Explaining to Esra all the adventures I'd had since I left her grove took all of dinner and then some. The food was amazing though, the buns really did try their best with this stuff. I wonder what would happen if we got them a bigger spread of spices? Gosh, and the way Cream had gone and bounced around the kitchen when I praised her had been so cute.

Esra’s wariness of the buns had lasted until she took a bite out of the food. Adam had taught them well, at least with this recipe, and the results were pretty damned good. She’d asked what else I had them doing, and I’d described the various tasks they had been assigned around the place. That explanation led to how they were harvesting wood, and of course, I had to tell her the Millowhall part of the story.

“No!” she laughed, her white eyes bright with mirth. “You had that blowhard Carac bowing and scraping? By the gods, I wish I could have seen that! You must have cut into his concerns rather heavily if he stopped his egotistical strutting enough to negotiate with you!”

“He seemed kinda nice,” I shrugged, smiling nevertheless at her happiness. Esra didn’t get excited like that often. “I mean, uptight and stuff — but not a terrible person.”

“He’s not a terrible person under all of it, no,” she nodded, a wan smile coming across her face. “I just dealt with many a mage such as him in my time, and I find myself running out of patience for their type. You can only listen to a man tell you all about his own importance for so long before you begin to fall asleep.”

Probably why she was such an irritable grump too — it must have been such a tough thing to try and do good for people in politics around here. Especially during Fennimore’s rise to power and all those manipulative assholes that he liked to hang out with.

“Yeah, I hear you,” Troy nodded with the slightest of eyerolls. “There were types like that in the military, too. People who let their power get to their head, running their mouths and acting like they’re hot shit. Then comes time to actually do something real and they flake off.”

Esra hummed agreement, eyeing Troy as though seeing him in a new light. “You were in the military of, uh— Earth, was it?”

“For a nation on that world, yeah,” he nodded. “Saw combat, although the nature of it is very different to what it’s like here on the ring. Same motivations for the wars, though — under all the layers of political— well, you know.”

“Interesting,” Esra murmured, her eyes drifting between all of us from Avonside.

Interesting was one word for it. I could see that she knew what that meant for the long term political landscape of this region. I wonder if she agreed with Fennimore or not on this issue?

The moment ended when she turned to me with a serious but distinctly motherly expression on her face. “Back to more immediate matters — you, my little apprentice, are going to need to do some serious magework when you finish this little adventure that you are on,” she told me sternly. “You have no defences, for one thing, which is a terrible oversight. Additionally, I will be showing you how to modify some of the spells you have created to be more efficient. Not to mention figuring out what to do with that… frankly, terrifying store of energy you have beneath our feet.”

“Oh, what about it?” I asked, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. Was she going to tell me that it might explode at any moment?

Contrary to where my fears had been running, her eyes lit up with the sort of evil expression reserved only for mad scientists about to press the button and unleash their doomsday weapon. “My dear, sweet little child — there is so very much that we could do with it. You will not hear me say this often, but you have unwittingly stumbled upon a system that will forever change the balance of power within the Nameless Garden. The storms out here, combined with your methods of collecting the energy— oh my word.”

I felt a proud grin blossom across my face, followed by a happy blush. “Does that mean I did good?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t let that pretty head of yours swell, Rynadria Belrose. I worked hard on it, after all, can’t have it becoming grotesque and misshapen.”

Oh no. She used my full name!

We did eventually have to go to bed, and to my surprise, Esra asked to use a room to sleep in for the time being. Her grove wasn’t very well equipped on the home-and-hearth side of things. She’d muttered something about her magic and spells being a priority over niceties, or whatever. I don’t know, I wasn’t paying attention.

I did pay attention when she offhandedly explained the reason for creating a magefruit. It was like… saving your progress in a game. It took time, effort and a not insignificant amount of energy, but once it was created, it set a hard lower limit on the raw power a mage could bring to bear.

You could torch a whole grove to the ground, destroy it utterly and the mage who owned it would still be able to wield raw magic with the same power and finesse that they had when their grove was at its peak. Their spells would still be gone, but if they could escape, then it allowed them to build a new grove far quicker than the first time around. It explained why she had made my mage fruit and then hidden it in the first place.

It was way too late in the night when we all finally fell into bed, and waking up the next morning to continue our journey really, really

sucked. God I was tired.

The following evening, Esra was there again, practically dragging me by the scruff of my neck to begin teaching me magic things. Specifically, she thought it was some sort of crime against humanity that I didn’t have a short ranged teleport spell — the kind that she and Fennimore had been using in their duel way back then. Apparently it was a staple spell or something?

That took most of our limited time that night, largely because she was never satisfied. I had to keep making changes until it was absolutely perfect in her eyes. Something about keeping her apprentice from teleporting herself into the ground. Then it was off to collapse into bed, mentally drained from the strain of working with spell plants as well as the scant night’s sleep I’d gotten before.

This routine continued as we made our slow way through the winding paths of the obrec mountains. They were beautiful too, some chasms wide enough to be proper valleys, with towns and villages up and down the walls. With the way the obrec revered their forests, it wasn't hard to figure out why they built on the slopes instead of the valley floors.

Some, like the wild obrec, still followed the old traditions, living within the ancient depths of the forests. They were a secretive and elusive lot, and no one knew much about them. The majority of their kind though, they lived on the slopes and walls of their great mountain range. The carved obrec, or the carved clans, named for the way they carved their cities out of stone, were the ones we’d been interacting with this whole time.

