Chapter 36: Travel

I had noticed while riding to and from the fields where I made my enhanced produce that the roads in my territory sucked. I wanted to do something about it, something other than wandering about the place slowly raising roads using my magic. But on the other hand, I had no patience to design and oversee the building of a British industrial-revolution era style highway. Not to mention the time – Britain’s roads had sprung up over decades, whereas I wanted results within months. At some point I would start some rail lines, but that wasn’t needed yet.

No, like I did so often, I turned to biological manipulation to solve this problem for me. Using Green, White for order and some Blue for calculation, I designed a plant which would drop road-seeds. These road seeds needed to be activated by an acid like vinegar or citrus to grow. After being activated, they would rapidly grow a system of roots, anchoring the plant. These roots would connect to other nearby plants’ roots, allowing them to communicate and share information.

The plant would spread a network of sprouts to detect the lay of the land. Then the plant would grow a platform that was gently curved to connect to the neighboring platforms, conform to the land, and otherwise be as flat as possible with a slight convex shape for drainage. The platforms were all raised a half-foot off the ground, so that drainage to the side of the road wasn’t an issue, with bands of waist-high brush help keep traffic on the road and act as a central divider.

Once the platform reached a certain size which depended on how much acid was used to activate it, maxing out at about a four-lane highway, it would stop growing. The platforms themselves were just rough enough for a good grip, photosynthetic and tougher than steel with a natural toughness enchantment strengthening the already hard wood. The root system removed issues of the road’s underlying surface being washed away.

To remove a section of road, you could dig around the side to be close to the roots, then treat them with salt mixed with a base such as soap. The plant would die and rapidly rot away. The same method could be used to remove the brush to allow entrances and exits. To make a new one, you needed a seed which only I produced.

I had the Ravens coordinate with the Hounds to plan out improved road routes throughout my territory, then sent them out with leather water-skins containing vinegar and baskets full of seeds. My greenroads grew like weeds across the map of my territory. It made it far easier for goods to be transported across the land, and soon I was selling my seeds at about eighty dragons for enough to grow a mile of highway. The Seven Kingdoms had some ten thousand miles of major roads, and I had no doubt that in time all would be grown from my seeds.

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By August my roads were spread across my land and I was entirely sick and tired of playing estate manager.

Teleportation was proving more difficult than I had expected, and no matter how fast and strong Aethon was, or I was for that matter, there were issues with physical force and the physics of how to move much faster than we were going, especially over rough ground. Flight would take care of those issues.

Furthermore, there was the basic question: can any land-bound mage truly call themselves a proper wizard?

I thought not, so flight was essential.

I had thought about all the different ways I might do it; running on telekinetic platforms, blasted about in a bubble of air, changing the direction of gravity, and so on. I also had the dragon eggs, still waiting to be hatched, and whatever bit of magic it was that dragons used to keep their massive bulks aloft.

But I didn’t want to bring dragons back, not yet. Not while I was still unready.

When I had dragons, I needed for them to be able to be my sole focus. I needed to be able to watch them, see how their minds formed, ensure that they would be obedient to me, that no other could steal them from me, that they would not grow in power to challenge me. Dragons were mighty enough, the local equivalent to the atom bomb.

After I was done with them, they would be upgraded from city-killing fission bombs to country cracking fusion bombs though. I needed to be absolutely sure of my interactions with them, and free from all distractions.

Honestly, I didn’t even want the distraction of getting home to be there when I woke the dragons. Optimally, I would figure out a way home, reunite with and upgrade my family, and then return to achieve my childhood dream of being a dragon-mounted mage-knight.

So in the end I went with a simple telekinetic field as my flight mechanism.

I say simple, but the enchantment was anything but. Based mostly on Blue for the active control and intelligent reading and reacting to my physical signals, the enchantment made a skin-tight telekinetic field around my body. Then with a lot of fine tuning I had the field react to my movements, small instinctive twists of the hips and shoulders to spin about, movements in the torso that on the ground would help me dodge to get lateral motion, leaning forwards and backwards to accelerate or slow down.

The outside of the field was actually a lightly armored reactive shell that hugged my skin. It counteracted most of the force of wind-pressure so I didn’t feel like I was getting blasted by a tornado while I was whipping about. At higher speeds a teardrop shape would form for better aerodynamics, though the movement-driven inertia responses would still send me moving about as I wanted unless I turned it off and went into cruise control.

There was a backup mode that let me use set amounts of force in specific directions, but that wasn’t as intuitive to use especially while doing other things.

