Elevation of mana a prog.., p.1
Elevation of Mana: A Progression Fantasy, page 1
ELEVATION OF MANA
WANDERING AGENT
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission from Podium Publishing.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Michael Robert Taylor
Cover design by Yanhong Lu
ISBN: 978-1-0394-6650-0
Published in 2024 by Podium Publishing
www.podiumaudio.com
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: JUSTIN
CHAPTER 2: NEW WORLD
CHAPTER 3: ELIAN
CHAPTER 4: SEASONS CHANGE
CHAPTER 5: FIRST SPELLS
CHAPTER 6: POTTERY
CHAPTER 7: FIRST WORDS
CHAPTER 8: DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH
CHAPTER 9: BIG FISH
CHAPTER 10: FLIGHT OF THE BUMBLEBEE
CHAPTER 11: BATTLE AGAINST THE BEAR
CHAPTER 12: AWAY FROM HOME
CHAPTER 13: TRAINING MONTAGE
CHAPTER 14: DEEP CAVES AND WILDCATS
CHAPTER 15: COMING HOME
CHAPTER 16: PLAYING
CHAPTER 17: THE CALL
CHAPTER 18: WHILE THE ELDER’S AWAY . . .
CHAPTER 19: PLANNING FOR . . .
CHAPTER 20: SURREPTITIOUS CONSTRUCTION
CHAPTER 21: THE REWARD FOR GOOD WORK
CHAPTER 22: WINTER ONCOMING
CHAPTER 23: BEASTS OF DARKNESS
CHAPTER 24: REGROUPING
CHAPTER 25: VICTORY AND MOURNING
CHAPTER 26: BURN
CHAPTER 27: A PLAN
CHAPTER 28: WINTER PART ONE
CHAPTER 29: CONTRACT
CHAPTER 30: WINTER PART TWO: THE HUNT
CHAPTER 31: FARMING, FIRST ATTEMPT
CHAPTER 32: JOINERY
CHAPTER 33: TRADER
CHAPTER 34: COPPER
CHAPTER 35: COMING TO TERMS
CHAPTER 36: KNIFE
CHAPTER 37: NEGOTIATIONS
CHAPTER 38: FIELD TRIP
CHAPTER 39: THE OTHER VILLAGE
CHAPTER 40: PRODUCT REQUESTS
CHAPTER 41: TOOLING UP
CHAPTER 42: TEENS
CHAPTER 43: RETURN TO THE CAVE
CHAPTER 44: ACROSS THE DARK SEA
CHAPTER 45: NIGHTMARE
CHAPTER 46: RETREAT
CHAPTER 47: NEW MAN
CHAPTER 48: CRACKS ON THE SURFACE
CHAPTER 49: THINGS FALL APART
CHAPTER 50: WOODS BATTLE
CHAPTER 51: JUDGEMENT
CHAPTER 52: TRIAL
CHAPTER 53: ONWARD
CHAPTER 54: CITY TOUR
CHAPTER 55: HOUSE
CHAPTER 56: SLEDS AND SLAVES
CHAPTER 57: SETUP
CHAPTER 58: FIRST EMPLOYEE
CHAPTER 59: BLACK SAND
CHAPTER 60: VISITOR
CHAPTER 61: SHORIN
CHAPTER 62: IRONS IN THE FIRE
CHAPTER 63: VILLAGE DISPUTE
CHAPTER 64: Farming Take Two and a Big Hole
CHAPTER 65: HOMEWARD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER 1
JUSTIN
Justin,” a voice called out to me. I waved it away, wanting nothing more than to catch a few more minutes of sleep.
“Justin!” it repeated insistently.
“What?” I yelled as I sat up, looking around for the source of my irritation.
Beside me was Professor Keeburn, a brunette bombshell in her late twenties, and my advisor. I hardly had time to process what was going on.
“You fell asleep again,” she said, pointing to my desk.
Again. It was happening more and more recently. As I tried to work on some of the more interesting bits of this program, I found myself waking up here a lot. I was the low man on the totem pole in my department, but that would soon change. No one else was capable of building the kind of machine that I was. Not with the problems they were running into.
Did I really care about their proprietary little computer, designed to keep others out of the base processes? No, not really; but I did care about getting access to the lab for my own work, and so I needed to play the game for now. That meant listening to Keeburn. I knew I was her first advisee and would have to fight tooth and nail to pass in the end, but that was fine. She was the only one who could get me here to work on what I wanted.
Crystal structures that could hold a program, forming it with their very design; that was my dream. Was it particularly useful? Well, not in its current iteration. But it was beautiful, almost organic, and had so much potential for growth. The math was hard, but that was fine, I liked the challenge.