Speaking of clans — we were travelling through Cherrinbrook territory now. Millowhall wasn't far from Mossbed’s border with them, although it hadn't always been that way. The chunk of land between Stonechaser and Mossbed territory used to belong to Mossbed, but a few hundred years ago, Cherrinbrook took it during a minor war.

I was starting to dislike these Cherrinbrook folks, considering how they were still being belligerent, and because of what they did to Eilian. The average Cherrin farmer we saw was chill, though, so it was probably the high-ups causing the problems, as usual.

On one particular night during our travels, when Esra brought up the topic of my transformation, Troy rather surprisingly educated Esra and everyone else on what it meant to be transgender.

He didn’t out himself as such, but he explained the pain of it, the desperate hate for one’s own body and the toll that it took on the mind. He explained how much damage it dealt to a persons life without them even realising it, how people might withdraw socially, because the act of socialising as the gender they were assigned at birth was mentally uncomfortable, or even painful. He also explained the added struggles we faced in many seemingly unrelated areas of life, like how we might also score poorly in school because some portion of our mind was always assigned to resisting the existential horror of having a body that changed in ways that felt fundamentally wrong.

Many other aspects of our experience were spoken about, and Esra seemed genuinely interested and sympathetic, which was… odd. Old people were generally pretty bad with this kind of thing. Then again, she hadn’t really cared when I introduced Grace to her, so maybe it wasn't old people so much as the society they grew up in.

The next day, while she was teaching me a proper spell to use for heating the baths, I asked her, “Esra, where are you right now? Out on the ring, I mean?”

She paused as she was sketching out some diagrams on paper and glanced up at me. “Somewhere. It’s best you don’t know, I’m afraid. Rest assured I’ll be making it to that town of yours shortly. This ecology business you talk about has me intrigued.”

I perked up. “Really? I was going to try to get some books made about that stuff to put in here, so you might not have to go all the way if you want to learn.” I said, pointing around us at the mostly empty library. “I have a whole plan for how to implement a functioning ecosystem in my grove when I get the chance.”

“A generous offer, but I'm afraid that an education from those who are experts in their field is far superior to one gained from books, as you should well know,” she chided me, giving a pointed look around us.

“Hey!” I grinned with more than a little cheek. “You said I’d stumbled on something really important by blindly following my instincts.”

“And you could have just as easily killed yourself, or much worse, so I’m going to chalk it up to dumb luck and make sure you don’t break things again,” she grumbled, still irritated that I kept bringing it up.

“Alright, alright,” I laughed, distractedly playing with a strand of my dark magenta hair. The way it shone in the light was kinda mesmerising sometimes. I loved it.

“Put your hair down and pay attention,” she snapped, tapping the paper with a finger. “This is important — you get this wrong and it will burn to the ground this whole damned tree you love so much.”

“It’s a good tree,” I complained. “Why wouldn’t I love it?”

Her response was a weary sigh, but we got back to the lesson anyway. God I was getting tired though. Endless boring rides in an obrec cart during the day followed by intense lessons in spellcraft during the night — it was playing hell with me. I wished I could've slept in every day and rolled out of bed at noon, preferably with cute messy bed hair — hair that would have my girlfriend throwing me back into bed with no intention of sleeping. Was that really too much to ask for?

Goodness I was always so horny, but never when I actually had her on hand… being perpetually tired was a bit of a barrier to multiple orgasms.

Apparently it was too much to ask for though, because two weeks later when we reached Thistlescar, home and seat of power to our obrec friends with the same name, I was exhausted.@@novelbin@@

Thistlescar was near the border with Cherrinbrook, and far smaller than Millowhall had been, which made sense considering it was just the hall for a noble family within the Stonechaser clan, rather than a full capital city or anything. The Stonechasers lived along the northwestern edge of the obrec mountains, in an area that had seen much more erosion than further south. Storms liked to hammer in from off the plains, causing all sorts of geological mayhem.

It meant that the area was this strange in-between stage — obrec canyon-mountains being on one end of the spectrum, and normal, natural mountains being on the other. It gave them a different sort of beauty, where the mountains were raw spikes of stone, where only the greatest ledges remained. In some areas, the obrec had been forced to carve paths along the slopes of those needle-like heights.

The castle Thistlescar sat carved out of an enormous promontory of stone that had sheared off from a long, high ridge years ago and now hung out into the wide, shallow chasm. It towered over the forest below, looking for all the world like it would finish toppling down at any moment, despite having never moved more than an inch further from where it currently sat.

“That doesn’t look safe,” Kit murmured, staring at the castle with trepidation. He’d been getting more and more timid recently. Something about Mer’s attempts to woo him had him restless and sort of vaguely upset, even as he also seemed to enjoy her attention. I was worried about him. I might have to talk to Mer about maybe taking a step back.

“Oh, it’s perfectly safe, don’t worry,” the obrec woman in question said soothingly. “In fact, since we hollowed it out and turned it into a town, we actually lessened the danger — not as top-heavy. It’s not going to fall for thousands of years, if ever.”

“Tell that to one good earthquake,” Kit muttered, glancing away from both the castle and Mer. “I lived in LA for a few years, you look at things differently after you feel your first really big one.”

“Yeah, that’s very true,” Grace agreed from next to me. “I think we’ll be fine, though.”

Despite how close the place looked, it still took most of the afternoon to actually make it there along the winding cliffside road, and the way the stone monolith began to loom over us certainly put some legitimacy behind our friends in my minds eye. I mean… it’s one thing to meet a bunch of people with money and carts, but to see this massive fortress town… that was something else. I hoped the rest of their noble house were as cool as this lot.