Work Text:
The sky over the ruined desert was jarring in its expanse, as though Alinua's field of vision had been slightly small her whole life and now she was seeing just a bit beyond the natural reach of her eyes. She lay on her back on the soft ground, feeling the way the sand moved around her head as she set it down. She didn't like the sensation very much; sand seemed unstable and uncommunicative compared to wood and grass. But it was new, so she wanted to figure out how to enjoy it.
The sun had passed its peak and begun its journey toward the opposite horizon since they had settled in to wait for the dark-haired stranger to wake, and Alinua was starting to worry about the desert. She knew she should be focusing on watching the new person, in case his strange caustic magic came back when he woke up, or he stopped breathing. But the silence felt like death. Alinua had fallen asleep for years listening to the conversations of insects and birds in the trees outside her shelter. Even on the rare days when snow turned the world quiet and soft, she could let the power flow a little closer to her skin and hear the heartbeats of animals moving through the forest. The only sound in this wasteland was the occasional howl of wind moving around a lightning-blasted crag, and there was no life to that at all. The only expressions of life Alinua could sense outside their little group were the imperceptibly tiny creatures eking out lives under the soil. She had kept those out of her shelter, because she remembered learning that they could get inside your body and make you sick, which she didn't know how to fix.
What ate at her was the idea that this place had used to be alive, before the Storm. Around the second hour, she had made her friend—Kendal, she reminded herself, still not feeling like a name yet—explain what he knew about the region. He had said that the Storm was older than Vash, which seemed like a strange idea for him. Then he had told her that the surrounding lands were either forests like hers or grasslands where people had cut the forests to farm and build homes, so the place that became the Storm had probably been similar.
She knew that life wanted to make more of itself, and that it had certain shapes that it preferred depending on the environment. When she had first started living in the tree, she had tried to use her magic to make the plants more like what she remembered from her home, and most of them had died because they weren't the right shape to live well in the forest. Thinking about the desert sitting here silent under the rocks, wanting to be a forest but not having anything to start from, was starting to make her uncomfortable in her skin. There had been bad days in the tree when she had to get up and pace long ovals around the forest just to stop being in the same place. She still wasn't sure whether she would stop having those.
Before she was totally aware of the impulse, she got to her feet and moved over to where Kendal was sitting with the new person. He turned as she approached—just his head, and exactly enough to fix her in his field of vision. His mouth turned down at the corners when he saw her face. She hadn't thought she was even making an expression, but he had seen something. "What's wrong?" he asked.
"It's too quiet," Alinua answered, and realized that she hadn't thought about how that would sound or how Kendal's instincts would respond. He stood up quickly and silently, his stance wide, his eyes tracking over her shoulder and then starting to scan the horizon, left hand unconsciously drifting to his sword. She added hastily, "No, I mean, not like that, it's just, um, it doesn't sound like the forest. There's… nothing living here." This sounded silly and obvious coming out of her mouth, but Kendal softened. She closed the last steps between them and he put a steady arm around her, drawing her in to sit down with him next to the new person he'd insisted on. Alinua took a moment to reach out with her power and reassure herself that all of their hearts and lungs were doing what they should. Kendal's burns were healing well, with new layers of skin already spreading industriously over the damaged area.
The rhythm of their heartbeats was relaxing. When Kendal started speaking, she started listening a few words late. "Well, the Storm is thousands of years old," he said, with the tone of someone working out what his idea was as he said it. "In this region, plants and animals couldn't survive the lightning, and new life magic couldn't spread here because of the ambient energy. But… it doesn't seem like there's no life at all." He pointed past the unconscious stranger, toward the crater his magic had carved in the desert. "How did you do that?"
Alinua followed his hand and saw what he was showing her: the remains of the wall of branches she'd called from the ground to separate Kendal from the thing with the yellow eyes. Her heart jumped. By now the plants were little more than a pattern of ashes in the sand; they were drawn from memory and hadn't been intended to live for long in this climate even before the explosion of disintegrating magic. But they had lived.
Alinua had been acting on instinct, letting the magic make most of the small decisions for her. She couldn't remember exactly how she had done it, but there must have been something for the magic to work from. Life saturating the soil underground, maybe. Abruptly, she remembered how it had felt to pour power into the tree in Windscrest to help all those people, to touch Kendal and feel the magic respond with perfect clarity to her will. To want to fix things, to heal, and to have that remedy at her fingertips, flowing precisely where she directed it after years of fighting for control.
