When Wisteria awoke, she was surprised. Not because she expected to never wake again (she didn’t) or because she didn’t recognize the ceiling she was currently staring at (she did), but because it hadn’t felt that long since she put herself into a healing coma.

Has it been two hundred years already? Maybe, but then again, maybe not. Two hundred years had only been her best estimate, after all, she could have guessed wrongly. Who knows, maybe Azalei had found some way to make her heal faster?

Wisteria slowly sat up and tried to focus on her surroundings. Her sight was still blurry from having slept so long, but she could tell that her best friend was nowhere in sight. Which, granted, wasn’t that big of a surprise. She would have probably been more surprised if Azalei had been by her bed, given that she should have spent at least a hundred years in a coma.

Slowly, ponderously, Wisteria pushed her covers aside, noting how thin and weak her body is. It was nothing she had not expected, so she put that out of her mind as she forced herself up on rickety, trembling legs.

For a few moments she just stood there, willing the fog in her mind to clear away as she tried to clear her vision, rubbing at her eyes with a bony hand. She took a deep breath, and immediately doubled over coughing as the thick dust cloud she had unknowingly kicked up invaded her nose and assaulted her dry throat. Grimacing, Wisteria let out a harsh breath before she ignored the dust with the uncaringness of someone that didn’t necessarily need to breathe.

‘... Azalei’s a clean freak. He’d never let the place get this dusty.’

With the afternoon sun streaming through the windows, Wisteria quickly noticed the thick dust all over her bed, her wardrobe, her desk, her floor, and even all over her own body, which was the source of the choking dust cloud that was dancing around her even now. Oddly enough, her spear stood in the center of the room, stabbed into the ground over a… was that a magical circle of preservation? The targets… every non-living thing in the room? What did Azalei even set this up for?

Hesitantly, Wisteria took a step forward, nearly falling over as her legs shook, weak from at least a century of inactivity. Again, she ignored the pain in her legs the way only a woman who feared neither injury nor death could, forcing herself to stumble and limp her way out of her room, ignoring the spear for now. She remembered how much the thing weighed, she wouldn’t be picking it up any time soon.

Eventually, she managed to get to the door without tripping even once, leaning heavily against the rotting wood. Opening her mouth to shout only resulted in a raspy hiss and a sharp pain in her dehydrated throat, so Wisteria just frowned, shut up, fumbled with the doorknob and pushed the door open.

Time had not been kind to her home. Reddish-black moss covered the walls and the floor, while dark purple vines with bright red leaves crept all over the place. The chairs she remembered carving, made over the course of weeks of idle whittling were little more than piles of mush, long since rotted away. Both her spinning wheel and loom were likewise ruined by the ravages of time. What might have once been the massive metal chessboard she had played all sorts of games on with her best friend had completely rusted through, leaving only a pile of rust staining the floor where no plants grew.

As she looked around, Wisteria finally noticed the wisps of red mist in the air. The clouds of dust she had kicked up before had obscured it, but now it was exceedingly obvious. It looked similar to the poisonous fog that had marked Azalei’s territory, but it felt… different.

Azalei’s fog shouldn’t even be in the house, anyway. Wisteria had put up barriers around their home and their garden long ago so she would stop seeing everything tinted red, and while Azalei wasn’t the best with magic, he wasn’t so inept that he couldn’t maintain her barriers while she was asleep. Still, it could have just been the march of time that did them in. She might have even believed that theory… if there wasn’t a massive hole where their front door used to be.

Azalei was the one who built that entire wall. He was proud of it, too, which made its destruction even more unsettling.

Wisteria tamped down on the anxiety and fear she could feel building in the back of her mind as she limped over to inspect the hole. There wasn’t much to see, unfortunately. The march of time had worn off any details she might have been able to glean from it. The most she could tell was that the wall was definitely broken inwards, meaning that something had blown a hole in the wall from the outside.

Another look around the house let Wisteria see the cracks in the stone floor, almost hidden by the carpet of moss. Two, no, three triangular pebbles that might have once been stone arrowheads lodged into the walls. A glint of metal caught her eye, and Wisteria found the most damning thing yet; a broken blade made of adamantium, sunken into the stone floor and so covered in moss she almost didn’t see it.

‘Calm down.’ Wisteria thought to herself. There has to be an explanation for this. Maybe Azalei had left to visit his family in a rush and accidentally knocked the door and the surrounding wall down, and simple hasn’t returned from his visit yet. Or maybe Azalei had gotten tired of waiting for her to wake up and left, so she’ll have to hunt him down and yell at him to feel better. Or most likely, her mind was just playing tricks on her, showing clues and hints of bad omens where there were none. The house is very old, and with her in a coma Azalei would have no reason to care about any part of the house except his own room, that ass. That broken blade could even have just been something Azalei brought back, since he rather liked collecting shiny things.

