Beautiful. Simply magnificent. It was everything I wanted and more. Quite literally ‘more’, as in more than what I laid out, more than what I expected, more than what my sometimes flighty mind can cook up on a spur of the moment idea rampage.

“It’s beautiful! Simply Magnificent! Isn’t it everything you wanted Master?”

Fucking dryads, or is it hamadryads? I may never truly know. I hate it that we sometimes think along the same lines to where our thoughts literally match. It’s probably due to the fact that my nature sorcery is turning the once innocent and carefree creatures into innocent and carefree creatures that won’t leave me alone! Damn I’m a grump today.

After showing the leafy ladies the size of the jungle I wanted and spending hours describing the kinds of fruits, veggies, and berries that I wanted in it, the damn things took off like a bat outta hell. I didn’t hear from them in days so I decided to rest and relax and work on my internal enchantments as well as the temp tattoo ones as well. AND IT WAS GLORIOUS! I relaxed, had a couple rations cubes while not wearing armor on the riverbank, played fetch with Spot and climbed trees to bug Tuki when I got bored. Other than the fact that I was completely away from all ‘human’ contact, it was awesome. I put in some serious work to make my living spaces in the Hole and the Lab as comfortable as possible. I made chairs out of living wood that I enchanted to conform to the body of whoever sits in it, enchanted the main stone table so that it could act like one of those strategic sand tables on command, and I even got a super nice big bathroom going with water conjuration and banishment enchantments for a hot tub/shower duo. Fancy looking marble and polished wood made the living space almost look like the inside of one of the old school Virginia mansions where people with way too much money on their hands used to live.

I even had a blast messing around with trees in the forest surrounding my home. I didn’t really dare to mess with the Yggdrasil offshoot that was my home, but all other trees were fair game. Several of the big oaks became stashes of weapons and armor while others had conveniently placed knobs for me to quickly climb up and out of sight. I even took the time to grow treehouse blind to hide in if ever I needed them. Some rowan trees also littered the small clearings in between the larger trees and I remembered that rowan trees tend to be symbolically or magically significant in books that I’d read. Naturally, I had to mess with that too. I placed several small super-charged crystals of quartz or ruby or sapphire in their roots and carved a small rune for health on their trunks. Maybe over time they would gain unique properties or become excellent materials for all kinds of experiments.

One section of forest I created my own personal version of an outdoor gym, something that is much more common in the United Kingdom than America. Of course I didn’t need it thanks to flesh sorcery, but it was a lot of fun pushing my nature sorcery to make a natural setting for unnatural things. There were stone blocks for weights with defined carvings for the approximate weights, pull-up bars and body-weight exercises. I even stuck in super nice seven foot by four foot mats of luscious grass that would have made any golfer drool. What took me the longest was putting in the most epic swimming pool complete with a waterfall with auto-filling/draining enchantments to regulate the water and its freshness. Off to the side was an imitation of a bar complete with bar games such as pool and darts, each bit lovingly conjured and shaped to be as accurate as possible. The pool balls were slick marble and the pool sticks were polished oak while the dart boards were hardened clay with self-refilling enchantments so the board would always look brand new.

I pretty much made a bachelor’s outdoor dream setting now that I think about it. The trees were more than happy to bend to my wishes as I put in a ‘cover-the-area’ setting in their trunks with an enchanted crystal. When it rains, the trees will bend their branches to largely cover up the play area and divert the water away from the fun.

On the outskirts of the forest, about two miles away from home, I set up an explosives testing area next to one of the Rappahanock river’s bigger banks. I had an idea on how to fix the explosive crystal shells in Gungnir as they wouldn’t actually go boom yet, but testing them close to home was definitely not in the cards. The river bank was a mix of sand and clay, which I extended up a bit and then spent time hardening the soil and dirt near the trees ringing the river bank. Even though I love explosives, I didn’t want to ruin the setting of the forest with my magic bombs.

After conjuring and shaping an 8x8x8 foot stone table in the middle of the cleared river bank, I set one small crystal round that had about a ten percent charge in it. My theory for why it didn’t explode when shot was due to the crystalline structure actually being too perfect. Perfection, when in reference to structure in a crystal, directly affects how durable it is. Diamonds tend to be the hardest crystal as they have the most ordered and perfect structure, and because I conjure my own crystals, I force them into the most orderly structure possible. Due to that habit, they just don’t have the necessary weaknesses for them to shatter when necessary to distribute their explosive payload. A normal bullet consists of pieces that when properly used distribute the tip inside of the target causing the damage. In my case, the crystal shard is flung by my weapon Gungnir at high speeds from within the spatial storage area. The payload was not only the sharp carbon crystal, but also the raw mana tucked away inside.

Taking my time, I picked up the crystal round and began banishing tiny bits of it to form a weakness that would hopefully split it after impact. Ten agonizing minutes of detail rendered what I hoped would be the perfect bullet. Popping it into Gungnir, I focused out on the water and mentally ordered, “Fire!”

