Our arrival at Thistlescar held significantly more fanfare than I had been anticipating. There were obrec children everywhere for one thing, and when they saw humans they went mental. I found myself with a little procession behind me as the caravan trundled into the huge courtyard at the base of the fortress town.

Little obrec children yammered away at me in the local dialect of the obrec language, that I had no hope of understanding. Still, they didn’t seem to mind that all I did was smile and create little showers of ephemeral rose petals everywhere. That particular spell had been made for an entirely different and non-child friendly activity, but they didn’t need to know.@@novelbin@@

One thing we learned very quickly was that every single obrec in this place was part of the Thistlescar noble house. Which kinda confused the hell out of us who were used to the human definition of noble.

Turns out that when the humans first met the obrec, they decided that they were “barbarians” so they named their most immediately obvious form of social structure as ‘clan’. Then, they got just as confused as we did about the whole thing and decided that the actual clans within what they'd called a ‘clan’ — which actually functioned more like a small kingdom — were called noble houses.

So if we could go back and change the language disparity, it would be more accurate to say these Thistlescars were a clan within the Kingdom of Stonechaser. The obrec didn’t seem to care about any of that shit though, because why does it matter what the idiots down in the plains thought?

“Those of us closer to the ruling line in the clan still have to do all that fancy pantsy noble stuff though—” Mer was explaining to us as we helped get the carts secure. “Ah, that's not quite it — we don’t all strut around like we’re the best thing around, like the obrec in the big cities or the humans down in the plains. See, the Lord of Thistlescar is Horln, he rules all our lands like you’d expect. Otho ‘n me are the kids of his younger sister.”

“So you’re like, minor nobles if we convert to silly human standards?” Kit asked with a shy grin. The guy was tall but somehow he still managed to make shy seem cute on that big frame of his.

“Yes,” she agreed, her eyes shining with mirrored mirth.

“Otho! Mer! Welcome home! Oh— who do we have here?” a loud bellowing voice called.

We all turned to see a rather old obrec man — who was somewhat on the heavier side both in girth and height — making his way over to us.

“Uncle Horln, the man himself,” Mer laughed, opening her arms just in time to get all but plowed over by the huge obrec.

Okay so clearly things were a little informal around here. None of the other obrec seemed particularly phased by their lord barrelling through to pick Mer up. There were smiles and laughs, but no bowing or scraping of any kind.

“How’s my favourite niece?” he asked with a hearty chuckle, placing her back on the ground. “And my favourite nephew! Did you make us some of those stones we’re meant to be chasing?”

“You have no idea,” Otho grinned, looking incredibly pleased with himself. As well he should, since a simple act of kindness by him and his sister led to them making an absolute mountain of money, with the possibility of more in the future.

Otho and Mer took turns explaining their recent adventures to an increasingly large crowd of Thistlescars. Apparently they had been set upon by wild beasts before we found them. In their retelling, it'd been a heroic battle to sing songs about. I had a feeling that the reality of the encounter was much more mundane, if no less brutal. Then came all the Millowhall stuff, a story that I knew way too intimately, so I kinda phased out for that.

We moved indoors once the wagons, the goods they carried, and strange cat-deer that pulled them, were safely stowed. Inside, they had this huge communal room filled with tables, chairs and roaring magefire hearths, where cooks were already working on a feast to celebrate the caravan’s return.

Those fires were immediately of interest to me, and I rushed over to take a look. Claih laughed when she saw my interest, and with a just as intrigued Kit by my side, she told us all about it. They burned magic, basically. Specifically they were powered by the magical crystal that was abundant in the obrec mountains. They were fairly simple things, converting raw magical energy into flame at a very efficient rate, which made for a good source of warmth in a huge stone fortress like this one.

We stayed a total of three days in Thistlescar, during which time I actually spent most of my time working on my grove’s defences with Esra. She had me weaponise my windbreak, modifying their base plan to incorporate an energy shield of sorts. That got me thinking bigger though. I’d been a huge Star Gate nerd a few years back, and one thing that I had always loved was the city of Atlantis. What if I copied that, but in tree form… oh my goodness, so many ideas.

“Esra, what if I use my big tree in conjunction with these ones to create a huge shield? I’d probably need a ton of power to do that right? But I have a ton of power laying around, and the next storm is going to overflow my lake even further,” I mused, sort of just rambling my ideas off.

