Origin Witch - Standing at Last
Sunlight came through the third-floor glass sliding doors in a single unblemished bar of bright gold that cut straight across the dark timber floorboards.
Corinne lay flat on her mattress, chest rising and falling in slow shallow hitches. Her gray linen tunic was damp at the collar, soaked with the cold sweat of a three-hour physical therapy session that had left every nerve in her thighs screaming. Beside her knee, Steelwool perched on the low bedside stump, round honey-colored eyes fixed on her. The owl chick let out a quiet click-click, spiky metallic gray feathers preening under the warm sunbeam.
Corinne didn’t look at the bird. She stared at the ceiling beams.
Her status panel floated in her vision, pale blue text clean and steady. Name, Corinne Mercer. Race, Earth Human. Level, Lv1. Strength, two, plus thirty from the Moonstone Carver. Agility, one. Physique, two. Spirit, eight. Health, twenty of twenty. Mana, eighty of eighty. Talent, Zephyr Float, Grade-E, currently inactive. Nerve reconstruction, eighty-eight percent complete, phase two restored.
Eighty-eight percent.
The second dose of Nerve-Restoration Fluid, distilled two nights ago from the last fragments of the Canopy Drake’s marrow, had done its work. The white-hot electrical fire that had scorched her lower spine during the first treatment had smoothed into a deep steady warmth flowing down her hips, through her quads, into her arches.
She could feel the air. Not just the cold draft under the glass door, but the subtle texture of the woven vine floor mat beneath her dangling heels.
Corinne took a deep measured breath, held it until her ribs hurt, let it out through her teeth.
She reached down with both hands, grabbed the sturdy timber frame of her bedside table, and hauled her upper body toward the edge of the mattress. Her dead-weight legs didn’t dangle limply this time. As her hips shifted, her quads tightened, a real muscular contraction that pulled her knees up toward her chest.
Pain shot up her spine, a sharp grinding ache that made her jaw lock, but her feet dropped toward the timber floorboards and met them with a clear, solid thud.
Bare soles flat against raw oak.
Corinne sat on the edge of her mattress for thirty seconds, fingers digging into the wooden stump, shoulders hunched as she let her body adjust to the sudden heavy pull of Kaelum’s gravity. Without Zephyr Float her torso felt heavy. Her chest felt thick. The two hundred pounds of bone, muscle, and flesh that magic had rendered weightless for thirty-five days suddenly weighed every ounce of those two hundred.
“No floating,” she whispered into the quiet room. Her raspy voice was barely audible over the wind in the high balcony leaves. “Not this time.”
She placed her hands flat against the wooden bench beside her bed.
Press.
Her arm muscles locked. Her biceps bulged under her dark tunic sleeve as the Strength-plus-thirty enchantment from the Moonstone Carver at her belt engaged, giving her withered upper body the brute torque it needed. Her hips lifted two inches off the mattress.
Her knees wobbled violently. Her calves shook like dry reeds, tendons popping with sharp dry sounds as five years of unused muscle fibers were forced to bear her skeleton.
“Up,” she snarled through clenched teeth, eyes locked on the glass sliding door ten feet ahead. “Up, you broken piece of trash.”
Her quads flared with white-hot tearing agony. Corinne drove her heels hard into the oak, felt her knees lock with a wet crunch, felt her spine straighten vertebra by vertebra until her shoulders cleared the line of the bedside shelf.
Her leaf-mark flared. Lime-green light pulsed once, hard and automatic. Zephyr Float caught her a half inch off the wood, holding her upright on borrowed weightlessness.
She hung there, supported entirely by the talent, her bare soles brushing the solid timber of The Spire. Her first time upright under her own power, weightless, in five years, one month, and fourteen days.
The world looked completely different. From a floating drift the horizon was something you looked up at through branches. Hovering upright, her eyes cleared the line of her high balcony railing. She looked straight across the canopy, eye to eye with the vast rolling ocean of giant oaks stretching toward the southern horizon.
Her knees shook so hard the hem of her dark linen dress vibrated against her shins. Sweat poured down her temples, stinging her eyes behind her black frames, but she didn’t release the lift.
She took one drifting step forward. Her right heel lifted off the timber. Her foot swung forward three inches through the air and settled flat on the floorboard with a sharp CLACK.
Her weight shifted. Her left leg caught the balance, ankle flexing.
Second step. CLACK.
Third step. CLACK.
She drifted three feet across her high bedroom, hands hovering two inches above the balcony railing for balance, breath coming in heavy ragged gasps that shook her chest.
Steelwool hopped off the bedside stump, fluttering metallic gray wings to land on the balcony railing beside her hands. The owl chick let out a loud triumphant keek-keek, big honey-colored eyes fixed on her face as it rotated its head a full hundred and eighty degrees to watch her dangling feet.
Corinne reached the glass sliding door. She leaned her chest against the polished timber frame, trembling hands gripping the wooden latch, and looked out over Sector 666.
Down on the southern border, four miles off, the smoke from the melted Iron-Ridge vanguard was gone. The narrow granite ford was clear, guarded by Garrett Thorne’s war-band, while Jasper Finch’s trade wagons moved back and forth along the central creek path without a single Coalition soldier daring to step down from the cliffs.
Her Magic Desk on the ground floor chimed, a single blue private message rising into her spectacled vision. Jasper Finch reported that he had just received an urgent message from General Caldwell’s personal adjutant in Sector 665. Caldwell was withdrawing his vanguard from the southern ford and officially rescinding the annexation decree, and he wanted to open a private trade channel with The Spire, offering three hundred pounds of high-grade copper ore and twelve obsidian blocks for fifty vials of her anti-acid health salve. His adjutant asked whether the Standing Witch would grant his officers an audience.
Corinne hung at the edge of her high balcony, bare feet brushing the sun-warmed timber, wind blowing her dark hair back from her face.
She didn’t laugh. She didn’t type a victorious speech. She reached out with her right hand, pressed her palm against the glass sliding door, and opened the frame wide to the crisp morning air.
“Tell General Caldwell,” Corinne said softly into the wind, her voice steady, clear, cold as Anseic spring water, “that if he wants my salve, he can climb the stairs himself.”
— Origin Witch —