At the beckons of the voice in her head, Maeve approached The Giving Tree where it rose from the throne upon its little island. She snapped out of her trance once there, finding herself abruptly sequestered deep beneath its canopy. She searched around in a panic for her son, calling out, “Sorrinn…? Sorrinn!?” When she couldn’t find him, she verged on running off to look for him. That was when that bell chimed behind her. Except it wasn’t in her ear as it’d always been up till then. Her body whipped toward the sound’s source on instinct. There was where she saw the ghostly woman with six arms, standing before the pond’s bank in silence, facing the tree.

“You have come.” The woman said, long strands of wheat golden hair softly billowing against the breeze. She turned to face Maeve, a welcoming smile upon her face. “Thank you.”

Hesitance swelled, then waned in Maeve’s mind like the tide. Something of the woman’s presence was so wholesome, peaceful, and good. Stoking any embers of dubiosity into flames of suspicion was impossible. With a chime of the wind, she trusted the mysterious woman as if she were her own mother.

Be that as it may, the presence of her ease didn’t scrub the questions from her mind or the perplexity from her furrowed brows. “You’re the one who’s been ringing the bell… Who are you? What do you want with me?” She was going to leave. “I have no time for this; my son needs me—”

The woman held out one of her many hands in plea, saying as she stepped forward, “That is why you’re precisely where you need to be. What encroaches upon this land cannot be thwarted by any mere magic conjured by mortals. All I request is that you offer me your ear. After that, if you are not convinced, I give you my word that I will not hold you.”

Maeve nodded briefly in agreement. “Alright.”

She offered Maeve a cordial dip of her head. “Thank you. I am Saoirsei, the mother and caretaker of this Tree of Preservation. I’ve summoned you here because you wish to protect your child from the self-eroder, and I wish to protect all who have found a home within this sanctuary. Our wishes and the profoundness thereof align enough for us to be of service to one another. Helping the village means saving your son. You have no reason to refuse my offer.”

Maeve had read something about her kind in the Elven lores, she believed—mystic spirits; the ancient offspring of The Mystic Force risen during the dark ages. They preceded The Ancestor, so much about them short of their existences was still unknown to the illuminated world. Some mystic spirits, such as the Great Serpent, Iishyae, were hostile toward people but otherwise neutral if left alone. Some, such as the Tyrannical Sovereign of Dragons, Tiamat, were evil, world-ending disasters in waiting. Others were beneficial forces unto the world, such as the Progenitors of the Fae, the Twin Archfey, Oberon and Titania, themselves. Was Saoirsei one of the good ones, she wondered.

“How do I know I’m not being led astray by a demon in disguise, merely assuming the guise of a benevolent spirit? I knew a girl once who was fooled by desperation into signing herself into eternal servitude to a devil. How do I know it won’t be me becoming the protagonist of a cautionary tale?”

“You cannot. You will simply have to have faith in your instincts. But, as you can see, I myself am rather powerless—naught more than the conjured whisper of a long-extinguished existence.” Saoirsei shifted halfway toward the tree and looked up at it with silent longing, ever-running tears falling from her chin. “I forfeited the seeds of chaos I was born from to birth something of order during a time when such a concept didn’t exist in this world. I wished with all of my existence for any who found their way to this land to be absolved from the chaos of the outside world—to never know hunger, thirst, illness, suffering, or strife. To never be lost or alone in this world… To always have a home to return to no matter how far they wandered.” Her blindfolded gaze returned to Maeve. “Now, it demands all of my power to merely present this fading image before you. All so I may seek your aid before the paradise I sacrificed body and blood to create is razed to the ground by that parasite of the End.”

Maeve didn’t need to hear any more. Her instincts told her she could trust Saoirsei, and for her family’s sake, she’d accept the risks of being wrong. Resolve steeling her gaze, she only had one thing to ask: “What do I have to do?”

Saoirsei raised both of her central hands sealed in prayer high. With their ascension descended a branch from the topmost reaches of the Tree of Preservation. The branch bore a lone fruit, more golden, more radiant, and more rotund than all the others. That fruit descended before Maeve, hanging within her reach. “The Elder Fruit—the first fruit ever born by the Tree. It has amassed the Tree’s essence over the millennia that it’s remained unplucked from the branch. Within it lies a grand revelation of what you would call fifth-tier Preservation magic—and the abundance of mystic energy necessary to actualize a phenomena so profound into being. All you must do is take a bite—and brace yourself.”

Maeve looked on at the fruit in awe. Its power radiated from it like Radiance from The Sustainer. She had to ask: “Will I still be me after?”

“If you are strong-willed, yes. But your body will be transformed to bear the fruit’s burden. What you may become may not be that which you are now.”

“…Like a grimel?”

A shake of her head. “I can at least attest that you’ll remain humanoid. You’ll evolve into something greater than humanity and bear a spirit’s blessing.” Her head lifted. She watched a mother bird make off with one of the Tree’s fruits to bring back to her chicks in the nest.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Good enough for me.” Maeve plucked the fruit from the branch and had a squelching bite—no regrets. The fruit was tasteless against her tongue. But perhaps that was because all of her senses were rendered blind before she could even swallow. The trickles of its juices falling down her throat alone were like a spontaneous anvil fallen from a thousand-feet up—like a supernova in her brain. By the time she swallowed the innards, she was floating above the ground, back arched far, universe-speckled eyes heavenward as an abundance of golden mystic energy raveled around and embosomed her within its incorporeal womb.

