“What do you mean you don’t know where Avonside is?” Jerril exclaimed as we stood outside the first major human town we’d visited since we left the mountains.

“Well, we didn’t exactly have any maps to follow when we left,” Adam told him, matching the elderly obrec’s volume. “We didn’t even know fuckin’ magic existed by that point. Or obrec, for that matter.”

“It’s in that direction,” I said, pointing towards where my tracking spell said the rings were. “Like, literally exactly that direction.”

“Ah yes, very helpful,” Jerril huffed, closing his eyes for a moment as he took a few calming breaths.

“The first town we found was called Agoshin,” Troy said, having wandered over when he heard shouting. “Once we get there, I can get us to Avonside.”

“Agoshin,” Jerril nodded. “Thank you, finally a name, something I can work with.”

All but dragging Troy by the arm, the elderly obrec man took him over to what I called their command wagon. It was where Jerril rode, along with their gold and maps. Goodness the man could get grumpy when things weren’t going efficiently.

Adam sidled up next to me as they walked off and leaned down to whisper, “He and Esra would make such a cute couple. They could argue each other hoarse for our entertainment.”

“I don’t think the ring would survive that,” I grinned, shaking my head in amusement.

Three days since Kit had gone into the fruit and we were struggling. The guards in the Empire of Ghraiga were less than accommodating, and not in the same way that the obrec ones had been. No, Ghraiga apparently had a huge bureaucracy problem.

When the others had originally passed through, they’d just been a band of heavily armed travellers. Suspicious, sure… but you didn’t make money out of taxing people like that. A wagon full of obrec goods however… that was far more tempting. So licenses were needed, stamps and seals were needed and a lot of palms had to be greased with coin. The Stonechasers acted like it was no big deal, but my mind was blown.

We’d been stuck in this stupid town for days, waiting for pompous aristocrats to sign a document, and they couldn’t give a shit about how many mages were in the party. So, three days after arriving here, we were finally ready to leave.

The town wasn’t even interesting. Their buildings were all made of stone and wood, with gross rotting thatched roofs over any building that was obviously owned by someone poor. The wealth disparity here was stark and egregious.

We’d stayed in an inn that catered almost exclusively to travellers like us, or… well, the obrec had. We stayed in my grove obviously.

Mer had been mopey as hell since Kit went into the fruit too, trudging around and sighing a whole lot. It was cute, seeing the strong, confident warrior woman pining after my friend. I just hoped it turned out okay… Kit was a mysterious and sensitive guy and had a feeling that he needed a lot of finesse to handle in a romantic sense.

“Hey, whatcha thinking about?” a quiet, caring voice asked as arms wrapped around me from behind.

I hummed in happy surprise and leaned back against Grace, taking in her warmth and smell, revelling in the feelings of safety and love that they evoked within me.

“Just… stuff,” I shrugged, the willpower to fully explain my thought process eluding me. “Nothing terribly interesting.”

Her laugh was tender and quiet in my ear, and we turned to watch the obrec get themselves ready to leave. It seemed that Troy and Jerril had figured out a route to take.

“Holding you like this, it makes it so clear that the fruit really did give you a form that fits who you are,” Grace murmured, kissing my ear. “My strong but hesitant girl, powerful mage with the restraint not to use it on the innocent. You’re incredible.”

My cheeks heated with her words, while places further down heated with her kiss. It had been so long since we’d made love, properly at least. We’d tried a few times, but exhaustion was my constant companion these days and after the second time I’d fallen asleep while we were trying, we’d given up. For now.

“You two ready to mount up?” Troy asked, oblivious to where my thoughts had been.

I choked on my tongue and started coughing at the unintentional pun he’d made while Grace laughed and nodded. Time for more mind numbing days of wagon travel followed by magecraft in the evenings. Hurray. At least my grove was well fortified and I had spells for all sorts of strange crap.

My tree had spells for airflow now, spells for heating, actual lights in the form of spherical fruit hanging from the ceilings. They had to be high enough to be out of reach of the buns though, because apparently the little critters thought they were mighty fine snacks.

The landscape of Ghraiga was not the most pleasant place to travel through. At least in the mountains the view had been stunning every single day. Instead, we got vast low rolling hills with grass and low shrubs as far as the eye could see.

I’d heard great plains like this being described as seas or oceans before, but I’d never realised how true it really was. Sure, the weird freaky one from a month or two ago had been something, but this was… a whole other level. By week two in the massive empire, the never-changing vista was beginning to wear on my sanity.

I was told that the south east of the empire was actually interesting, Troy saying that it sounded like it had a climate similar to southern France or something, but I’d never been to southern France so I had no idea what that was like.

Even Grace and the others were starting to hate the monotonous countryside. When they had originally come through here they had been further to the west, using the river system to travel much faster through this barren place.

