SAGN: Chapter 11- The Devouring Rose free porn video

Chapter 11 The Devouring Rose Phar' Naqua, in the aether: Day 12, 0400 hours She could smell the dawn approaching. It was like a faint tickle that played tag with her senses; it was almost dancing there on the edge of her awareness taunting her. If she had someone to describe it to she might say that in some ways it was almost like the mental equivalent of smelling an iron pan on a stove slowly growing hotter with nothing inside it. Just as with the slowly heating pan the smell of dawn increased as the heat that rolled with the line of approaching sunlight was concentrated and began radiating towards her. Of all of the things that hand fallen into place and now made up her existence since her mind had stabilized. Of all the things that she had grasped about who she was now, this was one of the most unexpected aspects of who she had become. And of all the sensations that she might have expected to experience being entranced by this experience was not one she would have considered; it left her enraptured almost. For a day and a night now she had been perched unmoving on one of the high branches of her elm lost in what was around her. Doing nothing except absorbing the sensations streaming to her, relayed from all parts of the Grove around her. And each moment that she did she could feel her connection deepening. Even if she wanted to she couldn't have turned away from what was bathing her. She felt submerged in experience and she couldn't tear herself away from it. When she had first ascended into the higher branches, M'Tehr had initially tried to get her to return to the physical world briefly. Selicia may have been lost in the feeling of timelessness but that did not mean that when she had been absent for a long enough time that she and Jacen did not wonder what it was that was delaying the Arath' Mahar's return. It was inevitable that she would enter the aether seeking after her and it was inevitable that she would keep seeking until she found her. When she became aware of her and what she was doing, Selicia would have thought that the very first place that M'Tehr would have looked for her would have been the king elm that was Selicia's Phar' Ador. But that instead was the one place that she almost avoided looking most of all. It was if that was the one place that she could not bring herself to stare at and study for more than a moment or two before her gaze shifted elsewhere. And as she looked and continued to not find her, she could hear the faint echo of the call that M'Tehr was sending in her direction. There was a flavor to that as well that hadn't been there before she had linked with the Grove. If there was a word that came close to expressing it she supposed that it would be that she was shrinking from speaking with her. She was shrinking from doing this but her need to do so was driving her toward her anyway. For most of the time that she was seeking her she can confined her efforts to criss crossing the walled enclave of the Grove itself; sometimes dipping into the aether, but mostly not. Selicia had watched her as she searched through the ever changing scene of the woodlands spreading out below her. M'Tehr was calling for her but Selicia would not answer; there was much more for her mind to ponder at the moment. And ever since her broadcast vision she felt less and less bound to answer right away when the hamadryad called out to her. She could have ended M'Tehr's search quickly enough she supposed. She could have called her to her side and then returned to her contemplation in silence but there was something that she had to look for inside of herself. She was close to it and if she turned her attention away from whatever it was, it was sure to slip away like a morning mist and evaporate without her finding what it was or what it could mean for her. She was close to whatever it was, she knew that much and even with M'Tehr calling for her it was not enough to break her concentration inward. In the brief moments that her call grew more insistent she did allow that M'Tehr should have known better. It was obvious that she was close by Selicia thought to herself. M'Tehr's own connection to the Grove, even if it was only forged through her temporary Phar' Ador, would tell her that Selicia was still within the confines of the Grove itself. She would know that Selicia was neither in danger nor had she left, but whatever it was that made her seek out Selicia drove her to continue her search. Recognition of what it was that she was looking for bloomed in Selicia's mind and with that recognition came and understanding of what it was that had drawn her into the upper branches of the elm and into herself. In retrospect, it should have been obvious once she had recognized it, but like any epiphany it was only so once it had manifested and not a moment before. When M'Tehr circled back again and entered the great clearing that surrounded the king elm Selicia reached out and beckoned to her with her thoughts. She was immediately rewarded with M'Tehr's feeling of deep relief that Selicia's silence was finally broken. And when she looked upward and glimpsed her resting on the branch overhead the wave of relief coming from her was almost palpable. When M'Tehr pleaded with her to return to the physical world for a time Selicia had no choice but to refuse. Her meditations had laid out a task that she could not ignore now that she knew its importance to what she was becoming and she told M'Tehr so without using any words. Unlike before she could feel