Chapter 13: Mab (Patreon)

Travel was quick when the land itself aided every step you took. It was nauseating when back, forward, and side to side were exactly the same. Jeb looked over his shoulder and spotted the trail in front of him. The stump they’d passed no longer seemed to exist.

The effect had to be localized on Jeb. It made much more sense, from an energy expenditure sense, to confine the warped space to Jeb and his companions, rather than the entire forest.

But there was more to it than just warped space. If Jeb were to stop completely, he would keep moving for a few seconds, as if he was sliding to a halt on a skating rink. He never quite came to a complete stop, either. The ground beneath him came to life beneath him and undulated, carrying him forward whether he wanted to go that way or not.

A little less subtle than the inviting, moss-covered trail. Must have lost patience.

Since Jeb didn’t have to devote any of his time and attention to walking, his thoughts drifted toward the wall surrounding the diseased creature, specifically the celtic knotwork on the inside of the bubble that seemed to keep it going.

I wonder what function that knotwork served? Jeb thought. He’d seen objects that used Myst. He’d seen enchanted objects, he’d seen dungeon cores.

But he’d never seen a self-sustaining spell.

Save Myst traps, I suppose. But those weren’t really active, the way the bubble was active.

I wish I knew enough about Myst to inspect the tutorial bubble from the outside, maybe it would have looked the same. Too late for that, now. Now, Jeb had experimenting to do.

His foot and the hunk of wood that served as his other foot wound their way through, the tangled growth parting in front of him as he walked. His focus was entirely on celtic knots.

First Jeb tried to use his nearly photographic memory to replicate a chunk of the wall of seamless knots. He quickly realized that wasn’t going to work. He couldn’t replicate something that complex while walking. Not even close.

So Jeb approached it from a different angle. They reminded him of Celtic knots. What did Jeb know about Celtic knots?

They were seamless. One piece of rope twisted into a knot with no beginning or end. Or at least, ideally, that was the case.

Is there some way of feeding a thread of Myst back into itself? Jeb wondered. The next few minutes, Jeb started working on figuring out how that might work. Normally a thread of Myst couldn’t interact with itself unless it was budded into a separate thread.

Jeb tried to simply loop his Myst into a circle, feeding the thread back into itself, but that didn’t work, the thread just slipped through itself, as it had before.

Hmm. The next thing Jeb tried was to loop the Myst around, then bud it back into itself.

That got some results. At first it was unstable and had a tendency to explode with a puff of displaced air – Jeb was only using a tiny amount for safety reasons – but eventually Jeb got somewhere. He did this by carefully managing the amount of Myst that was fed back into the loop by the bud.

Since buds were inherently smaller than the Myst string they budded from, Jeb achieved the most success when he made a smaller split and then fed the larger string into the beginning of a smaller loop, then blending it back in via budding.

At first the loops crumbled in the blink of an eye as he walked, but the more he practiced getting the ratio right, the longer they lasted, until…

“Ack!” Jeb cried when the circle of telekinetic Myst locked in place in front of him and lingered in the air just long enough for him to walk directly into it. He tried to stop, but the forest floor beneath him maintained his forward momentum, and Jeb decked himself in the face with a loop of self-sustaining Telekinetic Myst.

One step closer to being a real wizard, Jeb thought, rubbing his nose as the forest slid him forward beneath the disintegrating loop of Myst. Now that he’d achieved a proof of concept, he had to figure out what the celtic knotwork was about. Jeb’s hypothesis was that the tangled Myst knots did one or all of these things:

1: It provided some kind of extra stability, allowing the spell to self-sustain longer.

2: It functioned something like programming for pure string spells, by having buds of string Myst rub across each other in multiple places and alter the function of their Myst while feeding input back into the spell.

3: Some kind of copyright protection through complexity?

Was this impromptu magical practice just a way to distract himself from the Impact-reaming he was sure to receive from the fae who the gods themselves were wary of?

Yes.

But sticking his head in the sand of magic practice helped him feel better.

“What was that?” Vresh asked, looking down at him as she kept pace with his body sliding through the enchanted forest.

“Knotty practice,” Jeb said, waving her off.

