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“Stupid, nasty, icky, fuckin useless ass lump of half-living leather, FUCK!”

The process of carrying the heavy woven enchanted leather collar for Spot wasn’t hard, or it wasn’t supposed to be hard. In fact, it was annoyingly weird. It turns out, enchanting things whose nature is the exact opposite of your own carries strange side effects. I was more than physically capable of actually lifting the collar, but moving it almost made the damn thing come alive. It kept twisting and turning and undulating like a snake that wanted to get the fuck away from me.

“I MADE YOU!” I screamed at it, both hands gripping the gold medallion. I could almost hear it hiss in displeasure, but my mind reassured me that it didn’t have a mouth or lungs. It was the middle of the night and all I wanted to do was sleep, but this thing did not want to cooperate with me. I had mentally pinged Spot twenty minutes ago so that he would meet me at the under-tree hideout entrance, and he was excitedly barking his head, jumping for joy even though he couldn’t see me. “I will curse you, I will drag you, I will fucking UNDO YOU if you don’t just come with me!” I growled, cracking the medallion up and down like a whip. “You know what? Fine, you wanna play this way, let’s fuckin do it, let’s go bitch!”

Losing my patience on something I made wasn’t new, but the last one that talked back was Gungnir, and I don’t really like it when inanimate things talk back. Conjuring buckets of sand, I used earth sorcery to encase the medallion and the giant dragon-leather collar into a ball of sand. “How do you like me now asshole?!” I celebrated, easily pulling the ball of sand. Kicking open the door from the tunnel to the under-tree hideout, I smugly skipped through my living room.

“What’s with the giant tennis ball?” Johnny said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “It’s too damn late to be playing fetch with that big ass dog! What the fuck man?”

Reeanth stepped out of the kitchen doorway. “Silence runt,” she commanded. “The lord of the land has no need to explain himself to you.” Turning her head to face me and the wayward collar, her eyes lit up scanning the makeshift container. “Did you make an enchanted snake with a heart of gold? Are you creating living things now my lord?”

“Yo I don’t fuck wit’ snakes man . . . “ Johnny said, backing up with his hands partly up in the air. “They’re all kinds of messed up. Poison, chokin, hidin’ and sneakin’ round. Oh no, sounds like my last girlfriend, so hell no.”

Before I could say anything at all he bolted back out into the room I had tunneled for him. Reeanth turned her eyes towards me.

“Ah come on!” I yelled, putting the giant floating ball of sand in between us, “Turn that shit off! You know it burns!”

“I’m sorry my lord,” she said, cutting of the sorcerous eye beams, “I do forget the side effects of my own abilities at times.”

“Well put some practice into it, and get some sleep. We got a long day tomorrow.”

But my day, or night really, wasn’t over yet. Opening the door to the outside freaked me out just a bit as Spot’s mouth was wide open right in front of the door, his tongue lashing around and his horrible dog breath coming in hot.

“Back up mutt! I got a present for you!” I said lovingly, “And I’m sure it can’t wait to see you either!”

Spot bounded back and ran around the glad like a puppy hunting for a place to pee. Tossing the sand ball in the middle of the clearing, I banished all the sand and let the collar fall. What I hadn’t anticipated was that the minute sparks of Chaos that had remained in the firestone somehow combined oddly with the living silver to form a semi-intelligent thing. What was worse was that I couldn’t really grasp what it was looking for. All I can figure out is that a sum greater than its parts had emerged. Looking back, it might have been totally brilliant. The leather came from a fire-aspected dragon, and dragons love treasure, and making the collar was combining things that really should go together, such as dragon leather with Chaos-altered gold and silver and an altered firestone. The whole idea was then to give the completed project to a mutated canine that had eaten part of a dragon and gained characteristics of said dragon from the flesh sorcery that I had given it. Maybe, just maybe, this all would line up and make my canine even more badass, hopefully.

I stayed right in front of the entrance of my home, ready to haul ass if I had to. The now free magical collar reared up, its medallion seeming to look around as if it were the head. Spot crouched low, growling deep and angry. I sent a picture of what I wanted to Spot, for him to dominate and put on the collar. I also sent the feeling that it might even be better than a treat, but I definitely had a treat for him when he was done.