how unnecessary words or even thoughts were for something like this. They were unneeded; the broadcast state of emotion that Selicia directed to her silenced M'Tehr's plea even as it reassured her that all was well. This was utterly new to her and it had only manifested after she had linked them all, but since she had taken that step the idea of using the depths of her emotions like words that spoke not in syllables, but in sensations seemed perfectly natural and tidier in its own fashion. The idea of doing this at all had sprung as a concept full grown in her mind and though it was new to her it was still complete in ways that words could never convey. Even the shared mind of the Grove was almost clumsy in comparison to what she used now to communicate her desire and her need to the hamadryad looking up at her. M'Tehr's head visibly lurched back from the impact of the transmitted emotion and she slowly blinked as she absorbed it. It must have had a greater impact on her than Selicia could have imagined for her to make such a humanlike response, but M'Tehr coped with it well enough. She looked upward at Selicia for a long moment and then she bowed her head in acknowledgement before slipping away to leaving her in peace. Selicia exhaled slowly and closed her eyes and turned back inward to resume her contemplations without further disturbance. There was just so much that she needed to consider, especially now that she had chosen Phar' Naqua as the name that would embody its identity. She hadn't understood when she was doing it why such a small thing would have the significance that it did, but M'Tehr had been correct; choosing the name that would make the Grove unique and distinct from what was around it had been much more important than Selicia realized it could be. Suspended on the branch of her elm as she floated in the aether she could feel the difference it was making already in the land around her. There was an immediate change that she could sense that was already infusing the Grove in a palpable way. Even lost in such a small thing as smelling the approaching dawn she could taste the difference in the area surrounding her new home afterward and although she was not certain, she was sure that those who were sensitive to it among the men gathered around her home probably sensed the change in the Grove's nature as well. She supposed that if she wished she could have asked M'Tehr about this change, but as much as she might have wished otherwise it wasn't something that she was sure that she could share with either M'Tehr or Jacen. They had always been Fae and had no other frame of reference, she didn't think that either of them would understand how someone like her; someone who had once been human before a rebirth like this, was experiencing these sensations now. She pitied them in her own way that they would not be capable of grasping what it was that she was suffused with as each slow minute brought the day's light closer. Should she even try to tell them she asked herself when she first recognized what it was that she was experiencing and in her inner voice she answered her own question before it was even finished forming. The answer was of course no, they would not grasp it and would only see the surface that their understanding could ken. What she was doing at the moment was a perfect example of that state of being. It might appear to others that she was only crouched on one of the larger upper branches of her elm, but it was hardly just that. There was more to what she was doing than even a Fae observer could discern if one happened to be watching her right now. There was so much that demanded her attention that she was finding it hard, even with the enhancement that she recognized as being part and parcel of her change, to help her cope with it all. She was one with it. All parts of the expanding Grove around her were part of who she was. She was the land and the land was her. And not only the land that the Grove presently occupied, but the land around this small spit of wildwood that would in time also be part of her home. It was already far greater in size than any of those gathered here suspected and it was still stretching invisible tendrils around her in all directions laying claim to what was to be. What was to be and what was mingled together and her spirit laughed with the joy of it that was unlocked in the slowly awakening land around her. It was a heady feeling, and to one who had been a mortal man only a short time before it was also a wave suffusing and drowning her. The sensations were wave and breaker and undertow and all of them were pulling her in every direction all at once now that she was no longer directionless. That was why this was necessary. It was why she needed this time to turn inward. To ground herself and finish seeking her center. To look deep into the well of her own soul, and then drink deeply of the draft she found there and understand who she was completely. She couldn't do that outside of the aether. There were too many other things that were competing for her attention now that who and what she was had been finally understood by the others. The shock of the revelation was slowly fading and with its absence other things were rising that were as distracting to her in their own way as the indifference to what she was telling them before had been in its turn. Before they had listened to her with only a surface attention like that you would pay to a child that was filling the air with meaningless babble as they struggled to say their first few words. That