Bone Golem

The destruction of the cave was much more perilous than I had predicted it would be. My assumption had been some small rocks falling, or maybe a large boulder or two. Preferably somewhere other than directly falling on me. I was very good at making the circuits I knew how to make, but that didn't mean I could survive massive pressures. I probably could rebuild myself afterwards, so long as my head wasn't crushed, but I didn't really want to test that. Had the issue I faced now been a boulder or two, my repulsion circuit would have pushed me out of the way if it was too weak to move the falling object. That wasn't what happened. The room collapsed entirely. The holes I had gouged out with my mana bullets acted as focal points for cracks that shattered the entire space. That was survivable, if uncomfortable. I had only gouged as deep as my hand was long, after all. Not even a single boulder fell, though there was one piece around the same size as the table I was still laying on. Luckily, that piece fell right at the entrance of the room. What happened next was much more surprising to me. The earth surrounding the cave slowly and silently closed in towards me. The room, expanded by the depth of my bullets' penetration, was being consumed by the surrounding earth.

I already had a cocoon of stone, but I could feel the surroundings closing in. The tunnel was already gone, so my escape route was closed. Not that I was sure how to use the tunnel to escape anyway. I had yet to figure out how to make my bones move, after all. Hopefully, it was merely a function I hadn't figured out and not one I would have to fit into the extremely small amounts of space I had left on my body. All I could do was make sure my defensive circuit didn't suck me dry or lose power as I watched the room become smaller one moment to the next.

A new sensation filled my will once again. A primal, inescapable surge of impulses. An intent to flee. To fight. Something. Anything. My experience with rage allowed me to stifle it to an extent. At least the violence was much reduced. I would be in an even worse situation if I attacked at the walls again. I couldn't flee. What was I meant to fight? Wasting energy on such things would only hasten my demise. As I realized that, the impulses abated. Once you knew what the impulses were, they were easy to ignore. I hoped rage worked the same way, losing control was not a feeling I was fond of. Now what I needed to do was understand. Why was the space closing?

I spread my will out into the stone, meeting much more resistance than I had through the air of the room and tunnel. The difficulty made sense to me. Other things I found as I explored the earth made much less sense. My impression of stone and earth as a solid was being called into question the further I looked. Beyond the extended room, the stone was smooth. There were no cracks as it closed in on me. No crevices for me to take advantage of. It was a single entity, uniform and unstoppable. Why? Another question was why I thought of stone as granular while it clearly was not...except for the pieces that fell when I broke the room. That aside, I still needed to know why I was being eaten.

My will was starting to spread too thin to control as I delved deeper into the stone in every direction. I needed to understand, though. I continued spreading it thinner until I recognized something. There was a crushing pressure within the stone itself. It was so pervasive that the mana itself was taking on this attribute. Then I realized what was happening. The room I'd been in had only been allowed to exist because of a circuit my Creator had inlaid into the walls. I hadn't been paying enough attention to recognize them, either that or they were so degraded that the circuit was undistinguishable from the surrounding mana. Maybe a combination of both. I'd have to pay more attention in the future.

There was hope for my survival. I had spread far enough to find another skeletal structure within the earth. Broken in many places, but mostly intact. I relaxed and spread my will thinner still, trying to understand the pressure more completely. As I allowed my will to relax into the mana, I recognized why I would be destroyed by the earth and undid my circuit before the closing earth could put real pressure on me. Instead I built a new series of circuits to crush the stone into light and fluffy dust such that I sank into the stone table. The table was broken in several places by now, but with my crushing I allowed myself entry into an entity of stone as a solid piece. Sort of. Hopefully the earth wouldn't require compressing my new dust cocoon too much before it was satisfied with the level of cohesion. Then all I needed to do was wait. Rather, all I could do was wait.

The stone wasn't interested in the room, or me. It simply wanted to crush all stone back into the original shape and regain cohesion. Earth was a single solid unit. Or at least, it was supposed to be. As with all things, there were exceptions.

I got bored as I watched the earth close in, so I started manipulating the mana surrounding my body into rune-like shapes. I could understand all of the runes on my body as they were part of my self, but I needed something that could manipulate the earth if I wanted to get out of the stone I'd just encased myself within. I wasn't intending to be yet another static entity enveloped by the earth, never to move again.

Runes were merely strands of intent drawn in a particular pattern. Mana flowing through it would have an effect, either through the natural flow of mana across the surface or directed via will. If I could find the right one, I could make the earth stop collapsing on me. That would be necessary. I would also need one to part the stone. Adjusting a three dimensional rune into a two dimensional rune to be used in a circuit was a little difficult, but I had the time. The other option was being buried in the earth for eternity, after all.

I spread half of my will out into the stone as diffused as I could allow it to be before I dispersed into the mana to watch the flow interact with stone. The other half I devoted to forming shapes with intent. It wasn't long before my dispersed half learned a flow of mana that caused the stone to tremble. Another flow pattern caused trembling to calm within the stone. Natural flow patterns weren't poignant enough to cause actual variations in the highly cohesive earth, but this was what I'd needed to develop the correct shape of a rune. The dispersed portion of my will returned, joining the rest of me trying to perfect the rune shape.

There was no telling time after the room finished closing, but it took me much longer to decipher the rune than it had taken the room to close. Regardless, I eventually found the runes I wanted. I wrote them into a circuit, and the earth rippled around me, moving my body in the direction the tunnel had been leading.

Researching the runes had been much more strenuous for my will than mana consumption, so my core had finally formed! A clear substance smaller than a grain of sand and more ephemeral than gas floated alone within my skull as I finally breached the surface. My circuit had carried me with more force than I anticipated and I was spat out of the earth with enough force for me to fly several body-lengths before my head slammed back into the earth, followed by the rest of my body.

Wonderful. Now it was time to figure out how to move my body. My body had fallen into a heap, due to the way I landed. My bones were no longer arranged the same way my Creator's had been. Before I thought of the arrangement, however, I had to figure out how to move them. Remembering my Creator's shape was easy. Assuming it was less so. The largest problem I had was a lack of resource material. Surrounded by earth, it was easy to learn what flows of mana would affect earth. What would I do to affect bone? The only example I had was myself, and all of my bones were coated in so many circuits that no flow of mana could possibly fit into a space to see how unaffected bones would move. All I would be learning would be runes to affect circuits. It did have some utility, but I didn't want to test that on the circuits keeping me alive.

Having no other recourse, I simply waited. I learned runes for the surrounding materials, but I couldn't stretch my will far enough to find bones to test out. I delved into the earth, hoping for another interred corpse. There weren't any. Since the more time passed the stronger my core became it wasn't a particular problem to sit in a heap awaiting bones, but eventually I ran out of runes to develop. That was when boredom became quite irksome.