Too bad we didn’t have a lawn tractor or ATV to drag the thing back up to my sawhorses. Aunt Ash saw no reason for a tractor when I could mow the lawn part of our property with a push mower, and our neighbor’s goats would clean up the fields several times a year by some arrangement we had. She said hauling wood was good for my character.
“Draco could haul you if he was larger,” I said to the tree trunk. It was only nine or ten inches in diameter, but almost twenty feet long. A wave of something from the forest flowed over me, relaxing and slowing my beating heart. A dragon wasn’t the right shape for hauling wood. A giant dirt dude would be better, I thought as the warm feeling of acceptance I got from this part of our land refreshed me. There were lots of broken dead branches lying around and so, on a whim, I set out the stick figure internal frame of a seven-foot-tall dirt dude, thinking how cool it would be. Then with a sigh, I got to work, chopping the log into thirds, my eyes returning to the wooden skeleton periodically. Hmm. Not today, but perhaps there was a way.
I dragged my logs out, one by one, and got them to the barn. After sawing, I had eighteen rounds of wood that needed splitting. A small pile of dead hardwood was the end result after I sweated my way through the logs. Stacking them inside the barn would come later, as dinner would be soon.
The next day, after school, I went back out to get more, foregoing my Wytchwar practice, as I had another project in mind. I took my ax and a little messenger bag of Craft gear, along with several water bottles.
The framework for my big dirt dude was still there, untouched, and I set about cleaning the bark off the dead sticks with a knife that Levi had given me. My black Sharpie marked well on the clean pale wood, the runes of my spells easier to write on the big sticks than they were to etch into the wood and wire frames of my small game dudes. Rather than cover the frame with dirt by hand, I simply loosened a patch of ground with one of our little hand weeding rakes and then poured some water to make it muddy, mixing in some ferns, leaves, and wild grapevine. Then I cast an Earth spell to move the mud. It didn’t work as well as it should have, probably because of the addition of the water, which is not one of my affinities. But wet ground was still just ground, so a small modification and the mud flowed over the skeleton. Pulling heat energy from the rock pile that had soaked up sun all day, I hardened the mud enough that it wouldn’t fall off. Then I pulled more power from the ground around me and sent it into the giant form. It shook and twitched. I was worried about the next part, sending my awareness into the form. Mom had taught me how with the little dirt dudes of Wytchwar, but pushing myself into a seven-inch-tall form seemed like it should be a lot easier than a giant seven-foot-tall one would be.
I was wrong. It was actually easier, just as writing the runes on the larger wooden bones of the avatar had been. I could feel myself inside the mud and wood body, aware of the ground underneath it. Then I went to move and discovered that moving three hundred pounds of dirt and wood is a lot harder than animating a pound. It took way, way more effort to even make one of the arms move. I had to pause and pull more energy from both the rock pile and the ground under it, as well as the forest around me. I pulled and pulled, slow and careful, hoping my aunt wouldn’t sense what I was doing, hoping that the Rowan tree behind the restaurant would keep my work shielded from any sensitive people nearby.
It was like being inside a big room. A hollow space that needed a lot to fill it up. Luckily power seemed to flow easily, especially from the rock pile that I liked so much. After about ten minutes, I tried sitting up again.
The big dirt dude moved easily this time, lifting its torso smoothly off the ground. Next, I tried standing and found that my grapevine-lashed joints were too stiff and awkward. It was a moment’s work to re-imagine them in a different configuration, one that allowed each joint to move with a full range of motion. In my mind’s eye, instead of being used like rope, I saw them like actual tendons and ligaments, connecting each wooden bone to the other, the vines actually fusing into and becoming part of the wood.
Much better, but still the big avatar was a whole lot clumsier and so much more clunky than my little wire and mud game pieces. On the flip side, it was more powerful—way, way, way more powerful. I easily knocked over a dead tree that had to weigh several hundred pounds, then picked up one end and hauled it to the edge of the woods like it was nothing. I had left my sawhorses set up here, and mega dude was more than capable of lifting
