Skyclad (Fate's Anvil Book 1) Read online

  Titles, Mantles, and Aspects

  [Worldwalker (Title)] - You have travelled through the void between the many worlds! Every world is different, each with its own gifts and dangers. To help you survive strange new places, you gain a slight boost to health and an increased ability to learn new things! (+50 to Health, +50% increased gains to Skill Experience)

  [Blessed of the Guardian Tree (Title)] - Through an offering of the blood of your enemies, you have reawakened the ancient tree! You need never fear its hungry roots! Future offerings or actions that benefit the tree may enhance this Title!

  [Naked Survivor (Aspect)] - You have defeated foes and increased your own power while [Naked] and [Unequipped]! For gaining five or more levels in this manner without the benefits of any [Class], you have gained this Aspect. Experience gained and points rewarded are doubled while you are [Naked] and [Unequipped]. Equipping clothing or items of any type will disable this Aspect. Facing further challenges and reaching new milestones of personal growth while [Naked] and [Unequipped] will enhance this Aspect for even greater benefit.

  Afflictions and effects:

  [Starvation] - All regen effects disabled!

  Morgan was resolved not to repeat the same mistake of spending points without at least a little bit of thought and consideration. Acquiring [Naked Recovery] had changed her, and had used her body’s last reserves to do it. Her health, Stamina, and Mana weren’t actively draining away, but they were no longer recovering, either. The changes brought on by learning the skill were providing her with a wealth of information in the back of her mind. Just by thinking about it, she could tell exactly how bad her [Starvation] status was. She could feel the state of her very bones, and everything outward. Not only her lack of any remaining body fat reserves, but the strain on her organs to simply keep going. She could also feel older injuries, the hardened places where she’d fractured bones growing up, the scar tissue around wounds long forgotten. She could even feel her own reproductive organs and knew exactly where she was in her ovulation cycle. It would have been a case of too much information for Morgan, but apparently the changes wrought by the skill allowed her to keep it all walled off in her mind unless she actively looked, though it was quite disturbing at first.

  Her internal musings were interrupted by the tree once again. The shaking had stopped completely, but the light grew brighter and brighter. Morgan was briefly afraid she’d end up blinded, as she could see the bright pulses even though her closed eyelids. With a sudden gigantic FWOOMP the light vanished, and Morgan gazed upward in stunned wonder. The withered tree she’d landed in was no more. In its place was a gigantic, sprawling canopy of vibrant green. While the verdant layers of giant oak-like leaves blocked the light of the two moons, the undersides of the leaves pulsed gently with a soft green glow. The effect gave the pale radiance a shimmering effect on everything it shone down upon, like the gentle ripples across nearly still water. The effect was stunningly beautiful, surely something no mortal eyes had witnessed in millennia, if not longer. And Morgan didn’t notice any of it, nor would she have paid it any bit of attention in the slightest if she had. In her starving condition, every single fiber of her being was focused on one single thing: the tree had grown fruit .

  The tree had grown a lot of fruit. Hundreds upon hundreds of radiant, reddish-golden fruits. Morgan scrambled to her feet, even the scrubby loofah forgotten, as her senses from [Naked Instinct] informed her that these fruits were indeed edible. There was a tinge of danger about them, but she was unable to pay that any attention in the face of her hunger. The closest fruit to her current position was in a cluster of three that were hanging in a clump almost right above her, but at least ten feet higher than she could reach with her feeble jumping. [Starvation] and her emaciated muscles had simply left her too weak to manage any effective way to get to them. There were no branches in reach she could to climb, and the rejuvenated bark of the tree was smooth, and offered no purchase for her weakened grip. They looked somewhat like cherries or apples, but enlarged to almost half the size of basketballs. The very sight of them made Morgan’s mind scream thoughts like tasty and juicy and yes please!!!

