Heretical Fishing

Book 2: Chapter 47: Ancient Memories

Despite the events of the day, I thought it was going to be a relaxing afternoon.

The sun filtered down through the canopy above, its light shifting and swaying with the wind blowing through the leaves. Maria put her hand in mine, and I held her tight. Corporal Claws, the apparent druid of this grove, had one half of her body draped over each of our knees. I had the toothy end, and she gazed up at me with her trademark cheeky grin, made all the more mischievous by the dagger-like points of her teeth.

All the church members milled around the clearing, gathering in small groups as they walked from tree to tree. They wandered, gazing up at insects and smelling flowers. The scene reminded me of visitors in an art exhibition, moving from exhibit to exhibit with excitement and childlike-wonder on their faces. Maria squeezed my hand, and when I turned toward her, she was as awestruck as everyone else, but there was a hint of hesitancy coloring her disposition, hidden in the creases around her eyes usually caused by smiles.

I thought to ask what it was, but then the world started to glow.

It was a subtle thing at first, as if someone had slid up the saturation on an image. Colors grew more distinct from one another: the lemons became the color of a yellow highlighter; Corporal Claws’s pearly teeth turned almost opalescent; the grass and leaves surrounding us looked like something from a cartoon; and, most noticeable, the blue in Maria’s eyes glowed like everfrost beneath the midday sun. Everyone stopped moving, their eyebrows lowering and faces growing concerned.

Then, the light truly bloomed.

Lines of the purest white shot from every visible part of the lemon trees. Some bloomed from behind me, and I whirled, seeing them coming from the tree I leaned on. Last, they beamed up from the ground, tracing the patterns of roots that connected the trees before shooting outward in tangled webs of indescribable complexity. It all happened in the blink of an eye, and would have been over before it began to a regular human. With my enhanced vision, however, I saw each microsecond in exacting detail.

When lines shone from every part of the spirit’s tree, they expanded.

The pure white light diffused, stretching and connecting until they touched one another, then, with a note of finality, a boom like 1,000 drums being struck at once tore into existence. The sound went through me, pounding against every fiber of my being. When it hit my core, that nexus of power within that seemed to contain my chi, it reverberated, absorbing the sound and sending it back out.

My body jolted, my limbs splaying outward and back arching. My diaphragm spasm’d, and as I tried to breathe in, my body froze. Swift as it had come, the light bled from the world. My inner muscles relaxed, and with my back still arched, I took a shaky breath.

“Fischer!” Maria was in front of me, holding my face with her hands. “Fischer! Are you okay?”

“Y... yeah...” My voice was raspy as I spoke, and I cleared my throat. “I think so...”

Everyone had gone still, their eyes locked on me. I stared back, not understanding the concern on their faces.

“What’s up...?”

“What’s up?” Barry repeated, his voice shrill. “You just exploded with light—what the frack’s up with you, mate?”

“Me?” I laughed, shaking my head. “Nah, it was from the tree.”

“Aye...” Fergus said, clenching and unclenching his fists. “The tree first, but then you.”

“Not just light, either,” Theo added. “It struck me—like it had a physical force.”

Ellis flew into action. He sprinted at me, his notepad in hand as he leaped. He came to a skidding stop before me, his eyes pinning me down.

“Tell me everything.” He swallowed, lowering pencil to paper. “Spare. No. Detail.”

I opened my mouth to respond, but then something tugged at me.

“Fischer?” Maria asked, but her voice was distant. “Fischer!” It got further away as I was dragged away, swept up by a welcoming presence.

***

The ancient spirit came into being above a vast expanse of dirt.

She was freshly awoken and, with nothing tethering her to the land, she sailed on unseen currents of air, flitting to and fro in whichever direction the wind blew. Though she knew not what she sought, something deep within her did, and it scanned the scoured lands for a foothold.

A draft brought her closer to the ground, giving her a better view of the battlefield. A terrible conflict had befallen the coastline, leaving behind not one spark of life. The earth was pock-marked with rivets, holes, and impact-sights, revealing hard clay below. Part of the coast itself had been entirely obliterated, chewing a circular crater into what should have been fertile soil. The ocean’s water had rushed into the crater, mixing with the exposed dirt to become a muddy, lifeless bay.

Though she was closer to the ground now, she could still see for miles in every direction. All was brown dirt and black ash, not one speck of greenery remaining following whatever calamity had befallen this place. It filled her with... despair?

Yeah, that was it.

The wind blew her southwest, and as she approached a range of mountains, curiosity joined her morose opinion of the world she found herself in. The mountains had been freshly unearthed; their peaks were filled with jagged rocks and angular sheets of slate. Whoever or whatever had destroyed all life here had done enough damage to rip the world’s crust apart and rearrange it.

