Quantum shift, p.3
Quantum Shift, page 3
part #1 of Phase Shift Series
Abruptly, the wind ceased, and the sudden lack of resistance nearly pitched him off the summit he had finally reached. He blinked as golden sunlight bathed him, warming him and banishing a chill he hadn’t even realized the wind had buried in his bones. He glanced around, and his eyes fell on a majestic creature, sprawled out in the sunlight before him.
The beast’s head was shaped like a dragon’s, golden-hued with silvery teeth. A single horn, pearlescent and spiraled, rose from its forehead, and a silvery beard hung from its chin. Its body was shaped like a massive deer, but it was covered in rainbow-colored scales and had a long, sinuous tail like a serpent. Its hooves were bright bronze and struck sparks whenever they clashed together.
“Greetings, Troias,” the creature said in a voice that rumbled like the earth and crashed like the waves. He could hear the roar of the wind and the crackling of fire in its every breath, and the sound of it awed him to the point that it took him almost a full minute to realize what it had said.
“Wait, you know my name?” he asked, almost taking a step back reflexively. At the last moment, he stopped himself; he had a feeling that even a single step backward would be a very bad idea. “How do you know my name?”
The creature chuckled. “We are in your soul, Troias,” it informed him gently. “We know all that we need to about you; how could your name escape our notice?”
“In my soul?” Troias repeated. “Wait, that’s not possible. What are you talking about?”
“You may wish to forget what you believe is and is not impossible,” the animal spoke warmly, without judgment. “Otherwise, you may find yourself claiming that much of what you see in the coming days is impossible, when clearly it is not.”
The creature shifted and rose to a sitting position, towering over Troias. “In any case,” it continued, “there are forms we must follow, and even I am beholden to them. I am the kirin, a creature of every Facet, although primarily of Spirit. I am self-awareness, introspection, and the power that you hold inside yourself. I offer you nothing, yet with me as your guide, all things may be possible, and you will gain far more than I could ever have given.”
“Hold on, you don’t offer any gifts?” Troias echoed. “All the other creatures had something to offer, though.”
“Because I know what they do not,” the kirin smiled at him. “I know that you will accept nothing that is handed to you, Troias; everything you want, you must earn, or it holds no meaning for you.
“I could grant you gifts of power, wisdom, and insight, but you would ultimately reject them all. That is why you continued to climb, why you refused to yield when I attempted to hurl you from the mountain: you need the struggle, the challenge. Having accomplished that challenge, now you are ready for me to guide you.”
“So, what are you offering?” Troias asked curiously. “How can you help me?”
“I can grant you the gift of choice,” the kirin said proudly. “I can open every Facet to you; you will be able to proceed in any manner you choose. As well, I will guide you down the path of Spirit, a path that very few have every fully walked, and one that leads to power beyond anything the lesser Facets can offer. As I said, with me as your guide, all things become possible.”
Troias’ eyes narrowed. “And what’s in this for you?” he asked suspiciously. “Why do all of you creatures want to help me?”
“Oh, that is simple,” the creature laughed. “Power, Troias. Power and status. As you grow, I will grow with you, and we will gain strength together. You have potential for true greatness, and if I help you reach that potential, I will gain as much if not more than you.”
“Are you really a kirin?” Troias asked hesitantly. “I remember seeing them in my old RPG gaming books when I was a kid, but they didn’t look much like you do, really.”
“I’m not, really,” the creature admitted. “None of us are truly what we appear to be. We’ve taken forms that most closely match our Facets, personalities, and predilections, based on what we’ve been able to glean from your world’s history and mythology. It’s easier on new lifeforms if their totems are something familiar.”
“So, what exactly does a totem do?” Troias asked. “What’s the point of one?”
“Bonding with a totem unlocks your Facets. Each creature naturally has one or more Facets available to them – usually just one, but having two is common enough, and three isn’t that rare – but without a totem, they have no access to these Facets. Naturally, you have the potential to unlock five, which is really very rare and is part of what drew me to you.”
