Sophie led Mabel across the courtyard to the greenhouse. She was glad she had spent so much time cleaning up in advance of the gardener’s visit. The grass was still high in a few places further back, but the path was at least clear enough.

Elowen floated along beside them both, still muttering to herself about Magewood, as Sophie opened the door. Light filtered into the greenhouse in patches from where Sophie had managed to pull some of the vines off of the roof during her first attempts at cleaning up. There was also still that pesky broken window that she’d need to get fixed – hopefully before it rained again – but she had at least swept up all of the glass and all of the dried leaves and other things that had been on the floor previously.

As soon as Mabel stepped foot inside, she gasped in surprise, eyes scanning over the rows of saplings in amazement. “Surely not!” She shuffled over to the first one, faster than Sophie had seen her move previously.

She did something with mana, then – Sophie could see the blue light glowing at her fingertips. “Ahh,” she said, shaking her head. “I see.”

She moved on to the next and the next after that. She worked in silence, making her way through all eleven plants as Sophie watched. Elowen floated beside Mabel, here and there, getting a little too close for Sophie’s comfort at times, but Sophie supposed that the social mores of an ageless shrine spirit were a little different than the average person’s.

Finally, Mabel shuffled back up to the front of the greenhouse, shaking her head again. “This is quite surprising, indeed,” she said. “Eleven Dawnwood saplings. And then the Magewood in the shrine. Who planted these?”

Sophie shook her head. “I don’t know,” she admitted. She glanced over to Elowen, but the spirit had an odd blank look on her face, so she didn’t bother pressing her. “Dawnwood? Magewood? What’s so special about them?”

“Hmmm – well. It’s a bit tricky to explain –” She sounded quite excited to do just that, however, so Sophie nodded, letting her continue.

“Some plants like Magewort and Mageweed must be harvested and consumed to have any benefit. But you wouldn’t harvest Magewood –” She sounded horrified by the mere idea of it. “Instead, the trees act as huge, natural sources of mana. In fact, there’s a shrine just south of here in Crann that runs entirely on mana generated by a Magewood.”

That… sounded like a lot of mana. Sophie couldn’t even fathom how much would be needed to power the shrine fully. Even with her newfound mana sense to help, she had not been able to fully understand the depths of the shrine’s depleted mana pool.

“But the problem is,” the gardener continued. “That it is an extremely tricky tree to grow. It takes a special ability to plant. In fact, I know of no living Gardeners with the skill to do such a thing. It takes a master of the craft, and even then –” She gestured to the plants in the greenhouse. “Well, this is the result. Planting perhaps twenty seeds will often give you nineteen Dawnwood and only one Magewood, and that’s if you’re lucky.”

“What’s the difference between the two?” Sophie asked. They all looked about the same to her. Well, except that the one in the shrine seemed a bit more… alive than the others.

“From the little I do know about these trees, Dawnwood by itself is not so special,” Mabel explained. “It doesn’t generate mana like Magewood does. But they would be worth keeping for the seeds. The seeds have the potential to become Magewood, but again, only planted by a true master. It’s such a fascinating topic. So you truly have no idea who planted these? I’d love to meet them.”

Sophie shook her head. “I believe they belonged to the former shrine priestess, but she’s –”

“Right,” Mabel said. Her tail swished back and forth along the greenhouse floor. “I see. What a shame. There aren’t many of these trees left, you know? Only a few Magewood on this continent, at least. Perhaps more Dawnwood, but without the ability to replant them…”

Sophie got the picture. So the trees were dying out. It seemed pretty stupid for this fantasyland to have trees that couldn’t even continue their own species, but maybe it had been different in the past.

“These trees…” Sophie began, unsure how to phrase what she wanted to say next. “I mean, they’ve been here for such a long time. Are they even alive? I mean, the one in the shrine seemed to be alive, but –”

Elowen began to argue that they still contained mana and therefore couldn’t be dead, but Mabel simply laughed.

“Of course – it’s harder to tell if you don’t have the ability,” Mabel explained. “These saplings are just dormant – the ambient mana levels are too low for them to thrive, so they’ve gone into a sort of hibernation. The one in the shrine is a bit of a special case. It’s surprising that it wasn’t dormant, as well – or perhaps it only recently came out of hibernation?”

She looked at Sophie expectantly, but Sophie shook her head. “I’m not sure. It was like that when I found it.”

Mabel nodded. “Well, regardless, these saplings are not very old at all. Sure – they might be decades old as we perceive time if they belonged to the former priestess, but I’d say they’ve only had a few years of actual growth before going dormant.”

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“Wait – what does that mean?”

“When Magewood and Dawnwood trees are still so young as these are, they need mana to grow and establish their root system. Not only are they difficult to plant, you see, but they are difficult to grow to adulthood in that regard since they need a strong, steady source of mana. These would have never had the chance. Not with whatever happened here. Likely the earthquakes during the Mage Wars.”

