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Chapter 187: Interlude: Old Soil, Old Plants
🕑 Added 2024-12-06 17:38:44 +0000 UTCCN: Mention of Injury
We live in a world of magic where many things are possible. For example, it is possible that one day your friends decide to chop you down in one fell swoop.
Half of me falls to the ground, twigs and branches breaking on impact like fingers. It is something I have learned: To make people care, you have to pretend to be like them. The other half of me remains stuck in the ground to decay over time like an abandoned body in a grave.
Isobel asked what I would like to happen to my old wood. Whenever my old tree dies and I get replanted, she wants to carve a little keepsake out of it. Make a figurine that looks like me — she’s already got a little version of my spirit body and a little version of what my old canopy looked like. I don’t ask what she makes this time. I let her because it’s kind of cute, although a bit awkward. I don’t tell her that.
How would she feel if someone made keepsakes out of the chips of her body even though she’s still around? I imagine she wouldn’t mind at all. I’ve never seen her get embarrassed. It’s like that feeling doesn’t even exist to her. Luckily I can hide my blushes well when I walk past her room and catch a glimpse of old pieces from me on her desk.
Of course, many preparations had to be made before they could fell me. For example, Dema made pots for me to live in.
“Like this?” she’d asked and I would shake my head.
“Can’t you make it oval shaped? My canopies tend to grow like that. I’ll have more soil to walk on.”
Then she would decrystallise the pool of blood and reshape it.
“This is better, but perhaps you could add some embellishments to the sides. I won’t see them but others will.”
“Embellishments? Like what?”
I clicked my tongue. Did she really need me to say it out loud? “Like on the house,” I forced out. “Like what you’ve done to the walls.” I want my little house to look like our big one. How is that not obvious?
“Oh, yeah, I can do that,” Dema said with a thoughtful nod and after a swing of her hand she impressed the most beautiful pattern I have ever seen onto the pot, just perfectly fitting our home.
“This is all wrong,” I say, making her redo it twice because I don’t want her to know that making me happy is effortless for her.
“So, how about this?” she eventually asked after meeting all my demands with unbearable patience.
I stared at the pots for a while — different sizes for when I grow up, with little murals on the sides and no drainage holes, because I can take care of that myself with Skills, and leaking fluids that have run past my roots all the time would be embarrassing.
“We need lava,” I said, because that would make it easier.
“Lava?”
I nodded. “Lava rocks. Place them at the bottom of the pot before filling it with soil. That leaves room for standing water to collect without biting at my roots.”
Dema made a little gesture of success — just a small pump of her fist at the prospect of getting to see lava again. Then she wrote it down on a note. “So, that’s all? Pot needs filled?”
“Well, yes, it would need to be filled eventually, with soil and with me.”
“No, I meant—”
I know what she meant! Just need to make sure they don’t forget to actually put me in it at the end. “Also,” I started, “this is only the first half of the process. Blood crystal isn’t porous enough, you need to make the actual pots out of clay to help the excess water out.”
“Wha— Really?” Dema scratched her head. “I gotta potter pots? How’s that work?”
“I figured you could just use an earth-type Skill?”
“Why, I’d need to make one… and that’s a lot easier if I know how to get there by hand first. You have any leads?”
I blinked and my mouth hung open for a moment. I’d wanted to be a little cheeky, yes, but I didn’t expect it to actually be that much work for her… But her eyes were beaming at me in excitement — literally glowing. I took a short breath and walked over to one of Isobel’s bookshelves in the library. I took out a heavy one she brought to me once, many years ago. Most of the advice in it is bad and inaccurate, but…
“Look,” I said, opening a page — I have its position memorised. “You see that?” I pointed at a picture of a bowl. “That’s Iridescent Descent.” I swallowed, losing a bit of confidence. Why did I think this was a good idea? “I know it’s a mythical material, but this book says it used to be made in Lakurna, in the south. And it says here—” I wetted my dry lips, reading off the properties: “Can be infused with mana to increase durability, it can even grow or shrink in size depending on magical concentration, and apparently can produce nutrients that get infused into whatever is inside it; food or soil. I know it sounds too good to be true, but…”
Dema looked more interested than I expected, and then literally on the same day runs off on a side quest to figure out how to make it. She wasn’t back even after weeks.
