Spirits of the Land
The Origin of Magic in Grooselan
Patterns. Patterns within patterns within patterns. Patterns everywhere!
Four kings. Sure, they called themselves clan leaders, but kings all the same. Four kings for four biomes, four biomes in the sacred land. There were those people outside, but you didn’t see them too often. Don’t think about that! Four kings, four biomes, four industries. Artistry, check. Couldn’t go anywhere here without seeing that. Building, check. Hard to fit in the ritual space but he got some good timber and figured that was enough. A piece of leather for the farms and some coins for the traders. All balanced in value, everything equal. And in the middle sat his sister, fidgeting slightly.
“Gerald, are you sure?” asked the slender figure with neatly kept brown locks down her back. Pretty by some people’s definitions. Certainly her betrothed, but Gerald couldn’t afford the distraction and barred him entry. He did get permission. After all, Erin trusted him, and that was thankfully enough.
“Yes, yes. It’s perfect! It has to be. Now keep quiet; I need to concentrate!” Gerald was somewhat handsome in his own right, nearly six feet tall and with straight, though unkempt, brown hair, but even in a city of artisans he stood out as the quirky one. He’d managed to chase off everyone his age―not on purpose, mind you―but he was on the cusp of a breakthrough! He just knew it!
Alright, balance, balance… And it must be formal! No familial ties here. Those didn’t matter. “Spirits of the land, come forth! Reveal the inner spirit!” Gerald commanded, his voice rising as he spoke.
Nothing happened.
She looked up at him. “Gerald?”
“Sister, are you focusing yourself?”
She blinked. “Was I supposed to be doing something?”
Ah! How did he forget to tell her? No, no, focus, just tell her quickly. “This is about you. Not me! Focus on what you are, and I’m sure it’ll work this time!”
He gave her a moment to ready herself. She changed positions, crossing her legs in front of her in a more meditative stance. “Ready,” she said calmly, assuredly, and it was time again.
“Spirits of the land, come forth! Reveal the inner spirit!”
This time, something did happen. An outside observer would describe it as a coalescing mist, though not on top of either Gerald or Erin, but in a space between them, outside of the ritual square. To Gerald it was the spirits themselves coming together, selecting one of them, and then that taking a physical shape. And a physical shape it did take, first adopting a sky blue hue, then growing, thickening, lengthening… And less than a minute after Gerald’s command, a full-size, blue-scaled wolf stood before him. Specifically, before Erin; it was facing her. But rather than the hungry look that might have scared her, it was like a pup adoring its mother.
Gerald held his concentration a moment longer to be sure his work was finished, then dropped his upraised arms to see his sister already approaching the strangely decorated wolf. “What… are you?” she asked aloud.
“I don’t know,” the wolf answered. It had a feminine voice, a little lower than Erin’s.
“Eeek!” Erin screamed. “It talked!”
Gerald was nearly as lost as his sister. The ritual was sure to do something, he knew, but he still had not known prior to the experiment exactly what form it would take. Apparently, it made a talking wolf. “How can you talk?” he asked the wolf, much more calmly than his sister had spoken.
“I am… of Erin. We share. I think.”
Success! Yes, this was definitely the sort of thing Gerald had been after! To a point, anyway. Just having a friendly wolf was a huge boon, assuming it didn’t vanish in a few minutes. Those things were nearly six feet tall themselves and a sight stronger than most warriors Gerald had seen. Not that he’d been to the plains much. But the merchants came with bodyguards, and bodyguards only beat wolves with their superior weaponry. But one thing stuck out; Gerald was certain he’d not spoken his sister’s name the whole day. “How do you know her name?”
“The same way I can talk, I think. And now she is wondering my own name. Mmm. Only one thing comes to mind. Does ‘Trust’ work as a name?”
That was it! The inner spirit!
“Ehhh. Eh-huh.” Erin was calming down a little, listening to her brother converse with the strange creature that somehow even knew what she was thinking. “I… yes. You are… Trust?”
“That is what I represent, I feel. And if you’ll allow me, I think I can be… more.” The wolf approached Erin, then sat down and waited.
Erin, for her part, was faster on the uptake this time. She didn’t quite know why or how this wolf was here, despite having sat through the ritual her brother had meticulously prepared. But she felt like Trust could be, well, trusted. Like how she trusted her own brother. It just… gave off that kind of aura, she supposed. She reached her hand out and petted the wolf’s enormous paw.
And gained paws of her own. “What?”
Erin withdrew her hand―well, now her gray-furred paw―and stared at it. As she watched, it changed back into a hand. And then back into a paw, as she willed it. She tried to force more to change, but it wouldn’t happen. “What‒ What is this?”
“I think you can copy the wolf, Sis,” Gerald suggested, eyeing her curiously, almost enviously.
“Not entirely,” she stated. “I can’t do more than the paws.”
“What if you tried doing something else? Maybe the scales, but without the paws?”
She tried it. It worked! And then she changed back to normal because having scales felt really weird. “Ooohhh. Well, that is a thing. That I can do now. I’m… not sure how we’re going to hide Trust, though.”
“Hide?” Gerald thought for a moment. “Oh, hide! Ah, you thought I meant to keep my breakthrough a secret! No, no, not at all. I just needed to be away from others so I could concentrate! And so you could, too, of course. No, we will be the greatest in the four kingdoms! We’re at the dawn of a new era!”
I waved my hands around a lot while I was doing the voiceover. It was fun! But I didn’t capture any of it. If you bypassed the voiceover, try giving it a listen and imagining me waving my hands around like the crazy person Gerald is supposed to be.