“WELL I STILL THINK IT’S PRETTY!", Selda roared in Nari’s general direction as the elf threw his hands up in disgust and walked away to fume silently.
Blackstone held his head carefully in his hands, shaggy blonde hair spilling through his fingers as he focused on his breathing. They'd been up all night since his…he wasn't sure. He remembered being exhausted and talking to a flower to stay awake before it had started talking back. It felt like a dream, or maybe a nightmare, because the pain and consequences were all too real.
Roland and Gaius had examined him for hours, layer after layer of spellframes almost obscuring his entire body at several points during their ministrations. Then they did it again while everyone, including Blackstone, drank an elixir to fend off the exhaustion. Guide hadn't been much help, as he mumbled to himself about blessings and forest spirits throughout the entire affair.
Selda stomped back up to him as he sat, propped up with several packs in his bedroll. He sighed into his hands as she poked at it again and made his scalp prickle. He dropped his hands and caught her red handed in the middle of another poke and she let her finger go limp, curling down into her palm. Blackstone gave her a flat look while she smiled awkwardly back at him before dropping the act and growling in frustration.
“Look Blackstone, quit being a pans- Wait, shit.”, Selda winced and started over, “Just get up, walk it off. Roland’s been bitching there's nothing wrong with you for the entire morning. Its weird and I'm sorry it happened but we gotta move soon.”
Blackstone grunted vaguely and slowly reached his hand up behind his right ear before pausing a few inches away from his neck. He tried to gather the courage to poke it again when something cool and soft made contact with his hand. He froze as Selda’s eyebrows almost climbed off her face and her mouth formed into a little oh of surprise.
“It's uh…it's snuggling your finger. Okay, nevermind. You figure that out first.”
Blackstone slowly lifted the tiny brass mirror that he had brought along to assist with shaving and angled it towards his new friend.
The flower grew directly from his neck an inch or two behind his ear, despite the few small leaves below its petals doing a fantastic job of concealing that fact. It was a delicate, beautiful thing that strongly resembled the flower that still sprouted from the glade a few dozen feet away. It had a small range of motion that it was currently exploiting to lean towards his hand and explore his fingers with amazingly animated petals. Every time it moved, even slightly, he could feel the network of roots and vines inside his body shift slightly.
“Blackstone, I tell you, this is a blessing from the Forest Spirits. Not one in a hundred years or more has been so honored.”
"Yes, how wonderful.", Blackstone replied to Guides' hundredth repetition of the statement as the petals began to attempt to tug his hand closer with feeble strength.
He vaguely remembered the man cheering and celebrating while everyone else was trying to save him. There was a surprisingly clear memory he did retain, however; Roland had drilled the man with a surprisingly sturdy punch squarely in the nose over it. He turned to meet Guides’ eyes and noted that Roland had blackened both for his trouble. The man returned his look with a huge smile as he sat a few feet away from him like an excited child.
“It's never happened in living memory but it has happened now! The Horned Man, Sister Willow, Fullbloom. All of them blessed by the forest spirits, all bore some mark of the forest like you now do!”
Blackstone noticed as Gawin's ears twitched the second Guide started rattling off names. The portly man suddenly had the grace and poise of a mountain-goat as he bounced over to them with a charcoal stick and a hastily retrieved parchment roll. Gawin simply flopped down immediately to Blackstone’s right and clapped him in the shoulder before turning to Guide.
“Sir, can you repeat those names one more time and perhaps tell me just a bit about their stories? It could be quite important, these old stories are wh-"
Guide shot him an uneasy look as Gawin suddenly remembered their agreement and tried to salvage it, “-aaaaaat I live for, you know."
Blackstone snorted, then began to giggle stupidly as he leaned back on the packs. Within a few seconds it had devolved into a booming laugh that came straight from his belly while everyone turned to look at him. He continued laughing until tears streamed down his face and his sides hurt, eventually being forced to sit forward and cough hideously to avoid throwing up.