“Okay, so I get that Earth, Water, and Death are Facets, but what the heck is a Facet?” Troias persisted. “I still don’t get it.”
“Facets are energy sources,” the kirin explained. “When a Facet is unlocked in you, you can draw power from that energy source and use it. You’re an Adept, so you’d use that energy to empower yourself or your strikes as ki. A Mage would pour the energy into spells, while a Savant would channel it into objects. It might be called ki for Adepts, mana for Mages, and essence for Savants, but really, it’s all the same thing; only how it’s being channeled is different.
“Everyone has at least one Facet available to them, although how powerful they are with it varies greatly and depends on their personality and their physical abilities. If you choose a Totem that matches your available Facets, you’ll be more powerful with each Facet than you would normally. If you choose a Totem with Facets that you don’t have unlocked, usually, that part of the totem’s power is simply unavailable to you. I can unlock all of your Facets, though, so you can use them all, even the ones you aren’t naturally inclined to, like Air, Fire, Life, and Mind. You won’t ever be as strong with those as the rest, but you’ll be able to use them.”
“Wait, you said that three Facets isn’t that rare. How rare is it, versus having five? How many Facets are there?”
“Maybe one in ten people have two Facets usable,” the kirin smiled. “One in a hundred or so have three, and one in a hundred thousand have five, although your particular five are much rarer, since so few people unlock either Death or Spirit, more like one in a couple million. That means that there are probably a handful of people like you out there right now, but you’re only going to find them if you go looking.”
The kirin shifted. “In total, there are nine Facets. Normally, the max an average person can unlock is eight, since the Facets of Life and Death tend to be mutually incompatible. The math here is kind of meaningless, since the numbers are simply too large, but if the Earth still had its former population, there might be one person each generation who had the natural talent to use eight Facets, but only one in ten or so of those will find a totem that can unlock them all. Those few usually become legends if they survive; power calls to power, after all.”
Troias swallowed; the idea of someone with that kind of power coming up every few generations felt awfully anime, and he was definitely not looking to be a Chosen One. However, if eight Facets was so rare…
“What about nine?” he asked hesitantly. “How rare is that?”
“It’s hard to say, really,” the kirin laughed. “There are very few of us who can unlock all nine, just as there are very few people with the determination and will to reach us even when we’re available, which isn’t often. I can’t remember the last time it happened, and that’s saying something.”
Troias stared at the beast, utterly stunned. “O-okay,” he finally stammered. “So, what do we do?”
“You just have to choose me,” the kirin said. “Then, we’ll merge, and you’ll wake up. It’s that simple, really.”
“Okay, I choose you as my totem,” Troias said quickly. “Is that all…?”
His words broke off as the landscape around him began to collapse inward, falling toward him as if pulled by gravity. The kirin began to stretch and elongate, its tail, hooves, beard, and horn all reaching toward him like tentacles. He tried to recoil, or at least to swat away the tendrils, but he was frozen, unable to do so much as blink or breathe. The tendrils struck him in a line running down the middle of his body, from the top of his head to his groin, and he felt warmth spreading through him as each tentacle seemed to be absorbed into his body.
A moment later, a brief stab of pain raced through him, rushing from his crown down to his feet and back before vanishing. The sky about him collapsed inward, racing toward him at breakneck speed, and as it smashed into him, he fell into darkness and knew no more.
Chapter 3
Awakenings
Troias groaned and rose from his bed, wincing as a sharp pain stabbed through his skull as the bright, morning sun pierced his eyes. His head felt like a bunch of tiny little blacksmiths had taken up residence and were pounding away, each hammer blow a pulsing ache in his cranium.
“God, I hate mornings,” he groaned as he grabbed his duffel and pulled out a pair of sunglasses. Without the bright light stabbing his eyeballs, the pain in his skull eased from tiny blacksmiths to a tiny drumline practicing in his brain. He sighed and gingerly rose from bed; his knee always hurt the worst in the morning, after having been still so long, and as poorly as he’d slept, he expected a slew of minor aches from his aging back. To his surprise, neither his leg nor his spine protested his movements, even when he went into a series of stretches designed to loosen up his old muscles.
