070 – Fairy

***

I had often wondered why monsters altered by lunar daemons were so ill-natured. Most seemed to be savage, toxic, large, and especially aggressive toward human beings. Their bad attitudes made the continent uninhabitable. If the mutations were random, one would expect a portion of monsters to be hostile, another to be fearful, and another to be especially weak or passive. Yet that was not the case. Here in a hidden section of forest, I at last discovered some rare examples of peaceful monsters.

The meadow had no noxious plants, only soft grasses and green shrubs that—in a botanical paradox—flowered and bore fruit at the same time. Small, fuzzy creatures waddled across the meadow to sniff at my boots. At night, luminous beetles floated on the breeze, and in the morning, fluttering swarms of butterflies replaced them. No predators lived here.

The existence of this place baffled me. The other wildlife should have invaded to devour these naive and helpless species. Yet that had not happened. The wolves who chased me here had not dared to cross the threshold to feast on the adorable little fuzzballs or me.

A shady grove adjoined the meadow. The trees there, festooned with flowering vines, were so heavily laden with fruit their branches sagged low. Bright blue mushrooms grew from rotting trunks in the loam. The birds nesting in the branches had fantastic plumage and sang with unstructured songs that sounded more like tinkling wind chimes than music. Long legged sloths picked their way through the treetops, cracking the hard shells of nuts and gobbling down the meat.

Everything was in harmony. This place was a paradise. Frankly, that terrified me.

I recalled that Iiyluzh the Viridescent Blade consumed a highly toxic fruit as an initiation into a sect of assassins, the Black Scorpions. A bite of that same Axiol Fruit crippled Fownst the Alchemist for life. The continent brought forth all manner of deadly things. The only reason I could surmise for hungry monsters to avoid this place was that its pleasant exterior concealed some hideous poison. Perhaps the bright colors were a signal of warning, like an arrow frog or coral snake. I wrapped my cloak tight and covered my mouth with a cloth.

In the center of the grove, a spring bubbled up among a circle of ancient trees. I approached the pool, wondering if it were the source of the toxin. At the edge of the crystaline water, a single bloody arrow lay in the grass. I picked it up. No mistaking it, this was one of mine. And since only one of my arrows hit anything, it must have been the one that struck the silver hart. There was no other blood around and no sign of a corpse.

I heard a faint whispering, but when I turned around nothing was there.

Cautiously, I probed the pool with a tendril of flame. Unique essences mingled within this spring water. In fact, all around me the trees and plants and even the soil had trace amounts. Magic infused everything. This place was a gold mine for aetherics.

It was regretful to be separated from the slave raid, but the monsters could get along fine without me. Anyone could beat up trolls. It didn’t take a swordsman. And Nimblesto could manage the goblin scouts without me. In a way, a bumbling human prone to getting lost in the woods was a liability for the whole mission. It was better for everyone for me to stay here and investigate.

The magic garden took up about six hectares of land in total, with the pool and ring of ancient trees at the center. The magic was densest at the pool and gradually lessened toward the periphery. I collected several prime samples, mainly dry herbs, roots, minerals, feathers, bark, and other things which would not rot on the trip home. Due the potential toxicity of this place, burning spiritual herbs to collect their essence could be a health risk. I didn’t want to inhale lungfuls of deadly smoke, so I settled for imperishable samples.

Consuming mana could sustain a mage for days without food, but not forever. Eventually, everyone had to eat something solid. My hunger compelled me to do an experiment. Fruit grew at the edge of the garden that were entirely free of lunar essences. That did not mean they were edible. They could still possess normal, physical toxins. But with my augmented physique, a small test wouldn’t be deadly. I peeled a fruit and cut out a five by five centimeter cube. Then, I popped it in my mouth. It had delicious flavor unlike anything I’d tasted before, and my intense hunger made it even delicious. But to conduct the test correctly, I would have to wait several hours to see if it had any adverse affects. My stomach growled in protest.

This strange, peaceful garden in the middle of the monster-haunted wastelands must have been one of those sacred sites where swordsmen went to meditate on their art. Magic welled up here along with the spring water. It calmed the nerves and brought on a mild euphoria. I could have built a tiny hut and lived at this spot as a recluse with no fear of monstrous predators or other people. Maybe the Void Cult would assume I had died and never bother me again.

