The next day dawns upon a sobering sight. If I had ever doubted the power of fire, the scene before me is enough to cure me of it forever. A grey wasteland stretches ahead of me, its reach vast.

The contrast between healthy forest and burnt field is stark. I don’t think any Earth fire would look like this: the edge of forest almost untouched next to an area which has been burnt completely to ash.

The non-vine-strangler trees have of course been impacted – the heat of the inferno has made its mark in terms of wrinkled and burnt leaves, singe marks on the closest trunks.

Yet the impact is minimal: with plenty of vine-stranglers to feed the fire, it hadn’t protested too much about me directing it away from the other trees. Looking back on it, I think that, in as much as fire can think, the inferno considered it a ‘later’ rather than a ‘don’t touch’. It doesn’t take well to being told it can’t have something, but if it thinks it might get it later, it’s a lot more amenable.

Thinking about fire brings me back to the ball of it still bobbing over my shoulder.

“Can you understand me?” I ask, a little uncertainly. It doesn’t seem to react. Maybe it didn’t understand me, or maybe, like my first Bound, it just can’t communicate its understanding. “If you understand me, move over to my other shoulder,” I tell it, pointing with my finger and also focussing on my intentions. Nothing.

Maybe it can’t understand me? But then why did it stop attacking Bastet right at the beginning? It seemed to recognise what I said when I called her a ‘friend’. Sighing, I sit down and pull out some food, barely even recognising what I’m eating as I do so.

My mind going over the question, I’m suddenly hit by an idea. All communication so far seems to have been emotional in nature. It sent me affection, curiosity, and alarm. What if my emotions are what were communicated instead of my thoughts?

Turning to face the ball of fire, I wordlessly tap my right shoulder and try to project a sense of…desire. The ball moves to bob over my right shoulder, exuding a sense of question. In response, I send it the bubbly feeling which inevitably causes a smile. It bobs a little faster, sending the same feeling but times ten back at me. My slight smile widens, unable to do anything else at the feeling of…I can only call it simple joy.

Alright, well, communication is clearly not going to be easy, but at least it’s possible. More testing will have to be done later. There are other things we need to do and at the moment the elemental ball of fire I’ve somehow Bonded is interesting, but not urgent.

Forest, can you hear me? I ask, projecting my mental voice as much as I can. Recently, I seem to have done a lot of projecting my mind – across the Bond between Fenrir and me, into the venom in the danaris’ body, into the inferno as it consumed the vine-stranglers.

All of it means that I’m becoming a little more used to the idea that my being – whether my mind or my soul, or something else – does not need to stop at my skin. And means in turn that I can sense better how my mental messages are projected into my environment.

At this moment, though, I don’t actually have any link to the being I’m trying to contact, so my mental projection doesn’t go far. Perhaps it’s limited by my ‘domain’ or something.

I hear nothing. I feel nothing. No sense of connection, not even any sense of something which hears but does not want to respond.

Sighing, I finish my food and push myself to my feet. I was concerned that this might be the case. Before, my connection was either with the vine-strangler right in front of me or the inferno which was consuming them. Now, there is nothing for miles except for this grey wasteland.

A whisper of wings heralds my scout. She’d gone up without me even asking, predicting exactly what I’d need. Landing on the opposite shoulder from the Fire elemental, a picture is sent across the Bond and I know that my map will have updated.

“Thanks Sirocco,” I say, daring to affectionately rub at her head. She hesitates for a moment, then leans into my touch, as if deciding that yes, I may pet her a little. Then she pulls away, ruffling her feathers in a business-like manner. A pointed feeling comes across the Bond – it’s like she’s the chair of one of the meetings I used to attend, sternly pulling me back on task. “Alright, bossy bird,” I tell her, more than a little fondly.

Opening the map, I look at the changes. A frown makes its way onto my face. They’re not exactly what I was expecting.

Of course, there is a huge area which is now blank on my map – no vine-stranglers, no forest, no grass, nothing. Nothing but ash, anyway. I feel a bit depressed at that thought for a moment. You did this, a little voice inside me accuses. You destroyed all of this.

A feather-light touch brushes past my right cheek and I turn my head to see the Fire elemental bobbing just an inch away from my eyes. It’s exuding concern, question, and a touch of fierceness. I find I understand exactly what it’s trying to say – concern for if I am well, a question about if there is an enemy to fight, and a commitment to doing what it can to help.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“It’s fine,” I say, trying to send that as some sort of feeling that the little elemental will understand. “I’m fine.”

And after that moment of depression, I find that I am. The vine-stranglers were a blight on this area of the forest; they would have killed and driven out just as many in their spread, if not more. I remember too what I once thought about fire when studying it for the first time: fire is not destruction alone; it is also creation.

The ash which lies upon the ground now will be watered in by the next rainfall. The nutrients within it will provide a rich terrain for other plants to grow. In a few years’ time, there will be no way of telling what happened here. In a few decades, or centuries – depending on how long these normal trees take to grow – the forest will have retaken the area and it will be like it was never invaded.

