Chapter 8

The hair on Titus’s neck stood on end as he crossed the tree line into the barren forest. At first, he thought there might be a predator or monster around, but he soon realized the feeling of alarm came from swiftly dropping temperature.

He turned around and saw a line in the western sky where the light gray clouds above turned ominously dark. What few details he could make out of the landscape below the divide quickly blurred and disappeared in the falling snow.

“Shit. Shit. Shit,” Titus spat as he turned and started running toward home. A gust of wind beat against his back, blowing the first snowflakes past him.

Should he turn and try to get back to Lylean? Would it be closer? Glancing over his shoulder, he asked himself if it would even matter.

“Think, Titus. Think. Think. Think,” he muttered as the gusts strengthened and began whipping the snow around him.

He wouldn’t make it home. That was guaranteed. As more snow joined the first few flakes, Titus realized that getting back to town was equally impossible. Damn it all to hell, he wasn’t some woodsman from Wisconsin or Upper Michigan. He was from a freaking small town in Ohio and had no clue how to survive out in a blizzard.

Titus had a small tent attached to his pack, but quickly dismissed the idea of trying to set it up. It would protect him from the wind somewhat, but the tiny, one-person tent would quickly collapse under the weight of the coming snow.

Well? What did he need? Shelter, first of all, but that was in short supply. The forest covered an area of low, rolling hills that offered no protection normally, but the nearly seven feet of snow had turned it into a flat plane of white. He also needed heat, enough to keep himself warm, which meant a fire. That fire needed fuel and he needed a place for the smoke to escape.

Titus realize he needed a damn igloo. But he didn’t have anything besides a dagger on his belt to cut out chunks of snow, didn’t have any idea how to build one, and didn’t have enough time anyway.

In the path up ahead, he saw three trees growing close together. Two stood straight, while the one in the middle leaned to one side, making it look like a thin letter N. After a quick glance around, he decided it was as good a shelter as he would find out here. Approaching the trees, Titus noticed the darker trees absorbed sunlight and warmed up, creating small areas of melted snow around their trunks that looked like the snow was going over a waterfall. This reminded him of the deep snow below him as he turned to face the biting wind and cast Floating Disc, but made it larger and oriented it vertically and put it between him and the wind. With tree trunks on either side, it was enough shelter to let him think.

As if angry that it had been thwarted for the moment, the blizzard gained intensity until Titus wondered if the disc would hold. He needed to find something out of the wind, or he was going to die out here.

With around two meters of snow beneath him, it seemed like his best bet was to go down. Titus formed the circle and muttered the words for the flamethrower spell they used to clear off the top of his and Alise’s house. Directing it toward his feet, he began melting a ramp downward.

However, the spell was intentionally weak, and that was working against him now. He and Alise used this spell for hours at a time to clear the snow from their house, but they needed to leave the grass and foliage undamaged. As the snow beneath his flames melted, the snowstorm gathered steam. The tunnel itself seemed determined to frustrate him as gusts of wind struck the front edge of the tunnel’s ceiling, breaking the loose snow and dropping it into the forming hole, and the freezing wind turned melted snow back to ice the moment he moved the jet of flame away.

The floating disc finally gave under the blizzard’s battering and cracked before vanishing. More pieces of the ramp’s roof fell under the onslaught of wind, but there was little he could do but carry on. He could have made another floating disc, but doubted it would have lasted more than a few seconds.

When he finally slipped down the icy ramp he had made, the wind howled above his head, and every tiny bit of his exposed skin was on fire from the insane cold of the blizzard. He remembered some nasty winters growing up, but nothing on par with this. He took a moment to summon another disk, this time placing it across the top of the hole. He then quickly dismissed it and summoned a second disc shaped like an oval as yet another chunk of the ceiling dropped onto his feet.

Titus took a few moments to breathe a sigh of relief in the dark, cold, wet, icy hole he had made. He wasn’t safe yet, but he at least didn’t feel like his life was in imminent danger anymore.

“Sorry, Alise, it looks like I’m going to be home late,” he whispered into the darkness before casting the flame jet again.

If not for magic, Titus had no doubt he would be a Titus-cicle buried in the snow beside the trees he took shelter in. But once he made it past the initial terror of being caught out in this storm, magic had made his life so much simpler.