With a giant bark and leap, Spot landed on the collar with his two front paws, growling at it as he exuded waves of raw mana. The collar almost let out a squeak as it went limp. Spot snatched up the medallion with his teeth and flung it into the air, pointing his snout perfectly up. Almost as if an artist painted it, the collar opened up and fell down perfectly snug around his neck.

“Don’t look smug” I said, grinning my butt of. “I made it just for you boy.”

My trusty canine’s tail thumped like a machine gun against the ground, almost causing me to fall.

“Hey now, I know you want the treat. Stay,” I commanded, “I’ll be right back.”

Ten minutes later, I had thrown Spot a basketball sized chunk of dragon meat and I watched him to make sure he didn’t go into another metamorphosis coma. It was fascinating to watch with my flesh sorcery what was going on. I stood next to Spot with one hand on his leg and felt his seed of flesh sorcery that I had given him, only, it wasn’t a seed anymore. The implanted magic had grown and woven itself into every fiber of his being, and the DNA or magical parts of fire and dragon had been as well. I turned my attention to Spot’s stomach were the chunk of dragon was sitting. Spot hadn’t even chewed or gnawed on it, simply swallowed the whole thing as if I actively starved him. It was dissolving in his stomach acid super fast, as if it was a furnace in there. I waited for twenty minutes just to make sure that nothing weird happened, then called it a night.

The next morning brought all the promise of a new day but all the perils of the apocalypse with it. I spent the early morning finishing drawing the temporary tattoos for my companions and making some canned soup for breakfast. When the other two woke, I had steaming bowls of mushroom soup for them, and a stone tablet each with runic carvings, and I gotta say, earth sorcery makes carving so easy.

“Look, I know it doesn’t go together, but it’s what I got right now.”

Johnny looked at me, Reeanth, then at the soup next to a hot cup of coffee. “Hard times for farmers huh?”

“Yeah man,” I answered, “But we’re hunting off the land from here on out. Most of the other cans of food are spoiled. It seems methods of preserving that don’t involve magic might be out the door.”

“Yes my lord, higher levels of mana simultaneously do and do not accelerate the overall decay rate.”

“Huh?” Johnny mumbled through a big mouthful of soup.

“Preserved foods in the presence of mana deteriorate faster,” she clarified. “The same goes for dried meats. Most people or mundanes use nullification or stasis boxes for food preservation. It is by far the most energy efficient technology for food.”

“Huh?”

I looked at Johnny, “Magic dude, magic.”

“Oh.”

Rolling my eyes, I turned back to Reeanth. “So, take a look at that tablet there, those hold the blueprints for the melanin tattoos I was gonna do for you if you want. They’ll only last a couple months, but they may just save you life. Also,” I paused to pull out a belt. “This goes with it too. It’s a kinetic energy distributor as well as an extra mana storage unit.”

“Looks like a belt man.”

“Yes Johnny,” I said, “It is a belt. It’s an enchanted belt.”

“Oh.”

“So this does what my lord?”

“The runes over here go on your sternum, back, and all four limbs. Those ones distribute kinetic energy across your whole body instead of just one point, so bullets shouldn’t be a problem for you. And, if the energy is too much for your entire body to handle, the belt will handle the bleedoff,” I explained. Continuing on, I said, “The best part is that it can store an incredible amount of energy and also you can use what you’ve stored to power your suit or heal or whatever you want. These ones over there, are regeneration runes. They’ll help your body deal with extra lactic acid or carbon dioxide so your stamina should just be ridiculous. And lastly, these ones are rune channels so that your nano-tech suit can draw or push excess mana up and down them.”

Her jaw dropped. “Thought you might like that,” I smirked, “And, I also took the liberty of implanting kinetic and transfer runes on your mana-maul. There’s a small diamond in there too just in case you need some extra oomph.”

“I’m not worthy my lord! War runes are not for one such as I? Only landed vassals may have such things, and that’s after graduating from the Poly-Arcane Institute of War and Research!”

My eyes narrowed just a bit from curiosity. “What uh, tell me a bit about that?” I said lightly.

“Only the richest and most powerful go there my lord. I am a noble now that I have sorcery, but I haven’t been recognized by the Centauri ranks as a sorcerer yet. The shortest education you can receive is a decade long. Your ancestor Merlin helped to found it, but it has changed in the last few millennia.”

After lodging that tidbit of knowledge away in my brain, I turned to Johnny. “Want a tattoo man? It’s not permanent but it’ll help you kick ass.”

