Totem Ch 3: Swallowing Strange Pills (Patreon)

The only reason I got away with hiding the bag for as long as I did was because it was still chaos in the rest of the village.

From the screams and shouts, the battle — or invasion? — Was still going full force.

Mom shot a despairing glance to dad and then transferred me over into his arms. She jumped back through the hole in the wall rather than using the door, like a badass.

And, like a permissive parent, dad let out a long sigh and set me on the bed. The top blankets were littered with shards of pottery, but I didn't mind. When he turned away to start blocking the wall using his badger magic, I shoved the bag of pills in between the wood frame and the wall.

Then we waited.

I suppose that the battle was turning our way, seeing as we didn't go back into the bolt hole.

I ended up dozing off after a few hours. I blame my little baby body. I woke once or twice to dad sitting next to me, keeping guard. He smiled down at me once and said something with the word, "brave" in it.

I suppose a real toddler would be screaming his head off, or whining. I just didn't have the energy. Let him think I was brave.

When I woke up again, the house was dark and my parents were sleeping in the bed. I was curled between them.

Again, something I would have felt distinctly uncomfortable as an adult.

As a toddler… It wasn’t too bad.

I took my time wiggling out and crawling to the foot of the bed where I had stored the pills.

Thankfully, my parents were sacked out. They didn't stir.

Time to see what magic could do.

My best guess was that these were sort of magic batteries. Something that had topped my parents up. So what could it do for me? 

Shielding the top of the bag, I plucked out a pea-sized orb at the top. It glowed so brightly that it through shadows all around the dark room, in between my fingertips.

I popped it in my mouth. It… Made my tongue feel tingly, and an experimental bite told me I sooner break my teeth than the orb.

Oh well. Down the hatch.

I swallowed.

Huh. It was kind of tingly going down, too. And warm. Very warm.

Too warm.

Oh shit.

Oh shit!

The warmth expanded rapidly, verging on pain. It was like the worst heartburn I had ever experienced. Like downing a milkshake of ghost peppers.

Weirdly, the pain was concentrated right below my belly button.

I clenched my muscles, wondering if I was going to have to make a run for the outhouse.

But… It was hard to explain. It wasn't digestive pain. It was both deeper and more diffuse.

Yeah, I was pretty sure I had just poisoned myself.

Stupid, stupid! Just because full on adults could take the pills didn't mean my toddler body could handle it.

I fucked up.

But I refused to call out for mom and dad. They’d had one hell of a busy day, repelling the invasion and all. I didn't think I was dying. I could ride this out. Probably.

Shutting my eyes, I forcefully made myself relax. This would probably pass.

Only when I relaxed and looked inward did I realize there was something to see.

It was as if an inner eye I'd never been aware of had opened. With my new sight, I saw a hazy white blue light cycling slowly around my middle.

It was a little like the depictions I'd seen of gas orbiting a black hole. A brighter portion in the middle outlined something that should be there, but wasn't.

And I found that by concentrating, I could slow or speed up the light’s rotational rate.

Okay. What the shit was this?

Concentrating further, I realized I could see the pill I had swallowed. It was hanging out there, right next to my belly button. Wasn’t my stomach higher than that? 

In any case, the pill let off more and more light by the moment. That light slowly drifted to join the stuff orbiting the black hole.

If this was a drug-induced hallucination, it was a weird one.

I concentrated on the new light escaping the pill and found I could sort of direct it, too. Slowly, by clamping down with mental pressure, I forced that scattered cloud of light from the bill to condense and more quickly join the orbiting light.

And I found once that happened, the uncomfortable burning eased.

Within about twenty minutes, the rest of the pill had been used up and was now slowly orbiting the black hole. That light didn't seem to be going anywhere, but it didn't hurt either.

I opened my eyes and found my skin slick with sweat. I felt like I had just run a marathon.

What had just happened to me? Was this magic? Could I do magic now?

* * *

Spoiler: I could not do magic now. 

Not unless "magic" was the ability to move the light orbiting around my inner black hole faster and condense it down into a ring.

I worked on it during quiet moments the next day. It would only work when my mind was settled, and I could concentrate.

It felt like real work, too. Though I was just sitting there with my eyes shut, I felt tired to the bone after I was done. I would need a break from concentrating.