After sealing the hole on the surface behind him, Titus melted his way down to the ground, which quickly turned into a large puddle from all the meltwater as he made enough room to stand upright. His oiled leather boots were up to the task of standing in the water as he planned out his abode for the next few days. About a half-meter off the ground, he began making his living chamber, then stopped as he realized he needed to do something with the meltwater first. Titus inspected the ground beneath the puddle and noticed a slight slope off to the right. As he began melting his way through the hardpack, the puddle followed him. He made a low-ceilinged, sizeable chamber where the meltwater could collect and hopefully soak into the ground over time. Returning to the entrance of his soon-to-be igloo, he used his belt knife to chip away some of the snow from the wall he was about to melt and used it to build up the snow at the bottom of the ramp, then realized he had an easier way to backfill the path to the ramp. Titus dispelled the floating disc protecting the entrance and sent a small avalanche down the frozen slope, depositing it at the bottom. He took a moment to summon another disc to block the freezing wind before starting to smooth and pack it down with his feet.

Titus frowned at the sheer amount of snow that had fallen down the ramp, and even now, he could hear more chunks sliding down and thumping into the other side of the floating disc. He knew that melting his way through meters of snow would take a while, but it still unnerved him how much had accumulated in a relatively short time.

Putting it out of his mind, Titus turned toward the opening he had already started as the flame he had been holding for light once again became a jet.

Titus woke up but didn’t open his eyes. There was little reason to. As the snow piled above his home for the past three days, his surroundings had become either dark, dark gray, or black inside, depending on the time of day. Because of the long winter nights, it was mostly black.

He heard the howling of the storm as it continued to rage above him and took a little solace in the fact that his ventilation hole wasn’t blocked. Yesterday, he needed to fire a flame arrow up the shaft to unclog it because none of his other flame spells could reach it. To keep it clear of snow, he cast the flame spell he used for starting fires in the fireplace.

The flame traveled lazily from his hand over to the middle of his igloo and came to rest on the pile of snow that had accumulated beneath the ventilation hole. Like his other flame spell, this one wasn’t strong, but it lasted for a long time and kicked out enough heat to keep the inside of his snow cave tolerable. The last part was mostly due to some modifications Titus made to the spell. The flame didn’t glow as brightly but produced significantly more heat. It now acted more like an omnidirectional infrared heat lamp. Mounded snow beneath the vent hole covered up another of the floating discs. However, while cast from the same spell, it wasn’t a disc but an upside-down dome that kept the floors from melting. Titus had to drag out some high-school geometry from the depths of his memories to figure out how to bend the floating disc. It took a number of tries, but he was quite happy with the result. Now, only a ring of the floor near the igloo’s wall sloped downward slightly from the flame, but that was fine as he had already hollowed out channels along the wall to direct meltwater into the drainage area.

His cavern had grown several times larger than when he first dug it out, thanks to the dull flame in the middle, but it seemed as though an equilibrium had been forged between the heat of the flame and the freezing snow. The walls were coated with a layer of clear ice, which did little to impede the flame’s radiant heat. Instead, the snow behind it melted, but the water quickly re-froze into even more clear ice that allowed the process to continue. When he measured it last night, the ice shell of his igloo was about the length of his index finger thick.

Titus whispered a quiet apology to everyone who had been stuck out in a blizzard like this and either fought like hell to survive or lost the battle and succumbed to the weather. After those first few tense minutes, this life-threatening situation had turned into more of an annoyance than anything. Now, his greatest enemy was boredom as he waited for the storm to blow itself out.

But he decided quickly to do something with his time stuck there. Alise said that storms could last a week or more, so once he had attained some degree of comfort and security, Titus began tunneling into the snow around him.

First on his agenda was a toilet of sorts. Food wasn’t an issue since he could magic up a meal, but the digested remnants were. He built a somewhat winding tunnel in hopes of trapping any smells, then melted a hole he could squat over. The winding tunnel ended up being mostly useless when he realized that burying the waste with snow was enough to kill the smell.

The second chamber he built was for studying. He made the walls of the room as flat as possible, then charred the end of a stick and used it as a pen to write out his ideas. It was far from perfect. The char on the stick’s tip didn’t last long when writing, and the only place he could get them was usually flooded with meltwater, but it gave him something to do while he waited out the blizzard.

