Four years after the invasion

Zalia sat leaning against the base of the Ancient of Life, legs resting up on a root. It was winter, a blanket of snow resting across the Grove, dulling down the sounds from all the animals and people living in it. Despite the surface calm of the Grove, there was an excitement pulsing through the town for multiple reasons.

The results of the elections had been sent across the kingdom and Zalia had been surprised when she had read it. Lady Leyra Indis had failed to get re-elected, along with two others, one each from the civilian and military councils. Zalia had no idea how that had come to pass until she spoke to the Ancient of Wisdom about it.

Apparently, there had been rumours spreading about Indis’ previous involvement with the now-dead king. The people of Endaria held no love for the former king and her closeness to the man had done her no favours. As such, she had lost the election and was now just a citizen like everyone else.

Zalia didn’t think this was something that had happened naturally, rather being a cause of some politicking or the other. If she had to guess, General Faian had wanted to get rid of Indis simply because she was too self-obsessed to realise that what she thought the kingdom needed wasn’t always what it actually needed.

She admittedly felt a bit bad for Indis as this was the thing she had been fighting for most of her life. Still, it might bring some perspective and a life lesson to the woman. Hopefully.

It had been stressful to learn of Ember and Aylie’s fight in the north, with Aylie having to defeat some kind of mind-controlling demon, saving not only the town it had under its thrall but Ember as well. If she had just been with them, it might not have been an issue at all. Still, she was proud of Aylie. Not so much of Lumin, who hadn’t even been there until the demon had been dead. What was the point of having an Ascendant follow your loved ones around if they weren’t even going to be there when they were in danger?

It had sparked an argument between her and Ember because she had been hard on herself for not being there, while Ember argued that she couldn’t always protect them, that they had to hold their own once in a while. Zalia had realised Ember was right, eventually. If she was always protecting them from everything, they wouldn’t ever stretch the limits of their powers and grow to a point where they could protect themselves from most things.

Despite all that, life was still good. She had been working with the Ancient of War to devise a method to block teleportation into and out of Nature’s Reclaim. This was mostly because she and Ember were getting stronger and if they were right about the Astar taking any stronger humans and doing… who knew what with them, they needed to be prepared for that eventuality. The Astar had already taken her once after all.

They had come to the conclusion that while she could maintain a certain level of protection using a large Dodge-vine and Adastem ritual, its adaptive nature meant it wasn’t extremely well protected against any one thing in particular. It might block some weaker teleportation but that term could not be used to describe the Astar’s.

So she had needed to find some herb with the teleportation or spacial element. Without any confirmation that such a thing even existed.

She had never needed to search for a particular element in a herb before, relying on what she had to get by. To be fair, what she had was quite expansive, covering a lot of different scenarios.

It had been a conversation with Glemp that had found her what she needed.

Years ago, when she had first arrived in this world, she had found a plant called Frozen Time. She had almost forgotten about the thing, having given the only piece she had ever found to Glemp to experiment with. While Glemp still hadn’t reached Silver rank, they were close and had learnt a thing or two about the plant since then.

Glemp had learnt that when you reversed the element of time that Frozen Time held, you got Space. So, she had collected some more of the plant from the mountaintop and come home, ready to perform a new ritual.

This was the other reason that the people of Nature’s Reclaim were so excited. Zalia had told them all about the ritual she was going to perform today, so they were prepared and aware of its effects. She had been planting Frozen Time all across the town for the past few days, along with making sure Dodge-vines were in the right places for what she had in mind.

Something she had learnt about Herbal Magic a while ago was that she could cast a ritual over the span of a very long time, with the time spent meaning the scale of the ritual could be much larger. She had figured out that it would take her two days to perform this one at the scale she wanted, a huge amount of time to invest over the course of which she would need to be standing still.

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With a sigh, she stood up and stretched. With a twist of her head, her neck cracked ever so slightly. She wished this slower aging would hurry up and slow it faster.

She had prepared a comfortable little spot outside of her house to perform the ritual. While it looked like a cultivated garden of plants, it was an extremely well-protected place. It was a series of living rituals that had the anti-teleportation ritual, spiritual, physical and adaptive protection from both perception and attacks. That was on top of the protective effects of the Grove that affected both herself and the plants that made up the living rituals. It was a lot, but well worth it to make sure the investment of time worked out.

