Dana's Journal, Entry 1 and Entry 2

Entry 1

My name is Dana, and I’m starting this journal in the hope that it will help me stay sane in the midst of all the recent turmoil. I may decide to delete this before anyone sees it, like my last journal. But in case I don’t, and someone is reading this, I have a pretty good idea of who you are. You are probably a cryo, recently thawed, and you want to know something about the person who saved you from being a permanent popsicle. This is assuming Victor’s plan will actually work, and we successfully thaw cryo-bank Masis. Let’s go with that.
You were dead for about three hundred fifty years. They may call it “stasis” or “coldsleep” but the fact is that you were dead. There have been lots of cryos thawed over the last few centuries, and most of them soon wished they had stayed dead. Usually what happens is, a gang or an army finds a cryo-bank, then someone who is not quite as stupid as the rest of them figures out how to thaw the popsicles. The cryos who make it out of that process alive are enslaved, or worse. Worse is when the gang or army has no use for the cryos other than entertainment. That’s pretty common, since most cryos are useless. No offense.

So, congratulations, you are back from the dead and we aren’t going to do horrible things to you. But I suppose if you are reading this, then you already know that. Then again, maybe you know otherwise. After all, I am getting ahead of myself.

During the time you were dead –thirty years after you were frozen, to be exact– something happened which changed the entire universe. We call it “The Advent”. Bear with me here… The world was going along, there were billions of people, there was technology, there were big cities and big governments, and there was no magic. Or more accurately, there was so little magic that it was hardly worth mentioning. This is the world you remember, the way it existed before you stepped into a cryo-pod and became a popsicle. Then, one day, there was magic. Just like that. And that is The Advent. To this day, people argue about why it happened. Some say it was caused by a scientific experiment. Some say it was caused by aliens in another galaxy. Then there are the religious people who have their own theories, not to mention the wars they have fought over it.

From what I have read, the advent of magic wasn’t obvious at first. Here’s an analogy. Back in your day, there were wi-fi networks. Now imagine if a new network suddenly appeared that you could join from anywhere in world, but nobody knew how to access it. Well, some people would figure it out pretty fast. That’s essentially what happened with magic. We were always equipped to use magic (some of us more than others), but there was no magical energy around to actually put to use. Then one day there was. And all over the world, people started coming out of the woodwork who could do amazing things. First just a dozen or so, then hundreds, then thousands, then millions. They would learn from each other. What followed was very messy and complicated and the history books don’t agree on very much about it. But the end result is this: the human population went from well over ten billion to well under one billion. The large cities are all in ruins, and there are no large governments anywhere. About one of ten people use some kind of magic. One out of a hundred are good at it. In some ways, the world was a better place back in your time. But I couldn’t live in a world like that. I wouldn’t last a day.


Entry 2

I’m a wizard who lives out in the city ruins. I’ve been on my own since I graduated from Karmak’s School of Wizardry, where I was the only girl student. I learned boy-magic there, like everyone else.  Flaming balls, flashy bolts, pushy winds and things that go boom. Boy stuff. I look like a boy when I’m wearing baggy clothes, which made it easier to blend in. Hah! Who am I kidding? I never blend in anywhere.

Two weeks ago. It was a typical morning and I was sitting cross-legged on a fire-escape overlooking the ruins of Gates Boulevard. There was an ancient vid-show on my tablet in my left hand while my right hand entertained the feral cats below with dancing lights. I heard a rumble from the east. The cats scurried away into shadows as it got louder. I double-tapped my tablet to make it change from rigid to cloth-like so I could fold it up and put it in my pocket. I knew that it was Jason coming down the street. He’s the only person in the city who still has a working motorcycle.

Jason is never far from trouble. He is either in it, or he is looking for it. My heart was racing by the time his bike skidded to a stop on the street two stories below.

“Hey Dana! If you’re not too busy playing with your pussy cats, I could use your help downtown.” Jason could have starred in one of those ancient vids. The kind of vid where there’s a hot guy in a stylish leather jacket and boots who can kick everyone’s ass. I stood up and slowly stretched. Jason watched me and revved his bike a few times.

“C’mon, Dana! There’s a pack of junk golems on the loose, smashing stuff up!” He had to shout pretty loudly to be heard over the engine.

I nodded and cracked my knuckles. I didn’t feel like shouting back. If he looked closely, he may have seen my lips move slightly as I mumbled an incantation. A gust of wind blew my patchwork coat from its nearby perch on the fire escape and onto my outstretched arm.

