BT - Book 1 - Chapter 29 (Patreon)

Micah touched the craggy bark of the old growth tree, his fingertips trailing across its rough and damp surface.  Even without casting a spell he could feel its age, the gravity and presence behind the giant.  Its branches spread out over a wide mossy glade, practically touching those of its sisters.  The six majestic giants towered over the clearing, only allowing a small amount of the sun’s light through their leaves to dapple the moss and grass below

He turned from the tree, sighing.  The stag was trying in vain to wipe sap from a slain dryad on the forest floor, but the stubborn ichor clung to its antlers, staining them a brownish green.  The bodies of a dozen dryads littered the clearing.  Childlike creatures made of knotted wood and leaves, Micah had been loath to kill them.  Each one of them reminded him of Esther from their diminutive size to their playful mannerisms.  Unfortunately those mannerisms manifested as they attacked impishly, giggling when they inflicted a wound or dodged an attack at the last second.

Still, there hadn’t been much of a choice.  If he’d been blessed as a fire mage, it would have been an easy battle.  Instead, his only options were to compete with the dryads in his usage of wood magic or try to use air magic against the wood attuned creatures.  Both were awful ideas.  Air magic was notoriously weak against wood magic, the spells just didn’t work as well as they should in the same way that fire magic was extra effective.

As for wood magic?  The Dryads were born to it and lived their entire lives using it in every facet of their day to day existence.  One casting of plant weave was all Micah needed to know that their skill levels were at least double digits above his.

Instead he’d simply fought with his spear alongside the stag and his summoned Onkert, occasionally healing them when the dryads made it through their defenses.  Glancing over at the Onkert’s shredded corpse he pursed his lips.  As soon as the dryads had hamstrung the Daemon, they almost completely ignored him and the stag, focusing their efforts on tormenting the crippled creature.  It gave them the opening they needed to pick off a couple of the shifty plants, turning the tide of the battle.

Without the Onkert they clearly would have died.  Even with the bonuses from the Thaumaturge class, Micah was only twice as strong and fast as the average human.  The dryads on the other hand could literally merge with wood, making them as easy to fight in a forest as an individual wave in an ocean.

Almost every spear thrust was answered by one of the giggling dryads stepping sideways into the gigantic trees guarding the glade.  Worse, the sweeping blows using the pole of the spear as a staff were simply ineffective.  Micah learned the hard way, at the cost of a bone deep stab from a trio of wooden talons, that the wooden haft of his spear simply passed through the Dryads.

In between healing the stag and himself frequently, they barely managed to kill all of the dryads, a task that finally earned him the level up he’d been waiting for since Mursa presented him with her challenge.  As for the stag?  Micah glanced at it, a smile on his face.  Already it was beginning to glow, an aura of violet and gold lighting up the isolated glade.

He put his hand back on the tree, sinking his awareness deep beneath its bark.  The stag would begin its evolution soon and there wasn’t anything to do but wait and stand guard.  

The sap and pulp of the tree sang to him, whispering stories of bygone ages before humans settled the frontier.  After years of using temporal energy he could almost see the tree as it had been, from a timid sapling to its current mammoth state. His fingers tingled as Micah could all but taste the potential of the tree.

For some reason, temporal energy wasn’t just about time.  Rocks were old, but they barely had any power in them.  Same with people.  You could take years from anyone, but from some people the time just meant more than others.  The important and famous people he’d met while working at the Royal Academy were heavily laden with temporal energy while an old peasant woman known by no one barely had enough to power a magelight.

These trees were important.  Before humans settled the land, they’d been landmarks to the elves and beasts that dwelt in the forest.  The elves gave the trees names, and told tales of them to their young.  He could feel their hands on his branches as they climbed above the canopy to survey the rest of the forest.  Their voices whispered around him as they gave thanks for his shelter from the elements.  His roots touched those of his sisters, intertwining.

Micah pulled his hand off of the tree, blinking rapidly.  He took a deep breath, running his hand through his lea- hair. 

Trembling he looked at his hands again.  Covered in callouses and burns from constant exposure to the sun, they were still pink.  Wonderfully pink.  No brown at all. 

He shuddered before returning his gaze to the tree with new respect.  They were exactly what he was looking for, great batteries of temporal energy that could easily fuel dozens of great rituals.  They were also a reminder.  Once again he was a child playing at understanding the games of adults.  Rather than a grand match of false smiles and politics, Micah was tampering with the very forces of the cosmos itself.

For all of his mastery of ritual and time magic, it was still a black box to Micah.  He knew that when he changed some variables such as reagents, air pressure, and lunar phase that the results changed, but he didn’t have the first inkling as to why.  That lack of understanding mean that he could easily make an accidental misstep that could cost him everything without even knowing that he was walking down the wrong path.

In all likelihood there was probably a good reason why the average wizard couldn’t use temporal energy.  It defied mortal comprehension and that made it dangerous.  The tree had almost pulled Micah into its timestream and history.  If he’d fallen deeper into its grasp, Micah had no idea if he’d be able to find his way back out.

