Ryn of Avonside

It was three days of instruction and preparation before Esra decided I was ready to attempt some of that basic telekinesis that she’d been talking about. Three days where the reality of what had happened began to sink in, really, truly sink in. I had a woman’s body now, and more than that, I was technically also no longer human at all. Instead I was part human and part magical plant or something.

The family ring stayed with me, I couldn’t resize it yet, but Esra had decided I wasn’t allowed to try until I was able to do it with my powers. She described it as being an extra incentive to work hard, like I needed any more incentive. I was learning magic after all! That was like every moderately geeky person’s dream!

It was another sunny day in the garden, just a few clouds scudding across the strange sky, each one presenting the question, where had it come from? Esra’s Grove wasn’t that big, certainly not large enough for clouds to form, so where were they coming from? A question for when we moved on to Grove related activities, I guess.

We were sitting on the lawn again, its leaves still cool from the night’s chill, and I was beginning to get antsy with all the waiting. I wanted to attempt it now, why was there so much damn preparation involved in this? How much damage could I really do with simple telekinesis?

“Now remember, start small, we don’t know how strong you are yet, how much baseline power you possess, so to speak,” she explained yet again as she placed a stick down between us.

A cloud passed over the strange sun of the Nameless Garden, and I looked up absently at its backlit, milky depths. Esra shifted in annoyance, and I focused my concentration back onto the innocuous little stick.

“Let us begin,” she told me, her stare hard with expectation. “Do you feel your power?”

I nodded, my eyes becoming unfocused as I turned my attention to that strange new sense of magic I had. It was surprisingly easy to find the power I had within me. There was no struggle to visualise it or anything, like some books I read described— it was painfully hard to miss, a bright beacon of sensation within me.

“Good, now coax it to grow outward towards your target, like the plants around us,” she murmured, her eyes now also glazed over as she focused on her magical senses.

Feeling around my power, I pushed it out, seeking my target. It was hard at first, I had very little control over my magic as it just randomly wandered about. Slowly I was able to take hold though, directing it through the invisible underside of reality until I very carefully wrapped it around the stick and tried to lift.

The was a crunching, cracking sound and wood went spinning off in all directions at high speed. Esra was fast, placing thin glowing shields of hardened air between the both of us and the exploding stick. Wow, alright, now I understood her caution on the subject.

“I think that answers the question of magnitude,” she said calmly, removing the shields. “You could stand to work on your subtlety, however, my little apprentice. In all things.”

“Oi, I tried!” I protested, frowning at her petulantly. “Not my fault you packed that thing full of explosives!”

“I did no such thing,” she exclaimed dismissively.

“Uh huh, I don’t believe you,” I grumbled, although it was quite obvious that I actually had just used too much force. I wanted to wind her up a bit though, cos I’m a pain in the ass when I'm not weighed down by the crushing weight of dysphoria.

“Try again, with a different stick,” she sighed, rolling her eyes.

I gave her a grin. “Well it would be hard to try with the same stick now wouldn’t it?”

“You think yourself so very witty, don’t you?” She replied dryly. “Enough talking, more lifting. Gently.”

A week later, and I was able to lift things around using my mind-vines with ease. That’s how I thought of them at least, but really it was just the magic within me growing outwards. Not pure magic, though. Esra had explained that all of our magic was ‘flavoured’ with the distinctive notes of our realm. Pure magic had been theorised to exist, but so far nobody had proven it.

My ring was now fitted to my finger, and often I found myself wondering how the others were doing. Was Grace doing okay? Were Kelsey and Melody able to further their relationship? Was Duncan doing okay with the loss of his love? Had they managed to keep Bray from accidentally burning the whole of Avonside down? So many questions.

When I wasn’t practicing manipulating the magic within me, I was learning about the more advanced theory of magic as wielded by mages and our various counterparts. The other caster magic wielders were known as Warlocks, the ones who made deals with patron magical beings in exchange for their power. Warlocks lacked versatility, if their patron was a fire spirit, then they could only throw fire around.

As such, they were sought after for specific tasks, or in times of war, where their much more intuitive magic was easily put to use. Mages, on the other hand, were considered far more powerful and versatile, but only after they'd made considerable investment in their powers. A newly created mage would be very weak and vulnerable, little more useful than a standard human, while an ancient and powerful mage might strike fear into an entire region.

The reason for all of this lay in how the plants of a mage’s Grove gave them power. Imagination and willpower were the watchwords of a Nameless Garden mage. For example, one day I was explaining mobile phones, the internet, and coding to Esra, and she almost immediately took me to a particular flowerbed she had set up.

“This is a mage’s true power, Rynadria— their Grove. More importantly however, it is the plants within the Grove that give us our spells and abilities,” she explained, leaning down to give one of the plants a gentle examination. “Each species represents the instructions for a spell, like this ‘code’ you mentioned. We funnel the raw energy of our Grove through the instructions written into the physiology of the species, and we get a defined result. This species here is one I developed myself, although I know of several others that perform a similar function, that of far-seeing.”

“Oh, that’s cool,” I said, genuinely interested now. “Why are there so many, though? Surely if you have one plant then you don’t need a bunch of others. Are they backups?”

