Ryn of Avonside-161: Force of Will

“There's a wound in you, I'm certain,” Esra finally said, leaning back into her chair. fɾēewebnσveℓ.com

I sagged. Severing the connection between me and Dr. Richards wasn’t as clean as I’d hoped. My grove was reflecting the injury to my hafornsu, too. There was a section along the inner lining of the rock column that just felt… thin.

Well, at least it’d done what I wanted it to. All the various ways that a newly converted mage can inherit attributes from their sire had been snipped. For example, he no longer shared my mage mark or my grove. I had no idea where he'd have ended up if he’d tried to phase out into the mundane world on his own. Lucky for him, Ryn’s bun had been able to dump him in Avonside. Come to think of it, if my grove wasn't his default Garden destination anymore… where would he return to when he came back? Honestly, I'd be very interested to hear what happened there…

Assuming he managed to get back in, he'd be able to create a grove and do magic like normal, unfortunately. That was something I couldn't have taken from him.

With a heavy sigh, Esra fixed me with a sort of weary, frustrated, and vaguely understanding look. “I’m sure you're aware, but your actions will have had a negative impact on the further development of his magic. I'm not sure to what extent, or how it will manifest, however… something tells me that the ordeal yesterday was of a more symbolic than practical nature.”

I looked down at the roughly sawn wood of the floor and nodded. “Yeah.”

“It was still utterly foolish,” she admonished me again, without any real heat in her words.

A bird chirped outside the window of Esra's new, partially living wooden cottage. One of the few new innovations that she'd taken from Ryn was the idea that animals could help a grove flourish.

“Yeah,” I nodded. She was right. I didn't talk to people enough — I didn't ask for outside opinions on my work. I kept to myself and got so lost in my own thoughts that I forgot to touch down in reality.

Esra must've seen some of my thought process in my expression, because she asked, “Have you been fermenting any more terrible ideas that I should be concerned about?”

“No… I don't think so?” I said, genuinely not remembering if there was anything I should tell her about. Then I remembered my magic dealings with the Queer Club and blurted, “Wait, yeah. I don't know if you remember, but I've been trying to figure out how to alter the bodies of the other trans people, without putting them in a fruit. I haven't found a way. So I was thinking of just putting one of them in a fruit and if they want, they can propagate it amongst themselves?”

Esra made a thoughtful noise and began to pluck at the cuff of her deep brown robes. “Having recently learned a significant amount about your culture — being queer is tough, so adding… well, a Garden mage is an incredibly difficult thing to obfuscate on anything other than a temporary basis. We are too far diverged from the average member of our species. It paints quite the target on their backs, even as it wraps them in magical agency.”

“I know… and I explained that to them too,” I agreed. “I just don't have any other options.”

Esra was quiet for a second, then sighed. “If I were still in possession of my power and connections, I might have extended a request to a mage from another realm. Most realms will make an effort to reorder the body to suit their needs, and there are a number that can achieve that aim without painting their hair in metal.”

She said the last part with a wry gesture at our hair. I snorted, but then I stopped to think. A memory was tickling me, right between the lobes. I sat there, willing it to fully reform, until suddenly my eyes widened.

Back in the conversation with the trans folks, I'd had a half formed idea about the wrong body problem, but grumpy Amara, infodumping Lily, and a sneaky little ferret had all distracted me. The computers held a lot of information about the Umare and what they were up to. What if, somehow, we could figure out where more laboratories were? They developed the fruit. What if I could find how they did it, what if their research could guide me?

Assuming they didn’t all want to slowly turn each other into Garden mages. I’d made a big deal over the potential problems that being a mage could bring on you, but many of those problems could be mitigated or ignored — if you went into it with a little ingenuity and a willingness to use some ‘magical agency’ as Esra put it.

Except… Fennimore existed. Any mage who placed their grove within the same Nameless Garden zip code as the rest of us, would inevitably find themselves in his sights. He’d already proven that he was hellbent on controlling as many Garden mages as he could. He’d already driven into hiding or outright killed many powerful mages, like Esra’s coven. If he came for the club, they'd probably be forced to close ranks with the Order.

Sighing, I dropped that train of thought and looked to Esra. “I was thinking that maybe there might be some hints about the creation of the mage fruit in the computers we took from that Umare laboratory. That might help me design a similar process?”

Esra pursed her lips and looked out of a small window while she gathered her thoughts. “Learning that our connection to the Garden was manufactured has been a disquieting experience. I suppose, given who and what they were, that the Umare did indeed document the process. I am sceptical, but perhaps with a blueprint you could follow in their footsteps.”

“Should I try?” I asked.

Her lips twitched into a slight smile. “I don't see why you shouldn't.”

A couple of days after Drs Richards and Wilcott left their fruits, Aiden went into one. My grove still wasn’t able to create another fruit, but Esra’s was. She apparently had a grove that was very… well, it didn’t take long to recharge.

It was a week after Aiden went into the fruit that we had a breakthrough with the computers. I was in the queer club, sitting cross legged on one of their rickety old sofas with my eyes closed. I was toying with spell ideas during a time where I should've been relaxing, but it was difficult to just turn my brain off like that.

Lily, who'd been read into the alien computer project as a junior technician, gasped. “Cat! They got it! They unlocked one of the computers! The data is up to look at in the project files.”

My eyes snapped open, and I hastily picked my phone up. Swiping and tapping my way through menus, I scrolled through the photos that the team took of the unlocked computer. There was a base menu, by the look of things, and… data of some kind? No, they were data readouts, but they weren’t getting any input so the fields were at a sort of null baseline.

“We should go over there,” I said, stumbling to my feet. My legs tingled uncomfortably as blood rushed back into them.

Lily was getting up as well, her laptop going into a satchel that she grabbed from beside her chair. “If they got one open, it won't be long before they're all open.”

Together, we rushed through the grounds of Avonside. Every now and then, through the alleys and courtyards, I'd catch sight of new buildings, or the skeletal beginnings of them. The university was becoming a town, with the smaller stone, timber, and slate roofing on the new construction contrasting with Earth-built concrete. People were spreading out from their old cramped emergency living arrangements.

At one point, we passed a small new building hidden into a little U-shaped nook, and Lily slowed like it had a magnetic hold on her.

“What’s that?” I asked, eyeing up the building. Through some wobbly glass windows, I could see maybe eight people sitting at two tables.

Lily suddenly flushed and picked up her pace again. “Oh, they let us build a games den. Mostly we've ended up playing magic, though.”

My brow furrowed, and I took another peek over my shoulder.

“Card game, not actual magic,” she clarified quickly.

Now it was my turn to have my cheeks heating. “Oh.”

“Sorry, I'm a bit of a… I don't know, MTG degenerate,” she said, with an odd sort of proud, but self-conscious laugh.

I was enough of a nerd to recognise the acronym, although I'd never actually played it. I honestly didn't have much of an opinion on the matter, so I sort of vaguely nodded as we continued on.

Lily, it appeared, wanted to talk about it though. “We've been trying to figure out how to print new cards, you know? One guy had an offline database on a hard drive for some reason, so we have the cards in digital form, but… yeah. We're using sleeves with hand written card text on paper, but you can tell by the feel and look — whether you're about to draw a proxy or one of your real cards.”

She continued to talk about it, and I did my best to follow along, but it was hard. After a minute, I was distracted by a small workshop where some students were trying to create some sort of rudimentary magitech device. It looked like it might be for generating electricity? Since when had magitech escaped out into the wider community?

If I remembered, I'd ask Bray about it. If.