She stood up, unconsciously using Kendal's shoulder for support, and walked with purpose toward the ground where her branches had been. The sand that had been exposed by the explosion was cold, like damp earth, but fine and dry. Kendal watched curiously as she scooted downwards into the hole—remembering around halfway to be careful for any lingering black magic—knelt down, and pressed her palms into the cold sand. The gray branches crumbled to powder beneath her hands and stuck to her palms and fingers. Out of old habit, Alinua focused on her breathing: first a long exhale as she reminded herself where her body was and what she was feeling, and then, simultaneously with breathing in, she pulled life into herself and pushed it into the ground.
Her power answered. The sand came alive with luminescent green organic patterns, spiraling out from Alinua's hands. For the second time, her friend stood and prepared to move toward her. His heart beat faster.
The ground rustled. Dry plant shoots began to spring up through the loose soil, churning up the sand into a brief cloud of dust. The growth began around Alinua's hands, but once the shoots were exposed to the sun they spread like water, filling the whole depression. Alinua opened her eyes. She was left kneeling up to her shoulders in a field of yellow-green meadowgrass. It swayed in the slight wind, tickling her hands and bare arms. Her stomach jumped in excitement. It could work—thousands of years of magical destruction had not been enough to kill this place completely. She realized she was expecting to hear insects calling, and the meadow suddenly felt very silent. It still didn't feel exactly like what the place could be, but…
Kendal was standing at the edge of the field, focusing on her. He looked like he didn't know quite what to think, but when she turned and he saw her face, he smiled. She ran to him through the dry grass—suddenly unsteady on her feet—and grabbed both of his hands. "I can do it," she told him. It came out breathless. "I can— I think I can do something for this place. Fix some of what the Storm did."
Kendal looked into her eyes. He was still smiling, but his expression looked absent somehow. "What are you going to do?"
Alinua looked at the ground. Her mind was blank all of a sudden. What am I going to do? A forest or a grassland had so many moving parts that all supported each other. She had seen the way that birds and insects helped plants spread by eating their fruit and flowers, the way a dead tree or animal became part of the forest floor thanks to strange fungi, the way the populations of seemingly unrelated plants changed wildly depending on how much meat the people of Vash were hunting. She didn't want to try with animals. She still felt instinctive, gut-deep revulsion at the idea of creating a chimera—similar, actually, to the way her skin itched thinking about the desert. Still, her magic and her want to fix things rose up in her chest as determination. Alinua knew the forest. Until the last few unbelievable days, it had been her life. She would have to make the land livable, and life would sort itself out.
There had to still be water underneath the soil. They had already seen birds circling overhead, inspecting the newly visible desert. She thought she would start from simple, hardy plants like mosses or liverworts; she didn't want to spend energy on complicated things like stems or flowers in this harsh place. They would need some adaptations to make sure they could hold onto water instead of losing it to the dry air…
Kendal said, "Alinua?"
Her unconscious response was, "Hm?" She wasn't sure how long she had been thinking. Her palms were dry. She looked up at Kendal's face.
He wasn't looking at her. He was looking over her shoulder with his eyes slightly widened. Confusion or apprehension, again. A chill ran up Alinua's neck. As she spun around, she heard him ask, "Are you doing that?"
The meadow was dying. Where there had been a field of healthy, strong-rooted grass, there were only dry brown husks. Now that Alinua could see what was happening, she could feel the plants drying, shriveling with each passing second like dead bodies. Alinua vaguely heard her own voice say, "No," but she wasn't paying attention to that. She wanted to think, this can't happen, it takes longer than this for things to die, but she knew that life magic accelerated all the processes of living things. Dying wasn't a different thing. How much magic had she pushed into this ecosystem? She wasn't sure. At the center of the crater, where the magic had been most concentrated, the breeze was lazily pulling dead shoots out of the ground and carrying them, spinning, into the sky.
For a moment, Alinua remembered the winged woman she had healed in Windscrest. She wondered if she had done it as thoughtlessly as she remembered. She had been sure she could control what she was doing.
Alinua stepped forward into the dry grass, which crumpled underfoot, and let more magic flow into the ground. From underground, the sand glowed a dim green. There had been bad dry seasons in the forests outside Vash. The god's people had been able to have water imported from their allies, while Alinua had—after one miserable, delirious summer—started collecting rainwater during the rainy seasons. The forest had no such trouble. She knew what plants did to hold onto water and survive; she knew what kinds of life survived in deserts. She would not believe this place was unlivable yet.
The grass came alive and verdant with her power, but she could feel that she was the only thing holding it together. If she let go, it would wither again. Instead, she reached into the bodies of the plants and started to change them. Roots extended deeper below the surface, burrowing into harder soil in the hope of extracting more resources. The thin, waxy film that she knew coated the skin of most plants grew thicker to hold onto as much elemental energy as possible. She remembered learning the name for that skin at some point, a blurry memory of larger hands guiding hers over the parts of a flower, but the name itself was forgotten. Deep inside the plants' structure, so small that they were almost imperceptible even to her sight, the vesicles the plants used to store water were changing shape. At the very smallest level of life, function came from shape, not the other way around.