In fact, he felt pretty good, despite being hungry and having a killer headache. It almost felt like he was hungover, which meant he was probably dehydrated, no doubt from all the coffee he’d been drinking last night. He’d need to head to the water pump and grab a drink quickly, to see if that helped before he started moving stuff from his truck to the cabin. He wanted to get a hike in today, for sure, and he still needed to do his daily training regimen. Having a headache wasn’t an excuse to skip that, no matter how easy it would be to say that it was his first day of vacation and he should just take it easy.
He tossed on a pair of shorts, not very practical in the 40-degree weather but comfortable enough for the exercise he was about to get, and grabbed a shirt to take with him. The water pump was down toward the lake, and he gratefully drank several swallows of clean, crisp water before splashing it over his head and neck. His headache eased slightly right away, and as he cleaned himself, he noticed crusted blood dried on his chest and upper arms.
“I must have had a nosebleed last night,” he speculated as he washed the sticky, brown crust from his skin. “That’s probably why I’m so dehydrated. Also, probably why I had such weird dreams.” He shrugged and slipped the shirt on over his wet skin; it would dry quickly enough, and all his towels were packed in the truck along with toilet paper, food, and a slew of necessities for the week to come. He sat for a moment, staring out at the serene lake. The morning sun had barely risen over the trees, meaning that he was up much earlier than he’d planned, and it shone gloriously on the placid surface of the water. Not a single ripple disturbed the surface, and the lake eerily reminded Troias of the one in his dream the night before.
He let his thoughts drift back to that dream – he remembered it with amazing clarity, something that was fairly rare for him – and recalled the sense of quiet, hidden power he’d felt from the strange, talking fish. He could almost feel something similar in the water below: there was a sense of tranquility, but also of hidden depths and a promise of power waiting to be unleashed. He sat quietly for several moments, his mind in a state very near meditation, as he processed the strange dream.
It felt so real, he marveled inwardly. I mean, I’ve never felt pain like that in a dream; I should check myself and make sure I didn’t have a stroke or something. What’s the test for that? Smile and stick out your tongue, right? Everything feels fine, but I suppose it’s better to be safe than sorry.
He chuckled and rose to his feet, putting the weird dream aside. It wasn’t like he’d never had dreams of being a superhero before, or of being one of the warriors in his MMORPG games. He’d simply never had one that was so vivid, and it was messing with his head. For example, when he’d touched the ground to push himself to his feet, he was certain he’d felt an upswelling of energy that felt just like the stone outcropping the dream bull had been standing on. The ground held a similar sense of solidity and immovability, but the feeling was a pale imitation of the flawless rock of his dream.
He shook off the strange sensation and started the walk to his truck, enjoying the silence of the morning. He usually only rose early to go fishing, and even then, he preferred night fishing to early morning, so he wasn’t used to how utterly quiet the forest was. He expected to hear birds singing and small animals starting their day, like he did in the afternoon, but the forest was almost totally still. He glanced around, looking for signs of life in the branches overhead – a bird ruffling its feathers, a squirrel dashing from limb to limb – but everything was perfectly still. It was as if the forest was totally empty of life, and a vague sense of unease began to worm its way up his spine. The forest was never this quiet; while he wasn’t an early riser, he had been up in the morning before, and he knew it was louder than this.
His gaze dropped to the ground, and he froze as he saw a small, twisted body lying motionless on the forest floor. The black-furred body of a squirrel rested in the leaves just to the side of the path, its body broken and contorted as if it had fallen out of its tree. Blood stained its black fur even darker and pooled beneath it, soaking into the leaves and dry ground. Troias swallowed hard as he saw another body just past the first one, this the corpse of a tiny goldfinch. Like the squirrel, its body was broken and twisted, and blood stained its bright, yellow plumage a dark orange that looked almost black through his sunglasses.
