Those Hours Before
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The Village
Inside a forest and at a time there stood a village, and it was, as all villages were, a cozy thing.
The people living in the village were known to themselves as dryads, and they were a peculiar folk. They had skin made from tree-bark, sap through their veins, and the flowing hair of leaves. It was no surprise then, that those who passed the village by would often call them “tree-people” before dryad, and by nature of their peculiarity and nature itself, they would take little offense and in fact say, “Yes, indeed. But we prefer dryad, and thank you.”
Maybe they were a little polite and simple for their own good, but they were a peculiar folk, and for those from the outside, to be polite and simple was to be very strange, indeed.
And that was the people. But a village was more than people – it was their homes, too.
Throughout the village stood the groves where dryads lived, and within each was a family and a tender. There was one grove at the boundary of the forest. It was scaled with oak, and short and stumpy, for it only held within it five souls, and dryads were not the ostentatious type to build more than they needed.
They were a family of four and one – Mother, Father, Andura, the youngest, and Lepius, the eldest.
And there was Rosemary, the tender of the grove.
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five hours before his awakening
Andura
Today, it was the day of love, and she would shout it from the roofs to her face of her beloved.
But first, presentation.
Her eyes roved over herself and she nodded, before frowning and adjusting her ring. It was always the ring. The mirror reflected back to her a familiar face – a birch tree’s bark inlaid with two eyes, a nose, lips – only the same, plain dryad. Curse it all. At least her hair, her autumn leaves, had deigned to act proper today.
She adjusted her ring again, before striding about to give her legs something to do rather than jig.
“Be at ease, Dura. You look halfway decent.”
She flung her comb at the speaker, and the grinning dryad caught it, then twirled it in a hand. What irked her was how he lounged. Was he not aware of the sheer scale of this day? The sanctity?
“Quiet. Give back, now.”
He tossed away the comb, and it spun to a stop in the far corner of her room. Andura stared at it for as long as patience allowed her, calculating whether a punch or a kick would deliver the most damage to a male dryad. She decided on a slap.
“Ow! Okay, okay, I’ll get it. Eldertrees, here.”
She kicked him too, for good measure.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Other than being cursed with a buffoon instead of an older brother? Having the buffoon in your room, probably.”
“Well, you know. Buffoons make for good decoration.”
“This is not funny, Lepius. This is the day of love. This is... this is Yurth. This is big. Big big.”
Lepius smirked, “Indeed. He is of monumental size.”
Her hands shot for more ammunition while he marched onwards, “Listen. He’s mad for you. And take your fingers off that ring, Mother calls it a bad habit.”
“Sprouts… it is, isn’t it?”
Then, she sighed and proceeded to collapse onto her cot, and by virtue of his buffoonery, him too. He let out a noise of pain. But she made no indication to move, for she was holding her hand up to her forehead, checking to see if she was heating up. Maybe… just a little. He snorted at what he would call her ‘drama-acting’, but his arms came up around her anyways, then tightened across her back, as if to trap her within him.
After a while, he let her go.
She began asking something, paused mid-way, and quietly repeated it.
“Can you tell me that again?”
He untied a knot of yellowed leaves she had missed.
“Yurth is mad for you. All will be well, sister.”
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Lepius
He slipped out of the room before he could lose control. If he did, she would be swaddled in bed, asleep after a calming tonic, and then she would kill him the next day.
In the kitchen, Mother was pounding elderberries into paste. Her mana swirled around her and then across the room, and how wonderful it smelled, all cheeses and sandalwood. When he stepped into the storm, it called out to him. He could just about squint out the mana-visions her presence summoned: his father, banging on the table and laughing as Andura told him about the date, him and Rosemary exchanging grins, and his mother, smiling, a beacon of light in the middle of it all.
The mana of family.
The visions all faded away after she switched her focus to him.
“Why won’t you ever braid your hair properly?”
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She muscled him into a chair and straightened up his leaves. He blinked, and a plate of bread and elderberries topped with cheese now sat before him. Truly the magic of mothers.
He took a big bite.
“You should be up earlier. Aren’t you supposed to be training in the temple today?”
“It’s my day off. I want to spend it teasing Dura.”
His mother sighed the sigh she reserved just for him. “You’re a healer. You’re supposed to make people feel better.”
“It’s called negative reinforcement, and-”
“That’s not what it means.”
“-and okay, even if it doesn’t, are you going to stop me?”
“… you’re just lucky I’m playful by nature.”
He gave her his most innocent look before a burly arm draped itself across him.
His father said, “Oh, let the poor boy be, Mother. Remember him at my age?”
“I don’t think I could forget, Father. How dashing you were.”
Yep, time for me to leave. He kicked his father’s leg, getting a roar of challenge out of him, and dashed out of the front door.
Ah, Rosemary was there.
Rosemary was the tender of his family’s grove. Every grove had a tender, a spirit halfway ancient magic and halfway real, and that magic was always the mana of home. Each tender was unique, too. For his grove, Rosemary was short, stumpy, scaled with oak, and had a riot of colours for hair. The way Father had built the grove. And as long as they called it home, her form wouldn’t change, not since the first oaken trees twisted to wall it up and his mother painted the branches overhead in every shade of summer.
“Is Andura still-”
He was already smirking.
“Yes, indeed. Should we place bets on whether she cries before or after the date?”
Rosemary stomped her feet, “How dare you. You should be consoling her before her big day.”
“Big day?”
He waggled his eyebrows at her for a bit. Then they both dissolved into covered giggles, and Rosemary said through her hands, “Stop it.”
“The bet, or the big-”
“Finish that, and I’ll whoop you. I’ll bet she cries before. Winner gets to…”
“Say ‘I told you so’?”
She scuffed some dirt at him as he bounded away, laughing, “Are you off then, my dear?”
