Alicia took Hinny to a livery down the road who would apparently stable the daft girl for next to nothing — apparently the owner often came around for tea back in the day, and had a soft spot for Alicia and her dearly departed spouse. That left me and Mirra to take the bags inside and “get acquainted with the place”, as Alicia put it. I thought that was a pretty insensitive thing to say of a building which looked like it ate dreams.

With Alicia trundling away and almost out of sight, I found I still hadn’t budged. The place creeped me out. Not in the intriguing way, either. It just felt wrong.

“It’ll be okay, dear,” Mirra said, ever intuitive.

“Just adjusting,” I sighed. “Alright, let’s do this.”

I took the chunky key Alicia had handed me and tried it in the lock. There was no need, as it turned out; the lock was busted.

“Visitors,” Clive clucked. Clive opted to stick with us, rather than trapse after Alicia. I guess he only enjoyed hurling abuse at her when someone is there to translate.

“Seems that way,” Mirra said, and I swear I saw a flash of metal when she shifted her pack. One to watch, is our Mirra.

“I guess the law doesn’t care all that much about what happens to the property of…”

“Criminals?” Clive supplied.

“Druids,” I finished, shooting him a look as dirty as the sidewalk.

“Same thing, right?”

“Shut up, Clive.”

“Mel,” Mirra gently cautioned.

That’s right. I’m in Magalat now. I have to be very, very careful about what I say, and especially careful about who I say it to.

“Let’s get inside,” I said, but even then my hand hovered over the handle. It was that kind of burnished brass that looks dirty even if it’s not. I just knew it was going to make my hand reek a particular, metallic, blood-like stench.

“Ah, to the Glade with it,” I uttered as I finally opened the door.

My nostrils were filled with a wave of rotting, mulched plant matter. Whatever the looters had come for, it wasn’t the herbs. Pots were tipped spitefully on the floor and counter, and whole planters had been upended. Once luscious leaves and strong stems were now compost, forming a rich humus that ate up and incorporated Iffan’s collection of patterned rugs.

I have no love for horticulture — that much is well documented — but the brazen disregard for that which could grow fruit to feed, or flowers to heal was irksome. It went against the teachings of the Anvil! We were supposed to harness nature, to steer it to suit our needs. Wanton destruction wasn’t the goal. By the Plough and the Hammer, damn it. Honestly, people. If they listened better I wouldn’t have nearly as much cleaning to do.

I dumped my bags in the entryway — just one more heap of mess on a whole mountain of rubbish — and had a look around the sorry old building that I’d be calling home for the foreseeable future.

The ground floor was pretty recognisable as a shop. There was a counter immediately across from the entrance and shelves along the walls for display goods. These were largely empty, and a few of the shelves were dangling to the floor or had been pulled down completely, but I gathered from the shards of glass crunching beneath my boots that these had been stocked with an array of tonics and tinctures. The windows in this room had been nailed shut. From what I could gather, this wasn’t the work of angry locals boarding the place up. I think perhaps Iffan had done it himself, probably to keep his flasks out of direct sunlight.

Behind the counter was an overly cramped office, full of ledgers and more quills than a person could burn through in a lifetime. A simple, rickety chair lay on its side before a desk that sagged under the weight of Iffan’s stationary. It’s true that I’d never known Iffan to be one for the luxuries in life, but the silly sod could have at least sprung for a cushion.

The less than generous proportions of the office were down to the majority of the ground floor being given over as a greenhouse. Actually, a greenhouse makes it sound a bit more cheerful than it actually was. This felt more like a cave. There were rows of herbs so common that I noticed them even in their petrified state. I recognised these as hardy plants, that could endure sub-optimal conditions and thrive with minimal sunlight. Around the sides of the little allotment were fungi, mosses and vines that preferred darker, danker conditions. Even so, almost everything was dead, save one or two tumorous mushroom clusters and a creeper that had grown out of control and started straddling the ceiling.

Up a creaky staircase next to the office, I found a depressingly similar sight. Iffan had tried his hand at some interior construction, whacking up a series of prefab walls to make two claustrophobically small rooms. He’d done this maximise the space for, you guessed it, another nursery.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

I don’t know what Iffan had done up here, or how, but the air was humid, and markedly warmer than downstairs. It was stifling, there was so much moisture in the air. The plants that had lived here were obviously a bit pickier, because not one had survived. I could just about glean from the near-fossilised petals strewn about the floor that many of these had been adorned with bright, vivacious flowers. They were now just shades of beige and brown, with the barest hints of their former lustre.

The two rooms were a miniscule bedroom, which I hoped by the Anvil Alicia had not been condemned to sleep in, and a basic workshop. It looked like either Iffan or Alicia had done some amateur woodworking here. Sawdust coated the skirting rail, and unfinished boards, halfway to becoming planters, were propped against the walls or scattered on the floor. The tools had all been looted, of course.

The third floor contained another obligatory nursery, but was at least a bit more generous in terms of how much was given over to the poor saps who had to live here. Oh, wait, yep. That’s me.