There were seventy nodes around the town that made up the pieces of the larger living ritual she was about to perform and each of those was protected by a similar setup as well as enchanted physical barriers to ensure no one could break the living ritual once it was complete. The ritual would be able to handle the breaking of multiple nodes as long as she replaced them quickly enough but she didn’t want to take any risks.

With all that ready, she moved over and sat down in the centre of her setup to begin.

The first step was summoning all the material needed for the ritual using Herbal Magic’s Iron rank ability. She had spent time growing all of the Frozen Time she needed due to its lower-rank limitation but hadn’t bothered with the Dodge-vine.

Piles and piles of glittering petals made of ice appeared around her, summoned from her spacial storage. They were soon followed by Dodge-vine that was dried and crushed into a rough dust. More and more appeared, all of it Silver rank because of the Bronze rank effect of Harvester.

⪼ ⪢ ℋ 𝒶𝓃𝒹 ℋ ⪡ ⪻

Twenty hours later, she had finished summoning the Dodge-vine. It was an improvement on the weeks she had spent growing Frozen Time but still a painful amount of mana and time. She could feel the very slight buildup of pain in her soul due to over use of a passive but compared to the Gold rank spirit trying to separate her from her own soul, it was nothing.

The piles of Dodge-vine and Frozen Time petals around her lifted up and floated across the town. The few people who had slept and then come back to watch the ritual exclaimed as it happened, excited to see something other than summoning herbs finally happen.

They continued to spread until a haze of herbs lay over Nature’s Reclaim, each leaf and piece of dust spinning gently as it floated in place. Then, nothing happened.

Many of the people down the hill were looking around expectantly as if they thought the ritual would go off immediately. Zalia could only wish it were so.

⪼ ⪢ ℋ 𝒶𝓃𝒹 ℋ ⪡ ⪻

Across the next day and seven hours, Zalia sat in the middle of her living rituals, protected from outside distraction… mostly.

She was attacked a few times by miniature fluffy missiles throwing themselves at extremely high speeds towards her shoulders, back, head and body. This was due to the not-so-small kittens escaping Boreal’s careful watch.

They were getting bigger now, nowhere near fully grown yet large enough to have a bit of momentum behind their pounces. Luckily, Zalia was quite immune to their attacks because of her rank and abilities. She was also used to that kind of behaviour, having raised Boreal herself.

In a way, she was a grandmother to the litter. Where Boreal had to be stern and strict in her mothering, Zalia got to relax and have joyous times with the five, leaving the important stuff to Boreal.

They all had names that Zalia couldn’t make with her own voice, all of them different sounds that Boreal could make. They also had names given by Zalia and Boreal together that she could pronounce.

The carbon copy of Boreal was named Frost, both for the abilities she had as well as the colour and body shape that was the heritage of the mountain cats that lived in the north.

The other carbon copy kitten that was the exact same colour and body shape of the father, also known as the Ancient of War, was called Rush. This kitten had a long and lithe body, his fur flat and yellow-gold instead of fluffy and grey as well as missing the distinctive icy spines that Boreal had. This kitten's powers were focused on pure speed, with the force of his attacks being based on the very same thing.

There were three others, all of them with different mixtures of fur colour, body shape and abilities. Breeze was lithe with flat fur but had Boreal’s icy spines along his shoulders, back and tail. His abilities focused on mobility and dodging rather than speed, as well as many that affected the mobility of his enemies.

The two other girls both had Boreal’s fur, one with her stockier, stronger body and the other with the lithe body of the Ancient of War. These two were named Prance and Pounce, for the way they often fought. The two of them had been close since birth, lacking the icy spines of Boreal and the flat, yellow-gold fur of their father. Prance was uniquely gifted at distracting things while Pounce did exceptionally well at taking them down with a single, well-placed strike without being seen.

Often, if one saw Prance hopping around something, catching its attention, that meant Pounce was somewhere near about to strike.

Despite the best efforts of the five, Boreal’s constant supervision and Zalia’s immunity to such shenanigans outdid them. The ritual built and built, the herbs in the air glowing brighter and brighter over the time of the casting, as mana was poured constantly, if slowly, into it.

Towards the end of the ritual, most of the people of Nature’s Reclaim had to wait inside as the sheer brightness of the ritual blinded them.

Finally, with a surging flash, it activated.