“You… that’s preposterous, of course you can’t—“ Esra started before trailing off, brows furrowed. “Hmm, if you used that tree as a reservoir, that would fix the problem with— and as an amplifier, it is an awfully large tree after all— but how would you tackle the law of arcane pressure? That much energy would cause a catastrophic— no… it might be possible if you feed it back into the structure… Ah, but then there’s that warlock of yours...”

I couldn’t help a grin as I watched Esra’s sharp mind fade out of reality and into the problem. Her eyes were on fire with intellectual lust, the kind that someone with a love for problem solving got when they were making headway on a particularly interesting idea.

It was almost ten minutes of muttering later than Esra stood up straight from her increasingly hunched posture to announce, “It is possible, and more than that, I may have discovered a possible solution for your storm energy storage problems too. We will need that girl of yours, however.”

“What, Grace?” I asked, confused as to how she could help.

Esra smiled. “She is instrumental to the success… or wildly ruinous outcome of this experiment.”

Oh dear. Mage-mother dearest was insane.

“I’m confused.” Grace sighed, rubbing at her eyes with thumb and forefinger. “You want to push a spell plan through my— um, maginetic field? While both of us are in plant form, so we can use that empathic thingy?”

“Yes, indeed!” Esra nodded like a bobblehead in a tornado.

“Then I point it at the big tree,” Grace continued, eyeing the older woman dubiously.

“Quite so!” Esra agreed, still nodding, except the van that had the bobblehead was thrown clear of the twister and was now tumbling back to earth. “You are not confused at all, my dear.”

“Alright. If you say so…” my girlfriend sighed, eyes finding mine. She did not look very confident.

I reached out and cupped her cheek with just a taste of the infinite tenderness I felt for her. “You can do it. I believe in you — you’re incredible.”

“I wish,” she said, although her bashful smile said that at least something in my words had landed home.

“You two can get all mushy and romantic with each other after this task is complete,” Esra grumbled, although some of her usual bite was missing from the words. “Let’s get to work, please.”

I nodded and took my hand back, then trailed my eyes over the plans we’d drawn out, using up quite a lot of rather expensive paper. One thing that sucked about obrec culture. Wax fucking tablets were the norm for hashing out ideas like this. I shuddered.

The plan was both simple and complex. We were taking a version of the spherical shield spell that I already knew and tying it into a collective of plants and trees throughout the grove. By Esra’s own admission, this was treading new ground. Spells like this had been attempted before, sometimes successfully, but always at a far smaller scale. No one had the sort of energy reserves that we had out here in the boonies of the Nameless Garden.

The shield spell would be anchored using the huge main tree, while the middle layer of the windbreak trees would expand its reach out to the very edge of my grove. An edge which was now technically down at the bottom of the huge cliff. I hadn’t realised it, but the place had grown rather substantially.

The part where Grace came in was interesting. After Esra had learned about the nature of my girlfriend’s powers, her eyes had almost fallen out of her head. By using Grace to amplify the spell, we weren’t just increasing its overall power. We were lacing it with the power of other magical realms.

We’d tested this before we went ahead with the big version, and when I funnelled my shield spell through her, it had become changed, different in a way that was awkward to the magical eye. Rather than purple, it had taken on a shimmering white-rainbow colour,  while its efficiency was increased by a staggering factor. It was like the magical equivalent of advanced composite materials. By threading the magic of every realm through the shield, it became far stronger than each individual part might have been. Nothing, not even fae creatures like Ollinfer would be able to get through the large, storm-powered version — in theory. It had to work on a larger scale, first.

It took a long time to get the spell structure right in my mind, holding the tree and all the changes we’d be making to it together, while also working on the outside ones — it was intense. So difficult, in fact, that I lost hold of it it more than once — the whole thing unravelling in my head, and causing us to have to start over.

Two hours later though, I had it done, and with a desperate gasp I said, “Okay, I’ve got it. Are you ready Grace? I can’t hold it stable for long!”

“Yes, yes! Go!” she blurted, bright magical plant eyes wide with worry and excitement.

Here goes nothing! I pushed the mental plans at her, powering it with as much of my own energy as I could muster while using our empathic link to guide her as best I could. Which wasn’t the best way to communicate complex thought, if I was honest. Communicating something like, “a little more to the left,” with pure emotion was like trying to play charades while standing a mile apart and using binoculars.

Working together like that, we very carefully maneuvered everything into place, and after double and triple checking via binocular-charades, we finally agreed that it was good. Like a codie hitting compile on a particularly troublesome piece of code, we watched and waited to see if anything terrible would happen.

Something did.