Serenity wondered exactly how he was talked into this. He was there for all of it and could even review the video if he wanted to, but that didn’t really explain it. He wasn’t actually all that interested in training as a World Shaman; yes, he’d happily take the training and adapt it to fit himself, but it wasn’t a driving need.
Right now he’d rather study enchanting. It would be less embarrassing, and that was saying something. He’d always been terrible at crafting anything and no matter how hard the Voice pushed it, enchanting was going to be the same.
He’d been waiting here for hours. He’d known it might take a while to get permission to travel to Berinath. He still thought they’d be better to go around, but he’d somehow allowed Senkovar to talk him into going across the moon. It was partly the man’s arguments and partly Serenity’s dislike for leaving a situation like this behind him; he was willing to do so if it made sense, but he’d rather not.
Serenity took another look around the room he waited in. It was plain and undecorated by local standards, though the wood paneling and floor would be worth some notice on Earth. The windowless room had only a single door and the only furniture was a sturdy, yet quickly made, set of wooden chairs and a table. There were only eight chairs, which meant the room could easily hold a standard team plus one or two people, whether they were friends, teachers, or something else. The table looked fairly beaten up, both from being smacked with something hard, probably a chair, and from people carving things into it. The reason for the guess that the “hard object” was a chair was that two of the chairs were clearly newer than the other six.
That made it fairly normal for a small private meeting room at a Mercenaries’ Guild headquarters. Damage to the meeting rooms wasn’t common, at least not compared to the common room, but it was frequent enough that the Guild’s furniture was often utilitarian and cheap rather than the far nicer goods that could be found in the more expensive living quarters at some Guilds. Serenity was sure that if this were Earth, the table and chairs would be the cheap folding kind.
Well, they might have a slightly nicer table. Sturdy was important there, while flimsier chairs might mean the table was more likely to survive. Maybe?
The door to the meeting room opened and pulled Serenity out of his musings.
“I knew he was talking about you.” The woman in the doorway was immediately recognizable as Elder Lizven, the dryad who he’d interacted with on Berinath. She stopped there, as far from him as she could be while still easily speaking to him. “I hope you’re worth it, boy. Your master insists that you’re no undead and he’ll have you prove it. We won’t make the trial simple; you must do as he’s said you can, as he did, and shape a place for a new dome without the Forest’s help. You’ll also answer our questions in a truth ring. Were I you, I’d avoid Berinath. I could never be you, for Death magic is not a magic I’m willing to wield.”
Elder Lizven half-turned away, then turned back. “It’s only what you did before that gives you this chance. Even with that, even with the respect for Life that you showed for your family and friends and even our guards, this is not unanimous. Don’t disappoint those who supported you.”
Serenity wasn’t sure what to say or even what to think about that. They’d taken his desire to keep his people safe and his avoidance of conflict as respect for Life? He didn’t know what to think about that. They weren’t wrong, exactly, but he wasn’t sure they were right either.
Before he was able to pull his thoughts together, the Elder dryad was gone.
World Shaman Senkovar Et’Tart almost immediately took her place. “That went well.”
“Do you think so?” Serenity didn’t. “”I’m still not sure this is a good idea.”
“What’s the worst that can happen? We have to run away? That doesn’t leave you any worse off than before.” Senkovar’s smile was annoying.
Serenity shook his head. “No. The worst is that they try to kill me, it doesn’t work, then I have to kill them, probably taking out a large portion of the Forest of whatever dome I’m in. Then we run, leaving the population of the dome to deal with a dome that no longer has enough air, warmth, and whatever else the Forest did for it. Water, probably? No matter what, that’s a dying dome. And I’ll have killed it and many of the people in it. That’s the worst case.”
The grin slipped from Senkovar’s face as Serenity spoke. “Here I thought you’d say they might kill you. It says something that you think of the world before yourself. Don’t you think it’s a bit arrogant to think you can kill the Forest? The Great Trees are the next thing to gods to the dryads, and the strongest are well over Tier Ten. I’m not sure what Tier they are.”
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Serenity shook his head again. It was clear that they weren’t quite communicating. “No, it just means that I don’t think they can succeed. I’m very, very hard to kill. If they do manage it somehow, they won’t like the results. Past that, I don’t think killing is where they’d go first, not when they think I’m undead. It’s more likely they’d try a direct conversion ritual, which could be very unpleasant; I’d run first. Misdirected magic can be unfortunate. As for their Tier, it doesn’t really matter; they’re still trees. It isn’t always easy, but anything can die.”