was no longer the case, now she had their complete attention. So much so that she could feel them trying to assign deeper meaning to even the most trivial things that she did or said. From being almost an object of pity in her own way she had been elevated beyond her understanding and it was reflected in how she was treated. It was most immediately apparent in the change in attitude that she had noted from M'Tehr and Jacen after she had drawn their minds into her own. Before she had made the decision to draw them into her mind so they could see what she had experienced when she was created, without the filter of her words muddying the idea of it standing between them, both of them had treated her in a very different way. She could say that much about it and not be speaking of either of them in any negative fashion for they had treated her well. Much of the time though being treated well by them meant their handling of her was more akin to the kindness shown to an ill, befuddled relative that you humored from time to time; firm, but not in any way harsh or inconsiderate. But when she began to regain her sense of self, when she faced what had happened to her after she emerged from the fogbank of innocence that had fallen over her mind, other things began to stand out to her amidst the awareness that was slowly being revealed by the tide of ignorance that was now receding. Things done for her such as their kindness. The kindness freely given by them to support her in her innocence; kindness meant to comfort even as it smothered her and held her back. Innocence was a strange word to choose she thought to herself, but it really was the best one she could think of she eventually decided. Innocent was what she had been during the time between now and when she collapsed after dueling with the dark man that last time she faced him. Everything that happened in between those two states was a pure a state of innocence as any she could ever hope to contemplate or experience ever again. No matter what her actions had been after the elm drew her back inside itself once the dark man had fled, with no mind to guide them there was no concept of good or evil present in her afterward. And if she really had thought about it before as she emerged from the blankness the way she was doing now, then she would have realized that was the purest form of innocence. In that respect she was little different than Adam or Eve had been before the fall; she had the same absence of even understanding that such a thing as good or evil or anything in between even existed at all. As her mind began to heal though, one of the first things that she recalled and comprehended was that kindness they had both shown her. At first she let it support her as she groped her way mentally back to some semblance of understanding, but the kindness could not remain what it was for her as she did that. Somewhere along the way, from innocence to becoming herself, the kindness changed as well. It went from supporting to stifling or at least that is what she felt it become as the pieces of her mind began to interlock and mesh and finally begin to become clearer to her. She felt like she was being humored and that they had the belief inside of them that before long she would wake up from her delusion and recognize what they already knew was what was true and it was not what she knew it to be. They didn't have that view of her any longer she realized. In an instant it seemed they had made the leap from humoring her to standing at a distance from her trembling in the glare of the knowledge her actions had brought to them. The kindness died in that moment and the reverence began and in its own way the reverence was more stifling as the kindness had been. A wall of rules governing how they viewed her and interacted with her rose between them like mountain thrust upward from the clashing tectonic plates below them and each moment since then it had loomed between them higher and more impassable. In a way, now that it was gone, she wished that the kindness had remained. That at least was comprehensible to her. When she was human she hadn't existed bound by such a rigid hierarchy that compelled her to pay attention to its demands; but clearly the dryad race and their satyr companions did and although she didn't fully understand it yet, apparently she was at the top of it. Both of them had made that abundantly clear to her in the reverent level of deference that they unhesitatingly displayed to her since she had emerged from her elm after sharing her mind and memories with them all. Although she had been struggling to adapt every moment of her existence once her mind had emerged from her nature it had been in no way easy for her to do so and as much as both of them helped her they were at the same time not helping. For a time it felt like moment by moment she was being shaped by unseen hands. Hands that were settling her into the role others expected her to play and at the same time she was finding that it was becoming less a role to be played and rather something they expected her to embrace. Her whole being was in some sort of flux she realized and there were influences acting on her that she was not wholly aware of the entire time and it had not ended, her actions had only changed the direction of those influences. The longer those influences shaped her the more she became aware of; subtleties that hadn't been there before. If she were to have gone ahead and accepted them at face value and not shared herself, she might indeed have settled into what it