Fimbulwinter (Daniel Black) by E. William Brown

but
    enchanting it to fly around was surprisingly tricky. After some experimentation
    I realized that the control problems were basically the same as trying to make
    an aircraft fly solely on vectored thrust, which is the kind of complicated
    problem I could easily spend days or even weeks trying to solve. Since I was
    looking for a faster way to transport the refugees that didn’t seem very
    practical, although I resolved to come back the problem in the future. Being
    able to fly would be amazingly useful.
    I played around with other ideas for a bit, looking for one that might
    work. Stone golems pulling stone wagons? Amulets enchanted to ‘heal’ fatigue
    continuously? Levitation spells on the baggage? Most approaches turned out to
    be impractical on examination, either because they’d require too much
    enchantment time or because they needed an effect my sorcery didn’t want to
    provide.
    Eventually I decided to let that problem stew for a bit, and turned my
    thoughts to weapons and armor. So far I’d been pushed way too hard in all of
    our fights, and I could easily have lost one. Any real power gamer will tell you
    that if the outcome of a fight is in doubt when it starts you’ve already screwed
    up, so I was determined to find a better way to deal with giant monsters.
    Force fields had proved invaluable so far, but keeping one running often
    took more concentration or mana than I could spare. Force blades were
    devastating at close range, but their lack of mass made them a lot less useful at
    a distance. I needed substantial improvements on both, and a bigger mana
    supply, and a way to make myself more durable, and some defenses against
    being surprised, and...
    I reigned myself in before the list could get too long. One problem at a
    time, Daniel.
    Some experimenting with the power tap enchantment I’d come up with
    revealed that the rate it generated mana was determined by the size of the
    object it was tied to. So my tiny little amulet might last for centuries, but its
    energy output was relatively modest. If I wanted a real power source I’d need
    69
    something bigger.
    Fortunately that was an easy problem to fix. I could conjure stone easily,
    and with a constant power source metals were possible as well. So my new
    amulet was a thick bronze disk about three inches in diameter, suspended from
    a braided rope of copper threads. I took the time to work out a proper on/off
    switch for this one, as well as a remote cutoff just in case an enemy got hold of
    it one day. It weighed a couple of pounds, enough to be a bit uncomfortable,
    but I’d live. The extra weight meant it delivered more than ten times the energy
    of the original version, and there were all kinds of things I could do with that.
    For starters, I could enchant it to surround the wearer with a force shield
    on command so I wouldn’t have to do that myself. I carefully constructed a
    substantial energy reservoir to hold the shield up against any sudden flurry of
    blows, and took advantage of the hefty power supply to make the barrier
    considerably stronger than the ones I’d been using as well. With that running I
    might actually make it through the next fight without getting covered in blood.
    But I couldn’t count on it withstanding every attack, so the next function I
    build in was automatic healing. There was no way to make it especially
    intelligent about how it dealt with complicated injuries, but it was surprisingly
    straightforward to have it just indiscriminately dump healing energy into the
    wearer. The result should look like natural healing sped up by a factor of a few
    hundred, which ought to make even really serious injuries survivable.
    I had a thousand other ideas, but my crafting was interrupted by dinner.
    That was a communal affair for the whole group, although I was surprised
    to note that Avilla seemed to be running things. She stood at the hot stone
    surrounded by a clump of peasant women, who seemed happy enough to