The Land of Broken Roads

Dirt dreamed of Socks that night, but it was a weak enough dream that he wasn’t sure if it was really him. The pup kept trying to speak with his mouth, but all his words were barks, causing severe frustration for both of them.

The other dream of the night was a tree-dream, full of their thoughts and experiences, only the tiniest portion of which he understood. But when he woke, he could remember a little more of it than last time. Enough to recognize some of it as the eternally shifting world of magic, all its patterns and shapes. More than anything, it humbled him. He’d never really expected to fully understand their world, but this gave him a lasting sense of inadequacy.

Not that he was about to give up. It’d just take a while. A very, very long while, with lots of practice he wasn’t likely to get racing up and down the countryside with Socks. But it was something to work on.

He rolled out of bed and stood up, stretching with a squeak that sounded out of place in the solemn silence. It was only barely beginning to lighten, just enough to find his way around. The early morning fog hadn’t gotten down through the gaps in the roof and into the room. Mostly it floated above, outside, thick as ever. The air was cool—cold, even—and he felt it keenly after being used to waking up laying on a warm puppy.

But it was his cold, in the middle of his forest, caused by his humidity dampening his skin and everything else. He might have spent more time outside the forest than in it by now, but he still thought of this place as home, and that made every part of it his.

They’d left his backpack leaning against a wall, unopened. His dark red sweat-soaked shirt was spread out on the floor next to it and didn’t look very dry. He sauntered over to the backpack and squatted down, opening it to look for the magical primer. He had to move some spare clothing out of the way to find it, which reminded him that Home had threatened him with a bath at some point. Not that he minded getting clean, but if she was going to start acting like Marina…

Dirt grinned and pulled off his pants. Might as well get properly filthy first, then. It’d be nice to get a good coating of his dirt, since it might be a while before he got another chance. His bare legs immediately made him feel a lot colder than before, but he wouldn’t give up that easily. He snapped his fingers to summon a light, then changed it into a hot ember to start warming up the nearby air.

Then he took the magical primer and sat down against a wall, shivering at the cool stone. He almost laughed at himself. How weak was he starting to get? A few weeks wearing clothing most of the time, and here he was unable to handle a typical morning in his own villa.

The second thing he noticed was how strange it felt to be sitting on the floor. It was hardly the same room anymore from down here. He really needed to make some chairs. Now that he thought about it, he wondered if he could get the dryads to bring some from Ogena with root travel. He had gold now, so he could buy them. Oh well. That was a concern for another time.

He unrolled the scroll and skimmed through the important parts, increasingly unimpressed with what he read. But the diagrams were good, all drawn perfectly under an exacting hand. The enchantment preserving the scroll even kept the little pinprick of the compass at the center of all the circles.

Dirt tried to look past each design to see the truth behind it, the reality hidden away in the magic world. He drew them one by one with his mana body, isolated and disconnected so they wouldn’t do anything, and tried to watch if they resolved into a true image. Sometimes it worked, giving him a better glimpse into a world his mind was the wrong shape for. Mostly the simpler sigils, signs of modification or those dealing with simple elements, like the heat of his ember.

The diagrams of several kinds of ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ sparked a memory and he jumped to his feet, eager to chase it before it faded. He had something for hot and cold already! He raced out of the room and down the hallway, risking breaking nose or toes in the near-perfect darkness where the dim light hadn’t reached yet. It had been right there in the atrium, in the corner where he used to sit and read. How had he not seen it?

Dirt switched his warming ember back to a light, since the atrium was black as night. The hovering light hopped and bobbled to follow him as he ran over to the corner, making his shadow jump wildly against the faded frescoes. He had to hold still for a moment so it’d settle down before he found it. The dial! The only one like it anywhere. He gave a little cheer, despite how silly that was all by himself, and his voice echoed through the empty room.

