The acorn weighed a ton, in the magical sense of the word, but it was even heavier with a sense of importance. The energy it contained was dense, compact in a way that I really didn’t want to touch. The nascent supernova marble of swirling power it contained gave off an earthy scent and gravity itself was being warped, my drink and a pen lifted off the table, slowly orbiting the acorn. Such a small piece of humongous life that could change everything. Before my visitor had left, he warned me that the seed, if planted could create a gateway for my own use, but if done, would also more deeply connect Earth to the World Tree, letting gateways open far easier than ever, not that there weren’t a few already spitting otherworldly creatures across the deserted surface. His parting words before he vanished were what worried me the most. As Earth is now mostly abandoned and humanity (about 98% of us) was saved the coming tumult, he told me, “Earth is up for grabs.” That scared me more than anything. A new form of warfare was coming to Earth, and I am at ground fucking zero.

Other small items around the living room began to float, one at a time. Pictures began to look as if someone was pulling them off the walls while the acorn’s glow strengthened and pulsed. I am way too tired for this shit, this day needs to be over. I grabbed the newest annoyance of my life and as soon as I touched it, it stopped, the new solar system in my living room falling all around me. Opening my hand revealed, on the strictly visual spectrum, a normal acorn, calm and sleeping. On the magical side of things, it was gobbling energy like a starving elephant. Looking like I don’t have long to decide what to do with this little time bomb, if I wait any longer, it may sprout in my hand and decide that I’m the dirt. Shaking that horrific thought out of my head with exhaustion nipping at its heels, I ran inside to grab some special ingredients, thensprinted to the front yard and conjured a stone ladder on the side of the house. I still had my helmet on, and used my magic to make a socket for a lightstone, instant miner’s helmet. A shred of an idea had popped into my head, and I was frantically trying to come up with the rest of it. I had four normal Earth acorns that had barely sprouted planted at the four corners of my house and a generator with pre-programmed spells ready to go and my house was already bunkered down with a double layer of energized stone. Time to make with the magic. I stood next to the chimney and conjured about two feet of dirt across the entire top of my house. Planting the World Tree seed in the center of my new plot with my added ingredients, I cast my mind into the four corner-placed seedlings with their enchantments and connected them to the newest addition, slowly adding in a rune of willpower to the enchantment, trying to bend this force of nature to my own volition. This tree will be mine. It will be my gateway, under my control.

My magic reached through the enchantments down to the generator in the basement that was supporting them. I slowly changed the power flow to about medium, and I could feel the seedlings slowly grow up the corners of the house until they looked like vines under the direction of my Nature sorcery. I really didn’t have the mental energy for this, at all, so my plan had a stop-gap. The seedlings met at the World Seed and formed a small cage around it, then I took the growth-limiter enchantment already present in the seedlings, and forced it on the World Seed. Now, it will gain energy and life from the generator like a battery, but sit in stasis till the morning. I stumbled off to bed, my magic barely able to keep me awake. Laying on the couch next to my lady, I used my flesh sorcery to put me in the deepest sleep I could muster without courting death.