Serenity almost mentioned that he’d killed his first Tier Ten at Tier Four, but Lykandeon’s death was due to some very special circumstances. Admittedly, fighting a forest would also be unusual circumstances that he could take advantage of, but it wasn’t really comparable. He wouldn’t have months to prepare this time. He also didn’t actually hate the forest the way he’d despised Lykandeon. “Just because it’s the worst case doesn’t mean I think it will actually happen. The most likely case is that I’m not able to convince them and I have to escape again. That’s not really that bad.”
Senkovar simply nodded at Serenity. “It will be only the two of us until you’re done. Cymryn and the two Triacts will stay here on Kvim. If things go very wrong, try to let me know so I can use my own escape plans.”
Serenity knew it. Senkovar wasn’t as confident as he’d seemed.
That wasn’t really a good thing, was it?
----------------------------------------
Serenity only had time to glance up at the imposing sight of Tzintkra looming in the sky above him over a dead moonscape below before Senkovar shook him out of it and told him to head over to the side, where a group of guards waited for the two of them. Unlike his last time on Berinath, this time they did not bother to bind Serenity’s wrists. He wasn’t sure if that was a measure of trust or if it was because of how easily he’d slipped his bonds the previous time. His guess was that it was mostly the latter masquerading as the former for the World Shaman’s benefit.
The guards around Serenity were fewer in number, but they weren’t the simple Tier Two and Tier Three guards of his first trip. This time, they were all at least Tier Four and Serenity was fairly confident the leader, who was actually in the rear, was at least Tier Eight. On top of that, they were clearly aware of both the deal the World Shaman had struck and what happened the last time Serenity was there, as they didn’t leave any easy openings for Serenity to simply walk through.
They were escorted quite a bit farther into the dome than Serenity expected; he’d expected to be left on the perimeter. Instead, they were brought into a dark area surrounded by enormous trunks.
Serenity could feel each tree as they passed it. These were giants indeed; each of them towered over the small group of humanoids. Each of the trees seemed stronger than Lykandeon had been. Serenity wasn’t entirely certain if the power was that of one tree or the entire grove; if he had to guess, it might well be the grove.
Or as the dryads put it, the Forest.
At the same time, they didn’t push their presence out. It extended past their trunks, covering the area between their boughs and their roots, but it didn’t fight with the aura of anyone who walked through. Serenity could feel a few of the trees slowly react to his aura, but the overall feeling remained. That reinforced the idea that the strength he felt was the strength of the Forest, not the trees; each individual tree was likely weaker than the Forest, though there might be some exceptions.
There were many other plants in the understory, though the route they followed was a path that looked like it had simply grown that way, avoiding the short yet springy moss that formed the pathway.
Serenity didn’t see any wildlife around them, but he felt it; more than once, he walked beneath a low branch and felt something relatively weak fly or bound away. He never caught more than a glimpse of feathers or fur; whatever was there was good at staying unseen, at least from him.
The mossy path eventually led to a large tree that Serenity could tell had seen better days; there was a sense of Time and Death about it, though the Death affinity was not strong. Serenity was uncertain if anyone else would even notice the Affinity. The tree was slowly dying.
Whether or not they could feel it, Serenity was confident the dryads knew about the tree’s senescence. It really didn’t take much work to make that guess when the wood had clearly been manually removed in a large area; this wasn’t the gentle reshaping and directed growth Serenity had seen before to make living spaces inside the giant trees. This was a place where the opening had been carved out of dead wood.
Or, now that he got a closer look, patches of living trunk interspersed with dying wood in a way that looked more like damage from a fight than natural death. “What happened here?”
“Nothing you need to worry about, stranger,” the guard’s leader said from behind Serenity. “Keep moving. There will be time to talk after this is all over.”
That seemed fair. If anything, it was probably more understanding than Serenity would have been if someone he thought was a huge threat were near his home. He certainly hadn’t given the Valkyrie Ann and her people a chance to explain themselves, after all, he’d just arranged to have them thrown off the planet. He wouldn’t have been shocked if the dryads did the same thing. It would have been easy enough; all they’d have had to do was refuse to perform an alternate test.
Serenity would have preferred that, if he were honest. This was a huge hassle for relatively small gain, at least so far. The time savings of being able to go through Berinath was minor; Serenity wasn’t even sure why the World Shaman was in enough of a hurry that a month mattered. He certainly hadn’t seemed that rushed on Earth.
The only thing he really stood to gain from it was practice dealing with another world, doing something he thought of as terraforming work with the help of the core. Serenity didn’t know when he might have the need to use it, but it was definitely a capability that interested him.