It has been constructed with the utmost care and dedication, nurtured as if it were a newborn babe so fresh to the world that one false move might cause it to shatter into a thousand pieces. Indeed, I have given every hour of the past few days to the cultivation of this precious seedling, foregoing sleep and even food for fear that I might miss some crucial moment of its development. It is not enough that this being be brought into the world with sentience, but morality as well. When I say that it is like a newborn babe, I do so with the dawning comprehension that to me, it is my own flesh and blood. Its roots are my veins. Its branches are my muscles. Its sap is my blood. Its leaves are my skin. It is now so much a part of me that I despair at the purpose of its creation.
I cannot undo what has been done though. A guardian is necessary. Though this seedling is still as small as my palm, it will soon grow, and in its growth, it will throw off seeds of its own. I will be made a grandfather and great grandfather long after I have passed.
Yet now my mind recoils from a new dilemma. A child of sense and morality must be molded, they must be educated in right from wrong, good from evil. Like all children, it is susceptible to corruption from selfish forces. It might be swayed with honeyed words and sparkling treasures. I have not made it to be immune to such desires, as the heart of morality necessitates the choice between want and need.
I will prepare it as best I can, teach it of the failings of my age and my father’s age and my grandfather’s age. I will tell it the stories of creation and the gods, and leave it with the choice of belief. Yes, I will raise it to be a good and just child of my line.
But herein is my fear. The terror that now grips me at night and robs me of peaceful rest. What will become of my child when I am gone?
This is, of course, the fear of all parents. Yet few of those still living need to fear the immortality of their life choices. If I am lax in my duties, if I cannot impart enough of my will onto my child, then corruption will inevitably seep in.
Self-education is the clear and easy solution, but my precious seedling has no eyes to see with. It has no lips with which to sound out words, and no hands with which to hold tomes or scrolls. It is too late to amend its physicality. That much is done. I might leave it with my scripts in the hope that it develops a skill in the years beyond me, but why would a fish yearn for the sky when it has never flown?
No, hoping for the best outcome of self-tutelage is not sufficient. My creation will need a tutor in the years to come. Someone to continue its education and guide it on its journey into the myriad years ahead. Already it craves the binding of a creature with a soul, like a child craves a parent. I will locate an apprentice and, in time, have said apprentice bind to the seedling as I am now bound. Thus I will ensure that my lineage is never spoiled.
Mystic sighed and massaged the skin between her eyes, pinching at the bridge of her nose as if to mold it into even narrower an arch.
“You had such a beautiful plan. Tragic that you had to go and die first,” she muttered to the yellowed pages laid out before her.
::Are you done yet?:: The petulant, faintly fatigued whine of a high, nasally voice thrummed through her thoughts.
Mystic sat back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest and turning to face the soft kiss of sunlight streaming in through the open window of her study. The slow, steady twitching of a pink-tipped blue tail darting in and out of her periphery like an upside-down metronome informed her that Hope had not moved from her languid stretch across the shelf just to the side of the open window.
“The answer is as it always is. I am never done,” Mystic replied.
A long, low sound issued through her mind and through the air above her head as the pink and blue draca released the most aggrieved groan her tiny body could push out.
::Just give it a rest, would you? It’s not that bad. Thayer’s going to be dealing with a lot worse than some sulky forest when you kick it anyway.::
Mystic shot out a quick breath through her nose; the only response she would grant Hope’s insensitive comment.
It was all well and good for the draca to be flippant about the future. Her children were grown and, aside from the heart attack that Magika’s bonding of one of them had been, thriving. None of them would be saddled with the mantle of leadership upon Hope’s passing. None of them would have to contend with princes frothing at the mouth for a war, or hydras that may or may not pop back up for a second round someday, or worlds that just up and vanished for no reason. None of them would have to feel the cold, hard pit in their stomachs, as if they’d just swallowed a mouthful of charred chicken and no amount of sweet wine sauce could mask the ashy layer of carbon that now coated their esophagus right down into their abdomen.
In a way, Mystic pitied the forest that surrounded the Warren. It had grown lush and wild since the centuries old death of its progenitor. It had spread its seed far, but never too far from home, and never too close so as to encroach on that which it held sacred.
In so many ways, it was like a teenager, full of mute rage and undirected frustration. It wanted to explore and to learn and to grow, and yet it feared what lay beyond its borders. Feared it so much that it destroyed all which it didn’t understand. What it did understand was that once it was loved, and then that love had been taken away. And in its place came the sweet, sticky seduction of power.