With nothing but time, Titus turned his thoughts toward creating magical macros again, but with little progress. Magic was, in essence, instructions on how to warp reality. He couldn’t figure out a way to embed those instructions in a smaller spell. It was almost as if he needed some kind of intermediary step, a cipher of sorts that could take his simple instruction and expand it into the words and will required to cast.

The thought perplexed him as the igloo warmed enough to rise from his sleeping roll. Titus wandered down to the toilet and made some yellow snow in the bottom before returning to the main chamber and conjuring up some food.

The trip to the toilet brought up his other issue. The Hero’s libido.

Maybe because his dick never got a chance to rest while in Lylean, his libido seemed to be in overdrive. He hadn’t masturbated since he and Alise began sleeping together, with the exception of the times they watched each other, and he didn’t have any proper lube anyway. There were also the memories of his old life, where he spent more time in Rosy Palmer’s embrace than he cared to admit. He figured he had jerked off enough in his past life to fill his quota for this one as well. As usual, ye olde trouser snake didn’t give two shits about his feelings and conjured memory after memory of sinking his cock into Alise, Beri, Adaya, and Raithe.

He managed to fend off the arousing memories long enough to piss and get his dick back in his pants, but by the time he reached the main chamber, he could feel the intrusive thoughts making him grow again.

His study chamber helped take his mind off the complaints of his body. With his light spell floating above him, Titus walked through the short hallway to inspect the night’s damage. Scribbling in hard snow with the charcoal on the end of a burnt stick was less than ideal, and every time he slept, it took about twenty minutes to repair all the places where his impromptu ink had run or otherwise disappeared. His mind returned to the idea of a cipher or key that would allow him to input the word ‘Fire’ and output the instructions for the spell, along with the will needed to cast it. But how do you store one’s will or intention?

Titus drew a circle and etched the spell for Hold Monster into it. No, that wouldn’t work. It stopped the target from moving but didn’t enforce your will onto it. Sleep probably just fiddled with the target’s brain chemistry, and he suspected the Charm spell triggered a massive dopamine hit whenever the victim looked at the caster. The Command spell seemed close to what he was looking for, but what exactly would he be commanding, magic itself? It was also very restricted by its single-word limitation. He needed it to form multiple words and their corresponding symbols.

He also didn’t have much experience with the spell. It required the target to understand your language and, to a lesser extent, the desire behind it, which made the spell useless against animals or even someone who didn’t speak your language. Aside from Alise, there had been no one to practice it on. Other than a short study of its potential uses like ‘Leave,’ ‘Grovel,’ and ‘Strip,’ the last of which Alise gleefully offered to be the victim of his practice, he hadn’t paid much attention to the spell. With all of its limitations, he doubted Command was actually enforcing your will on someone else and was more like a short-term hypnosis.

Titus grumbled at the thought. He wanted magic to be this amazing power that could bend reality to perform miraculous feats. It still bent those rules, which was miraculous in itself, but instead it seemed to be doing cheap tricks by playing with people’s heads. Titus wasn’t comfortable with the idea that this type of magic was just a faster form of hypnosis, but more importantly, if it was, then that made it useless for what he wanted to do.

He scribbled the Fireball spell on the wall, then put Flame Arrow right next to it. They shared numerous symbols, one of which he recognized as ‘Fire,’ but most of the others were mysteries.

“If I were going to create an arrow of flame, what would I need to do?” he asked the spells on the wall. “If you answer that, I’ll know I’ve gone completely nuts,” Titus chuckled before contemplating the spell in front of him. “I need fuel, oxygen, and ignition. Fuel must be the hydrogen in the air. That would take care of oxygen as well, but most of that hydrogen is tied up in water vapor. I would need to break the oxygen from the hydrogen to create enough fuel to sustain an arrow. If I compress the gases enough, they will heat up and auto-ignite. Now I have burning hydrogen and oxygen trapped in a narrow tube.” Titus sighed. “Flame Arrow is just a damn rocket without a body. Wait, no. The symbol for ‘Fire’ is in there, so it has an ignition aspect and doesn’t light itself.” Even so, the spell made the arrow hold its shape as it traveled and, he guessed, continued feeding it fuel and oxygen for a brief moment after it launched.

