- [One year later] -
“AaAaAh!” yells the woman in shock, stretching out her arms far above her head, kicking her legs. The fire sorceress Vilenna stretches herself out, pinned down to the chair she’s on, struggling to escape. She flails around, howling as next to her comes laughter.
Staub, the dark-elf, sits there and slaps the table, trying to breathe in properly as she watches the water droplets run down Vilena’s stomach.
A piece of ice was dropped onto her from above, from the branches of a tree, and it slides down her belly which was sunning very comfortably in the summer afternoon sunlight. The sorceress flops out of her chair, falling to the grass and crawling like a worm for a second, starting to cry in a rather pitiful way. But then she starts screaming again a second later as a new piece of ice drops down onto her bright red back from above, landing right in the curve of her spine. The sorceress howls in surprise, scrambling on all fours and taking off.
Staub clenches her stomach, laughing as she watches her run off a few steps in a strange half-jog, before looking back up toward the tree.
“You little rat!” shouts the woman, holding her back with one hand and shaking a fist up at the tree, at the girl who is sitting there and laughing — Luisa. “Just you wait!” she warns, fire starting to glow around her hands.
“Vilena!” warns Staub from the table.
The sorceress puffs out her cheek, visibly pouting her way for a second, before exhaling and letting the fire dissipate. “Fine! Fine…” she mutters, strolling back to her spot, warily watching Luisa. The girl in the branches lifts her hands into the air, showing that they’re empty. Vilena sighs, sitting back down in her chair.
A fresh scream fills the air. The sorceress flops out of the chair onto the ground again, rolling the other way.
While she had jumped out the first time, Luisa had dropped the rest of the ice she had down into the chair. “You little urchin!” yells Vilena, rolling onto her back and glaring up at the tree at the laughing girl.
“Vilena!” scolds Staub, who she suddenly finds standing over her and blocking the sun. “You can’t call her that. Apologize,” she demands.
Vilena’s eyes open wide in protest. She lifts her arm, pointing past Staub at the tree. “She started it!” protests the sorceress.
Staub grabs the pointing finger in her grasp, turning the arm. Vilena mutters several ouches as she rotates along with it. “She’s a kid. You’re an adult. Legally, at least,” remarks the dark-elven shield-maiden, the black feather around her neck blowing in a gust of wind.
There’s a soft thudding as Luisa jumps down, giving each of them a soft half-hug as she starts to run off. “Bye Auntie Staub, Vilena!” calls the girl, waving back over her shoulder.
“Where are you going?” calls Vilena after her.
Luisa doesn’t stop running, following the wind down the way from the top of the world tree hill. “Away!” she laughs, vanishing down the road.
Staub lets go of Vilena’s finger, pulling the woman up to her feet and dusting her off. “Come on, get it together Vilena,” says Staub, patting the woman on the back. But she rests her head on the dark-elf’s shoulder and sobs crocodile tears. “Cry baby. It’s just some dumb fun,” says the woman, rolling her eyes.
“No, it’s not that!” says Vilena, pulling her head back and pointing down the road. “It’s just that…” she sniffs. “Our little girl is growing up so fast!” she howls, pressing her face into Staub’s shoulder and actually crying now.
Staub sighs, patting her back, but she can’t help but roll her eyes. After a while, she turns her head to look down over the lake and toward the city.
It has grown beyond imagining.
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- [Luisa] -
Luisa weaves through the streets, making her way down across the little bridge at the foot of the hill and running.
She stops for a second, looking back behind herself toward the world tree.
It has no leaves, no greenery, and no flowers like it had done in the year before in this season. It is dead. The invasions, the monsters, it survived all of it, only to succumb to age and illness at the very end of it all, funnily enough.
But the world hasn’t ended, as was prophesied. It’s just continued to grow more and more and more.
Out off the sides of the mesa, water and grass have spread for kilometers out in all directions since then. It’s grown rapidly at a natural pace but also through the hands of intentional reseeding programs. Teams work in all directions, carefully replanting and nurturing the extremely fertile ashlands, and by the day, new forests sprout and emerge, together with the first houses and settlements outside the confines of the mesa and the world tree’s shadow.
The world and its people — both being interconnected as one and the same — are healing.