“Sorry, must have lost track of time . . . When is it anyway?” I looked down at my phone and paled. It wasn’t evening at all, but rather morning . . . on Saturday.
“Yeah, as you can see, your weekend has already begun. Now, go home and rest. You’ve still got classes on Monday and need to be fresh before we continue here.”
“Yes ma’am,” I said, hopping up.
She waved me out of the lab after I’d had a chance to pick up my things. With my bag over my shoulder I made my way home. The campus was huge and well spread out. Sadly, that meant that it would take me a while to get across. But I had the whole day off, and the walk would at least be nice.
I stopped by Sub-Mart—a little off-brand shop—to pick up some snacks.
“Hey! Look who’s here,” the man at the counter said, looking up.
“How’s it going, Jose?” I said.
Jose began making my order before I even said anything. He laughed when I asked him to double up, and grabbed a bottle of water.
“You doin’ good? Look like you’re about to fall over,” he said jovially as he packed my stuff for me.
“Fell asleep at the lab again.”
“Man, you gotta learn to relax some, and not work yourself to death.”
We shared a laugh as I nodded to him in agreement. Jose and I had something of an understanding. I was always polite, not just here, but to everyone who handled my food, and he was friendly. We got along particularly well because I’d told some woman screaming at him about the lack of peppers on her sandwich that she needed to shut up and pay for her damn food, or leave. Jose wasn’t the owner or manager or anything, so he couldn’t really do that himself, but having a good relationship with people often paid for itself.
In this particular case it paid for itself in spades. When Jose was alone in the shop, he’d often refuse to take money from me. The only cost for lunch on a really slow day would be what I tossed in the tip jar, which was always at least a couple bucks. Today was one of those days. He gave a discrete nod as I put some cash in the jar and headed out the door.
A few minutes later I turned off the sidewalk, heading into a little back path. If you spent enough time around any institution you’d find little sections like this—trails and the like that had been made over the years. I was pretty sure that this one was used mostly by joggers, and those who, like me, didn’t feel like walking an hour around this wooded lot.
I’d walked this path a hundred times—in the mornings, afternoons, and evenings—though never at night. So it was a surprise when I tripped, rolling down a small slope and into one of the many gullies that were all around here. The little hill above me was perhaps twenty feet, and steep.
“Ow, shit,” I said as landed.
It was no big deal in the end. While climbing back up there would be a pain, I could follow the creek down for a few minutes until the slope was a lot closer. At least nobody had seen me, I thought as I walked along the shore, finally coming to a large stone pipe.
It was one of those pipes they put in to channel water—seven feet tall and set deep into the ground, maybe ten feet long. Sure, it was spooky, but I could see the other side no problem, and walking through would be no issue at all. Didn’t even look like there were spiders or anything in it. Waving my hand a bit in case there were any webs, I began to trudge through.
In the brief darkness of the pipe, the world began to shake, violently tossing me against one of the sides. That was weird. This area of the deep south wasn’t exactly known for earthquakes, but I had little time to think about it. As soon as the shaking stopped, I stood and bolted for the far end of the pipe, unsure if there would be any aftershocks or if something major had happened.
As I came out, I looked up for the path, only to find it obscured by trees. That was fine though. With a turn I headed into a patch of denser brush, aiming to cut my time down. I pushed and pushed, finding it thicker than I’d have wanted, with thorns and vines wrapping tight around me. It was also a bit darker; not night, but twilight. As I passed through the underbrush, I found myself in a deeply shaded grove, perhaps thirty feet across.
“What the hell . . .” I looked around. Above me, the trees wove into an impermeable canopy. On all sides was an unbelievably dense thicket. In the center was a pool with crystal blue water and vines spreading out over patterned stone.
That wasn’t here before. I carefully walked forward, still trying to head for where the path should have been.
If nothing else, this place was beautiful and might make a good place to show friends or whomever when I had the time. The vines were glowing, enough so that I was hesitant to touch them.
As I made my way toward the thicket, I noticed a problem. As soon as I reached the edge of this surreal oasis, I felt my hand begin to shake. I could push through, out of this grove and back into the normal world, but the thought of doing so filled me with terror deep in my soul. One step forward, and I shook like a leaf. Another, before the pool could even be out of sight, and I fell to my knees.
This wasn’t good. I ran back the way I came, determined to head through the hole I’d pushed on the far side, only to find the same thing happening. No matter how I tried, how I worked, I couldn’t leave sight of the pool; my body simply wouldn’t move that way. I fell to my knees and tried to crawl, only for the terror to sink deeper and deeper, like death pouring into me. Within seconds I found myself turning back to the pool and running toward the comfort of the soft blue light it gave off.
