Path of Dragons 18 - Chapter 14 - First Steps (Patreon)

The first leaf crumbled into ethereal dust, spreading numbness throughout Elijah’s mind.  Shelly’s identity hovered over him like a pending avalanche, waiting to bury him in a thousand testudine memories that did not belong to him.

Elijah retreated into the core of his own identity, holding it together through sheer force of will.  Decades of maintaining control under the influence of the Call had trained him well, and he managed to fend off Shelly’s identity.  Yet, he still saw flashes from her mind.  He still felt her emotions, simplistic as they were.  And at times, he felt himself merging with her.

If he allowed it to go much further than the first few steps, he would be eternally lost.  Maybe he would become her dedicated thrall, subject to her every whim.  Or perhaps he would just die, dehydrated and starving as he lost the will to see to his own needs.

That would take a while, given his constitution and regeneration, but it would happen eventually.

Either way, Elijah wouldn’t allow that to occur.  He clung to his own mind, gripping it tightly in an effort to keep Shelly’s influence at bay.  He wasn’t entirely successful, but he managed to protect the most important parts.

Along the way, more leaves crumbled.  Their lack left Elijah increasingly overwhelmed by the enormity of his own thoughts.  Splitting them into pieces had protected him from the realities of his new life, but now that they’d steadily decreased, Elijah could barely focus on what was important.

It became more and more difficult with every crumbling leaf until, at last, only Elijah’s diffuse mind remained.  It wasn’t contained within a leaf, but rather, it was the network that tied them all together.  Spores.  Leaves.  Everything.  If his normal cultivation system was a tree, albeit one with draconic and fungal characteristics, then his diffuse mind was the atmosphere surrounding the canopy.

Most of the time, Elijah didn’t even recognize it.  It didn’t do any of his actual thinking.  Instead, it housed the core of his identity from which everything else grew. 

That being said, he was not accustomed to having everything crammed into that ill-suited vestibule. 

And that meant pain.

Lots and lots of pain, like someone repeatedly slamming a hammer into his thoughts.  As always, Elijah endured, though not easily. 

He knew he couldn’t keep it up indefinitely.  For better or worse, his mind had grown expansive enough that it simply couldn’t exist for long without the mechanisms that he’d built. 

So, he wasted no time before diving into the process.

It wasn’t long before he remembered something important – his identity. 

Elijah had long accepted that his identity was as multi-faceted as his mind.  He existed as a human man, a dragon, a beast, and now, a tree – all simultaneously.  Yet, he had recently begun to wonder if separating them was the real solution to his identity issues. 

At times in the past, he’d tried to incorporate them into a unified whole, and he’d been met with varying degrees of success.  He had even incorporated draconic and bestial traits into the tree imagery he’d adopted for his cultivation system.

But was that really the best way?

Of late, he’d been ruminating quite a lot about his place in the ecosystem, and Shelly’s memories pushed many of those thoughts to the forefront of his mind.  Did he really need to invent a new kind of species?  Some kind of dragon-beast-human hybrid tree?

No.

Elijah was certain that that was the wrong way to go about it.  But what was the answer?  How else could he incorporate each part of his identity?

That was when he remembered the spores.

They weren’t part of any of those categories, and yet, they helped to represent a part of him in a way that none of the others could.  What did that mean, both in the present and in his future?

It didn’t take long for Elijah’s thoughts to turn to the World Tree.

It was a tree.  Obviously.  But it represented so much more.  It also encompassed the known multi-verse, spreading its roots and branches far beyond its original scope.  In doing so, it had incorporated so many different environments and ecosystems.  Some were mundane, like forests and lakes.  But others were almost entirely abstract, like Ignara, the Plane of Fire. 

Did that threaten the World Tree’s identity?  Not at all, at least as far as Elijah could tell.  He’d done some research into the subject, and he’d quickly ascertained that the World Tree never wavered.  It was exactly what it was, regardless of setting or circumstance.

Elijah wasn’t a tree.  Not completely.  But he could take some cues from that.  After all, that was probably what Kor had meant when he said to think like a tree.

Or maybe the old apsara was just being obtuse.

Either way, Elijah believed he’d hit upon something important.  His identity didn’t need to change depending on the situation.  He didn’t need to think become someone else each time he changed form.  Instead, he needed to incorporate everything into a unified whole, while maintaining the distinct characteristics of each individual aspect of his identity.

The answer wasn’t to create some chimera. 

It was to build an environment.  An ecosystem.  He needed to forge a world within his mind that extended to the rest of his cultivation system.  The tree could remain at the center, proud and tall and infinitely important.  However, there was nothing to say that he couldn’t populate that world with dragons, with men, with anything he could imagine. 

That far exceeded the scope of his current task, though.  For now, he only needed to lay the groundwork.  With each cultivation iteration, he would improve his tree, but he would also sow the seeds of life within the imagery he’d only just begun to create.

With that in mind, Elijah began to rebuild his leaves, and in painstaking detail.  To do so, he incorporated all the lessons he’d learned from using Dictate of the World Tree.  Each leaf contained aspects of plants, fungi, beasts, dragons, and humans, but they became far better integrated than before. 

Obviously, plants provided the basis.  From fungi, he took the ability to consume almost anything.  From beasts, he took the predatory instinct.  From dragons, dominance.  And from humans, adaptability. 

In the past,  he’d relied almost exclusively on biological components.  And that worked, at least to a certain degree.  Yet, it was also only part of the story he wanted to tell.  There was no avoiding the reality of magic, and despite the system’s attempts to codify it, ethera was not an exact science.  It dealt as much with perception and intent as it did with hard and fast rules.

As a scientist, that frightened Elijah.  As a Druid, it excited him. 

