Chapter 10: I Need a Fucking Drink

My best friend was a were-cat

I stood there a while digesting the news “Who else knows?” I finally asked.

“About me? No one. My parent, the one who turned me, died.” Isiah looked down, took a deep breath and exhaled. “I was out in the woods hunting, when I found this woman. She was bleeding from these horrific wounds on her chest, so I quickly went to help her. She thought she was under attack so she slashed me, nearly killing me. The next thing I know I am waking up in her arms with a metal taste in my mouth. She explained that she had been attacked by a pack of were-wolves, and she almost killed me by accident. She explained that she had turned me to save my life. Weres are really hard to kill, so she lived for 10 days before succumbing to her injuries, she taught me all she could during those 10 days. It has been 5 years since, I figured out most of the rest on my own.”

“Thank you for telling me.” I said.

“Now we know each other’s secrets.” He said. “Although I know you aren’t telling me everything, like how you really learnt to fight.”

“Mages and weres both live for an extremely long time, I am sure that in time we will know everything about each other.” This was true, truly powerful mages could live up to 5000yrs old (not to mention I was an immortal) and weres could live for almost 2000yrs, but they rarely did, due to the constant interspecies wars. Fighting like cats and dogs had a completely different meaning in the true world.

“So what do we do now?” Isiah asked.

“We hide amongst the humans and carry on. I suppose, technically we should be on the side of the witch, but my parents were humans, all of the people I know are humans ... I just can’t side with the witch” I said.

“No, you idiot. I meant what do we do now?” he said bursting out into laughter

“Well, I feel like I am about to make a breakthrough in power and I have no tent. Would you mind being my lookout as I meditate?”

I sat down to meditate, folding my legs underneath me. I opened up my connection to the void. Two tiny holes opened up on the palms of my hand, I started gathering the energy into my meridians, the gaseous vortex of void energy in my core started to rotate. My meridians started to vibrate, phasing in and out of reality until they achieved a quantum state of duality, being both here and in the void at the same time. I clapped my hands together, completing the circuit. The energy started to rotate through my body. Each rotation seemed to speed up the vortex, increasing its centripetal force, causing the gaseous vortex to compress into itself. The speed of the vortex rotation kept increasing, until I reached 99 rotations; normally at this point the vortex would have reached its apex of speed and collapsed back out, like a hurricane losing energy and turning back into a tropical storm. But this time it didn’t, I managed to break past the 99 rotation barrier reaching a 100 rotations and the vortex imploded inwards. The vortex turned inwards forming a ball which kept condensing in on itself. After what felt like hours the ball condensed into a singularity and then exploded. The void energy washed through my body. I braced myself for pain expecting the void energy to rip my organs apart to reforge them, again. The pain I was expecting never came; instead all I got was a cool refreshing sensation as if jumping into a refreshing pool on a hot summer’s day. The void energy that rushed in was different from before. It was denser, almost a liquid, it was much more compressed and more potent. It went into all the cells and caused a qualitative change to the void energy inside those cells. I felt refreshed, like I had boundless energy and I couldn’t get tired, no matter how much I worked. Previously I had a near infinite stamina, but that was mainly an inexhaustible mental stamina, my body still got tired, but my mind would push past those limits. Now it felt those physical limits simply no longer existed.

I breathed in deeply and exhaled. I was finally a true mage, with the ability to enter the true world, whatever that actually meant. I looked inside myself to see what changes had occurred to my core. Gone was the simple gaseous vortex, now there was a circular liquid ball of void energy surrounded by a spiralling disk of gaseous void energy clouds: Like a newly formed protostar surrounded by its circumstellar disk. These gas clouds were constantly being condensed into a liquid and accreted into the core. My meridians were now in a constant quantum dual phase, pulling in just enough energy from the void to sustain the slow expansion of the liquid protostar that was now at my core.

I opened my eyes, they adjusted to the dark instantly, I was able to see much more clearly in the dark, it wasn’t like I expected it to be, everything was in different shades of blue, purple or black, you could guess at the actual colour of things but it was all just a blue-purple. Even the grass was more purple than green.

“Before you even say anything, go to the stream and clean up. Jeez you stink” Isiah said, he was standing about 10 yards away from me holding his nose.

I sniffed the air, BIG MISTAKE, holly hell I stunk. There was an oily film of impurities stuck on my skin slowly drying into a smelly crusty mess. This was all the stuff ejected from my cells when they were “washed”. I quickly ran to the stream which was nothing more than an artificial water channel that was diverted from the River Soar to bring water to the farms.

After a thorough cleaning, I sniffed myself again. Satisfied that I was clean, I dried myself and changed into new clothing. Those old clothes needed to be burnt, they were covered in David’s blood from last night and now the filth from whatever came out of my every pore. Without even thinking I manipulated the void to be in anti-phase with the world, I used this discordant edge to vaporise those old clothes. This power could be useful, but I wasn’t strong enough to sustain this power for long.

I walked up to Isiah. “Thanks for looking out for me, I felt like the breakthrough was imminent and I couldn’t waste the opportunity.” I said gratefully

“That power of yours is really useful” He ignored my thanks and said, looking at my clothes. “What else have you got stored in there?”

“Anything and everything, I have my whole life’s possessions stored inside. It is very useful in that way. “ I said looking up at the sky; it was still at least a couple of hours until dawn.

Suddenly I felt all of the night’s events crash down on me. I had killed someone. I had taken a life. At that moment my new reality finally sank in. Even after almost 4 months of living here in the 6^th century I still thought of myself as a 21 year old from modern England, temporarily stuck back in time. I had half expected John to Deus ex Machina his way into my life at the first sign of trouble and whisk me back to my present time and into my safe life. I was finally accepting my new reality, I was stuck here, out of my depth, in a time not my own and a reality that I barely recognised anymore. My best friend was a were-cat.

Thinking of Isiah also reminded me of the fact that Isiah had also shot David. I sat down opposite Isiah and said “That was the first person I have ever killed. I should be freaking out, but I am not. That is what is freaking me out.”

“Maybe it’s because I am no longer a human, maybe it is because I grew up a huntsman. I didn’t really feel anything when I took aim and loosed that arrow. He was just another deer for me to kill. Perhaps that makes me a monster, but that’s what I am now” he said transforming his hands into claws, his eyes going yellow with an eerie glow, his slit like cats eyes dilating into vertical eye shapes in the night