Ryn of Avonside

We hung around in my Grove for two days as the storm assaulted us. We had ideas of continuing our trek without stopping in to sleep here, but considering we'd left a storm behind outside too, we figured we'd just take a rest.

Verburch worried me initially, considering they weren't covered by my large dome shield. Luckily, my forethought to change the grove to sit in calderas that had sheltering walls proved to be our saving grace. Verburch was fine, if a little battered.

During our time stuck indoors, when I wasn't doing theory work with magic, we started making boardgame sets.

“We have paints,” said Melody as we sat, a couple to each sofa. Catherine was stuck down in Vurburch, so it was just Melody, Kelsey, Grace, and me.

Staring down at the coffee table between us, where a tablet sat showing the pirated Pandemic boardgame files, I hummed thoughtfully. “I can grow flat wooden boards. Thin so they're not unwieldy.”

Melody grinned at me, excitement beginning to visibly build inside her like too much pressure in a car tire. “Do it! I'll go grab my paints.”

Before I could even say I'd do anything, their sofa became a cloud of limbs as Melody launched herself up and towards their room. Kelsey, apparently used to her girlfriend’s sudden and violent departures, just smiled and draped herself more comfortably over the sofa.

Melody crashed back down, kneeling at the coffee table as she spilled painting supplies over it. She looked up at me, her deep brown eyes wide with expectation. Phew, she was hard to resist when she fixed you with that look. So cute, so pretty.

A touch called my attention back to Grace. She was thoughtful, in a distracted way, when she said, “Give me something to carve — I can make the pieces. I don't have much practice, but I'm pretty good with my fingers.”

“Oh, I bet you are,” Melody quipped, giving Grace a lidded stare.

Grace blushed adorably. “Because of my hairdresser training. Jesus, Melody.”

I stifled a giggle and instead cleared my throat and fixed the chaotic girl with a softly admonishing look. “Melody.”

She flushed and gave me an apologetic glance. “Sorry. Uh… boards?”

While I began to coax the wooden coffee table to grow some very square-shaped branches, I caught Kelsey rolling her eyes in exasperation.

After I'd made several mostly-straight boards that I then sliced with my magic blades to be actually straight, I made several thick dowels of wood for Grace to carve.

That left Kelsey and I without anything to do. She gave me a soft smile. “Have they been making paper? We probably need some for the cards and rules booklet.”

I nodded, carefully avoiding looking at her. I liked Kelsey and Melody, but after the talk Grace and I had recently, the flirting hit a raw nerve. Sure, Kelsey was being chill and restrained, but I mean… gah.

Realising I hadn't elaborated, I cleared my throat. “Yeah. We have some in the library. I'll go get it.”

“I'll help,” she said, standing up at the same time I did.

I had to squelch a sudden burst of anxiety, carefully keeping my face neutral. “Okay.”

Kelsey didn't notice, instead pointing a finger at Melody. Her voice was gentle, but stern. “Be good.”

Her girlfriend looked up like a deer in headlights, the picture of startled innocence.

Kelsey followed me into the stairwell, and we wordlessly headed for the library. The storm outside was still raging, but with the thick conical canopy of Stormpine, the windows were mostly sheltered. Looking through the glass at the zone sheltered by that canopy, I was struck by a sense of melancholy safety. The rain was thick enough to look like mist as it dripped through, while the layer of greenery surged and twisted like it were a green sea that the wind was whipping.

“You've made a beautiful home for us,” Kelsey murmured. “Feels so safe here.”

She stood beside me, respectfully keeping my personal space intact. I reached out and brushed my hand over her shoulder blade, then pulled back. “Can you get Melody to chill a bit? Grace and I had a big talk, and we're not really about the whole…”

“No, I understand,” she sighed, looking down at the smooth heartwood of the landing. “She's not trying to be annoying or intrusive… she just… she doesn't know when the bit has gone too far. She isn't good at reading when she's crossed someone's boundaries, you know? Gets caught up in goofing, but forgets to check if everyone is still smiling.”

“You just said the same thing in three different ways,” I laughed softly. “I'll take that to mean you understand.”

She grinned and blushed — her eyes crinkling in an adorable way that pulled at and accentuated how red her cheeks had become. “That's a safe bet, yeah.”

“Let's go get that paper. I think we have some early-attempt paper that's thick enough to be used as cards,” I said, taking a step towards the edge of the landing.

She followed after me, and asked, “Who’s making the paper, by the way?”

“Fabrication department. They have this whole process, and the best part is all the materials can come from me, the farming waste, or the forest around Avonside. It involves a lot of grinding, boiling, and straining that limited the scale of production originally, but Claih and Bray made some magitech machines that help with a lot of the processes,” I explained, happy to move to an interesting and safe topic.

She smiled, shaking her head in wonder. “It's so cool — how we're bootstrapping our way back up.”

“It's very satisfying,” I agreed.

Finding the card paper wasn't difficult, it was stacked, abandoned, in the corner. Catherine ditched it the moment a better option became available.

When we got back upstairs, Grace and Melody were chatting about the boardgame we were going to recreate — Pandemic. It was a game that simulated a global disease outbreak, and all the players had to work together to eradicate the various diseases that popped up.