  With a whimper, she brought up her status menu once more. She had twenty points left to spend on skills, and hoped against hope that something there would provide an option for her to reach this suddenly appearing food. Preferably before any changes her body was forced to experience rendered her dead after all. She was almost certain that picking [Naked Weapons] would force even harsher changes on her body, and she hadn’t been all that enamored of the thought of turning her skin to bark or stone in the first place, even before her starved condition came about. That left [Naked Magic]. There might have been other skills farther down the list, but she was in no state to waste time considering. Holding her breath and hoping she’d gain some way to knock down some of the fruit, she spent her last twenty skill points and promptly passed out.

  She woke up in the middle of her ensuing collapse, not enough time having passed for her to even fall completely to the floor of the hollowed-out center of the tree. She felt like she was falling, but the moment stretched out in slow motion. She could feel yet another new sensation in her body now, that thankfully wasn’t converting the last of her muscle tissues in order to change her. It was a buzzing kind of tingling that she could feel from her head down to her toes. It pulsed along with her bloodstream, and felt the most intense in her head and around her heart. Morgan barely had time to assimilate this new feeling before time caught up with her and she fell flat on her back, the air driven from her lungs with a “WHUFF!”

  The expulsion of breath and the impact was followed by a simultaneous drop of her health by a few points, but also of her Mana. The part that left Morgan equally shocked and hopeful was the audible pulse of force that emanated from her body, causing the tree to shudder and the fruits to shake slightly. The silvery message now floating in her eyes was one that left her almost giddy.

  You have learned the Spell [Mana Pulse]! Project a wave of raw magic away from your body, at the cost of Mana! Practice and experience will help you control the released energy and increase its efficiency!

  For a few moments Morgan forgot even her starvation, overcome by sudden excitement. With wide eyes she held the scrubby loofah up before her face and babbled “Oh my god, did you see I just did MAGIC!”

  She got back to her feet, shaking with excitement and anticipation, eagerly pointed at the fruits right above her head, and shouted, “MANA PULSE!” at the top of her lungs. And nothing happened, much to her consternation and no small bit of embarrassment.

  Okay, she thought with a feeling of chagrin and self-reproach. Slow down and figure this out. Everything about the announcements, messages, and the status menu had worked on thought and willpower so far. So I shouldn’t assume spells and skills are any different at all, she told herself. A quick check told her that she had thirty-five Mana remaining, so it had cost her six points for a relatively small and weak wave of force. If it cost her six every time, she only had five more tries to knock some fruit down where she could get it.

  She looked up at the fruit once more, raising a hand toward it. With a deep breath she concentrated on how much she wanted the fruit. She needed that fruit. She let the part of her brain that could feel the buzzing energy gather up a bit of it, and imagined it simply pushing toward her desperately needed meal. A tingly feeling like her whole arm had been asleep built up, but she willed it toward the palm of her hand, and to her surprise it actually began to obey. Her hand began to tremble and felt as if too much blood was being squeezed into it, and suddenly the magic broke free from her hand with a WHUMP while half of her remaining Mana vanished in an instant.

  An elongated—the only word Morgan could think of to describe it was lump— of distorted purple and blue energy shot upward. The lump of compressed Mana slammed into the lowest hanging fruit, and then the second, splattering both into a juicy spray of pulp that coated the hollow of the tree and a s
uddenly very dizzy girl in a generous layer of sticky purple jelly. The sudden drop in her Mana had left Morgan extremely light-headed and dazed. She slowly scrubbed at her face with the loofah, but some of the jelly made it into her mouth, and all other thoughts were driven from her brain. To say it tasted merely good was to blaspheme against the very concept of food.

  Just the tiny bit that had passed her lips into her mouth sent a riot of sensation through her body. She could feel her internal reserves being restored just a tiny bit, and a tingling rush hit her brain like a locomotive. The initial rush left her weak in the knees in a manner she most certainly did not expect in her current situation. With a gasping moan, she melted down into the hollow of the tree, and was about to start licking the pulpy mess off of her hands out of sheer reflex when a light thump heralded the third fruit falling in front of her. The sticky mass of jelly in her hair and on her body instantly forgotten, she dropped the now fruity loofah in order to seize the giant red fruit in trembling hands. If merely a taste had done that, how much better would an actual bite be? A whole fruit?

