The Land of Broken Roads

The wind ceased, but the huge face’s mouth remained open, unmoving, like a cheap carving on a fountain. The faint fog that composed her form waxed, waned, then waxed again, and Dirt felt the temperature shifting around him as it happened.

“Hello?” he asked. There seemed to be a minor reaction in her mind, but it was lost in the tangle too quickly to tell what it was.

Another gust of air blew over him, almost silently, despite his expectation her mouth would make some kind of whistling noise. It didn’t, and that made the gusts of air seem to be blowing in from anywhere. Normal wind, instead of whatever this was.

“I’m sorry, do you know how to speak using words? Or maybe you can think something really clearly for me?” he said. She seemed to be hearing him, but without any understanding that he could tell. He tried to follow her thoughts, but the tangles weren’t anything concrete. They were a representation of a being comprised largely of motion itself.

At the next gust, he thought he recognized something in her thoughts. A trace of himself, but not as a whole person—it was a process, rather, a sensation like the wind itself would have as it passed over and around him. The smoothness of skin and the roughness of cloth. That gave him the insight he needed: it was his shape, perceived as a progression, as a motion. Front, then sides and arms, then his back, as it washed over him. That perception then slid wildly throughout the twisting threads of thought, chased and led by many, many others.

Now more of what he saw in her mind started making sense. It contained more information than the trees’ minds, startling amounts, even if less of it was… analyzed? Acted on? It was the shapes of things, but understood like a map, perhaps. No, there was no use trying to compare it to human ideas. It was simply what the wind felt, and that was all.

There was no use trying to put the images together into something he could recognize. There was no chance of that, with too many things moving too quickly. But if he held his attention on a single spot and simply tried to feel, to let it wash over him and experience it, he could almost understand.

Dirt opened his eyes and took in the scenery again, enjoying how the brightness of the sun gave the greenery a hint of cheerful yellow, making it feel active. Very different from the darker greens far below in their quiet shadows.

The gentle sound of rushing wind that stirred the leaves across vast distances in every direction filled his ears, punctuated by happily chirping birds. The flat face watched down from above, expressionless, and Dirt realized that wasn’t really her. That was just an attempt to be recognizable, to let him see that she existed. No, the elemental had no body at all. She was alive all the same, though, a living band of motion that stretched past the horizons. No wonder her mind was so long, and so full of observations.

“What’s her name?” he asked Callius, whispering at first. The rushing wind drowned him out, so he said it again, louder.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you. I’d have to think it, and I suspect you’re too far to see my mind,” said Callius.

“Starwatcher, how about you? You’re watching, right? Can you think her name for me?” asked Dirt.

As if her name called her into being, Starwatcher formed her plump dryad on a nearby leaf, but it was hollow inside, having almost no weight. She looked like a frame, not a complete puppet. Her face was whole, but even if it hadn’t been, he would have recognized her from her shape. Which, now that he thought about it, might be why she did it. How true would that be for any other dryad?

“I can think the name,” she said, her voice surprisingly normal. “But be careful. The names of elementals are not like names for other things.”

“I’m ready, go ahead,” said Dirt.

Starwatcher’s mind pulsed in the way of trees, tremendous bundles of thought passing in cycles or waves, except the portion devoted to maintaining her dryad, which was smaller than usual. And a new section, disciplined in perfection down to a low hum, almost an emptiness like the minds of half-dead things. Into that space emerged a string of shapes and signs and patterns, each more arcane and bizarre than the last.

Dirt recognized it well enough—it was a glimpse into the world of Magic, which infused reality imperceptibly, like Spirit or the Dream. Dirt knew two words, for lack of a better term, from that world. Shaping wood and calling wind. The sign for wind, he found woven into the greater whole that Starwatcher showed him.

The name of the elemental didn’t appear all at once, either, like a normal name would. Her name was a process, not a discrete signifier. It would be like having a complete dance for a name, or a song, and if any part was left out or changed it wouldn’t be the name anymore.

“One more time, please?” asked Dirt, doubting his ability to remember it even after twenty times. The dryad obliged, passing it through her mind once again, each section of it weaving into something new with each moment until the process was complete. Perhaps he could recognize it compared against similar things, but he certainly couldn’t reproduce it yet.

