Subject: Second Circles ch. 7: Ashes, Ashes
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Posted on: 2018-04-14 21:31:00 UTC
Julia, who still thought she was a boy, who still thought her name was James, who still was trying to ignore the growing wrongness of those assumptions, spent the entire rest of the day working on her spelling.
Along with the big spell, whose final draft spread across fifteen feet of relatively smooth rock, she'd worked smaller spells too- adding to her vision, seeing air pressures, temperatures, velocities. She could see the high-altitude winds, now, with eyes that weren't the blue ones she'd been born with.
But the big spell was done, and checked, and double-checked. Inside its huge outer circle were two overlapping ones- one of which described the rock she wanted to vanish, one of which described the rock she wanted to freeze. In their overlap was the hardest part of the spell to write, the cold mathematics that described a volume for boiling, and then the throat where the first, most important shockwave would form, where the escaping gas would step from subsonic to supersonic.
Julia had seen a Saturn V main engine, stared at the largest rocket engine man had ever made. Its throat had been two feet across, plus change. The one she was building was a hundred feet across, and seemed like it might not be big enough for a magma chamber measured in cubic miles.
But her day was up, her math was worked, and she started reading the spell as the sun descended to balance on the horizon.
The Speech was flowing more easily, now- she wasn’t learning it as much as remembering, curling text turning into syllables and Speech as her eyes passed across it. She pivoted in place, from her name-circle in the spell, reading.
This is a request for a temporo-spatial intervention of Knesset-Brown classifications twelve and thirteen, divided along a surface to be described…
A major working took a lot longer to say than the minor ones Julia had done before. It felt like the whole world was listening, as it had when she’d read the Oath. It felt like the whole world was waiting, ready to do the utterly impossible, to protect Life with nothing more than her designs and requests.
And then it was done and the world stopped for an instant, contemplating. For just an instant, Julia felt utterly foolish- she barely knew where she was, beyond what was necessary to work the spell, trying to bend an entire volcano to her will to protect a forest and this was somehow an extension of the great battle of Life versus Entropy?
The mountain rumbled underfoot. The rumbling got louder and Julia was pretty sure she saw something happen at the tip of the mountain and then there was an enormous boom as the eruption started.
Ash poured out of the top of the mountain into a looming cloud, growing thicker and broader and taller until it blotted out half the sky. The rumbling had become a full-throated roar, unbelievably loud- the sound poured over Julia like standing under a waterfall, she could see the trees pulsing in time with the shockwaves.
Please work, please work, please work, Julia thought, watching the cloud stretch taller and taller- it didn’t look right, the flow was too slow, the engine was coughing, spluttering…
And then a shockwave roared down the mountain, so strong it lifted dust from the ground into a low gray fog. It washed over Julia, blasted into the trees like a hurricane- and the cloud of ash turned into a column, roaring skyward so quickly it drew what had come before with it into a pillar stretching into the blue-black of the zenith.
The flow was supersonic. The flow was supersonic and perfect and pressure waves formed inside the column, shock diamonds a thousand feet high in ash-choked air. The spell written around Julia glowed bright as daylight, bright as an arc lamp, and the engine ran perfectly as it hurled thousand-degree ash twenty, thirty, forty thousand feet in the air.
The eruption drew air like a bonfire, howling up the mountain with all the ferocity that the shockwave had come down it moments before. Julia had braced for this, spelled against this, and she could still feel the great draw of the roaring volcano.
And then something flared at her feet. The smooth roar of the volcano became an angry scream, chunks of stone ripping out of the throat of the volcano as the spell flickered, the lines burned, frost spread across Julia’s hands like hungry claws-
In a soundless crack that overwhelmed even the volcano itself, Julia’s spell failed. The shock threw her out of the circle entirely, and she stared up through the furthest branches of the little maple tree as the rising ash cloud slowed, slowed more, and then the tons of ash she’d suspended in empty air began to drag it down, down, down onto the still-erupting peak.
