An Arcane Engineer in Another World: Book I, Exile, chapter 6

Seconds later, a set of big claws penetrated the metal of the doors and yanked them out. In the light of my spells, something loomed in the gap.

Teeth, matted fur… bones shining through, and a pair of eyes gleaming with greenish light.

Fuck! I jumped back. It wasn’t an unclean spirit; it was an elemental, probably born of the hunger of the animal.

But what the hell—think later! I barely managed to avoid a swipe from its claws, the brown fur falling out as it moved.

It turned and looked at me as it advanced.

If I stab it will it… Shit I don’t know!  I hadn’t ever had to face an elemental like this before. And if I had, I’d have called the guard like a smart person.

It charged me and I dove to the side, the entire structure shuddering as it struck the wall. Then it was getting up, ignoring the fact that it had smashed in its muzzle, bits of bone and flesh falling onto the floor.

If it got me, it wouldn’t be able to eat me—the elemental was working on urges, not need.

Not that it’d help me at that point.

It turned and faced me, and the bubbling growl came from it, the remaining skin stretched tight over ribs.

What do I… My hand went into my pocket and I felt one of the heat stones.

Right.  I pulled the stone out and then dodged again as the bear tried to murder me, sending my little collecting of goods skittering across the floor and incidentally, making me drop the stone.

“SHIT!” I shouted and dove for it, managing to grab it, rolling to my side just in time to avoid the critter’s claws.

I dodged back, my free hand digging for my stylus.

C’mon, c’mon…

What I was about to do was the kind of thing that got apprentices reprimanded—or arrested in the worst case.

Normally, a heat stone released its heat slowly.

But if you screwed up the ritual, or damaged it in a certain way…it’d give up all of its heat, very, very quickly.

But it wouldn’t be something I could control. I jumped away from another charge, and then was standing, facing the dead creature, a bear I realized. One hand held the stone; the other with my stylus.

I’m gonna have to time this very, very, close. If I screwed up… Well there were no hospitals here to treat a burned hand.

“C’mon!” I shouted, and it charged. I waited… then drew the stylus across the stone, connecting two symbols and then as I felt it grow hot then searing, dove to the side and stuck it into the bear’s side, through one of the gaps in its skin.

It turned to get me and then paused, shaking its head. Elementals that had taken a body didn’t feel pain or sensations, not like biological beings did. In the old days, that’d been a way to detect them if you didn’t have any magic. Animals would avoid thorns or other objects, but a body possessed by an elemental didn’t care if its skin was torn to hells.

But there was a difference between a few tears and a heat stone giving up four hours' worth of heat in around twenty seconds. It rose up on its hind legs as the yellow light started to shine through the gaps in its skin, a hissing sound rising. And then…

“Oh shit!” I shouted and dove behind a rack of tools. I’d figured it would burn it, but forgot—it was mostly a frozen body and heat plus ice produced steam… a lot of steam…

Which was why the bear roared once…and then exploded, most of its body flying across the room and hitting the walls. Then it collapsed, twitched once and stopped moving. I stood up and worked the ritual of mage sight and…

The elemental was gone, disrupted.

Unlike spirits, elementals were ephemeral. They couldn’t reform, being more like a thunderstorm or forest fire than a living being, no matter what form they took.

But if they formed around a formerly living being, they patterned off of its behavior. The bear was hungry, so the elemental acted like a hungry bear, using its own senses to track me.

“And now I have to move into the front,” I muttered. At least the explosion had missed most of my gear, so I wouldn’t have to clean it up.

****

The front room was colder, and I used another heat stone to make some warmth as I set up a little tent behind the counter. I was tired but a bit too jittery to go to sleep.

I don’t think there’s another one out there, but why the hell was there even one?

Elementals had been a big problem during the Wyld Age, but that had been thousands of years ago, before damping rituals had been designed. Since then they either had to be deliberately conjured or something very nasty happen to call them up. But that’s why…

Oh. Fuck.

I looked at the atlas and the newspapers. They didn’t say a thing about magic. Not a single structure had any magical enchantments or artifacts. Not a single one. Not a light stone, or even a typical house-blessing.

I knew it, but I hadn’t thought about it. If there was magic here now, there hadn’t been. IF there was magic here…

No ward stones. No history of thousands of years of mages and shamans domesticating magic. Even I, who spent way too much time looking at the opposite sex, remembered the history lessons about the Magery Revolution, right up there with the discovery of farming and writing. The revolution where mankind and related species stopped being “priests” and worshipping magic phenomena, and started shaping them. When your response to elementals running wild wasn’t human sacrifice but putting out a ward stone to damp out the mana currents.

Not just one kingdom or one era. Thousands of years. Modern rituals were better, but nearly every village had a local wardstone, the inscriptions nearly effaced by time, but still working to the point where we actually had to establish preserves, deliberately kept free of our workings, to see what the world had been like during the Wyld Age.

There was an elemental here. I didn’t know why, but everything I’d seen meant that they didn’t have any knowledge of magery.

So if there was an elemental here, something was changing.

And that meant…

This world was about to enter it’s own Wyld Age.

“I should have charged a lot more for those Gods damned damping rituals,” I muttered. Because you really need to stay alive now.  Unless someone else had come from my world… I looked down and patted the book. You’re the only damned person who can save these people.

If any are alive.

And on that comforting note, I leaned back and listened to the howl of the wind.