***

Near sunset, a herd of silvery deer had come to drink at the spring pool. They traipsed through the ancient grove, nervous and alert for danger. These monsters did not resided in the garden permanently, but visited when thirsty or when pursued by wolves. I still had my bow and could have taken another shot to redeem myself as a hunter, but there was no need now. I munched on my fruit and spit out the hard seeds.

This secret garden was not toxic, as I had first conjectured. The deer safely drank from the spring, as did other visiting creatures. In fact, the opposite was true; the water had a salubrious effect. A bubbling health elixir flowed straight from the ground. None of the other plants or animals seemed to be harmful either.

So then, if this place wasn’t toxic to outsiders, why did the wolves refuse to enter?

The strange standing stones provided a clue to the mystery. The smooth stones were not arranged by chance. Someone, or something, had placed them in clusters around the garden, often stacked on top of each other or set in circles. Within these standing stones, the essences were shaped into complex constructions: monster magic. These were somewhat similar to the proto-runes I found in the eye-titan’s lair in the citadel, which had given me the starting point for my new warning rune. I didn’t know if these standing stones had a purpose at first, but they could be the source for new creations.

My poor notebook was damp and wrinkled. My satchel had gone into the river with me when I avoided the giant boar’s fire belch, and the water washed ink from the paper. Nature was so inconvenient. Now I had to scribble rough diagrams on the waterlogged pages and rely mainly on memory.

The day passed quickly as I made a precursory examination of the standing stones. The layout of the stones through the garden struck me as eerily familiar. My suspicions increased when I found some woody roots that possessed a high density of mana. This root system radiated out from the ancient trees at the pool and connected to the bases of the stone clusters. It could not be a coincidence that this set up so closely resembled the giant arrays in the basement of Power Station Thirteen. The garden was a primitive mana pump. It drew energy from the Heart of the World and funneled it into the magic pool.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

The garden’s array couldn’t match an Ancient power station in efficiency or scale, but it could feed some local daemons and create an anomalous zone in the middle of the wastelands.

***

At night, a host of glowing beetles took to the air. The jewel-like insects had translucent bodies with inner organs that flashed various colors depending on their mood. Each beetle was about the size of cicada, but they only made a soft buzz as they floated gracefully across the meadow. Their multi-color lanterns gave a festival atmosphere to the garden.

My levitation staff nabbed one in the air and guided it into a glass bottle, which I stoppered with a cork. My little prisoner flashed green in dismay.

“Got you. So you’re the one behind all this, are you? I should have known.”

This bizarre creature, despite its size, carried a daemon in its breast – or its thorax anyway. It was much smaller than other daemonic monsters, such as the devil-birds and saber-tusked boar, but size didn’t necessarily matter for a spiritual being. The three witches carried their familiar daemons in small pets; Veylien had a yippy lap dog, Gritha had a fiery salamander, and Malisent had a Orma the snake.

The jewel beetles didn’t feel exceptionally strong, but they traveled in large numbers. The swarm could have created this garden for their own benefit. The process of how this came about was unclear. I suspected the daemons had originally inhabited the stones, where they formed the mana pumps, and they possessed the insects later on. The spirits modified their new bodies and their environment to fit their particular tastes.

“I hope you enjoyed it, sparkles, because your days of freedom of over. You work for me now.”

The garden was a perfect spot for capturing daemons.

I now had a good store of essences and basic tools for working on aetherics, but I still needed to upgrade to daemonics. And Deamons couldn’t be created from scratch, they had to be captured, either pulled down from the moon or sucked out of some weird creature.

Near the edge of the garden, I dug up a half buried piece of slate and washed it clean. I could carve into the flat stone a rough array and use my new tablet to inscribe the aetheric runes. The former spirit of the golem now served me inside a cube of topaz and silver. The daemon assembled the basic runes and placed them around the magic circle at my command. The most complex and handmade runes were held inside semiprecious runestones in my satchel. Those could temporarily attach to the array, sitting at the points of the pentagram, and then get removed when the work was done.