“Fuck yeah!” he said through his last bite, scraping the bowl clean. “Let’s do this! As long as you let me show the monkey king who’s boss when we get back.”

“Fine.”

Taking my time after breakfast to use flesh sorcery to make tattoos was not as involved as I thought it’d be. My abilities were more than happy to darken melanin however I wanted in whatever shape I desired. Reeanth’s flesh almost leaped at my touch, bending to my magic like a willing worker who is obviously overpaid. Her body took to the runes as if they were meant to be there all along. Johnny however, something about his body rejected all but the most basic runes. The mana storage runes barely worked, but the kinetic absorption worked great, as if he were meant for movement and combat.

The regeneration runes I put on him also wouldn’t link to the mana storage runes or the rune channels to a mana storage gauntlet I’d made for him. They only worked if it pulled from his body’s internal stores of power. I figured that it had something to do with his dependence on a different kind of energy than what I was using.

“Johnny, what kind of power do you use? I use mana, but your body uses something different, what is it and how do you picture it?”

“Hell if I know the name of it. I just call it power. And it works best when I’m at peace.”

“Peace huh?” I muttered to myself, wiping off all the mana storage runes from his skinny bare chest. Taking a moment to picture something that’s completely alien to me, I carefully opened myself fully to my flesh and mana sorcery, taking in every detail of Johnny’s inner workings. As I watched his heart beat and his blood pulse, I mapped out in my head piece by piece every biological system and their connections. [There, there, over there, and . . . . some right there, weird,] I thought to myself. [There’s little holes that exist metaphysically all over him.] My consciousness sorcery joined the mix to open up my senses to his soul, and that’s where information started flooding in. Certain points on Johnny’s body, many points in fact, seemed to emit a kind of suction, but I couldn’t see what the point was until I saw his soul. Johnny’s soul was tied to his body at well over a hundred different points, like little tiny anchors. And those anchors were sucking up some kind of energy that was invisible to me but I could tell were there as his soul rippled with every pulse of inward suction.

There was a big point in the middle of his forehead, but it seemed to be exhibiting less force than the rest of his points that were much smaller. Taking a small leap of logic, I put my finger on his forehead. No change in the odd suction. I couldn’t even feel it, physically or meta-physically, as if I existed on a different wavelength than the energy Johnny needed to survive. Coaxing my flesh sorcery, I started to coax the skin on his forehead to darken and my unconscious pinged me. Pulling my magic back for a moment, I retreated into my mind as waves, no, flashes of memories and information rocked my head.

“You ok man? What’s goin on?” Johnny’s concern was nice, but it didn’t help the raging headache that came from nowhere.

“Nah man, my head hurts,” I said, trying to keep the information I’d just been bombarded with from the forefront of my brain. “Maybe I overdid it the past couple days. Anyways, you’re good to go, have fun.”

Standing up, I hurried back to the under-river bolthole and locked it down. I didn’t look at anyone or anything until I knew I was totally alone. Suddenly, my chest started heaving and feeling heavy. Using flesh sorcery, I forced my body to calm down, but something I had unconsciously learned was freaking out the part of my brain that no human normally gets to meet. Shakily forcing myself to sit down, I scooted over to the center of the cavern where one of the giant matter-to-mana generators quietly pulsed. Putting my back against it, I tried to relax and let my mind play through the information.

Gungnir, the conscious bit that stuffed back into my head by Gav’riel, had brought information with it when it got put back. Some of the stuff was the surface information from the copy of Reeanth’s brain, but some of it was the organized stuff that Gungnir had retrieved from Rath’s brain.

The spur of the moment idea that I had that I was going to experiment with was apparently dangerous, the way that a literal dragon would view it as life-threatening. Since the mana containment and mana siphon runes wouldn’t work for a cultivator, I wanted to see if I could make runes that would let him draw in his own kind of power. Going with the stereotype, the Eastern religion thing, I pictured the image for Yin and Yang, somehow feeling in my gut that would probably get the job done for him. In that moment, memories from Rath retrieved by Gungnir kicked my subconscious into action.

Images of sorcerers in chains, painting scripts and vile runes in their own blood while cultivators lashed them with crackling whips covered in thorns. Snapshots of dragon nests dashed to pieces while cultivators ripped eggs apart. Flashes of wizard towers torn down by groups of cultivators maniacally laughing. The pictures stopped as suddenly as they had started, but one phrase came to the fore, You know not what has been unleashed.