Again, Alinua was struck by how easy it was. Channeling this much had used to mean constant vigilance, the awareness that slipping for a second could mean the power exploding out through her skin. Here, it took as much focus as moving a limb. Without even a conscious directive, she expressed her intention and the magic executed. And the tree in Windscrest had been a single organism. This was complicated. A field of individual shoots, microscopic adjustments to internal structures, decisions about root patterns, and she knew instinctively what to do. The feeling was like operating a complex and perfectly-built machine that she had known her whole life.
A cold, strong hand settled on her shoulder. "Alinua," Kendal said, "hold on."
Alinua looked at him. She had sat down in the field, and he was on one knee next to her. His eyebrows were creased with concern. The green light of life magic dappled his face, moving with the shifting grass.
The desert air was taking on a chill, and the sky was turning a less pale blue as the sun sank lower. Goose bumps ran up Alinua's arms. She found that she could speak and focus on casting at the same time, but it was difficult. "I'm okay," she said. Her voice came out weaker than she wanted. "Really. It's not like the cave, I've been able to control it perfectly fine since then." She wished she knew what her face looked like.
Kendal was unmoved. "You're warm. You look tired. I don't want you to channel too much."
The plants were still losing water too fast. Alinua couldn't channel water, couldn't see where it was going. Something heavy and angry rose up in her throat. "This is important," she told Kendal. "The desert— I'm working on it. I can help."
"Can you?" he asked. "What are you trying to do?"
She wanted him to understand, but she also wanted him to go away. Talking made her focus slip. He was distracting her. "I need to find out what's happening to the water. The moisture shouldn't— The skin, the thing— I just have to— Ugh!" She couldn't find the right words and keep her plants alive at the same time. It made her feel stupid.
Kendal's expression fell further, hardening. His shoulders were set. "You don't have to. Listen, what you did in Windscrest was good. You helped those people. You kept their town alive. That's important. But…" He hesitated. His face reminded her of when he had stumbled over his words with the stone golem, knowing what he wanted to say but not knowing how not to push her away by saying it. "…These are just plants," he finished, quietly. "It's a desert. It's okay."
He saw, maybe in her eyes somehow, that he had said something wrong. He opened his mouth again, but Alinua cut him off. "It's not," she snapped, and her voice caught in her throat. She took his wrist with both her hands and pushed him off. "It's not supposed to be. Just let me focus for a second!"
Kendal said, "Alinua—"
Emotion had always affected her magic. Now, wild with frustration, she threw open her channels and drove her own awareness down into the earth. She would find out what was wrong.
Her connection to Life was not yet mature enough for this to be a conscious experience. It felt less like seeing than remembering something she had forgotten.
When the Storm was born, it had hurt. Billions of life's fragments had been caught in the wave and killed instantly. Millions more survivors, mostly the subterranean and small, had starved in the following days as each section of the Storm blasted away all but one of the elements on which they sustained themselves. There had been very few extinctions. This part of the world was not unique in weather or geology, so nearly all the forms of life that lived here were also extant elsewhere on the continent. Life outside the Storm had carried on.
The Storm could not kill everything. Life was adaptation.
The roots of the meadowgrass were intertwined with a thriving underground mass of other organisms. They were as diverse as the life she had been familiar with, and none of them was like anything she had ever seen. Life adapted under incredible evolutionary pressure to live in this place where lightning saturated the air. There were root networks that might be called plants, complicated digging life forms that might be called animals, but she knew their internal processes were entirely different. Most were driven not by life energy but by connections and repulsions of lightning. Searching for them with life magic had been like trying to find the air by sight. For all her changes to the grass, it could not compete with this life in absorbing and holding onto the elements.
This environment, she knew instinctively, could not survive. This life was adapted exclusively for an unending lightning storm. Over the next few sefs, the vast majority of these creatures would die, and the ecosystem would be replaced by whatever next evolved out of that chaos. She felt the populations of life fluctuate erratically, reacting to the changes in the environment. Some species thrived exponentially off the new influx of energy, while the most complicated were already dying off. The effects of her injection of magic would be impossible for one mind to follow, but—
She was aware, without abstraction, of the unbelievable fractal complexity of an ecosystem. She could feel every interaction. A particular microbe might absorb exhaled energy from other organisms, subject it to inscrutable internal processes, and excrete a slightly transmuted form of energy into the environment as waste. Then there were other organisms whose only intake of that magic was this transmuted form, that in turn supported or consumed other forms of life through their particular biology. If a particular species grew in number, other populations would react: life that consumed them for resources would grow in turn, while their competition would be starved. Each of these species was a keystone in itself. Every fragment of life had immediate effects on its surroundings, and uncountable cascading effects on the whole system. And the relationships were not constant: anything that could be observed about the ecological role of a species depended on its context in this moment. In the next, the system might work differently. Small, random decisions made by individual populations exploded into macroscopic effects on the world, which fed back into the lives of the creatures that lived within it.