WHOOMPF! No boom. Feeling out the area with my magical senses, my water sorcery showed me the fine particles that the round shattered into, but I didn’t see or feel any kind of explosion that I was hoping for. Attempts two through eighteen revealed roughly the same results. The round was more than happy to shatter on impact, but not actually explode. I dipped them in my magically charged blood for the next score of attempts, and that didn’t do shit. The next twenty involved putting even more mana into the damn rounds, but the energy still dissipated when the round shattered. And when I didn’t put in the strategically placed weakness into the round, charged it and shot it, it didn’t break at all. It functioned like a freaking piercer round. Staring at the latest conjured crystal round in my hand, I saw the temporary tattoos on my arms, the kinetic conversion rounds.

“Hahaha, well I am a certified idiot,” I chuckled to myself, “But at least I’m one when nobody’s lookin’.”

Reworking the enchantment in my head, my mana sorcery tweaked what I had to convert kinetic energy, from the round being shot from Gungnir, into heat energy and provided a visual of the rune for me to use, a cartoonish looking bomb that Wily Coyote would have used. Putting that bomb rune on the round, I charged it up to about half full, shoved it in Gungnir, and fired at the river again.

KABOOM!

“FUCK YEAH BITCH!” I screamed as I ran out and danced on top of the water. Pulling a Jesus is pretty damn cool, but I’m sure He wouldn’t appreciate it, so I ran back out onto the shore and conjured a whole mess of bomb rounds. Charging them up to full power, I stuck them into Gungnir and began blowing up, I mean testing, the river.

Then it hit me, why stop with explosive rounds? I mean, I already have piercing rounds, and the rounds with the crack in them can function as a sort of scatter shot after hitting the initial target. Conjuring another normal round, I put a hammer rune on the tip and charged it up as much I could. Slipping that runed bullet into Gungnir, I conjured a ten foot cube of solid granite on the riverbank and ran about a hundred yards away. Aiming carefully, I fired the hammer round at the cube.

PUMFFF!

Hmmm, nothing I can see from here. Running back to the cube, I noticed that there was a fist-sized crater in it, but no other kinds of damage that I could see. As soon as I ran my hand over it, the entire cube just fell apart, as if I smacked a sand castle at the beach. Running both of my hands through the mess, I scooped up a handful and examined it with earth sorcery. Yup, it was still granite but now it was granite sand. Holy fucking shitballs on stick! I am a goddamn genius! I have rounds that go boom, some that are completely normal, and some that shatter, but now I have the wallbreakers, the tomb-busters, the tower smashers; I have crystal rounds that can literally carve through solid rock. Damn I love magic.

Whistling all the way back to my lab, I set up another set of solar panels that converted UV radiation into mana and put it outside in the clearing in front of the Hole. In the center of it, I put a large empty crystal battery and then made another and buried it underneath. After making a power bank, I set it up for continuous charge and then began the boring work, carefully conjuring crystal rounds of each kind and storing them in Gungnir for the eventual undead crusade.

“Is he dead?”

“I don’t wanna touch him, you touch him!”

“He might think we’re flirting with him, Mother forbid!”

“Don’t invoke Her! She favors him! We’re just the outermost leaves, just get his attention somehow.”

“Don’t you see how much power he’s playing with right now? That’s more than we can make in a century of sunbathing.”

“He made a mini-sun, or sunlight gatherer? I can’t tell, scoot over!”

I was steadfastly ignoring them and concentrating on my work until that last phrase, sunlight gatherer. Every damn book, movie, joke, and reference that I can think of holds sunlight as what kills the undead, well, that and holy water and silver bullets. But I am a sorcerer with nature in my repertoire, so doesn’t that mean that maybe this is something I can get a hold on? Pausing in my bullet conjuration, I closed my eyes and sort of felt around my magic for a bit, various applications of each part coming to the fore, but nothing related to sunlight itself. My nature sorcery let me know that sunlight is related to what I work with, but it’s not within my purview. Having sunlight around certainly makes it far easier to work nature magic but it isn’t something I can directly control.

“Then I’ll do it indirectly,” I muttered, turning back to my work. The manufacturing of the crystal rounds was now governed by several automated processes thanks to consciousness sorcery, which left me free in the rest of my brain to think of other ideas. I remember an old collection of novels where the humans had these ‘sunstones’ that kept away dinosaurs that wanted to eat them but didn’t affect the herbivores. Fuck if I understand how that science/magic worked, but my problem is undead-centric. Sunstones, or my version of them, is something I could use if I could actually make them. Shit, why the hell am I trying to figure this out when I have more than three sources of information behind me.

“Ladies? Do you think you can answer a couple questions for me?” I asked, making sure to stay still as my body and magic was working on conjuring and storing crystal rounds. A chorus of ‘yesses’ and ‘of course master’ was actually nice to hear for once.