But I got no mystical powers. No scales on my arms. No badger fur. No tail, either, which I was counting as a win.

So, the next night I did it again.

I took a moment of distraction to hide the bag of orbs outside my house under some leaf litter. Better not bury it, considering my dad had badger earth powers.

At night, I snuck out and swallowed another orb.

Pretty much the same thing happened. The burning pain sucked, but it didn't come as a surprise.

And I found that if I sat there with my legs crossed in the old style lotus position and focused on my breathing, I could condense the light more easily.

I repeated the process every night for a week. The light built around the black hole — the ring around the event horizon was pretty bright now — but nothing else happened. The light didn't dim, either. It was just… There.

Meanwhile, my village was being rebuilt. It turns out having dozens of people with animal and elemental powers made for quick work.

The second day after the invasion, we held a mass funeral. There weren't as many dead as I'd expected.

I never got a full explanation about who had attacked us, or why. The people around me seemed to think it was just something that happened.

The word they spoke I eventually translated as ‘Deformed’.

My language skills were growing by the day. Soon, I was able to ask pointed questions and mostly understand the answers in a roundabout way.

"Why is daddy like a badger?" I asked one afternoon.

In answer, my mother took my hand and led me to the front of the hut. Standing guard on either side was a statue of an earthen badger and a wooden alligator with a shallow moat filled with water and river stones around its feet.

"These are our totems," mom said — mostly. I was still missing words, grammar, and context clues, but I got the meat of it. "This is your father's brother badger, and my sister alligator."

Then she made a gesture of reference, touching her to four fingers and thumb to her forehead at the alligator. I'd seen them do this to their own statues every time they entered or exited the house.

"Why are you an alligator?" I said, and I could hear the whine in it. This was one of those frustrating things that was such common knowledge that no one bothered to explain it.

She smiled down at me. "It's who I am, and when you become an adult, you will find out who you are, too."

Are you kidding me, woman? I have to wait decades?

I didn't have those words, so I just said, "When?"

Smiling, she leaned down and touched my nose. "When you're a man. At fifteen years, usually."

Well at least it wasn’t twenty-one-- wait, what?! You were ‘grown’ at fifteen?!

She wasn’t done. Now keep in mind that my language skills were on the shaky side but I understood the gist of what she said:

“Your totem will come to you in the night and tell you what kind of person you are, and your purpose. Then he will lend you his strength.” She stretched out her scaly arm in example. “These are marks of sister alligator’s power.”

My suspicious mind was a’buzz. I liked the idea of magical power, but I didn’t like the idea of it then assigning me a purpose.

“What did it tell you?” I asked.

She smiled. “To protect my family.”

That wasn’t so bad. Not “assassinate the president” or “work the fields for your landlord until you drop” or whatever.

“What about Daddy?”

Her smile didn’t dim but she said, “The words your totem tells you are the most private and important in your life. I will tell you, but you must not tell anyone else or ask others for their life’s purpose. Do you understand?”

“I promise not to tell.” I made a zip-lip sign, which is universal.

“Brother Badger told your father to work the earth, which he wanted to do anyway.”

Made sense. My dad was a farmer through and through.

I wasn’t looking forward to the day he figured out I wasn’t.

I didn’t care what my totem said to me – assuming it visited Earthlings at all. I wasn’t growing grain for the rest of my life.

“I want to fight the bad guys!” I said. “Can my totem be a wolf or a… a tiger?”

Still smiling, she swooped me up into her arms. “Your totem is you, Seth. Whatever it is will be perfect.”

Well since I now lived in a world where villages were regularly attacked by outsiders, I was determined to have something badass.

“I’m a tiger!” I declared.

“Aw, my little brave tiger.” She snuggled me close.

Ugh, humiliating.

***

I gave up on eating the pills as a way to spontaneously generate magical powers. Finally, I had accepted that in this world, they came from totems. And like it or not, I’d only get mine when I reached fifteen or so.

So I “found” the bag with the remaining twenty pills and showed mom the next morning.

From her reactions… I think we just won the lottery.

Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten so many?

Oops.

Little did I know that doing that had been the best decision I made since arriving here.

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