“The earthquakes?” Sophie frowned. “And then what? They just stopped growing?”

“Something like that,” Mabel agreed. “They would die eventually when they used up the last of their mana reserves, of course, but until then, they remained in this state – somewhere in between.”

Sophie stared at the two rows of plants. It sounded an awful lot like what had happened to Elowen… The trees were stuck in the same sort of half-existence, just clinging on by a bit of mana until they used the last of it. She was incredibly glad she hadn’t sent them all off with the trash cart or something. She thought it was best not to mention that part of the story to Mabel.

“Why would she have kept so many of them, though?” Sophie asked. “Wouldn’t the one Magewood be enough?”

Mabel laughed. “Well, she likely wouldn’t have known which one, if any, would result in a Magewood.”

All of Mabel’s explanations painted a strange picture. So Rosalie got all of these trees – for what? In the hopes that one of them would be able to fix the mana problem with the shrine? But then something happened during the Mage Wars to make the mana issue worse? And then Rosalie disappeared…

And left both these trees and Elowen in some sort of weird stasis.

“Ah, well thank you so much for coming out here,” Sophie said. “Actually, there’s a garden plot in the back of the shrine I’d like to learn more about if you have some time. And if you wouldn’t mind giving me some instructions on how to take care of all of these plants…”

“Of course,” Mabel said. She began shuffling her way out of the greenhouse, but she glanced back at the rows of saplings before stopping suddenly.

“Priestess Sophie,” she said, suddenly addressing Sophie in a formal manner that no one in the town had before. “I would caution you against letting this become public knowledge. It’s –”

She rested her hand on Sophie’s arm, and she looked worried. “Well, it’s not dangerous exactly. But you have something special here, for sure. I doubt there are many of these saplings left in the known world. And if there are, they are a closely guarded secret. It’s not every day you can grow something capable of generating enough mana to sustain a shrine, you see…”

Sophie frowned at the warning, but she nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I think I understand. Here – let me show you to the garden.”

***

Sophie showed Mabel to the garden plot behind the shrine, which had become a cacophony of competing mana to her newfound Mana Sense. She wasn’t quite sure what was causing it, until Mabel showed her some Mageweed and Magewort plants mixed in with more familiar things like lavender and spearmint. The lavender had spread so far into the yard on one side that it had formed something like its own field, and the spearmint had nearly conquered the mage plants growing the little garden plot, which had also been neatly framed by mana stone hidden under all of the plants. But even among all of that, there were no true weeds. Apparently mint grew so aggressively that it needed constant vigilance to prevent it from spreading like it had, with the benefit being that it choked out most of the other weeds.

Before Mabel left, she instructed Sophie on the care of all of the plants, including the Magewood and Dawnwood saplings to the best of her knowledge, as limited as it was. She also told Sophie how to harvest the Mageweed and Magewort, along with tips on how to use them for mana regeneration. Apparently they were both used in teas. It seemed quite likely that all of the tea Sophie had thrown away had been mana regenerating tea. Well, even if it had been, it was old, nasty mana regenerating tea, so it would be better to experiment with making it fresh.

After they were finished, Sophie had offered one of the Dawnwood saplings to Mabel in exchange for her help, but the other woman had refused flat out, saying it was far too high a price to pay for some gardening tips, and she couldn’t do much with it anyway, since she didn’t have the skill to plant the seeds. She did accept a cutting of one of Sophie’s Magewort plants, however. The ones in the garden seemed to be a slightly different variety than the one that Mabel was familiar with. And she promised to come back out and check on Sophie’s gardening progress.

“We’ll make a gardener out of you, yet,” she had said, almost threateningly, before heading back toward the path.

Sophie had never had a green thumb, but somehow she had found herself in the possession of not one, but twelve rare, half-dead plants that she needed to revive. She would not be responsible for killing them off completely. Especially if one of them had the potential to fix the mana issue in the shrine. If only she could get it to thrive. So maybe Mabel had a point…

Sophie returned to the garden plot behind the shrine with Elowen floating alongside once the Gardener had gone. She glanced over at the spirit, the question right on the tip of her tongue – didn’t Elowen remember anything? But she resisted. It felt… well, it still felt cruel in a way. And it didn’t matter. Perhaps Elowen would remember more when the mana situation was better.

And perhaps now Sophie had a real possibility on how to fix things here without waiting for that Earth Mage to come back from his quest. If only she could figure out how to get the tree to actually grow.

Luckily, Rosalie had left an entire library of plant books. As much as Sophie didn’t want to dig through all of the boring-looking volumes again, at least now she would know what she was looking for. But first…

There was the garden. It seemed a shame to let the mage plants get crowded out by the other herbs.

So, Sophie knelt down and began to get to work – she had a lot of spearmint and lavender to harvest.