After Milo defeats the (now uncorrupted) tree lady at cards, we get a chest to loot as a reward. More coins, another card, and a scrub brush that he hands to Meadow.

“A cleaning brush?” Meadow says, raising an eyebrow at it. “I wonder if it does something special.”

She tosses it in her pack and we head back around the now-normal pond to Valerian’s atelier. I can’t believe I just used the word “atelier”. It’s just a weird gazebo with a second floor that’s an art studio. I didn’t think gazebos normally had second floors, but then gazebos usually aren’t made from living trees magically twined together to form buildings. Is it still a building if it wasn’t built? Whatever.

Valerian is not on the ground floor when we arrive, but the ladder is hanging down like an invitation. Meadow starts climbing up, and I’m right behind her. I want to see what he’s got up there and if he doesn’t want me up there, he can dump me out himself.

Although the room is made of living branches, very little of them can be seen past the piles of canvases. Some of them sit on easels, some are stacked haphazardly, and others hang from the living walls. Many of those piled up appear to be blank or primed with basic backgrounds. The paintings on the walls, however, depict overhead views of the Wisteria Garden in each of the eight seasons.

This guy could have instantly reverted the gardens to their normal state just by dumping some vis into the orange painting, and likely would have done so if we had failed.

“You were successful,” Valerian says without looking at us.

“This stone was spewing out waves of eldritch aspect,” Meadow says, holding up the now-gray pebble.

Valarian nods. “Eldritch is such an obnoxious and unaesthetic aspect. It’s pernicious. Inimical.” He turns to look at me and Milo. “And entirely your fault.”

“We didn’t do anything,” I say. “We helped put a stop to it.”

“Do you think it’s a coincidence that this only happened when you arrived here?” Valerian asks. “The Wisteria Grove is a peaceful locus, but it was compelled to create a challenge for you to overcome.”

“This is ridiculous,” I say. “Even if that’s true, we fixed it immediately and no one got hurt.”

“Will you still say that when you see a village you’re visiting get attacked just because you’re there?” Valerian asks.

Anise sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. “Look, even if you think reincarnators cause trouble just by existing, you should probably blame Corwen and Grubwick for summoning them. They’re here now, and if they’re Heroes, then let them be Heroes. You can’t expect them to sit in their Hearths their whole lives. Unless you’re planning on killing them now, it’s pointless to complain.”

“I have said my piece,” Valerian says, then turns to Meadow. “You have taken your first steps on the journey to mastering the Art. What skill did you unlock?”

“True Art (Aspect Painting),” Meadow replies.

“Ah,” Valerian says. “A good starting point for someone with as dreadful Max Inspiration as you do.”

Meadow smirks but doesn’t even look offended.

“At least you had the good sense to switch the stone’s aspect to one that’s capable of counteracting the eldritch infection,” Valerian goes on. “Or was that even deliberate? You have doubtless spent more time training Ranger skills than reading books and studying concepts. You know what vis is but you have no idea how it actually works.”

“Are you willing to teach me more?” Meadow asks.

“I am not,” Valerian replies. “Should you take an adult class related to the Art when you reach 21, you may return to me then. Until such point, I leave it to you to practice and glean whatever knowledge you can on your own.”

Meadow doesn’t look at all put out. “Very well. Thank you for introducing me to the Art. We’ll take our leave now.”

We leave the gazebo, and take some time to finish exploring the Wisteria Garden before we leave. I can tell where the core is by the way the vis in the area is moving, but finding the way into it is another matter. The swirling vis leads toward one of the circular park areas with flower beds and decorative pathways, In the center stands a set of silver bells in different sizes hanging from a bar. Like the formerly eldritch fountain, this one doesn’t make it into a maze, but I still feel like there’s some sort of puzzle here.

I walk up to examine the set of bells in the middle of the park, noticing as I go that the stones making up the path resemble seashells. The wind blowing through the gardens makes them ring in different pitches as it goes by.

“Another musical puzzle,” Milo says. “Any idea what tune it might want us to play?”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“Probably something flower-related, I would guess,” Meadow says.

“Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary,” I say. “How does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells, and pretty maids all in a row.”

“What’s a cockle shell?” Anise wonders.

Milo points at the walkway. “These.”

“Oh, huh, I thought that was just a neat pattern,” Anise says. “I’ve walked through here several times before and even played with the bells, but never figured out what tune to play. Even if I could play tunes.”

“Hmm,” Milo hmms. “I don’t actually know how to play this song offhand, but we can probably figure it out.”