  With no further hesitation, she sank her teeth into it. The closest she could come to describing it would be the soft meat of a cherry with the crisp flavor of a juicy apple, but so much more intense. Every bite she took sent climactic waves of satisfaction through her entire body that were almost enough to break through her extreme hunger. By the third bite she felt the [Starvation] affliction drop back down to [Hunger]. Three more bites and that was gone as well, and she felt her resource pools tick back up slightly. Mana increased the most, but she could feel health and Stamina returning as well.

  With her extreme hunger no longer forcing itself on her attention, she was able to slow down a tiny bit. Not much, considering how delectably orgasmic the fruit was for her to consume, but enough for her to regain a little bit of influence over her thoughts and mind. To her senses, enhanced by [Naked Recovery], the delicious meal was like glowing bits of radiant contentment that settled in her belly; a more satisfying afterglow than any sex she’d ever experienced. She could feel more than see the flecks of glowing energy dispersing into her blood, and everywhere they went, her body was restored bit by bit. It was a slow process, but she could sense her body beginning to fill back out. Her ribs were no longer so pronounced, and her bottom didn’t feel so bony as she sat on the smooth bark of her treetop alcove. The sensual pleasure crashing through her body with every mouthful only seemed to grow in intensity, but at the same time she found herself more able to endure it, writhing and whimpering as she continued to eat.

  All too soon the fruit was entirely consumed, and Morgan only stopped licking the sticky remains off her hands and arms when she got a mouthful of the nasty tasting bird splatter that still covered half her body. She gagged and spluttered as she spit that back out with a grimace, but the experience was enough to shock her back to some semblance of self-control. There was absolutely zero chance of her managing to stand back up, not with such sensations shuddering through her body every other minute or so. Despite that, she vastly preferred this situation over the extreme pain and discomfort she’d experienced every other time something happened to her in this new world.

  The sum of her experiences since arriving in this strange new place had been one terrifying crisis after another, and while suddenly unexpected waves of euphoria were something she’d never asked for, she decided they were a much better situation than being eaten. With her resource pools slowly but steadily on their way back to safe levels, and nothing trying to kill her right at this moment, she picked up her scrubby loofah and hugged it once again before seeing to the worst of the sticky mess all over her body. There was a limit to how well she could clean up without a source of water, though, and soon the lacy puff of loofah was saturated with sticky fruit juice, pulp, and a good bit of grime and bird mess.

  “All covered in…fruity stuff…” Morgan said to the loofah in her hands. “I’ll just call them churples, because they look like cherries and taste like apples and giant—” She paused with a gasp as another wave of pleasure interrupted her train of thought. “Uh…and calling them giant fruit isn’t really a name…”

  She felt extremely sleepy. The sheer insanity of her situation, the constant near-death experiences, had all taken their toll, and while her body was healing because of the fruit, she was simply exhausted down to her soul. When the next wave of sensation crashed through her, she rode it on down and simply lay on her side, gently setting the fruit-saturated loofah on the floor as she fell into a still twitching sleep.

  Morgan slept. Her meal of the recently named “churple” fruit kept working during her slumber, slowly restoring her pools of health, Mana, and Stamina all the way to full. Her pleasant nap only lasted a scant few handfuls of minutes, however. Her eyes snapped open as [Naked Instinct] screamed in her mind with a sense of impending calamity. Her Recovery senses allowed her to see in frightening detail just how bad it was. The restorative energies from the fruit she’d so blithely named a “churple” had continued to flow into her body, pushing her health and Stamina pools well past double the maximum provided by her current stats. Even more terrifying was that she could see the glowing essence of the fruit within her continuing to disperse into her blood and the rest of her tissues, and her Mana pool was increasing far faster than Stamina or health. Already she felt hot and fevered, and as her Mana reached triple her normal maximum, a new status message appeared:

  Status Afflicted: [Mana Burn]! You have absorbed more Mana than your body can contain! This effect may stack for increased damage!

