Of Ice, Death & Monsters-Chapter 65 : For We Train

Godwin led me to the other side of the library, where a door awaited us both. Opening it revealed a ladder that was attached to the edge of the doorway, going down to the forest ground.
My mind emptied for a bit as I felt nature take over. For a moment, I felt myself become the leaf that fell towards the blossoming flower, drifting through the wind. It felt so surreal that my own body nearly fell down the ladder if it weren’t for Godwin catching my arm.
“Are you alright? You suddenly looked like you were about to jump off for a moment.”
I got up and patted myself down, looking around as I collected my thoughts. “I’m fine, just… I don’t know what’s up. I think my power has gone haywire. I keep on jumping around perspectives and points of view. It happened in the hallway… In the library, now here.”
Godwin leaned in, watching my eyes. “Fascinating, can you care to tell me how it feels? What it’s like? I’m quite curious about the specifics on how it functions, especially after witnessing the power you held against Zmey.”
I scratched my cheek awkwardly. “A-Alright then, well, help me down and I’ll try to explain.”
Godwin stepped down on the ladder, reaching out to me as he began to guide me down the steps. I turned to look at what was holding the house up, my eyes lighting like a lamppost at night as I saw giant chicken legs being the load-bearing support of the huge abode.
“The legends were true ahhhh!” I fanboyed silently as I gawked at what was before me.
“I know, marvelous, isn’t it. Do you believe perhaps the house itself is alive, or perhaps it’s merely an animated appendage?” We got near the ground floor as the both of us stared at the feet in wonder.
“I mean, both are likely right? She and Roga made all their stuff animated, flying around doing whatever they desired. But this place is also alive, and I wouldn’t put it past them to have a living house.”
Godwin nodded along with me as I pondered in real time. “Much akin to the Werehouse.”
Upon saying that, we both stared at the sky, as if expecting to find a full moon even if it were morning.
“I don’t think this is a werehouse… Although… Huh, maybe it is, and it’s not fully transformed.” I walked towards the legs before Godwin pulled me away, causing me to realize I almost did something very stupid.
“Oh yeah… Thanks, almost forgot where I am.” I laughed awkwardly as Godwin patted my back. “I forget too- a,h speaking of forgetting, what is your ability like? The whole connection process?”
I started to walk around the wooden house, trying to pick up of any signs of Katya and the others as I spoke. “Well…” I pointed to my head as I waded through the grass. “It’s like having a million voices plugged into your head. Every waking moment I had, they spoke to me. Sometimes they were loud, sometimes they were soft, and sometimes they used their own voice, and sometimes they used mine. It was disorientating for the most part.”
“Ah. Is that why you sometimes started to act and speak like those whose soul you had?”
I nodded along, remembering all those times Andrei came out to try and talk with the Keepers… Man, I really did end up messing with them like that, huh. I rubbed my head in shame before turning to Godwin. “Yeah, and it took a while for me to get them under control. It was in this strange mental realm- wait, actually.”
I stopped for a moment to collect my thoughts, but also to hear better as the sound of clashing blades filled the air, and I needed to follow it.
“It wasn’t a mental realm- or maybe it kinda was. It was Nawia. I was on the center island, the one that Zmey guarded. There, I talked with the souls in me and managed to reason with them. After that, I managed to get them mostly under control, but that only lasted a few minutes to maybe even a few hours at best.” I sighed for a moment, closing my eyes as I tried to connect again, listening to the world.
Instead of hearing voices in my head, I opened my eyes to find… Darkness, well, not really pitch black, I could tell different shades of light from each other, but other than that, I mostly could feel, I could… crawl? And whatever I felt like I was crawling right now was quite hard, dense, and almost similar to wood.
I then forced myself back out, taking a deep breath as I stumbled back into a tree, instinctively looking to my left as I found a worm crawling into a hole deep within the trunk of the tree.
“Huh… It looks like now it does something completely different.” I poke near the worm as it continued to crawl.
“And that would be?” Asked Godwin curiously as he crouched down to see what I was looking at.
“I tried to hear the voices again, but then suddenly, I just… Became a worm?” I said it as if I was asking a question, which, honestly, at this point, I was. This whole process was confusing, and trying to wrap my head around it gave me a dull headache.
“Remarkable, you’re able to connect with the souls of the world, hear and see them, experience them even. Perhaps it’s because of what happened in the Nawia, it supercharged your powers in a way, shooting them far beyond the norm.”
He began to take out his book and jot some notes on the pages.
“I guess, if you put it that way, maybe. But where do you think the other souls went? The one I already connected with?”
“Perhaps they’re back in the Nawia? If you could connect to it in your sleep, maybe that’s all they usually are- And maybe when you go back to sleep, you’d see them again. Actually, that does beg the question then, did anything happen to you as you slept?”