Wisteria studiously ignored how cleanliness in his home was one of the few things Azalei had never compromised on.

Continuing in her search, Wisteria stumbled towards Azalei’s room and peered inside. It was little better than the rest of the house. In other words, it was a right mess.

The door was in such a poor condition a touch from her frail hand sent the thing falling over, shattering into pieces as it impacted the floor. The pile of gemstones Azalei liked to collect were buried under so much dust it looked like a chunk of slate in a corner. His bed was visibly wrecked as well, obvious even through the mold and dust.

It was what she saw through the window of Azalei’s room that made what blood she had left in her desiccated body turn to ice. Spinning around, she hobbled as fast as she could out of the house and into their massive garden.

Azalei loved his gardens. More than his gems, more than cleanliness, though just a little less than he loved Wisteria’s company. He had been taking care of plants long since before they met, and his love for gardening had infected Wisteria as well.

They would tend to the flowerbeds, prune the various bushes, relax under the shade of the flowering trees together, whiling the days away watching the clouds and enjoying each other's company, surrounded by the colors and scents of plants and earth. He had been so happy when Wisteria had extended her barriers around the gardens, letting him grow more types of plants that would normally have died from his poisons. And yes, also because he could enjoy the colors of the vibrant flowers without everything being tinted red.

Now? Now the garden was completely overgrown. Weeds so high they reached her hips, creeping vines strangling the wilting trees, flowers growing wildly wherever they liked. It was clearly ruined. Abandoned.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Wisteria could only stare in shock as her legs finally gave out and she slid onto the ground. What could have happened? Wisteria had problems with her self worth, she knew that. Azalei growing bored of her and abandoning her, or forgetting about her to visit his family? Those Wisteria felt was possible even if logically she knew he wouldn’t do such things. Azalei abandoning his garden? That was simply impossible. Come hell or high water, if Azalei had actually left, he would have found a way to bring his favorite plants with him, at least.

And yet, she could clearly see the massive wisteria tree he was so proud of, his first success of many. It was covered in vines and moss, branches almost bare. The tree they had loved to curl up under together, shaded by the pale purple flowers, was now almost dead.

Wisteria didn’t know how long she sat there staring blankly at the ruined garden, trying to beat back the panic and dread that she might have lost a loved one again. She might even have passed out for a time, given that she had suddenly started awake again to find herself flat on the ground, the sun having set, plunging everything into darkness.

She took a deep breath, pushed herself up, and punched the ground with all her meager strength. Her dry, brittle fingers broke on the hard packed dirt, the pain lancing through her brain helping her to focus.

How this happened. Who could have done this. When, why, what, all of that can wait. Right now, the most important thing is to find out where Azalei is now. If he had died, his corpse would be obvious, and she likely wouldn’t have woken up in her own room, untouched by anything but dust. That means he must have gone off elsewhere.

Azalei’s a tough son of a bitch. If he were so easy to kill, she would have killed him herself during their first meeting.

Buoyed by those thoughts, Wisteria dragged herself up and went back to her room. She would have to heal, and prepare, and for either of those things she would need to be armed. Grabbing her spear, she pulled, dislodging it from its place stabbed into the magic circle on the ground. Her sharp, enchanted, solid adamantium, and extremely heavy spear.

She really should have expected the spear to immediately fall flat onto the floor after she pulled it out, ripping her left arm off at the shoulder as it went.

Wisteria stared flatly at the bare socket where her arm once was, noting the thin, brackish, and almost slime like blood pooling around the stump but never actually leaving her body. Sighing, she managed to free her severed arm from under her spear (after much work; she had first accidentally ripped her arm off at the wrist, then when she tried to retrieve her hand she had to leave two fingers under the spear’s shaft) and stick it back into its socket, letting her blood bind the limb back in place.

“Well.” Wisteria sighed, her voice still barely able to be differentiated from a rasping hiss. “Wouldn’t be the first time I subsisted on tree bark and weeds.”

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Four weeks have passed since Wisteria first awoke. As she had predicted, she had eaten nothing but tree bark and weeds, but whatever she could shove down her throat could be used as raw materials to heal faster, somewhat. She still looked like a walking corpse, but the two fingers she lost trying to pick up her old spear had almost finished regrowing and she could move about without staggering and swaying like a drunkard now, at least.

On this day Wisteria found herself in the river, taking a bath for the first time since she went to sleep. Granted, desiccated as her body is she hadn’t even had to so much as use the toilet since she woke up, her body greedily cannibalizing everything she ate and drank, to say nothing about sweat, but she still felt mildly gross.