“I guess the reason I need to be careful with her name is if I say it with mana, and get it wrong, something weird will happen? What’ll happen if I do that and get it right?” said Dirt.

“Dirt!” said Callius.

“What?”

The dryad just looked at him with a blank expression.

“Oh,” said Dirt, breaking into a slow smile.

“The difference is it’ll work from anywhere, as long as you’re outside,” said Callius. “So, do you have any ideas?”

Dirt watched the gentle breezes shake the wind as far as he could see. Whether the elementals were the wind itself, or simply partakers in it he couldn’t say. But they were not separate from it. While most winds returned to the sky and journeyed onward, some smaller currents of air twisted down into the branches and were lost, and the minds associated with them faded. They didn’t seem to be dying, but perhaps they were. How long did a wind live?

The round face hovering above him was only part of the great current of wind flowing across the treetops, and Dirt’s body was hardly more than a tiny curiosity, a unique shape among so many similar things. The elemental knew where he was, though, and perhaps her face with her mouth that blew air was more like hands, trying to feel something in more detail.

He searched the many pathways of her mind until he found himself again, the sensation of his skin and pants against the wind. It took great mental focus to follow it as it flowed through her thoughts, but into that spot he sent a wordless feeling of warm greeting. Hello.

She touched his mana body again, the wind of her mouth causing electric sparks that danced all through him. He had no eyes for the world of magic, but he could sense the creation of shapes and patterns all around him as they manifested and faded.

Starwatcher said, “She is trying to play with you.” A gust of wind shook the leaf she was standing on, causing her to lean precariously to one side. Her feet were perfectly fixed, however, and she stayed put.

Dirt closed his eyes and used all his mental focus on his mana vessel, doing his best to perceive what the elemental was doing. There were two problems. First, he could only barely sense any of it. His mind kept trying to turn what he experienced into something more familiar, like a feeling of touch or an image of sight. But that’s not what it was. The more it became like something in the physical world, the less true it was.

The second problem was that none of the magic happening around him was doing anything. It was all just potential, none of it made real.

After a time spent in earnest focus, it got a little easier, but the elemental seemed to be losing interest. She was trying to interact with him, and he was acting like a statue.

Was there a bit of magic he could do without actually completing it? A potential with no actualization? There was, and it was so instinctive to him he hardly even thought about it.

He raised his hand to snap and create a small light, but he left his fingers pressed, hovering in that moment between preparation and completion. A magical pattern manifested near him, one which he knew so well he’d never even looked at it. Light.

The elemental’s mind pulsed with sudden excitement and drew around the magical symbol for light with patterns of her own, expanding it into poetry. Dirt watched in awe, holding the inchoate light with all his strength, as she worked. One piece of her efforts stood out to him somehow. Just that one part, but something about it seemed familiar and tickled his curiosity fiercely.

Then it hit him—he knew it from the magical primer scroll, and unconsciously long before that. He’d just seen it yesterday, in fact. The written representation was a poor substitute, but it meant ‘growth’ in the sense of expanding to reach within prescribed limits.

That was it! He wasn’t sure whether to be proud of humans for getting it so close, or ashamed at how inadequate it was. Was that the limit of human magic? Scrawling out half-understood magical ideas and fueling them with power and hoping they worked?

No, proud. He should be proud. How had they even done it, without any real guidance? If only he could go back in time and ask himself.

Dirt shook off his focus and his awareness returned fully to the world, almost like waking from a dream. “I figured it out! Callius, can you tell her I’ll be back? I need to read some more. I need my scroll in my backpack, too, wherever that ended up. Can you send me to the schola again? No, wait, I’ll tell her. I’ll try,” said Dirt, so excited he was in danger of babbling.

He quickly sent the elemental two emotions, one of growing affection and one of temporary farewell. Hopefully she’d understand, or maybe the trees could fill her in. He doubted she’d go anywhere, since she was in so many places already.

There were so many things he needed to try! He almost jumped out of the tree and risked his mana being insufficient to keep him from going splat when he hit the ground. No, he could summon wind below him and have it blow upward to slow him down! He just needed to add this and maybe this to the magical word the dryads had taught him.

Best not to risk it, though. Breaking your bones hurt. “Can you send me down with root travel, Starwatcher? Please?”