“They are backups, yes, if one dies while you are out in the world, you will have more to fall back on. Far more importantly though it increases the total amount of magic you may channel into a given spell. Too much magical energy and too few plants to conduct it, and you will burn them out,” she explained arching her back in a joint popping stretch.

We paused for a moment as one of Esra’s Grove tenders wandered past. It turns out that the plant creature we’d seen near the magefruit had actually been one of these things. In order to keep a Grove functioning while the mage was off in the real world, they created tenders, creatures that were both physical beings, and an extension of a mage’s Grove. Their purpose was to take care of the plants, or in other words, to tend them. Why the one who’d stopped Grace had done so, neither of us knew for sure, but Esra believed it might be tender-decay— a phenomenon that occurred when a tender was separated from the Nameless Garden for too long.

“How do you think up the plants?” I asked as the tender ambled away, content to do what it was created for.

“That is a complicated and time consuming process that I will have to begin teaching you. Which… may as well be now, so listen well,” she told me curtly, seemingly frustrated by something again. Oh dear.

Creating plants, it turned out, required me to first create my own Grove, and for that, Esra had plans. Elaborate plans. Plans that required an entire month of preparation on Esra’s part, during which I got very antsy. It felt like I was making no progress at all towards becoming a real mage or getting back to my friends.

“Imagine the Nameless Garden as an ocean, and our Groves as merely islands of order floating in those waters. What we will do now is dive into those waters, slowly at first, and I mean that this time, I don’t want to have to fish you out by the scruff of your neck,” she told me gruffly, although by this point it was mostly for show. I knew she had a little soft spot for me.

“Right, and we’re going to go really far out into that ocean using that crazy spell you’ve been working on for the last month,” I said tiredly, if Esra had a flaw, it was repeating things over and over until my brain screamed for respite. I guess it also served to hammer the information home, but my memory wasn’t one of those that required this style of teaching.

“Indeed, and why are we doing this again?” she asked, prompting me to reply with the answer yet again. After this I was never going back to college.

“We’re going out really far into the unknown regions of the Nameless Garden because mages can swim to each other’s islands and break things there, weakening that mage in the real world. You want to spare me from all the infighting by hiding me out in the middle of nowhere. It also gives me space to expand,” I replied in a bored tone.

I’d been studying the history of inter-mage conflicts for a week now and my god were they a petty lot. It was basically gang warfare in the Nameless Garden, groups of them banding together and then hitting each other’s Groves in drivebys and shit.

Esra had been involved in a powerful block of mages who’d been intent on mutual protection, basically putting up such a strong defence of their Groves that they didn’t need to worry about attacks. Their group, or coven, had all come crumbling down when they had been targeted back in the real world. One by one they had been assassinated or driven into hiding, until Esra too had been forced to vanish.

“Good, then are you ready?” Esra prompted, reaching out with a soft, wrinkled hand for mine.

“Yeah,” I nodded, a smile creeping onto my face. I was so ready.

Together, we felt for the edges of her Grove with our minds and power, gently prying the seams open to allow ourselves passage. There was a rush of vertigo as up and down ceased to be and the tranquil garden of her realm was replaced by a far more wild scene. A strange void spread out in every direction, unusual fractal plants forming, growing and twisting in every direction, before they abruptly withered and died.

It was like an endless zero gravity jungle was constantly forming and then dying over and over around us, never content with its shape and structure, always looking to twist itself into something new and interesting.

Esra and I floated there in that void, hair drifting aimlessly with the absence of gravity. She squeezed my hand to get my attention, and I looked over to see her nod back behind us.

When I followed her gaze I found myself looking back into her Grove, the surface translucent and smooth with swirling colours. It was absolutely beautiful. On the outside it seemed spherical, even if on the inside it was not, as though Esra had taken that spherical space and warped it into the one she needed.

Before I’d had time to properly appreciate her Grove from the outside, we were moving away at speed. Esra’s spell was one that propelled us through the Nameless Garden far faster than any mage could normally achieve.

When I’d asked why another mage couldn’t just create the same spell, she’d simply shrugged and said that they could, but the farther we went, the harder it would be to find me anyway. Most mages simply opted to stay within what was known as the Losi Fertile Zone. An area of the Garden where magic was dense and easily utilised by mages and their Groves. Sort of like how everyone liked to hang around an oasis because there was a lot of water, but you could still survive out in the desert if you knew how.

Except Esra had a plan here too… because she’d discovered another oasis, another Fertile Zone. It wasn’t nearly as large as the Losi one, but what it lacked in size it made up for in safety. It was so far away that only someone who knew where it lay or was extremely lucky would find it. Esra had found it with that same luck one day, aimlessly exploring at regular speed for days at a time.

Ever-forming plants flashed by as we sped through the Garden, flickering past at a speed almost too fast for my eyes to lock onto any single one. I saw a few more Groves along the way too, shining orbs in the distance. Some of them were huge, far larger than Esra’s, and that kinda scared me. Who were the mages that those belonged to?

Eventually we left them all behind— our journey taking us onwards into the endless expanse of changing vegetation. Towards the site of my future Grove!