The Fountains Of Aescalon: Connected Realms, #1

By Dan Melson

The first thing Alexan knew was standing over an impossible corpse with an ichor-stained sword.

 

Exiled from home for reasons of politics and health, he has to orient himself in a new home, but he still has the skills he was 'born' with, skills which make him a wizard in his new homeland.  A blasted, sterile cavern has many portals, but the one he chooses leads to the top of a huge tree, the source of magical power for an entire world.

 

Power is plentiful in Aescalon, but those who have it want to keep it all for themselves, and the arrival of a new wizard upsets the balance.  It seems everyone who doesn't attack immediately wants something from him - including a cursed demi-goddess desperate to escape her fate who thinks Alexan may be able to help her.

 

But Alexan can't even help himself until he unravels the secrets of The Fountains of Aescalon

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dan Melson
• Release date: Apr 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386681748

Dan Melson

Dan Melson is married to the World's Only Perfect Woman.  They have two daughters in training for world domination.  They live in Southern California

Book preview

Chapter One

Splinter

The first thing I remember was a sword in my hand and a corpse in front of me.

The corpse looked human, but wasn’t.  Judging strictly by outer appearance, it would have passed.  Looking inside at the organs and genetic material, a star dragon was more closely related.  At least a star dragon came from a three dimensional being.  This corpse in front of me was from a different sort of place entirely.  The body I was looking at was put together in a place of differing geometry.  Fractal iterations within it said that it came from a place where the third spatial dimension wasn’t as developed as we’re used to.

My sword was real, but felt wrong.  It was a standard charged bondsteel blade, a glossy dark gray in color.  It should have been sparkling blue and silver, but it wasn’t.  What had initially appeared to be blood dripping off it was now changing, reverting to its true state - a two toned ugly blue and blackish green - as the glamour faded.

How did I know these things?

Good question.  I could not remember anything that had gone before.  Not who I was, not what I was, not where I was, where I was from.  Nothing.  I couldn’t remember anything about how my dead opponent had gotten there, how I’d killed it, how or why we’d fought.

Logically, my memories should have been accessible to me through auros, even if I couldn’t remember normally.  But they refused to come.  I tried perception, hoping to read the molecules themselves, only to discover I didn’t have any.  I wasn’t material at all; simply a self-perpetuating energy pattern.

That wasn’t right, or at least wasn’t the whole story.  I thought of myself as human, I identified as human, my mind told me I was a loyal adherent of humanity and the Human Empire.  I was, at some level, both human and somehow important within that Empire.

There had to be an explanation that made sense, I just didn’t know what it was at the moment.  Knowledge filled me - all about the Human Empire, its history, cultures, and technology.  I knew an uncountable number of facts about the universe and how it behaved in exhaustive mathematical detail.  I had skills and abilities beyond the average human – I’d read the corpse in front of me with perception and compared it to a large number of other biologicals (the star dragon being a large predator of the interstellar depths and one of the most alien species humanity had encountered).   I could even use those skills.  I just couldn’t have told you who I was – or even what I was.

I wasn’t in custody, and was obviously considered a responsible adult, as I was armed not only with the sword, but also several other weapons, weapons that obviously belonged where I was wearing them.  Nobody sane lets children or the insane wander about multiply armed.  So the first hypothesis was that I had known who I was until the last few minutes at the very most.  The second hypothesis was that my late adversary was somehow responsible for my loss of identity.

I couldn’t detect any alarms going off, so whatever our combat had been, it had evidently escaped notice somehow.  Nor were there any further evident threats, so I put the sword away, in a pocket made by kored.  Not that there was anything unusual about being armed in the Empire, but having it drawn would draw attention.  To unaided vision, I would appear unarmed.  Not that appearances meant much in the Empire.

The excitement of the moment passing, I suddenly realized how weak I was.  It was bad.  With normal human eyesight, I could see through my visual projection.  That was a sign that collapse of the field was imminent.  My power levels weren’t just low, they was practically empty.

This energy field couldn’t eat like normal people could.  My only means of sustenance was using matra to pull energy from the environment around me.  The trouble was that I was almost out of energy to make it happen.  I let my image fade more, weakening the basic field that was me to free up enough power to draw.  This area was heavily served by power; I could feel it coursing through conduits and machinery nearby.  I wanted to find a siphon I could control to draw from, but I dared not delay.  Instead I drew a trickle from a converter line I could reach, hoping the drain wouldn’t be noticed.

It was almost too late.  At first, power intake was barely more than I was spending to keep the channel open and drawing, but I didn’t have any choice.  In the first minute, I barely pulled a sixtieth more than I was using in order to keep the draw and myself going.  Maybe two iprime – a couple shakes of seasoning worth.  That might be enough energy to keep me going a quarter hour if I had no other demands.