Up here I found the master bedroom. Clearly Alicia had won that battle, because it was actually a decent size. It wasn’t particularly flashy, but it looked comfortable, and had storage enough for two-people’s worth of clothing. I did roll my eyes at the sketches of sparlillies and morrowshoots adorning the walls. I mean, really, Iffan? Is it not enough that you’re surrounded by plants every turn of the wheel? Do you really need to go to bed staring at them as well?

The rest of the floor was divided equally in two. One half was shrouded in darkness so deep and impenetrable that I had to shuffle one foot in front of the other not to trip. The other half was bathed in every ounce of light Iffan could squeeze from the sun. The contrast left me with red and blue splotches in my vision that I felt sure were going to be responsible for me falling down the stairs.

Naturally, the lit side was the nursery. Iffan had installed makeshift skylights in the ceiling, and the shutters of the windows had been removed to maximise the plants’ exposure to the precious, life-giving sun. Most of these plants grew tall, almost to the height of a plum tree, with those at ground level having thick broad leaves to soak up the light not hijacked by their gangly cousins. There were more survivors here than elsewhere, but they were bone dry and brittle. I had no idea whether or not water could bring them around at this point, but I figured I owed it to them to try. Later, of course. Plants do not get fed before humans.

The void-dark section took a bit of deciphering to figure out its purpose. There were plants here, of course, but by now that was like pointing out there are hairs on my head. Mainly the room was given over to a complicated array of flasks and glass apparatus, hemmed in by small cauldrons and a selection of kettles. It took a while for my eyes to adjust, but eventually the picture took shape. I gathered this was where Iffan mixed up his concoctions. There were books tucked away in draws or piled neatly on the corner of workbenches that detailed ingredients and brewing times. I have no idea how he read his tiny scrawl in that abysmal lighting, but apparently he did. Some of the beakers and vials were salvageable but most of the more impressive apparatus had been smashed by vandals. It looked like they had taken great joy in listening to the glass shatter. A pity, as we probably could have sold some of this stuff.

The final place to explore was the back garden and outbuildings.

When one hears there is a back garden and, not one, but two outbuildings, they form certain expectations. Let me go ahead and squash those expectations right now.

The “garden” was the tiniest, sorriest slither of crappy, gravelly dirt I had ever seen. On all sides there were enormous, looming three-storey buildings, absolutely starving the little patch of any light or joy. It felt cold, miserable, and more like a cellar than a garden. To put this in perspective, do you know what plant loving, green-fingered master-botanist Iffan had planted here? Cabbages. Fricking cabbages. That’s how sorry this little scrap of land was.

At either end of the “garden” — yes, I am going to keep referring to it with sarcastic quotation marks — were an outhouse and a rickety shed that contained the kitchen.

The outhouse was a glorious, Anvil-sent gift, the likes of which I cannot describe. I had been dreading having to hurl my morning, uh, produce onto the pavement. I have no idea how anyone can be okay with that. Clive has better toilet manners than the residents of Magalat.

The kitchen was less of a victory. The little lean-to was poorly knocked together, with cracks between the planks and damp patches on the ceiling. The cookware and crockery was rudimentary, but it would do in a pinch. I’m not exactly a seven-course meal kind of chef, so I could make do. The biggest disappointment was that it looked and smelled worryingly like the outhouse. We’d probably need to get a cat, or else train Clive to catch rats.

So this was what had inherited from Iffan: a curse that would get me good and dead, and a decrepit old building in a scummy city, with an entire forest’s worth of decaying plants. This sucked.

I went inside to find Alicia back from stabling Hinny.

“Damn it, A.A., you could have warned me! This place is a travesty! I have no idea how you lived like this. I thought mum and dad’s place was barren, but this is just ridiculous. Where are we supposed to sit and eat? Come to think of it, where are we supposed to sit at all? I’ve seen, like, one chair. It didn’t even look comfy! Plus the place is a flipping mess; there’s an unholy number of plants around… Alicia?”

I had to replay that little rant in my head before I noticed that Alicia had been completely impassive throughout my long, selfish speech. She was just standing there. Standing there staring at the shattered, broken body, of a life she used to live.

No, Mel, this doesn’t suck. You suck.

“Oh, Alicia, I’m so sorry,” I said, way, way too late.

“It’s harder than I thought it would be,” she laugh-sobbed, wiping a tear away with a sleeve that looked like it had seen some use. “This would have hurt him so much. To see it like this,” she said, waving at the plants, trodden into the rugs and kicked along the floorboards.

I’m ashamed to say that only then did I set aside my self-pity and see the place for what it was.

I was in Iffan’s home. His shop. The place where he and Alicia had been a family. I was an intruder in an individual’s passion made manifest. I was a voyeur, bearing witness to a couple’s love, their unity, their life.

More so than when I heard the news of his execution — more so even that at the small memorial we held quietly, privately, guiltily in his shame-drenched honour — I felt Iffan’s passing.

Here lived Iffan.

A good man, with a great heart, a warm smile, and time for everyone.

Cursed by birth to die at the hands of those he helped.