The Land of Broken Roads

Despite the nice long soak in the bath and sweating all his fear out, Dirt found it hard to focus on reading. He kept thinking about being tossed up into the sky and the blank terror of knowing the ground was rushing up at him but being unable to see it. And just to make sure he didn’t forget for long, his fingertips were prickly and sore. Home was right about the cold damaging him. His toes, too, but they were easier to ignore since he wasn’t doing much with those.

The other thing making it hard to focus was how much of the material seemed familiar. He’d roll to a new sigil or spell and nod to himself, recognizing it immediately. And he’d remember ways it interacted with other sigils, but half of those he hadn’t seen yet and couldn’t remember.

What worked best was pretending he didn’t know any of it, and studying each new sigil like it was the first time. And if he did any imaginary combining to make a new spell, it was only with things he knew. That was a growing list, and he already had a good start. But then the problem was that so many of the descriptions seemed incomplete or simply wrong, and he had to keep rethinking everything.

For example, the sigil for wood, which he was certain about. It was part of the word the dryads had taught him, and he’d used it to shape wood plenty of times. In a text on alchemy, the author thought it meant the color green. In a different text, it was labelled as ‘to make solid’, and in another, ‘gentleness’.

Avitus was sure that last spell would never work. He recognized the name of the author as someone he’d always disrespected. With cause, it seemed. There were a lot of those—spells he didn’t think would work. Their effects were always too subtle to detect right away, like making a harvest more bountiful or increasing one’s attractiveness to the opposite sex. A spell to light a lamp, well, that had to work right away or everyone would know. But one to redirect the attention of thieves? How would you measure its effectiveness?

Hunger eventually got him to wander out of the library and look for a dryad, but not before he knew another twenty sigils, counting only the ones he trusted. He had ten more he made specific note of because although their descriptions were too often contradictory, they seemed important.

Walking through it on his way outside, the schola felt dead as a tomb, even with his lights and embers bringing life to it. The smothering silence of the forest still got in and without any dryads watching everything he did, the whole place turned oppressively solitary.

He was starting to miss Socks. It’d only been a couple days but what was the right length of time to be away before you missed someone? The pup wouldn’t be pleased to do this much sitting around and reading, but he probably would’ve learned how to talk to the elemental right away.

After all, Socks had a window into the world of magic that Dirt’s body didn’t. A faint, hazy glimpse, as if through a watery, mostly-closed eye, but a glimpse nonetheless. To Dirt, the magic world was much more obscured. It was like how he’d first spoken to the trees by sending them the sensation he caused when he sat on their roots, along with hello. They couldn’t fully conceptualize what was happening; just enough to know they were touching something. It was like that. And Dirt’s brain wasn’t nearly large enough to make himself a magic-world dryad to explore in, if he even knew where to start.

So sigils and spells it was. Shapes and shadows and hints, like trying to communicate by watching someone scratching on the opposite side of paper you were holding. At least he didn’t need all the little tools humans used. No wands or gems or chants. None of that.

Home had left her dryad waiting in the schola’s garden, sitting on a stone bench next to a grimy statue of a naked woman with one arm extended toward the sky. Her dryad was inert and her eyes didn’t move when he stood in front of her.

Still, worth a try, since he was hungry. “Home?” he asked. “Can you hear me?”

She reacted, fortunately, but only animated her face, which Dirt found amusing. The poor trees must really be busy. He didn’t feel like it was his fault, though.

“Can I have some sap?”

Home held up one arm, which creaked like bending wood, and a large glob of sap appeared in her palm. Dirt took it and said, “Thanks!” She left her arm up, and her eyes quit following him.

He walked over to the little basin and drank some of the pure water that filled it to wash down the sap. When he stood, a chill wind blew across the ferns, filling the silent forest with its soft sound. Dirt stuck his hands in his pockets and huddled against the chill, glad he had clothes on. The ever-familiar rhythm of tree-magic shuddered in the stone beneath his feet, and after only four slow pulses, the wind stopped dead and the area fell silent again.

Dirt peered through his mana vessel and caught only glimpses of the great and subtle working of magic all around him. Half-seen patterns of spells greater and more complicated than he could measure drifted past, lighting across his perception only faintly, like drifting cloth. He recognized portions, though. Wind and air and water and others, in spiraling geometric perfection.

