It was still dark when Emika woke up. It didn’t feel like much time had passed. For a while, she just laid there on the ground, a hump of wood and flesh, not sure how to even move.

She wasn’t hurting that much. It just felt all weird. She vaguely understood that her body parts had reattached through branches — she could see her hand in front of her, the fingers on it like before, just that there was this little space of juniper in-between.

Emika was glad she still had them. She was especially glad she still had her leg. Or at least, she thought she still had it. She could feel it, but wasn’t sure where it was. Behind her? On top of her?

It took her a moment to collect her thoughts. Slowly, she started to remember why she had been here. Yes, Maxime was dead. She could see the purple beech on the clearing. The forest fire was still growing as well, but the clearing seemed to provide a safe distance for now. And then, there was Melisande, still unmoving, rested against the tree that had grown from Maxime.

Melisande was a bit unlucky. The fire would be able to reach her eventually. Maybe even soon. Emika needed to stop lying around like a pile of chopped wood.

Pressing her eyes together, she imagined a version of herself standing upright, with her growths pulled back into herself as much as possible. As if she was entirely human. At the same time, she tried to get her muscles to stand up.

Somehow, it worked. Not without issues, though. She did fall over shortly after getting up, and then landed on the ground with a big thump. The earth was somehow fairly soft, and with her weight being so high, it felt like landing in a dense liquid, with her actually causing a little bit of a wave in the soil.

At least, she was aware of her body parts now. It was all more or less in place. She could stand up normally, and felt the strain on the connecting wooden tissue within her waist and leg. A weird feeling, but not painful, and the wood didn’t seem quick to break. Slowly, she limped towards Melisande.

“Hey, are you awake?” Emika asked, the flames about ten meters away, the air dry and hot. She looked around and found a lot of tea still strewn around, so she imagined a kind of bowl grown from circulating juniper branches coming from her waist, and ended up collecting the tea in there.

Right as Emika was about to collect some, she recognised that actually, a lot of dirt had been shovelled into Melisande somehow. “We can’t have that now, can we?” she mumbled to herself, laid Melisande on her back, her entire torso and stomach exposed through the deep slashes Maxime had inflicted.

Then, she tried to pick out the dirt. The pieces of moss, the little twigs, the grass stalks, and some mushroom parts. Emika smiled. It felt like doing surgery.

Glancing at Melisande’s face, she suddenly felt a bit of a shiver. The button eyes of her friend were closely fixed on her. “Wait, don’t tell me, you’re conscious? But can’t speak?”

Blushing, Emika hurried up, entering both her flesh hand and her wooden hand into Melisande to find if there was more foreign matter in there — the wooden hand being a bit of a useless gesture since she didn’t actually have any sense of feeling in it. It daunted on at least some part of her mind that having her hands inside her friend that way felt very good. The moment she realised that, she pulled her hands out immediately and emptied the bowl of tea inside.

Lastly, Emika did her best to connect the torn pieces of Melisande’s skin fabric together. It was hard to coordinate between her two hands — one of them of wood and growing into place rather than moving, and the other made of freshly cut off fingers patched back on in a hurry.

She let out a deep breath when she saw the parts of fabric heal back together. Melisande would be okay.

“Had fun with that, huh?” her voice suddenly broke through Emika’s consciousness, giving her a start.

“Oh, god. You are awake. Sorry. This… I was…”

“You were doing your best,” Melisande smiled, and slowly got back up with Emika’s help. “Thanks. Can do that again some time. Felt kinda nice.”

Emika blushed hard. Yes, sure, let’s again fumble her hands in her best friend’s insides. Why did that idea feel much less wrong to her than it should?

“What do we do?” Emika asked as they made their way to the centre of the clearing. “Do we try to get out now or wait until the fire’s out? Wait, how did you even get here?”

Melisande turned around to watch to a specific direction within the forest. “I came from there.” She thought for a second, before adding, “I wonder where it is. Should have arrived by now.”

“It?”

“The Well of Abstraction. It brought me here. I mean, it’s pretty slow, so when I understood the general direction it was moving to, I just ran ahead. It should be somewhere there,” she explained, pointing into the woods.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Oh god,” Emika realised. She had a pretty good idea as to why the Well wasn’t here yet. “Let’s hurry and fetch it. It might be in a bad state right now. You think you can make it through a few flames?”

With a shrug, Melisande started moving. “With how much you pushed back in, I’m at about 20% right now. Should be enough for a while, since we aren’t fighting. Some charred fabric can heal away. Let’s rush through.”

And so, they did. It didn’t take so long to move through the flames; the fire had apparently reached its peak and wasn’t that much advancing any more. Emika tried her best to shield the two of them with wood, and used roots and branches to clear out a path in front of them that wasn’t lit up.

“Damn you can do quite a lot now. And you were so spent earlier. Better now?” Melisande wondered when she saw Emika grow so much, so quickly.