Let’s test hypothesis one and two.

Jeb spent a half hour getting a more solid grip on creating a celtic knot. For a test subject, he started with one of the easiest ones, a simple knot made of three arcs that wove together to form a triangle.

He switched back and forth between a simple loop and a simple knot, trying to pay close attention to the amount of time they hung in the air before they began to disintegrate. Since he was rapidly improving his ability to get the ratio correct, he flipped back and forth between the two to hopefully compensate for that.

It did seemlike the knot lasted longer, but Jeb wasn’t sure if he could attribute that to the placebo effect.

Testing in a more controlled environment required.

For Hypothesis two, Jeb simply tried to make that same simple knot produce Jeb’s thermal Myst conversion.

It was a pain in the ass, and Jeb nearly dropped a burning ball of radioactive splooge on his eyeball, but he eventually managed to create a burning arc of thermal Myst string, just sitting there in the middle of the forest like the Cheshire cat’s smile.

The Myst string that he managed to get it to work only vaguely resembled a celtic knot, with a bunch of scraggly little strings hanging off here and there, either aborted or strung around to supplement one string or the other that wasn’t quite the exact right ratio.

It was ugly, but for a proof of concept, it was good enough. It made the programming idea plausible.

Now I just need two different types of Myst, and more practice at applying them different ways.

Jeb had been thinking about how Myst strings behaved and how he might be able to manipulate them further.

Jeb wanted a healing spell.

Jeb started from kinetic energy. He wanted to leapfrog from kinetic energy to healing.

Healing had a purpose: A causal relationship between itself and the caster that his kinetic energy did not have. Jeb’s kinetic energy was neutral.

But ignoring that, what was healing? Biological energy and time, right? Jeb might be able to leapfrog from kinetic energy to chemical, then biological energy, then apply the right causal relationship to the spell, which would then make it a healing spell.

Right? So Jeb’s first goal would be to approach chemical then biological energy.

Is biological energy even a thing? It’s work. Work done by the body to repair itself.

What Jeb needed to do was create a spell that energized the cells in the body…somehow…then assign it a relationship to himself that dictated its behavior so it didn’t just create wildly out-of-control cancer.

Jeb could see two ways the causal relationship might work.

Either he could envision the spell itself as a foreman doing extensive repairs on Jeb’s home, or he could envision the spell as a long lost…someone…whose return completed Jeb, filled in the gaping hole in his psyche and made him whole again.

Which one would work better…Jeb wasn’t sure, but he was leaning toward the second.

Again, this all assumes I can find a Myst frequency that gives people unbridled cancer.

…I should probably do some animal testing first.

To that end, Jeb started playing around with the intention of expanding his option.

Broshaw’s Collar to regulate the flow of Myst, and seven branches in Zeshnei’s Translation.

Jeb distinctly remembered Vex’s offhand comments about the techniques that Jeb was lacking in. The ancient Sindio must have been a former teacher, because the creature seemed to derive a great deal of pleasure in pointing out Jeb’s flaws for no purpose other than to see Jeb improve.

Jeb had – he was pretty sure – figured out that Broshaw’s Collar was an ingenious little knot you could create around the base of your Myst String. It acted like a flow regulator and surge protector. You could tighten it to artificially narrow the resulting String beyond what your freehand control could do. And if your spell was about to explode, it would stop the feedback from going past it, keeping the explosion small and the string still available to form into a new spell, rather than having to start from scratch, losing time, effort, and Myst.

Jeb frowned and carefully branched seven buds off the main string, just above Broshaw’s Collar. It wasn’t too much of a strain on his Myst. His horsepower had grown by leaps and bounds, It was more the control and visualization that continued to challenge him.

Jeb was tempted to put points in Nerve, but he was a bit preoccupied with not exploding at the moment, and if the gods could decide to simply rip the Nerve away from him any time they wished, then what was the point? Jeb would much rather get natural Nerve in a Deal.

Make a Deal for gramma’s secret cookie recipe in exchange for a cookie or something to that effect.

Jeb took the seven branches and looped them back down into the primary String, gently at first, then with increasing intensity, pushing past the Thermal Myst frequency.