He glanced down again at the water in the basin. He knew how to shape wood, right? What would happen if he swapped out the sigils for wood and growth and replaced them with water? Keeping everything else the same.

The word to shape wood couldn’t make it fly, so Avitus decided to make the water stand up, like a little pillar. Maybe all of it, standing straight up like a long, thick pole. A backward waterfall.

Avitus held his hands over the basin, made the image clear in his mind, and manifested the spell. The surface of the water rippled until a lump arose in the center. He fed it more and more mana, but it didn’t help much. The water was too slippery and didn’t want to stay put. He couldn’t shape it in sections, he learned. He had to do it all at once.

But it helped if he shaped some sections more strongly, like the outside. Then it’d hold the inside water in place. And rather than lifting the water into shape, he had to push other water down, and then it’d rise where he wanted.

He adjusted the spell the more he used it, shaving off useless parts. The water couldn’t grow, at least not using this method, so the parts of the spell related to growth and destruction had to go. And there was no communication like with a living plant, so a large chunk of the spell fell away with no effect. He still knew none of the sigils in that part, which was a shame, since they might actually help when talking with elementals.

He added other things to it, one of which he’d learned from the elemental: continual application of force. But after a few more tries, he removed it again. Feeding it a steady flow of mana had the same effect.

No, less was better. He removed more of the spell. Anything he could think of that wasn’t active or that wouldn’t work on water had to go. More than once the water rejected his magic and collapsed, sloshing back into the basin. But he kept working at it, adjusting the spell’s shape and the sigils that comprised it.

He reduced it to only five complete sigils, arranged around a balanced circle. Perfect in its simplicity, but pushing most of the work onto him and requiring serious concentration. It felt like he was trying to dream out loud, with how strongly he had to picture what he wanted to happen.

But it worked. He could play with the water however he wanted. Avitus poked a finger into the basin and drew out a thread of liquid that stuck to his fingertip as he twisted it in the air. After that he scooped out a ball with both hands and held it balanced in place, watching its surface quiver and ripple. He pulled the ball between his fingertips and it stretched like gut.

This was as close as he’d ever get to moving things with his mind. If only Socks were here! He’d…

The water splashed back into the basin as he froze, eyes wide. He’d seen Socks move things with his mind a million times but he’d never been able to do it himself, and neither of them could figure out why.

It was so simple. So obvious. So impossible, before this exact moment. He didn’t need the spell at all! The sigils were for complicated things, like processes and procedures and spells. But he didn’t need them for something so simple. The power was already there. He just had to remove the filter and enact his will directly.

Avitus’ fingers trembled as he held them over the water again. He balanced on an edge sharper than his knife. If he tried and failed now, he might never do it again. But if he succeeded… if he succeeded!

Move, he commanded the water with a thought. The mana inside him didn’t move. Neither did the water. He swallowed the panic that followed, that maybe he’d ruined it. Maybe his failure had introduced doubt and it’d never work.

He cast those ideas away and hardened his mind. Discipline and sincerity, he remembered. That was his true power, and he needed great quantities of each for this. He’d been too hasty. Next time.

Avitus pushed away everything that wasn’t part of the task at hand. He mastered every inch of himself, quieting even the constant stream of imagery in the deep recesses of thinking.

He tried again. Move. He strained his will, exerting it as hard as he could. The water stayed still.

They’d melded their consciousness, he and Socks, countless times. He’d watched the pup move things with his mind, always with such effortlessness that neither of them could even find a mechanism for Dirt to exercise in hopes of learning. Socks had just done it.

Avitus had everything in place already. He knew his mana body and was familiar with it and how it worked. He knew his own mind, how to focus his will. And he had run his fingertips across the immeasurable world of power that lay just beyond perceiving. He need only turn his will, and the power would obey.

He tried again. Move. Nothing. But he got closer. It had to come from deeper. From a place of truth, and not one of belief where doubt also resided.

Avitus drifted his hand to the side, slowly passing it over the water. This was it. He held perfectly still. The world would either obey, or it would not.

He drew his hand upward and willed the water to follow. Not with a word, or even imagination, but with will from a place deeper than words could reach.

The water shivered, barely, briefly, and went still again. Avitus cast away any excitement that might distract him. The task was all that existed. He looked intently at the water and made it move.