Before she could think too much on the power of a being able to create mountains, something reached out and tugged at her soul. She sailed down toward it, using what insignificant energy she had to direct her path. Fighting against the unseen winds trying to sweep her along, she reached the scorched landscape. It smelled of burning, and she recoiled, warring with the urge to take flight once more and get far, far from this place. The only thing keeping her there was a spark of life, and she reached down with part of her spirit, using it to sweep aside a clump of dirt.

There, nestled among the ashes and mud, was a single leaf. It was yellow, starved of sunlight and nutrients. Part of it was brown and rotted, disease having taken hold.

She looked toward the sky.

She could leave this place of death, sail high above the earth to find a place filled with life and abundance. Part of her demanded that she did so for her own chance of survival, if nothing else. But then she gazed back down at the seedling. In this place of war, where the earth had been scorched and not even a splinter of wood remained, it had sprouted. Against all odds, the seed defied the very heavens, seeking to grow where naught but ashes remained.

Her mind was made up. She reached out to the single leaf, and, like the ocean flooding the crater to the northeast, they became one.

She immediately gathered chi from the surrounding land—it was acrid, as if the very air surrounding her was... wrong. Ignoring the flavor, she poured it into her new body. First, the rotten leaf was healed, then another grew. Her twin leaves absorbed the light of the sun, and using the energy it provided—along with the acidic chi around her—the spirit and her new tree grew.

The sun and moon took their turns in the sky, blurring by as time passed and she turned from seedling to sapling and from sapling to tree. Birds flew high overhead, sometimes resting in her branches and leaving seeds in their wake. Slowly, over the span of years, life returned to the valley. Weeds and grasses grew first, but as other seedlings sprouted from the earth, their canopies eventually spread and starved the weeds of the sunlight needed to survive.

It was with her tree thriving and reaching its branches toward the sun that she had come face to face with her first cultivators. The four men had known of what she was, and as they spoke of harvesting her chi, she tried to fight them off. She had raised a root in defense, seeking only to shield herself from their attacks, but their leader caught her extended root like a bird would pluck an insect from the sky. This one moment of distraction had been all it took, however. His three companions attacked at once, seeking to destroy the man and claim her chi for themselves.

But they had underestimated the scarred man. Even with a lethal wound in his side, he had lashed out with fire and lightning. All four cultivators died that day, and instead of harvesting her power, it was she that absorbed theirs.

As decades passed, the muddy waters of the bay grew clear, storms washing away mud and leaving sand in its place. The surrounding trees grew, and she even expanded to inhabit more, adding them to the network of her body. The entire time, however, the available chi dwindled. At first, she had assumed it was because of where she chose to live. The earth has been scoured of life, after all, and who knew what effect that would have over time? As decades turned to centuries, she knew the truth of it—the world itself was losing its chi.

This only made the cultivators more brazen.

They sought her out, all the while blathering about her brothers and sisters they’d already extinguished. More was her elation when she absorbed the chi of each and every one. Despite the dwindling chi, she had grown powerful, and with each cultivator’s passing, the distance between herself and the attackers widened.

Then, something changed. Power returned to the world, and those cultivators she did sense rarely bothered her. They fled from or pursued one another, and those that came for her chi were already pushed to their limit, seeking her out in desperation. This time lasted for the mere blink of an eye compared to the centuries she had seen.

One day, it was over. Like a flashfire, the excess chi burned bright and disappeared, and the world was returned to its dwindling state. More cultivators came, some of which sat beneath her canopy rather than attack. She merely watched and listened to these travelers, as was her way; she would not seek the destruction of life unless it sought the end of hers. These humans knew not what she was, so merely used her vast canopy for the shade it provided. Despite their lack of aggression, she had no doubt they’d try to rip out her nexus of power if they knew what she was—not that they’d have succeeded.

Slowly, even these peaceful cultivators stopped visiting, and lacking the chi she absorbed of those foolish enough to attack her, she knew it was time to rest. She withdrew from her network of trees, leaving them there to be claimed by any spirit with the power and inclination.

With one last breath of her beloved forest’s sweet air, she went to sleep.

***

My eyes flew open and I took a deep breath; the air was sweet, just as the spirit remembered so long ago

Tears welled in my eyes, tickling my cheeks as they ran down my face. Maria stared at me, her eyes wide and red.

“Fischer... where did you go?”

She wiped the tears away as I sat up, focusing on my breath to calm my emotions.

“The tree... she showed me her memories.”

Ellis was still sitting before me, his face filled with desire and hands trembling.

I held up a hand, stalling the question no-doubt burning the back of his throat.

“I need a moment, mate...”

He sat back.

“Right.” His hand still shook, but he put his pencil away. “Sorry, Fischer, I didn’t intend…”

Something filled my vision, not at all caring that I had willed the System’s notifications to halt. I swallowed, my mouth going dry as I read the line printed before me.

New Domain established!