Industry is booming now that the war is over and all resources are being brought forward into the production of food, medicine, and homes rather than weapons and ammunition. Factories are being refitted, and people are beginning to find their way back to the old way of doing things, as is quite necessary. It feels like every second woman that Luisa runs by has a bump on their body, if not already several children in their arms. Immediately after the war, the population exploded violently. Housing and schools are being constructed in preparation for the new generation, who will never know the world that she knew before all of this happened or the world of the past. These new children will only know the healed and regrowing world and will never understand what it took to get there.
It will all just be baseline for them.
The girl stops by the lake, looking down at its reflective surface for a moment, at the face that looks back her way — changed, than when she had first seen it.
— She smiles now. Although there are still a lot of times now when she doesn't, fewer now than after the end of the war, but they still come now and then at night.
The girl hurries on; she doesn’t want to be too late. She promised to be there.
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She bends off into the forest, climbing over some old ammunition crates that nature has begun to claim for itself. The thriving people of the world don’t have a need for them anymore, at least for now.
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Caretaker sits in the deep forest.
Birds sing around her, high up in the trees and sing their songs peacefully to one another. Occasionally, they flock from one part of the forest to another. Fat, jolly bees buzz through the air without a care in the world as they move from one pungently rich flower to another. The grass, which is so vividly green and saturated, seems to have trouble swaying in the warm wind because of its fullness.
And sitting kneeling in the center of the clearing, there is a very tired woman with short black hair and antlers that grow out of her body. If one were to look at her, it would be a riddle at first glance to decide if she was human or animal. The dryad smiles softly, holding in her arms a bundle that she pokes in the nose.
It makes the appropriate, standard military regulation noises of a laughing infant, as defined by article seven of the military code of conduct for child soldiers.
She looks at the boy, touching a strand of his black hair and pushing it to the side, giving her a look for a second that haunts her, despite its vapid emptiness.
He has his eyes, and sometimes she sees flashes of him in them.
“Mom!” calls a voice from the forest. Caretaker turns around, looking over her shoulder at Luisa, who comes running her way through the trees. "Sorry, I’m late,” pants the girl, catching her breath and then dropping down next to Caretaker. The dryad spares a precious arm, grabbing Luisa and nuzzling her face.
“That’s okay,” says Caretaker, letting the girl go again.
Luisa looks around herself. “So? What’s up out here?” she asks.
“I wanted you to meet your other auntie, my sister,” explains Caretaker, gesturing toward a simple stone marker that makes up a grave she had found herself sitting at a very long, long time ago. “You two would have gotten along,” explains the dryad. “She was also very energetic, like you.”
Luisa watches the flower-decorated grave and then looks back at her mother. “…There used to be a lot of dryads, huh?” she asks, lifting a hand and grabbing hold of Caretaker’s right antler.
Caretaker nods, looking down as a small hand plays with her fingers as Luisa bobs her head back and forth. “The world tree needed us,” explains the dryad. “But now…” She stops, shaking her head. Caretaker purses her lips for a second, collecting her thoughts together. “Well, it might just be me that’s left. No more world tree, no more dryads.”
Luisa lets go, falling quiet for a second. Then she looks back at Caretaker. “Don’t worry,” she says. “He might grow horns in a year or two,” explains the girl, looking at her little brother.
Caretaker smiles, rocking the baby in her arms and then leans over, kissing the top of Luisa’s head. “Let me tell you a little story,” she starts. “This here is where I first saw him, you know?” asks the dryad, nodding her head to the side. “Pilot.”
Luisa doesn’t say anything for a moment, before then breaking that silence. “Hey, before you start, can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” replies Caretaker.
Luisa thinks for a moment, her finger brushing over the grass. “If the magic of the world tree is what kept you alive, then how come…?”
Caretaker slowly shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she replies.
It should have been that with the world tree dead, the magic that created dryads should have run dry — just the same as if it were the other way around. The world tree is a great source of the world’s magic, for all casters and monsters alike. It’s a primary source of it, the primary source. Without the world tree, there is no magic.
— There are no dryads.
But here she is.
And the wizards and priests all seem to be just fine.
It is as if the promise of the apocalypse was never really more than an untrue fear. She’s not sure. She just… doesn’t know.
