Chapter 69: 69: A Choice to be Made

Reality skewed sideways like a cardboard box without two of its walls, before it twisted and spun like one of those vomit inducing carnival rides. Except it wasn’t just a mechanical object doing the spinning, but the very orientation of whatever stood for the laws of reality in the Nameless Garden.

I felt like I was a yoyo on the end of a hyperactive toddler’s finger while they bounced around inside a barrel that was inside another barrel that was rolling down a rocky hill. I felt like I was made of rubber and my body was being twisted around a pencil that was then snapped in half. I felt like melted mozzarella being eaten by a hundred year old woman with no teeth.

In short, the world went fucking upside down for a few seconds and then suddenly I was rushing for the bathroom, Esra and Grace not far behind me.

We spent a while in there just vomiting our guts out, the viciousness of what had just happened to our minds and bodies so overwhelming that it was hard to do anything else. Grace was the first to come back to herself, wobbling over on unsteady legs to hold my hair out of my face while I shuddered over the toilet bowl.

Eventually I began to calm down, and after washing my mouth out with water, I turned to an also recovered Esra. She had a worried frown all over her face, mage sight active as she stared up into the heights of the tree through the walls.

“I don’t know what could have caused such a reaction,” she said, half to us and half thinking out loud.

I opened my mouth to speak, to ask her if she had any idea what had just happened to us, when I noticed something. Something that really should have registered to me sooner.

“My grove!” I blurted, rushing for the door. Was I correct? I felt something vastly different through my connection with my source of power.

The other two were after me moments later, calling out with questions and frustration. They’d find out at the same time I did though. No sense in throwing words around when we could go and find out.

The afternoon sun hung lazily in the sky as we burst out of the main doors of the big tree. There had been some light rain that morning, leaving the ramp slightly damp, puddles in the corners. It made our headlong rush down the ramp more than a little dangerous, but we made it to the bottom just fine.

Then it was out and into my grove, so different from when I had first created it. The vast expanse of grass had shrunk drastically, only fifty or so meters in radius around the tree now. The rest was a forest of spell plants and trees, sprinkled at random across the plateau.

Loamy soil few up behind us as I led the other two through the twisting paths that my buns had picked out. They meandered between the trunks of my fairy-like forest in a way that I loved, but I’d heard the others complaining about how they made no sense. It made perfect sense if you had an eye for the flow of things. A straight path through a wild forest like this one would be a travesty.

“Rynadria! You damned pest, where are you going?” Esra cried in frustration.

“You’ll see,” I exclaimed, and then as we burst out through the windbreak trees, we did indeed see what had happened.

Below us, the ephemeral mists that had swirled and danced beneath the cliffs of my grove were gone. In their place was an absolutely stunning view, a broad shelf of land protruded out from the base of my plateau, ending in another cliff some five hundred meters from where we stood. Beyond that were the mists again, lit with the orange of the afternoon sun. Like my grove had been in the beginning, that massive shelf was a vaguely flat sea of verdant green grass that swayed gently as wind rippled across its surface.

“Oh my,” Esra breathed, reaching out for a tree to support herself. “I may have forgotten to take something into account…”

“What did you forget to take into account?” Grace asked, looking anxious as she played with her thumb, pushing it around with the other hand nervously. “Did I break Ryn’s grove?”

“Far from it,” Esra smiled, staring out at the new expanse of green land. “We simply… expanded it. Rather abruptly, which is what caused us such distress. Normally one grows their grove in small increments, a tree or three here, and patch of flowers there. It is not often that something as grand and ambitious as that tree is altered. See, a grove grows not just with the number of plants, but also with their complexity. We often forget that our groves are intelligent, in their own way. They thrive on the artistry that we create within their bounds.”

“And we just wove together a massive and very complex spell that spans multiple plants,” I finished for her, understanding hitting me like a splash of cold water to the face. “Wow… that is… no wonder my internal power reserves feel so strange. It’s almost doubled!”