“Okay, but what if we make a new board using the map of the Ring around us?” Melody was saying. “It feels a bit weird to make the map be Earth…”

Several days later, when the storm finally abated, I got to work on some long overdue magical objectives. The first was to create a new personal shield spell to replace the one I burned out. I got both Grace and Catherine to help for that one, which was why it was the three of us out in a field on the upper plateau, stoically ignoring the remaining chill of the storm.

“So… something I didn’t really think about or process until you mentioned it now, is that the monsters we fought tasted kinda…” Grace said, kicking awkwardly at the grass. “...Uh… well… it tasted like the Red Nightmare, but if the magic were less raw and chaotic, and more refined, with a purpose.”

“You can get all of that from your aura?” Catherine asked, curiously. “I could use your help with a few things — diagnostics that aren’t making sense to me…”

“If I have time,” Grace said looking up with a wry smile. “Shit’s real hectic right now.”

“Tell me about it,” the small bespectacled girl muttered. “Two new human mages coming, and we don’t even know who one of them is.”

“No word from the militia? I know they were looking into who might be missing,” I said, feeling my gut curdle a little with anxiety. The loss of our monopoly on magic in Avonside was going to be a headache. It’d been inevitable, and honestly, you could argue that morally speaking, keeping an iron grip on power like that wasn’t a good thing. Still, my trust in my people was severely lacking right now.

“That’s the thing,” Catherine sighed. “Both Dr. Richards and Rhea are missing. “The militia told us as much before they suddenly clammed up. I think the rest of the council is keeping them quiet.”

“Fucking stupid,” Grace said, rolling her eyes. “Neither of them will get much done without training, and they need us for that.”

“Unless they make contact with Fennimore,” Cat muttered darkly.

Grace’s expression fell, and she looked to me with worry. “Unless they do that.”

I cleared my throat and gestured back to the beautiful, vaguely table-shaped plant before us. It was the holographic spell-building plant that Cat, Esra, and I had designed to help us work together on spellcraft. Despite how versatile it was, the actual table-plant itself was a very simple thing. It was just an illusion spell, mixed with an intent detector, and a shaping apparatus. Basically, we threw our thoughts at it, and it converted them into an image.

“Right, the Red Nightmare,” Catherine said with acid sarcasm. It was very clearly not directed at us, but at reality and the perpetual shitstorm it was inflicting on us.

“So, those monsters were organised Red Nightmare, you’re saying?” I asked, prompting my girlfriend.

She nodded, squinting into the barebones tree we had currently hovering in the cooperation holo-table. “I think so. It feels odd, though… like… Okay, so this is super random, but have you ever heard that when pigs get released back into the wild, they really quickly revert to being boar, or something like that?”

“I actually did know that, yeah,” Cat said, nodding thoughtfully.

I, however, was very confused.

Cat, looking up and seeing that in my expression, took my hand absently and began to explain. “It’s called feralization. They don’t actually become boar, they’re two distinct species now, but they regain a lot of the traits that their ancestors had. Thicker, darker coats, tusks, more lean muscle, that kind of thing.”

“Exactly,” Grace said, smiling thanks at Catherine. “So, the point is that the Red Nightmare that I conjure feels like a feral version of the monsters we fought in that empire city.”

“So these monsters are… what, domestic, refined versions of the Red Nightmare? Summoned or created entities?” I asked, trying to picture what kind of maniac would do such a thing.

Grace wiggled her hand in the air in a so-so gesture. “No, not exactly. The Nightmare that I can conjure feels like a feralized version of the demons we fought. It’s like… it’s like the demons came first and there’s an even more primal, extinct version of the Nightmare that they are derived from, and the current Red Nightmare is the same energy as the demons, but it’s returned to how it used to be — as much as it can, anyway.”

“That is so confusing and extremely interesting,” Catherine muttered, taking out a notebook with her telekinesis so she didn’t have to drop my hand. She began to scribble notes in it with her free hand while it hovered in midair.@@novelbin@@

Rather than write any of that down, I began to imagine and extrapolate those facts into a guess of the wider picture. “Origin, primordial Nightmare, gets used by someone for something — order is imposed on it… or maybe it just comes into contact with order and transforms, like undisturbed sub-zero water being bumped so it rapidly forms into ice. Either way, the Nightmare is in an organised form… then, what? It gets released, or breaks its bindings and becomes as much like its old self as possible, leaving some remnant organised Nightmare behind?”

Catherine paused her note-taking to listen, then began writing all of my musings down too. “Interesting hypothesis.”

“Also not what we’re here to do,” Grace laughed, watching the two of us go wild about spooky magical theory. We were probably dead-wrong, but with Cat taking notes, we could do some investigation and figure out what was really going on.

“Right, right,” I said, dropping my mage-sister’s hand to stare at the tree template. “So, we need to figure out how to make a spell that can protect better against the Red Nightmare.”

“And give it more robust power distribution capillaries so you don’t chain-detonate half your forest in a panic,” Catherine said, with such a good poker face that I almost believed she wasn’t poking fun at me.

“You,” I said, my arm flashing forward to boop her nose. “Can shush.”

Cat just raised an eyebrow at me.

“I’ll recreate my original spell, and we can start testing,” I sighed, suppressing the urge to boop her again. Little minx was getting very confident in herself. It was nice to see, but also very… okay, it was just nice, and the teasing made me happy.