged into the air, its jaws opened wide as it flew toward Ping’s right forearm.
Mara froze Time.
The lizard stopped in midair, suspended several inches from Ping, who exhaled loudly as Mara approached. She bent to examine the scaly animal and noted the wreath of green feathers that ringed its neck and covered its chest. Tufts of smaller feathers formed a tiny crown above its snarling face. Its black eyes reflected the campfire.
“It’s a dinosaur of some kind,” she said.
“Yes. I suppose that makes sense, given the circumstances. The stone must have formed from its body millions of years ago,” Ping said. Taking his gaze off it for only a second, he looked at Mara, wide-eyed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“You’re flickering. You’re overexerting yourself.”
Broken Spells (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 6) Page 11