“I think our dear Dirt is excited,” said Callius, glassy eyes sparkling with shared amusement. “What did you figure out?”

“Oh, well, I think if I take another look at the—” He vanished into pure speed, bouncing this way and that, and landed with a sudden thud near the colonnaded entry to the schola. He laughed into silence and jumped to his feet. Callius had done that on purpose! Dirt really needed to come up with a way to play a joke on a tree.

Dirt took deep breaths to wash out his dizziness, but it wasn’t so bad this time since he hadn’t come far. It was still quite a marked difference from above, though. Up there, it was warm and bright and windy, full of noise and motion. Down here, it was dim and silent and pleasantly cool.

He wasted no time and snapped a couple lights into existence before any dryads had even appeared. They were just starting to arrive, some forming anew and others popping into existence, probably sent by root travel. Dirt ran inside, ignoring all the boxes in the main hall, and turned down the hallway to the right, his bare feet slapping the stone and echoing loudly.

Dirt was running so fast he slammed into the ancient wooden door frame to slow himself down and bounced into the room. He checked each scroll as fast as he could without damaging them, looking for texts on magic. FOR THE PROSPERITY OF CATTLE. That was one. He gently set it near his feet. SCRYING AND ALL USEFUL IMPLEMENTS. That was another. THE HAND. He put that one with the others.

By the time he’d gone through them all, he’d found twenty non-magical texts that had sparked some recognition in him, things he knew he’d read and loved as Avitus. But even better, he’d found several dozen magical treatises of varying usefulness. THE MEASUREMENTS OF THE HEAVENS, for one, had more geometry in it than magic, but it had some divination constructs that should prove useful.

The room had about thirty dryads in it now, too, and Dawn in particular kept reading over his shoulder. He could tell from how they shifted about anxiously that they were curious, or at least that they wanted him to think they were.

“Here’s what I figured out from the elementals. See these drawings? They’re sort of how a human would perceive a pattern in the world of magic. I think that’s how we used to do it, long ago. Gather the right patterns, put them in the right configuration, and then feed it mana. They’re crude, but they’re close. It feels so primitive now! But I guess it worked,” said Dirt, rolling through the text to find the next schematic.

“And what will you do with them?” asked Dawn, almost into his ear.

“Well, this, I don’t think this will work to talk with her if I just draw them. But if I can find the real meaning behind each one and how it’s really supposed to look, then I should be able to use that. I already know a few and there are others that I’m remembering as soon as I see them from when I was Avitus,” he said. “I think I might be able to speak with her well enough to learn the rest as I go.”

“And speak with us too. Human language is so weird,” complained Dawn.

“Maybe, but it’s pretty good at expressing human thoughts,” said Dirt.

“Then your thoughts are weird, too. Soft folds of flesh, and you blow air over them to make them vibrate, then shape the vibrations with a wet tongue and teeth and lips, and somehow that’s your thoughts,” said Dawn.

“No, the thoughts are the words, not the flapping tongue itself. It’s not that different. How is this—” he said, manifesting the word for light in the magical world, hoping they could detect it, “any different from just saying ‘light?’”

“Because the first one will make a real light appear, and the flappy flesh sound won’t,” said Dawn.

“Do not be distressed, friend Dirt,” said Home. “You are strange, but we also adore you.”

“Oh, I know. You’re just teasing me. But Dawn has a point. Humans have a bunch of words for light, like in my language and the language of the Camayans. Different words for the same thing. So the words signify a thing, but they aren’t the thing itself. I think the difference is, maybe the magic world’s word is the thing itself. Or part of it,” said Dirt. Now his mind was spinning with too many things at once. Why did they have to bring up philosophy?

Home said, “That magic word for light is not the light itself. It is the action of a will on the world of magic, suited to a specific purpose. Here, watch.”

The woman created a ball of wood in her outstretched palm and tossed it into the air. “It is like my hand, tossing the ball. It is not the ball; it is the cause of the tossing. We know all things by the processes that create and comprise them.”

Dirt nodded and said, “Okay, that might be helpful to know, actually. So if… hmm. Okay, let me read for a little bit.”

He put down the scroll he was reading and picked up THE HAND, since that looked like it’d be the most informative. And it was. It was an advanced guidebook on how to operate on the world directly, making things slow down or speed up, helping to lift heavy objects, and so on.