Once she was clean, she took the time to contemplate her appearance. She was still bald, of course, her hair being way down the priority list of things her body had to repair, and she was still so thin it looked like she should be confined to a bed. Her skin was at least no longer cracked and dry, though it was still pale as death. Her eyes were the only thing unchanged from how she remembered them, a little on the larger side with azalea red irises, the color a result of an experimental spell she had cooked up while she was bored one day.

Before she knew it, she had a finger tracing over the scar that marred her face, a splatter of dark red tissue under her right cheek that traced a path under her jaw and down her neck, right next to the ring of massive teeth marks that encircled her right shoulder, courtesy of a manticore’s poisonous spit and powerful jaws, respectively. Her other hand went down to her abdomen, touching the starburst of twisted flesh where the same manticore had thrust its stinger through her.

Those were the only scars that stayed on her flesh permanently. A reminder of the beast that had all but killed her when she was a child, and of what her father had sacrificed to save her life.

With a final sigh, Wisteria looked away, laying down on the riverbank as she waited for her clothes to dry. More than three quarters of her wardrobe had crumbled when she touched them, leaving her with barely three sets of clothing. Better than nothing, and without the preservation magic cast on her room she likely wouldn’t even have clothes.

If she was to enact her grand plan to leave the forest to search for her best friend, she would have to get some new clothing… which meant hunting, and more importantly, making a new spindle-and-knitting-needles sewing kit.

Another thing to tack onto her list of things she needed accomplished before she set out, right under “heal enough so I can at least haul my spear around” and above “actually make a damn plan”.

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Four months after her awakening, Wisteria was recovering well. The house was cleaned, the garden weeded and cleared, the rotted furniture had been burned, and she had even managed to recreate the barrier around her house to keep the poison out.

Surprisingly enough, Wisteria had discovered animals roaming around in the poisonous mist. Deer, wolves, a boar she spotted in the distance, and even squirrels and rabbits. She had wasted no time setting up traps for the smaller animals, though she hadn’t had much luck. Either she had gotten rusty with her trap making, or the animals had somehow gotten smarter.

Unfortunately, despite the food and the exercise, she was still very thin. No longer skin and bones like she was when she first woke up, but that just meant she no longer had a collapsed stomach and sunken cheeks. She was still rather gaunt, her ribs easily visible under her skin.

That also meant that her strength was still severely lacking. Her last attempt at lifting her spear worked… for all of ten seconds, before she had to put it down for fear of losing her fingers again.

At the height of her power, Wisteria had shrugged off wounds that would kill any man, walking through battlefields and coming out the other side a bloody mess before being restored to perfect health in a matter of hours. Now? Wisteria knew that her stubbornness that led to her coma had severely damaged her ability to heal, but she was only now discovering how much her regeneration had been impacted.

After four months of sitting around, though, Wisteria was getting antsy. She had stuck to the area around her home for the past few months, cleaning up the house, weeding the garden, as well as drawing water from the nearby river, but the silence and isolation was getting to her. She blamed Azalei. Before she had met her best friend, she was accustomed to loneliness, easily going for months at a time without interacting with anyone, but after she met that wise cracking prankster bastard, she could barely stand it.

One more month, Wisteria promised herself. Just one more month, and whether anything changed or not, she wasn’t sitting around anymore, not even if she had to put her spear in a sack and drag it behind her by a rope.

She even had a plan for what to do when she left, now. The first thing to do would be to find a village and gather information about the current era. Maps, important people, the current year, maybe even check if the idiots at the Tower of Magic Research had managed to finally make a new spell worth something, if it even still existed. Second, she would need to look for rumors about Azalei and sudden cases of poisonous fog.

Everything else will just have to be improvised from there.

… It wasn’t much of a plan, but she had literally nothing else to go off on. Two centuries was a very long time, and the world would have moved on without her. Would the nearby towns she remembered have become cities by now? Or had they perhaps faded away? She didn’t know, so she’ll just have to deal with it.

Confirming her plans and mentally checking off the equipment she would need to prepare for the coming journey, Wisteria slowly stood up from where she had been kneeling. Opening her eyes, she gazed upon the little shrine she had first made so very long ago. It was a basic thing, just two headstones beneath a cherry tree. The years had worn away the words, but she had taken the time to replace them, slowly carving the names back into the rocks over the past few weeks.

“Papa, Uncle Elrad.” Wisteria said quietly. “Thank you for listening to me. I’ll be heading off soon, but I’ll be back. And I’ll drag Azalei along by his neck if I have to.” She cracked a small smile as she made a little bow, then turned and walked back to her home.

A whisper of wind blew past, the flowers she had planted around the stones waving at her back.