The dial was just as he remembered. Not quite as long as his hand, its leaf shape contained enough gold to make ten necklaces, with the point indicating which enchantment was selected. It had four settings, four complete enchantment circuits that would adjust the temperature in the entire villa at once. Such magic was shockingly expensive, since you had to keep someone on regular retainer to keep refueling it, usually hourly. Even if a rich citizen paid to have one drawn, they’d only hire a wizard to give it mana for special occasions.

But his was special. Avitus had been a genius among geniuses, or so he’d fancied himself, long before meeting the wolves or trees. He’d laid the enchantment himself, overseeing the engraving of each line in each stone throughout the whole villa to an unprecedented level of precision. A single charge of mana would heat or cool his villa for ten hours or more.

That by itself would have been enough for his name to be spoken all across the Sunset Empire, but he’d gone farther than that by overlaying all four enchantments in the same spot, to be selected with this very dial. The underside would complete only one enchantment at a time when turned.

Dirt set it to ‘mild warm’ as gently as he could, holding his breath for fear it would snap off in his hand. It scraped a bit as it turned, but it turned. He touched the dial with a fingertip and pushed some mana into it.

Nothing happened. Nothing even felt like it was trying to happen. He tried not to be too disappointed. After all, this was ancient and it wouldn’t take much to ruin the spell. One stone out of place, one line disturbed by a crack, anything. No, this was just another thing to put on his growing list of projects. Maybe he could trace out the patterns and see how it worked, but it wouldn’t be easy, since he’d have to pull the stones apart to look between them. A project for another day.

He took the scroll and stepped out into the fresh morning air, fog swirling around him. Droplets of water fell like rain from any disturbed ferns as he walked where his garden used to be. The little iron fences were gone, as were all the flowers he’d planted in each space. And the tree in the middle of the intersecting pathways. It had been a small tree, some kind of fruit, with a little bench to sit on. Nothing of that remained either, but he sat on the smooth paving stones where the bench once rested and resumed reading the primer.

All in all, it contained around fifteen basic spells and enchantments, and thirty-six different magic words to make them up. He rested his chin in his hands and set the primer aside, wondering what he could say with thirty-six words. They weren’t even words in the usual sense. Certainly not ‘hello.’

No, now that he thought about it, there had to be something more to how they talked. How could there be a magic word for hello in the first place? Hello wasn’t an operation. It wasn’t a function of the world that needed to be powered. It was just an idea. Well, ideas were a function of a mind, and the elementals and trees had those, so there must be more to it.

How early had he woken up? He rolled the scroll closed and stood, shivering slightly from the chill. He walked down the stone pathway to the gate, where only dark smudges of rust remained of the hinges. The dryads outside were still sleeping, standing straight, staring at nothing. Empty dolls.

If one of them had been Callius, Dirt might have been tempted to shape his dryad into something else, or remove the eyes or something, just as a prank. Just to see what he’d do. But he wasn’t as familiar with these ones and couldn’t have picked them out of the crowd. The last thing he wanted to do was offend a tree.

With nothing better to do until the dryads started waking up, Dirt wandered from building to building, checking the interiors and gardens to see what else had survived. Anything wooden was long gone, as was most of the metal, but that left plenty still to find. Statues and other carvings, for one, largely in excellent shape after being buried for so long and protected from the weather. No skeletons. If any of those had survived, the trees left them buried.

One small home in a row of apartments had a bronze lockbox as tall as his knee, which the dryads had probably thought was furniture. The rusted-out hinges shattered when he opened it and the inside contained only a thick layer of rock-hard, black material. But if this chest hadn’t been opened by the dryads, that meant there were probably plenty more out there that also hadn’t been opened, and that piqued his curiosity so hard he was tempted to put off speaking to the elemental until tomorrow.

Further searching was not to be, however, because the trees woke up and came looking for him. Four of them, all girls he didn’t recognize, stood at the door of the apartment home and waited for him to come out. He pointedly ignored the fact that all four of them had short, rough tunics on.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning, friend Dirt,” said one. Her voice was an inhuman, breathy groan that made him smile slightly. She still needed practice.

They had nothing more to say, staring at him with pleasant but wooden expressions.

