Angela hiked between the trees of the Druid Grove, and it wasn’t long before her dad disappeared from sight. Not just her dad, either. All sounds of industry from the south bank vanished, leaving nothing but the murmer of a healthy forest.

She smiled. It was a nice place. Peaceful. Not too dense, with open space for grasses and a wide variety of trees that represented the species found around Palmyre. She wasn’t sure how she knew that, but it made sense. Because, y’know…druid.

Angela continued walking for a while, but eventually she stopped. Scratching her head, she looked around and frowned.

Nothing was happening. Why wasn’t anything happening?

At a bit of a loss over how to proceed, she closed her eyes and waited to experience something. Anything.

Nope.

That didn’t seem right. Shouldn’t there be a flood of energy? A deep connection with the earth? A desire to strip naked and frolic? Instead, all she felt was an urge to return to the city and see if hashbrowns had been invented.

“Okay, I’m here!” she called out. “In the Druid Grove! Because I’m a druid!”

Nada.

She waited.

Then she waited some more.

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Ennàd, what am I doing here!” she shouted.

“Hey, keep it down!”

Angela looked around, trying to find the source of the voice.

“Up here, lady!”

She tilted her head upwards, finally spotting a grey squirrel sitting on a branch, staring at her.

So far as squirrels went, it was large. Very large. Huge, even. Not height-wise, so much as it lacked what one would call a “traditional” squirrel figure. More of a pear shape. Or gourd? Yeah, gourd was better, but a distorted gourd. The kind you’d see in a grocery store, then immediately text a picture of it to your friend with the caption, “Dude, WTF is up with this gourd?”

Okay, it was obese. It was a staggeringly obese squirrel.

“Uh, did you just talk to me?” she said to the squirrel in the tree.

The squirrel flapped its arms. “Whadda ya mean, ‘Did you just talk to me?’ Of course I talked to you! What? Didya think, it was the tree shoutin’ at ya?”

This morning was turning out weirder than she had expected. “Sorry, but I wasn’t expecting to speak with any animals today.”

The squirrel looked skyward. “Oi, this lady don’t know from nothin’.” He looked back down at her. “Chickadee, you’re a druid, standing in a Druid Grove, and you didn’t expect to talk to no animals? What’s wrong with you?”

A small bird with a white and black head landed on the squirrel’s branch. “Leo! I told you to stop calling women chickadees! It is offensive to my very nature.”

“And I told ya my name is Leonard!” the squirrel said, lazily swinging a paw at the bird, who easily dodged his hand.

“Now, Leo,” the bird trilled back at him, “we have been acquainted for nearly three years. It is only proper that we adopt cordial diminutive names by this point.”

The squirrel—Leonard—shook his tiny fist at the chickadee. “Yeah, well where I come from, it’s proper to dispose of bodies in the river. You want I should take up that hobby, too?”

The bird’s feathers puffed up, and she trilled in indignation. “Well, I never! Let’s see if I help you the next time a spider crawls into your home.” Then she hopped off the branch and flew away.

Leonard ran to the end of the branch, shouting after her. “No! I’m sorry! You know I hate those eight-legged bastards! I’m sorry!” When she was out of sight, he visibly sighed and hung his head.

He looked down at Angela. “Look at me. Acting like some thirstbucket ’cause a chickadee won’t take care of spiders for me.

“Oh well,” he said, suddenly perking right back up. “Kay, I’m comin’ down!”

Then he jumped off the tree and dropped three metres onto the top of Angela’s head.

“AAAGH! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!” she shouted, slapping at her head and dancing in a circle.

“Hey, stop it lady! You’re gonna hit me!” he shouted, barely holding on with his front paws as she spun around, his hind legs flailing through the air.

“That’s what I’m trying to do!”

“Well stop it! I’ll get down if ya stop spinnin’ already!”

Angela gritted her teeth and stopped, allowing the squirrel to climb out of her hair. It took far longer than she would have liked—not surprisingly—and by the time the chunky squirrel made his way onto her left shoulder he was audibly panting with exhaustion.

She craned her head to look at him. He was bent over, one paw on her ear and the other on his knee, heaving for breath.