The water rippled more deeply. It followed as he moved his hand around the basin in a circle until waves formed, sloshing over the edges. He scooped up a handful with his mind, letting it form naturally into a sphere. Then he brought it to his lips and drank it right out of the air.

All the world returned as his mental discipline fell apart. The endless green above and below, the silence other than dripping water. The feeling of his own clothing on his skin. Tingling pain in his toes. He jumped up and cheered as loud as he could, mind wild with joy.

“SOCKS, I CAN MOVE THINGS WITH MY MIND!” he screamed mentally. Countless tiny minds around him reacted, first in surprise, then confusion, then forgetting him entirely. Except the trees, who had to stop what they were doing for a moment to figure out what he’d said.

“Sorry,” he sent the nearest ones. “Ignore that.”

They obliged without any reply, resuming their calculations. Any other time, it might be fascinating to watch them all working together so furiously, but Dirt had other things to do. Avitus had never done this. He was sure of that. No one had. Maybe no human ever.

It was so quiet, so solitary, that Dirt’s exultation was almost ruined by disappointment. There was no one to show, no one to tell. Just the empty forest, full of trees too busy to pay any attention to the mighty thing he’d just done.

Although… that meant it would be a surprise. Socks hadn’t replied, so he was probably too far away to be watching. Dirt would wait until they were back together again and say nothing. He’d move things casually and see how long it took Socks to notice. That would have to do.

He pulled out his knife and lifted it from his palm with his mind, then made it slowly circle around him. First while he stood still, then as he walked slowly, practicing. The hardest part was not thinking about what he was doing, but simply doing it. If he thought about it too much, the dagger got slippery and fell to the ground.

Dirt tried lifting a cylindrical pillar stone, but it was way too large for him. The mere attempt put enough pressure on him that he almost fell to his knees. Since there weren’t any little rocks to practice with, he ran to the schola to look for things to practice with. He lifted the lid of a chest with his mind, curious at the feeling of weight it put on his knees.

But the lid slammed shut and Dirt realized he needed to take a break for a moment. It was getting harder to grab things and a feeling of deep tiredness was creeping into his brain. This had been quite a day already. He’d spent the morning sure he was about to die. Why push it?

Well, because, what else was he going to do? He’d done enough reading for the day, and the trees were busy, so what else was there?

Dirt poked around among the piles and boxes and chests, all the pots and baskets of gold and silver and whatever else had been preserved. He avoided the ones with little figurines, though, not wanting to be distracted by suffering gods. He used his shirt sleeve to wipe the front of a silver plater and looked at the decoration around the edge. It showed a hunting scene, he guessed, with several dogs chasing a deer. And a person’s head, for some reason, with mid-length hair that could be a man or woman.

There was a lot of that, it turned out. Just about anything fine enough to be made of silver or gold was worth decorating. That was fun for a while; looking at all the people and animals and trees. Scenes of battle or street life, bathing and eating, cattle and sheep and fearsome monsters. All of those, he knew the names of, which surprised him. No goblins or gryphons, no lumbering tentacle monsters sliding out of pools. But there were fauns and satyrs dancing in meadows, upside-down striges, centaurs with spears and bows, several kinds of gorgons tormenting and frightening men.

Dirt almost walked back out to find Home and ask her if she knew of any fauns or satyrs. Were those real? He and Socks had seen a lot of forests and never found any.

They’d seen some large birds that could perhaps have been striges, but probably not. What else did they feed on, other than human babies? And actually, he remembered something about witches being involved, so maybe they weren’t proper monsters in the first place. Maybe one of the scrolls would clarify.

‘Witches’ was a word that had never entered his head before, but now that it did, Avitus could only think of it with disdain. Sorcery, not proper magic. Beastly frauds with a few tricks. Market charlatans and scammers. Unwashed women in ragged robes who promised to rid a woman of her pregnancy for a price, or skinny men rattling bones at passers-by, threatening them with dire fates if they didn’t appease the dark powers. For only a few coins, so why take the risk?

The more he thought about it, the more indignant it made him. Wives of rich politicians scrawling curses on lead plates, thinking they were causing their husband’s success. A hundred other such things. Sorcery.

