Looking down the cliff, Felicia swallowed hard. It had taken her a little over two days of careful driving to reach the sharp line that divided the towering desert from the rolling fields. The drop to rolling sand below was at least a hundred meters. This distance was rather insignificant when compared to the impressive mountain range of dunes to one side of her. At least, it had seemed insignificant when she wasn’t standing on top of it, looking down the perfectly straight divide. The cliff was weirdly sharp. There was little natural about the linear nature of the drop, and erosion seemed to be an ignored suggestion to the barrier. The ground seemed ordinary soil right until it stopped. It might be a bit dry, but the grass growing on top of it was only slightly yellow. Her tank should have caused a lot of loose soil to fall down towards the sands below, yet the fact that her vehicle was parked but a few meters away and left tracks twenty centimetres deep didn’t affect the sharp cliff at all.

She couldn’t suppress a shiver as she walked back towards her vehicle. She could wield mana like it was nothing and had the impossible power to create stuff from nearly nothing, yet an obviously magical phenomenon on such a scale made the hairs on the back of her neck rise.

Then the prickling feeling transformed into something more, and Felicia knew that she was in danger. She dropped through her tank's hatch quickly, her movements natural and easy. Something in the back of her mind made her close the hatch behind her. She was still turning the handle into its locked position when her world shook. She fell backwards, painfully bumping her shoulder into the driver's seat. The single window in her tank shone a bright yellow light into the otherwise dark interior, letting her find her small bunkbed in the back of the tank. The entire vehicle shook again when she threw herself on the fine linens of her bed and the light shining in from the window got a reddish hue.

Felicia willed whatever was covering her tank to vanish, and nearly fainted as pretty much all her mana disappeared within a fraction of a second. She laid still for ten seconds and scrambled towards the thick piece of armoured glass that was mounted in the front armour the moment she regained her wits. The vehicle was partially pointed towards the desert, only letting her glimpse a sliver of grassy ground. She managed to see that the grass was burning with incandescent flames. Fire many times brighter than ordinary flame danced across the charred field. Felicia started the tank’s engine, using the last bits of mana in her system to start the rough turbine powering the heavy armoured vehicle.

She put it into reverse, remembering to brace herself against the sudden acceleration just in time to prevent smashing her teeth against the viewing window. The tank’s suspension rocked the cabin back and forth as she sped away backwards. She managed to see a perfectly circular patch of black ground surrounded by swaying flames just as a streak of white crashed down onto her previous position. She felt the explosion more than she heard it as she closed her eyes against the bright flash.

Throwing the tank controls around, she reversed the spin of a single track. The noise coming from the segmented caterpillar tracks had gotten a distinct unstable and janky edge. Felicia looked backwards and willed her bed out of existence. She used the influx of mana to douse the new coating of fire clinging to her tank’s armour. Throwing both tracks into their first gear, Felicia steered towards the nearest patch of forest. Another tingle in the back of her neck made her take another turn, just in time to see a bright light coming from beside her tank. She raced across the grassy field, zigzagging the ponderous beast of a vehicle as best she could. The projectiles had come from above, letting the businesswoman conclude that she was under attack from some form of magical artillery. Her heart hammered around in her chest as she sent her tank careening through the underbrush as she plunged back under the cover of trees.

It took her half an hour to calm down from the frantic and hyperventilating mess she had become. She slowed and started driving between the trees instead of through and over them. It took her another half hour before she got her shaking and rapid breathing under control. All in all, she commended herself for managing to stay calm in such a hair-raising situation and parked her tank in a small and shaded clearing. She stepped outside after she did some more mental self-assurance and nearly went back to a shaking and gibbering mess of panicked nerves. The smooth armour plating that covered every single square centimetre of her vehicle was warped, the thinnest corners even looked melted. It was like the composite plating that she had spent hundreds of hours creating had been mere thermoplastic polymer under a heat gun. The hardest and strongest combinations of physical materials she had managed to develop had melted like wax under the magical fire.

Then Felicia realised that the weakness she felt might very well be the complete lack of mana in her body. She made a tree vanish and immediately felt better. She was about to consume a few more of the tall giants when she realised that suddenly appearing holes in the forest canopy would make pretty nice targets as far as magical artillery went. Felicia then consumed some more plants here and there, only daring to dematerialise the occasional tree. The soft noises of the forest around her calmed her down even further. The constant rustling of leaves, bird calls and other sounds had unnerved her at first, but she had grown used to the atonal background orchestra after three days of forest travel. Her tank had made surprisingly little noise when she drove it around trees at lower speeds, allowing her to take in the ambience of the green maze she had been navigating. She had kept mostly to the forests as she made her way over towards the desert’s edge, avoiding towns and crossing as little roads as possible. She was also sure she was slightly mad now, as even the sight of faraway people had sent her in a minor panic attack each time she came across a village or caravan. Three months of isolation had left its marks on her psyche, after all.