The Fireball spell was more confusing as it had a bunch of extra symbols. There must have been something else in the fuel mixture besides hydrogen. He had seen enough science experiments popping balloons with hydrogen, oxygen, and a mixture of the two to know that fireballs wouldn’t make ‘whoosh’ and linger for a few seconds if that were the case. Actually, from playing around with things he shouldn’t have as a kid, Titus guessed it probably was something close to propane.

“If the Flame Arrow spell splits the oxygen and hydrogen in the air and burns them back together, why not split apart some carbon dioxide and create a hydrocarbon in an oxygen envelope?” he asked aloud.

“Very good. The surrounding free oxygen makes the created propane burn hot enough to make the spell dangerous,” said a voice from beside him.

Titus turned to look at the speaker and blinked repeatedly. “I expected the hallucinations to start after more than a few days had passed.”

Saili giggled. “I’m no hallucination.”

“I never expected to see you again,” Titus chuckled at the pink hologram of a nude woman floating beside him.

The hologram looked around. “This seemed like an opportune time to come chat with you since there is no chance of anyone seeing me.”

“But, why?”

“Because you are interesting, Titus. Theus isn’t willing to allocate the processing power to look into your future because you aren’t a true Hero. You are an unknown variable we planted in this world, and I find that fascinating.”

“That sounds like watching a single ant in an ant farm.”

“Given the difference in technologies, your analogy isn’t far off the mark.”

“So what is it that you find so fascinating about me? Have I done anything in particular to catch your attention?”

“Aside from manipulating spells in different ways to suit your needs and things like this,” she waved at the wall filled with magic symbols, “No, not really. But I find your mind to be fascinating. So many of those we’ve swapped bodies for have gone mad or grown to hate themselves. You have repeatedly vanquished the thoughts that destroyed the psyche of many others.”

“You make it sound like mistakes like mine happen all the time.”

“Approximately one in every hundred thousand.”

“That seems high for a computer able to extrapolate my future from a few molecules.”

“I see your point, but that was because you were lying on a bed in our transfer bay. My accuracy drops significantly when reaching across dimensional barriers. There are just too many variables to account for. I had scanned the young man at the bus stop months earlier and determined that was the best time to take him,” her eyes unfocused for a moment. “You were still supposed to be walking toward him when the truck pulled out in front of you. I was supposed to take him while you and the driver had a short yelling match. Instead, you were early.”

“And I’m so insanely happy for that. I love Alise more than I ever loved any of my girlfriends on Earth.”

“What about the women you spent the weekend with?”

“Friends with benefits, but I don’t think we see each other as anything more.”

“I can’t give you a full future, but I can say that you should keep your heart open to other women.”

Titus’s eyes widened. “Did something happen to Alise?”

“No, but I see the threads of many women of this world intersecting with yours, and I don’t mean your side business.”

“You aren’t mad about that, are you?”

“Not at all. If it were up to Theus and I, you would have a line of women from all over this world waiting to sleep with you one after the other. But that isn’t practical, and you wouldn’t enjoy it.”

“I may have asked this before, but why not just transfer a small packet of nanites into everyone every so often instead of asking the hero to re-innoculate the populace?”

“Energy. Dimensional transfers take a lot of energy. Doing what you suggest would quickly overtax me, and I monitor tens of thousands of planets at once. Using Heroes may be a lot slower, but have proven just as effective. Effective enough that your presence alone has made Theus put off the search for this world’s replacement Hero.”

“How? I was only with a few women.”

“Yes, but some of them have the same idea as you in making some money, though they will quickly discover that my blessing has diminishing returns as they will mostly pass on enough to replenish what has been lost over generations and only offer a minor boost to their partner’s abilities. However, that boost will still be enough for others to seek them out. The adventurers here are a pragmatic group who will invest in even a small enhancement if it means better chances of survival.

“The other has already inoculated the rest of her party and is enjoying her newfound power and popularity. She will likely be propositioned by other parties as soon as she returns to a guild house. Once the blizzard passes and travel is possible, ‘Saili’s Blessing’ will spread rapidly just from those few women.”

“Seven degrees?”

“Something like that, but we need it to happen on a global scale, not just your Hollywood. Those few women seem to be on your mind at the moment,” she said, commenting on the tent in his pants.