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***

It had only been five minutes and he was already itching for a universal remote control with a fast-forward button. He’d already composed an apology for Nightshade, one for Amacus, and now he was making one for…Rafflesia.

Among the trees of the forest, he was watching her sitting on a passing branch. She wasn’t real, he knew that. With the emotions swirling in his chest, her identity was just as Amacus had said: a personalized playback of his own regrets.

She waved at him. What had happened, happened. All he could do was nod his head towards her. The next step after that? Dunno. Raffie pouted and waved again.

He sighed. If he could get past this faster, he’d do so, but what could he do?

Distracting himself, he faced Dane. “Hey, how long until we get there?”

“Huh? Ah, thirty minutes on-foot, an hour by carriage.”

“Should I just get off and make a break for it?”

“And get lost when you get there? Yea, sure, go ahead.”

Guy has a point.

“Just enjoy the ride! Hell, if you’re so bored, I’ll even give ya a guided tour!” He leaned over. “’sides, I had the suspension tuned last week,” he play-whispered.

“So you do take care of your stuff.”

“Course I” — Dane groaned. “Is it hard t’give an old man some slack? Oh, the town’s coming up.”

He pointed at an earth-walled silo-like building. Craft squinted at it, but he couldn’t make out the details. “Hey, I thought we were still an hour away.”

“To the town hall, yeah, but if we’re just talking outskirts, a slinger could probably toss a rock at the temple from here.”

That’s one hell of a slinger.

Just ahead, Craft noticed a kid running down the road and coming closer, pulling a kite along. Seeing the kid at all shocked him, and it took him a moment to figure out why: he hadn’t seen a kid in years.

The kid ran past them, waving at them, shouting “Hello!” with an innocent smile. He waved back. What face was he making, he wondered.

They got closer to the silo from a while ago, and he realized it wasn’t even a silo at all. It was an earth-brick structure, built like a multi-layered cake around an ancient tree as if enshrining it. Dotting its facade were windows for every room, and small, differently-colored flags hung from window sills and branches that grew out of the building’s facade.

Green leaves and flowers sprouted from those branches. Further up, atop the roof, there was a scaffold of vines taking on a cylindrical shape, somewhat narrower than the floor below it, no doubt outlining building’s next floor.

A part of the scaffold glowed, and Craft was fixated on it. A vine wove itself around the base of the scaffold, stopping, creaking, and once it had completed a whole round, strengthening.

The carriage passed by some of the residents, watching the event from the far side of the road. “Whoa, it really did it,” one of them said. “That’s it for this year, huh?”

The building was slowly growing, and they were unbothered by it; they expected it.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

He faced Dane, expecting a proper explanation, but the guy was just grinning at him.

Craft sighed. “That’s the most concise explanation I’ve ever heard. Zero words? A telepathic sage of all time” —

Dane groaned. “Can’t’chya be more amazed! Come on, my man!”

Craft chuckled. “It’s not my first time seeing a growing building.” Actually, I like this version better. It’s not made of meat. He gestured to it. “The setup here’s like it’s protecting the tree, though, so that’s what I’m curious about.”

Dane clicked his tongue. “Can’t be helped if you’ve seen somethin’ like it before. Welp, it’s pretty straightforward: the tree’s got a spirit, the building’s got a spirit, they shake hands, and bam, contract established, and ya got yourself a buil-tree.”

“A sage of all time.”

“Shuttup.”

“And a ‘buil-tree’ ?”

Dane shrugged. “I ain’t the one with the naming sense. Theory goes it used to be called a ‘building-tree,’ so ain’t anyone surprised a few letters got nabbed into an alley somewhere along the way.”

Craft shrugged. “Fair enough.”

He looked at the buil-tree once more. At least that thing knew how to build itself.