Jeb’s string turned into a colorless liquid and flopped onto the forest floor with a goopy splash.

Jeb bent down and poked his finger into the clear fluid.

Don’t try this at him kids, Jeb thought, amused. As if reacting to his apprehension, his pajamas grew an arm-length pair of gloves, protecting his fingers from the substance.

Despite the gloves, he could still feel pretty well as his fingers slid against each other.

…oil? Jeb made the connection quickly. Chemical energy.

With a thought, Jeb grabbed a small amount of it and set it on fire with Thermal Myst.

It burned merrily and for a long time, sending up gouts of smoke.

Yep. Chemical energy.

It was good to know that Jeb could make napalm if he wanted to, although that still wasn’t a big change compared to what he could already do. Jeb starved the fire of oxygen until it went out, then moved on.

Chemical energy is in the ballpark of the kind of magic I want to interact with the body. So what do we do now? Add extra branches of the new kind of Myst to fine tune the spell within that ballpark?

Jeb briefly thought back to Vex’s spell that could turn someone into someone else. The complexity was astounding, but now that he was beginning to understand spellcraft, he realized that the Christmas-tree-like structure that had seemed amazingly complicated was actually built on a series of simple repeating designs that simply looked more complicated when taken as a whole.

I think…I’ll be able to get there one day. I mean, I just made lamp-oil. From nothing! Or did I make the air into lamp by saturating the nitrogen and hydrogen in the air with carbons? good question. Requires testing in a vacuum.

I wonder if there’s a way to adapt the honeycomb technique to the –

“Hey.” Vresh said, tugging Jeb’s elbow.

“Eh?”

Vresh simply motioned in front of them.

Jeb’s jaw dropped.

“Oh yeah, that thing I was trying not to think about.”

Before them was a gossamer rift in space surrounded by a ring of mushrooms. Beyond it, the land was saturated in wild color. The green of the foliage was greener, but rough, like it had been hewn from paint. The sky bore a vivid sunset which silhouetted a palace.

The whole thing looked like it had been painted by Bob Ross on acid.

Let’s just put a happy little palace right there. It’ll be our secret.

“This should be interesting, if nothing else,” Jeb said, taking a step forward.

The gossamer barrier between the two realities parted easily, and Jeb found himself standing inside a painted world. An abstraction of nature where sights, sounds and smells were far more potent than they had been on the other side.

The light of the setting sun bounced off the rough foliage and stabbed into his eyes, a birdcall carved through the air with a physical presence that seemed to cut through the silence like a knife.

A fat bee buzzed past, setting Jeb’s teeth rattling, and carrying the scent of pollen past his nose. The scent seemed to crawl up into his brain and live there.

Jeb cocked his head.

Pollen and something else.

The faintest hint of rot.

Interesting.

Jeb walked forward, clearing the entrance as his senses acclimatized to the richness of Elsewyr.

The other three reacted similarly, blinking and squinting as they entered.

Piwaki sneezed.

“Where is this?” Vresh asked, her eyes round as she scanned the abstract art that was their environment.

“This is the next step on my quest to get rid of the nuke in my Impact,” Jeb said, pointing toward the palace. “Let’s all hope that Mab forced me here to request that I put her out of her misery, then hands me a knife. That would be convenient.”

“Albeit unlikely.” Borg commented.

“True,” Jeb said, resting for a moment on his walking stick as they overlooked the silhouetted palace bridging the river at the bottom of the idyllic valley.

“…Let’s go wear out our welcome,” Jeb said, heading down the mountainside.

The sun of Elsewyr didn’t rise or set based on the time. It was based on proximity to the palace. Jeb tested it by sitting still for an hour.

As they approached, the sun gradually climbed in the sky, shining straight down on the palace, which sported leaflike protrusions that seemed to collect the light and leak it down in waterfalls of brilliant liquid light.

The building had odd architecture that would never have worked in the ‘real world’. First of all, it seemed to be made from one piece of stained and polished wood. It had the onion roofs like Alladin, Which Jeb was fairly sure weren’t a particularly common design choice.

The buildings surrounding the palace were squat and seemed to be carved from the same piece of wood, all the way out into the city that surrounded it.