“First, I’m gonna need your names,” I said as a vision of lovely dryad flesh paraded in front of me. Their eagerness to please was way too attractive. “All of you look similar enough to be identical siblings and how do you know Meliad?”

“We don’t have names.”

“We are seedlings, the youngest kind of dryad.”

“Meliad is our Root.”

“The Root is to us what the Mother is to Meliad.”

Not helpful, really. And yet they just kept looking at me as if that was plain English, as if I were the dumb adult who couldn’t understand that the floor was lava and walking on it would result in death. Fuck it.

“Okaaaay,” I mused, deciding just to go ahead and skip the obvious lack of connection in the hopes of getting somewhere. “Do you know what a sunstone is or where I can find one? And what do you know about the Hungry Ones?”

The instant I finished my sentence, the dryads screamed and shot up the nearest tree.

“They’re not here!” I yelled, making sure to stay still. “I just need to know what you know about them because I’m going to have to go on a hunt soon. I got bullets that I think will work but I need some kind of backup magic and all I can think of right now is fucking sunlight!”

Two green heads popped out from the oak tree’s canopy. “Th-th-they’re not here?”

“No.”

“They’re always h-h-hungry. Life, flesh, it’s never enough, they just eat and eat and rend and tear!”

“Cold, they like the cold, they bring the cold, everything is dark and hurt when they come, but they always come.”

“Yeah, no, I got that, but does sunlight do anything against them?” My exasperation clearly wasn’t noticed. “Or is it fire that they fear? Come on now, I need a weapon that’ll blow them away, something epic that they won’t see coming.”

Another dryad popped out from the tree. “A sunstone might work. There’s a bunch on the other side of the mountain! They glow and it’s so nice to sit near them if I’m not sleepy when the sun goes down!”

The last dryad slunk down the tree, cautiously looking around as if the Hungry Ones were going to pop out of the shadows. “Nothing is ever enough, not even life, or energy, or mana. They just grow stronger and hungrier. You would be their favorite if you came near them, they can smell you. You reek of raw life, upturned soil and fresh spring. But they run from the sun. Dawn is their enemy, it burns them, weakens them, reveals them for what they are. For the Hungry Ones are more than the dead, they are the living dead. Some fly and drink from the throat of those with blood, some scrape flesh from the living and add it to their own like the Slaker Vine. The most fearsome simply look and their gaze makes the living wither away.”

That about covers it. I need a portable sun. Where the fuck is Doctor Octopus when you need him? Shaking my Spider-Man nerdom out of my head, I contemplated possible solutions, something along the lines of the solar panel. I could capture sunlight in sunstones, possibly, or is it more energy efficient to use runes to convert mana into sunlight or UV radiation?

“You, and, uhm, you, go get me a couple samples of the sunstone, the brightest most powerful ones you can find. Other you and other you over there, go find me sage and any other plants that undead things hate. We can grow and weaponize those down the road if need be.”

As they scampered off, I saw that my hands and earth sorcery were done conjuring up stacks of bullets. Carefully checking the piles of rounds stored in Gungnir’s storage space, I sent my thoughts into the crystal speartip and concentrated on sunlight, focusing all of my energy on what the sun means to me. It does seem that the more I invest emotionally in my work, the more power or oomph it seems to hold. The sun, I mean, it used to just be the big ass yellow ball in the sky that made summers too hot or burned my almost too-white skin, but it was also the source of life on our planet. It grew our plants and heated our oceans and turned the entire system of weather that nourished life on our little blue marble in space. I can’t control the sun or the magic related to it, but everything I have, all of the magic that I am is intensely tied to the sun, and that is what I’m working with.

As I meditated on my magic and its relationship to the sun, I focused on the runic aspect of my mana sorcery. I needed something special, as I had the feeling that the basic circle with squiggly lines wasn’t going to cut it for the kind of power that I wanted. Symbology is oddly important to making magic work; it sort of creates a tie between the ‘belief’ aspect of magic to the ‘will’ and then sticks a bit of ‘emotion’ to glue it all together. The whole concept sort of falls apart if you don’t believe that it’ll work. The Hungry Ones were probably not the nice sort of people that will give me many opportunities to test out my weapons on them, so going in balls to the wall is probably the best way.

Holding a disk of stone in my hands, my earth sorcery kept sketching and erasing and re-sketching different images that meant ‘sun/life/power/purity/nature’. At one point the image was the stupid sun from the Teletubbies show with the weird looking baby, uhgg. I did way too much baby-sitting when I was younger. The next was a nice visual representation of a sunflower. I had used sunflowers before, in fact, that’s not a bad idea, gotta remember to find and grow some more around the forest. With luck, I’ll be able to use nature sorcery to turn those little dudes into the Hungry Ones’ nightmares, or daymares for that matter.