I let out the equivalent of a sigh as I flowed out into the world and unfolded the parts of myself that had gotten a bit too compressed in there.

Helen’s body began to fall, and I used a few strands of energy to catch it. I bundled a few of them into a platform and arranged it to lie face-up. At the same time, I closed its eyes, folded its arms over its torso, and tucked the cloak’s edges closed. Hopefully, this would make the woman’s body a bit more presentable for friends and loved ones to see.

I made to hand it over to Alexander only to discover that he’d brought his arm up to shield his eyes and the trees and his clothes were moving as if they were in a strong wind.

Ah, perhaps my interface layer had turned out too luminous. But at least the structures that were meant to mimic sight and hearing were working.

It was a bit embarrassing, but all I could do was dial back the excess energy I was putting out into the world. I also shifted some portions of my interface into adjacent dimensions and folded up others until what was left resembled a vaguely humanoid blob of glowing energy. This time, I used the tree-like object for reference and added differently colored patches on the ‘head’ to act as the eyes and mouth when conveying expressions.

“What was that?” Alexander asked, bringing his hand down and giving me a questioning look.

“I miscalculated how much energy I’d be putting out in this form,” I admitted, reluctantly forming the words. “And it’s already drawing attention,” I added with my equivalent of a sigh as I sensed a whole group of life signs heading in our direction. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s fine,” the man replied, glancing in their direction. An exasperated expression briefly crossed his face, and he quickly spun together an energy construct in his hand before sending it flying their way. “They’re just agitated from the attack,” he explained, “that will keep them away until we’re done here.”

Considering the energy construct didn’t seem to do anything to the group of people when it found them, about halfway to the little forest, it was probably a message of some sort.

“I see,” I responded before moving on. “They’re belated, but you have my condolences,” I wrote out and floated closer to hand Helen’s body over.

“Thank you,” the man replied, accepting both the words and the form wrapped up in the cloak. “I do wonder why you wrote that about finding a donor,” he added, giving me a shrewd look, “After all, I can’t imagine that Helen promised you less than everything that was hers to give when making the deal. And a tissue sample is far less than her body or identity.”

The energy making up this form roiled agitatedly without my conscious input at his statement.

I hadn’t mentioned what I’d gotten out of the deal outright, but Alexander had guessed correctly, anyway. Did he simply know his wife that well, or was ‘everything’ the standard offer that the locals made when making deals like the one that had brought me here?

“I wasn’t sure if that counted,” I wrote in answer, miming a shrug. “People will offer a lot of things when they’re desperate, so I didn’t take that at face value. Getting out of the place I’d been stuck in was more than enough.”

“And now?” he asked, arching his brows at me. “As I recall, you implied that crafting a new body wouldn’t be a challenge. Was that an exaggeration?”

“Not much of one,” I admitted, floating to the side and back, “It’ll take some experimentation to adapt what I know to work in this plane of reality, but I can do it.” After all, I had a lot of collected experience to work from and no other pressing commitments.

“Do you require any specific tools or reagents?” Alexander pressed.

“No, only space to work.” I didn’t need much, just enough to fit an adult human body, plus a cocoon or pod to hold it. “I can do it here if this spot doesn’t get visitors often.”

“Why not at the castle?” he asked. “It would be a more secure location.”

“I don’t want to disrupt any of your defenses or utilities by accident,” I explained. “You just saw how a miscalculation with experimental technique went,” I added. The energy constructs woven into the walls and ground weren’t flimsy, but I had already damaged some of them with my first clumsy uses of Helen’s techniques.

Also, I wasn’t sure if we’d built enough trust for him to be inviting a mysterious non-corporeal being back into a place that had just gone through what seemed like a major attack.

“I am aware,” he said dryly, then gave a considering hum, “Yes, I can arrange to keep visitors away. How long do you think it will take?”

“I can’t say for sure since it’s experimental,” I wrote out the frank answer, “and don’t know what time-keeping units you use around here.” I was also really out of practice with keeping time, so much so, that I had ended up constructing a mechanism to do so for me as part of the interface layer, using the heartbeats of Helen’s mostly dead body for reference.

“Point,” Alexander conceded, “I’ll just have to check in from time to time then. I hope you won’t mind the interruptions.”

“It should be fine,” I told him. He probably wouldn’t get too disturbed by any messy failures and it was sensible not to let a stranger work unsupervised.

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It was interesting that he could make such arrangements so confidently, however. I hadn’t wanted to assume too much, but perhaps I was dealing with the master of the estate.

“You’re being awfully accommodating,” I wrote. It went against the whole looking gift horses in the mouth parable, but again, I wasn’t sure that we’d built enough trust for that to apply yet.

“You’ve shown a lot of goodwill so far and I don’t want to spoil that,” Alexander responded, then smiled wryly, “Besides, is it so surprising that I want to stay on the good side of the person who saved my children?”

The relaxed demeanor was undercut by the way his energy would occasionally roil agitatedly, but it wasn’t as bad now as before I’d passed the tree test.

I mimed a crooked smile and wrote back, “No, that’s just common sense.”

*****

Alexander departed at a more sedate pace than when we’d arrived, and this time I noted that he made surprisingly little noise despite all the armor and weapons he wore.

I kept track of his life sign (easily the strongest in range of my senses by several orders of magnitude) once he was out of sight and felt him take off using the movement technique from earlier as soon as he’d reached the edge of the little forest. The dozen smaller life signs that had been agitatedly milling about joined him on the way back to the large structure I’d arrived in, acting as escorts.

