Earth Ancient I

The elf watching Kies noticed that something had gone awry and jumped to his side. "What's happening!?" he demanded.

"Look down!" Kies told him. The elf glanced down at his feet and saw that he was trapped. Without wasting a second, he knew what he needed to do. The elf called for vines nearby to assist him. From the large thick vines pinning down the golem sprouted smaller vines. They wrapped around Kies' feet and squeezed them.

"It's too tough!" the elf exclaimed. The thorny vines were too weak to crack the rock. The elf grabbed Kies' arms and tugged as hard as he could to pull them away from the golem but it was futile.

The golem's magic had spread far by now and Kies was running out of time to think of something. It was halfway to his core and once it reached that…

Thankfully, due to his weakened sense of emotions, Kies was able to keep calm while this was all happening. All he needed to do was copy what the golem did. But there was just one tiny problem here and it was that he was terrible at controlling magic. He only practiced to the bare minimum to conjure his spells and let his massive pool of magic power do everything else.

Kies never saw a point in perfecting control when he could brute force the majority of problems, but this was one of the times that brute forcing won't help him. If he knew something like this would happen, he would have spent more time practicing control.

Kies fought the golem's magic with his own but the golem had much better control of its magic than him.

Kies did his best to push the golem's magic back but it was like a towering wall. He was sending endless waves to break down that wall but it was too weak to do anything.

Kies realized that copying the golem's method wasn't going to work for him here. He had to think of something else. Kies drew his magic back and let the golem's magic surge forward. It was a dangerous move but if he continued what he had been doing before, it was only a matter of time before he lost the battle.

Kies concentrated his magic in his circuits and regained control of it. He pierced through the thick of the golem's magic and once he reached the tips of his fingers, he expanded the magic to cut off the golem's flow. It was the same trick that the golem did.

That was the first step. Kies used this opportunity to remove his hand. He did the same with his other arm and freed both of them. Lastly, he expelled the magic in both of his arms. After the last of the golem's magic was extinguished from his arms, he felt his senses return to him as his own magic flooded back into them.

All that the left was to free his feet which proved to be more challenging than freeing his arms. Destroying the rock holding him in place wasn't too difficult of a task, but that would mean shooting a hole through his feet as well.

Kies never tried severing body parts to see if his regeneration worked to that extent and testing it now may or may not turn him into a cripple.

For some reason, the golem's magic didn't infiltrate this body through his feet as it did with his hands which made things a whole lot less stressful.

Kies condensed the wind and carefully blew off piece by piece the rock and once the gaps were big enough, he pulled his feet up and out of the restraints.

Kies looked to his left as he heard muttering and saw that the elf was performing a high-level spell and immediately called out to him to stop chanting. "I'm free. Cancel your spell."

The elf opened his eyes and saw that Kies was indeed free and stopped his spell. Without waiting for another second, he summoned the vines and pulled the two of them back up the hill and away from the golem.

The two looked back down and saw the golem churning, creating vibrations. They had to get down onto their knees to avoid losing balance.

"You can't keep trouble from following you wherever you go, can you!?" the elf shouted at Kies, his eyes wide open with fury. Even after he warned him not to do anything rash, this happened.

"I'll fix it," Kies told the elf in an effort to calm him down. He knew that he was at fault here once again and the only way to quell the elf's anger was to clean this mess.

Kies or ready to call in a storm when all of the sudden, a voice boomed in his head, surprising him so much that his magic went out of control and almost sliced in half one of the ancient trees near them.

'What is an Aeos doing in my territory!?' it asked. The voice resonated in Kies' head, and it sounded like rocks smashing against each other, but Kies made out the works perfectly nevertheless.

Before Kies could reply, the voice spoke again and it felt as if the entire world was shaking 'What grudge do you hold against me!?' its voice boomed.

Kies glanced at the elf to see his reaction but he just returned an angry glare, seemingly oblivious to what Kies was experiencing.

"I'm waiting. Fix this like you said you would."

Like some sort of a coincidence, the golem stopped shifting and everything became still again. The elf raised an eyebrow and asked, "What did you do?" He didn't see Kies move even a finger but the rumbling suddenly stopped.

"It wasn't me," Kies told the elf.

"If it wasn't you, then who?"

Kies returned his gaze back to the golem and heard the voice explode in his head again. "Answer my questions. Why are you in my land, and why are you attacking me!?" There was no doubt about it. The golem was speaking to him telepathically.

"The golem stopped itself. It is also speaking to me."

"What!?" The elf stared, both stunned and worried. He didn't hear a thing and guessed that it was speaking only to Kies, telepathically. "What is it saying?" he anxiously asked. The elf never thought that communication with the thing was possible but if they could get the thing to leave on its own then that was the best solution they could possibly achieve.

"It is asking us why we attacked it," Kies briefed the elf on the situation. Correction, it was specifically asking Kies why he attacked it, not anyone else.

Kies never learned telepathy but he tried to speak to the golem in his head like he had done before with the owl. The first and foremost important thing is to answer the golem's questions then Kies could ask it how it knew his identity and so on.

'I don't bear a grudge against you,' Kies started, making it clear that it wasn't in their intention to make an enemy out of the golem. 'I attacked you because there is a tree in your path that is home to the elves,' he explained.

Silence. Kies waited for a response but when none came, Kies thought that his message didn't go through or that it was ignored. Kies opened his mouth to speak but as he did so, the golem finally said something. 'I understand. I will overlook your previous hostile acts. I will also change my path to avoid the tree.'

Kies conveyed what the golem said to the elf and he could see the tension escape his face. "Thank the spirits." A leafy green sphere appeared in his hand and he said something to it in Elvish before sending it off in the direction of the tree. Kies turned and hundreds of elves on the branch tops, tiny as specks of dust, armed and ready to fight. The shaking woke them all up, but they should be eased to hear that the golem no longer posed a threat to the safety of the elven capital.

Now that the problem was out of the way, Kies had a few things that he wanted to ask the golem. 'Can you still hear me?'

'What is it?'

'Are you by chance... An Ancient?'

---

Grammar errors, story errors, other errors, and advice, email flightless05@gmail.com

Thanks!