Unable to decide if she should go through with the risky grafting method of attempting to remove her curse, Xamiliere kept bargaining and searching for any kind of an alternative from the array of methods Ulmus thought might solve her problem whenever there was a lapse in the conversation. However, the ways of the immortals rarely put much value on the time it took to get anything done, and anything that had a fair chance of working would require her to stay in the grove for more than a year – sometimes several years or even more. Not only did Xamiliere not have even the slightest desire to stay for a second longer than was absolutely necessary, being away from her friends for a year or more was out of the question. Perhaps she had a fair reason to be wary, as a year was a long time for an adventurer and a lot could have happened in her absence, or perhaps she had become slightly overly cautious about the briefness of mortal lives now that Acacia had brought up the matter. No amount of finagling seemed to expand the number of viable options from two: the risky grafting method or simply staying cursed for the time being. Though at first the idea of staying cursed seemed the lesser of two evils, the idea of spending even a week more entirely confined within the inn was a miserable thought now that she had gotten the chance to live normally in the grove. Once the winter subsided and nature would once more begin to bloom as well, the misery would only grow tenfold as she would be missing out on more and more quests and adventures with her friends. On top of that, in her current state she was absolutely useless when it came to Anastacia’s grudges with the violet sect. The necromancer seemed to be set on steering herself into a direct conflict with the sect, and not being able to be there for her when the time came was the maybe the foremost reason Xamiliere couldn’t immediately decline the grafting method as an option.
“In many ways, though you pale in power against the necromancers of yore, I think you and your counterpart are the more dangerous ones.” Ulmus pondered to fill a moment of silence when their conversation with Anastacia had ended. “Sir Alabaster lacked any resemblance of warmth or humanity within him, and even the singular soft spot he possessed for the other one was largely because he admired the sheer power that could well overtake his own. I suspect much of his eventual anger was over the great deeds that would go undone without Ivory, at least as much as love. Ivory, on the other hand, could barely muster the spite even to defend himself. Trough the cheery façade, you could see the weight of each and every life he took on his shoulders, and once he took it upon himself to feel remorse for Alabaster’s actions as well, a curse from a muse was barely needed.”
Anastacia frowned. “What? How does that make me any more dangerous than a literal psychopath who was even more powerful than me? I’m more or less sane for a necromancer too.”
“Alabaster’s cold and calculated rage was efficient for taking down his enemies, all he had to do was to turn the cruel efficiency that build his empire towards the task of felling the gods. It worked well up to a point, until age and the sheer might of his opponents halted his progress. Doomed to an unwinnable position, he accepted his loss because there were no other options, there was nothing left to drive him onwards, no motivation to face the bitter end.” Ulmus explained their theory. “You, however, are different. Possessing most of the mellowness and passion for life Ivory once had, no doubt it makes you much less likely to begin conquering. Yet, deep within you smolder the embers of Alabaster’s capabilities. Should the world find a way to break you, they will set aflame the rest of your soul and creates a fire that can not be put out as it feeds entirely on your feelings and cares not for the realities of the situation. Should things go south, maybe you’ll be the one to break the quiet of this world?”
The necromancer scoffed at the idea. “Let’s agree to disagree on that. Go find the other one if you want someone to stir trouble for you.”
“I want no such things, quiet suits my pace perfectly – but the fact that there’s a missing white one concerns me.” Ulmus said in a tired tone that suggested they were done talking for the day. “Just as you posses a spark of cruelty, they posses a spark of mercy and self-reflection. Acting with cold and unfeeling efficiency would no doubt land them a lofty place in life, but as the silence settles, the latent parts of their soul will rise up to the surface. Hard to say what such a change would cause, but it is safe to assume they will stare at their past actions in horror, regret the horrible things that made perfect sense in the moment. I would say that they’ve probably torn themselves apart from guilt, but that seems like an unlikely end to a white one.”
“So, is it possible that this other white one is just dead? I have a hard time believing someone like that could hide from other necromancers.” Anastacia asked. The exact vastness of the network of spies and scouts in Mournvalley’s command was unknown to her, but the swift discovery of any and all necromancers had always been a top priority for them, so she found it hard to believe someone anywhere near to her might could slip by them unnoticed.
