Last Witch Standing (Mountain Witch Saga) Read online

  As the P-51 completed the final revolution, he pushed back the controls. It jumped upward, now climbing at a forty-five degree angle. Further, and further it rose, as he held the controls. Finally, it was only a speck in the distance, nearing Lake Thompson and the forests that surrounded that large body of water. There was just enough gas in the plane to reach the lake before stalling. Good, he didn’t want it to go down anywhere else, didn’t want it to be salvaged.

  Dan stood in the grass, his hand to his face, breathing in short breaths, the dew soaking into his shoes, and watched until the plane was only a distant speck. Then he turned back towards the parking lot and home.

  He dropped the control into a garbage can at the edge of the park, as he passed.

  Chapter 7

  One Year Later

  Thursday, May 17, 1973

  The Citadel Universe

  Katie could hear them moving in the halls below, blocking her paths of escape. Didn’t matter. They may think that they could just box her in here, and then, when the Witches’ Council Members returned in force, capture her. But they underestimated her. Plasma bombs were not her only trick.

  Katie grasped the ladder with white-knuckled fingers. She needed to reach that book: the one on mathematics. Now that she was at war with the Citadel, her learning had to be accelerated. With higher mathematics, she could learn how to create abstract models of physical systems to measure new theories and techniques against. Without it, she was limited to her own crude, trial-and-error experimentations.

  Katie stood inside the Citadel’s library, a stack of pilfered books by her feet. Around her were shelves of hefty volumes containing the knowledge accumulated by the Citadel over the course of the last thousand years: magic books, physics and math texts from many worlds, histories and biographies of key events and individuals in history. Painted scenes from the Citadel’s history looked down from the domed ceiling: a group of witches from an earlier millennium, gathered around a stone table in a grass field, hammering out the Accords by which they would govern their world; a battle scene between the Citadel’s defenders and invading witches from, Andreas, another world; the inauguration of the first Headmistress of the Citadel’s academy.

  A few plasma bombs had ensured Katie access to this room. Students and teachers had fled. With the Witches’ Council out of town for a convention, the Citadel Guard was probably awaiting instructions before acting.

  Calculus could be used to model the world.

  That was the tool. Too many variables. If she could create the right models, isolate the needed variables, she could unlock the secrets around her. Physics could tell her which variables were most important, and mathematics, how to isolate these variables to produce usable solutions. There had to be a reason for all of this. Headmistress’s explanations made no sense to her. If Katie could understand science and mathematics, she could discover who and what she was, where her brother, mother and father had gone and how to return to them.

  What was she doing here? Where was her family?

  With each week that passed, memory of them faded further. Now, she couldn’t even remember their names. She had to return before she forgot too much and couldn’t find her way.

  Katie grabbed the books on math and science and put them in her satchel. It was time to make it past the gauntlet.

  She opened the library door. The hall was empty. Floor, ceiling and walls were scorched black from her battle to gain entrance and the area smelled strongly of burnt wood and singed plaster dust.

  At the end of the hall a box window overlooked the library’s backyard. That was the way to freedom. Downstairs held guards. She did not fear them, but why fight when you don’t have to?

  At the window, she grabbed her satchel tightly.

  “Halt!”

  Katie turned to face the noise. A tall witch in a black robe and red hair pointed at her with a staff, a wood and brass shaft topped with glittering jewels. Katie recognized her as Eudora, a Representative of the Witches Council, here on a visit from another world. Behind this witch stood several robed witches and a squad of the Citadel guard. Headmistress was not among them.

  Katie willed a plasma bomb into her palm. It fluttered blue, then extinguished. Katie lit it again. It extinguished again.

  “We can block your channeling, sorceress.” Eudora banged the bottom of her staff on the wooden floor.

  The window was the thinnest barrier to the outside and Katie backed up towards it, grateful she had never allowed Headmistress or any of the student’s or staff to see her fly. Below it, a drop of nearly a hundred feet: higher than she had ever flown before.

  Eudora smiled as Katie bumped into the wall below the window. Trapped. Now or never.

  Katie willed her insubstantial body to pass through the windowpane and the crisscrossed iron lattice reinforcing it. Her stomach fluttered as she entered the matter, a jolt of electricity stunning her briefly, then she was through, in the open air. Flying. What would her big brother say if he saw that his little sister could fly?

  She looked back. Through the window, Eudora, and the witches in her party, stared at her hovering figure, mouths open. Katie waved at them.

  Into the air she fled, each step putting her forward by several yards. Below her lay the deep green of the well-manicured Citadel lawns. Ahead, the lake sparkled in the sunlight. It didn’t matter now that the mill was destroyed; the area was effectively off limits to her. She had underestimated the effect her destruction of it would have upon the Citadel staff. With one act, she had gone from cute little Citadel pet to mortal enemy.