If there had ever been a World Tree, Jeb was pretty sure he found the people who took it.

“I wonder.” Vresh mused aloud.

“You wonder what?” Jeb asked.

“In a world composed entirely of immortal beings, who handles the plumbing?”

“That’s a good question. My guess is that Immortality would play holy hell with the pecking order. Whether that would make society eternally static, or a razors edge from a coup at every moment…I’m not sure.”

Jeb would have to lean towards eternally static, given that people told stories about the same queen Mab a thousand years later, but who knew for sure? Maybe it was an inherited title.

As they approached the city, they began to see signs of life. The occasional shuttered window and the crunch of dirt beneath fleeing feet around alleyways. There were people here. They just appeared to be more than a little wary of strangers.

Jeb didn’t see the whites of another person’s eyes until they got to the gate outside the palace. At first glance they appeared to be human, but the ears were a bit off. Not exaggerated as much as the stories would have you believe, but enough to give pause.

And they seemed to be entirely controllable.

The ears twitched and swiveled towards the approaching group in a way that was clearly nothuman.

The guards were dressed in elaborate livery with dark blues and reds and gold tassels, evoking a sense of royalty.

Their skin, however, was sallow and waxy. They visibly recoiled form the sight of the foreigners, but they kept their feet planted where they stood.

As a matter of fact, their feet appeared to be planted where they stood, buried several inches into the molded wood. They couldn’t leave if they wanted to.

Jeb sucked in a breath, but decided not to comment on that. They didn’t need an outsider telling them how they should behave. If immortals wanna spend the rest of time guarding a door, then who was Jeb to argue?

Instead he opened his mouth to explain their situation, but they cut him off before he got through the first syllable.

“Jebediah Trapper and company? You’re expected.” The one on the left said, moments before the gate silently swung open.

The fae winced as the group passed through the gate, visibly flinching away from Jeb as he walked past them.

Interesting.

Something about Jeb made the fae distinctly uncomfortable.

Can they feel the bomb? See it? Is it even the bomb?

The younger fae showed a less severe version of this reaction, accusing him of ‘smelling bad’. Maybe these older fae with more power and more sensitivity to impact were able to more accurately feel the death rolling off of him.

A good enough guess for now. We’ll keep it in mind.

Jeb forged ahead, up the ornate staircase and through the oversized double doors that opened themselves as he approached.

Straight ahead, in the main hall, was a table with five chairs, loaded with food that smelled unnaturally delicious. Jeb hadn’t eaten in a day, so he was pretty damn hungry, but according to myth, fairy hospitality had a spotty record. Eating it was tantamount to accepting an unspoken Deal, which gave them power over you.

Jeb’s skin prickled as he made out a figure above and beyond the table full of delicacies.

In a species entirely populated by immortals, Mab looked old. She was whipcord thin, with a high-cheekboned, alien beauty that had been weathered by time. Her hair was black that seemed to be just beginning to turn grey in a salt and pepper bun, and the faint wrinkles on her face put her biological age somewhere in her early fifties.

Mab had a sharp, focused gaze that was equal parts intelligent and unstoppable. Her eyes were practically welded on Jeb’s.

As Jeb approached the throne, she gave a warm smile that chilled him to the core.

“Scion. It’s so wonderful to see you with my own eyes.” Her voice traveled easily across the distance, as if she were standing only a few feet away from the four of them, and not sitting on a raised dais about a hundred feet away.

“Hold up,” Jeb said, raising a hand to stop her. “Are you actually Mab and not a paid actor or body-double meant to trick me into making a Deal with someone other than yourself? keep in mind I don’t know what you actually know what you look like, so I have to be cautious.”

Mab frowned for a moment before she broke into a musical laugh that echoed through the hall with the ring of silver. It seemed to resonate behind Jeb’s eyes.

“The throne suffers no one but Mab upon it,” Mab said, wiping a tear of amusement out of her eye.

“I notice that you didn’t say whether or not you are Mab or if that is the throne at all.” Jeb said. “It would make me far more comfortable if you were to simply say ‘I am Mab, Queen of the fae.’

