Stellar Transformations

Kairo stared at the beast and wondered if he was an ophidian.

For the beast was an elderly man who was playing with eight stone tiles on the ground. Scaly, gray skin sagged on his bony body in a ragged tunic and pants with flax sandals on his feet. A thin tongue flicked over his snout, and yellowish, slit-pupiled eyes rapidly blinked at the stone formations he kept casting.

"Hel—lo?"

"Tiss not day. Not tiss day." The elderly man hissed as he gathered the stones to shake them in his hands before tossing them to the ground. He gawked at the haphazard pattern the stones made, his eyes unblinking, then shrank back with fear as he pushed aside a stone to pull out another from the mud. His finger shook as he flipped it.

Kairo stared at the stone's crude etching of an eagle reaching for the skies.

The man gulped and looked up, seeing Kairo for the first time. "You! Fly-bird, you!"

"Sorry?"

The man shuffled on his knees to Kairo and looked pleadingly at him. "Great king summoned you, the universe moved you. Pick with heart. No head: your round, my round, all rounds die. We always die."

He returned to his stone throwing with greater vigor as if he wanted to wipe away the bad throw.

Kairo stepped away, feeling unsettled, and skirted around him to face the bridge.

"What bridge? " he groaned, seeing a straight causeway of rocky and slippery shale with water constantly passing over it. Taking a wrong step would lead to a tumble into the river's depths for the fishes to snack on. He felt static and a cold sensation on his skin.

"Maybe magic is protecting the path." He grabbed a handful of stones and tossed one in the waters, riling mad spits and splashes. Eventually the waters calmed.

He repeated the stone toss for the other side and yelped when a mouth full of tiny teeth popped up, before receding to the depths.

"Right. Path it is. Nice and slow."

"Boy. Heart not head. Keep to the straight: don't fall," the elderly man said over his shoulder.

"Keep to the straight, got it."

Kairo took slow steps to find the safest footing. His nerves tensed when he nearly skidded on his next step. He stretched his arms outward and wobbled to regain his balance, then continued to step carefully.

A cacophony of hissing and shrieking erupted from the path's edges. Water spat and splashed at his feet, eager to knock him over, but whatever magic was in place kept the river's monsters confined to the water.

"Woah!" He shouted when his foot slipped and he wobbled on the next step. Swiftly, he grabbed his hockey stick and stuck it in the ground to steady himself. He continued the rest of the way using his stick for a crutch.

"I hope I don't have to do that again." He panted for breath, relieved to stand on solid ground when he reached the other bank.

His walk through wild growing grass and trees felt too silent and still. At least, he wasn't being attacked. Gradually, a canopy of leafy trees shaded the sky to make the way forward obscure darkness.

"I wonder if these pouches have a lighter or matches." He felt around his belt pouches for one and heard Genie's sigh in his mind.

"You have something to say?"

"Matches? The whole point of this training is to use magic. Say a spell on a stick to light it up."

"What spell? I only know the two you guys taught me: none of them starts a fire. And, since some demon decided to forgo proper training and toss me into the deep-end to fend for myself, I'll light a fire how I want."

"Someone's a bit grouchy."

Kairo groaned. "You know what Genie? Why don't you order a big dick platter at Lucky Dork's and keep enjoying the show, quietly."

"I already did that. The pâté was a tad too salty for my liking."

Kairo shook his head and unhooked his crossbow. He fired a bolt at the tip of a stick to set it alight. He smugly returned the weapon to his back and picked up a torch.

"Fine. It was magic I guess."

Kairo chuckled as he continued his walk through the canopy. The way was cool and continued to be uneventful.

"Let's hope the stone ring is nothing special." Although, he seriously doubted it would be with a name like the Stone Ring of Destiny.

What's destiny anyway?

He never thought much about it before because there was never a need. He had a good home, a steady job and a simple life. Maybe he had once wanted more than the mundane, but his life right now was too much on the extreme side.

The canopy opened to a clearing, revealing daylight and a foggy sky. His torchlight illuminated a gray, monolithic pillar stone with rune symbols carved on the surface. A sculpture of a snake-face woman's head crowned its top. As he glanced around, he saw seven similar pillar stones with different runes. They formed a stone ring.

"Maybe that elderly snake man was a bridge guardian?" Kairo recalled the man throwing stones at the mud.

He yelped when white flames encircled the clearing to confine him within the stone ring. Words appeared in his mind.

Light the Redolence stick.

"Redolence. What's that?" He scratched his head and asked Genie, then frowned when he felt disconnected from him. "Right, the path decision. But I haven't decided yet, so I should still have contact with him."

He tried again, but the feeling of being alone with his thoughts prevailed. Eventually, an answer arrived in the form of a red incense stick, which floated down into his hand.

Snaps and sounds of sparking flames drew his attention back to the pillars. The stench of sulphur was strong around them as rune symbols glowed boldly on the faces.

"Elephant, dog, wait..." As he mentally traced the fine lines of a birdman with golden wings spread wide on one of them, he realized a connection. "Is that the god Horus?"