  With the new status affliction, Morgan could feel her fevered body heat up even further, and her steadily rising health points ceased ticking upward. The increased heat seemed to cause the glow from the fruit inside her to intensify even more, dumping yet more of the extremely concentrated Mana into her system. Staring up at the canopy, she frantically repeated the same process that had originally splattered churple jelly everywhere. The first [Mana Pulse] didn’t even cause a noticeable change, as she felt her Mana continue to skyrocket to four times her natural total. A notification she felt more than saw heralded another affliction of Mana burn on top of the original, and Morgan felt her blood ignite.

  She’d continued with more Mana pulses, and feeling herself burning from the inside out, she screamed and pushed with all her will in desperation. Her world was purple flame. Without realizing it, she’d managed to channel Mana pulse into a continuous wave straight up and away from her body. Notifications went unheeded in her agony, but she could feel her health being burned away faster than the fruit essence restored it. She knew she had to recover her health, and the only way to do that was by stopping her efforts with Mana pulse and switching to the healing skill. She was somehow managing to hold her Mana stable with two stacks of Mana burn, but her instincts warned her that another might be impossible to manage. As her health dropped down into single digits, she went for it, grasping at her only chance.

  The only thing that saved her was the initial restoration of health that came from activating [Naked Recovery], but it was a double-edged gift. The skill also increased Mana in its upgraded [Naked] form, and two stacks of Mana burn became three. Her blood burned with even greater heat, and only another skill increase in [Pain Resistance] kept her conscious. Before her body was completely incinerated by rampant Mana burn, salvation appeared before her eyes in the form of the most welcome notifications she had yet seen:

  You have gained the Skill [Mana Resistance]!

  You have gained the Skill [Mana Affinity]! Mana flows through your veins, and is bent to your will with ever increasing ease, increasing the effectiveness of your magic!

  You have gained the Skill [Heat Resistance]!

  You have learned the Skill [Spell Channeling]! Through experimentation and experience, you have learned how to continuously channel spells at increased Mana cost! Effectiveness and efficiency will improve through use!

  Between the resistance skills and the newl
y acquired affinity, Morgan managed to bring her health back into the triple digits, by an extremely slim margin. Another stack of Mana burn forced her back to channeling [Mana Pulse] with all her might. The magic exploded upward from her body like a raging purple torch that waxed brighter in rhythm with her pounding heart. Her skin had begun to blister and crack, glowing blood seeping from the thin fissures and flashing to wispy vapor as soon as it left her body.

  When her health once again began to approach such critical levels as before, she swapped back to channeling her recovery ability. Each shift would herald another stack of [Mana Burn], followed by more resistance increases, and more pain. Two more levels in [Mana Affinity] had enabled Morgan to force truly obscene amounts of power into the spell. Her vision had already failed her, the incandescence of her blood continuously burning away at her eyes from the inside. She found she needed no eyes to receive the notification messages. They appeared one after the other, an eternity of burning in between each silvery message of hope for her fraying sanity. Every level in resistances meant she lost less ground as she healed herself with [Naked Recovery], and she gained several levels in that skill as well.

  Every stack added to [Mana Burn] made the heat even more intense. [Pain Resistance] gained levels rapidly as well, but it was barely enough to hold her mind in one piece. As Morgan let go of [Mana Pulse] to once again heal herself, [Mana Burn] reached the tenth stack.

  [Mana Burn] has reached its maximum limit and triggered a [Mana Cascade]!

  Morgan’s body thrashed as her [Pain Resistance] skill levels were rendered irrelevant before the onslaught. She no longer had to channel her pulse spell to expel the rampaging torrent of Mana from her body, as it exploded forth in an incandescent wave that shook the ancient tree all the way to its roots. And then it was over. Her health was in the single digits, but she was alive, somehow. Her body was ravaged, from her bones all the way out to her blistered and cracked skin. She rolled over with a hacking cough, spitting up gritty, ashen residue where her lungs had continuously smoldered while being healed. With an effort of will she hadn’t realized she possessed, she activated her recovery skill for just the time it took to heal her eyes enough to see. Her beloved loofah was amazingly still in the tree with her, albeit slightly singed, and stained the color churple. As she clutched it to herself once again, one last notification made its presence known to her just as she lost consciousness.