People often associate the feeling of anger with the raging blaze that is fire. A careless spark or unattended campfire which leads to a devastating forest fire, incredibly hot and wrathful, devouring every living thing in its path. The machinations of man contrived to create a controlled flame, such as the concentrated power of a blowtorch which cuts through the hardest steel. What the lowered eyes of mankind has failed to see and understand in our limited wisdom is that the true expressions of anger are those exhibited by Mother Nature herself with the elements most needed for life, earth and water. That which is the foundation of life is also the most widespread consequence of death.

Victims of truly powerful earthquakes and tsunamis grasp on the most basic level that the 10 on the Richter scale isn’t just the earth shaking her fist, it is a total rejection of what is on her surface. The shockwaves of the indignant mother reducing the surface to rubble, and then to dust. Everything we have ever known as humans would be crushed and ground to pebbles as we tumble to the floor, suddenly unable to walk as the most steady part of our world acts like jello. And then, it wouldn’t get better. The follow-up of the initial cosmic temper tantrum is a tsunami. Multiple tsunamis that emanate from the core of the outburst. The total and utter obliteration of the remaining structures along the coastline. Mother Earth flips the table while her son, the Sea, the Ocean, hurls his wrath at what he can touch and drags it back to the unconquerable depths of the blackness.

It wasn’t hot. It didn’t burn. My anger exhibited none of the attributes of fire. It cracked, and split, and tore like the crust of the earth breaking open. It flooded, and drowned, and washed away the remnants. Realizing that after all of this time, my abilities, my powers, my fragments of a dream that brought wonder to my life, were changing me, altering me in a way I didn’t understand until now. Not only had my body and soul been crafted to fit something more, but my mind itself was shifting, and I didn’t like it. I wanted to still be me, I am still me, but something about me was not the same. Is this what it takes to achieve my goals? I have to become something different? All I really want to do is survive, and survive long enough to see my fiance again, but at what cost? Humans only live around eighty years for a reason. Our minds are not built to withstand the test of eternity. The stress of eons of living is what kills us. The accumulated weight of the ages is what keeps the majority of us from reaching past the point of our first century, and then twists the knife so that those who do break the first limit are soon dead.

The natural disasters of my anger were twisting inside of me, raging to be let out, loosed upon the uncaring vista of the world. The realization of my own nature combined with the circumstances fought with my soul, my human spirit, the only indomitable thing about me. The only part of me that had a chance in hell of surviving, of enduring. I had done things I wasn’t proud of. Enslaving animals and beasts? I had done that for the sake of surviving, but it wasn’t me, or was it? The act itself had changed me. It made the next enslavement, the next domination that much easier. Murder? I had done that too. Maybe in self-defense, and maybe it would be considered a reasonable action, but I had still done it. Would it make the next murder incrementally more quick? Would I pull the trigger, push the knife, squeeze the throat as if it were nothing given enough time? How much change happens before I am no longer me, before I walk up to a mirror and not recognize the face that stares back? Take over my continent? How gigantic my ego must be for me to contemplate that idea?

“Be Kind.”

My fiance’s favorite phrase echoed in my head. That’s what she always used to tell me every morning before I went to work. Be kind. Sometimes it was irritating. I didn’t want to kind, I wanted to be tough and direct. Sometimes, it was comforting. There’s love there, a genuine reminder to make the world a better place, one word at a time.

“Be Kind.”

Looking down at my hands, I noticed that they were covered in powder and some of it was wet. In the minutes I took to fully explore my anger and let it run through me, my sorcery had reacted to my emotions, conjuring rock and crushing it, conjuring water and changing its shape to produce random rough spikes that whipped around, flailing like a caught octopus struggling to escape its fate.

“Be Kind.”

The words rippled through my soul harder than the throes of a dying god. The memory of fiance evoking feelings and thoughts that I had pushed aside, claiming I didn’t have time to deal with them. But I’m not stone. I am not the unforgiving tide washing away the frailty of my humanity. I am not the pounding avalanche crushing my enemies beneath the inexorable weight of my strength. Yet.