Toth had not intended to corrupt his guardian. At least, Mystic assumed as much. As far as she knew, Toth hadn’t even been aware of its existence beyond his subterranean dungeon. It was just the sheer presence of a being that old and that powerful that leeched into the ground, and thus into the roots of the forest. And so, lacking a mentor, the forest had turned to the siren song of hydra chaos instead.
Those early days of attuning with it, coming to understand that it was not just alive, but sentient, had been absolutely nightmarish. The first time she called on the forest to aid her, the damned thing had ripped an entire battalion in half and nearly squeezed the life from her in its zeal. It was only a deeply ingrained desire to protect that which it saw as its family that kept her alive that day.
Prince Achille still refused to set foot past the forest a second time.
In the days after that assault, Mystic put considerable effort into understanding the forest. She combed through the crumbling diaries of its creator for every scrap of sentence that even hinted at the forest’s purpose or construction. She walked among the woods, getting to know its thorny bark and tar-like sap and strangling vines. And then, inch by pain-staking inch, she began to peel away the layers of corruption piled atop its core. The process was slow and now, even decades later, the forest still pulsed with a desire to rend and tear and destroy. By the time she reached an age at which her failing mind would no longer be able to control the creation, which she hoped was still a millennia away, it might at last be at a point where it would at least give a warning before ripping someone apart from the inside.
This was not a thing she could leave to Thayer. Not that her son couldn’t handle it. For all his irritating tendencies of being a typical teenage boy, he was quite magically gifted. He was also a summer child though, raised in a time beyond war and the threat of hydra rampage.
She had once considered Bane for the unenviable task, but quickly dismissed that option as well. Bane had suffered enough atrocities already. He deserved a future free of corruption.
There were other options among her faithful apprentices as well. Ayzha and Lucia and T’Dalen, all of which came with their own reasons to be dismissed from the running. At the end of the day, after exhausting the names of every mage at her disposal, Mystic came to a realization; she didn’t want to risk the chain being broken a second time.
It didn’t matter how well she laid out her plans or how far in advance she prepared, the potential was always there for something to go awry, just as it had the first time. She couldn’t risk the forest being left unattended again. It would be too much like losing one’s family all over again. And dammit, she’d started to love the twisted thing.
What she needed was something that would age with the forest, growing as it did. Something that was as timeless as itself. The unicorns wouldn’t come within a hundred miles of it, and the other guardian races were as good as extinct. There were long-lived dragons of course but-
Mystic sat forward abruptly, the breeze of her sudden motion ruffling the pages laid out so meticulously on her desk. Her mind grasped at something she couldn’t quite see, but it was there. The answer was just out of reach.
Shoving her chair back from the desk, Mystic stood and arrowed toward the door.
::Is it dinner time?:: Hope called sleepily in her head.
Mystic ignored the question as she yanked the door open.
A trio of attendants stood on her doorstep, each one grasping a different armload of fresh hell in the form of paperwork. One stood directly before her, knuckle raised and ready to knock at the door. The look of shock on his face as she opened it before he could twist his wrist forward was second only to his look of abject terror as he acknowledged that she stood less than a foot away.
“No. Not right now,” Mystic said, striding into their midst as if they were collectively formed of vapour. They parted before her as rapidly as water before the bow of a ship.
“But Your Grace,” one of them protested in a high, squeaky voice.
“Too busy,” she called over her shoulder. “Leave it on my desk.”
And then she was gone, quick-stepping down the stairs to the main level with single-minded determination.
The answer continued to tease her mind as she wended her way through the attendants and attaches and ambassadors toward the back of Castle Drakmor, and from there into New Warren. It was so close that she could taste it. It tasted of winter’s bite and fall’s decay and spring’s flowers and summer’s baked earth. It tasted of a single syllable name that should have come easily to her mind, but continued to hide in the shadows of her thoughts. It tasted of strength and size and formidability, and yet she could not put an image to it. Dammit, she knew this thing was the right answer if she could just remember what it was.
Into New Warren the Red Mage stalked, her path cleared of all obstacles. People suddenly recalled that they were not in as much of a hurry as they thought when they caught sight of her billowing toward them like a flame tornado with a mission. Even dragons discovered that they’d actually been meaning to duck into that den right there in front of them rather than risk filling the hallway when she appeared.
Thankfully, her warpath was short, and soon she came to the extensive library that housed not only the histories and stories of the five princelets, but also an extensive collection of knowledge on the Nexus. Draconic ancestries and species info and “how to” guides for new dragon riders lined shelf after shelf after shelf.
The librarians did not question the High Princess’ sudden appearance in the evening hours. They did not disturb her as she claimed an entire long table for herself and began piling books atop its surface. The bravest among them let Mystic know when they were closing up for the evening, but took off the moment the Red Mage offered a non-verbal grunt as acknowledgement of her words. Then Mystic was alone in the darkened library save for her books.