Further out, the twins still seemed to be in the same spot where they’d been brought by their guards. The orange-skinned doctor’s life sign was near them, as was the maid-turned-wet-nurse. Even the basket I’d made to hold them was there, which struck me as a questionable decision.

Perhaps they thought that I couldn’t use it from a distance. Or maybe they didn’t want to offend a powerful unknown by rejecting a gift from them. In any case, it gave me options for intervening if someone tried to go after those children again.

I tucked the wooden sphere containing the tissue samples I’d taken from Helen’s body into the center of my energy projection and tried not to feel too much loss at the end of the first real conversation I’d had in… however long it had been since I’d died.

There would be others, whether with Alexander or other people, though in the latter case, I’d have to learn the local language first. That wasn’t an insurmountable difficulty, since I was capable of forming new memories and learning things even in my incorporeal form. But it would require being able to observe the locals and time.

Having a body would help, as would the ability to speak without sounding like I was trying to summon another eldritch abomination, especially for dealing with people that weren’t the best at reading. Alexander had been a good sport about having to read my responses, but the pace of our conversation had been halting compared to the others I’d observed.

I shook those thoughts off and decided to explore my new surroundings instead.

The glowing tree-like object wasn’t the largest or tallest thing around, so it hadn’t been immediately visible even when approached from the air. There was a mixture of several types of actual trees growing around it, as well as other types of plant life, forming a little forest. Their forms were broadly similar to the trees I knew from my own life and the knowledge I picked up later, but there was no guarantee any details about them would line up.

I could sense the animals milling about, smart enough to stay away from strange glowing energy beings, but also curious about them. There were mostly small ones nearby, with a few larger ones further out. From the few glimpses I caught of the critters scampering through the trees and on the ground, they weren’t the typical woodland fauna of Earth.

Every single one of them had a bit of the energy the locals used to fuel their superpowers flowing through them, and just like with all the people I’d encountered, they had variances in how much of it they could hold and the… flavor they gave it. Even the plant life got in on the action, albeit in a much slower-moving manner.

It looked like there was a whole cycle of this exotic energy going on alongside the more mundane energy and nutrient ones. It was something I’d have to keep a close watch on when growing my new body.

The prospect still felt a little surreal and I couldn’t help but check up on the tissue sample I was carrying. It was still there, only now it was soaking up the energy it was surrounded by and slowly attuning to it.

That was another thing to keep an eye on. Depending on how things worked around here, it could be either a good or bad thing.

After a couple of circuits through the little patch of forest, carefully staying within the tree line at the edges, I returned to the central clearing.

I’d caught several squirrel-like critters along the way, having picked those with varying degrees of capacity for holding and using the local exotic energy, though I should probably call it magic for simplicity’s sake. If there was a different local term for it, I could always switch to using it later.

I picked out one of the trees bordering the central clearing to grow a few wooden cages from, using the technique copied from Helen. It worked a little slower because I had to manually give the magical energy the right flavoring and be more careful about directing it, but not to the point of rendering it useless. The wood it created was more than strong enough to keep the critters contained despite their attempts to chew, claw, or wiggle their way free.

As I settled under the ginkgo-like tree with the most injured not-squirrel held securely in my tendrils for healing practice, I sensed a group of half a dozen life signs leave what seemed to be the main grounds of the cluster of buildings and head for the woods. Among them was the life sign of the dark-skinned elf-looking guard that I’d helped out earlier.

I set the not-squirrel back in its cage as I headed for the edge of the woods to see what the group was up to.

They didn’t move as agitatedly as the ones who’d come to escort Alexander on his way back and came to a stop near where the stone path led into the woods. A trio split off to start walking around the little patch of wilderness, two began milling about on the spot, while the last one waited on the path and flared his magical energy.

I kept a metaphorical eye on the energy construct the team of three was putting down, but found it rather weak compared to what had been present in the building I’d woken up in. It wasn’t even subtle, having the feeling of something meant to be deployed quickly instead.

The dark-skinned elf-like guard kept flaring his magical energy at regular intervals, so I took it as an invitation to go over there and find out what he wanted.

He was looking around nervously when I peeked out from the tree line and went a little wide-eyed and tense when he saw me. That was fair since he’d seen me mulch a bunch of people significantly stronger than him not long ago. To his credit, he quickly tamped down on that and donned a fairly composed and professional demeanor.

“Greetings… nice Spirit,” he said in one of the elvish languages that I was familiar with, “My Lord sends you message.” Then he held out a piece of paper toward me.

As I took the paper from his hands, I mulled over the very accented and slightly broken way he’d spoken and wondered where he’d learned the tongue.

The message turned out to be a note from Alexander, explaining that this group of people was going to set up a perimeter alarm and mild deterrent to keep people from visiting the forest while I was using it. They’d be camping nearby to maintain them, and the elf-looking guard (apparently called Iefyr Aeberos) was there to act as an interpreter.

“Thank you,” I wrote in answer, keeping things simple, “I will leave you to your work. Signal me if you need something and be careful not to go into the forest.”

“Yes, nice Spirit,” Iefyr answered with a slight bow, mangling the term of address again.

It was amusing how seriously he said it, especially because he’d probably meant to call me ‘beneficent,’ or ‘benevolent’ but kept using the word ‘nice’ instead. I was tempted to stick around a bit longer to ask about how he knew this language but decided to leave the group to settle in first.

As I retreated to the central clearing, I couldn’t help but feel pleased that Alexander had taken action swiftly.

Perhaps we didn’t have trust in each other yet, and it would probably take a while to truly build it, but… maybe this was the start of it.