“Yeah. I might meet up with some friends later. D’you mind if I bring them over?”
For a second her face twisted into something, the same something it did whenever Andura hosted girls’ night. She never told him what it meant.
“What’s-”
“No-”
They had spoken at the same time.
“You go first, my sapling.”
“Sorry, yeah. Is there something wrong?”
She shook her head, and her smile was back.
“Nothing.”
“And you were going to say-”
“To stay safe, my sapling. Now go, with my blessings.”
He waved and bid farewell.
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The grove’s shadow cloaked him as he watched Andura stroll off with Yurth in the sunlight.
Oh, by the Eldertrees and the High Priestess he would roll his eyes – his sister was hopping, the madwoman. Even their arms were intertwined. Father would have waxed poetic about it, about tree roots tied and eternity, probably even carve it into one of his murals, and would that be a bet he hoped to lose. He almost lost his nerve to let his sister walk off.
But then he tendered his gaze on Yurth.
He nodded. Despite whatever was churning inside him, whatever brotherly instinct demanded of him, he knew it would be alright.
“Hey! You planning murder?”
Lepius smirked and he turned his gaze away from the couple. A loud dryad wielding a basket was making his way over, and they wasted no time in clasping arms.
“It’s not murder if no one finds out.”
“Of course. Then it’s just a happy little accident,” and he turned to watch as well, “they look cute.”
“Don’t even… start. If he breaks my sister’s heart… anyway, let me guess, you need a foraging expert?”
“Only call on the best.”
Lepius slung an arm over the shorter dryad, then grabbed the basket from him. There was some smacking and punching before Lepius yielded, mostly to turn and look back, but his sister had already vanished.
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The Village (Again)
The village he lived in didn’t have a name.
Yes, he would come to know that as strange. But then again, this was his world. Do people have a name for their world? Sometimes. Traders passed by and called their greater world Panacea, but that was silly. A world took to a name as well as a mountain took to a dress. And it was so easily offended, why… you were just one silly name from a thunderstorm. How petty a world could be to those who could dream beyond it.
So his world had no name.
It was indeed a strange place, but then again, all pretty places were peculiar. There were a hundred little streams and a grove for each one, and each grove stood unique; some bore carvings on the outer trunks; some walled with alternating trees, pine and oak, and pine again. A forest bordered the village on its east, and rising hills on its left.
All in all, it was a village of nature.
Whenever outsiders came to the village they would say with unerring precision: “What a paradise!” and the dryads would nod and look about as if to command applause. This was a paradise, thank you. And there were plenty of outsiders, too: nakhs and equine and elves, and most of all the humans.
And the outsiders themselves weren’t always the most interesting things.
For when they came, they brought with them their goods from the outside. Treasures. There was bronze forged into circles, yellow metal that shined, and colourful rocks that were bright in sunlight and the dark. So many rare artefacts. His people would barter for these treasures, but rarely would they strike any deal, for the outsiders always deemed whatever carving in wood or rock the dryads offered to be a pittance. They would laugh, put the artefacts away, and hide their sharp iron and copper.
There was no need to use them, not in this land of sticks and stones.
And they would leave, and never return. Sometimes they did, and they appeared as they did the first time, confused. And they would laugh again, and ask what clever magics his people used, to know their names and stories so.
They had never been here before, after all.
His village had a way of doing that – making people forget. Thus, it always lost its name.
It was peculiar that way.
It was not like this forever, his village trapped in time. The day was sunny and mundane, even in mundanity, had the world not tilted sideways. But that day the world found its pettiness. That day he left his sister on the arm of a weaverdryad.
That day he went to forage with Nurma.
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He was picking snowberries.
Half went into the basket, half into his mouth. His eyes drifted over the foliage, and he bent down to examine a particularly juicy bush, but he stood right back up after he heard a cry behind him.
“Eldertree’s roots! Pesky thorns.”
He examined the cut. It was not big, but the sap was still flowing, and there was no need to risk infection, not with him rested and his wellspring full. His second hand came to rest on the cut.
“It’s nothing, Lepius. No need to waste mana.”
“Shut up.”
He held it tight as the world warped into imagination.
Mana. Just like the High Priestess taught him.
Understand your concept, or feel your emotion. Gather the WILL.
FOCUS it. Think of nothing else.
Use your CREATIVITY to form mana-constructs, or direct pure mana.
As he refocused, the world stretched and narrowed into the point of a needle. And inside it, he dreamt. He dreamt of the warmth of the sun at home, the relief of an injury healed, and the fading ache of a treated sore. He dreamt of magic. When he released the hand, the cut had scabbed and fallen off to reveal unblemished bark.
Lepius was breathing hard. There was also a headache introducing itself, but all in all, it was a fair price to pay for to the warm feeling bubbling inside him.
“You should not have – ugh, thank you. Stupid sharpberry shrubs.” Nurma helped him up, “I can see the headache in that smile. Go and lie down. I will follow up, I just need to pick a few more.”
Lepius nodded and waved. Above, the sun was warm and bright, and below, the leaves were heavy and brown, and they masked his footfalls. A cool wind pushed at his bark and played with the leaves in his hair, and even from here he could hear the music from the central grove, masked by the blubbering of a stream nearby.
He heard Nurma cry again, and chuckled.
“Again? Don’t make me come and heal you a second time, you sapling.”
There was no response, and so Lepius shrugged. He would heal him when he returned.
He never saw Nurma again.
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(Here Ends) The Village
Inside a forest and at a time there stood a village, and it was, as all villages were, a cozy thing.
As Lepius would come to learn, that forest was called the Carralan.
As Lepius would come to remember, that time was the 14th Linval 432 A.S.
And at that place and time, the village was soon not so cozy anymore.