Torun’s first thought was that he had just had the most restful sleep. His second thought was to reach for his sword.
A tightness in his chest blossomed with pain, and the grunt that nearly escaped his lips shot thorns into his ribcage.
Still, Torun fought through the pain and managed to half rise, finding himself on a soft bed of living moss, tucked in some sort of wooden dome.
“Are you dead?” came a voice from the far side.
It was dark within the hollow.
“I’m moving, aren’t I?”
“Talking too. Doesn’t mean you’re not dead.”
“I’m alive. How?”
A dim green light suffused the hollow and a girl leaned in to inspect Torun’s wounds. She peeled back a large leaf to reveal bright green stitches. One had pulled free of the skin and the girl passed a hand over it.
The stitches moved, re-threading themselves, and Torun realized that a living vine was all that held his chest closed.
“What in the world?!?”
“It won’t hurt you!” said the girl, her voice pleading, “Just leave it until you’re ready to heal on your own, ok?”
Torun cast the girl a searching gaze. She seemed to be heavily swaddled in clothes made of moss. Normally, Torun might have assumed that the moss was merely fresh, but now he thought the girl’s clothes might still be alive, living on her, perhaps feeding off of her in some sort of unnatural symbiotic relationship.
“But…” Torun was still panting in fear, “It will come out right? When I’ve healed. It’s not going to… grow in me or anything?”
The girl laughed. “Of course not! Vines don’t grow on humans. We move too much.”
“But your…” Torun gestured to the girl’s moss.
With a smooth sweep of her arm the moss seemed to separate at the shoulder and slide from her arm, revealing healthy pink skin. She reversed the motion and the moss bent back up, like some flat green caterpillar, re-knitting itself in place without a seam.
“You’re a bender?”
“What’s that?”
Torun scowled and looked around the tree’s hollow. Yaosen was lying nearby on another bed of moss, a small leaf on his stomach and gummed into place by some sort of sap.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
There was a weak snort and Torun twisted to see the boulder-sized wolfboar huddled in a corner, a long line of poultices covering his back. The wolfboar’s sad, drooping eyes found Torun but he did not lift his head.
“Are your parents here?” asked Torun.
The girl shook her head.
“Are you alone?”
The girl shook her head.
“Any adults?”
“Just my grandfather,” said the girl.
Torun looked to the massive wolfboar again. It would take a small army to move Grunt, much less two more full grown men.
“Can you bring your grandfather? I’d like to speak to him.”
The girl chewed on the inside of her cheek, “He can’t really move, and he doesn’t talk much besides.”
Not the girl, not the grandfather, and no one else here. Torun weighed the possibilities.
“Did…” Torun hated that he had to ask this. “Did the moss move us here?”
“Of course not,” said the girl with a smile, “The roots did.”
Torun vaguely remembered something stealthily coiling around him as he struggled to draw breath in the wake of Lu Gun’s attack. He remembered being dragged off toward the stream, but had assumed that was his dying mind’s last tricks.
Where Torun came from, some children could bend flames the size of a candlewick, or a few droplets or pebbles in the other nations. There were even some secret airbender children who could summon gentle breezes to play tricks on their elders, like snuffing a candle or amplifying a belch.
If this girl was a bender, she was an extremely powerful one, to move a boar and two men with her powers.
“What was your name, young lady?”
“You can call me Duu?”
“Hmph. Torun.”
Duu smiled, “Let me get you some food, Torun. You’ve been asleep a while. You must be reeeeally hungry.”
Torun nodded his thanks.
Duu, huh? That sounded like a Foggy Swamp Tribe name. In The Accounts of the First Meteor Knight, there had been a powerful waterbender of the swamp tribe who had been able to bend the water in the grass. But he had been, by all accounts, a savant, highly trained in the swamp benders’ tradition of waterbending and a spiritual leader besides.
Could this girl have developed such a thing on her own?
When the girl returned, Torun found that he was indeed famished. Nuts, berries and edible leaves were light fare, but Torun realized that it was exactly the type of thing that had been missing from their diet for weeks.
There were mushrooms too, but he left those for Grunt.
When Torun had finished eating, he gestured to the unconscious form of Yaosen with his bark bowl, “Do you know if my friend will be alright?”
Duu scrunched her face, “I’m better at skin and bone. I haven’t had much practice healing blackblood or breathers.”
“Do you mean lungs? And livers?”
Duu shrugged, the moss on her shoulders rustling.
“What about him?” asked Torun, motioning to Grunt.
The injured wolfboar hadn’t touched his pile of mushrooms.
“Oh, he’s just sad. I don’t think he liked losing his razorback.”
Torun scowled, but found that he knew exactly how Grunt felt. “I don’t suppose you managed to collect my sword. Or my armor.”
Duu shrugged again, “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. You did very well, young lady. Very well indeed. Now,” Torun motioned to the leaves laid across their wounds and the sappy goop smeared underneath, “can you tell me about these herbs?”