Propagated Cracks

She opened her eyes with a start, with a pounding headache and stinging pain from her forehead, lying prostrate in the dust.

She had been dreaming of a time when she was much younger, when she still had family left alive, before the earth had fractured as it did. She delighted in the sun, the singing chorus of birds, and the verdant grass of their final family picnic.

It was a rather abrupt shift of frame of mind to awake in the world as it was now. She rolled onto her back and looked up to see the cracked glass of her front window. Through it, she saw the gray-orange color of the sky, sunlight now having to fight through a thick layer of dense magical mist, one of the first things that had come up from the earth. The arcane mist now hung 30 stories in the air, a haze that many of the buildings downtown rise into. She remembered when her father and brother went to scout the Arcan-O-Corp tower looking for channeling stones. They had needed them to power an AOC1201 Warding System to protect their home and supplies from scavengers. But, her father and brother never returned, and the warding remained dormant. It wasn’t much longer before she lost the rest of her family to scavengers and had to flee and wander on her own, becoming a scavenger herself.

In time, she made her way across the reversed-gravity field of Darlings trench and found her way to the small house she lived in now at the trench’s center. She remembered first seeing the house, floating ten feet above the mouth of the trench. She remembered throwing a stone across to try to hit the house, but seeing the stone fall upwards into the arcane mist above. What kept the house at the center floating there, without falling either way? Some effects of the magic seeping up through the cracked earth defied the laws of nature and logic and knowability.

Her deep dive down memory lane was interrupted by rustling coming from her storage room straight down the hallway. She moved her hand up to her chest with a start and felt great relief to find her grandmother’s heart-shaped locket still around her neck. It wasn’t anything too valuable, just a small brass heart, but it was one of the last connections she had to her family and the life she had once known.

She hopped up to her feet quickly and quietly, but swayed back and forth, now realizing her dizziness. With a hand raised up to her forehead, she saw some of her blood on the ground and pieced together what had happened. She thought she had seen a shifting shadow in the mist above and looked out the window intently. Someone must have snuck into her house, crept up behind her, and hit her in the back of the head. How did they make it across the trench? Regardless, they had to be stopped. She had food and supplies stocked up to allow for her to survive for a while she tried to find a sustainable source of food. She needed as much time as she could get.

She walked down the hall silently, fighting to stay on her feet as the dizziness slowly began to clear. The hallway was lightly illuminated by the grey-orange light coming from outside through a window at the other end of the hall.

Suddenly, her locket flashed for a moment with crimson light and she felt smooth wood against the palm of her left hand. She looked to see that a dagger had appeared out of thin air in her loose grasp. Being startled by this, she dropped the newly formed dagger, which fell to the hardwood floor with a clank and disappeared in red smoke. A german shepherd jumped out from the storage room into the hallway with a loud bark and a growl. The dog was followed swiftly by a tall man with a long grey beard and a trench coat wielding a wooden baseball bat.

“I know you’re here somewhere moving around. I don’t want to have to kill you, so you better stay hidden and out of my way,” the man shouted.

She was confused. He should be able to see her. She looked down and couldn’t see her hands or the rest of her body. Had she turned invisible? Not even the dog seemed to be aware of her presence in the hallway. Had she gone beyond invisibility into imperceptibility? The man went back to the storage room to gather food and supplies while the dog sat and continued to guard.

She continued to creep towards the storage room. Once she got within a couple feet of the dog, her locket flashed crimson again and the dog turned and ran into the storage room and started to growl and bark at the man.

“Lucky! What’s gotten into you, boy? Hey! Hey! No!”

She heard as Lucky the dog began to bite and attack the man. After a couple seconds, she saw Lucky get launched into the wall of the hallway, as the man leapt and swung down at him with the bat.

She said forcefully, “No!” and reached her hand out towards the man as her locket glowed again. A look of shock came across the man’s face as he was surrounded by crimson smoke and lifted into the air. As this happened, she became visible again. The man mouthed the words, “Who are you?” as red smoke filled his lungs. Lucky walked over to the window at the end of the hallway and somehow nuzzled it open. The man slowly floated in the cloud of red smoke and out the open window, over the trench, then up into the arcane mist.

She collapsed to her knees. Many strange things had happened since the earth cracked. The arcane mist, reversed-gravity fields, some people turning into pigeons or squirrels, some fish being able to breath air. But this was the first time she had actually seen a person channel magic to cause strange happenings.

Generally, people had only been able to tap into magic through artificing technology. It was people’s constant searching for arcane sources that led to the decline of the environment and ultimately to the propagation of cracks and fissures across the surface of the earth. There had been myths of Channelers a select few who could wield channeling stones without technology to perform great feats of magic. The capabilities of arcane tech were limited by the specific designs, the effects being manifested through the physical components of the devices themselves. The capabilities of the Channelers were limited only by their imaginations and will-power.

As Lucky the dog lovingly licked her face, she pondered these newfound capabilities. Was it all a dream? A hallucination from getting hit in the head? Was this heart-shaped locket made out of a channeling stone? How could she control these powers if they do really exist? What was she capable of?

Tears rolled down her face as she opened the locket and admired the photograph of her grandmother, Irene. The photo was taken when Irene was about her age. Back then, the world had been full of life and love and hope. Now, life was barely hanging on and love seemed unable to find a foothold in the midst of self-preservation. But, looking at her young grandmother, feeling this strange, new power, she sensed something within herself that she hadn’t felt in a while. It was burning faintly right now, like a candle struggling to stay lit in a stormy gale, but perhaps it would grow to be an unstoppable conflagration, expelling darkness with marvelous light.

She felt hope.