If all this sounds easy, trust me, it wasn’t. I had to stop practicing in the castle after I hit an interior wall hard enough to crack it. It took over a week just to design a prototype of the spell, and I was still fine tuning this and that months later. Still, by the end of August it was functional if not perfect, and I had learned a lot about simple forces, my body, and control-reaction loops in enchanting.

It gave me the idea to develop magically-motivated power armor someday, but the idea of doing more of that fiddly work at the time was anathema to me.

There were two big issues with the flight enchantment. First, I saw no easy way to apply it to Jon, let alone the different bodies of Aethon, Shadowfax, Togo and Ghost. Instead I developed a flight ride-along, something to keep their relative position with regards to me the same so I could carry them about on a flight if I wanted.

Second, the enchantment was only the structure of the spell; much like an airplane, it still needed to be actively fueled to fly. That was fine for me, but even for those as heavily enchanted as Jon and the others there just wasn’t enough mana available for continuous or high speed flight.

If I wanted them to be independently flight capable, I really needed to look into ambient mana gathering, mana storage, and mana generation. I was sure all three were possible, just probably really difficult, at least in the quantities that I needed.

I wasn’t too bothered though. I always loved my dreams of flying, and being able to do it for real was awesome.

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Buoyed up with my success I decided to turn my hand once more to teleportation. Previously I had tried many, many failed methods to instantly transport myself. As failed teleportation seemed potentially dangerous, I tested it with a combination of precognition and small animals. I killed a lot of small animals named Science! in the process.

But Science! the First through Eight Hundred and Seventy Fourth would not die in vain! That I swore.

The closest to an actual teleportation I managed was to project the pattern of their mana onto a slightly distant spot and then force the body to move there. Sometimes Science! didn’t even explode on the other end or disappear into the aether, just coming out horrifically disfigured. Then progress slowed once more to a crawl.

One day I was feeling particularly bored and lazy. I had been trying and failing to manage teleportation for all of August. I had no new ideas to try. And so there I lay in one of my labs, trying to summon the motivation to get some work done. A large number of Science!s were in cages against one of the walls.

Without really thinking about it, I reached out to one of the Science!s, a squirrel in one of the series which had been pre-treated for toughness in the hopes that that would help to survive teleportation (it didn’t). I tugged on that faint, nebulous link between us, provided some mana, and wished he was in my hands.

Science! the twelve hundred eight first disappeared from his cage and into my hands.

I blinked down at Science! the 1281st, and he blinked his eyes us at me. A wide, wide grin spread across my face. I tossed Science! across the room (it’s not animal cruelty when the animal is literally tougher than the stones) and tried again.

Science! the 1281st promptly exploded all over me.

“FOR FUCK’S SAKE!” I screamed. Then I ranted, raved, tossed my chair against the wall, swore like a sailor and screamed a bit in my rage.

Eventually I got it out of my system. Panting and once more calm, I looked at Science! the 1282nd and teleported him.

It worked!

I laughed and laughed and laughed in my joy, and didn’t stop until my stomach hurt.

It was far from what I needed to return home, but every journey begins with a first step.

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For the rest of September I practiced with my new skill, which I called Calling (since it called animals to me). I investigated the important questions: why Science! would sometimes explode; how much mana it cost to transport Science!; whether distance mattered for possibility of transportation, exactness required of mana manipulation or quantity of mana supplied; what happened if I used a little more mana than needed; what happened if I used a lot more mana than needed; whether I could teleport something twice at the same time to make a duplicate, etc.

I found out a few things. First of all, the mana required to transport Science! did vary. It started off as what seemed to be the exact amount of mana that was bound in all the active enchantments plus the animal’s own essential manna pattern, which was basically the energetic description of that being. Then it approached a maximum of two times that much energy. That maximum was asymptotically approached, so after a few hundred miles the extra mana was pretty negligible.

Both too much and too little mana were deadly. Too much and the pattern would be distorted when it arrived. If the animal was lucky, the corpse was merely mangled and unrecognizable. Unlucky, and it fucking exploded, spraying blood everywhere. Too little and the animal would just disappear, poof! Gone, disappeared into the aether. I tried tracking them with a sympathetic bonding, but the bonding just straight up disappeared.

This actually led to the development of one of my most powerful spells yet. I called it Exile. It used a single White mana to seize hold of a creature’s pattern, then a single colorless to initiate teleportation to a preset destination; I used the Wall. It was a simple, clean, eradication of any target. The only ways I could see them blocking it was if they could either avoid my mana senses, or prevent the forceful teleportation.

Then, because that wasn’t effective enough, I came up with Mass Exile. Basically, instead of just using White to target a single pattern, it used multiple Whites and targeted multiple patterns at a time. I added a Blue refinement to auto-target patterns within a certain area as well, making it area-of-effect rather than multi-targeted.