Emika gave a thoughtful hum. “Not sure. Feeling much better, yes. That guy found out I apparently sap magical energy from surrounding beings. That I take from them when I’m hurt, to heal. I must have absorbed what was left from him and… From the Well. If it was already in range.”

“The fuck you mean, you sap from others? Is the Well still gonna be alive? That’s why we’re hurrying, I suppose?” she rambled as they rushed through the remaining flames.

“Yeah. I mean… it’s probably fine. It ate a piece of me back then and stood up right after. But I still feel bad… I want to give it a hug.” Then she remembered she shouldn’t be giving any hugs.

“Honestly, ‘The Well’ kinda sucks as a name. You know it likes you, right?” Melisande mused as she climbed over a log in their path.

“What are you getting at? How do you know it likes me?” Emika frowned.

“Because it keeps following you? And it helped me when I needed to find you.”

“A name, huh… Okay. I’m not going to lie, I like the Well too, as strange as that might sound,” Emika admitted. She thought for a moment. “So, how about… Abstie?”

“Abstie?” Melisande stared at Emika, her button eyes wide open. “You mean, like, bestie, just much worse?”

They’d left the flames behind and were by now simply pacing on a path to the direction the Well was expected from. Emika was starting to run out of breath — somehow she realised moving her wooden protrusions was exhausting, but in a much different way compared to moving her flesh. Throwing herself through the forest for almost an hour hadn’t exhausted her lungs like this.

“Because it’s a Well of Abst-raction,” Emika panted as her glance wandered over the distance of the woods, trying to make out the scarlet red ring.

“I got that part,” Melisande murmured and rolled her eyes. “You’re dangerously close to losing naming rights. I wasn’t aware you’d be so bad at it.”

“Then how about Wellie?”

“Okay, you’ve lost them,” Melisande scolded.

“Can you even do any better?”

The doll put her chin in her hand and made exaggerated thinking hums for a while. Then, she said, “How about Dear?”

“Deer? Because it looks like a deer?”

“No, I mean dear, as in, darling. Something that’s dear to you,” Melisande said, raising her arms, gesturing at Emika. “But yes, it sounding like ‘deer’ would be the second layer.”

Emika thought this didn’t sound too bad. That said, she still wasn’t happy with it. “I don’t know. Sounds a bit much like a pet name.”

“You don’t think of it as a pet?” Melisande asked. She pondered that for a moment, and then added, “Makes sense. Perhaps it’s more of an ally. So… a name I might give to a person, then… How about ‘Apple’?”

Emika stared. “How would Apple fit? Didn’t you just complain about my bad naming sense?”

“I just— It’s red and round, you know!”

Emika laughed. “Apples don’t have to be red! I was thinking of a green apple.”

Melisande laughed too. “A red fruit, then. How about ‘Cherry’?”

Looking into Melisande’s questioning gaze, Emika felt a very warm feeling well up in her chest. Yes, she could picture that. “Cherry sounds good. Let’s ask if it agrees.”

The next few minutes went by without either of them speaking — until they finally saw it. On the ground, overgrown, a mess. The Well. It had indeed been hit by Emika’s absorption ability, just like on the rainy day at the railway station.

Emika ran to it, jumping down beside, trying to resist the urge to pet the poor little thing. It was convulsing heavily, obviously in some amount of pain.

“Oh god, I’m so sorry,” Emika wailed, again twitching and holding herself back right before touching it. She felt shivers going down her body, and for the second time that day, her lower lip started wobbling. “I’m so sorry I hurt you,” she managed to press out.

A moment later, Melisande arrived next to her. With a gentle gesture, she patted on Emika’s head, then wrapped an arm around her. “It came here to save you. And it did. I don’t think you would have survived that amount of damage had it not been in range.”

After saying that, Melisande crouched down and started petting the Well of Abstraction in Emika’s stead. “Thank you so much for keeping her safe, Cherry. Is that name okay with you?”

Upon being touched, Cherry twitched, and pulled its legs close. The ring started rising in the air, and the growths snapped away from the ground. It then moved a little closer to the two of them.

“Must be a yes,” Melisande smiled, and moved her hand to Cherry’s belly to help it get up.

Emika simply sat down on the forest ground. She felt awful. Was that really what her fate would be? Absorbing the life energy of others, without her own nor their consent, having them sacrifice themselves for her?

This was messed up.

Melisande walked a few steps together with Cherry, making sure the creature could properly move. Just as both of them were behind Emika, she suddenly felt a touch to her shoulders. Melisande was apparently removing part of the clothing that had burnt itself into Emika’s skin in the fight against the flame weasel.

“The hell’s that?” Melisande murmured.

“Huh? What’s what?”

“On your back, Emika,” she replied, a little soft-spoken, but tense. “This might be trouble.”