No wonder the Ghraiga Empire couldn’t control the nomadic tribes that roamed around these steppes, the sheer magnitude of the place would make it impossible. You could send millions to their deaths in these golden grasslands, withered away by horse archers without ever wounding one of the enemy. I wondered if we’d meet some of those tribes. It had been one such tribe that had attacked Avonside, oh so many months ago. I hoped any we met were more peaceful than that one had been.

“Do you think the others are okay back at Avonside?” Grace asked sleepily as we rode in the wagon on yet another monotonous day. I was in her lap, slouched and dozing as she played absently with my hand, pushing at the squishy bits and moving my fingers randomly. Like she did with her thumb, but my hand instead.

“I really hope so,” I replied after a moment of thought. “They are still alive, at least. I think. Their rings move around ever so slightly whenever I cast the tracking spell.”

“Things were stable there when we left, but also… worrying. I remember we talked about the politics stuff, but the reality of our situation was really beginning to sink in to people. I mean, most of us are students who had whole lives ahead of us back on Earth you know? We were so used to how the world worked, and now everything is different,” she said morosely, sighing and pulling me closer against her. In a whisper, she added, “I’m coping because I have you.”

“Oh Grace…” I gulped, my heart in my throat. I wiggled around until I was facing her so I could give her a tender little kiss. “I haven’t had time to deal with that, sadly. I’ve had almost no downtime to really think about things since this all began… just non-stop shit happening. Maybe when we get back to Avonside I’ll start to feel it…”

“It’s more than just an individual thing for me though,” she said with a shake of her head. “I mean, people were tense. They would get angry over stupid shit, there were fights between the more testosterone fuelled guys, that kind of thing. Plus gossip, oh my god the gossip.”

“I remember you telling me about how people were talking about you,” I said, thinking back on our conversation in that inn so long ago. “How people blamed you for my death.”

We’d also discussed what we’d do if things had gone bad at Avonside. We had more power than the entirety of Avonside. Hell, even more than that now, with my grove expansion and Esra’s return to teaching me.

“I am bad with confrontation, with conflict, I said at last. “I try to find peaceful solutions, even if those… even if the solution is to give in and let myself get walked over like a doormat.”

“Not anymore, you’ve grown,” she disagreed, kissing the tip of my nose. “You still try to be peaceful, but you know how to use force when you need to as well. Just remember how you picked us up and hung us in the air when we chased you.”

I laughed, a smile forming on my face involuntarily. “Okay, yeah. But still, I—“

“Hey you two, we might need you to be up and on your guard,” Otho said, poking his head into the back of the wagon. “Mer thinks she saw someone, not sure who. Just a shadow…”

My first thought was about ring builder mind fuckery, but we would have felt it here in the wagon too if that were the case. Which meant that there really might be someone out there watching us. I guess it was time for me to do magey things. Time for Esra’s relentless training to pay off.

“Let me take a look,” I said, pushing myself up and exiting the slowly moving wagon.

“Mer’s eyes are pretty good, I don’t know—“ Otho began, but I smiled and shook my head, cutting him off, “Not with my eyes dummy, with magic.”

“Oh, right…”

Moving off to the side so I wouldn’t get slowly and excruciatingly run over by the wagons, I raised my hand and closed my eyes. The spell was there, ready for me to call it to my aid, and I did.

I felt the tattoos swirl up my arm for a moment, building into a bubble of energy that formed within my fist. Clenched my fist tight, popping it and sending out a pulse of curious, seeking magic.

It raced across the landscape, surfing the undulating hills up to two miles out before it doubled back and returned to me. I took it back into my hand and inspected it with mage sight, squinting as I tried to understand what it was telling me. It was confused, which couldn’t be right. It was telling me nothing was out there, and then for a split second it would falter, telling me the opposite, although only in vague terms.

“My spell is… acting up,” I said, opening my eyes to find Troy and Mer had joined us, along with several of the caravan guards. “It’s almost like… Esra said this was a fairly standard spell, hold on. Let me try something else.”

If my standard and well known mage spell for scouting an area was acting up, it might mean that there was also a spell to counter it, and I was getting odd readings rather than nothing because of how much power I could bring to bear.

Something I’d noticed about mages from the ring, both young and old, allies and enemies, was that they all dismissed the half of them that was plant. They saw it as a sometimes useful but mostly irrelevant side effect of being a mage. They didn’t explore it, didn’t embrace it. They left it to sit in a metaphorical shed to gather dust.

I transformed then, taking on a moderate amount of my plant nature. Enough that I could move freely while still being able to do what I wanted.

Crouching in the grass, I wormed my fingers into the dry soil and cast another spell, one I’d thought up and created myself. I spoke to the grass on that base empathic level, amplifying their sense of being just long enough to ask them all a question.

What is out there? Do you feel boots crushing your stalks, kicking up your roots. Do you feel the insects scatter as vibrations warn them of potential danger?

Yes. We do.