Christopher Kuan’s parents were dying.

Two weeks ago, they and half the other grown-ups in Disya had been rescued from a cave-in at the mine. His parents had assured him again and again that yes, it had been scary, but it was over now and they were safe.

They had lied through their teeth, and Christopher could see it so clearly that he had to wonder why they had even tried. They could barely make it through a sentence before their weakened voices strained for air and they started coughing wetly. Their skin was sallow and ashen, no amount of sunlight and rest seeming to help them.

He’d been studious in the manners of medicine since he was a child, his endeavors to become a doctor and rise above the Disya mines one of the great passions of his life. Christopher knew that most doctors even gained magic powers, once they’d worked long enough, and that was something that nobody back home could boast of.

But all that medical knowledge failed him now. He knew how to mend cuts and bruises, how to set bones and heal sprains, even how to treat the seven most common variants of plague.

What he didn’t know was how to cure the type of disease that originated from within, the kind where there was no plague to extinguish. He’d spent far too many sleepless nights in the library, paging through dusty, rarely used textbooks for anything that might lead him to an answer, and he’d ultimately come out knowing little more than he had before.

Christopher spent his days in the mines now, spending gruelling hours swinging a pickaxe choking on the same air that was killing his village. His family needed him to put bread on the table, his parents' cases of miner’s lung having worsened. Christopher’s father was now too weak to walk without aid, let alone work long days in the mine, and his mother was so busy caring for the two of them that she didn’t have time to enter the mines. Not that Christopher would have let them. He was fifteen years old now, strong enough to work the mines, and his parents needed to rest. Other families hadn’t been so lucky as to have someone that could replace them, and Christopher often laboured side-by-side with the same men and women who had experienced that cave-in and been consigned to a slow death by suffocation on black ash.

At nights, he sneaked out of the house for the village doctor’s. It wasn’t hard— his parents slept like the dead, and he often worried that he would wake up to find that their slumber had become permanent— but it ate into his sleep, the precious midnight hours expended, and it meant that he was that much more exhausted come morning. He wouldn’t have had it any other way, though, because he knew what was coming.

Nobody wanted to talk about it, and Christopher felt like he could understand an inkling of why, but the fact of the matter was that half of Disya was dying. Every night, there was a new critical case in the village doctor’s, one that the nonmagical doctor had little capability to cure, and Christopher was right there with him, comforting and soothing the patients. He recognized all of them. Nathan’s dad, Kyle’s mother, Duncan from the year above him at school. There was an ugly, sour knot of pressure building up inside his gut, one that hardened and grew every time he went, but he couldn’t not go. Every night, without fail, he and the good doctor sat by the beds of one who was coughing up black-tinged blood, and they did what they could.

Sometimes, what they could simply was not enough. Christopher had seen boys and girls that he had grown up with wither away into husks of themselves, watched as his childhood best friend’s father coughed up one too many things that should’ve stayed inside him and passed on. He cried for three whole days, the first time, but by the sixth death he was beginning to grow numb.

Useless, that was the word that kept coming back to him. Years of training, and I can do nothing but comfort my people as they die.

Christopher had never been a boy of great faith, but a few weeks after the life-changing incident he began attending the multifaith Church, in hopes of finding salvation through something greater than himself. Disya was too small to have magical healers amongst the ranks of its Church officials, and though he begged the priests time and time again for a true healer to come to the town, he received the same answer each time.

“I am sorry, I truly am, but we are simply too far down the priority list,” the priest told Christopher for what had to be the tenth or eleventh time, his voice as gentle as it had been the first. “I wish I could do more for you, but the healers are all being requisitioned to larger cities.”

Disya was a small town, Christopher knew, with a population barely reaching the triple digits, but that statement made him burn hot with rage for a second. He controlled himself, as always, telling himself that the city folk needed healers just as much as he did. The words felt like ash inside his mind, the bitter taste of his refrain something that he knew he would not be able to swallow much longer.

He prayed. Nonmagical medicine and the almighty Church had failed him, so who else was there to turn to? Certainly not the owners of the mine, who rarely came to town and cared only for their profits.

“Holy Nacea, God of the Hospital,” he would recite, night after night, patient after patient. “Be kind to us, one more time. Cleanse us, strengthen us, save us.”

The words gave him some solace, but solace was not enough when his parents were still just a single bad day away from perishing.

And one night, as he laid a cool towel on a dying man’s forehead and said his rote prayers once more, his words were answered.

He saw a being, greater than anything he’d ever seen before, framed against a moonless sky. Christopher’s eyes didn’t quite understand what he was seeing, and he felt deep in his gut that he didn’t want to.