However, that is for the future. For now, I see where the collection of remaining vine-stranglers is on my map. This is what is confusing me.

While I don’t have completely clear memories of my time connected so thoroughly to the inferno, I’m pretty sure that I didn’t intentionally sweep around in a circle to isolate a small patch of the carnivorous trees in a sort of island at the centre. I thought I was rather burning them in an always-advancing line which stretched across the whole of the vine-strangler forest. I was expecting to see the remaining ones in the furthest corner.

Then I recognise exactly where the trees are making their final stand and I realise what must have happened. It’s not news that the trees can move – we learned that to our detriment when they funnelled us through their body to face the salamander. But I had thought it was more of a slow shift that they could do rather than an all-out march.

However, whatever the capabilities of the trees, it seems like they’ve holed up around the entrance to the tunnel through which we passed – the tunnel which leads to the Pure Energy stream and the Energy Hearts nearby.

That’s both good and bad for us. Good, in that it’s not that far away; at the speed we can travel, we can probably make it within the day, even from where we are right now. Bad in the sense that I don’t know what the clump of trap trees could do with the time and Energy to prepare.

Then again, I suppose that there’s probably little they can do to protect against me calling another inferno on them. I’m not injured from the last time and with them isolated as they are, I wouldn’t need to worry too much about stopping the fire burning: it would go out by itself once it ran out of fuel.

Of course, the question remains about whether we can spare the time: River and his band must be a good way towards the village by now, and it will still be a good day’s travel to get to the village for us.

Then again…I suppose that it’s not completely out of our way: the Energy tunnel is relatively close to the village. It might extend our journey by a few hours, but not by as much as a day. Though we would need to camp before reaching the village in the morning…. But that’s only if we get going straight away. I make my decision.

“Alright everyone, let’s get going as soon as possible. Drink something, grab a bite to eat, and then we’re going into the ash wasteland.”

*****

Of course, we weren’t able to leave as quickly as I’d hoped. Since we are travelling through wasteland, the herbivores – Trinity and Shakira – aren’t able to graze while walking. That necessitated a bit of a delay where all of my Bound got to work collecting things they could eat and piling them on Trinity’s back. Shakira had been happy with that arrangement – she could eat on the hoof. Trinity hadn’t been so content, but by instructing Shakira to feed Trinity as much as she ate, I’ve managed to keep both of them happy.

I took advantage of the delay to level up, putting four of my points into Willpower – which effectively meant five thanks to the bonus – one into Constitution to bring my health above what it had been before the elemental came along, and one into Dexterity.

That final point had been the subject of much mental debate, but in the end, I decided that Dexterity would still be necessary for using physical weapons and tools, even if it didn’t have an impact on mental processes. Which I’m not at all sure that it doesn’t. Plus, I was hoping that it would help me move a little better in my chitin-scale and nere-hide armour. On reflection, I think that it does, but one point makes such a little difference now that it’s hard to tell for sure.

I dipped myself in the pool after all my other Bound had drunk their fill and I had replenished my containers of water with boiled stuff from upstream. Going into the dry ash field, we’re going to need it.

The trek through the field of ash is, predictably, dusty and unpleasant. I have never wished I had wings like Sirocco so much as today when every step kicked up light ash which coated us in grey. By the time we see the vine-stranglers on the horizon, it looks like we’ve been dipped in grey paint.

Then there’s the danger aspect: the ash coats the landscape like freshly-fallen snow, hiding an uncountable number of holes and dips in the terrain. I have to fix several sprained legs and one broken tibia when Pride, the haughty spinosaurus look-alike, gets one foot caught.

All that means that it takes a lot longer than I was expecting to get to the final stand of vine-strangler trees. The sun is already barely hovering above the horizon by the time we get there.

Those vine-stranglers had better still be willing to make a deal or I’ll burn them immediately, I think darkly to myself, in a bit of a foul mood from all the difficulties and delays. I have no intention of camping on top of ash – who knows what danger inhaling so much of the stuff could cause us? No, the cave system would be a far better proposition, assuming that nothing else has moved in to take the salamander’s place. Though if it has, I’ll burn it too, I decide.

Maybe I should be worried about how easily my mind is jumping to burning things, especially considering what my experience of walking through its aftermath has been, but right now I don’t care.

Can you hear me now? I ask the trees as we get within a few metres of the closest. My tone is weary despite my best efforts – I’ve been doing the same thing at regular intervals. I suppose at least the fact that I haven’t had any sense of the forest being able to hear me is a good thing: if it could, that would probably have meant that I’d have left bits of its root network unburned. I certainly didn’t leave any trees half consumed.

I hear you, a voice comes back. Finally. It sounds fearful, the trees closest to me starting to move gently, though there is no breeze strong enough to move them. Have you come to consume me utterly? it asks.

Not unless you intend on trying to take back your surrender, I tell it grimly.