  Where to go? How far could she walk through the air like this? This was further than she had ever gone. It was one thing to jump across the squash fields, another to stay in the air and cover large distances.

  When she had passed the lake and into the forest, beyond, even, the ruins of the old city, she descended, gently gliding onto a ridge.

  Katie looked out across the landscape for signs of pursuit, but saw none. Nevertheless, she could not stay here. If they could block her plasma bombs, they might be able to overpower her. The best thing to do was to rest, then see how far she could fly.

  Maybe she could find a place far away, deep in the woods to hide. To hide and study. She clasped the books tightly. Inside, she was certain, was enough knowledge to render her invulnerable to the Citadel. She would study then, perhaps, go on another raid into the library for more books.

  After that? Maybe she would know enough to return family, wherever they were? This was a strange place and she was frightened. Katie wanted to go home.

  Chapter 8

  June, 1975

  The Planet Pangea

  Katie hovered over the immense planet. Green land masses, with the blue of oceans covering large portions, indicated its habitability. It was nearly twice the size of the Citadel’s world and half again as large as Earth.

  This would be her home, her Pangea.

  She recalled her first, tentative steps, at flying. Now, she could fly large distances, and travel at will throughout the Cosmos. Instinctively, by feel. This disturbed her; she needed to know how and why she could do so. First, though, she had to find a permanent place to stay.

  A shadow cast at her feet. Katie looked up to see a giant condor-like bird overhead. She decided to follow it and see where it went. Anywhere a big bird nested would probably be a pretty neat place.

  Over trees, meadows and lakes, the pair flew. Where the largest lake ended, the terrain rose into steep cliffs. At its zenith, the sky radiated a warm, deep blue; at the horizon, cool, light blue. The lakes, pristine and untouched by humankind, reflected deep aquamarine and ultramarine blue hues. Beside the shores, large herds of gazelle-like creatures drank abundantly from the water, apparently oblivious to predators. The air around was clean, absent of all pollution. Katie knew about Africa from her brother’s World Book Encyclopedia set. This is what she imagined Africa would be like. Her Africa! Her Pangea!

  Her own planet, named
after the supercontinent that once existed on Earth.

  When the condor reached the first cliff, it veered to the right, but Katie did not follow. In the distance she counted five more circling. They made their nests here and here was where she would make hers.

  If only she could show her brother! But where was he? Something had happened to her before arriving on the Citadel grounds. There was a family. Hers?

  The images and memories were fading into nothingness. She was alone now.

  Katie expected a trial finding a place to make permanent camp, but this first cliff she landed upon had a cave that could be used as shelter for her precious books. And the view! All around rose majestic cliffs, below, a deep valley filled with wildflowers and trees. Condors were the largest birds she knew of. It was fitting that she, a powerful creature herself, should share a home with them. It was perfect!

  Even with the Power, it took Katie most of the remainder of the afternoon to clear out the cave and make it suitable for habitation. In the furthest reaches, stacks of bones lay in the dust. So, there had been other predators here. Well, she was at the top of the food chain now. She left these remains undisturbed – in case she later wished to reconstruct them to see what sort of animals they were, how they were composed, and what had killed them.

  Even in such a place, on a remote planet at the edge of the known universe, Katie took precautions. First, she strengthened the walls in the front, using the Gift to compress the molecules into a near diamond hardness, then she created a tunnel from the back of the cave to the start of a trail she intended to clear up the cliff. This she sealed with a boulder. In case the front was blocked, she now had an exit. Tomorrow, she would construct a path down the cliff and into the lake valley. This would take some time as it would need to be hidden and accessible only to her. She wanted no surprises – either by wild creatures from this world, or Citadel Witches come to take her away.

  The work done for the day, she arranged a bed of foliage collected from the bushes and small trees that protruded from the cliff’s sides, and set her pack beside it.

  Now that she was safe and isolated, it was time to practice her skills. Those visiting Citadel witches had blocked her power during the library battle. How had they done so? Katie produced a ball of plasma in her left palm and tried to recreate, in her mind, the moment it had happened. No, she hadn’t felt the Power being choked off at the source – her collecting of solar power. That meant they must have extinguished the plasma itself.

  She tried to destroy the plasma. First, she set up a counter-wave. This caused the ball to become unstable, decomposing from a ball into an amorphous shape in her palm, but it did not extinguish the blue fire.

  Then it hit her. They didn’t extinguish it at all. The witches moved it! They interfered with her channeling for an instant, possibly as short a period as a microsecond, and sent the plasma somewhere else – perhaps into deep space. Katie willed the plasma to another area of the cave, behind her. It disappeared from view.