Making new arrays in the field was a real pain. I needed to develop faster means to deploy them without spending hours chipping away at rocks and boulders.

“All finished. Now we can move you to a much more comfortable cage.”

This process did not need a complex array. It only had to pull a daemon out of its current anchor and move it to another of my choosing. The more mana I added, the stronger the effect, although fragile daemons such as this one might collapse with too much force applied to their delicat structure. I placed a homemade daemon cell in the center of the pentagram, a polished sphere of alexandrite, and put the bottled beetle at the point of the star.

My mana flowed into the circle, lighting up the stones and drawing the spirit from its flesh. The shiny bug’s carapace crumbled to pieces like crushed glass. A tiny mote of light spiraled down to the daemon cell and winked out. Judging by the state of the cell, it could hold five or six such spirits, and I had three more empty spheres in my satchel. That didn’t give me room for the entire swarm of bugs, but it was a good harvest.

One by one, I used my staff to pluck the insects from the air and trap them in the bottle.

After netting a dozen or so daemons in my spirit cells, the floating jewel beetles took notice of my kidnappings. They reacted by coming together into one dense swarm. They began to pulse in sync, and their multi-colored lights all changed to a crimson red. The swarm bathed the meadow in a bloody light. It seemed they didn’t care for my research. Most concerning, was the fact the mass of bugs organized itself into grid pattern. Their tiny sparks fused into a net of soul flame. Harmless as individuals, the total swarm became a formidable monster.

“Okay. I’ll admit it. I might have gotten a little greedy. No hard feelings, right?”

The swarm rearranged itself into weird geometries then settled on four concentric rings rotating in opposite directions. A cold wind blew across the meadow and shook the treetops. The frightened herd of silver deer bolted from the grove. Aided by my Quick Thinking technique, my eyes could trace the flight of the bounding creatures. One of them, a hart with large antlers, bore a red scar on its side. That monster had lead me into a trap as revenge for that merciless arrow.

“Yeah. Fair play, I suppose…”

A horrible crashing noised followed the deer. One of the ancient tress exited the grove, using its roots as limbs. Its motions resembled the tentacles of an octopus pulling itself across dry land. The tree’s upper branches also became unnaturally flexible. The twisting limbs fell on the ground like great hammers, tossing up clods of dirt and leaving scars in the turf. Loosened leaves fluttered through the air like confetti.

“On second thought, it would be a shame to waste too much time in this place.” I hurriedly stuffed all my runestones and tools into my bag. “The outdoors is no place for me. All the rain and bugs. No. It’s better not to stay too long. A civilized person needs civilization.”

The spinning circles of angry jewel-beetles chased me across the meadow. The daemonic bug swarm controlled the animated tree monster, or at least served as its eyes. Their pulsing red light followed me out of the magic garden, as did the deafening roar of shattering tree trunks and rolling boulders.

The spirits ejected me from their garden. I fled back to the safety of the wastelands.

***

The raiding party beat me to the mountains by half a day. The tributary of the Spitpoison had thinned to a stream, which cut a narrow pass through rocky peaks. Its waters were crystal clear and as cold as ice. The Warcreeps prepared for a hike up this steep path to the highlands, where our true objective lay. They carried thick coils of rope and long iron chains wrapped around their chests.

“You’re late,” Famigrist growled.

I was out of breath, muddy, and soaked with freezing water from running along the rocky stream for two days straight. I shook some bits of gravel out of my wet boots.

“Took a slight detour.”

“Don’t get lost again, or we’ll leave you for dead,” he said. “Did you at least catch any game?”

“My hunt was an outstanding success. But I didn’t bag anything edible.”

“From here on we travel through the highlands. It will be cold and desolate, with few animals or trees.”

“Sounds great. Can’t wait to see it.”

Our party began the march up the mountains. We ascended to a height that gave us a commanding view of the lush valley and, in the distance, glinting pieces of the Spitpoison river. On a wooded hill, a flock of orange-winged birds took flight, and the green treetops shook as if struck with a giant hammer. An agry rumble rolled through the valley.

“What was that?” Famigrist said.

“Ha ha. Probably nothing to worry about,” I said. “Let’s get climbing! Those trolls aren’t going to enslave themselves.”