Taking in the clear forest air, she laid her forehead to the still cooling metal of her tank. The gently curving line of warm composite didn't feel calming at all, however. She had spent a lot of time in research and development, and the final product she had come up with was as heat resistant and damage proof as she could manage. Three months might not seem like a lot of time to develop a fully functional main battle tank, but she had the power to put any random idea to the test after but a single application of will. The vehicle she had been driving could be translated to millions of ordinary man-hours of metallurgic efforts and weapons research. And some rapid cast spell had damaged this pinnacle of modern and material perfection to this degree. The ticking sounds of cooling metal plating did not make her relax in the slightest.

“Could ya stop eatin me trees?”

Which is why she instinctively lashed out with a wave of annihilating mana when she suddenly heard a voice coming from behind. She spun around just in time to see the effect of her reflexive move. In slow motion, she saw the forest being turned into mana. Green grasses and low ferns vanished slice by slice as she felt herself filling up with power. A couple of centimetres of the ground also disappeared, the bacteria and fungi in the soil barely managing to compensate for the mana cost associated with absorbing dead matter like rock and fibre. The small person who was looking at her with narrowed eyes also vanished in a bloody flash, leaving a wedge-shaped fan of bare earth in its absence. The image of the bearded midget flashed in her mind, and Felicia somehow realised that she made a mistake before a foreign mass of knowledge smashed into her head. The amount of raw and unfiltered information nearly knocked her out again, just like it did three days ago. Hiding and skulking through forests while riding a main battle tank was not all Felicia had done over the last days, though. She had thought a lot about a lot of things. She had used the new knowledge that was forced into her mind to bring context to a lot of data. The information overload she had experienced actually was a phenomenon Wegland - the unfortunate wizard she had first killed and then made disappear into energy she consumed - had been familiar with. She had left the majority of the personal memories well enough alone, only coaxing useful tidbits of data from the chaotic clumps inside her mind. She tried going through all of it at first, but the mind-numbing tedium of magical research memories and endless years of remembered practice had left her too bored and catatonic to do much that day. So instead of wanting to understand what was happening - like she had done with the fragmented fighting skills from the guard’s and Wegland’s entire life - she had just let the forceful knowledge wash over her.

She caught a few glimpses of an alien world here and there, but consciously kept her mental eyes closed as the midget’s entire life was sucked into her soul. Then the grinding was back, the screeching pain at the centre of her being that forced her to acknowledge that she was overloaded with mana. And to make matters worse, there was another one of those blindingly bright stars suddenly inside her chest. The few present when she woke from the dead months ago had not moved a single time, almost letting her forget the miniature blazing suns she saw each time she closed her eyes. The motes of dust and grains of glowing sands had become putty in her hands when she understood what they were for and had utilised them to make plants and animals. The blinding bonfires of illumination had left her alone until a new one joined. This new one was not content to do nothing. This new one was not happy with sitting placently inside her mental realm, unmoving and silent. This one fought back, and Felicia immediately knew that she could not win. The slightest hint of unhappiness radiating from the blaze nearly broke her mind. She had thought her character tempered in the fires of uncertainty and randomly happening bad events. She was very much wrong, as her life force flickered the moment the new light let her know it was not happy.

She knew what to do with the rebellious ball of million degrees fire though. She cast it out and willed it into something. The first thing that came to mind was a human shape, a standard human adolescent with completely neutral features and no hair. The sun refused and nearly turned her into cinders in its irritation. The wizard’s image - the wrinkled and decrepit old man perfectly clear in her memory - was equally denied. Felicia thought a single thought then. She knew that another wrong choice would be her end. So she gave the blaze the image of the midget. Its happiness was the last she noticed of the creature before the new galaxy of heat and light inside her mind was enveloped by a smothering shell. The shell didn’t stop there, as it also took her mind with it into darkness.

“Yah. Shoulda known.” Sharp pins where stinging her back. “No red. You're a good one.” Some of the spikes she was lying on vanished, causing the remaining ones to stab into her flesh in an even more painful manner. She opened her eyes and saw a triangular patch of blue sky surrounded by a far too wide variety of trees and plants. She twisted her neck and looked upon the dwarf standing next to her. The little guy had a bushy green beard, covering over half his face in a chaotic sprawl of vibrant fuzz. He was clad in very roughly and randomly woven fibres complimented by shining leaves. His green eyes peered directly into her face, staring into her soul from behind wild eyebrows set in sunken sockets ringed by dark skin. “Excuse me, but you're bad for me. I can't eat you, though.”

