Trees, it turned out, were entirely different from wolves.

Profound, I know.

As my mana surrounded my chosen specimen, the differences were immediately obvious. The tree had its own mana, as I knew it would, but where the wolf’s had been wild and active the tree’s was steady and still.

Moreover, with the wolf I had been able to sense her will guiding and shaping the mana within her. The tree simply… was.

No, that wasn’t quite right; I could see the mana flowing within the tree, circulating throughout it, clearly accomplishing something vital, even if there was no intent guiding it.

Unfortunately, that also made trying to claim it like pressing against a locked door. The wolf had been able to let me in, but the tree just sat there. It was made all the more irritating since I could feel that the tree was producing mana, like a slight mist coming off its leaves and immediately dissipating into the air around it.

I figured some of that mana would eventually reach me as it joined the slow ambient trickle coming in from my surroundings, but that didn’t solve my immediate problem.

I tried sending my mana in through the roots next, reasoning that roots served as the plant’s intake for a lot of things, but to no better effect.

Finally, after hours of trying, I was frustrated and needed a break. I decided to mull it over while I worked on claiming more of the stone within my sphere. 

Before I could get started, though, I saw movement a bit further into the woods.

---

 

“Asha?”

Leien’s voice snapped her back to reality.

“What!?” Asha managed to keep her volume down, but it was a near thing. She looked around, but nothing about this patch of forest seemed notably different from any other. The look of concern on Leien’s face was doing nothing for her nerves though.

“I’m not sure where we are.”

“You’re lost?”

“We’re lost.”

“How can you be lost? Doesn’t your goddess literally hold your hand and lead you wherever you want to go!?”

Leien rolled his eyes. “That is not how it works. This is where her guidance led, I just… don’t know why. I don’t see any of your spikes around here.”

Asha shaded her eyes, peering up into the trees around her. Still no giant, aetheric gauge-eating magpies to be seen. “Well, should we turn around?”

---

 

Actual living breathing people. Gods, I’d been trying not to dwell on the possibility that I was the only one who’d survived whatever had happened that day. Well, survived after a fashion.

This was an enormous weight off my mind anyway.

The two had stopped just inside my border and seemed to just be talking, which raised a new problem: I had no idea what they were saying.

Their language had hints of familiar words and sounds, but trying to parse what they were saying was like looking at one of those impossible images illusionists would conjure, the ones designed to fool your mind.

That meant I was probably not in Alvaria anymore. Maybe this was one of the lost territories? I supposed it could have been somewhere across the sea, but the woman’s pointed ears indicated that she had Alvarian blood, so the odds I was on a different continent were low.

Would they be able to understand me? How should I contact them? I could probably carve words into the ground or a stone, assuming they could actually read them.

Wait, should I contact them? How would they regard whatever I was now? I’d hate to have gotten this second chance at life, only to run afoul of some cultural taboo and get destroyed for necromancy or something.

Realistically, I only had a level of influence over my surroundings to match a middling geomancer but my range was, to my knowledge, unparalleled. Add to that my rate of growth, and I could see people reacting in fear if they knew about me.

Besides, what if these were the nobles who owned this land? The same land I had been claiming and shaping, and in a sense becoming. I know my parents would not have taken kindly to a presence like the one I now was manifesting on our estate. 

Alright well to be fair, based on their clothing it seemed unlikely they were nobles. They both looked prepared for quite some time in the wilderness, not a pleasant jaunt on the grounds, so hopefully if there was any claim on this land it was just some forgotten statutory footnote.

Still, perhaps just knowing that there were people out there was enough for now. It had eased the isolation I had been feeling, and reassured me that there was still a world out there. For the time being, though, I needed to figure out what being a part of that world would even look like for me.

---

 

Asha was characteristically lost in thought as she trudged back to camp behind Leien. The day had been… mixed. In the end, they had recovered all but two of her gauges. She hadn’t seen her friend who had created them for her in months, and probably wouldn’t until the war to the west had resolved enough for the academy to reopen.

In the time she’d been out here, two of them had already suffered enough damage to render them unusable. If she lost a few more, then she wouldn’t have enough to collect worthwhile data sets. She’d have to pack them in for the rest of the trip, abandoning their ostensible purpose out here in the wilderness.

Of course, this trip was more about staying well clear of the fighting out west than actually accomplishing anything, but they’d anticipated being out here for a couple years at least and she really didn’t want to spend those years bored out of her skull.

She was still surprised Leien had agreed so readily to this plan of hers. It wasn’t like it was particularly well thought out. Then again, her best friend had always had trouble avoiding getting swept up in her impulsive ideas, and without his [Cleric] class there would have been no way for this trip to work. She would have had no choice but to return home until the war ended, and nobody wanted that.