The dryad lets out a long exhale, handing the bundle over to Luisa, who grabs the baby and holds it. “It began right here,” starts Caretaker, looking up at the sky. “It all…”
Her voice trails off as she stares, almost blankly up at the azure blue of a summer above the good world that knows nothing but peace from here to God.
Luisa looks at her in concern for a moment and then follows her widening eyes, turning her gaze up toward the sky above the world tree city that begins to intersect and criss-cross with a honeycomb weave, rippling and quivering like disturbed water.
It doesn't take seconds until alarms start blaring all across the city and for the soldiers, who could not find it within themselves to step back from the spiritual contract that they had made with themselves, jumping to readiness within a second’s notice. All around the city, in a manner of moments, trucks and machines jump awake from their long slumber as men grab guns from mounts on the walls and burst out of doors, flooding into the streets to keep whole what is theirs.
The clouds, the blue, the sky — it all pulls together at a point of convergence like a finger pressing through a sheet of fabric, which then rips open and from it flies a comet. A shooting star.
— A plane.
Its wings burning and full of holes, its body marred and torn apart, it spirals and hurtles through the sky with a trail of murky black smoke in its wake like the stroke of a brush across the canvas above. It screams a banshee shriek, flying over the forest and toward the lake, followed by an explosion that rocks the dead limbs of the world tree as a loose bomb lands somewhere in the forest.
One of the limbs falls off of the tree, collapsing into the dirt and the lakeside, sending a splash up toward the sky as the world rains back toward the clouds but only once.
Caretaker grabs her children, holding both of them with animal strength as she runs through the woods like a feral, jumping and bounding over logs and boulders alike, kicking off of the ammunition crates by the shore and toppling them over as she lands in the soft sands of the giant lake, panting and staring.
Staring at the crashed, smoldering plane from another time, another place, that floats near to the shore, looking no different than it had done in her memories. Setting her children down onto the shore together, she jumps into the oil-stained water, clambering onto the floating, hissing wings of the plane she had climbed up onto so many times in the past, fire waning as it burns out against the dented, battered sheet metal aeroframe. She grasps the fractured, ash-smeared canopy and, in her rush, forgets to use the unlatching mechanism, simply instead ripping the weakened metal hinge off of its base entirely. The broken glass falls halfway off of the plane into the water and she looks inside, not sure how this has come to be.
But then again, it’s not like she really ever knew last time either.
Caretaker looks at Pilot, strapped there in his seat, her charms and keepsakes that she had made for him dangling all around the cockpit still. His uniform is covered in ash and filled with cuts and holes from burning machinery.
And he looks no different than he did on the very day she saw him last, that long year ago.
A soft crackling comes through the broken radio. It sounds like rain. Or maybe even a voice belonging to some woman. Caretaker doesn’t know what it is, nor does she care, as she jumps inside and shakes him until his eyes begin to open and look back into hers.
All along the shoreline, trucks and convoys of soldiers begin to roll in.
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- [A Secret Place] -
Schtill stands with her hands behind her back, watching the scene unfold with a smugly satisfied smile on her face as around her work men and women around the clock. They’ve never stopped their work, and she’s never stopped hers.
Her black boots click together as she turns around, looking down through the glass chamber of the very last thing that she had a team of special fairy operators of the F.A.E. unit extract from the spirit world before the gateway to it was shut forever — as was deemed to be the safest measure for their own world.
Below in the lab stands a team of scholars, researchers, and druids around a thick, broken collection of metal fragments and pulsating, black dirt. A large, green sprout juts out of the very same world tree seed that they had used to destroy Tango Prime — a seed that she had ordered to be recovered. She intends to replant it right here, right where it belongs.
The world needs magic if its people are going to protect themselves. They all need the world tree and its powers. Because even if they won for now, they didn’t win forever. Tango Prime was eradicated, the global crisis was averted and the apocalypse was ended.
But if there’s one thing that she’s learned after all of this, then it’s this:
— The war never really ends.
The world tree sprout shoots out a root, spearing a nearby man through his heart. The others scream and run out of the lab as she watches from above as the vine throbs and drinks, as the new world tree begins to grow right before her very own eyes and raw, untamed magic begins to sparkle in the air around her.