Then I vaulted over the railing. It was a twenty foot drop, so I made another gust – this time to slow my fall. I landed behind Jason on the seat of his bike, but my aim was a bit off and I banged my knee really hard on something metal. It hurt so bad I could barely stop myself from yelling. I grabbed on to him tightly and clenched my jaw. Right before we sped off, I heard Jason say “You are a badass!” Maybe he didn’t notice my clumsiness.

I forgot all about the pain in my knee when I realized we were going straight towards the ramp. When I say “ramp” I mean a huge broken slab of Gates Boulevard that was angled upward. It was the sort of thing that a young boy or a madman would take one look at and say “Hey that would be fun to drive over!” and that was exactly what Jason did. Drive over it, I mean, not make the remark. I was scared but I kept my eyes wide open while we were airborne. There was quite a lot of very broken street beneath us as the bike sailed through the air, and we needed to land on a relatively intact stretch in order to not die. Mind you, I could have pushed away from the bike and made a gust of wind to cushion my fall. But then how would I feel if Jason landed the bike safely and laughed at me for bailing out? It was better to risk death. As it happened, the risk paid off and Jason stuck the landing perfectly on another slab of street that was angled just right. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure he had made that jump dozens of times before.

Jason turned right on 5th Street, maneuvered skillfully around potholes and burnt out cars for another two blocks, and then came to a sudden stop. There were signs of a skirmish in the middle of the road – scattered chunks of plastic and metal debris, skid marks and what appeared to be blood splatters. “They were here half an hour ago,” he growled. “Couldn’t have gone much more than a mile since then.”

“Is that blood?” I pointed to the suspicious splatters on the road.

“Yeah. Zeke was with me. These golems are tough.”

“Is he okay?” Sometimes stupid questions need to be asked.

“No,” said Jason. There was a pause, and then, “I dropped him off at the camp. Got mashed up pretty bad.”

I decided to change the subject. “There’s a trail of earth magic going down the street. We can follow it easily.”

Jason nodded, and we sped off again. But not for long. We spotted the golems a few minutes later. Jason parked the bike about a hundred fifty meters from the pack, directly in their path. He grabbed a weapon that was hooked to the side of his bike – a long hammery thing which I was later told is a kind of “bec de corbin”. Basically a fancy sledgehammer, but the head had a sharp beak on one side instead of being flat on both. We set off towards the golems.

Junk golems are large humanoid mishmashes of whatever happens to be lying around when they are created – in this case, mostly pieces of car wreckage and concrete. They are held together entirely by magic, and so tend to be very unstable. Proper golems – say, mechanical ones – are constructed carefully and held together with joints and stuff. Proper golems are merely animated by magic, so they are pretty difficult to destroy. With junk golems, though, a strong blow is usually enough to knock them into pieces and disperse the magic holding them together.

“So…”, I said, “how many did you guys manage to take down before they got Zeke?”

“One”, said Jason. “The smallest one. But I think it’s back now.”

We were about fifty meters from the pack. There were six of them. The shortest was the height of a man, the tallest was…huge…probably over five meters tall. I tried not to think about it. There was a clanking and scraping as they shuffled towards us down the broken street.

I stopped walking. “Let’s meet them at the chokepoint”, I said. The street narrowed just ahead, with the base of a very sturdy and intact skyscraper on one side, and a huge pile of rubble and junk on the other side, leaving a gap of about five meters in between. The golems, being wide and stupid, would go through one or two at a time.

“Yup”, agreed Jason. He stopped as well. “Check this out.” Jason held up his weapon to show me the head. His initials were engraved on it, and they had a faint glow. I passed my hand over them and got a read on the enchantment. It was amateur work. Not particularly powerful, but there was a simple earnestness about the aura that made me smile.

“You did this yourself,” I said. “I’m impressed.”

“It’s shit,” he replied. “But it’s better than nothing. Can you make it stronger?”

I rolled my eyes. “Sure. You ask me now that the fight is about to start.” I grabbed the weapon and put its haft to the ground like it was a walking stick. “I’ll give it a quick buff.” Placing both hands around the steel head, I gave it the strongest imbue of kinetic amp that I could manage. The letters glowed brightly now.

“Nice!” said Jason. “This is going to wreck them.”

“Only the tip,” I replied.