Everything fell to silence for a while.

Soon, cracks etched across the golden cocoon. She exploded free in a burst of force, a choir of angelic voices harmonizing around her. Her hair had lengthened, becoming a wheat golden shade, eyebrows and lashes feathered, and her irises dyed a delicate pastel pink like cherry blossoms at the dawn of spring. Her ears had elongated to wispy threads, prominent twin wings of white-pink-colored feathers flourishing boldly behind them. A similar set of wings had grown from and coiled around her ankles. At that moment, a grand, luminescent pair of energy-born wings, many-colored in hues of pink, white, black, and gold, forcefully broadened from her upper back. A halo of flowers grew around her head and flowering vines draped over her wings like decorative chains.

A golden violin weaved itself into existence from her mystic energy above her. Eyes opened, awake, she reached and claimed it.

***

A white-haired Leporid Eldradimon surfaced from hiding in a small clinic beside many others—the village healer named Opal. Opal had witnessed everything from the window of her clinic. She overlooked the carnage for Sorrinn’s sake, rushing to the boy’s aid immediately. She felt his neck for a pulse. There was one, strong and persistent. He was only asleep, albeit wounded and bleeding. The pink of her nose twitched. Her long, floppy ears further drooped in relief atop her head full of straight, cascading, snow-white hair.

She hovered her hand over his wound. A sage green bubble of radiance enshrouded the area. His injuries promptly mended amid the glow. She picked him up in the cradle of her arms before rising to the extent of her short height. Then she addressed those who’d survived with a projecting, shrill voice. “Listen up, all! I know you’re probably hurting, scared, and confused right now—and you all have the right to be—but we all have to play our part now if we’re to ever return from this tragedy. If you’re injured, come to the clinic and we’ll tend to your wounds. If you’re unharmed, able to move, and see or know someone who is injured, I need you to help get them to the clinic for treatment ASAP. Those in critical condition take priority please.”

Her beautiful, jewelish gaze—resplendent and pale like twin opals—descended. “And if you’ve lost loved ones in the tragedy and aren’t of mind to help yourself yet help others, you’re fine where you are. Don’t force yourself to be strong for anyone’s sake right now. Everyone else, please do your best to collect the dead and restore the village to itself. Basurum will be drawn to possess the corpses of the tragic if we don’t make haste with a rite of purification. Thank you.”

Her words set the bulk of the villagers into motion right away. Some guy shouted, “Ya’ heard the good doc; let’s get movin’!” Everyone started chugging after that. They relayed Opal’s words to those who weren’t present to hear. It didn’t appear the villagers were going to let the tragedy break them down.

A Human woman saw to begin wrangling up all of the children into an unoccupied seamstering workshop with loud calls. A few other village women offered her assistance in that endeavor.

Opal herself was on her way to her clinic with the sleeping Sorrinn, when an off feeling drew her steps to a halt. Her ears erected straight up at the whim of an unknown instinct. Every hair on her body stood on end for reasons beyond her fathoming. An abrupt sense of consternation and panic—a whisper in the back of her head—that she couldn’t explain. Her heart rate elevated and her body tensed stiff. She searched every which way for danger with flicking eyes.

That was when she saw him—that blank-faced Elven child forsaken of all color, hidden in plain sight amongst the recuperating masses. He stared right at her—through her, like she wasn’t even there. Slowly he approached her with this spine-chilling impassivity in his void-hued eyes. Slowly she backed away in instinctive fear. She blinked. The Elf had vanished into thin air.

Questioning, she paused. The breath she’d been holding fell from her alongside her wound-up nerves. Then, it felt as if the sky itself had collapsed atop her head. She was forced to her knees by the crashing weight of the world. Eyes broad in fear, heart thrashing in her chest, the gravity had quintupled over the village. Lances of sourceless dread drove pikes through her and everyone else’s hearts. Her flight instincts wailed in her head, but she couldn’t move a muscle yet open her mouth to scream. No one could. Everything had become silent and stagnant.

“You believed it was over?” a growling, whispering voice questioned from nowhere yet everywhere. “You believed you had won?”

An ominous, pitch-black blip hollowed open existence in the middle of the road. Through it surfaced the spiked, scale-clad arm of a monster. Its four talon-bearing fingers burrowed deep into the stone of the road as if it were softened dirt.

A low growl permeated the village air. “You were mistaken, Apotheos…”

By the strength of its fingers, it pulled itself through the rift. The visage of a void-scaled dragon surfaced into the light, a spiked crown of horns risen from its scalp. Its maw of a thousand knives peeled open. A reverberating, guttural sound clicked outward from the back of its throat. Exhausts of black miasma exhaled from the corners of its mouth. Its glowing white dot eyes were fixated on Sorrinn and Sorrinn alone, bestial within its obsession.

Its other arm reached through and ripped the fissure open wide into a gaping void. The path opened, the rest of its body stepped through—a shadow-veiled dragon standing erect in humanoid form. The Silhouette was a ten-foot, bipedal, draconic beast with a lithe build resemblant of both serpent and man, obsidian-black hide as jagged and resilient as stone and clad in spiked, crystalline scales kindred to thousands of knives growing from its flesh. Every crevice oozed a tar-esque sludge which hissed in the Radiance of daylight. Everything the substance contacted corroded.

It approached Sorrinn where he slept in Opal’s arms. Not a tremor crept through the ground beneath its clawed feet. “Your flame is extinguished. And now, you, and everything you’ve ever known, shall become one with The Void…”