The scrape of a claw on bark in the otherwise silent clearing drew Micah’s attention upward.  Barely ten feet above him, a greyish white form clung to the trunk of the tree, its large luminous yellow eyes fixed upon him.

As soon as it met Micah’s gaze, the monster let out an earsplitting screech, revealing a pink maw studded with needle like fangs.  The world around him spun, the cotton gauze of vertigo wrapping itself around his thoughts.

Micah jumped backwards, stumbling and falling to the floor of the clearing as the ground lurched beneath him.  The creature pounced, landing where he stood at the base of the tree just a second ago.  He stared dazed, his mind trying to make sense of the being as it stood on its hind legs revealing a bipedal torso covered in grey bristles.  It spread its arms wide, revealing the membrane connecting its torso to its arms.

The monster opened its mouth, a short almost squashed snout, and let out a high pitched chirping noise that stung Micah’s ears and caused his vision to blur slightly more.  Around him a chorus of chirps responded.

“Oh fuck,” Micah muttered, glancing to take in the creature’s companions as they scampered down the other great trees of the grove.  “Pack hunters.”

They circled him, giving Micah a chance to plant his spear’s butt in the soil to steady himself and clamber to his feet.  He muttered the incantation to wind shield, hoping that its disruption of the airflow around him would be enough to deaden the creatures’ sonic attacks.

With a distorted chirp, the monster in front of him leapt into the air, spreading its clawed hands to take advantage of  its membrane and glide toward him.  A cacophony of screeches assaulted Micah from behind.  The wind shield did its work, and the dampened sound buffeted over him with little effect as Micah set his feet and plucked the creature from the sky with a well timed gale thrust.

The spear stabbed clear through the creature, its light and aerodynamic body not designed to absorb the mana infused attack.  With a spasmodic shudder, the monster died at the end of his weapon and a wave of distressed chirping erupted behind him.

Micah spun around to found another five of the monsters arrayed in a semi circle around him, gesturing wildly.  WIthout pausing, he cast root spears and watched as three of the creatures were impaled on stakes of wood that thrust up from the ground, shredding their thin and lightly muscled bodies.

The other two let out plaintive chirps, hopping into the air and skimming away from the area of the spell.  Micah let them go.  They were too fast for him to catch and running into the forest after them on his own sounded like a tremendous way to get ambushed.  Right now the important thing was watching over the stag.  

The next half hour was spent pacing nervously, glancing into the darkness surrounding the clearing and hoping not to see the glint of a monsters’ eyes.  All the while the violet-gold aura surrounding the stag intensified until it was a veritable cocoon.  Before long it was so bright that Micah could no longer look at it.  Even a glance robbed him of his night vision, and his situation was far too precarious to risk fighting blind.

Finally, with a bass rumble that rattled Micah’s teeth, the light around the stag exploded outward in a burst of mana and wind.  The blast almost knocked Micah from his feet, but after a quick step to recover he turned to see his companion’s new form.

It stood almost six feet tall at the shoulder, its lithe snow white form brimming with barely restrained energy.  The stag’s horns now grew backward, a beautiful metallic array of thorny tines jutting from the main swept-back root.  Micah caught his breath when he noticed the last and most significant of the changes, a pair of downy swan’s wings lay folded against the creature’s sides.  

It approached Micah, and almost reverently he put his hand on its pure white fur, feeling an almost electric crackle as they made contact.  Alien emotions suddenly filled his mind: pride, accomplishment, bemusement.  Micah looked up, his mouth half open and noted the twinkle in the stag’s eye.

Telivern.  Its name was Telivern.  Micah didn’t question how he knew the name.  It appeared in his mind fully formed yet disconnected the same way the emotions did.  

“You can talk now?” Micah furrowed his brow, his fingers trailing through Telivern’s fur.  Mana in the fur crackled and sparked around his fingers, filling his nose with a faint whiff of ozone.

Amusement. 

Micah smiled back at Telivern.  “Well,” he corrected himself.  “Maybe you can’t speak, but this is something else.  All this time I’ve felt like I could understand you, but now I finally can.  That alone was worth risking my life against a bunch of terrifying wooden children and bat monsters.”

Telivern glanced past Micah and took in the shredded bodies behind him.  It brought its nose down and pressed the wetness of its muzzle against his cheek.

Gratitude.  Affection.

“Come on,” Micah responded, his hand still enmeshed in its soft fur, simply content to retain proximity to his friend.  “We should head back to the cave.  I need to teleport back to Basil’s Cove and make up some sort of halfway believable lie about my blessing.”

Bemusement.

“I will say,” reluctantly Micah removed his arm from Telivern’s back.  “Of all my sixteenth birthdays, this one is my favorite.”

It bumped its muzzle into the back of Micah’s neck as he began walking from the clearing.

Confusion.