“Are you a god?” Christopher asked, speaking into the void. “Please. Help us.”

He remained there for a split second, almost long enough that he felt stupid for speaking to nothing, and then a flurry of images flew through his mind. Of battlefields, of hospitals, of homes.

Of healing.

In a flash, he was back at the side of his patient, the impression of a [PACT] fresh in his mind, and now he knew what to do.

“Gods above,” the village doctor said, stumbling back from the patient. From Christopher. “What was that?”

“It was,” Christopher said coolly. “What we needed.”

It was like his whole life he had been seeing the world in black and white, only now discovering the concept of color. There were so many things he knew now that the doctor simply lacked the knowledge of, so many possibilities to set things right.

He knew what this was. He’d spent far too much of his childhood locked away inside his room, reading a fresh batch of books from the library, and he was more world wise than many of the other residents of Disya.

An oath. Magic.

And yet he still couldn’t heal his family, couldn’t help his village. Christopher knew that he lacked the potency that would come with experience. There was a difference to the air now, a thread of power that he knew he couldn’t have sensed before thrumming through it, but he had yet to grasp every part of his newfound oath and his power was yet developing.

What he did have, however, was knowledge. He knew what ailment his town was suffering from, now, and he knew what he would have to assemble to fix it. A medicine would have to be created.

“Peppermint, rosemary, ashweed, and silkgrass,” the apothecarist told him. “We have those, but not emberwood.”

“I need all of them,” Christopher said, his tone dead serious. “The lives of so many depend on it.”

“I know,” the apothecarist said, her wizened face softening. “You’re trying to do so much, our neighborhood prodigy. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have it?”

“I ran out months ago,” she admitted, her voice shaky. She looked close to tears. “I’m so sorry. The shipments are so infrequent, and I, I didn’t send for more.”

“Please,” Christopher begged. “You have to tell me where I can get it. I need it.”

The woman behind the counter of the dingy, poorly-lit apothecary grimaced, pulling herself together. “My source is nowhere near here.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Christopher asserted. “I’ll get it even if I have to walk to the ends of the earth myself for it.”

She must have seen something in his eyes, because she responded immediately rather than trying to comfort him like she usually did. “Clarsin. I buy my emberwood from Clarsin.”

“Clarsin…” Christopher frowned. “That’s near the capital.”

“Damn near two hundred kilometers away,” the apothecarist sighed. “The train there takes days, and the nearest town that even has a train is a hard week’s trek away.”

“I’ll make it,” Christopher promised. “Just a little more time in the mines, enough to keep my parents fed, and I’ll go. I swear I’ll help everyone. Even if it kills me.”

“You poor boy,” she said, placing a wrinkled hand over her heart. “I’ll give you the herbs for free. Get yourself a cart, at least. A tent. Something to keep yourself safe on your journey.”

“Really?” Christopher asked. “You’d do that?”

“Of course,” she smiled. “Christopher, everyone in this town loves you, and you’re the first mage that Disya has had in decades. Of course I would.”

And just like that, he was three-quarters of the way to saving his people. He left the apothecary one filled canvas bag heavier, the sound of the little bumps and collisions of a half dozen clay jars packed full of herbs accompanying him all the way home.

Christopher arrived back at his house three hours past midnight. Two more days. Two more days, and he would leave.

One last day, Christopher chanted to himself, bringing his arms back for another swing of the pickaxe. One last day.

The coal seam stretched deep into the mines, but the richest parts of it had been blocked off by the collapse, its resources cut off just as Disya had begun harvesting from it.

Now, though, the owners of the mine had visited town and cleared the path. Christopher had talked to them as they used a staff with odd letters carved into it to blast the rock open, begged them to let him ride in their carriage with them, to help him obtain the final ingredient he needed, but his pleading had fallen on deaf ears. His cheek still stung where he’d been slapped. In that moment, he’d never felt more angry, but he knew that his rage would’ve been wasted on the likes of them.

He had more important things to do. His pick met the seam with a vengeance, loosening a fat chunk of coal and kicking up a cloud of ash, obscuring his light.

Christopher was growing to hate the color black.

“We’re almost done with the last cartload,” Jules said, pausing for a second to stretch his back. “Let’s go a little longer, then we’ll be done for the day. We’re well on our way to our quota.”

Christopher’s mining partner had also been his second favorite teacher growing up, only behind the village doctor, and it was a little surreal labouring away at the same task with him.

“Yeah,” Christopher grunted, hefting his pick again. “Just a little more.”

