Ryn of Avonside

Esra looked me up and down for the tenth time, until finally she sighed and shrugged. “I don't know. You've done something utterly incomprehensible again and I haven't the first clue as to how we can identify what this is.”

“That's not the only thing that's been odd about Ryn,” Catherine said.

Esra snorted. “Oh, I am aware.”

“I mean, when you transfer from the Ring directly to her Grove, it's a very jarring shift and sometimes you can see a sort of odd, twisted version of the place on the Ring that you're coming from,” said the smaller mage, exasperated.

“Interesting,” said our mage-mother. “I'll look into it at some point. Perhaps it's a side effect of the Grove being so full of people. Who knows, but I'm very busy, so I cannot promise an expeditious answer.”

“That's fine,” I said. “We need to get moving anyway, those miles won't walk themselves.”

“Oh, you're leaving already?” Catherine said, looking disappointed. “Uh… can you add the lift shafts to the tree before you go?”

I smacked my forehead. “Right. Let's go find Bray.”

In the back of my head, a small team of brain cells was beginning to worry about this mask-and-ears thing. I was pretty sure that this time, it wasn't me who did the crazy thing. Something or someone had done this to me.

Verburch was coming along nicely these days. The foundations for several longhouse-style buildings had been laid out along roads that arched into a semicircle with the flat face at the lake's edge. The axle spokes were still there of course, reaching out from the central square, where the teleportation crystal stood like a proud monument to some dead king.

The lake was quite full after the storm, and its normally clear waters were murky with runoff from the hills that formed the walls of the caldera. To my surprise, there was a small boat out on the water, where I could see a couple of dudes fishing. When did fish get put into the lake? Come to think of it, I didn't remember putting reeds in either, but there were clumps of them up and down the shore.

It really felt like the lower caldera was growing without me, which was honestly ideal. I was helping with so many projects these days, that it felt like I was wasting time with this big scouting trip. Like, the preliminary decryption of the alien computers was sitting on my phone, ready to be scrolled through. I'd normally be so interested in it, but it was just another thing in a long list now. Thankfully, I was about to cross one long-standing task off my list.

We found Bray in the workshop, where they were organising to repair a few of the roofs that had taken damage in the storm. Buns and people were everywhere, taking carefully measured replacement wooden beams to their intended destination, or making new shingles to replace those lost.

I thought it might be difficult to get to my old friend through all the chaos, but the moment people saw me, they stepped out of the way. It was eerie, and the deferential treatment made me extremely uneasy.

“Bray,” I said when we got to him.

He and Smoke looked up from a blueprint he had weighted down on a table and smiled. “Ryn, Grace, Cat, how'd things go with the storm up at the tree?”

“The shield stopped it from being too bad,” Cat said, moving over to peer at the blueprint curiously. “What's this?”

Bray grimaced and shared a look with Smoke, who thumped lightly in sympathy. “The plans of the Hall. Trying to figure out how the roof fits together because we lost a whole section of it.”

“Damn, you just finished that,” I noted, glancing back at the door. The corner of the Hall was just barely visible through it.

“Yup, fuckin’ sucks, but what can you do,” Bray shrugged. Looking down at Smoke, he added, “Right, Smoke?”

“What can ya’ do?” The bun mage said, imitating Bray's shrug. The two exchanged a fist bump.

Bray glanced back to me and smiled, “They're great, by the way. Excellent little buddy.”

“Aw, shucks,” said Smoke in a deadpan, looking the complete opposite of coy.

“Right,” I laughed, stepping close to give the bun a gentle pat on the head. They leaned into it, so I continued. “Bray, we have enough stored energy to put in the lift shafts now. Do you want to come tell me how to do it?”

“Don't need to,” said my friend, turning towards a high scroll rack that was full of blueprints. The paper wasn't blue, of course, because we couldn't make it. He returned with a smaller scroll and handed it to me. “Drew this up a while back.”