“Oh man. I am so out of shape,” Leonard said through wheezing breaths. “It’s this grove, ya know? Dumb good acorns here. I got a cousin, lives up near da temples? Says they got acorns just as good. What a gavoon.”

Of all the things Angela had considered facing when entering the Druid Grove, chauffeuring an obese squirrel wasn’t one of them.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

“First things first,” she said, “can you please explain to me why you’re speaking like an extra from The Sopranos?”

“I got no idea what that means, lady,” he said.

“Why do you have a Brooklyn accent?”

He shook his head again. “You gotta throw me a bone here. You’re just spoutin’ words that don’t make sense.”

Angela closed her eyes and turned her head skyward. Fucking druid class.

“Let’s try something simpler,” she said. “Why are you on my shoulder?”

“Oh, dat,” he said. “We gots ta go into the grove. I’m supposed to go with you.”

“Why’s that?”

He shrugged. “No idea. But we gotta go.”

“What if I don’t?”

“Ain’t no choice.”

“There’s always a choice. In fact, I think I’m going to—”

“LADY!” the squirrel shouted. “I’m dead-ass on this one. We’re goin’ to da centre of the grove to see a god. Ya really don’t want ta piss off the gods.”

“Ugh. Fine,” Angela said, resigning herself to heading into the grove with Leonard the Brooklyn Squirrel perched on her shoulder. Because apparently, that kind of thing was normal now.

“You know, I’m pretty sure you don’t even have a real accent,” Angela said as she marched through the forest. “It sounds kind of fake.”

“Hey, dis is how all squirrels talk. I don’t need some prejudiced cab driver tellin’ me I don’t sound ‘Grove’ enough just ’cause I moved here from da city.”

“Cool,” Angela said. “Cool, cool, cool. I’m your cab driver now. FYI, I expect to get a tip when we get wherever we’re going.”

“Yeah, well lay off the smack talk and we can look into it.”

As they progressed into the glade, the canopy got denser, but there was still enough light getting through that it dappled the ground with spots of sunlight. It illuminated a path through the undergrowth that wasn’t worn so much as it was grown, with a low carpet of grass that wove between berry bushes and scrub until it reached the centre of the grove. The path terminated at a square, stone planter, around a metre tall and three times that on the edges. It was filled with soil and hosted a topiary sculpture of a woman sitting cross-legged, staring upwards at a sunbeam that broke through the gap in the canopy. Her body was made of some kind of broad-leafed shrub, while her robe consisted of a red-berried vine that fell from her shoulders in a manner almost indistinguishable from fabric. Even sitting down, she was probably 5-metres tall.

Well, that thing is clearly going to start talking to me, Angela thought, just as a woman’s voice loudly said “Hello!” directly behind her ear.

“Jesus! Fuck!” Angela shouted, jumping away from the voice at the exact same time Leonard did, the combined force of the two jumps launching the unfortunate squirrel through the air and into the topiary, where he disappeared into the sculpture-woman’s bosom.

“What the hell, lady!” Angela said as she turned around to see Ennàd smiling at her. Angela leaned back and plunked her butt down on the planter's edge, clutching her chest. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”

“Come now, you think I don’t know how much strain your heart can handle?” the goddess asked.

“Yeah? What about me!” Leonard shouted from within the topiary. There was a rustle of branches, followed by the squirrel dropping out the bottom of the shrub and landing on his back. His little legs flailed in the air for a moment as he tried to roll over, finally managing the feat by rocking side to side to gather momentum. Once he was back upright, he waddled to the planter’s edge and climbed up beside Angela. “You coulda killed me with that stunt!”

Ennàd raised an eyebrow. “I see your familiar has already picked up your irreverent ways.”

Pebbles flew through the air.

Druid Familiar Acquired

Leonard the grey squirrel is now your druid familiar.

Both Angela and Leonard’s eyes went wide.

“Oh, hell no,” Angela said.

“Not a chance,” Leonard added in chorus, rubbing his head where the pebble had hit.

“Too late,” Ennàd said with a lilt in her voice. “A druid doesn’t pick the familiar; the familiar picks the druid.”

“Whadda ya mean, the druid picks the familiar?” Leonard said. “I thought I was supposed to pick da druid if I want the job. Which I don’t.”