He swung again, and he hit something that wasn’t coal and certainly wasn’t earth.

“What the hell?” Christopher tried to pull his pickaxe back, but it stayed still like it had been glued to the thing buried in the coal.

He pulled harder, and Jules noticed, coming over to help him.

With the two of them combined, pulling full strength, something finally gave and a chunk of coal larger than Christopher’s head came loose from the seam.

“What happened?” Jules said. “Your pick get jammed?”

“I’m not sure,” Christopher said. “I… I need to check this out.”

He turned the coal over, realizing belatedly that his pick was still attached to it. Christopher rotated it into his hands until he found it.

There were no words in his mind that could fully describe the features what he was looking at. It was a nugget of some material, no larger than a fingernail, but it was impossibly light while also being darker than the coal around it. He looked at it, and he felt less like he was looking at a metal and more like he was peering through a window into another world.

“You okay there?” Jules asked.

Christopher put his fingers onto the fragment, and his mind exploded with sensations.

It was like it had been when he’d first gained his oath weeks ago, that same flood of images, all relaying the same concept, except now it was infinitely worse. He found himself aware of his own body, perceiving the sensations of every individual hair and watching every goosebump rise on his arms, and beyond that his senses failed. Christopher forced his eyes open, but his world was dark, and he could not feel the cavern around him. He thought he should have been falling, if nothing was under his feet, but he felt oddly at balance.

And the images were still coming. They were nonsensical, now, shapes folding into themselves and becoming something anew, colors that he’d never seen before flying into his mind.

[HOST], someone that was not Christopher cried, and the universe agreed.

Christopher Kuan opened his eyes, and with the weight of the world in his mind he saw everything.

“Chris? Hey, Chris, you okay?”

Jules… Christopher saw the man, saw double, triple, saw what the man could be, saw how the man could end, how he could be changed, and he knew that he was capable of all of it.

The passenger in his head wasn’t going away. He could feel it, feel the way that he couldn’t quite recognize Jules’ face anymore, the way he’d already forgotten the name of the mining partner that they’d replaced.

Kill him, he thought. Make it easier.

He wasn’t the only one taken off guard by that. The thing that had stowed away onto him threw a vast clump of information into his mind. [CONFUSION], it said, and Christopher understood all of it, its nuances, the information that would take a millenia to explain out loud packed into a single dense concept.

The voice that had been his but not his was gone, and Christopher wasn’t particularly inclined to chase it.

He could create life now, he knew. That was his— no, not his, the stowaway’s— ultimate purpose. Life through vegetation.

It was almost perfect. With a thought, Christopher grew plants out of the coal, created enriching peppermint and lifegiving rosemary out of the seam that had already claimed so many lives.

And yet it still wasn’t enough. He thought of emberwood, but it would not grow when he knew nothing of its composition, of its properties. All he knew was that he needed it.

Clarsin. The stowaway seemed to agree with his purpose, the tilt of the images that came from its thoughts tending towards the positive, and when it sent its [AGREEMENT] Christopher was already ready.

A direction. He turned towards the seam, sure of his bearings as he was of the back of his hand.

“Chris! What the fuck!” Jules. He’d almost forgotten the teacher was there.

“I’ll be back,” Christopher said, and he walked into the ground.

It felt so natural, joining the ground and partially becoming it, entering a fluid state, and as he glided through the earth he nearly forgot that this should have been impossible.

Clarsin was only three days away, he could feel.

Clarsin. The emberwood. Salvation.

There was a nagging feeling in the back of Christopher’s greatly expanded mind, and he was fairly sure it wasn’t because he was mostly composed of soil and roots at the moment.

That other being, the one that had spoken to Christopher’s mind in his own voice… Christopher was sure that it had disappeared, but there was that lingering sensation of uncertainty colouring everything. He disliked it.

But that didn’t matter right now.

It had been three enlightening days and nights. Christopher couldn’t believe that he had once toiled away for hours, trying to glean the barest understanding of a human body. Now, he had unlocked the secrets to the world, discovering and perfecting the natural state of hundreds of new species of plants. He was approaching Clarsin at speed, growing the seeds of his discoveries in his path. They would grace the land with their presence, soon enough. Even better, he knew there would not be much longer till he arrived, and it had all been smooth gliding so far.

He… he frowned. Christopher needed emberwood, he knew this. To save… his parents.

Why was it so hard to remember their faces?

He shook his head, inasmuch as a half-liquid being could do so, and he continued on. He had a purpose, and he had a [PURPOSE]. Christopher would save Disya, and then he would help his stowaway learn about the world again.