To find a non-descript species with an unknown world of origin and an unknown lineage among the many collected tomes of the Nexus made the search for the proverbial needle in a haystack seem like a fun romp. There were thousands of books through which she might sift, and no way to narrow her search other than the tedious process of elimination. Yet Mystic was undeterred.
As evening gave way to twilight, Mystic read. She moved about the table restlessly, as if reading from more than one book at a time was the only thing keeping her heart beating. She looked through parentage charts and historical records and rider records and Big Books of Dragons, of which there were several. As her eyes began to burn and her stomach to scream in protest at her neglect, she relied on stubbornness to keep her going. This was not a thing she could just put down and pick up again the next day. If she did, if she laid her head down and let sleep reset her thoughts, the awareness of the answer would vanish into the ether of dreams. She had to keep going.
It was much later in the night when the door to the library opened with a hollow clack and closed just as hollowly. Heavy footsteps thudded across the stone floor, echoing off the high walls now lost to shadow. Mystic sat on the floor amid a sea of open books, each one opened and read and discarded in quick order. The latest victim of her focus lay across her lap, open to a page featuring a wingless, squat sketch of a grumpy looking draconid.
“I thought I might find you here,” Aaron said in a half-amused, half-exhausted tone. He stopped behind his wife, and Mystic moved her light sources around with a thoughtless twitch of magic so his shadow did not fall across her literature.
“I’m almost done,” she muttered absently. The words were as familiar to her as breathing, and spoken with the same level of automatic execution.
“Whatever it is, it can wait until the morning,” Aaron said.
“No, I-” But her words left her all of a sudden. In their place, the image of the squat, grumpy dragon reformed, taking shape and colour and depth. And a name. Ao.
Ao, of the forest guardians, of which there were so few. That was why she knew of them but could not name them. She’d only encountered the one, and Ao’s existence hadn’t particularly piqued her interest in the years long ago when she’d still been contending with the hydras. They’d come up again when she went to the Flurry with her family and spotted the name among the roster of participants.
Now she had a name and an image and a race, and the more she read on them, the more she knew that she hadn’t been wrong.
“I found them,” she cried as she jumped to her feet, clutching the book between her hands as if it might fly away if she let go. “Aaron, I found the answer.”
“The answer to what?” The High Prince asked. He took a single step back in the face of his wife’s over exuberance.
“To the forest, the problem of breaking the chain, the attunement. It’s here. The answer is the forest guardians. Gods, it’s so simple. How did I not remember this? They’re perfect. They bond with wild woodlands, and what’s wilder than our forest?”
“You really want to bring a dragon into the forest?”
“Not just any dragon.” Mystic spun around to face her husband and turned the book to face him. “A forest guardian. A dragon born to be one with the forest. They will live as long as the forest lives. No more broken chain. Don’t you see? It’s the perfect answer.”
Aaron looked from the book, to his wife, to the book, to his wife, and the expression on his face could only be described as infinite patience.
“Love, I think this is a conversation for the morning. Let’s go to bed.”
“No no no. I have to go see Schroeder right away. He’ll know where to find them.” Mystic snapped the book shut and tucked it beneath her arm. Yet before she could sweep out of the room in another torrent of red fabric and aggressively vibrant willpower, Aaron placed his hands on her shoulders. Gently, he turned her toward one of the bookshelves where a plaque listed out the shelf’s contents in alphabetical order. He stood her before the plaque and waited.
The golden square was inadequate as a mirror, but not useless. It could not give the details of her face, now lined with age, or the faint streaks of silver in her golden hair. What it could do was highlight the dark circles under her eyes and the way her hair had partially fallen out of its careful arrangement. One braid hung beside her cheek, while the other tucked back into her long locks with the tip of it poking out just behind her ear like a particularly hairy horn.
Mystic passed her tongue over her lips and felt the sharp edges of her own flesh prickle the soft organ. She listened, for the first time, to the protests of her stomach and the searing dryness of her eyes. She lifted a hand and tucked the other braid behind her ear, then cleared her throat and looked up at Aaron.
“I look a bit of a fright, don’t I?”
Aaron smiled at her in a way that said he both agreed and didn’t care. Then he planted a light kiss on her forehead.
“Food, bed, and tomorrow you can tell me about these forest guardians,” he said.
Still clutching the book to her chest, Mystic allowed herself to be led out of the library and outside, where Blakoreth waited to carry them down to their own den.Though her mind still reeled in delight at her discovery, now she was content to let it wait until morning. She would sleep well that evening, knowing at last that, of the many dark and twisted things that remained in the Forsaken Bower, this one would finally find its redemption.
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