But once obtained, that little extra allowed cracking the tap a little wider.  The power used was linear – what came back was based upon the power investment squared.  Given that maintaining myself was about a fifteenth of what I started with, being able to add just a little bit more meant I could recharge more quickly.  I widened my tap and increase my draw as fast as I had the resources.  The second minute my net energy increase was close to triple what I’d started with, and by the time I’d been drawing for three minutes, I had another twelve iprime.  That would last an hour or so, during which time I’d have enough spare power to maybe do something like find myself a siphon I could control.  It was time to leave here before what I was doing was noticed.

While charging, I’d asked myself How much do I know about where I am?  The answer was a significant amount, even though it had to be restricted information.  I was in the Planning section at Imperial military headquarters on Nexus Prime.  Public plans for the area overlaid with what I personally knew about.  I had to be someone important within the Empire to know so much about one of the most sensitive and important installations in the entire Empire.  I asked myself, Where do I live? and got nothing.  But Where would others expect to find me? was something I knew, and it was even worse: the heart of the Capitol Complex on Nexus itself.

One advantage of being insubstantial energy was that teleporting from place to place cost almost no energy, but that kind of jump was still out of the question in my current state.  Interplanetary teleports were possible, even routine, but the energy cost now would put me below what I absolutely had to have in order to sustain myself.  That was a decidedly nonviable plan.  So I asked myself, What’s the closest place I control?  I figured I might have a transient room somewhere, but the answer came back indefinite – too many answers.  Finally, What’s the easiest place to get to where I can be safe while I draw some power? gave me a useful answer – roughly an isquare habitat north by half that spinward.  Close enough that I could spare the energy to teleport directly, and best of all I had the relative positions stored.  Blink! and there I was.  Nobody else was present.  Yes, there was even a dedicated siphon – not a big one, but not shared, either.  I took control and started to draw power.  The situation had become significantly less dire and immediate.

Better didn’t mean the same thing as good, however.  I might have a safe space for a while, but that wasn’t the same thing as safe.  And I was still no closer to figuring out who I was.  Or what I was.  I thought of myself as human, I was patterned after humans, but I wasn’t human, at least right now.  I was acting like a variety of human: a mindlord, the multitasking operant human, used to working on several independent tasks at once.  But I obviously wasn’t human, at least not right now.  Was there something down beneath, secretly controlling me, that wasn’t human?

I searched the room where I was via perception.  There wasn’t anything personal here.  It seemed to be a transient rental for short term stays, but there wasn’t anything around that belonged to me.  Not even any shed DNA.  Whatever I was, wherever or whomever I’d come from, they hadn’t been here.  I’d been on my own at least since I’d been in this area.  How long before that was open to discovery.

Track back.  I was patterned after humans.  Was I patterned after a specific human?  That had the feel of rightness about it.  Furthermore, I could find no references to sentient self-perpetuating energy beings like myself in the database.  Therefore it seemed likely that knowledge of entities like myself had to be somehow restricted to a very few.  Imperial data was set up for dissemination, not secrecy.  It was almost impossible to remove something from public data once it was in public data.  Once beyond a small control group, knowledge would propagate uncontrollably. 

I was beyond even tantsi or teltsi in power, meaning ultsi or pentsi were the only options that explained me.  I knew how to use these mental abilities I had obviously possessed for some time on an almost instinctual level.  Only personal memory remained stubbornly absent.  In the absence of said memories, there was no proof my knowledge and skills were intact, but that knowledge and those skills were sufficiently broad it seemed likely.  A quick scan of a newsfeed disclosed I knew the rules and skills of every profession referenced, from investigator to police response units to military to civil government to social actuary.  Whomever furnished my pattern had a lot of experience or an amazingly broad education.  Likely both.

Meanwhile, I kept charging until storage had close to four prime of reserve mass energy, thousands of times more than I had when I arrived.  I wasn’t close to capacity, but wasn’t likely to use enough to threaten running out any time soon.

I checked the accounting of this rental.  I’d evidently arrived yesterday, paid for a week in advance.  The identity that had paid for the room, however, was a brand new generic graycode – created just to hold cash.  No history, no name, no qualifications.  Seeing the graycode account, I remembered the validations for it.  Entering them so I could examine my records, I saw that the only deposit, of two square luc, had come from another graycode.  I thought I remembered the validations for that one also, but they showed as invalid when I entered them.  Either my memory was mistaken, or they’d been changed.  Since only the holder of the account should have known those validations, something was not as it should have been.  Either the other graycode had been stolen somehow, or it had never been mine.  My attempts to trace who I was via records had come to a dead end.