There was something above him. Buildings, one of them high and mighty. Fields, waterflower and lilygrass running wild in them. A hundred… a hundred fifty pinpricks, barely registering to his senses.

[HOSTILITY]

Christopher agreed. They smelled like they were raring for a fight. Were they waiting for someone? A monster, perhaps?

He needed to find the emberwood, and so he began rising.

The scent of the pinpricks changed. No, not a change, but… it was more intense now. More hostile.

What was wrong? Was there truly a big monster coming? Christopher had read the tales, enraptured by the stories of knights in shining armor striking down great dragons, and he’d once wished to be one of them.

Perhaps now he could. He glided closer to the surface, circling around and around till he was almost at the top.

The pinpricks were getting even more intense now. Whatever they were preparing for must have been close, because he could almost taste their fear and anticipation through the soil now.

Christopher located the tallest building he could find, the same one he’d sensed earlier. A tower, of some sort. It would be here that he would emerge. If he could find someone to explain the situation to him, he would be able to help and get his emberwood, and then everyone could go home happy.

Emerging felt every bit as natural as walking, his form coalescing partway. He kept on a layer of soil and leaves over his skin, their embrace something he had rapidly become accustomed to.

There was someone covered head to toe in glowing blue armor standing by the tower, as if they had known he was coming. Perhaps they had, and they were ready to tell a new ally what—

A bright blue sword flashed towards him. It would have taken his head off just a week ago, but he was stronger now. Smarter. He melted back into the ground.

Kill them all.

The voice from earlier!

They’re in your way.

They’ll never understand.

Hindrances.

The voice was no different from Christopher’s, and worse yet, the sentiment it was trying to pass him was familiar. Bottled-up anger, from a thousand grievances ranging from the minor to the life-changing, and today he could feel the seal on that bottle popping open.

I’m going to show them all, he thought, and he wasn’t sure if it was the voice or him that had ‘spoken’.

His gift could recreate any living plant he’d seen before, and he’d seen an awful lot of them on his way.

Christopher created vines, the thorny kind he’d seen inside a thick forest yesterday, and he made them large, large enough that their strength would be able to crack open the tower that he’d emerged under.

[ATTACK]

Kill them all.

Christopher listened.

He ordered the earth to come apart to make way for a thousand different species, his mind working together with the gift of the stowaway to repurpose and attack with the plants he now knew intimately.

Pinpricks began fading out, and he smiled for nobody but the earth to see.

Still, he had a different job to do here. Christopher began gliding through the earth, searching this town for its emberwood.

He knew his limitations, now. It was difficult for him to sense what was a new plant and what wasn’t, but once his main body came in physical contact with it, he could add it to his repertoire.

There were too many places to look, and Christopher could only go so fast and do so much at one time. He noticed soon enough that there were flaws in his plants, evolutions that had taken hold imperfectly, and he realized why in an instant.

He needed power, and there was only one way to get power in this world.

Kill them all.

The number of pinpricks he could sense had dropped a fair number now. Two dozen or so. That meant…

Christopher set some of his plants on dismantling the dead. The human body was so fragile, and the corpses of those who dared stop him from saving lives were torn to shreds in an instant, their essence feeding back into Christopher’s stowaway and fixing his plants.

He searched from building to building, from field to field, and he found not a trace.

It had to be here somewhere. The… the… the woman. What had been her name? What had she done? Whoever she was, Christopher was sure she wouldn’t have lied to him. After all, that would have been evil.

There were, he noted with muted interest, another dozen dead.

Kill them. Kill them faster.

[IRRITATION]

I know, I know. Searching for emberwood was something that neither of his mind’s passengers wanted him to spend his time doing.

Christopher paused a moment in his search, evaluating the situation at hand.

His stowaway had decided to make a paradise out of the tower, at least a dozen variants of every species he’d discovered recently growing from it. The blue knight that had so rudely tried to assassinate him earlier was in the thick of that paradise, weaving and dodging attacks, their feet light on the grass.

[ANGER], his stowaway expressed, noticing his focus, and he agreed. All he’d wanted to do was help people. And what had he gotten? A sword to the throat, no words exchanged.

The grass. The knight wasn’t getting hit by anything, but there was no way that they could block the grass.

Christopher concentrated on the grass. Lilygrass, he sensed. Known for the way it coud be soft in the sun but stiff and unbending in the rain.

He wanted the latter attribute, and he focused his power, toning down the frequency and level of the plants that he had been pouring forth through the openings in the ground.

Christopher ordered the grass to rise, to grow, to—

Kill them all.