Dane took them through a web of trails, and the deeper they got, the more of those buil-trees Craft saw. There were at least two people along each road, humans like him and elves like Dane, dressed sometimes in pajas, sometimes in leather, and sometimes in steel, but Craft was more curious about the wolves who were walking around like they lived here.

They were the very image of beasts loyal to none but their own kin…and one of them just accepted a treat from a kid. Another pair played chess against each other, moving pieces around with their muzzles. Huh, so they really lived here.

“Oh, yeah, this one might pique your interest,” Dane said. Craft looked at him and followed his finger to a triangular structure. Looking closer, however, he realized what it really was.

One buil-tree leaned against another, fuzing together. The leaning one ended up developing thin support pillars beneath it to keep its crumbly earthen walls from collapsing. It was just like a giant 3-D print.

“Someone got creative, huh?” Craft said. He’d seen skyscrapers look just like that, but this one was the fun, eco-friendly version of it.

“Oho, no, that one’s an accident.”

“Huh? Sounds bad.”

Dane chuckled. “Yeah. Story goes about thirty years back — ‘rivalry gone outta control’ kinda thing. Whole town came to watch! The ‘pizza’ side” —

Craft snapped around. “The what?” —

— “threw pizzas like shuriken, and one o’ them nicked the buil-tree at the base, blew half the thing away” — he put up both his arms and gestured one falling on the other — “blam. Wild, ain’t it?”

Craft could only stare at him and blink. “It wasn’t a steel-cored pizza, was it?”

“Nope.”

Craft narrowed his eyes. “You’re kidding.”

“I ain’t crappin’ ya! ’Nuff passion does that to people!” He was laughing, but his expression straightened out. “Oh, since you’re new, it really ain’t a joke. Get into yer Hobby as much as that baker and you’ll get lots of Anima, and that’s gotta go somewhere sometime. Make sense, yeah?”

“Hobbies, huh.” He already knew it was a big deal, but it seemed there were details he couldn’t ignore. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

He looked towards the arch again. He’d seen tower demolitions before; the chunk of the base would be blown away, causing the tower to fall in the direction of the missing chunk.

These buil-trees were huge, however. He imagined at least five rooms would’ve been blown away to topple one.

“How about the people inside?” he asked.

“Oh man, they came back from the temple with pitchforks and pineapples. They kept on topping the baker’s pizzas with the devil’s fruit ’til he agreed to a settlement.”

“Sounds like a hell of an angry mob. No one tried to stop them?”

“Oh, I’m sure some folk came over” — he shrugged — “but hey! He had one job, and he went and blew it along with someone else’s home! I figure everyone’s agreed it just dun make sense you’re a baker and you manage to do that — no sense at all!”

Dane threw his arms up, but as they came down and rested on his lap, he looked up at the sky, then faced Craft. “Well, whatever, right? After thirty years, people’ve forgotten how pissy they’d gotten over the whole thing” — he shrugged — “and we’ve got this triangular thingimawhatsit to show for it. Neat, ain’t it?”

Craft hummed. Putting himself in the shoes of the people who actually went through those events, he couldn’t imagine that all of them had walked away unscarred from the experience. The baker, in particular, might not have even intended to blow up someone’s home — with a pizza of all things.

“Was the baker a good guy?” he asked.

Dane was taken aback by this. “He’s still around, actually. Talked to him once, he seemed a’ight. Didn’t even seem like the same guy in the story.”

For the baker who hadn’t meant it, even after all the reparations had been paid, he would still be burdened by guilt.

“That doesn’t seem right,” Craft said.

That gave Dane pause. “Whad’dya mean?”

“People were right to blame him, and it was right to make him pay, but even after that, I don’t think everyone walked away completely alright after everything.” He gestured to the arch. “Looks cool, but it cost something.”

Dane kept his eyes on the road. “Well, it’d be a surprise if it cost nothing.”

Growing through mistakes — what if the mistakes had been too heavy? Craft slouched, resting his arms on his lap. “Sometimes it’s not worth it.”