Why I’d even wanted a room was another question I didn’t have an answer to.  I knew that as an energy field such as I was, I had no need for sleep.  If I had any luggage that was not in one of the kored pockets carried with me, it was not in evidence.  The best hypothesis I had now as that I’d wanted to insure unmonitored access to the siphon.

Speaking of which, I didn’t see a reason not to keep drawing up to my capacity.  Nobody ever lost a duel through having too much energy stored.  I realized that I didn’t absolutely need the siphon at this point as I’d be able to draw directly via matra now that I wasn’t on my last dregs of power, but it was easier to use the siphon.  I kept up a steady draw, two bars per second.  I’d realize I was coming to a plateau in plenty of time to stop.

That begun, I made a list of my needs.

First was a body – an actual human body.  Through healing and perception, I knew enough of the principles to create one myself.  After consideration of the difficulties of sustaining life in a partial body, I realized it would be easier to start from a single cell embryo.  It would take time, and it might take several attempts because What causes operancy? was one of the few questions the Empire didn’t have a complete answer to.  I knew the person I’d been patterned after had been operant, because if not, I wouldn’t have been operant either.  But I didn’t have the genetic pattern to work with.  I had to have arrived here as I was, an energy field.  The samples of human tissue that were present in the difficult to clean parts of the room predated my arrival.

Either parent having effective operancy index of Red four point twentytwo or better would insure that all of their children were operant, and I was significantly above that.  I hadn’t stretched my limits yet, but I knew I had to be either a six or a seven.  Below that, all that was publicly known were the actuarial tables.  The problem was that I wasn’t combining an operant’s human sperm and egg; I’d be creating the entire genetic pattern from scratch.  The lesser outcome of going operant later did not appeal to me.  I needed an operant body to support my abilities.  I was in no position to conduct leisurely experiments.  I could defend my volume from perception, but probably sooner rather than later, I’d encounter someone who’d note the discrepancies and take action.  Especially here in Nexus system, which had a disproportionate number of the Empire’s strongest operants.

Having a body would also allow me to recharge by eating.  Until you are in a situation where you can’t, you don’t really appreciate how important that is.  It would also mean I wouldn’t have to expend power on any of those things a body could do for you, like wield weapons.

After I had a body, some means of earning income was probably the next most important.  I’d spent just shy of two prime luc for the room, leaving me with roughly one square fifty-eight to my name.  Basic living would cost roughly thirty prime per year, so it wasn’t an immediate need, but what I had wouldn’t stretch indefinitely.  My graycode was an adult’s, but other than that it came with no attestations of skill or experience.  I could pay evaluators for assessments, but those weren’t cheap.  I needed something people would hire me for as soon as it could be arranged.

And then I got a message through my graycode, a short phrase in mindlord that primary decoded into Obscure event line immediately.  Helpful package sent.  Understand must leave the Empire.  The secondary decode seemed to make sense in context as well.  Will allow six weeks.  Willing to meet once.  Your brother.

Once I’d had my attention called to it, I knew how to obscure my event line.  I barely had to think about it – it was evidently something I had a lot of experience with.  It took one of my para away from whatever else I might need it for, but that was an acceptable price.  Keeping my event line obscured would prevent others from finding me via kored.

There had also been a new deposit in my account – a full cube.  That wasn’t exactly small change by anyone’s standards.  You could buy a small merchant cruiser, lightly armed by Imperial standards but still capable of destroying unshielded planets, for roughly half that.  The deposit had come from the same account as had originally created mine.

The implication was obvious.  I was being given money to buy what I wanted to take with me.  As for an alleged brother, no confirmation one way or another.  Since I knew I was either pentsi or ultsi, I had to be either related somehow to the Fifteen Families or a significant player in my own right.  At those exalted levels, the rivalries got intense and deadly.  The Aree, after tens of thousands of years, still only had three really adult members.  None of the Fifteen Families had more than twenty living members.  If I had a brother, it would imply that I was Fifteen Families, but I might merely have someone posing as a brother, in which case I was in deadly danger.  I’d have to wait and see.

The fact that I’d been warned to obscure my event line argued in favor of whomever had sent the message being benevolent, but not strongly so.  If an enemy found me first, would a rival Family be willing to spend a cube to have an ultsi enemy quit the Empire voluntarily?  Yes.  By comparison with the alternative of coming after me personally, it was both lower risk and more certain.  It would also keep any allies from finding me to prevent it.

Suppose I decided to trace my own event line back?  I tried, and came to a dead end at the point I was standing over my dead adversary with my sword.  I tried forcing it back further, and there just wasn’t any more.  It was like I had come into existence at that moment, despite the fact I had access to a large library of skills and knowledge that had to have been built up over many sixties of years, if not 3600s.  My event line did not go any further back.

Would I leave the Empire?  Right now I didn’t see any reason to.  It would take a lot of convincing to even consider it.  And if so,