She smiled.

She stood.

“Oh, fuck!” Jeb dove to the left as something moved. It was like the great beast they’d all been riding up until this point had decided to buck. They were nothing but fleas on top of it. To Jeb’s senses, it felt like the entire world had just moved a couple feet.

We’re inside her Impact, Jeb realized with horror.

“I am Mab, Queen of the Fae.” She said, taking a step down the dais and dragging Jeb’s Myst senses with her. Her power was so thick he could feel it trying to suffocate him. If he relaxed for even a moment, it would pour into his mouth and nose and choke him to death.

“Well,” Jeb said through gritted teeth as he struggled back to his feet while his companions looked at him in blissful ignorance. “It’s a good thing we know you’re who you say you are.”

“I am inimitable, but the caution is appreciated,” Mab said, taking another step down the dais, then another, and another, making Jeb weak in the knees and bladder.

Thankfully he didn’t pee himself by the time she arrived at the most ornate chair at the table and took a seat. Once she stopped moving Jeb felt like the world had stopped moving. It had been a fight between his Myst senses and his inner ear, and the Myst senses had been a strong contender.

Now that the ancient Fae had sat down, the two senses were in harmony once again.

“Join me, won’t you?” She said, motioning to the table with the mind-numbingly delicious smelling food. If this were any other castle in any other reality, Jeb would have become a living Hoover and inhaled the cornucopia.

“Don’t eat the food,” Jeb said, carefully approaching the table and sitting opposite the ancient tyrant.

“On my honor as the queen of the fae, there are no pernicious ingredients, nor any debt attached to the food. The spread before you is a gift, given freely. You are welcome to it.”

“Good enough for me,” Borg said, sitting on Jeb’s left and piling his plate high with a sampling of every meat on the table.

Jeb rubbed the bridge of his nose as Piwaki followed suit. I can think of a couple ways that could be misleading off the top of my head! Vresh watched Jeb for a moment before pushing her plate away from herself. Whatever, those two are no big loss.

“So what exactly do you want?” Jeb asked, desperately trying to ignore the grilled ham and cheese in front of him. “And please be specific.”

“You’ve seen what I want. Experienced my current troubles firsthand,” She said, raising her hand to the massive crystal and gold necklace, seizing one of the crystal between two boney fingers.

“You remember Avelu, correct?” She asked, pulling the crystal away from her necklace and holding it up to the light.

There was a tiny, familiar man beating on the wall of the crystal.

“The diseased guy.” Jeb said, nodding. “I think we kind of…killed him on the way in,” Jeb said with a wince.

“Not to worry, you didn’t actually kill Avelu, I took the liberty of salvaging his soul before the corruption could snuff it out. By the strictest definition, I killed him. What you fought was curdled Myst controlling his body.”

“Curdled…Myst? What?” Jeb was honestly confused. Can you use curdled Myst to make Myst cheese? Why is that where my brain goes?

“It’s an ailment unique to fairies and wizards who take the Vow of Truth. What do you think happens when you break your end of a Deal?”

“Bad…stuff?” Jeb asked.

“That’s true, if vague,” Mab said, leaning back in her seat. “When you’re young and your powers are weak, like you, breaking your word will simply cause your impact to scatter violently.”

“I’m one of the most powerful humans on the planet,” Jeb muttered.

“That’s nice, young man,” she said condescendingly before continuing. “Once your Impact reaches a certain size, it becomes more difficult for it to separate from your body. It might instead turn sour, afflicting your body with a wasting disease that will eventually claim your life if you do not honor your word.”

“That didn’t exactly look like a wasting disease.” Jeb pointed out. “It looked like a cross between gangrene and turbocancer.

“The curdled Myst is so malignant because the Deal that was broken is the foundation of the fae race, and we have failed to live up to our end of the bargain.”

“I notice you’re using Myst and Impact interchangeably.” Jeb said.

“Not so. It’s the Myst that curdled, because the Deal fell through, turning the Impact sour.”

Jeb cocked his head to the side like a confused corgi.

Mab took a deep breath.

“The reason the Myst is turning Fae into monsters is because it originally belonged to humans.”