was that the Grove network expected her to be and maybe there would be less internal conflict with who she had been before if she had done that. Perhaps that was something the aether did when someone like her came into existence. She didn't really know and she was certain that no one else did either. She supposed that if the aether was the world's mind and spirit the way that M'Tehr believed it to be, that it was possible that it would reach out to her in some way to smooth her path, but she couldn't be sure that was so. But there was a problem with accepting that. Something that she hadn't considered before gaining herself and realizing that she was being molded in both overt and subtle ways as they brought her back into balance. It was probably because her mind was not intact enough to recognize it and she was under the stress of her own childlike need to measure up to what others who knew more about what was now expected of her as well. It would have been easy for her to succumb to the unintentional pressure that M'Tehr and the rest of the Grove were exerting on her as she recovered. And the one thing was that she was certain of was that there was no malevolence in them as they did so. They were not even aware that what they were even doing was not what she needed from them. That was the sad thing about it. And in its own way it was working at first; she had been an empty vessel in the beginning. One that they were shaping according to what they saw rather than what was there. The problem with that approach was that there was never any chance that it would be successful once her mind began to emerge. And now that she had access to her full awareness that would have been a greater crime that would be committed against her than the ones that already had been visited upon her physical body. She was who she was and not who they thought she should be even if it was tempting for her to embrace the path they had blazed for her. It would have been easy for her to do that. It would have been simpler to embrace their idea of her and it would have been just as wrong. If she were to have done that, if she were to accept what they were unconsciously making out of her, then it was only a difference of degree between what they were doing to her being and what the shadowy man had attempted to do to her in his own way. Both of them had strove to shape her, each using their own methods, for their own reasons. They had placed pressure on her to become something other than what she was and worse yet, she didn't know what that would be and that left her in the position of someone trying to walk on ground that was not only constantly moving beneath her feet, but also having that same ground threatening to swallow her whole with every step. If there was one thing she was certain of now it was that she was going to be have to be the one to determine what her next steps were going to be. But to do so she needed to understand what those steps should be. That was the epiphany that had bloomed in her mind. That she couldn't do that while M'Tehr was hovering around her and especially not now when she was so filled with the militant deference that she practically radiated toward Selicia whenever they were together now. There were constraints lurking in the shadows along that path as well; she was certain of that and before she committed herself to traveling down it she needed to do this one thing first. She needed to know herself and to do that she had to be alone. She let go of the anchor that kept her here and the holding pattern that the world around her was locked into faded from her vision and resumed cycling through the memories and speculations of the land around her. Where she was perched on a thick upper branch of her Phar' Ador she watched as the forest thickened and then shifted to sparse trees and then to drifting sands and back again. It wasn't surprising that M'Tehr had not seen her high in the branches overhead. It wasn't as if she had reached where she was by something as crude as scaling the outside of her elm as she might have when she was a boy. To get where she was now without being seen was such a trivial thing, she was surprised in her own that that M'Tehr had not thought of that first when she began to search for her. All she had done was will herself to simply travel up the interior of her trunk until she was midway up the height of the king elm and then she emerged where she could look down in solitude on the land spreading out below her. She thought that if she were able to do that it might help her to think things through, but she was wrong about that approach. She couldn't escape herself when she was trying to recognize herself and sitting still wasn't in her nature now any more than it was before. That also was part of her epiphany. Trying to be something she was not wasn't going to give her any insight into what it was that she needed to understand to be herself. She was capable of greater levels of concentration, that much was true, but in the end she wasn't someone who could sit still and focus inward until they attained the enlightenment she was seeking. That had never been her even when she was a human and that part of her nature had carried over when she became dryad. What she really wanted to do was to go to her favorite flea market and vanish into the crowd. To lose herself in the swell of humanity and be alone with everyone at arm's length for a time. She needed movement. Movement helped her to think and it wasn't just any kind of movement. It had to be done in a certain way; done