Solipsism: Chapter 7 (Patreon)

I woke up with my mind expanded and my senses bigger than the world itself. Not a terribly assuring state of being, nor one I was used to. I screamed. For a few moments I could see god, and then I could see god using a pair of nunchuks and telling me how to go faster than light. Everything made sense, and sense was made out of bacon. It was one of the most disturbing and confusing moments of my entire life, and the precious seconds I spent adjusting to it practically traumatised me.

However, it was worth it. 

“What is it?” Aexilica snapped, eyes shooting up and hands suddenly filled with daggers almost as long as her forearms. She looked like she was about to shoot off like a bottle rocket. 

“Nothing.” I answered hurriedly, “I, uh, I saw something while I was…Asleep.”

The look she impaled me with would have castrated a lessar man.

“You screamed because you had a bad dream.” She said, voice seeming to roll over the words, contempt mixed with disbelief.

“No.” I growled, frustrated suddenly. “Not…No, not just that, I…” Telling someone you’d been woken up by shamanic visions was, generally speaking, not the best way to be taken seriously. On the other hand, this woman’s friends had been eaten by a giant God, and she didn’t exist anyway. “I saw something, this vision, a few actually. Like the world was telling me something.”

I could see I had her attention now. 

“Describe it.” She demanded.

I did, but it took a while. By the time I’d gone through all the specifics- which I could remember with upsettingly perfect clarity- we were already packed up and walking again. Aexilica nodded gravely as I finished, though seemed a bit confused too.

“You said that told you things?” She frowned. I understood why instantly, mostly I’d just seen and heard bizarre, inexplicable things. Imagery the English lexicon had never really been designed to convey through description. 

“I learned more than I saw.” I told her, thinking of the best way to describe it. “It’s…I don’t know, esoteric? It seems like what I was being taught was the subtext of what I was being shown, if that makes sense.”

By the look of dawning understanding, I was pleased to see that it did.

“It’s in the stories.” She shrugged. “Worldsingers just…Know things.”

Well, that was a pretty good way to describe it. I did some more experimentation as we moved, and found that, sure enough, my powers went farther than they had the day before. Not in scale, necessarily, not even in the scope of what I could do yesterday, but now there was something else to them. An extra element that my gut told me was categorically separate from the one I’d been controlling yesterday. It didn’t take long to figure out what it did. 

Touching tree limbs left them stooping and swooning, holding my hand against the bark of trunks didn’t have so pronounced a visible effect, but when I tested it by smashing rocks into the stuff I found it breaking exponentially easier than when I didn’t use the new ability first. More experimentation let me actually reshape things to some extent, literally tying branches in knots if they were thin enough, and having them bend at close-to-ninety-degree angles even if they were on the thicker side.

Matter, I imagined, was my new trick. I was influencing matter. Like energy, I could only affect it with a touch, and this didn’t seem quite as combat useful but…Shit, I had seven more of those “Fundaments” according to my stat spread, and one of them was time. 

As fun as it was to unravel the eternal mystery of my imaginary powers, there was still a lot more walking to do. It was harder, now, not easier. This time I woke up sore, and that soreness only grew as all the protesting muscles were put back to work. We ended up covering a lot less distance than the day before, and I could tell Aexilica was growing irritated by the fact. 

Fortunately, the jungle- at least here- wasn’t that thick. We were out of it by the afternoon, and crossing plains was marginally easier. Partly through the basic mechanical fact of walking on flat land rather than uneven canopy, but partially because I could actually see our destination now. 

“That’s it?” I asked, eying the mountain range jutting up ahead. “The Huilickt Mountains?”

“That’s it.” Aexilica replied, giving me no more than that cursory response. 

I wasn’t very practiced at judging distance, but it didn’t look like we could be more than a day or two away. There was even a road leading up to them. So why was Aexilica suddenly so nervous? 

“Something’s wrong.” I guessed. “What is it?” She was usually cagey, but not like this. 

“This road is infamous among travellers, brigands love it. Lots of people make the attempt to reach Huilickt as an escape from the Irethani Pantheon.”

…Which would mean that they would head down this route, and thus make themselves ripe pickings for a robbery. Damn it. 

We moved slower, not faster, than in the jungle. Making camp in out-of-the-way stretches within sprinting distance of the road, doing without a fire despite the freezing cold. I thought I’d die, the first night, and felt the fears creeping back in the second. Still, if nothing else all my blubber did a good job of insulating me. Aexilica didn’t seem bothered by the temperature, or perhaps just didn’t have time to show it. She was far more concerned with keeping us from being ambushed. 

For a few days, that was how we travelled and slept. It was only on the fourth that things changed. 

We were setting up camp, a good distance from the road like usual. This time we were sleeping by a stream, taking the chance to bathe. That, I reckoned, had been our mistake. It was too predictable, too obvious a place. Maybe we’d overlooked it because we were tired, or maybe we were just stupid. Either way our fuck-up happened, and the attack came.