As Blackstone wiped his eyes and began to get a grip on himself again he noticed everyone was staring at him with a concerned look. Nari had his glaive loosely in his hand and pointed downwards with a concerned, pitying expression while he watched. Blackstone motioned for Nari to calm himself, which the elf ignored, and turned to Gawin before seizing the old man in a huge bear hug.
“Gawin you tactless bastard. Thank you for never changing.”, Blackstone released the confused man and laughed again when he saw that Gawin had clapped both hands to his neck and was lowering them sheepishly.
"I'm okay. The pain is gone, it isn't trying to use me as a puppet, and it's not growing…it just feels…nasty. I feel dirty somehow sharing my body with it.”
Everyone fell silent as Blackstone continued to speak and began to extricate himself from his improvised sickbed. He stood and stretched a bit, grimacing as he felt the delicate network of the plant shifting and squirming through his neck and chest with the motion. When he finished his stretch he turned and shoo’d Gawin away as he reached down and began to toss everyone their packs from the pile they'd propped him up with.
“I can feel it everywhere, even my fingers and feet. It's…I don't know. It's alive, obviously, but it's…thinking. It feels like music sounds, does that make sense? I'm terrified it's going to eat me from the inside out.”
Nari and Roland nodded, while Nari visibly fought down a full body gag as Blackstone described the sensation of the invasive plant. The elf looked ill just thinking about it when he caught the slim bag Blackstone heaved to him as Roland and Gaius watched on with cautious expressions. He knelt to roll his bed in the uneasy silence and then strapped it to his own backpack when he was done.
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“But Selda's right, we need to move. It's after midday already, we’ve lost half our travel time because of my stupidity. I'm not well, but I'll be well. If Tenebri could withstand the weight of defending our entire kingdom and still find the time to teach a timid grandson to use his Talents, I can withstand the weight of a single flower.”
Gawin teared up as he listened to Blackstone speak with growing strength as the blonde man stood and shook himself in his armor. He tightened the straps that held his mail snugly to his body, adjusted his gambeson, and tilted his head back to the sky. He took a few deep breaths before turning to face the group again. Guide surged to his feet with a sparkle in his eye as he locked his gaze firmly on the white petals waving in the wind.
“That's better, see? Told you. Walk it off, that's what my Da always says.”, Selda stepped forward and punched him in the hip and drew a jungle from his armor where she stood only a couple feet away, “Everybody ready to run? We can still make it to the first stopping point we missed the other day."
Various sounds and gestures of assent rolled back, even from Blackstone and Guide who both looked a little worse for wear after the night's events. Guide shot the flower another radiant look before nodding and jogging to retrieve his own belongings, quickly strapping the bastard sword to his back before he threw his pack over it. He took up his light horn bow and had returned before Blackstone even reached the shield that lay next to the stump he'd been sitting on. He noted the second flower was gone, not even a hole in the soil to mark where it had been.
“We’ll make it to our original objective before dark if we leave now.", Guide said as he squinted through his swollen eyes into the dense growth of pines that surrounded the glade.
Blackstone sighed grumpily and took a few steps towards him as he began to gather mana to heal the bastard's eyes for him when his own eyes widened suddenly.
The moment the mana fully condensed with the intent to heal the flower seized it, molding it through its root system within his body and adding to it with its own energy. The healing spell reverberated between Blackstone's own body and that of the flower, several times in a single second, gaining momentum and power each time before exploding out of Blackstone's outreached hand like a sunbeam and consuming the man's entire upper half in radiant light. Guide threw his arms up defensively with an alarmed shout before he stumbled and fell.
Blackstone froze as he felt the wicked tip of Nari’s glaive pressed ever so gently into the hollow of his throat, the elf having crossed a half-dozen yards and curved the blade around from behind him in a heartbeat as he held him there with the implied threat. He slowly lowered his arm and Nari lowered the glaive at the same time. Guide had already recovered from his shock and rose to his feet, patting himself as he confirmed he was still alive and well, eyes healed.