so that while she was alone with her thoughts, the ideas would flow and connections would be made without distraction. A condition that had become more difficult to attain since she had opened her mind to M'Tehr and by extension the entire population of dryads around the world as well. The good thing was that she didn't have the compulsive need to join with her sisters that M'Tehr apparently did and she could still separate her own thoughts from them. There was something important about that and she knew that if she was just able to focus on it she could probably recognize just what it might be. But for now it was more important to leave them all behind for the moment. She concentrated on where she was and slipped into the deeper aether and into herself. The effect was immediate. One moment she was there in the between that hovered barely separating the two worlds and the next she was completely in the aether and the only difference between the two worlds at the moment was the silence of the aethereal world around her. That was one thing that she had started to finally grow comfortable with she thought with growing satisfaction. When she was Cecil and first exploring this plane of reality, the silence of the world around her had been unnerving to him on a very basic level. Now it was swiftly becoming a welcome refuge for her. She stepped down from the branch and felt steps of wood and earth rise up to greet her. That was something new as well. Here in the aether her connection to the land and the living things that made up the body of the Grove was, if anything, even stronger than it was when it manifested in the other world. And her connection with it was knitting together ever tighter with each passing moment. She descended to the forest floor and began to wander away from her elm with no intention of doing anything other than moving aimlessly around within the confines of her domain. The questions that she had for herself about how a Grove mark was created and about the rose pattern marking her left wrist; a pattern that clearly wasn't that mark, seemed less important to her now than they had been moments ago. After she had broached the topic with M'Tehr, that effort to understand that part of herself must have seemed to them both to have become Selicia's main concern. It excluded all other demands and had dominated her focus until her need to dig that part of who she was to be out of her understanding became even stronger. It raged inside of her and then broke like a fever and when it did so she laid the burden aside. The compulsion she felt before she did so was frightening in its focus and for a brief moment she understood why a person with obsessive compulsive disorder would wash their hands a hundred times even though the effort left the skin cracked and bleeding in its wake. She would still be doing so she thought if it weren't for another compulsion that had supplanted that one. From the moment she had set things in motion by speaking Phar' Naqua's name she felt a driving pressure welling up inside her to complete what she had started, as if she had broken into the hidden aquifer swirling below her and having done so could not stem the water that gushed out of the earth like blood pouring from a mortal wound. But as demanding as that compulsion was there was another one that was warring with it and that one had bid her to step away from that insistent demand to solve what it was that her nature truly was. In a way her nature was warring with her nature right now and for a moment this part of her had the upper hand. That was part of the need she felt to focus her attention of what was gestating inside of her and now that she realize it this need was stronger than the other that animated her. Even with her attention redirected what she was doing brought home to her that there were bigger things that she needed to do and she still wasn't sure just what those things were. Her path was branching and both roads needed to be traveled at the same time for both compulsions to be satisfied enough to leave her be. Or maybe that wasn't it either. The problem with that was that while both demands were clamoring for her to follow them, for some reason the former just felt less urgent to her than the latter. The other urgency building inside of her was quiet at first but now as she was becoming more aware of just what that was, it slowly drowned out all of her other needs. Trying to grasp what it was that was being demanded of her had driven her into the upper regions of her elm in the first place. In the silence of the elm's upper branches she stilled herself and listened and in listening she felt confusion coalesce into understanding. The sister lodged within her was what had made her hyper focus jump it's track and in doing so it left her mind sputtering as it tried to do what was necessary to satisfy both needs at once. There was nothing bad meant by her doing so, it was just that her daughter was reaching out to her to make Selicia aware that it was almost time for her to separate her form from the place deep inside of Selicia where she had nestled since she was formed. Selicia's foot sank into the forest duff as she stepped off of the last riser of the staircase that the Grove had raised for her to descend. As the leaves swirled around her bare ankles she could only think about today. Today was going to be the last day that they would be linked to her sister in this fashion and realizing it was distracting to Selicia in ways that she could not have comprehended before now. Selicia walked