My flesh sorcery alerted me that some of my thoughts and feelings were not originally my own. They came from my other sorceries, which are alien to the natural state of the human soul. Mankind was not meant, not built to casually hold such power, such control. I conjured a small pebble in the palm of my hand and studied it. First, I am me. Rubbing the surface of the slightly pitted stone, I coalesced my thoughts, MY thoughts around what I felt my core to be. I am me. I am a sorcerer. I control myself, my abilities, my thoughts and my powers. They do not control me. The sorceries were a part of me, they had been since the day everything changed, but now, I could feel them coming to heel, a well-trained hound sitting at my feet, patiently waiting its owner’s commands. Bit by bit, flavor by flavor, the swirls of power granted to me by events outside my control began to join and mix. The sorcery of flesh commanding the bones of the foundation to accept the filling presence of earth and the nourishing rain of water while filling them both with the caress of nature. The sorcery of magic itself blanketed everything, fleshing out the cracks and providing a canopy of protection on my soul.

Control. I could feel it again. This is what I’ve been missing for so long. The ability to control every facet of every particle of me. The colored tinges of intentions no longer altered the power of my thoughts. I could feel it. The previous desire I had to dominate the changed beasts of the surrounding area to make it safe for me was no longer forefront in my mind. It had originally only been a side plan, but the flesh sorcery unconsciously pushed it to the fore. The water sorcery pushed me to build a base under a river as I sought that which could provide protection. My thoughts, now unhindered, showed the various actions I had taken while literally under the influence.

I didn’t really want to be king of everything I saw, the undisputed ruler of the unpopulated North American continent. My nature sorcery drove those thoughts, to be the biggest tree in the forest, the most powerful wolf in the pack. It seemed to have worked in tandem with my flesh sorcery to up my aggression levels and need to be the alpha. Don’t get me wrong, it had certainly helped me survive, but a rational human would have run from a dragon instead of trying to drown it. Or made off like the roadrunner when meeting the “genetically altered magical humans from outside our galaxy”.

“You ok there?” Gungnir said bobbing in front of my face, cutting my introspective journey short. “Don’t wanna alarm you, but the walls were shaking like crazy there for a bit and your skin was freaking glowing.”

I shook my head, coming to grips with regaining the fringes of my mind. Banishing the evidence of my magical freak out, I looked at Gungnir, the sentient shape-shifting weapon that housed a piece of my soul through pure accident. Another mistake. An overreach by several orders of magnitude. One wrong move by the wrong player and a piece of the most integral part of me could have been destroyed, or even worse, captured. “Hey buddy,” I said, my voice tired all the sudden. I lifted my hands. “Come here.”

Gungnir floated slowly down towards my hands, “You’re kinda creepin me out here. I’m not the one you should be angry at. I was just giving you options!”

“It’s not that,” I sighed, taking the orb out of the air and willing it back into spear form. Reaching out with my magic, I felt the inner core of my weapon, where a piece of my soul resided. “I’ve just realized some of the mistakes I’ve made in my ignorance, and having the most vulnerable part of me floating around is not the smartest thing I’ve done.”

I gripped the spear with both hands and flooded my sorcery into every part of it, and then centered my power on the core crystal blade.

Three loud whumpfs resounded through the room. “Hooray! I’ve been rescued!”

“Shut up Gungnir.” I snapped, my need to secure a piece of myself warring with what sounded like someone knocking on the door or stomping on the earth overhead.

“Open up sorcerer! I can feel you down there!” Three more muffled whumpfs sounded. “Don’t make me come down there!”

I willed Gungnir into knife from and secured it to my belt. “No fucking way,” I muttered, turning towards the staircase leading to the opening under the World Tree. “It can’t be.” I walked up the stairs and put my hands to the stone door, shaping a tiny hole in the stone door so I could peek out. My shock was outperformed by my mouth. “What the fuck do you want Reeanth?”