I began to panic in earnest and pulled out my phone. I’d call for help. Something was clearly wrong, and the authorities . . .
No signal.
That was impossible. I was near enough to a major college campus that there should be signal for days. At worst, there was always at least one bar. As I looked at the ground, I began to consider that I might be in real trouble.
Observe. That was what I needed to do first. I needed to understand my situation and then come up with possible explanations that I could test. Science had taught me at least that much. To that end, I poked and prodded at the fear barrier, trying to find a hole in the terror it inspired, only to no avail. I tried closing my eyes, only to find my feet would refuse after a few steps. I turned to the pool and tried walk away backwards. Same result. I took out my phone and snapped photos of everything I could see around me, looking for patterns.
The pool was in a divot on a solid stone foundation, and that foundation was surely important. There were carvings too, decidedly some kind of graphed-out mathematics that tickled at the bits of non-euclidean geometry. It was more complex than anything I’d seen before but somehow strangely similar to how I might try to graph something in two dimensions.
Carefully, I began to document with my phone. I moved the vines here and there gently, taking picture after picture of the patterns until I was sure I’d gotten the whole thing. This took several hours, and as noon approached, I broke into my food, taking a bite out of the sandwich Jose had been so generous to make me.
“My friend, when I tell you about this, you’re gonna call me a damn liar,” I said, thinking about the friendly worker. He’d certainly get a kick out of this place.
Luckily, my laptop was in my bag and undamaged, so once I was ready, I imported the photos to my computer and began linking them up, trying to get a picture of the full pattern. That took a while—resizing and editing, pulling bits together. I knew computers, but photo editing wasn’t really my forte. When I finished, I could see that there was indeed some kind of pattern, repeating out from the center like a fractal and painfully complex.
All the while I checked my phone, only to find the same message repeated whenever I looked. No signal. Whatever was going on, it certainly didn’t want me to communicate with anyone else. I went on like this for a few hours, trying to compare what I saw to anything I had saved on my computer. With access to the internet I might have made more progress, but sadly, I was lacking such, and try as I might, I had no luck.
I saw the power button lighting up, telling me that my laptop would soon be dead. I rushed to pull everything I could onto my phone—a rather weak prospect, but it was all I had. Not much longer after that, the battery gave out, pushing forward a dark screen.
As I looked up, I saw that the vines looked almost brighter. I hadn’t noticed until now, but for some reason they’d started glowing ever so slightly more. I checked in my bag for ideas, coming up with a few notepads and pens. The bag had one of those little solar chargers on it, and from that I might be able to drip charge my phone and laptop, if the light of these vines proved enough.
After two days, I had finished up my rations of sandwich and was faced with doing something I was not particularly proud of . . . I drank my own urine. It was gross, but it would buy me time. Time was what I needed—time to think, time to reason. The one drink from my lunch wouldn’t last forever, and the rule of threes said I had only days before that was a potentially fatal issue.
Further attempts to leave the grove met with the same result, but repeating experiments was no folly. It merely confirmed what I had previously suspected.
Above the little spot where I’d holed up, a flower had bloomed, brilliant and beautiful. Some other part of whatever nightmare I was stuck in. I considered destroying it but didn’t want to risk any blowback. Whatever was keeping me here had already demonstrated that it could.
I made calls and yells for help, to no avail. I hadn’t really been expecting it to work, so I wasn’t too down, but it didn’t hurt to try every now and then. While doing so, I noticed that I heard no birds or insects; nor did I see any. That alone was worth noting, as bugs were everywhere.
I worked off and on for another two days, and the vines were certainly getting brighter. I knew the time because the light was enough to charge up my phone a bit, if slowly, and even get a few minutes of laptop time.
There was no way this was natural, and I began considering supernatural options for how I’d ended up here. I was leaning toward fairies. I wasn’t an expert on them or anything, but this kind of story was their deal, right? Either that or I’d hit my head quite hard and was no longer all here.
This was reinforced by the fact that the little flower had bloomed into the most delicious looking periwinkle fruit, tempting me with succulent looking flesh. I was determined to resist it though. That screamed trap.
I knew I could last weeks without food if I had to. No, my main problem was water. Even with my attempts at . . . extending my water supply, I was out, and the tap was dry. My mouth was bone dry and painful, and there was no source other than the pool, which I was similarly afraid of.
I was too weak. Two-and-a-half days with nothing substantial to drink, and I was in agony. I wept as I tried to pull myself over to the pool, having just woken up from passing out. I’d said I wouldn’t drink, wouldn’t fall for the trap, but my body was betraying me, and if I didn’t, I would die here. I didn’t want to die.