He scratched his stomach and asked, “How is the new tree doing? The one I planted by Ogena? Is she healthy?”

“She is well,” said the same dryad. “They call her la Petita Mestressa.” The Little Mistress.

“I like it. Is she growing fast?”

“Compared to what?” asked the second dryad, her voice sounding a bit too deep.

“Good question. Never mind. I hope she’s happy, at least.”

“We are all happy,” said a dryad.

“I guess that’s true,” said Dirt. He hoped he wasn’t too obvious about looking over their shoulders to see if anyone else was coming. So far, they weren’t. “So, are you nearby? Where are you?”

Each of the dryads paused for a moment, then turned and pointed in different directions. As he suspected, they were the four closest trees, still several hundred paces away.

“Good. I need one of you to show me something. Do you mind making a space in your thoughts for me? Any of you is fine, if you’re up for it. So here’s what I’m wondering. When you speak in the world of magic, how do you share an idea like ‘hello’? Do you have words of magic that represent other things, like my words do?”

“We do not say hello,” said the breathy-voiced one.

The third dryad, who had yet to speak, silently extended her hand. He looked at it a moment and realized she wanted him to take it, so he did. She led him out of the apartment and into the street. The other three dryads went still for a moment, communicating with each other through their roots, then followed.

“What are we doing?” he asked, but she gave no reply. She made her face the perfect image of friendliness but didn’t bother to keep it looking very alive. Her limbs moved like a human’s, though, and her hand felt fleshy enough.

They stopped in the center of the street, a well-preserved section that fit together handsomely. All it needed was a good rain to wash the black soil off, but that would never happen.

The dryad stood in the pose that Hèctor had when he’d taught Dirt his very first dance. Side by side, arms extended. Dirt grinned and assumed the proper position as the other three dryads clapped a steady rhythm. Perfectly steady. Their three sets of hands sounded like one pair.

She put an eager smile on her face and the dance began, starting out just how he remembered. She knew it better than he did, it turned out, even though he’d had more chances to practice. Each foot landed in just the right place, one motion leading into another. Any time he was about to go astray, a gentle tug on his hand in this direction or that got him back on track.

Then another dryad joined, holding his other hand, and the dance became a different one altogether, even though the steps were similar. The same dance, even, just modified to keep in a line and dance with more people. He learned it quickly and started humming a little tune to accompany them.

The dance changed again when the two dryads joined hands to form a circle. Dirt stopped humming until he saw how it was going to go. They rotated instead of going side by side or back and forth, and once he could keep up, they added new steps to the mix, expanding the dance.

“Oh!” he said, stopping. “I get it now! Okay. Yeah. That makes sense.”

“What have you understood?” asked the deep-voiced girl.

“How you talk. I think I could have figured this out from what I saw yesterday, but I really get it now. You don’t talk. You play together, and that’s how you express yourselves,” he said.

All four of them giggled politely, and none of them got the sounds quite right. It sounded horrible, which made him chuckle as well. “Close enough,” said the breathy one.

“I’m ready to try again. Can you take me back up? Or should we wait for everyone else to wake up? Or, actually, are you going to make me climb up like yesterday?” said Dirt, walking off the street and into the ferns where the root travel could reach him.

In answer, he found himself flung upward, a sensation becoming more familiar each time. When he was thrown out, there was no ground to hit and in the instant of disorientation he reached desperately for the nearest branch and missed it. But a hand grabbed his and pulled him back up. Callius.

“Good morning, Dirt. Good thing you came out close enough for me to catch,” he said.

Dirt swallowed against the riotous pounding in his chest. It was a long, long way down. He couldn’t even see the ground through the slowly-dispersing fog. He could probably survive that fall. Maybe. Except he might not hit soft ground. He might land on a road.

“Next time, put a net for me to land in,” he said.

“How do you know there isn’t one down there already?” replied Callius.

“It should be up here.”

“But if it’s down there, you’ll have time to reflect on your mistakes before it catches you,” said Callius.