As he walked slowly along the trail, he felt like he’d stepped into a horror movie. The trail and ground were littered with the bodies of small animals, most of which were tree dwellers and looked like they’d fallen from their perch. At first, he wondered if there had been some sort of toxic gas cloud that had passed through last night. That would explain the deaths of all the tiny animals as well as his hallucinatory dreams; he guessed it was possible that a lethal dose of poison to these creatures would have just given him a headache, nosebleed, and weird dreams, especially if the gas had floated above the ground rather than hugging it. However, he also saw the corpse of a small, red fox, as well as that of a brown hare, two animals that he was certain hadn’t fallen from trees and usually hunkered low to the ground at night. That made it far less likely that some sort of gas had passed through. Surely, a cloud that was heavy enough to hug the ground and large enough to reach the tree branches above would have suffocated him while he slept.
When he saw the hunched, brown form of a buck deer, though, he knew that something more sinister was going on. The deer’s body was arched in pain, its neck obviously broken, and blood stained its muzzle and streaked from its eyes, nose, and mouth. Just like in my dream, he realized with a feeling of dread. That sealed it: any sort of poison gas that would have felled a 150-lb buck would have made him deathly ill, at the very least. The cabin wasn’t particularly airtight, so it probably wouldn’t have done much to hold out an airborne toxin of any kind.
He walked slowly through the carnage in mild shock, his brain refusing to process what he was seeing. As he reached the parking lot, he mechanically pushed the button on his truck’s key fob to unlock it, but the truck stood silent. He pressed the button again, expecting to hear a chirp and see the truck’s lights flash, but nothing happened. He shook his head as he realized that, as tired as he was last night, he must have left the lights on and killed the battery. No biggie, he thought dismissively. I’ve got a charger for it, just in case, and I can always head to the ranger’s station to see if I can get a jump, if nothing else.
He manually unlocked the vehicle and pulled out the cart he’d be using to transport his supplies. He stoically went through the process of loading the small wagon and pulling it to the cabin, stubbornly ignoring the apparent massacre along the path. There would be time to process that later; he’d need to get the bodies away from the path before they started to smell or attract larger predators…assuming, that is, that any predators still lurked in the graveyard that the forest had become overnight. For the moment, he focused on the task at hand, loading and unloading, putting each thing into its place.
On his last trip, he drew out his training weapons. He knew that most martial artists preferred using Asian weapons – katanas, nunchaku, jian – but Troias was enamored of European weapons, instead. He first pulled out a pair of relatively short, heavy swords known as Ulfberhts – at least, they were replicas of one. Each blade was about 3’ long and two inches wide, wider at the base and tapering to a sharp point. They were fantastic if pricey replicas of the original swords, which were famous in the Viking world for their strength, flexibility, and cutting power. The short haft meant they could only be used one-handed, and he was strong and dexterous enough to be able to fight with a blade in each hand if necessary, so he carried two for training.
The swords, though, weren’t his favorite weapon. That was the long, heavy glaive that rested on the bottom of the pile of supplies; at over 8’ long, it only fit in the truck by being laid diagonally across the cargo space, and even then, it needed some finagling to get it settled. The weapon was basically a two-foot, extra-heavy butcher knife attached to a seven-foot oak staff with an oval cross-section. The weapon had a small, slim crescent blade that jutted from the back, technically making it a glaive-guisarme, but he just called it a glaive and left it at that. His glaive had been further modified by the addition of a six-inch steel end cap and stubby butt-spike, allowing him to attack with both ends and making it easier to set in the ground to receive a charge.
He’d taken a turn participating in HEMA combats with mock weapons, but they weren’t really his thing; too many people fought for points rather than if combat were real, and in many of these tournaments any kind of touch counted equally. In real life, a cut to the arm, while painful, obviously wouldn’t compare to a thrust to the throat. Instead, he and several like-minded enthusiasts had gotten together every so often and held full contact tournaments using wooden practice weapons, with the rules being that you won by “killing” your opponent or striking a touch that rendered them unable to fight.