And it obeyed, obeyed just how he wanted it to. In the matter of moments, more than a third of the remaining pinpricks vanished, their essence flowing into his body.

He continued searching, but he’d barely been gliding for a minute or two when his stowaway interrupted.

[IRRITATION]

Still?

Christopher turned his attention to the surface.

The blue knight was still alive, when—

It should be dead.

He would have growled in rage if he had been in a form with lungs.

Fine, I’ll go myself. Christopher shot up towards the surface. The pinprick that was the blue knight was fighting their way up the central tree that the stowaway had decided to form by the tower, clambering from branch to branch even as the tree itself tried to throw them off.

Christopher was so focused on taking revenge upon his aggressor that he didn’t even notice that he was gliding straight into the tower.

He hit it head on, and while he couldn’t feel pain while he was in this form he still recoiled instinctively.

And then he recoiled again, once he realized what he’d seen.

The tower. It had been the tower. It was a wood he hadn’t seen before, one that he was beginning to understand.

The tower was made of emberwood.

Christopher took control of the tree from his stowaway, and he directed it to take the tower.

If they wanted so badly to stop him from saving his town, he would take another one down for their transgressions.

The tree made contact with the tower, and Christopher melded into the tree. It took only a minute, and then he was human again, crouched atop the tip of the tower.

At last. Emberwood.

He stayed for long enough to be sure that he’d gotten the right material, and then he once again became part of the earth.

The emberwood was finally in his grasp, and he—

Will never let anybody stand in my way.

He started reshaping the tree, starting from the inside out. It was careful work, but then his stowaway had granted him divine amounts of knowledge.

The tree was half again as tall as the tower had been, now, and soon enough it would all be emberwood.

[IRRITATION]

Right. There was still the matter of the blue knight.

Christopher’s heart was light now, his goal finally accomplished, and he sought the blue knight out almost whimsically. They were nearing the top of the tree now, still fighting the plants he’d been creating inside its branches. It was a simple matter, getting close to them, as simple as becoming one with the emberwood and finding the knight’s feet.

He emerged abruptly, and he brought a fist forward. Christopher had never thought of himself as much of a fighter, but now he carried his stowaway’s infinite knowledge with him, and he had learned the way of power.

The blue knight’s armor crumpled where he hit it, and then the irritant was gone, soaring off into the distance.

[SATISFACTION]

There is another.

What? Christopher had started to find it difficult to tell the difference between his thoughts and the voice, but he knew that had not been him. What did it want?

My kind.

The voice made itself known in Christopher’s mind, this time speaking with the rough tone of someone far older than him.

[CAUTION]

Peace, the gruff voice said. Once I fulfill my purpose, I will be gone.

Christopher found himself gone from the place he’d been, manifested as a human once more atop his tree.

He’d done something, and the voice had taken the recollection of it from him.

But the voice was gone. He could tell almost immediately.

He turned to the battlefield in horror. How many… how many had died because of him? How many had he killed? How many of them had he enjoyed killing?

Christopher had wanted to save people. He was a failure. He—

There were still some alive, and a small group of them—only three people—were hurling themselves at the base of his tree.

One of them was different from the others. Magic that his stowaway had once known.

[FEAR]

And Christopher found himself moving again, propelled in part by himself and in part by the terrified stowaway.

He gathered power and fired it raw, creating a blow that would grow plants from the inside out. It was sure to kill, and with the power invested in it, it was not something that could be protected against.

Christopher didn’t even realize that he had released the working until he saw it fly. He looked away, not wanting to observe yet another death by his hands.

And then the magic that his stowaway had feared was gone, his working was gone, the voice was gone, and he once again had full control over himself.

It was over. It was all over. He would return home, save his town, and turn himself in, he promised. He would take any and all punishment he deserved, if it meant he could rescue mom and dad.

The broken boy was just about to enter his tree and leave when he felt it.

More humans. More pinpricks, appearing in the edge of his senses.

A lot of them. Hundreds. More than a thousand.

Christopher was exhausted. He was running so low on power, now, and he felt like a wreck.

The stowaway, the voice, his thoughts… he wasn’t sure what he could trust to truly be himself, anymore, and no matter what he chose in the end he would still be a murderer.

[RESIGNATION]

The pinpricks started acting, forming magic in a way that his stowaway felt a spark of recognition at, and they fired as one. A thousand unified workings, and somehow they had located where Christopher’s true body rested, all of them directed at the same spot atop Christopher’s tree of emberwood.

“I was only,” he mumbled, talking to nobody, “trying to help.”

Christopher Kuan died thinking of his parents.