Ryn of Avonside

Because Ryn had taken Dr. Richards out of my grove, she took a while to return from her grove's ingress point.

Esra continued to hold me, looking concerned, until I finally said, “Esra, thanks, but I'm fine.”

“Are you sure?” She asked, letting me go and stepping back. “The feedback from such an abrupt severing of the fruit's link between you and Richards… it very much appears to be taking a toll.”

As if suddenly remembering to send and receive signals, my hafornsu informed me that it was most unhappy with what I'd done. Yikes, having a second body to feel pain with, on top of the usual body, was not a pleasant experience. Severing the bond of… well, to use a term from vampire fiction, the bond of sire to progeny — it wasn’t a clean procedure. At least, not using the method that I’d figured out. He’d still have magic, but the odd, ephemeral connection between us was gone. He’d still have magic, or the basis for it, but without training from another garden mage, he’d be just a were-plant.

A shock of pain lanced up through my side, then neck, and into my eye, like I was getting hit with some sort of instant migraine spell. God… fuckin’... I should really be running my plans past other mages before I did them.

As for my mental situation, honestly, I hadn't really been particularly emotional about the situation. No wait, I had, but those emotions were purely like, anger and other adjacent emotions. None of them really called for the kind of comfort that came with a hug.

“It is taking a toll, yeah, but I can deal with it. We should be going, anyway. If I remember right, we put Dr. Wilcott into a fruit pretty soon after Richards found this one,” I said, taking a few deep breaths to centre and push through the pain.

“Absolutely correct, and we most definitely do not want to leave Smoke to grapple with the situation on their own,” Esra agreed, but then she spiked me with a hard look. “However, if I hear that you aren’t going to deal ramifications of this whole ordeal, I will be most disappointed. Take care with your hafornsu, it will be fragile for a time. We will be having a discussion about this later, too. As for the emotional toll this appears to have taken… be sure to give yourself time to process it. Be kind to yourself, you hear me?”

I didn't answer, except with a grunt. Was it really even that big of a deal? He was a liability so long as he was in my grove, but he was gone now, and— ah, I was chewing on my thoughts again, like a cow with her cud — over and over and over. Swallowing it, I grimaced and made a big show of summoning the willpower to leave my grove, so the others would have some warning. I was discovering that telegraphing your magical intentions was just good manners. Well, either that or I was being like, reverse influenced by Ryn the Jumpscare.

My magical migraine pulsed with gentle ire when we made the transition from grove to Garden. It was only a small exercising of my will, though. I was still being careful with my magic.

We left for Ryn's grove, but stopped when we saw her floating towards us. A small weedlike shrub floated past as we waited for her to get to us. The little tangled mess of vegetation twisted into various nonsensical shapes as it drifted — and always, it seemed to be just on the cusp of becoming coherent. Actually, there were a few instances where it did look like it had some sort of goal or purpose, before it unravelled.

Ryn arrived at the halfway point between our groves with a smile, “Had one of the buns dump him in Avonside for you, since I can't deliver him all the way there myself.”

“Excellent, thank you Rynadria. Now, speaking of your rabbits, we must visit the one named Smoke. We're expecting Dr. Wilcott to finish developing within an hour or two,” Esra said with a stoic nod of approval to Ryn.

Ryn snapped her fingers. “Right. The mess continues to mess. Follow me.”

She led us about a mile around the massive bundle of mirrored bubbles that was her grove now, before diving in towards one of the smaller ones with intent. “Smoke’s grove is just beyond this one, I think. We'll have to cross through Alice’s grove to get to it, because it's completely encased.”

“Eternally preposterous,” muttered Esra, as we entered the barely twenty metre wide silvery orb.

On the inside, we found a hill baking in the light of an afternoon sun, while mist rolled around us, turning it into an island. In the middle there was a large, squat oak tree, with a bulbous trunk. At ground level, there was a little circular green door, barely large enough for me to duck through.

Just visible over the slight curve of the hill, we could see a bunny mage working intently on something on the ground.

“Wishie!” Called Ryn, waving to the bun.

The bun suddenly disappeared from view behind the curve of the hill, except for two very large ears that poked up and swivelled around like antennae. Suddenly, a little face popped up to stare at us, and then the bun mage was rushing over on all fours.

The bun wore the most intense pastel pink frilly sundress I'd ever seen. Where she acquired a garment like that, I could only guess, but it was covered in garden soil around the hem. She arrived in a blurring rush of ruffles and fabric, and crashed into Ryn for a hug.

Ryn gasped as the wind was partially knocked out of her, but managed to catch and hold Wishie. “Hey little one, what's up?”

“Spells are hard!” Came a small muffled voice from within the folds of Ryn's coat.

The bun quickly hopped back to stare wide-eyed at our group. “So many big people. You visit my grove? Why…?”

“You’re struggling with spell creation because you are still quite new to the art, and you're attempting to achieve too much with each species,” Esra said gently. “Start small, so that you can become more practiced at concentrating on each component as it is actualised.”

“Yes, teacher Esra,” said the small bunny.

Huh, so she had the buns calling her teacher? She had so many other learning related titles that this seemed almost reductive.

“We're just passing through, girlie,” Ryn said, giving Wishie a scritch on the top of the head. “Which way is it to Smoke's grove?”