“Wait, what?” Angela said. “She just said the familiar picks the druid.”

“No, she didn’t. She said the druid picks the familiar.”

They turned to Ennàd.

“Did you just say two different things at the same time?” Angela asked.

“Anyway,” Ennàd said, ignoring her question, “we should probably discuss your home in the city. While I don’t object to you maintaining a separate residence with your family, that is not where a druid spends their days—or their nights.”

“Yeah, about that,” Angela said, sucking air through her teeth. “The whole ‘spending time in nature’ thing? That didn’t really work out for me. Turns out I’m a city girl. Guess you’re going to have to revoke my class, right?”

“Child,” Ennàd said distractedly, “that is simply not how it works.” She held up a hand so a butterfly could alight on it like she was a frigging Disney princess. “You have sworn service to a god and completed their Class Quest. You are tied to me, now.”

Crap. Apparently, Angela couldn’t get out of this garbage class.

“Ugh. Fine, but if I’m stuck with the job, could you at least tell me what I’m supposed to be doing?”

“You go into nature!” Ennàd said, with a bounty of enthusiasm. “Search out corruption of the natural order. Evil magics, invasive species. You have an exceedingly high Swimming Skill—perhaps become a shepherd of the seas?”

Angela cocked her head. That didn’t sound so bad.

“So, like, stop overfishing?” she asked.

“No, nothing like that,” the goddess said. “I have priests and priestesses who bless crops and bounties of harvest from both land and sea. Why would I restrict that?”

Angela stared at her. Was she serious? She couldn’t be serious.

“Uhhh…isn’t too many bountiful harvests basically the definition of overfishing?”

“No, that is a separate issue,” Ennàd said, sounding flustered.

“So, how does this work then?” Angela asked, confused. “The priests pray for bountiful harvests while the druids are stuck trying to stop the fish from dying off? Seems like a raw deal for the druids.”

“No!” Ennàd said, her eye beginning to twitch. “That is not how it works at all!”

Leonard snapped his fingers—something that Angela was pretty sure should be impossible for a squirrel. “Hey, since we’re talkin’ about it, what about all dem factories with da harvested wood? I got a cousin, lived upriver. Says his house is some kinda furniture now.”

Angela snorted. “Yeah, and if Arenians ever discover coal, this planet is screwed.”

“What’s dis coal stuff?” Leonard asked.

“It’s these black rocks that can burn super hot for a long time, but they release a gas that destroys the environment and makes the planet too hot for life to exist.”

“Whoah!” Leonard said. He turned to Ennàd. “Dis coal sounds like some pretty serious stuff. You should get on dat, pronto.”

“That is not my duty!” Ennàd said, stamping her foot. “My job is to keep nature balanced and provide a bountiful harvest for those who pray to me! My druids work in nature, and my clergy work in the cities. It is clean, and it is comfortable, and it works, and I don’t want to talk about this!”

Angela and Leonard glanced at each other, then back at Ennàd.

“I don’t understand how you can balance nature while simultaneously ignoring the impacts of civilization on nature,” Angela said in confusion.

Ennàd balled her hands into fists and waved them up and down, again stamping her foot like a 6-year-old having a tantrum. “No! I am about life, and growth, and giving! The people of Arenia adore me, and I will not have that threatened. I am the people’s favourite god, and these questions are—”

Ennàd burst into flames.

“AAAAAGH!” Angela and Leonard shouted in unison. Angela tripped backward to sit on the edge of the planter, her familiar grabbing tight to her trousers as they watched the flames rip through Ennàd’s form in seconds. The intensity of the fire was a testament to its supernatural nature, and a moment later the god was reduced to nothing but two blackened trees, their charred trunks and limbs twined together in a skeletal mockery of Ennàd’s prior shape. Before Angela and Leonard could process what had happened, little green buds began sprouting on the blackened limbs. Soon, those buds exploded into growth as the foliage re-acquired its humanoid shape. Then, when the trees had grown enough to achieve the complete form of a person, they underwent a moment of sudden metamorphosis, transforming into godly flesh once again.

Only this time, it wasn’t Ennàd.