I shook my head solemnly as I began to walk again, this time trying to simply follow wherever the world was taking me. “Nope, not at all. It was complete and total silence, like I was battling Zmey one second and then the next, I was here.”
“Huh, interesting, perhaps after what happened, your soul also, in some ways, rested. This is all so fascinating… Perhaps…” He tapped his journal as I followed the sound of blades once more.
“Perhaps, you could do all the techniques you did against Zmey now as well?”
I stopped in my tracks and turned to face Godwin with a look of mystique. “Like… When I became lightning and shit? You know… I kinda want to do that again, that felt so sick to do, that and the other combos too, like I literally became water when he lit me on fire.”
Godwin nodded along, grinning ear to ear as if we were both schoolboys talking about our favorite characters’ powers. “Or when, after you surrounded him in water, you became that mountain! That was wonderful, you really did achieve Fated Magick!”
A small, proud grin came across my face as I crossed my arms. “I figured it was something like that. Fated Magick at my fingertips… The stories were all right, I felt so powerful, like I could do anything.”
I then raised my hands up, making buzzing noises as I tried to summon lightning from my fingertips. Yet even as Godwin stared intensely, waiting for the electric charges to fill the air… Nothing happened.
We both sighed in disappointment as Godwin stroked his chin. “Perhaps you need to fuse with the lightning nearby?”
I stared at him, completely confused, my eyebrows raised as I had just said. “Huh?”
“Clearly, in some shape or form, your power is linked with the ability to combine with souls. And, as Baba Roga said, everything in the world has a soul, I would garner to say that even natural calamities such as lightning had one.”
While everything he said lined up perfectly with how the world worked and how even my powers worked… I didn’t really like it. “But, if everything has a soul, do you think dust has a soul? Our molecules have a soul… Do you think our atoms have souls? Are we all just made up of-“
Godwin shook me by the shoulders. “Don’t think about it too hard. That’s how you become a Galle. Do not follow that path. Take a deep breath, let’s just assume that perhaps in this world there are no atoms or molecules, or that perhaps if there were, maybe they act as constituents rather than a whole entity.”
That kinda made some sense, but it didn’t sit right with me. If lightning could become a spirit, and even nebulous events such as memories… That opened up such a can of worms that I started to feel as if my skin crawled. The air around me began to grow thick, and my body shifted as if there really were multiple souls inside and outside of me.
‘Is my skin a bunch of souls stitched together? It’s made up of multiple cells… And those cells have individual molecules and then-;
“Peter Peter! Don’t… Think about it.” Godwin shook me once more as he snapped my mind back to reality. “We don’t have enough information as it is, and overthinking it like this won’t help.”
“Oh… Thanks- Wait, how did you know I was overthinking it? Can you read my mind to,o like Baba Yaga?”
He laughed and waved his hand. “No, of course not, it was just that suddenly I began to see the air around you become all smoky and your skin actually began to morph. It was quite unsettling, and I thought to myself that something must have been happening to you mentally.”
“Y-Yeah, well, you thought right- Wait.” I perked up as he mentioned that the air and my body began to change. Maybe he was onto something earlier when he said that lightning needed to be nearby.
I closed my eyes, raising my hand at a nearby rock, focusing myself for a bit.
‘I am the rock… I am the rock.’
I opened my eyes, finding myself in complete and total darkness, complete sensory deprivation, feeling only the void. In my shock, I jolted back to my senses, nearly stumbling back.
However, upon doing so, I saw that the rock actually tumbled a bit. To that, I raised my hands up high. “Yes! Ahah!”
Godwin turned to face the rock as well, raising his arms up in confused delight. “Yey! What are we celebrating?!”
“You were right, Professor. I just needed to be near an object and focus on it to actually control it. Although I can also try to become it… But I tried to be a rock and felt nothing, while when I was a worm, I could only differentiate light, so I’ll avoid that unless it’s for other living creatures.”
The Professor began to furiously note this down in his journal, nodding along with a massive grin on his face. “Wonderful! I wonder if there’s some way to test if this is still regular Magick or Fated Magick…”
I shrugged at that and marched along. “I think only folks like Baba Yaga could tell. Maybe we can ask her later.”
Finally, with my power, I closed my eyes, listening to the world around me as I focused on the flying critters above. I thought of myself as the bird, and suddenly, there I was, flying in the air, arms outspread as I looked below me.
‘Where are they…’
I muttered to myself in my mind, and then suddenly I found a few figures moving in the forest below. Focusing on it, my mind’s eye widened as I returned to my regular state, satisfied.
“But first, let’s go get to the others.”