“Smoke? Oh, is it time for the professor to pop out of the fruit?” Wishie asked. She had a habit of speaking very quickly, and with a touch of stream-of-consciousness, it took me a second to parse anything she said.

Ryn nodded. “Yup.”

“That way!” Wishie pointed over to where a trail led down the gentle slope of the hill. “Into the fog ten steps, then it's Smoke's grove!”

“Thanks, Wishie,” Ryn smiled, reaching out to give the bunny a quick head scritch.

Following the directions we were given, we followed the path into fog for a couple of seconds, until our vision was entirely obscured. I felt the threshold as we approached. One step, there was the soft scraping sensation of hard packed dirt underfoot, then the slight scrape of gravel, and on the third, stone cobbles.

Leaving the fog, we suddenly found ourselves in a gloomy circular garden ringed by a twelve foot hedge. Just inside that hedge was the cobblestone path, which followed around, helping to encircle the rest of the grove. Carefully tended trellis archways creaked under the weight of thorny, berry-bearing vines. Through the arches, a path twisted out of sight, although the likely destination was the small cottage whose slate shingled roof could be seen over the tops of the various spell plants that sat within their neat little beds.

The whole place had an almost overbearingly neat, melancholy vibe. It matched the bunny whose grove this was.

I winced as that thought passed me — I couldn't exactly throw stones there. I had a habit of being a bit brooding sometimes too. Was being brooding even bad? Was I trying to insinuate to myself that— gah! Not now.

Ryn led us through one of the archways and down a cobble path, past a gnarled old oak looking tree that I recognised as a shield spell. It only had a fraction of the power that Ryn or even I could utilise, though. The buns struggled pretty heavily with raw magical output.

Near the centre of the grove, we arrived at the little cottage, which turned out to be a moderately sized cottage but only if you were like three feet tall. Out the front was a dew-slicked lawn, and on that lawn was a mage fruit, glowing with a dull orange light.

Smoke stood in front of it, hands on hips as they stared up at the fruit that would soon release Dr. Wilcott from her months-long slumber.

“Hey, Smoke!” Ryn called as we approached.

They turned and regarded us with their charcoal grey eyes. “Hello. Lots of you. Why? Supposed to be friend in the fruit.”

“Yeah, but we came from Catherine's grove where she had someone who wasn't a friend,” Ryn explained as she watched the fruit with idle interest.

Smoke grunted, but otherwise kept quiet. I took that opportunity to sidle up to them.

“Hey Smoke. Thank you so much for hosting Wilcott for me,” I said softly.

“You owe me favour. It wasn't too bad, though. Is interesting to see how much power is in human mage,” they grumbled, scoring a line in the grass with one of the large claws on their feet.

It took another twelve hours for Dr. Wilcott’s fruit to begin showing signs of life, which was honestly pretty well timed as far as fruit went. Incubation times could normally vary in length by up to a week.

We passed the time by playing a few of the latest board games that were being developed. Smoke really enjoyed it, especially when they got to roll dice. Esra put on a show of being uninterested, but began to get very competitive as time went on. Meanwhile, Eilian was just fascinated by the complex rules and pieces that were on display. To her, board games had been fairly simple, with only one or two having the complexity of something like chess. Cards and tokens and strange, colourful boards were a trip for her, even after having played a few of the previous games.

We were just trying to decide if we wanted to finally call it and go to bed — some of us had been up for like, eighteen hours by that point — when the fruit shifted slightly. It creaked, then twitched again, and the board was quickly packed away while I rushed for a kit that we hadn't bothered using with Dr. Richards.

Smoke backed away while we worked. They weren't fearful, but they obviously didn't care to be involved.

A minute passed, then two, then all of a sudden, the wall of the fruit burst and a nude woman with shining grey blue hair sloughed out. Coughing and failing, Wilcott attempted to get the usual fruity gunk out of her eyes, but it was too sticky.

“Hey, ma’am. Let me help,” I said, and pressed a towel to her face as gently as possible.

She took it gratefully and used it to clear her face of the gross, sticky liquid that had held her suspended for a month. As she did that, I wrapped her in a much larger towel, to cover her nudity. The glimpses I got told me that the fruit had worked its usual magic, though.

“Thanks,” she rasped, sounding somewhat more… full, in her voice, as though some previous minor damage had been erased. She fell still when she heard it, then laughed softly. “Wow. I haven't heard that in… thirty years.”

“Ah, just you wait, Liora,” Esra said with a chuckle. “I believe that a glance into a mirror will give you quite the shock.”

Wilcott looked up, then smiled slightly when she saw Esra. “Esra. Nice to see you.”

“It is an unmitigated pleasure, as always,” my mentor said with a polite nod. “Now, I know that you'll be eager to discuss your new reality as a mage along the state of Avonside in your absence, but such discourse should wait until you are bathed, clothed, and provided with sustenance. There must be a minimum standard of dignity before we descend into… chaos.”

Chaos? Somehow, I didn't think Dr. Wilcott could cause much chaos. Esra was probably just traumatized by Ryn, myself, and of course, her latest pupils — the buns. Getting proper clothing on the dignified university councillor was probably a good idea, though…