  A shield. I need a shield! If she could shield it until the last moment, they would not have time to move it once she hurled it. Leaving it there, as she had that day in the Citadel library, had been an open invitation to a counter.

  Katie took out the books from her raid upon the library. In two years on the run from the Citadel, she had mastered the science and mathematics from several of the volumes. A dozen or so books remained. Among them were several non-science books she had mistakenly grabbed in her haste. Before discarding them, she would read them at least once. Perhaps they could help her understand what had happened to her. She picked up the first of them – Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche – and began to read.

  Chapter 9

  “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that one way or another.”

  J. Robert Oppenheimer, Father of the Atomic Bomb

  June, 1975

  Pangea

  The playground of creation. That is what Katie thought as she flew around Pangea. Cliffs, forests, jungles, waterfalls of incredible height and power, grasslands that spread for miles in all directions: all could be found on this planet.

  After landing, she retrieved Thus Spake Zarathustra from the cave and sat outside on a rock that gave the grandest view of the valley below and the cliffs around them. The air was pristine, as it always was on her Pangea, and a slight wind blew Katie’s hair as she spread the book open before her.

  Nietzsche was making everything so much clearer for her. She was alone because she was special. That was why she could do so much more than the human Citadel Witches. Katie was the Overman of which the philosopher spoke.

  What luck finding this book had been! To think she almost left it in the Citadel world because it wasn’t a science text. Had she done so, she would have missed learning her purpose and destiny. These quotes from the master particularly intrigued her; they were so true and described her so well:

  You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.

  The stronger becomes master of the weaker, in so far as the latter cannot assert its degree of independence — here there is no mercy, no forbearance, even less a respect for "laws."

  I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? "All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment.

  In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.

  And concerning the Citadel with their self-imposed limitations:

  That is mediocrity though it be called moderation.

  Yet, one problem remained, limiting her potential. This portion of the Cosmos was isolated, with less galaxies than in the area of the Citadel world. Travel between stars was not a problem for her, but away from a star, interstellar plasma or other source of energy, she could not acquire enough power to channel effectively. For the first time, she cursed not being a witch – they could store power. As a sorceress, a type of magical creature she now recognized herself to be – based upon a careful reading of “Powers of the Realm”, a book she had stolen from the Citadel’s library, she could not store power effectively.

  There had to be a workaround to this. Somewhere in the science books was the answer.

  Antimatter? That would be a powerful explosive. Usable both as portable source of power and as a weapon.

  Or, the strong nuclear force! If she could suspend it for an instant, the particles would annihilate each other, producing energy. That meant she could use matter for energy and would no longer be tied to only what she could pull in from kinetic energy in her environment. Yet, suspending the nuclear force took energy to do. Where would she get that initial energy? Back to square one.

  Finally, the vacuum energy, or dark energy, of space could be stored in capacitors via the casimir effect – but this might not be sufficient. Katie wanted enough energy to manipulate matter – regardless of where in space she happened to be. Traveling through space, she could do that effortlessly now, but when out of the effective range of stars or interstellar plasma, she could not draw ample energy to do much beyond travel. A small portion of her was witch, maybe two to three percent, and she shuddered to acknowledge it was Mountain Witch. How could one such as her be kin – even remotely so – to such silly little creatures?

  Nevertheless, she would try it, she would build those capacitors.
But first, there was something else she’d like to try.

  ***

  The blue giant star filled the space before Katie, its immensity and majesty crowding out all emotions other than a contemplation of its splendor.

  If I can destroy, may I also not create? We are all made of star stuff. How many new worlds can I give birth to?

  The heat penetrated her shield and, with an irony not lost on her, Katie channeled the very energy that penetrated it to increase its strength. She glided back through space, still facing the star, examining its solar flares, absorbing its beauty.

  Creative destruction.

  Katie used the Gift to reach into the center of the star. It was easier than she imagined, to feel into the solar core, as the amount of energy available to channel far exceeded that required.

  There is none but I.

  Once a star began fusing iron, it was in its death spiral. Once so massive as this would then become a supernova. Katie did not know how much fire and shockwave she could take without destroying herself, but this she did know: the timid did not discover, the timid did not create. She let loose the strands of Power, accelerating the fusion within the star.

  Silence.

  She backed up further, prepared to channel more.

  Crash!

  Needles of fire radiated outward, blinding Katie and hurling her back like a steel shot fired from a slingshot.

  I am become death, destroyer of worlds….

  The supernova would continue to spew out star stuff for some time, fertilizing interstellar space with a multitude of matter. This matter would coalesce into smaller stars, and perhaps planets, perhaps even a Pangea. She had done it: turned a dying star into a life giver.