The rune images were similar to Earth deities. From the corner of his eye, he spied a holder to place the stick. "I guess I light the stick and place it on the pillar I choose."

He peered at the stick, wondering if he should choose based on his birth date.

"Let's see, if I add up my birthdate, 2+1+4..."

He added the values until it resulted in the number 6, then walked around the stone ring to find the number and saw none of the pillars had any.

"Well, the Pillars of Destiny theory goes out the window."

Kairo dumped himself down at the center and crossed his legs, thinking on what to try next, drawing logical conclusions to various scenarios but couldn't reach a single decision.

"What did that snake-face elderly man say?" He thought back to the words spoken and gasped."Did he mean I would die if I kept using my brain to make a choice?"

The elderly man had mentioned something about eagles. He rose to examine the pillars again for an eagle rune, but there was none.

"Now what. My destiny pillar isn't here." An abstract thought surfaced. "But I'm also not supposed to be here, right? So in theory, the rules shouldn't apply to me, but it does."

His heart raced, reflecting his concerns and frustrations. What were the rules, and what designed a beings fate on a world, in a universe and across an entire cosmos?

Are we all just cogs in the wheel of time and it's just about the flow?

His Holy Ama Cross pendant swelled with gold light as he continued to ponder on the meaning of life, living and where he sat in the grand scheme of things. But I was drawn into Lux from my world for a reason.

The snake-man had said a great king had summoned him, but he ended up somewhere else. Lyon's civil war with his father fitted a motive. The prince was as surprised as he was to be summoned to his lap.

"If I was summoned to be a trump card of some kind, was it really by the demon king? Who would gain the most for me being here?"

Kairo had eliminated accidental as the cause: lots more people would have been teleported to Lux if that was the case. He frowned, as he thought over all the similarities of this world with his.

"Lux and Earth are so similar. Maybe I'm a connection to..." He circled the pillars, hoping for answers to leap out at him. No spark of inspiration or decision came.

"That elderly man said I should use my heart."

He groaned and laid down on the ground, conflicted on how to choose. What if the elderly man was there to trick him? All the what-ifs were confusing him.

"Screw it. Go with the heart and gut."

He sat cross-legged at the center of the ring again, closed his eyes and began to time his breathing to a steady rhythm, drawing his mind into a deep focus.

As the air and sounds grew still, unexpectedly, he was drawn into his spiritual sea. His heart raced when he searched for Genie, but he couldn't sense him.

"He did suggest he was only visiting."

"Light the Redolence stick. " A woman spoke to stir a soothing warmth around his soul. It felt like his mother's hug.

He looked to his hand and saw the redolence stick. A spark of realization dawned upon him.

If there was no god he resonated with in this world, then he would be a god to resonate with others.

"Like the eagle flying high to the skies. I'll forge my own pillar of destiny. One where this world can resonate with me."

The tip of his redolence stick burned bright with a white flame.

"What is magnificence: what is mundane, the stars resonate with and to all with time."

Kairo's surroundings displayed many universes that passed through cycles: times of war, evolution, peace and destruction. He witnessed the cycles of life and karma as infinite loops. Sometimes the cycle stopped or life was trapped in a death-cycle when there was no mutual resonance to ensure continuation. It was at those moments a being was sent to bridge the gaps and remove the stoppage.

"I am the resonance." He firmly declared.

The woman's voice echoed around his sea again, giving him a title for his chosen path.

"You are the Rezenens Mage under no god but the Laws of the Cosmos."

A scroll dropped into his hands, which was titled Star Transformation Path.

He opened it and was knocked back by a bombardment of letters and characters that flooded into his spiritual sea to overwhelm his waters and turn the blue into a musky-yellow glow.

They swiftly moved into a formation of words, sentences and paragraphs for him to read. All but one line was jibberish.

"Life is the seed of a mundane thought given meaning." He read the legible sentence and scratched his head.

Mundane he understood, and perhaps that was the point. To be born average and live an uneventful life, a person could clearly see what was extraordinary and magnificent.

Gold light empowered his aura. He felt a strange magic flow through him, which made him feel both mundane and magnificent.

"Um, did I just level up with a special power?"

He looked at his glowing hands and flinched when the Redolance stick rose before him, burning like a sparkler. It began sketching words with its light.

He who wields the Power of Mundane shall enlighten the magnificent.

The words transitioned in ribbons of energy that lifted his hockey stick off the ground. Sparks of blueish lightning moved around its form.

Kairo stared wonderstruck as he saw the weapon being upgraded. It was now a silver long polearm with a scythe-like hook. Not a piece of sports equipment anymore.

"I guess I can't keep calling it a hockey stick can I?" he said as he grabbed the weapon to wield it, releasing lightning strikes.

A brief summary of the stick's power appeared before him. It held the power to neutralize weaker attacks or wills.

Many names flowed through his mind, but one seemed the most worthy for his weapon. "You shall now be called Zeus!"

He smugly hooked Zeus to his back, but looked worried again when he wasn't sure how to exit from his spiritual sea.

The words came crashing down on him to bowl him over like a tsunami wave.

He gasped for breath when his mind had returned to the physical world, and he saw himself in the middle of the stone ring again.