It felt strange to cast his first spell in months, but it was even stranger to watch what happened next. As the taste of sulfur filled his mouth and the faint tingle of power spread through his body, the slender lightning bolt he summoned came down from the clouds above. It made contact with the tree’s tallest branch in a shower of sparks as the light peal of thunder passed through Simon.

What happened next happened faster than the eye could see as the lightning raced along the branches to where he’d carved his runes. Still, he could see the energy arc from sky to earth and earth to sky several times as it connected with the runes he’d left. They were burning with energy now, and even after the lightning stopped, they glowed a dim red color like the embers they were.

Simon expected that to be it. He’d used one spell to trigger another, and when it was done, hopefully, he’d get what it was he was trying to create. Even now, the spell was draining the life from everything it could within reach and condensing it in a singular form.

The results of that were more visual than he’d expected, and he could only wonder at how terrible such a working would have looked if he’d used it during the spring when the grove would have been full of leaves and grasses. As he watched and his runes burned, the entire area began to wither. Half-frozen trees sagged visibly. Then, as the last of their yellowed leaves fell in unison, some of the branches started to fall off as the strength of the wood was no longer able to bear the weight.

Simon watched the snow and branches rain down like the aftermath of an ice storm, and as it did so, a grayish ripple spread through the grass, moving outward in all directions from the grove. It slowed as it went, but all the scraggly yellow grass in its wake faded and sagged as well. He’d just ripped all the life out of a huge area, and he felt terrible about it. He was still near enough to the river that some spring flooding might well mitigate it. He tried to make himself believe it, but deep down, he knew this spot would be despoiled for a long time.

Simon vowed not to make a habit of it, as he noticed that all that stolen life made the tree at the center blossom unnaturally and out of season. Even while everything else died, that life force was drawn in like a vortex, which made the largest remaining branches burst to life in buds that instantly flowered into leaves and blossoms.

He started walking toward it then, and before he was halfway, the leaves were already starting to turn yellow and brown. A small forest had died to create a single tiny spring that would bear only one fruit, but that was all Simon needed.

Greater greater life force transfer wasn’t a spell he’d ever thought he’d have to cast. He certainly didn’t think that he’d have to use it to power a second set of runes to focus that life with plants, but he’d been inspired. If he was using his enemies to power fire and lightning from arrowheads and blades to activate and mitigate spells, then he shouldn’t be trying to do everything with life and healing by hand. That wasn’t the way that alchemy and magic were supposed to work.

While he’d never given any thought to making potions, he knew that he could embed a spell like this in something that was living like a fruit for at least a few minutes. The thought of how fleeting such a creation was likely to be spurred his steps and made Simon run toward the tree even before he could see the fruit he’d done all this to create.

It hadn’t just been like some goddess had granted him a vision. It was half a dozen moments from his life all lined up in a way that made it obvious in retrospect. The giant tracks that were and were not just lakes had made him question his own perspective for days, now his mind was on fire as it combined the disparate ideas of half a dozen lives. However, once he’d figured out what he needed to do, it was the other experiences across his lives that showed him the way. The frost orb that had slain a village, the flawed flaming sword that he’d slain both himself and the basilisk with, and even the circle he’d used to simultaneously save and damn Freya all said the same thing; real power needed a form to be channeled properly.

Simon needed to grow young, but he needed to filter that magic through something, and that something had to be alive. Those constraints had forced him to consider the demon seed. Part of him wished he had it to study today, dangerous as it was. Back then, it had been nothing but a nuisance, but now he could see it for the miracle it was. Those thoughts, combined with the memory of growing his first tree from an apple seed so long ago and a thousand little healing magics performed in cities and battlefields around the world, had come together. They’d spoken to him.

You might not have had the knowledge to heal a brain injury in Freya, his spirit reminded him. But you now have the magic that does, if only you let it manifest completely.

The creation of such a thing was beyond his ability to plan, even as an artist, but using magic and nature, he could create the palest of shadows, and that was what he did now. As he reached the tree, he could see that his forbidden fruit had already grown. In fact, it was very nearly ripe, and as Simon watched, the dull green fruit swelled and then softened slightly. He picked that moment to pluck it, and even though it was, in theory, a perfectly normal fruit, he would have sworn he felt his hand tingle at the contact.