Ulmus pondered the possibility for a while. “It’s not impossible, I suppose. You were supposed to die after all, and it’s impossible to tell if that was changed by design or a rogue deity enacting their own plans within plans. So maybe another such occurrence ended the other white one prematurely? However, it is not something I would rely on at all. I suspect that we will know soon enough…”
Anastacia wasn’t at all a fan of the ominous comment at the end, and had heard her fill of ancient knowledge for the day. Though she would have liked to know if there was a chance that the plan was just to let her live her life normally without getting tangled in some convoluted divine mess, she figured that it was better to let that thought live on in her hopes and dreams, than to have it be crushed by a mocking laugh from the elk. So instead, she stood up and offered her hand to Xamiliere to help her up as well. “I see. Thank you for your help today, but I think both Xamiliere and I have things to think about, so we will just return you to your peace for now.”
Xamiliere understood the cue to leave and stood up as well. “Yes, I’ll let you know when I’ve decided what to do.” She said, glancing in Ulmus’ direction and slowly staggering back into the direction they had come from.
“You’re quite welcome. You know where to find me, should you need to.” Ulmus sighed and resumed their rest with a tired chuckle as Anastacia hurried to follow her friend.
Though she couldn’t feel the usual signs of distress in her wooden friend, it didn’t take a necromancer to tell that Xamiliere was no closer to making a decision than she had been initially, and still had a lot on her mind. The spriggan slowly stumbled forwards in a distracted stupor and barely paid enough attention to her surroundings to avoid tripping on some of the smaller roots surfacing among the grass. Anastacia had hoped that getting away from Ulmus and having some privacy would make her friend open up, but that didn’t seem to be happening on its own. Eager to help as much as she could, or at least listen to the spriggan’s concerns, Anastacia decided to force the issue slightly. Before they were within earshot of their home rock, she stepped in front of Xamiliere and gently bumped into her, forgetting that her friend had weight now and a slight push didn’t send her across the room anymore, only resulting in her awkwardly hanging on to the spriggan to avoid getting knocked over herself.
Xamiliere grabbed onto the necromancer’s arm to let her balance herself. “What are you doing?” She asked, successfully distracted from her thoughts regardless.
The necromancer pulled herself closer and spoke in a hushed tone to be sure they weren’t needlessly overheard and interrupted. “I was wondering if you wanted to talk a bit before we go back to the others… about the grafting thing, I mean.”
The spriggan’s expression further darkened. “Did I make you worry? Sorry, I didn’t mean to.” She said and forced out a pained smile. “I just need a moment to figure things out. You can go ahead and mingle with the others; I’d honestly rather not be there anyway.”
Anastacia shook her head. “You’re not going to get rid of me so easily. Even I can tell this is troubling you more than you want to let on, so I’d rather be right here, just in case you need help.” She said, pressing her forehead against the spriggan’s wooden chest.
The winding path between the roots already hid them fairly well from the few spirits who had yet to approach Anastacia and still kept watch from afar. To be extra safe, they found themselves a nearby nook, barely big enough for Xamiliere to sit down and let the necromancer rest her head on her lap gave them some additional privacy as they stopped to work through the decision – or at least begin to do so.
Stopping gave Anastacia a chance to get a better look at her friend. In a matter of minutes, many of the fresh leaves that had sprouted on Xamiliere during her stay in the grove had begun to wither and die as the ancient energy swirling around in her was entirely distracted by her thoughts and only supported the workings of her body that were absolutely needed. Occasional touch or smile from the necromancer brought some vibrant green shades back for a moment – but only for a moment.
It was hard to tell if Anastacia had lost her sense of time because she was bad at tracking it, or if the timelessness of the grove was slowly affecting her, but after what could have been only a couple of minutes or a couple of hours as far as she could tell, she finally spoke up out of frustration. “I don’t mean to interrupt your thinking, but I am here if you want to just voice out your thoughts. Not sure I can help much since I don’t really understand the whole thing, but sometimes it helps me to just say things out loud instead of trying to keep everything in my head…”
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Xamiliere took the necromancer’s hand and squeezed it gently. “You’re already helping just by being there.” She said and smiled, at least seemingly genuinely. Yet the green light in her eyes remained dim at best. “I know I should just do it and there’s no other way around it… but…”
“Ulmus did say that there were slower ways to do it. Why not just take one of those if you don’t like the grafting thing?” Anastacia asked while fiddling around with the spriggan’s fingers to occupy her own hands.
“I absolutely will not even consider that.” Xamiliere gave a stern response. “Once you’ve lived for a long enough time, all you’ll really have left is the present. You don’t forget, but it becomes harder and harder to tell decades apart, then centuries and so on… There are people whom I’ve been very fond of, whose entire lives feel like they lasted for less time than the bottle of mead I had a couple of days ago. I’m not risking a second of this present I have and I for sure won’t miss out on year or more of it. Not to mention I would never be able to forgive myself if you or anyone else I could have helped got hurt while I was wasting time here. It’s already hard enough to let the guys go on quests alone.”