Jason looked at me quizzically, but we were out of time. The smallest (and fastest) golem had reached us and was about to punch Jason in the face with an asphalt fist. Jason intercepted with a blow of his own, shattering the golem’s right arm. The follow-up strike hit it square in the chest with a sound like a thunder-clap and sent pieces flying in every direction. I flinched as a chunk of metal whizzed past my ear. The golem’s legs stood without a body for a moment, then toppled to the ground and into bits.

Jason held his weapon aloft and gawked at the glowing head. “This…” he rumbled, “is badass.”

“Keep busy”, I said. “That imbue won’t last.”

There are two times when I get bossy:  when I’m in battle or when I’m doing chores. When shit has to get done, it has to get done. Jason and I had been through a few fights together, and I knew he would do pretty much whatever I said.

“Right!” And with that he set upon the two mid-sized golems (each about three meters tall) who were trudging side-by-side through the chokepoint. Before Jason could reach them, I mentally grabbed hold of the biggest piece of loose junk that I could, and gave it a hard telekinetic push. It was a blocky thing which may have been the engine of some large ancient vehicle. I don’t know, and I don’t care enough to ask the people who do. Anyway, it smashed into the first golem, which knocked into the second golem, and left both of them sprawling on the ground.

About that. There are three basic ways of using magic to move things around. The first, and most common, is telekinesis. What that means is you grab hold of the thing with your mind and give it a push. If you’re good, you can keep hold of it while it moves and make it go faster or move in a new direction. But in order to get a grip on something, you have to have a clear mental picture of it. The more complicated the shape, the harder it is. That’s why, when you see demonstrations of telekinesis, the mage almost always uses a ball of some kind. Cubes are good, too. But random chunks of debris, statues, or other complex forms are very difficult to keep a hold on. The second way to move things is by manipulating the medium they are in. Generally, that means using gusts of wind to push them. This is a harder method for most people, but I’ve always had a knack for it. It’s just a matter of squishing pockets of air in the right places. The third method is by far the hardest, and most mages can’t do it at all. The way it works is you make the thing fall, but in whatever direction you want it to fall. The best description I’ve heard is from Victor (who I had not met yet as of the golem fight). He says that you can “bend the fabric of space to your will”. He says it’s extremely dangerous, too.

Jason rushed in and started screaming and raining blows down on the two mid-sized golems like a man possessed. Every time that hammer connected it sounded like a bomb going off, and in less than a minute they were completely demolished. I don’t know how he managed it without going deaf from the noise or getting cut up by flying debris. This was a reminder that Jason has demons. I suspect that even his demons have demons. For my part, I just stood back and waited for him to finish.

And now – you guessed it – two even bigger golems came our way. These guys were about four meters tall, and each about half that wide. They were almost touching shoulders as they entered the chokepoint. So far I had been conserving my energy, but that was no longer an option.

“Wait!” I called to Jason. “Back off for a minute!” Jason gave me a confused look but he complied, running back towards me. With Jason out of harm’s way, I began to launch the heaviest objects that I could at the golems, as quickly and violently as possible. This wasn’t clever, but it was effective. The golems lacked flesh, organs, bones, or working machinery of any kind. Trying to freeze or electrocute them would have been pointless. If I had, say, tried to incinerate them, then we would have had to face red-hot flaming junk golems. And this type of golem was also immune to illusions and sensory attacks, because they were essentially mindless and senseless. So I hit them with heavy stuff.

It was working. The two big junk golems slowed and stumbled under my onslaught. Large chunks were coming off of them. And then something surprising happened. The Big One-- the golem in the back of the pack who evidently was tired of waiting for his turn-- grabbed what was left a golem in front of him and tossed it. I remember trying to put up a shield as the better part of a car chassis came straight at me. I wasn’t smashed, so I guess the shield did its’ job. But I must have lost consciousness for a moment, because the next thing I was aware of is Jason screaming something as a huge golem foot with the letters “oyot” on it descended on me. I had one of those moments when everything seems to move in slow motion. I rolled sideways and felt the ground shake as the foot smashed the pavement I had just occupied. A moment later and I was back on my feet, covering my ears and cursing.

The Big One took no notice of me. It just kept right on lumbering down the ruined street. That’s when I noticed that the smaller golems had reconstituted themselves from new parts and were trudging along ahead. As I pondered this, I was startled by a car chassis leaping into the air beside me. It was Jason – he had been trapped underneath and had only now managed to push it off with some telekinesis of his own.