Taking it from his outstretched hand, I unrolled and took a look at it. It was a top-down view of the second floor of Stormpine. The glass balcony was there, along with the upper section of the foyer, and the spiral stair that ran up the inside edge of the tree, above the main door. The added lift shafts were on the outside edge of the tree, beside the stairs. They added a bulge to the mostly circular tree trunk, but that was fine. Perhaps I could add windows up the shaft so people could view the grove while they rode the lifts.

“Just stick to the dimensions I've set there, and we'll be fine,” said Bray with a grin. “Try to keep the shafts straight, please?”

“That'll be difficult,” I said with a soft giggle.

Bray rolled his eyes. “Go on. I have work to do.”

When I made to leave, a small fluffy hand grasped mine, keeping me there. Smoke looked up at me with wide eyes, and my heart melted.

Kneeling, I wrapped them in a big, proper hug that lasted for a good long minute. The whole time, I could feel their whiskers twitching as they inhaled deeply and rapidly.

Leaning back, I looked into their steel grey eyes. “Doing okay?”

“Yes,” they said in a soft voice. “Just wanted hug from the Lady. Thank you.”

“Any time, okay? Just come find me,” I said, giving their head another pat as I stood up.

Their posture hardened again as I stepped back, and they gave me an adorable, stoic nod. Smoke really epitomised the strange dual maturity of the buns. They acted like children in a lot of ways, and had many similar needs, but they were also very independent and could display a maturity that many adults didn't have. Because of this, I’d adopted a more adaptive approach to my strange almost-parenting I did with them. If they needed a hug like Smoke just did, they got a hug, if they wanted to be left alone, I left them alone, and if they wanted to be treated as just another person, like Crash the barista-bun did, then they got treated like any old person.@@novelbin@@

Smoke wanting a hug like this was unusual, though. They must feel a bit stressed, if a usually gruff, independent bun like them was after some physical affection from me. I decided to ask, rather than guess. “Hey, Smoke. What’s up with you? Everything okay?”

They scuffed a long foot on the floor, then dug a claw into the wood. “Yes. Just nervous. Making human-mage in my grove.”

Bray’s eyebrows rose considerably. “What?”

Catherine winced and looked to me for support. I just shrugged. This was her mess, not mine.

“I uh… sorta went and made a mage-fruit because I wanted to study the process, and I got some good insight…” she said, trailing off as her cheeks flushed. “But I ignored the part of my brain that was trying to warn me of consequences. So I sorta panicked slightly and went to plant the seed in the woods so it didn’t die. Which, you know, is stupid in hindsight, because I could’ve just let it die and have gotten the opportunity to make another one later. Troy recommended I give it to Dr. Wilcott, because we made that deal with them. When I took her to the fruit, though, it was gone. Somebody got there first. We figured it was best if we still made her into a mage, so that whoever popped out of the first one wouldn’t be the only mage in Avonside.”

It clicked then, which bun was hosting Dr. Wilcott's transformation, and I looked down at Smoke. It made sense now, why they were a little on-edge.

Bray looked bemused, and I had a feeling that he didn't really understand much beyond the basics. “Okay. Wow, that’s a bit of a story. Not the best thing to happen ever, but it sounds like you handled it.”

“She did, and it'll probably work out okay in the end,” I said, giving the bronze-haired girl a smile. “Mages can't do much if they aren't trained.”

“Unless they talk to Fennimore,” Cat said, reiterating probably our biggest fear. God, a second James would really suck, especially if it was Rhea.

“Cool…” he said, nodding along. “That last part — kinda worrying. But, you know… that's not my wheelhouse so… you have the plans. I'll come up once the repairs are done down here. Rogue mages are more of a Grace and Claih thing, anyway.”

It wasn't too difficult to add the lift shafts in, now that we had a reservoir full of storm magic again. I decided to go ahead with my windows idea, too — adding tall panes of transparent crystalline wood between thick supporting beams of more normal wood.

When that was done, and seeds for new shield-trees had been distributed to the buns, we left the grove to check on the situation in our area of the Ring.

We discovered that the dry, rolling plains with its dotted copses of hardy forest were now exceptionally damp and dour. The sky hadn't totally recovered either, and it boiled with undulating layers of grey clouds.

We could navigate through it, though, so the next day, we continued our journey.