It was a fucking terrifying magic. I knew I sure as fuck couldn’t survive it if someone tried it against me, and it was cheap. So very, very cheap. If I’d done the right research, I could have been casting it weeks after arriving in Winterfell, after waking my magic. So I came up with a defense against it. I called it Stability, and its purpose was to break apart anything that tried to take hold of my pattern. Failing that, it tried to siphon off the energy from the teleportation effect, storing it or dumping it into an aura of light, heat, electricity; anything to bleed off the power.

The exactness of the mana manipulation when I wasn’t purposefully miscasting teleportation to kill shit was a bit difficult, especially over longer ranges. I ended up making a buffer spell, a construct that I could slightly over-charge and then have it feed the mana required. Ironically, that buffer spell was based on and inspired by the Blue area-of-effect spell-component from Mass Exile. The buffer drastically reduced mistakes with long distance Calling. When I added a bit of wiggle room on the exact location where the called would appear, it ended the mistakes. But I was still having issues with short distance calling.

Every now and then, things would disappear or explode after the pattern became unstable when doing short distance calling, and I couldn’t figure out why. Eventually I figured it out when I was trying to do a duplicated teleportation. By calling the same object twice, or really providing twice as much mana and then splitting the pattern, much the same way I did to cast multiple enchantments at once, I was hoping to be able to get a second creature on the other end.

It would be awesome; I could grow my army as fast as I could Call, make more wooly mammoths for the giants and then take some of them, and when I figured out how to duplicate items literally make permanent copies of materials. It was a grail technology, one of those things that are just at the very, very edge of what’s possible, and something that if you can achieve it has an utterly transformative effect on life.

When I got it to work, it explained why the short range teleportation kept failing. Copies always cost exactly the amount of mana as the creature’s basic pattern plus all enchantments and active magics. The teleportation for short ranges where the mana for teleporting and copying was the same meant that the magic wasn’t sure if it wanted to teleport the original, or to make a copy.

The copies also weren’t exact. Instead of the exact same song, it was like someone else singing the song in a different key, or a rock band doing a cover of a jazz song. Recognizably the same, but also different. There was a limit to how many copies I could make of a pattern, four per actual animal. I could tell that as I got better at magic, I might be able to make more finely defined, cleaner copies which would allow for more than four.

I decided that I didn’t like the word copies, and would instead call them summons. Making a summons was summoning, while teleporting an existing creature was calling.

It was also important to note that summons weren’t the originals. They had much of the same skills and knowledge, but none of the same experiences. In other words, a human summons might know fire was hot, because the original once burned themselves, but wouldn’t have any memory of that event. Furthermore, they were literally made from my magic, something that I had an inherent control over, and that control persisted into the summons.

They started off as something in between an automaton and a true copy of the creature they were based off of. I imagined that it was sort of like using clone troopers; obviously intelligent and human, but lacking a certain essential something that made them alive instead of just living. If I didn’t want them to change, if I wanted to keep them as semi-static mana patterns, they didn’t even need to eat. Just absorb enough ambient mana, or get topped off enough by me to avoid their mana patterns from slowly falling apart.

On the other hand, if I fed them food, allowed them new experiences, and basically just wanted them to then over time they would grow more and more alive. I had a few long-term experiments running to verify my suspicions that given enough time, enough life, they would eventually become true creatures which could serve as originals to call or summon off of.

It was far easier to perform summonings at a distance than it was to teleport a creature to a place where I wasn’t. The trick was that I had to use a bond to target it. In other words, I could summon a creature to me (via the original’s bond to me), next to the original (ditto), next to a different creature (via that creature’s bond to me, though that was difficult) or to one of my bonded lands (though the exact location wasn’t too accurate for that last one).

Once I figured out how to do that, it didn’t take too many Science!s to figure out how to Push not just summonings but callings as well. Pushing, of course, being the term for summoning or calling to a place where I was not located, as opposed to a simple summoning or calling to where I was.

This allowed another defense against Exile. Should someone manage to get past the Stability defense, there was a second layer, a spell I called Asylum. It was a dual-buffered pre-prepared teleportation spell set to send the creature on which it was applied to Harrenhal. Basically, it had both an empty buffer to accept any extra energy that the enemy who tried to exile them was applying so the teleportation couldn’t get overly full, and a full buffer to perform an immediate teleportation to a land inside the greater territory of Harrenhal.

Once I had that working on the Science!s, and had upgraded all of my friends and loyal creatures to defend against enemies who could exile them, I felt like I might be able to teleport myself without too much fear.

I just had some preparations to do first, just to be safe.