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Simon was conflicted then. Part of him was sure that he should return to his camp before he started to eat this because of the profound changes it was likely to have on his body. The other part of his was sure that if he did, the short-lived miracle would lose significant amounts of its potency. It might even rot entirely. Even as he stood there, the tree that had given him this fruit was dying a final death, like everything else around him. As he watched, he could see that rot was spreading up the side even as the trunk cracked open to reveal a growing hollow.

That decided it. Simon began to eat immediately. It was a fruit he’d had before. They were common enough on the plains north of Crowvar, and though they tasted like tough bananas to him or mangos that were only half as sweet as normal, he still enjoyed them. Ironically, the biggest downside to them was that they were only ripe and edible for a very short window in the best of times. That was even more true of the one he was devouring.

Though it might have been the sweetest, most delicious paw paw he’d ever tasted when he first bit into it, by the time he was halfway through, it was already starting to go mushy and overripe. That wouldn’t stop him; he would have kept going, even if it rotted before he reached the end.

He had to. He could feel his mouth tingling as the energy it contained spread down his throat and into his stomach. Bite by bite, it felt like his entire body was vibrating. The tingling wasn’t a taste. It was closer to the feeling of a slow spicy burn and the tingle of a nine-volt battery on the tongue. In reality, it was the greater life transfer from dozens of trees, powered by more than a decade of life and distilled into a single small fruit, and even after the strange feeling made his mouth go numb, he kept going.

We stuffed himself full, and after a couple of minutes, the only things left were the pips in the center. He pocketed those, unsure of what to do with them, but even as he turned toward camp, he could feel his stomach begin to churn.

Simon didn’t make it more than half a dozen steps before he felt those muscle cramps spread to his limbs. I’m not going to make it, he told himself. His first instinct was to cast a lesser healing spell to try to give him the ability to walk a little longer, but he suppressed that urge. The last thing he should be doing was using one spell to affect another. He had no idea what would happen at that point.

Really, I have no idea what’s going to happen now. He reminded himself. He was deep in uncharted territory, and though he’d used the correct runes and channeled his intentions as clearly as he could, he was under no illusions that this still might end in his death. Just because the tree grove had died, the tree had blossomed, and the fruit had been created wasn’t enough to guarantee that this would have a happy ending.

It was enough to give him faith, though, and as he collapsed, he grunted at the sudden discomfort and then barked out a word of fire. Unlike the masterwork of magic he’d just created, the burst of flame was one of the weakest spells he’d created, but he didn’t need it to be pretty. He just needed it to light the trunk of the tree he’d collapsed next to as he curled up into a ball and tried not to scream.

Reversing his aging a year at a time by stealing someone else’s soul with a greater word of transfer would have been a gentle, pleasurable experience. He would have grown addicted to it. It would have become his life.

This was the opposite. He hadn’t drained a year of life energy from the world or even a decade. He’d done that, and then he’d used it to fuel a complicated work of flesh magic to de-age him directly. In the space of an hour or perhaps a day, he was going to try to reverse time and make his body decades younger.

It was hard to be precise with such things, but he was looking to cut his age in half, which would make him perhaps sixteen, given where his body currently was, and it was going to hurt. He might be able to imagine all the things that would have to change to make that happen, but the details he was going to have to leave to his own biology to solve.

The tingling had turned to pain almost everywhere now. In some places, it was the sharp feeling of muscle cramps, and in other places, it was a bone-deep ache that was dull and throbbing. Everything about who he was unraveled a moment at a time as powerful forces surged through him.

Those sensations only escalated. The feeling that his stomach was cramping was replaced with a burning like he’d lit himself on fire, deep inside, and perhaps, he had. That was bad, but when a migraine started to thunder through his head, too, it was all he could do to curl up into a ball and try to block out these sensations.

Within minutes, Simon was screaming. He’d died a lot of painful ways, and his recovery after falling from the volcano had been awful, but this was violent and unbearable. At least when he’d been bricked into a wall and impaled, it was the same terrible sensations that he could slowly get used to, but here and now, everything was constantly changing.

This wasn’t just a sword through the chest; it was also a knife to his kidneys and a knee to his groin. It was everything hurting in every way imaginable, and something about the nature of the life force that was surging through him wouldn’t even let the darkness take him. All he could do was lay there and writhe in agony for a long, long time as his whole world became suffering.