“Wha awe yu?” Felicia found her own slowly fading speech impediment oddly fitting in this situation. She was sure that the small humanoid - because she knew with absolute certainty that the little guy wasn’t human - had a mouth hidden in that forest of a beard somewhere, but the sounds that came out of that hole could barely be classified as speech. She knew everything about the little shit, though. She fully understood each word he said, if not what he actually meant. She willed some mana into her eyes and nearly threw up. Like some form of an aborted baby, the misshapen midget was connected to the earth through an energetic umbilical cord flowing from his belly button. The obscene way his bulging stomach was exposed to the open air was a hint that something odd was going on, but that crime against fashion was the least of the weird things Felicia was currently concerned about. She knew the little man to be a horrible version of a dryad, its bushy beard a representation of the forest it was currently anchored to. The straight line of smooth skin representing the track her tank had made and the triangular bald patch that was similar to the patch of empty earth resulting from her mana accident was more proof.

“Awm Felifwa.” She really tried speaking this time, but even something as simple and basic as introducing herself was beyond her vocalisation skills at the moment. She had this mixed feeling in her heart. She was mad at Agren for taking up space and obstructing her speech as much as she was sad about the taciturn stone’s absence. “Nefew minw ouw namew fow now. Whaw fo you fink you awe doinw?”

The stern gaze she levelled at the amused dwarf had no effect, so Felicia willed the sharp spikes poking into her back from existence and caught herself nimbly. She stood up and looked down on the creature, which was swallowing hard. She looked back and saw that her tank was only partially there. Frowning, she willed the other half of the battle vehicle into existence. She then spent a few minutes carefully fixing all the molten armour plating on the tank. She lovingly straightened the warped plates and fused the weakened joints where she found them. She even took the time to recreate her bed and tidy up its small interior. She completely ignored the small group of multicolour badgers, not even looking at the vines restricting the group that had been following her. She also ignroed the green dwarf, who was now studying her with an alien expression on its small face.

“You're my boss, no? Sheit.”

“Donf curfe.”

“Aight. I can.”

Felicia threw one last glance at the weird little dwarf before clambering into her repaired tank. She hummed quietly to herself as she started the engine, the silent whir of the spooling turbine calming her down. The dwarf ran a contemplative hand across his beard as he watched her leave, a wide patch of forest swaying as he did so. Felicia left that odd encounter with conflicting feelings. On the one hand, she knew that the humanoid had been the new massive spark. She knew that he had a connection with the surrounding forest that was so intense, he might as well have been a part of the land and forest itself. On the other hand, she saw no way to keep the guy. She had killed him and had returned his life to him. It had been instinctual, but she had done so none the less — a sapient creature, a person capable of reasonal thought and lucid consciousness. It had not been in the process of trying to kill her - the sole reason why she wasn’t consumed by guilt from inadvertently killing the guards and that perverted wizard - yet she had mercilessly reduced it to a trickle of mana and a shining sun she had burned herself with. Instead of confronting the issue, she decided to drive away. She decided to remove herself from the equation entirely.

“So, were we goin?” Until the little shit asked her this very question just when she was steering her tank through the edge of the forest's underbrush. Felicia turned around and forced herself to be calm as she saw the little green-bearded midget standing behind her. She had known he was there before he had spoken, yet her stern refusal to acknowledge this fact had kept a slight veneer of denial going. This similitude was shattered when the decrepit little thing had opened his mouth.

“None of your bufineff.”

“Yas make sure there be trees.”

“Whaf woulf be fhe minimum amounfh of treef?”

“One erry forest-wise or so.”

“Deal.” Felicia was quietly proud of the way she managed to pronounce this word. She had relearned to talk with a mighty fervour over the past few days. Many animals had wondered what those weird guttural noises had been as she passed them, training her pronunciation and enunciation the entire time. The accumulation of many, many hours of vocalisation practice had not been spent in futile public articulations. This sealing of the deal was pronounced by her smiling lips as they curved with utmost perfection. Gangrib of the forest had just fallen into a trap, and he didn’t even know it. Felicia just smiled as she steered her tank towards and through the forest’s edge.

Then Felicia realised what it meant that she had somehow resurrected the little guy, and what it meant for her ex-employees.