A week later, after so much buying and selling of goods that my head was starting to spin, we set out for the Stonechaser lands and eventually Avonside. Coming with us was Claih and a few of her magitecht friends, as well as the entire Stonechaser party. It was a lot of people, and it made me feel a lot safer.
Sitting in my recently extended storage rooms were enough raw materials to sink an armada. Literally, like there was so much ore alone that any fleet of ships trying to fill itself would sink like the rocks it was carrying. Then there were the books stacked up in bookshelves in a floor I had converted into a library. I already loved that room half to death.
I’d missed reading so damned much. Kit, Mer and I had been camped out in there every chance we could get. Mer was there because she had oh so graciously offered to teach Kit how to read and speak some of the obrec language. I was picking up on it pretty damned fast too, which had me more than a little suspicious about what had been done to my brain while I was in that fruit.
None of that was even mentioning all the magical materials and other stuff of that kind that we’d bought. Everything Claih had said we’d need and more.
The obrec had been lucky with where they were placed, although they hadn’t realised it until recently. The smashed canyons that they lived in were overflowing with a strange type of magically charged crystal, and it was so prevalent in the south that there was said to be entire forests of the stuff. The crystal seemed to be linked to the impossibly deep canyons in some way. Kit had mused at one point that the crust itself had been fractured, and that was why they were so deep. He thought that the crystals had probably been formed during the same event.
Interestingly, their wealth in this stuff had only been discovered recently because Magical technology was a fresh development on a historical scale. In the time since, the near monopoly that the obrec had on the stuff had seen them rise far above their neighbours in raw wealth.
Speaking of raw wealth, I was a little terrified of how monetarily powerful I was, if I was honest. I’d come into a small fortune in gold stones, that I’d be using to fund the Order of Eleos as it grew. I’d never been even close to rich in my life, and having even this small amount had my anxiety running overtime.
The Stonechaser’s wagons were full of smaller, more lightweight goods that they intended to try and sell in Avonside. Cloth, spices and other such things. I offered to let them leave their wagons and stuff in my grove while we walked, but they laughed and said that there was no way they were walking the whole way. Which was good, because oh my lord did I agree. Riding on a wagon was so much better than walking. It basically meant I got to cuddle Grace all day.
Leaving the gates of the amazing city of Millowhall behind, we trundled down the cliffside road again, Grace had her head in my lap was we lay sprawled across bundles of cloth. She had her eyes closed as she relaxed, but she hadn’t fallen asleep quite yet.
“I’m so glad to be out of that city,” she mumbled, turning to smoosh her face into my thigh. “It was getting so draining.”
“That’s because I was literally draining you to refill my magic,” I grinned, stroking her cheek with a finger affectionately.
“You know what I mean,” she laughed, swatting at my stomach.
I grinned and ran my hand through her hair. “I do.”
She was right, all that growing trees, selling trees, negotiating with all the different factions of the city who wanted a piece of what was going on. Pretending to be a confident and powerful mage, albeit one who was much kinder than they were used to. It had been absolutely draining, so much so that we hadn’t even managed to make love again, which I was lamenting. It was hard to work up the motivation to have fun when you felt dead by the end of the day.
Opening her eyes, Grace glanced up at me with a more serious expression. “We’re going to be back at Avonside soonish. How do you uh, how do you feel about that?”
“I’m scared shitless,” I told her honestly. Like… there were so many reasons to be worried. Would Bray accept me for who I was now? Would the university recognise me as one of theirs, or would I be viewed as an outsider? Would they try some ridiculous attempt to control me, or worse, fight me for some reason?
I sighed and scrunched my eyes closed. “There are so many people who know me as Elias back there, and each one is going to have to come to terms with who I am now.”
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“Yeah, Bray in particular has been sort of hanging in my mind,” she said with a sympathetic sigh of her own. “I’m scared he’s going to flip out or something. Especially now that we’re like… together. Like, he might see that as a betrayal, and we’ve pinned a few of our plans on him, you know?”
“Yeah… I know,” I nodded, feeling ice form in my gut. Our return to Avonside was something that was beginning to take up more and more brainspace as we got closer. I needed Bray to be okay with me, he was the only friend I had from more than a year ago. I’d left practically no one behind back on Earth.
We were silent after that, thoughts swirling in our heads as the wagon bounced gently down the road. Goddess, but suspension was amazing.
“I wish that I could have found you earlier,” Grace said a few minutes later, her voice gaining even more melancholy. “Well, that and have you be born into a girl body.”
“I’m actually glad my life happened the way it did,” I whispered, feeling yet more ice coalesce inside me.