In memory, she knew this was not unique to this single environment: the same infinite depth could be found in the forest, or the ocean, or the sky. This extinction would be harsh, but whatever came after would be no less multifaceted. Before she opened her eyes, Alinua felt this fractal of intertwined systems extend to the far edges of her perception, and beyond.
She was still in the desert. The late-afternoon sun was warm on her skin and the wind howled through distant cliffs. Kendal had his arms wrapped around her again. She stirred and hugged him back, feeling magic drain from her fingers. For a long moment, he barely reacted, and she realized too late that she'd worried him again.
"I'm awake," she mumbled, trying to be funny. "I was just looking. You're squeezing me." At this halfhearted joke, she felt Kendal relax against her. He did not sag with relief, or even really move, but she felt it in his muscles and his heartbeat. She laid her head on his shoulder.
The details of the—vision? memory?—were already fading; it was too much to hold in her head. She realized that she had expected to be crying, but she wasn't. She was disappointed, she thought, and exhausted, but there was a strange sense of satisfaction as well. A sense of things being in their right place. It wasn't the way she usually thought—Alinua wondered distantly whether the feeling came from her, or from the voice with green eyes that she had seen in her last dream. She put it out of her mind.
They stayed like that for some time, less embracing than lying against each other, as the sky started turning from pale purple to indigo and the clouds swirled above them. Blown by the steady breeze, sand started to creep over the dead gray carpet of grass. It would only take a few hours before it was covered completely.
"It's not going to work," she said into Kendal's shoulder. "It's too big." She sat there for a while, trying to translate her thoughts into words that he would understand. Eventually she decided on, "It's not really dead, anyway. Just different."
At this awkward oversimplification, he pulled back and looked into her eyes. He looked sadder and more confused than she felt, which made her chest hurt even as some immature part of her found it funny. "I'm sorry," he said. "Are you okay?"
Her eyes flicked away from his, toward the sand. If she focused hard, she could bring back small fragments of what she had just seen. The image that stayed with her was the two of them, bright with concentrated magic, balanced together among the seething web of complexity. They were part of it; she had felt her breath filter into the environment. They had seemed so small. But she had seen what a small part of the system could do. She breathed in and out, imagining perturbations in the atmosphere on the other side of the continent.
She said, "I think so, actually." She would decide how true that was later. Kendal smiled softly at her, but she thought he looked a little unsure.
The dark-haired stranger mumbled something in his sleep. The two of them looked over to check on him and saw that he was shifting uncomfortably. Lightning had crushed the desert sand into a fine powder, which the wind was blowing into his face and clothes as he slept. Alinua hadn't spent much time looking at him—it struck her that he might actually be younger than her. He had a refined face and oddly short hair for someone dressed so formally. She thought of Kendal's burns, but it was difficult to stay mad at him. His tattoos were hard to make out, except the organic curls of life wrapped around his left arm. Maybe they could talk to each other.
The mage scrunched up his nose unconsciously. His hair was speckled with dust. Alinua smiled despite herself, despite knowing that she would have to protect Kendal from him eventually. She disentangled from Kendal and stood. "I'll cast a little. Let me just do one thing."
Kendal hesitated. "Okay."
Gingerly, Alinua coaxed a tree out of the soil. Like her branches, it was pulled from memory, something she had climbed and sat under when she was much younger. It had no real roots, no deep connection to the ground. It wouldn't live long, but it was separated from the ecosystem beneath them. That would keep it alive long enough to keep the sand out of someone's face while he slept. She could do that, at least.
Several days after the travelers moved on, rain clouds would form over the region that had been the Storm for the first time in thousands of years. The upper air was no different from that of the surrounding forest, after all. Rock formations that had been carved by lightning for centuries would be eroded in sefs. Some unique life forms would drown in the excess of water, while others would barely survive the new environment and eventually thrive above ground in new shapes.
Migrating birds and insects would bring the seeds of outside plant life to the region, which competed bitterly for space with the native species. Many of the Storm's life forms would be driven to extinction by hardy ferns and grasses. Others would find new niches and methods of coexistence with plants as they had with the Storm-dependent species, wrapping themselves around trunks and roots in symbiosis. Ripples propagated to the corners of the continent as neighboring regions reacted to the new ecosystem, and those regions affected neighbors of their own. The world continued on.