I’ve got bad experiences with people making promises and running off, but Dema has always come back, and has always helped, so I’m letting myself cultivate hope for once.
I get chopped down three months later. They put the seeds into special soil and Dema saturates the Iridescent Descent planter she made — it’s filled with so much of her mana it almost drowns me in affection. And so, for the third time, they start taking care of Sapling Me. And like they always do, they talk to me a lot even before the seed sprouts. I’m still buried under the soil but Bell is already venting to me about how her days went when she thinks nobody is listening, and Isobel reads me bedtime stories.
One morning Dema checks on me and then starts cheering, letting out: “She’s here!” — and she’s totally wrong. That’s just a fern weed growing in the centre of the pot, I’m off to the side, not yet sprouted!
And then she takes my pot and runs off to show off the fern sapling. I can’t see anything but I can hear them — through magic, maybe, or perhaps I can just pick up sound vibrations — and I can hear Theora let out a small hum. Please notice that this is just a fern. I don’t look like that at all! Yes, my leaves tend to split too but it’s all different!
“We gotta hold a birth celebration or something,” Dema says and I have no choice but to pout silently.
Eventually Bell follows the sound of the ruckus and squelches into the room on her little water-filled leg-tentacles. Dema shows ‘me’ off to her too.
“That’s not Treeka,” Bell says. “Treeka’s got splitting leaves too but that looks like a random fern.”
Oh, this girl is perfect.
“Wait, really? Then where is she? I wanted to see her again sooner…”
“It’s fine,” Bell says. “None says last time took her about two weeks to sprout, we are only three days in.”
Dema grumbles and I’m pretty sure Theora starts to pat her head halfway through based on how the noise changes.
They hold the celebration party a few days later when I actually reach my first leaf out, and I may have hurried a little just because I liked the prospect of them making a big deal out of this. And then… well, and then Theora takes me with her into the range of the time dilation device. So that I grow a little faster in relation to the others. Just us two, the others stay outside, and she spends a lot of time sleeping and then wakes up to fuss about me. She can’t use magic, but I’m strong enough by now that I don’t mind getting watered a day late or being left in the shade for too long. She gets better about it very quickly. I don’t think she has gardened much before this. But every mistake I have to painstakingly correct, she only makes once. As if she realises, as if she knows when I have to exert effort to mend things. It’s almost a little frightening how I can’t just make a tiny adjustment without feeling her wonder what she might have done wrong.
Frightening in a good way.
Theora, who could destroy the entire universe with a snap of her finger, but when she clips my branches, she does so with the utmost care. Then, she guides them with strong wires and I can’t help but feel things when she does. I can’t control my growth very well in the early years because things go so quickly, so I gave precise instructions on what I want to look like. And now she’s forming me accordingly and if — if I had known in advance how it feels to be coerced into my ideal self-chosen shape by a power beyond comprehension I might have gotten cold roots about it. But now I was stuck with every indomitable suggestion she ever so gently imposed on me, with her leading me right where I want to go.
Theora talks too. Which I know she does just for me, I don’t think she would ever speak to herself otherwise, not even knowing I can hear her. She gives little updates on what she was doing; mumbled good-mornings, low-voiced apologies when she clips a branch. She tells me she’s learning a lot and she’s excited for when she can finally properly grow her own darkness daffodil, because apparently she doesn’t much like light.
Which is a little funny to me. For one, she volunteered for this job of sitting me until I can materialise a spirit again, which involves a lot of light exposure. But also, she’s Theora the Sun. How does one get a title like this while preferring the shade? It would make me giggle if I could.
And so, those years passed, almost a little too quickly for my liking. And, truth be told, each time any of them spoke to me, I felt only ever so slightly bad.
Because they’re making a mistake — following a flawed assumption. And I’m letting them. They think I regress like Bell does. They think I don’t remember my past when I’m a sapling, because that’s how she works, and so they treat me like they treat her when she polyps. But I’m not like Bell. I keep my mind, obviously. I just can’t interact with the outside world.
But I never told them that. They never asked.
Would they still treat me like this if they knew? Be so vulnerable, divulge their secrets? Maybe. But… when you change the soil, you might change what grows. They have grown so used to me being the way I am already, and it feels so good. Can’t risk losing any of it.
