Seeing as how night is what brings all the monsters to the yard, I decided that being inside and creating their kryptonite would be the best use of my time. Light and fire huh? Well, fire is heat, or rather it is the visual expression of intense heat that is consuming combustible materials as long as there is oxygen right? So what is magical fire? Eh, I probably shouldn’t play with this inside, I mean, I do have a living tree in my living room. Speaking of tree, I stopped my musings and walked over to Sarah. Looking at her showed no outward physical change; I placed my hands on her trunk and sent my magical senses inward, trying to find any information I could. Emptiness is what I felt. The egg-like feeling of potential was, gone, or rather, it had moved. My senses felt a downward tug and I followed that to about fifty feet or so. She had grown a root that snaked down the house to join with the front root of the World Tree. This bitch! Being a little tree wasn’t enough, she had to go and join the infant World Tree, which was connected to the ACTUAL World Tree, the backbone of the collective multi-verse!

I felt a nudge at ankle, “Who’s this looker?” Rath asked. I had to take a minute to pull myself back and collect my emotions.

“This looker is, was, my fiance.”

“Whoa brotha!” his eyes going huge, “Dryads have more stamina than any mortal man! How’d ya swing that!”

“Uhm, she wasn’t a dryad a month ago. When the Ripple came, we were drinkin, and she wished to be one with nature. And apparently, now she’s one with the Cosmos.”

He looked at me, then back at the now empty shell, then back at me, “Dude, she isn’t dead. She’ll be back. World Tree Dryad are even more rare than seeds of Yggdrasil, but she’ll come back. Give it a couple thousand years or so.”

“WHAT?!” I freaked, “A couple thousand years? For fuck’s sake! What the fuck takes that long?”

“Good grief, you don’t know shit,” he grumbled, making his way to the basement with me right on his tail. He curled up at the feet of the generators.

I turned them all off except the main one powering the housewards. “Oh fuck no, no mana for you unless I get some goddamn answers.”

Opening one eye, he muttered, “So touchy.” He sat up a little, “Fine, the more powerful a dryad, the longer it will take for them to gestate. It takes even longer if the tree is on a ley line or is some kind of epic magical tree, like the World Tree, duh, and it takes even longer if a human converts over to a dryad as the soul has to undergo incredible amounts of change to handle that kind of paradigm shift. And your lady, has all of those. This house is on a growing ley line thanks to your mana pumps saturating the air with mana causing the nearby ley lines to shift their path here. And, she was human, AND, she is in the newest addition to the World Tree. This will probably take about four thousand years for her to regain consciousness. On the flip side, she will be one of the most powerful nature beings to exist in the cosmos. Even deities like your visitor won’t be able to touch her.”

Every negative emotion possible rocked my soul, one after the other. Blinding white hot anger at being alone, abandoned. Sticky, deep jealousy at the differences of power and lifespan. Wet and dark depression for realizing that the love of my life is no longer in it. Cloying despair, realizing that maybe her wish was way better than mine, and that maybe she would truly be happy this way. Ugly infectious guilt, because she probably didn’t even know any of this. How could she? How could she know that this could possibly separate us for millenia, or turn her into a tree, or that the wish would even be real? We were drunk! She didn’t even know what she was doing. Hell, I still didn’t know what I was doing. Man, I am low. I don’t even deserve her.

Rath just watched me. In my anger, my sorcery conjured and banished over and over various blobs of wicked bloody ice that floated around next to ores of iron and stone with carnivorous plants sprouting out of them. Spikes of bone exploded out of my body only to vanish a second later. Rath spoke, “Calm down mortal, before I eat your MAGIK!” The true name for magic rocked me back with energy I didn’t understand, bringing me back to myself. In those few words, the little lizard seemed to be larger than a freaking jet airliner, wreathed in magma and raw physical power, on a scale simple Earth creatures haven’t seen since the days of magic. My soul interpreted his true nature for a split second when he drew back the curtain on his true self. It just pissed me off more. I wasn’t thinking clearly, but then again, I didn’t care. Fuck this iguana. In fact, fuck them all.

I turned on the rest of the generators with my mind, linked them to the house crystal battery, connected it to Gungnir and pumped the mana output to the max. The entire process took half a second. Now, several days ago, when I finished altering Gungnir, I used a crystal shard of Chaos to make the spearpoint, but I had never really tested out the full capabilities. But what I was seeing now, is that the solidified embodiment of pure Chaos that is my spearpoint could easily handle the amount of raw energy that would have instantly vaporized any living thing. Gripping it with both hands, I set my feet and pointed it at Rath. “Don’t fucking threaten me lizard,” I said, “Raw Chaos doesn’t care what you are.” Crackles of shifting energy snaked up and down the base to the point, punctuating each word, my anger making the entire spear glow.