It was Aexilica who kept the situation from degenerating entirely into a disaster, having set up a few trip-wires around us. We were camped out at a rocky area, plenty of waist-high boulders all over to obscure vision and make movement difficult. A man caught his foot as the group approached us, falling and crying out in shock. We both lunged into motion at once, adrenaline taking control of our bodies and sending our brains into standbye.

Fortunately, there was only one direction the attackers could come from. Our backs were to the stream, and there wasn’t a near-enough crossing for the enemy to circle around and pelt us with ranged weapons from the other side. They did have them though. Something whipped by my ear, loud, sharp. A moment later Aexilica tackled me to the ground, cursing.

“Slings.” She spat, just as more projectiles smacked against the rocks and broke. I saw the real benefit to our camping site, then. Cover. But she didn’t seem nearly so pleased with herself.

“They’re going to close in with close quarters weapons while we’re hiding from the stones.” She growled, daggers coming out, wreathed with a curious, dull-green light. I didn’t have time to dwell on it before a big, ugly face reared itself up behind a nearby boulder.

I reacted without thinking. My hand lashed out, a fistful of debris in it. Tiny stones, most smaller than the tip of my pinkie, all gathered up and hauled along the last few days since I found out we might be attacked. My will struck them like a freight train, tossing them forwards with enough energy to make piddly human musculature seem like nothing. They shot out like bullets. 

Well, almost. It seemed the speed limit came from how much mass I tried to will into flying at once, rather than the individual target, because the handful of stone was a good deal slower than I might have hoped, and it flew inconsistently. Some pieces remained in contact with my hand for just a fraction of an instant longer than others, shooting wide or short. All of them spread apart near-instantly.

I’d been trying to make an improvised shotgun blast, what I got instead was…Well, a fistful of tiny stone thrown by a dumbass, but at the very least it was a dumbass with superhuman strength, and I saw a streak of blood as my target was caught by no small number of them and fell back shrieking. I rolled over, scrambling to my feet, then ducking back down as I remembered the enemy’s ranged weapons.

Slings, Aexilica had said? Those things that ripped chunks out of people’s skulls? Brilliant. I was darting around a boulder when someone else came for me, two other someones who’d evidently been circling around to pincer us. I threw another rock, this time a single, larger one that struck the closest man in the centre of his face from just a few paces away and…

Oh god. Oh god. I almost puked, the sight had my stomach spasming. I saw bits of bone, brain matter, an eyeball dropping down almost cartoonishly intact. His friend seemed more shocked than me, and for a moment his spear was wavering. I don’t know what possessed me to lunge for him, the same madness that had gotten me to stand my ground against that cyclops. I did. We went down in a grapple.

I’ve never been in a fight in my life, didn’t know what to do. I was scrambling at him and he was scrambling back, fingernails clawing at flesh, drawing blood, sending lengths of pain down my skin. My head smacked against something hard and stars started dancing in my vision, when I came to he was atop me with his hands closed tight around my throat. 

The panic set in near-instantly.

I tried prying him off with strength, and couldn’t. Punched him, but didn’t have the leverage or room to put the hurt in, and didn’t know how to punch even if I did. I scratched at his fingers, his wrist, his forearm. He ignored it, teeth grit and eyes hard as my vision started to turn crimson and my hearing was swallowed by the sound of a heart thundering to send too little blood to too weak muscles.

Magic, I have magic.

My hand came down on the inside of his wrist, and I willed it to move. I almost wrung my own fucking neck, his grip tight enough that the force needed to wrench it free sent a horrible popping and burning agony running down my spine. I was losing consciousness, thoughts slowing. I was scared.

It’s not real, this isn’t real. But it didn’t matter what I told myself, I wasn’t listening. This was it. This was-

Tearing, screaming, heat and wetness running down my hand. By now my sight had darkened so much it took a few moments of adjustment for my eyes to catch sight of my own arm. Under the strong moonlight- which seemed brighter than on earth- I could see clearly enough that my limb was drenched in blood. The brigand had fallen back and was now clutching one of his own limbs, screaming in pain and horror. 

I realised I was holding something, and after a moment of study that something became clear to me. Between my fingers, I gripped a long sheet of torn skin, thick bundles of soft tissue still clinging to the bottom of it. Revolted, I tossed it away instantly.

For a moment I just sat there, drinking in oxygen. Then movement caught my eye, and I saw the man who’d almost killed me was starting to get up. I lunged for him, pinning his body down, panic and the memory of my near-death spurring me on. This time I was on top, and his one strong arm was no match for my two weak ones. I stared into his eyes as they bulged, my fingers digging into his neck. 

Really digging in, almost like knives. I felt the substance of him, then, the same way I’d felt the tree limbs during my matter-magic tests. I realised what was happening just as I saw blood fountain free, softened meat yielding as if it were play-dough. I must have done more than just cut his artery, because the blood puddling around us extended a foot in every direction within moments. His struggling finally came to a jerky, desperate stop, and I was left kneeling atop a dead man.