Dirt laughed softly at himself, finding it silly how upset he was getting. He must have really hated them, if there was a separate word for the magic they did. If they did any at all. No, even that old anger was a kind of nostalgia. And if the idea still bothered him this much after so long, that was rather funny. Avitus was so proud of his mental discipline and maturity, and here he was losing his composure over street chanters. Dirt’s grin stayed on his face for quite a while after.

He found a die carved from ivory, now yellow-brown with age, which might be the smallest thing the dryads had bothered to dig up. Màxim had a few that he kept safely hidden. He’d told Dirt that he wasn’t supposed to know about them and if the Duke found out, he’d surely get in trouble. They were used for gambling, and Màxim had learned about it by watching soldiers who hadn’t noticed he was around.

Dirt shook the die in his hand and rolled it on the stone floor. Four. He lifted it with his mind, rotated it, and set it down showing six instead. Now there was an idea! He spent the next little while practicing throwing the die and making it land on the number he wanted. All it took was a little nudge with his mind, but the hard part was doing it too subtly to notice.

He practiced, then read some more, then picked through the gold again and looked at the images. After a while, Home fetched him, moving stiffly and saying little. She gave him a bit more sap, encouraged him to drink a little water, and then sent him back to his villa.

It was empty, no dryads standing in the garden or at the gate. Not even inert ones. Dirt watched the minds of the nearby trees for a moment, their minds still fully engrossed in their task. He was reminded again just how immense their thoughts were, and wondered why it was so complicated just to smooth out the weather. Who knew what else they might be up to, though. He could ask them tomorrow, if they weren’t still at it. Or the day after.

As soon as Dirt lay in his bed of soft fibers and closed his eyes, he knew he was going to have nightmares. Just laying in the dark with his eyes closed reminded him of flying, and he could almost feel his body in motion from it. The fibers folded themselves around him almost like the air did.

But he was being silly. He was tired. Dirt calmed his mind as well as he could and drifted off to sleep.

The night was indeed fitful and he had three separate falling dreams, waking right when he hit the ground. The first time, he was with Socks walking alongside a cliff. The second time he was climbing up the stairs along a tree and slipped and fell. The third time, the wind caught him again.

Each time he woke he was sure he felt the impact, and as he calmed his racing heart, he wondered if he’d been hovering above his bed and then dropped into it. That didn’t seem likely, though.

The fourth dream, he was fully conscious. He knew he was dreaming but didn’t wake up. He stood upon hard, bare soil, with nothing but a blackness devoid of stars in every direction. He tried to dream of something else instead, but the dream resisted. He tried to wake up and couldn’t do that either.

Dirt scowled at nobody. He was going to be tired and grumpy all day tomorrow, if this was how badly he was sleeping. He couldn’t even dream properly!

Eyes opened in the distance, glowing red and yellow like midnight fire. The shape was familiar, and he said, “Father? Mother? Is that one of you?”

It wasn’t Father or Mother, though. It was no wolf he recognized. Or even a wolf at all, perhaps, because it was inferno-filled eyes and bared fangs floating in blackness with no other features visible. No outline of black fur, no scars, no claws. If it had a body, it would have been mostly in the ground. The monstrous face glided silently toward him, eyes focused and never wavering.

It came closer and Dirt turned to flee as dread ignited into terror. The inferno in its eyes cast shadows in front of him as he went, which grew more distinct as he ran. It was catching up. It was getting closer.

Suddenly he was facing it again, unable to move. He felt hard dirt like a road under his toes but his legs would not obey him. He looked up at the eyes, filling the black sky, and the slavering fangs whose saliva sizzled and hissed when it hit the ground.

It spoke to him without words, instead using the images and scents of the thoughts of wolves. -You have my son’s scent upon you,- it said, and Dirt recognized Father’s scent in the bundle of ideas.

-You have encountered my grandchildren.- That included Socks and the other living pups. Dirt knew all their scents, and each was named.

The eyes and fangs drifted slowly backward, but never turned their focus from Dirt. He caught a glimpse of its hunger, its need. It had his scent now, Dirt knew, and would follow him. He was prey, but not the meal himself.

The dream erupted violently in a flash of chaotic light and fell apart. Dirt saw countless trees in their dream-shapes building a tree dream around him in its place and the eyes vanished, and the teeth. And the scent, and the memory, and Dirt dreamed he was one of them until morning.