There were so many possibilities that he could barely begin to comprehend.  But one thing he knew for certain was that the so-called laws of nature – the ones he’d always taken for granted – were more like suggestions.

Based on perception.

For instance, he had already established that a storm could be almost anything he wanted it to be, so long as he wrapped his mind in the proper framework to make it make sense. 

That flexibility was the key to everything, he believed. 

And he needed to structure his mind to take advantage of that.  That meant not only embracing the versatility that had always defined his class, but also the ability to look at things from different perspectives. 

No single creature could ever embody everything that encompassed Elijah’s identity.  None but Elijah himself, at least.  So, the imagery had begun to fall apart, which he believed was the reason he’d struggled so much with the Call.  Outside of Silvara, he could resist.  Inside?  And under the influence of Shape of Trees?  It was all but impossible to remain entirely separate.

The problem was that the concept of nature was just too big for him to combat head-on.  Integration was the most obvious answer, but that would cost Elijah everything that made him who he was. 

The only other option – at least as far as he could see – was to become larger.  To become more of what he already was.  To do that, he needed to become an ecosystem unto himself.  Not on par with the concept of nature.  Far from it, at least for now.  But he could lay the groundwork.  He could plant the seeds.  And as he climbed ever higher, he could become something more than a man.  More than a beast.  More even than a dragon or a tree.  Or the combination of all of those.

Elijah went to work.

As he rebuilt his leaves, better and stronger, he focused on the other aspects of his environment.  Where did life begin?

For a tree, seeds. 

But for an ecosystem? 

The answer came from the very thing to which Elijah already clung.  The diffuse space that connected the leaves of his mind was analogous to an atmosphere.  That was how he’d always thought of it, at least. 

So, he decided to run with it.

Creating the perfect atmosphere for growth was more than just the right temperature or moisture content.  That was a big part of it, but it also required the correct mix of gases.  Carbon dioxide.  Nitrogen.  Oxygen. A handful of other elements.  In addition to that, any system required microorganisms like fungi and bacteria. 

From those, the entire ecosystem would flow. 

So, as Elijah rebuilt his leaves, he also adjusted the atmosphere.  It could literally be whatever he wanted it to be, and he fell back on some of the residual instincts of the storm frog to see him through.  He created the perfect balance of gases, heat, moisture, and every other aspect of a healthy atmosphere, layering one atop the other until he had something like a jungle climate.

Then, he created rain.

Even going back to before the World Tree had touched Earth, Elijah had always felt that rain came with a cleansing effect.  Not only did it wash away the detritus that plagued any environment, but it also nourished the local life.  Nothing could exist without it. 

Elijah clung to that idea as he built a storm within his own mind.  His thoughts swirled like a cyclone, building pressure until clouds began to form.  After his experiences as a storm frog, it was easy.  And before long, a gentle, summer storm washed over the ecosystem of his mind. 

His leaves caught the precipitation, incorporating it.  That, in turn, served to cleanse him in ways that simply discarding those leaves could not.  If he’d been a little more perceptive, he might have thought of it as processing the pain he’d always kept within.  Another way to shield himself from the consequences of his actions.

But it was more than that, too.  The process would keep him going, but it would also serve to slowly rob those experiences of power.  The first to go would be the consequences of physical pain, which was comparatively easy when held up next to emotional anguish.  The latter would become less impactful, but Elijah knew there was no way to truly insulate himself from those effects. 

That was meant to stick with him.

Anything else would rob him of whatever indefinable something made him a person.

Once Elijah was finished with his storm, he went to work on the fungi.  For the most part, he left it alone.  The spores still did their job.  But he also added bacteria to the mix.  They were a wholly different sort of organism with a completely different purpose.  Where the fungi protected him from outside influence, the bacteria fortified what was already there. 

And finally, when all eighty-one clusters of leaves had been rebuilt, Elijah connected it all. 

A wave of dense ethera rushed out of him as it all began to work as intended.  It wasn’t yet an ecosystem.  The addition of an atmosphere wouldn’t magically change that.  However, what it could do was start the process.  Already, Elijah could feel the effects. 

For one, Shelly’s mind seemed further away than before.  It wasn’t.  Elijah was just better sheltered. 

For another, the atmosphere had already begun to nourish the other parts of his cultivation system.  The effect wouldn’t be dramatic.  It would take years for anything to change.  However, it was the foundation upon which the cultivation ecosystem would be built. 

Now, Elijah just needed to solidify it.

That would take an incredible amount of ethera, which meant that he finally needed to disconnect from Shelly.  So, he pulled away. 

The loss of that connection hit Elijah harder than he expected.

What made it even more difficult was the reality that Elijah’s mind was only half complete. Holding everything together was tantamount to lifting a mountain while someone repeatedly stabbed his eyes with needles.

In short, it was difficult and far from pleasant.

Thankfully, he didn’t need to think much.  He’d already established the location for the next phase. 

It wasn’t really special.  Just a peaceful glade he’d spent a few days cultivating and infusing with his essence.  The Plane of Nature provided everything else.

So, Elijah leaped free of Shelly’s head and, using Cloud Step, covered the intervening distance in only a couple of minutes.

By the time he thudded down into the center of that glade, he could already feel his mind on the verge of unraveling.  He refused to allow it.

Instead, he finally used Shape of Trees, cast God of the Forest, and embraced his Mantle of Authority.  And at last, he opened himself up to the vastness of the Call, which rode along on a wave of dense ethera.  The perfectly nature-attuned environment flooded Elijah’s every cell, both physical and ethereal. 

And in the Shape of Trees, he could simply exist, letting it nourish the construct he had created.  As it did, he finally embraced Hibernate for the very first time.