“I would complain more about running into all these nursery rhymes if these weren’t literally the kiddie dungeons,” I say.

It takes some (quite a bit) of trial and error. While waiting for Milo and I to figure out how to play the right tune, Anise and Meadow examine the brush she got as a dungeon reward and experiment with it a bit. It’s the length of her hand with a grip on the top, and looks like it might be good for doing dishes. When she tests it on the corner of one of her used canvases, the paint quickly vanishes as if it were a dry erase board.

We spend what seems like hours singing a stupid nursery rhyme and hitting bells, but I refuse to give up and walk off when the solution is right here. Aside from the lack of pretty maids. Maybe I should have gone with the “marigolds all in a row” version instead. There are many rows of different types of flowers here, probably including marigolds.

Finally, after playing the song for the thousandth time, the shells making up the walkways shift downward and form a staircase leading underground.

“Yes, got it!” Milo exclaims.

I attempt to fist-bump him, to his puzzled expression. I try to high-five him, with the same result.

“What are you doing?” Milo wonders.

“Ugh, what sort of celebratory gestures do you do?” I wonder. “Come on, let’s head down.”

You have discovered the core room of the Wisteria Garden. Skill acquired: Discipline (Focus)

A round room lies below the bell garden, lit only by the small crystal orb on a pedestal. A chest sits before us, which Milo goes over to loot greedily. He retrieves a handful of coins and a seed the size of his knuckle.

“Thanks, Mary,” I say to the core.

Wisteria Garden You are welcome.

“Did you really spawn that eldritch stone just to test us?” I ask.

Wisteria Garden No. A previous visitor threw it into the fountain for good luck.

“So how did it wind up eldritch?” I ask. “I don’t think some random adventurer would have been okay carrying it around unless it were dormant or some other aspect to start off with.”

Wisteria Garden You are correct. Anyone under Heroic rank without Discipline (Eldritch Resistance) would not have survived direct contact for long. As for the cause, I have already given you a quest to investigate.

“Uh… about that. Our cores decided to hide our quest screens. They wanted to see what we would do without explicitly having quests tell us.”

Wisteria Garden How odd. In that case, I will merely tell you that I do not know the origin of the eldritch. I did not cause that. If I were capable of creating that aspect, my entire garden would be corrupted, and very likely much of the adjacent landscape.

“Understood,” I say. “Well, aside from that, I enjoyed my visit to your garden. How do you feel about goblins? Do you mind if we bring some friends here?”

Wisteria Garden I am an aether core. I do not have feelings in the manner organic beings do. In any case, I welcome visitors of any race.

“Fantastic,” I say. “They’re not far away, either. We’ll be heading out now. See you later, Mary.”

We leave the Wisteria Garden and return to Corwen.

Once back home, I bring out the black pebble I found in the Spooky Grove and compare it to the gray one Meadow just got. They both seem to be the same type of item, just with different aspects. No longer eldritch, Meadow’s Elite stone is emitting an aspect that I think is ‘natural’. Meanwhile, my Basic stone’s aspect is yet unidentified.

At least it’s obviously not eldritch, as that would have likely been noticeable at even Basic rank. The thing is… neither of them are actually emitting any vis at all. I’m not sure if that means they’re dormant or if they simply don’t emit vis. They’re non-living, which would normally mean they don’t produce vis, since vis is life energy so far as I understand.

They’re the same type of item, definitely, and both came from low level dungeons. That indicates that they’re probably not a rare or special sort of item and it was the eldritch infection that was the real problem and not the item itself. It also means we’ve probably got multiple books in our library that mention them and I just hadn’t known enough to look up something about my own stone until I saw a second example actually doing something.

There it is, in a book about magic items. “Aspect stones”, as they’re called, are the basis of many magic items, as they can provide the power source. The reason I can’t detect it is because they produce aether, not vis. The eldritch aspect was simply capable of infecting the vis around it.

Many magic items simply use their sigil circuits as a Wizardry command to activate an aspect stone. A new Elite doesn’t need to put their own Inspiration into heating up the water pot, only tell a stone aspected to heat to activate.

Aunt Heather knew I was going to be a crafter and left it to me to learn about the stone for myself. Now that I understand what it does and start thinking about the implications, the possibilities are endless. It’s just a pity I don't yet have a way to change its aspect myself. That limits the versatility. But since it auto-aspected with the concept I was emitting most strongly when I found it, it does have some potential application already. I’m absolutely going to start trying to learn how to make magic items.

Maybe I’ll even figure out how to make a model skyship fly. A single Basic-rank stone should be sufficient for a toy.