“What the fuck was that?", Roland and Gaius asked in nearly perfect harmony before glancing at each other.
“Uh…I don't know. You usually can't see a healing spell, they aren't efficient enough to lose mana on visible effects beyond the healing itself.”, Blackstone replied lamely, "That was orders of magnitude more powerful than what I can usually do…and it barely took any mana.”
Guide busily explored his mouth with his tongue for a few seconds before cheering again to everyone's shock ans seized Blackstone in a hug of his own. He immediately released him as the flower pulsed threateningly with amber light at his sudden proximity to it. Nari snatched up his weapon again and bounced backwards at the ready, eyes locked firmly on the plant.
“Oh knock it off you dumbass!”, Selda shouted at him in frustration, “I'm not gonna deal with this every five seconds.”
Blackstone ignored them all and began to cycle the mana inside his body and direct it cautiously to the flower once again. He felt the flower examine the mana sleepily and then begin to convert and amplify it for him as the being that now shared his body finally worked out his intent. Blackstone extended his hand again, directing it away from the group and conjured a barrier.
Rather than the flat, hard angles of the barriers he usually conjured simply manifesting in place the shield unfolded in layers. First the plane of the barrier shimmered into existence, large and rectangular, it stretched ten feet end to end. Within the center a flower of light bloomed, face forward as its petals slowly unfolded and reinforced the spell with a ripple of amber light as each one opened in turn. The power within the barrier was formidable, both Roland and Gaius immediately pelting him with questions about how he modified the spellframes on the fly.
“I didn't, the flower did. It's helping me focus my mana, and it's adding to it somehow.", Blackstone snapped at them as small ordinary wildflowers began to bloom under the barrier as it hovered in the air. Soon even the grass itself began to reach up to touch the barrier as it grew seasons tall in a few moments and only looked to grow further before Blackstone cut off the spell.
“Blessed, Blackstone. Blessed."
“I'm starting to think the madman may be correct."
“Oh shut up Roland, you're only saying that because-"
“I do not like it, but I will trust you Blackstone. Should you feel yourself losing control to it I will ensure it is painless, you have my respect.”
"Nari I told you to knock that shit off!”
Selda got the last word in as she swung a ferocious hook at Nari’s gut for the threat, but the elf simply slithered out of the way with an offended look. He shifted his grip on the glaive and held it non threateningly while he held his other hand up in surrender. The dwarven woman leered back at him for a few moments before nodding and turning to face Guide as the man literally shook with excitement.
“Fuck it, can we just go? I need time to think.”, Blackstone said in a fragile voice as he looked into Guides ecstatic face.
The man nodded enthusiastically and whirled on his heel as he shouted to the heavens and herded the rest of the group into the line while Selda remained beside Blackstone for a moment.
"Pa! I wish you could see this! I'm the guide for a Blessed One! I'm finally living up to our family name! I'll swear I'll…”
"Hey Blackstone.”
He looked down at the woman as she put her hands on her hips and met his eye with an odd expression on her fave, "Yeah?”
She remained silent for a moment as she watched the others make their way to the edge of the glade and Guide began to explain their route. His voice when it drifted back sounded like he was describing a yearly festival or tournament instead of a deadly jog through one of the most dangerous places on earth.
Selda’s green eyes peeked up at him nonchalantly before she slapped his ass through the chainmail forcefully enough to make him squeal with surprise that even the flower in his neck felt radiating through his body. Blackstone goggled at her as she slowly turned red through her wavy brown hair and repeated something she had been saying to him all day.
“I-think-it's-pretty!", she mumbled out shyly and then bolted straight to the others, having seemingly lost her nerve at the last second.
“Y-You too.”
Blackstone was furiously glad she had been too far away to hear his reply as he beat himself viciously with a mental club for the awkward response. The blush on his own neck complimented the delicate whites of the flower that bobbed around in hysterics as he slowly made to follow her.
If he didn't know any better he'd say the sensation coming from the plant was laughter.