After letting myself sink to the ground, I started to massage my temples, trying to get rid of the persistent headache I had been suffering from since talking to Mima, as the weird dryad was called. There was something about the leaps in her logic and her infuriatingly calm and collected demeanour that rubbed me utterly wrong, that made me want to tear her mind apart if only to make it stop. Or maybe to see if I could elicit some sort of reaction beyond mild interest from her, something, anything, to break her composure.
It was an utterly childish desire, one I could intellectually understand as beneath me, but somewhere deep within me, the cruel idea remained. Maybe there was something to her words, if I was this tempted to hurt her after just half an hour of mostly casual conversation, I had no idea what I would want to do after being in contact with her for a few days, let alone months, years or centuries. No, I had a strong feeling that I would soon conjure up winter, hoping that she would fall into some sort of hibernation, something to keep her quiet for as long as possible.
The strength of these desires was quite surprising, to the point that I made a mental note to try and analyse my mind a little more, just to make sure the desire wasn’t coming from outside. I doubted it, simply because I was fairly confident in my mental attributes and overall superiority, but it was possible. Not really likely, for a variety of reasons, but possible and something to be investigated. Sadly, trying to find out if there was an outside force manipulating my thoughts using nothing but my thoughts was one of those fairly problematic things. Without a control group or any objective ways to detect such intrusion, I could only try and meditate, hoping to stumble across something within my thought process that didn’t fit but in doing so, I felt as if I had about an equal chance of inventing a justification for possibly manipulated thoughts, thus creating a false-negative or failing to find a justification for something caused by instinct or a gut-feeling, giving me a false-positive, making the whole prospect difficult. Alas, I could only try and experiment, maybe I would find something or would come to understand myself a little better. Knowing oneself and knowing one’s enemy and all that. If I could get to know myself, I would be happy with it.
An additional source of my headache came from the people around us, of that I was quite confident. The locals had, obviously, heard the dryad speak to me, they hadn’t felt a need to take a distance and I hadn’t put up measures to prevent eavesdropping, as Mima’s initial words had been the biggest cause of concern so setting up measures after she had spoken would be akin to locking the door after the horse had bolted. Useless and, in this case, even counterproductive as such preventive measures could be seen as an admission of guilt or an indication of malintent. Not a good look and while I was confident that we could fight our way out of the settlement if necessary, I didn’t want to cause damage to this community.
Not only were these people peaceful and welcoming, but they also lacked divine influence I could detect, meaning they might eventually become a bastion against religious fanatics, though I had a feeling their resistance would be more a passive resistance of obscurity once the wards around their settlement had time to grow in power. Currently, they were subtle and comparatively weak but when looking at the power I could feel from the dryads and comparing it to the power of the wards, I could get an idea of how strong those wards could become.
And that idea was fairly impressive, though it obviously depended on the dryads’ growth rate and how far they’d push themselves. If they managed to reach a respectable level, their wards would likely stand up to nearly everything, just like the protective wards around the elven forests on Arbotoma had. Those had only fallen when the unleashed Nidhögg had put his complete power against them while I added the fairly insane power of the Frozen Citadel to the mix, channelling the power of a Nexus directly through a specifically prepared focus. In modern terms, nothing below a nuke would get through those wards, though I had no real idea how a nuke would match up against powerful magic. Maybe the fallout of one would be comparable to the strangely poisonous aura in the Charland but that might simply be an idea born from two effects I couldn’t really imagine, let alone quantify.
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Sadly, their impressive wards weren’t really important, now that I was deep within those wards. What was important was that they had heard their primary protector, Mima, say that I would destroy her tree one day. Living with dryads, the people here already knew what that meant to a dryad and, obviously, they were not pleased with that idea. What made things slightly awkward was that Mima, the one I was supposedly destined to murder, didn’t care but the others? Well, harsh looks and a lot of quiet muttering were the extent to which they dared to express their displeasure but I wasn’t confident it would remain that way.
But at least the conversation with Mima had shed some light on the people here, especially their origin. While it was difficult to parse the somewhat disjointed information Mima gave, the conclusion I was drawing thus far was that the dryads were people who would have shattered in the town that used to be in this area but by getting connected to the closest tree to them, that fate had been averted. Being Shattered meant that the Soul, or maybe the connection between Soul and Body, was unable to withstand the sudden influx of Astral Power that came with the Change but by getting connected to a tree, that burden was off-loaded. Why it only worked here, I wasn’t sure but I had a feeling it had to do with Mima.
She wasn’t like the other dryads, that much I could tell, but the exact difference was a lot harder to pin down. Maybe she was something akin to a Scorched, who had been altered in the moment of Change, only altered to accept Nature Magic, though I had no idea how that might have worked. Or she had never been human in the first place but come into existence as a dryad. There were some hints in her diction, the way she was phrasing things, that gave me the impression she hadn’t been raised a human. There was no evidence unless I counted her confusing testimony, but it was the impression I got. Maybe I could take a look at her tree at some point, it might yield the evidence I was looking for, though I would have to be somewhat covert, given the declaration Mima had made. Getting caught studying the tree I was supposed to destroy at some point in the future would make things seriously troublesome.
With the existence of the dryads somewhat explained, the existence of the not-quite-elves was easily explained, too. They were just like the wood elves on Mundus, or they eventually would be. Symbiotically linked to the forest they called home, with dryads helping to sustain the forest and regulate the elvish numbers, making sure that the forest could sustain their immortality. Or agelessness, as elves could be killed like any other race.
As for how the people had been enticed into giving up their humanity, that was easily explained. Even during normal times, if the offer was to trade in an ordinary human body for one with pointy ears, an essentially infinite lifespan and a few other benefits in exchange for protecting and tending a forest, a lot of people would have accepted that offer. Especially since the tending wasn’t a complete full-time job, they could take extended vacations and travel beyond the borders of their forest, they just couldn’t live outside of it. That would be a bit of a downer for many, but I didn’t think enough of one to make people reject the offer out of hand. And that was during normal times.
At a time when civilisation was rapidly breaking apart, when the world had been on literal fire just a few days before and monsters were starting to roam the streets? Yeah, people would take almost any offer, so one that didn’t have any obvious downsides but enormous upsides and came with implicit and explicit protections? People would take it, without concern for the future, simply because taking the offer meant they had a future to be concerned about. It was similar to the considerations and concerns I had in regards to having Luna gain levels, she was losing out on her childhood by rapidly maturing but in turn, it made sure that she would have an adulthood in the future.
Hopefully, these people won’t come to regret their decision. And, even more importantly, the world wouldn’t come to regret it or would be forced to burn their forest because the elves became some sort of oppressive monsters.