It felt more and more familiar the more he read it, but strangely, it filled him with dismay instead of nostalgia. Avitus had known this text, or the author of it, perhaps, and disagreed strongly with some points. That feeling of frustration still lingered.

And justifiably so, because at least a third of the diagrams in the scroll didn’t look like they did anything at all. For example, this spell here had a complex set of diagrams and contained several words that Dirt was sure were correct. Lift was one, and guide was another. But the author had labeled a tangle scrawl as ‘This gives stone the weight of wood’ and Dirt was almost certain it was made up.

Indeed, if he thought about each word and let it manifest into the magic world, without giving it any power, of course, many of them sort of slid into shape. Others came apart, and that one—the one about weight—couldn’t be manifested at all.

Time sped by until the dryads made him stop to eat and drink. It was a good thing they did, too, because he needed it after all that sweating. His throat was parched but he’d been ignoring it, lost in reading. And after that, it was back to studying.

Avitus felt just like his old self, but without all the joint pain. Here he was, sitting on a flat stone floor like it was nothing, reading. What a delight that was. How old had he been, before? Old enough just sitting could be troublesome. No longer, though. And what pleasure could there be like a new text? Especially one that proved useful somehow. And these were all new texts, in every way that mattered.

He lost himself over and over in deep lakes of new information, some of it familiar like something recalled, but far from all. The most gainful things he learned were the new words, or seeing how a word might be modified. After one text he suddenly jumped to his feet and snapped his fingers to make a new light, this one blue instead of candle-yellow, because he was able to recognize the part of it that gave it color and change it. Then another, green. And another as a ball the size of his fist instead of a tiny glowing spot, by adding two new symbols that spoke of shape and size. Shape, as expressed in the world of magic and then brought to being in the physical world, proved to be the single most complicated part of any magical word.

The relations that these humans had known were sound, diagrammed in their proper places, but Avitus wondered if they’d ever done much directly. Well, there was one thing, he supposed. Snapping his fingers to make light. Perhaps that had been used as much to prove his mastery as to see in the dark.

After all, every text agreed on the methods. Drawings, using chalk or paint or whatever else, various ceremonial implements like daggers and candles and gemstones and bones. Rituals to follow, invocations of names and powers. Some were simple, but most were complex. And, as far as Avitus could tell, mostly pointless.

For example, this spell was supposed to help a newborn calf who was failing. The explanation said it helped generate blood and strengthen bowels and sinews, but in reality, as far as Avitus could tell, it just infused the poor creature with a bit of mana to give it enough strength to get up and walk around on its own until it started feeling better. Why go through all the trouble, when you could just do like Socks did and shove a bit of mana in directly?

So much of it was wrong, too, not just pointless. It made Dirt start to wonder just how much magic anyone had actually been able to perform. Some, surely. But they didn’t have the benefit of being suffocated in a tree to learn to gather mana. They had to learn it the slow way, whatever that was, so perhaps there was too much room for error for anyone to be sure.

Home patted him gently on the head and said, “Dear Dirt, you must retire. We must sleep soon. If we do not send you to your bed now, we will be asleep and unable.”

Dirt stood and stretched, exhausted and stiff. “Sorry. I can’t tell time in here. I hope you weren’t too bored just watching me.”

“We do not get bored. If you are ready to return, then let us step outside,” said Home, taking his hand.

Many of the remaining dryads, including Callius and Dawn, had already gone inert and fallen asleep. They stood perfectly still, lifeless, in a way that made Dirt glad he could tell they weren’t really human. No sooner had Home led him out into the ferns than he was tossed through the roots again in nearly an instant.

He landed just outside his villa, where a few other inert dryads had been waiting by the gate. He patted their shoulders as he walked past, even though they couldn’t sense it, and stepped lightly through the garden. He walked through the villa in the dark, by feel, tracing his fingers on the wall. Slowly, to keep from running into anything he’d forgotten about, but he encountered no difficulty.

In his bedroom, his shins bumped against a bed they’d placed here for him, just like the one he’d slept on underneath Home. He plopped into it with a contented sigh and snuggled down to sleep. What a day it’d been. First Father, then the schola, then the elementals, and all that reading. He was ready. Tomorrow, he’d talk to the wind.