Anastacia paused for a moment to think about what it would be like to be to have lived for such a long time. “I guess that makes sense, but none of us are that fragile. Maximillian and Dammar can handle themselves just fine and I’m not a pushover either.”
“You’ve already died once in the time we’ve known each other.” The spriggan fairly pointed out.
“That doesn’t count! Not only was it apparently fated, which is bullshit by the way, it didn’t even stick.” Protested the necromancer.
They fell silent for a while again as Xamiliere continued trying to convince herself to go through with the grafting. Meanwhile Anastacia had realized something her friend, who often didn’t talk about her past, had said. Knowing it was both rude to ask and not at all the right moment for it, she bit her tongue and restrained herself for as long as she could.
“So when you say ‘people you’ve been very fond of’…” She finally blurted out when both the curiosity and jealousy burned through her restraint.
Xamiliere was somewhat surprised to hear the question. Not only had she not really intended to reveal as much about her past in the first place, the fact that it bothered the necromancer so much made her a very tiny bit more hopeful. “Anna… I’ve lived with people for hundreds of years and have normal, functional feelings, obviously things happen. I can’t really claim that I’ve been in love before, if that’s what you’re worried about, but you know, things happen. The first couple of centuries out there were pretty wild, but I really think I’ve become more mature and calmed down ever since I settled in Valor.”
“This has been the ‘mature’ versions of you?!” Anastacia raised her voice in astonishment but caught herself doing so before it gathered any attention. “Do I need to remind you that we spent almost an entire week trying to convince Yulia that the meat cellar was haunted less than three months ago? Rosie literally called both of us ‘juvenile assholes’.”
Xamiliere chuckled and at least seemed to cheer up slightly. “I think it takes a mature mind to put that much focus, time and effort into a project.”
“If you say so.” The necromancer muttered. “What did you do before becoming an adventurer anyway?”
“After leaving this rancid place, I guarded a little hamlet for a while, some minor banditry here and there, a brief stint as a detective’s assistant before he was assassinated, some beast wrangling for a circus, personal assistant for an heiress, outlaw for unrelated reasons, a lifetime as a land-eel farmer, scam artist… and a few things you don’t need to know about – actually, a lot of things you don’t need to know about.” The spriggan reminisced about the several lifetimes worth of life she had spent among mortals. Based on her expression, she remembered most of it fondly even if a lot of it seemed questionable. “Being an adventurer has been by far my favorite though, and I’ve been one far longer than anything else and don’t intend to quit any time soon… Though that might not be up to me.”
“You think that whole grafting thing might change that?” Anastacia asked, half-accidentally bringing the conversation back to the matter it was supposed to be about.
Xamiliere nodded. “You heard what Ulmus said. Each spriggan once sprouted for a purpose, and there’s no way to be sure that this is mine. The more I think about it, the more unlikely it feels. Thinking that my purpose would be to abandon what I sprouted as, create this new identity of mine and leave this place. What sense does that make? The more I think about it, the more fake this all feels. I am a nature spirit, why the fuck would my purpose be anything besides looking after nature?” She lamented her eternal existence and the burden that supposedly came with it.
Anastacia remained less than convinced by her friend’s suspicions. The entire concept of having a strict purpose for one’s life went against her thinking and she found it a bit irritating that the spriggans were so quick to accept it. “I’m sorry, but that’s dumb. I know it’s probably rude and naïve of me to say, but I don’t for a second believe that you could be anyone else besides yourself.” She stated and reached up to squeeze the spriggan’s head by her cheeks. “I think you’re looking at this whole thing wrong. The fact is that this is what you are now, which means that either this is what you were always meant to be, or that whoever is deciding this whole purpose thing is so incompetent that you managed to slip past their fingers once already – and then it’s just a matter of doing it again.”
Hearing her troubles get simplified to such an amusing phrase did for a moment brighten her mood and brought back some of her energy, but ultimately, Xamiliere knew that it was an unfittingly mortal view of a situation the necromancer had no chance of grasping, nor could it even really be explained in terms a mortal could fully comprehend. Such things as fate and purpose held a much firmer grasp on beings ushered into the world in its first moments, doubly so on the ones that were still around. Adorable as she may have thought it to be, Xamiliere had her doubts that such finagled conclusions applied to the great spirit of the grove. “If only it was up to you…” She sighed and brushed the necromancer’s hair with her fingers, taking out a small piece of moss and a clover leaf that had stuck on to it at some point.