“I think I’d have other things on my mind,” said Dirt.

“We will not drop you,” said Home, emerging halfway from a leaf.

Dawn joined her, a girl with a woman. They held hands. “Not on purpose, anyway,” she said, eyes gleaming in the morning sunlight.

And the sunlight was finally here, just breaking above the horizon. Rays of light ignited the dust and humidity where they pierced between the leaves, filling the landscape with lines of glory. Bright golden light, clear greens, and the flawless blue sky above. Maybe he should build a little space to visit up here. A platform to sit on, with a bed for warm afternoon naps.

Socks would never see this, he realized with a bit of regret. The pup was simply too big for these light branches to support him. There was nowhere for him to stand even if he could get up here somehow. Dirt would have to share the image mentally, so he took care to experience it as fully as possible with all his senses.

The air was calm but began to move with the rising sun. Gusts of air blew in, and soon after came the elementals, dancing among the tangled treetops as they travelled. They were long, he knew, if they could be said to have bodies at all. They stretched from here to there, from distant to even farther away. He sent them all a mental idea of greeting, warm and friendly, which they seemed to understand, if not reciprocate.

Then an even, steady gust of wind bent the treetop several paces and calmed again to let it sway back into place. Over and over it repeated, until finally Dirt saw the great elemental’s mind appear and grow to its previous size as she got closer and closer.

A dance. A dance, he thought. He closed his eyes and said, “Can you tell her she doesn’t need to try and make a face unless she wants to? I see her just fine. I know where she is.”

He didn’t open his eyes again to look and see the result. Instead, he turned his eye inward and placed his thoughts as firmly in his mana body as he could. The sensation of air on his skin was impossible to ignore, but he let it happen, observing instead of resisting.

Dirt spoke words of magic, partial ones, with no power behind them. Motion, motion from stillness into activity, motion continuing until complete. Wind, a word he knew well. Moving wind, rising into being.

The great elemental responded and Dirt felt new words emerge, gathering around his to enliven and enhance it. Some he recognized, like sparks and light. Motion around shapes, drawing images in the directionless plane of magic. Ideas of physical shapes pressed themselves into his mana body not as themselves, but as the space created by the motion around them.

Dirt nodded appreciatively. She knew what the physical world was. She lived in it far more fully than the trees did. Everything she touched, she perceived in a thousand ways. The sounds, the scents, all of it. Including him, standing here holding a thin branch with his eyes closed.

He couldn’t simply listen to her speak, though. The dance required two. Dirt struggled to watch the patterns, to feel and experience what she told him and strained to react with his own limited vocabulary.

Dirt felt the air on his skin from her perspective even as he experienced it from his own. She drew it in magic, and he responded by sharing the word for ‘calling into being’. She colored that with the shape of cloth, which rotated around the whole as if trying to find a spot to integrate.

Accompanying that magical concept, her mind had a question in it, curiosity. Just the emotion of it. No words, of course, but he could tell that much. “Why are you naked?” she was asking.

Dirt grinned and swung his free arm and leg, letting the rushing air wash over him. He ran his hand through his hair, feeling the wind tug that too. How should he answer? Motion, was all he could think. He sent her the mental feeling of freedom and she drew a new word, a complicated one that his mana body struggled to accept all at once. Release from restraint. That was it. Release from restraint.

He drew the same word, sharing his happiness mentally. His excitement. It was possible! They could really talk! He could learn so much, and all he needed was practice. He drew freedom from restraint again and this time, decorated it with motion and the shape of wind as it moved around him.

The elemental’s mind flashed, nearly from one end to the other, in pure excitement. The wind suddenly increased, going from a steady gust to a strong gale that bent the treetop a dozen paces. The air pressed hard against his skin and his closed eyes. He had to breathe with his mouth nearly closed. Fear gripped and his mind raced to think how to tell her to slow down.

But she did not. The wind grew yet again and all at once, it tore him from the tree top and flung him upward like a leaf in a thunderstorm.