“What, why?” she asked, a little too loud for my liking.
This stuff was personal and I didn’t want anyone knowing. I hated talking about myself, about my past. Except Grace… I think I could trust Grace.
“Because of my family, because of my father,” I told her, below the volume of even a whisper. “Imagine what… well you don’t know him or what he did, but… just thinking about what he’d do to me if I was a little girl…”
I shuddered as blocked out and abandoned memories flickering to life once more within me. The raw animalistic fear that had gripped me every time he punched a wall, wondering if I would be the next target for his bloodied fists. The ugly slap of those fists on my flesh when I was the target. The aching as my body was never able to fully heal from one beating before the next happened.
“What did he do to you?” she asked, sitting up and placing herself next to me, back against the inside wall of the wagon.
“Physical abuse,” I told her, scrunching my eyes tight against the maelstrom of pain. “Psychological abuse. More. I don’t know what the courts would call it, because the whole thing never made it to anyone. It’s hard to properly think back on it, my mind sort of skips off it like a spaceship coming in at too much of an angle to the atmosphere.”
“Oh,” she said, sounding a little helpless. Instead, she put her arms around me and gently guided my head down to her shoulder. “I can see what you mean then. I’ll add, Ryn gets to grow up as a girl with a loving family, to my vague wishes.”
“That would be nice,” I mumbled, latching onto her like she was one of those funny things a surf life-saver uses to save you. “We could be next door neighbours, figure out we’re gay together one night when we’re having a sleepover and we kiss. Try and hide our cute little teenage relationship from our families and school friends.”
“That sounds lovely,” she said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “Just so long as one of us doesn’t fall for the other first. It would suck to pine after you for years while you bumble around like an idiot not realising you’re gay for me.”
“Hey!” I grumbled, feeling a smile of my own forming. “I wouldn’t do that!”
“Uh huh, sure… so you wouldn’t be so wrapped up in that pretty little head of yours, thinking about all sorts of wild things instead of facing the feelings inside?” she chuckled, kissing the top of my head.
“I wouldn’t… I mean… I’m sure I’d realise it,” I pouted, enjoying her affectionate words and touch even as she teased me.
“Keep telling yourself that babe,” she laughed, squeezing me tight for a moment. Then she was blurting, “Fuck, I love you so much.”
“I love you too,” I sighed happily, melting further into her comforting arms. Of course, then I had to ruin the feeling by posing a question that had my heart racing, even if I was sure of the outcome. “This means that you’re my girlfriend, right? I can call you that?”
“Of course,” she told me tenderly. “We are girlfriends.”
“Okay good,” I nodded, content again.
The wagon trundled on into the day as we continued to talk and cuddle, rocking gently with the uneven road. At some point the stone gave way to a simple and well travelled dirt road when we veered off the highway and down a side canyon. Then night began to descend and the caravan of wagons all pulled into a broad section of the wide ledge.
“Would you all like to use my grove to sleep in?” I asked Jerril as I gave a long, weary stretch. Damn, but being cramped up in the wagon for hours had made my muscles very angry with me.
“No, thank you for the offer though Ryn,” he smiled, bowing slightly. “We’ll do things as we always have. Need to protect the wagons after all.”
“Uh, I wouldn’t mind a nice bed though,” Mer said, shuffling her hooves on the ground as she gave me a hopeful look. “And a bath…”
Jerril just rolled his eyes and wandered off. They had a lot of other guards I guess.
“Sure, you and Otho can come with,” I giggled, motioning them both over as our group assembled.
We made the jump over into my grove and immediately began to make for the Happy Little Tree. It had been near to pitch black in the obrec mountains when we left it, only a thin strip of dark blue sky visible high above, but here in my grove the sunset streaked through the clouds and lit them afire with gold. I smiled at the sight, then found my gaze drawn to Grace to see what her reaction was. I found a smile on her face too. I liked that smile.
My wistful loving stare was interrupted by a frantic Cream the bun as she barrelled across the grass towards us at full speed. She skidded to a halt and rushed towards me, tugging insistently on my arm, trying to pull me out towards the rim of the plateau we were on.
“What’s up Cream?” I asked, frowning down at her. The little bun gnashed her teeth in frustration and used her little fuzzy paw-hand-thing to point out in the direction she’d been trying to pull me.
I glanced up, squinting to get a look through the trees. Wait… was that a person? Oh shit, they were using magic! I was sprinting before I could figure out if they had done any damage yet, my shield slamming down around me. Looks like it had finally happened, someone had found my grove.