“Well, it could be.” The necromancer nonchalantly said without a hint of jest on her face.
Xamiliere chuckled nervously, expecting something along the lines of burning down the grove if things went awry. “I’m going to regret asking this but… could be?”
Anastacia clumsily stumbled up and did the bare minimum to straighten her vest and sort her messy hair before speaking up. “I am a white one, am I not? Is that not relevant enough fate wise in these parts? Do I not have some weight to throw around when it comes to matters like that?”
“What are you saying?” The spriggan worriedly asked.
Clearing her throat first for the added effect to her declaration. “Hereby, not as Anastacia, but as Brume the White, extend this offer to you, fair spirit. Should you go through with grafting to relieve yourself of the curse, I pledge to use any and all means in my possession to drag whatever becomes of you back to Valor and entrap you there until you come to see things as you see them now. Should your fates and purposes choose to challenge me on this, I will sooner see this grove burnt to ashes than go back on my word.” She grandly stated, addressing the grove as a whole just as much as her friend and offered her hand to Xamiliere as a way to seal the deal.
Alarmed that someone might have heard them and as if terrified of some grander punishment over such a threat, Xamiliere hid further into the nook. “What the fuck are you doing?” She whispered, warily keeping an eye on their surroundings.
Anastacia moved her hand closer. “Apparently my continuing existence is a kick in the dick for fate, so might as well keep on kicking and make it hurt.” She grinned with complete disregard to whatever celestial wills supposedly dictated the way of things. “Say yes now and I will refuse to leave you behind, no matter what you say afterwards. Realistically, I might need Sorbus to help me get some stuff first, but I will take you back to Valor and with time, you’ll see things the way you do now. It happened once and it will happen again – though I still find it stupid that you think anything will change.”
The confused spriggan couldn’t immediately respond to the sheer audacity of making such a direct threat towards the grove itself while hiding between the roots of the great tree. Yet, she couldn’t deny the reasoning behind it. For better or for worse, any white one would be a relevant factor in matters of fate as the nature spirits understood it, and the threat was unlikely to go unheard by the presumably omnipresent forces of the world that made it spin as it did. Obviously, this led to the concern that accepting the offer would place the necromancer into the crosshairs of something she failed to even consider, but she was not incorrect about her current situation as a rogue agent in the world, which brought into question if the fates were even able to strike back in the sense the spriggans generally thought they could. It was quite a philosophical conundrum Anastacia had forced on her friend without thinking.
“Don’t think about it too much. If I hit my head and suddenly said that it’s my purpose to go back to Mournvalley and be The Anchor like I was supposed to, would you not do exactly what I’m suggesting?” Anastacia asked.
“I would get you back in a heartbeat!” Xamiliere answered without hesitation.
“Well?” The necromancer kept moving her hand closer until Xamiliere suddenly grasped it and pulled her into a tight embrace, holding her there for a long while without saying anything. “You don’t need to decide what you’ll do now, but know that no matter what you choose, I’m not leaving you here.”
Still refusing to let go, Xamiliere held the necromancer against herself as the green energy once more flowed out of the deeper parts of her wooden body, wrapping around both of them for a moment before slowly flowing back into the spriggan to begin working on revitalizing her body. More fresh leaves appeared where they had earlier withered away from and the small signs of wear and tear that usually fixed themselves but had now been neglected began mending. It wouldn’t be the end of Xamiliere’s worries over the matter, but the feeling of security and ever-growing adoration towards the necromancer allowed her to clear her thoughts and approach it without the fear that had paralyzed her earlier – maybe she even felt a tiny bit hopeful.
Though she was far from having had her fill of closeness, Xamiliere finally released her almost crushing hold on Anastacia when she realized it might have been uncomfortable. “You should go meet those fans of yours, before they come looking.” She said as an excuse to get a moment to recollect her thoughts.
Anastacia wouldn’t have minded being held for a while longer but it did start to feel a bit too intimate when the moment started to pass. She awkwardly stood up and looked around while searching for words. “Are… are you sure you’re fine? I could… You know… wait around for a while still – if you need me to!” Was the stuttered phrase she managed to gather while slowly turning red over the closeness that felt somewhat different from before.
“I’m fine now, thanks. Still have a bit to think about, so you can just go and I’ll find a spot nearby.” The spriggan smiled as Anastacia hesitantly started heading back towards the rock. “Just go already!” She laughed after the necromancer disappeared behind a turn in the path, only to peek back at her friend a moment later to make sure she was actually fine.