“My bike!” Jason sprinted off down the street. In a few moments, the first of the golems would reach his motorcycle and…trash it?  Hump it? Jason runs faster than me, but I can fly. Sort of. What I actually do is called “wind hopping”. You run and jump and then use a magic gust of wind to lift and push you along. I’m good enough at it to stay airborne for six or seven seconds at a time. The tricky part is creating the perfect counter-gust to slow the descent so you don’t break your legs on the landing. Rinse, repeat. On a good day I barely touch the ground in between hops.

I got a lot of height on my second hop and I soared over Jason and most of the golems. As I reached the top of my arc and began my descent, I realized something:  the golems were all inside of a giant bubble of magic that was drifting down the street. It was sustaining them. I hadn’t noticed the bubble until I got above it.

I pivoted in the air and adjusted my trajectory as the ground rushed up. At the last instant, I halted my fall with an upward blast of air which nearly ripped my clothes off. It also made the bike jump up and land on its side. The golems at the front of the pack stumbled from the wind. I had landed between them and the bike, just out of their reach. I channeled two blasts of pure kinetic energy – one from each hand – and pulverized them. This was a very expensive move in terms of magic energy, but it bought me time.

Jason now caught up to me, having avoided the relatively slow moving golems along his path. He was breathing hard.

“Holy shit! You just --” Apparently he was impressed.

“Your weapon!” I interrupted. “Give.” He handed over his hammer (I don’t like writing the fancy name for it) and I saw that the charge I had put on it was almost gone. I gave it another.

“Jason, I’m going to cast a very powerful spell. It will take a few minutes, and it might not work. I cannot move from this spot until I’m done, so I need you to hold them off.” I held out his recharged hammer in outstretched arms.

“Done!” he shouted. And with that he snatched the hammer and turned towards the approaching golems. He walked slowly this time, gathering his strength.

Most of a wizard’s spells are learned from other wizards. If the wizard has any talent worth mentioning, he will also have discovered some spells on his own. And if you’re me, you learn a few spells from your dreams and nightmares. This was one of those. It’s a spell I call The Void.

There’s the world that we see with our eyes – or think we see – and then there’s a world of pure Form. The Form doesn’t change, but different parts of it are revealed to us at different times and places. As wizards, we touch the Form with our minds, and the more in touch with it we are, the more powerful we become. The world we see and hear and smell and so on is connected to the world of Form. It’s hard to explain how. Maybe they are really the same world perceived in different ways. Anyway, casting The Void is like solving a puzzle. I gaze at the Form with my mind, from my current place, and try to see through to a far away point. I can rotate it and invert it and turn it any which way to look for a gap, but I cannot alter the basic structure. These manipulations take complete concentration. If I find a gap, then I do something which is best described as reaching through to the other side. That creates a drain which sucks all the magic away from wherever I cast the spell. And that is what I did.

The golems fell to pieces, starting with those farthest away. The Big One was last, as it had almost reached me by the time the drain opened. Jason had to grab me and pull me to safety as it collapsed into a pile of junk. He let out a victory whoop and slammed his hammer on the ground in triumph. I was too busy trying to suppress a panic attack to join in the celebration. The Void drains all magic from the surrounding area, and any nearby magic users as well. At that moment I was experiencing complete magic deprivation. Even people who don’t know any magic have some mental connection to the Form, however tenuous. When they lose that connection, it makes them feel like something is off -- they get lonely or depressed and don’t know why. But for someone like me, it is much worse. It is like drowning in blackness. Fortunately, the terror subsides when my magical reserves start to replenish.

Jason held me by the shoulders and stared into my eyes. He looked worried. By this time, I was returning from the brink. I managed to crack a smile.

“She’s back! For a minute there, I thought you were on a one-way trip to the inside of your head.”

“Not far from the truth”, I said. I put my arms around him and squeezed, head buried in his chest. He hugged me tight and rested his chin on my shoulder.

A minute passed. “Better check your bike,” I ventured. We disengaged and he walked over to where his motorcycle had fallen. It was now partially buried in rubble.

I took a moment to scan the area. With my energy slowly returning, I could now confirm that the huge magic bubble which had powered the golems was no more. I was also aware that the drain had not completely closed yet. I could sense the remnant of void swirling nearby, a dustdevil of negation. I shuddered.