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“We have… a lot of work to do young Ryn, a lot of work to do,” she replied, shaking her head in consternation. “But first… I think I am going to need a tree like yours after all. It is simply too great a tool not to use. Oh, and I think that growth energy plant of yours could use some… refinement.”

****

We left the Thistlescar town with high spirits and a lot of new goods to sell. Crop seeds, textiles and all sorts that Lord Horln wanted to sell. He was wholeheartedly behind the idea of forging ties of friendship with Avonside, provided they were willing to deal in good faith. Troy commented that we’d make sure of that.

Our journey home continued at the same mind numbly exhausting pace as before. I began to sleep during the cart rides rather than at night, which gave me plenty of time to work on my grove.

I focused on creating the defences for the upper plateau. The shield worked, thankfully, but I needed more than that. I created vines that lay within my forest, each one bearing innocuous blue flowers that would begin to arc lightning between them if the buns determined someone was a threat. In fact, I created a good deal of defenses like that. I had strangling vines that would attack people, I designed little seedlings that hid in the fallen leaves that once activated would spring up to grasp at people, their thorns heated to white hot intensity.

I also began the rather gruelling task of building a ramp down to the lower level of the plateau, which I frankly had no clue what to do with. I was still filling out the forest up above for crying out loud. I elected not to plant anything down there yet, instead focusing on creating the river system that would feed it all, flowing down from my lake above in massive waterfalls.

Another week into our journey and Esra had me bring Grace over to her grove where we could recreate the shield spell there too. Except hers was a little different. Rather than one large tree like me, she used six slightly smaller ones. Her shield would be different too, it was less robust than mine, but it had a rather terrifying additional feature.

Mine felt like a solid wall of faintly humming stone when you touched it. Hers simply vaporised anything it came into contact with. That’s right, hers was significantly deadlier than mine. When I asked why mine wasn’t like that, her response was simply, “You let so many people into that grove of yours that someone was bound to wander into it at some point. I assume that you’d like your guests to stay as a single coherent physical entity?”

I’d nodded and felt a little silly, because yeah… I could see someone walking into it at some point. Or touching it on purpose, just to see what happened. Not thinking about anyone particular on that last one, certainly not a long time friend of mine whose name started with B and ended with dumbass.

Esra’s grove was kinda frightening to be honest. She’d taken after me with the house tree, since she didn’t have time to go and get regular building materials. She had way more finesse and control over her plants than I did though, which was never more demonstrably visible than when I saw the house she’d made.

The six trees that were the central pillar for her shield had been coaxed into weaving their branches together in artful patters, creating a house in the process. It was incredibly pretty too, flowers and fruit hung from excess branches, while small creeping vines added a layer of thick greenery.

She’d even figured out windows using branches that would open and close them on demand. I think she was mentally controlling them or something, but I had no idea.

Her grove was already huge too, although she had it laid out in an organised manner, like her old one. No wild forest ecosystem here. She said that her mind desired order, and a forest like mine, however good for its defensive purposes, would be far too difficult for her to tend and navigate.

I didn’t bring up that my buns did most of that, I think she was a little grumpy that she had no idea about ecology yet. One of he few plant related fields that I had superior knowledge in.

Outside of the Nameless Garden, we finally reached the northern edge of the obrec mountains halfway through our second week out of Thistlescar. During that first night camping in the lowland woods, Esra appeared in my grove, huffing and puffing for breath. The downside to my newly expanded grove was that when people arrived, they arrived way out at the new edge.

It was early evening and the skies above were clouding over, producing a false twilight that gave a sense of peaceful melancholy. I pushed a stray strand of hair out of my face, the tiniest flash of irritation running through my mind as I wondered how it had gotten loose from my ponytail. Long hair was a pain sometimes.

“Ryn,” she gasped, leaning on a nearby tree. “I have need of you.”

“Oh? What’s up?” I asked, standing up from where I’d been playing with the new design that she’d made for the growth magic plants.

“My grove has grown to the point that I do not feel comfortable expanding further without first making sure of my current progress,” she explained, her eyes searching mine carefully. “So I will put the decision to you plainly now… which of your companions would be best suited to the honor of a mage fruit?”

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