They made it back to their campsite and began to settle in for the night, Leien preparing a few animals he’d managed to hunt while they were walking around today and Asha collating the data from her gauges in one of her many notebooks.

One of the perks of camping with a nature [Cleric] was that the plants around them quite literally bent to do his bidding. She sat on a cushion of moss, sheltered from the autumn winds by an enclosure of pine branches which the nearby trees had eagerly formed at Leien’s request. The space resembled the interior of a tiny hut, albeit one with prickly green walls. Very prickly, as she had discovered a few times since arriving in this pine forest.

She was lost in the world of numbers and trends, still no closer to figuring out the cause of the unnaturally weak concentrations of mana in the aether, when Leien threw a pinecone at her head.

She snapped the notebook shut, but her rebuke died on her lips as soon as her eyes landed on him.

He stood taut as a bowstring, his sword in his hand, a finger over his lips. His gaze darted around, peering through the branches which, though to her they seemed an opaque wall, to his eyes might as well have been glass.

He silently pointed at her pack and she immediately began stowing her supplies, her tension mounting. She’d only seen him like this once, when a patrol of scouts riding ahead of a Calanthian army had nearly discovered them barely two days after they left the capital.

He gestured her to stand by one side of their shelter, then with a gesture the soil churned under their fire, smothering the still-burning logs as they sank into the moist earth. Both of them could see well enough in the dark, so either he was worried it would give them away or wanted to get their eyes adjusting as soon as possible.

She wanted to ask what was out there, what it was that he’d sensed, but the fear that she’d bring whatever it was down on them held her tongue.

All went quiet and still. The night chill began to seep into her as she stood, hardly daring to breathe.

Then, with a horrible cacophony of snapping branches, the far wall of their shelter exploded inward, needles and splinters flying like darts. Something surged toward them, its form indistinct in the darkness. She heard a growl that seemed to reverberate through her chest, and then she was running. The branches opened to allow her through, and she heard Leien on her heels. Whatever that thing was, he clearly didn’t like his odds against it if he wasn’t even trying to engage it.

The tree branches closed in their wake, roots rising to trip their pursuer, but it seemed to accomplish little.

Asha ran, spurred on by the sound of the creature at their heels. Leien had pulled up next to her and was keeping pace. Twice, he’d had to catch her as she stumbled, keeping her on her feet, her momentum unbroken.

He began steering them, following some guidance from the trees which she couldn’t detect, and they slowly pulled ahead of the beast. She could still hear it racing after them, but whatever favor the earth goddess had bestowed seemed to be working.

Suddenly, a wall loomed ahead of them in the darkness and she had to hold out her hands to stop herself as she barreled into it.

Not a wall, but a steep cliff, rough stone seeming to have erupted from the ground. It didn’t look like any natural formation she’d ever seen, but that wasn’t nearly the strangest part.

Leien began to pull her along the wall, but she shook him off. “Leien wait! There’s… there’s writing on this cliff!”

It looked like two sentences had been carved into the rock somehow, her [Scholar’s Sight] letting her see the words clearly despite the murk of the cloudy night.

“What? That’s not…” he trailed off as he leant closer and saw that it was true. “We don’t have time for this Asha! We’ll try to find it again tomorrow if it’s safe.” He grabbed her hand, tugging her once again.

As if to illustrate his point, there was a sound from a short distance behind as though a tree had been snapped in half.

“Wait, not that way! I recognize a couple of the words, it says… something about ‘sanctuary.’ We need to go to the right!”

To his credit, Leien didn’t question or argue. He simply switched directions and led her the other direction along the cliff wall. There was a crash behind them, and risking a glance over her shoulder she saw that the enormous bulk of the shadowy monster had crashed into the wall right where they had been standing, though considerably harder than she had, leaving a small crater in the cliff face. It was already recovering though, shaking loose the rubble and beginning to surge after them.

Leien pulled her onto a narrow upward path she’d almost missed, one which seemed cut into the cliff face itself. They quickly gained elevation and she heard a roar from behind and below that was unlike any animal sound she’d heard before, a horrible guttural thing. Looking back, she nearly stumbled as she saw the path behind them was simply gone. The shadows clung to the creature’s form unnaturally, but she could feel its gaze on them as the steep path hit a switchback, cutting back across the cliff face in the other direction.

As they passed over its head, the creature snarled and hurled itself up the sheer cliff, its claws finding purchase as it half-climbed, half-scrambled up after them.

Then, Leien was pulling her into a stone hallway, far too clean-cut to be natural.

The two of them gaped as the stone walls around them seemed to flow, crashing together across the entrance and then freezing in a solid wall between them and the monster outside.

“What… the fuck just happened?” She asked an equally stunned Leien.