silently in the darkness that swaddled the Grove and drew it close to her; it felt as if she were drawing it in tighter around her with each step that she took and that was as it should be. The darkness was as natural for her now as sunlight had been before; it was a part of her as much as the earth beneath her feet was. A black velvet shroud that swaddled her and cloaked her movement leaving only the faint, furtive sounds of nocturnal creatures moving just out of the range of even her enhanced vision. Those creatures were her only company at the moment. But still she was not able to enjoy the solitude of her passage as she passed through the thick undergrowth that spread out from the pillars that were the tree trunks around her. Her feet passed whisper silent through the forest duff that lay thick on the earth and left no trace of her passage in her wake. As she walked she contemplated the steadily growing unease she had felt tonight and over the preceding days. As that sensation grew she found it intolerable to be around any of the others for any length of time and that feeling had only grown until just now. At first what she had been feeling over the last few days was nothing more than a slowly growing presence in the back of her mind until it wasn't. Right now that feeling had compelled her to seek refuge in the forest depths away from any of the others who shared the Grove with her for now. The hard thing about how she felt before now was her inability to nail down why it was that she felt this way at all. She kept thinking that tonight was different is some way and as the feeling grew greater within her mind she finally recognized part of the feeling for what it was; her own frustration over not being able to adequately pin down the true source of this growing sensation. It was the same feeling she had felt when Cecil had locked his attention into hunter mode as he chased down a string of poorly written code that was twisting in the wind and bollocking up its small part of whatever project he was immersed in. The fact that she recognized the essence of this feeling did little good though. If it could have then she would have not felt the way she did now. She wasn't certain of the source of this uneasy sensation that was rising around her and although her compulsion to enter the deeper forest had brought her this far it had still not alleviated that sensation in the slightest. Maybe it was the silence from the trees around her that was contributing to her sense of unease as well she considered. She may be bonded with the king elm that formed the centre of this part of Stafford, but she was still part of the entire Grove and the longer she walked in this recast form the more she could recognize and appreciate the faint whispers that they offered to her in a shy awkward form of tribute. It was new to them as well and their silence now as she passed among them was unnerving, as if they were restraining themselves from speaking to her for some reasons of their own. As she moved through the undergrowth that was clustered thickly just in front of her footsteps she pushed the feeling down and let her feet take her where they willed. She doubted that anyone of the cluster of humans gathered around the Grove's perimeter would be able to see her as she made her way across the Grove itself. She had no doubt that they would have the latest in night vision and movement detection gear and at another time and place she would have found her interest piqued and she would have been eager to examine those technological things to satisfy her curiosity just for its own sake. But even with that technological advantage she doubted that they would have much of a chance of seeing her right now. Some deep part of her knew that, if they could see in the aether at all, any who looked in her direction just now would only see a darker shadow drifting in a pillar of silence through the sighing, shifting burbling sounds of the physical worlds that competed with each other and that had come to embody the majority of the voices of the night within the Grove's narrow confines. It wasn't the first time she had walked about in this fashion. Indeed she was now doing so constantly; mostly at night in and out of the aether at will when she could move without observation and almost as much in the day itself. She couldn't remain still. It wasn't in her anymore. She was like a shark she supposed, but unlike that particular creature if she stopped moving she was fairly certain that she would not die but still she had no inclination to find out. Ever since she had emerged from the madness her nature imposed on her, she had found herself taking greater pleasure in simple actions like this. It wasn't that she hadn't found pleasure before in indulging an action as simple as a nighttime walk. It was that now that she was changed into something more it was a different experience for her. When she was Cecil, she had enjoyed slipping down at odd hours to drift through the shady woods overhanging the river walk before it was stripped bare of that comfort by the man developing the condos facing the river. With the way her life was structured before such a simple thing was easy enough to manage when she had been moved to do so. It was the change in how she perceived what she was doing now that spoke more deeply to her she told herself. Before when she slipped away and immersed herself in what little wildwood remained within the city limits, she had just been a passing presence; a visitor at best but always an intruder. The first time she stepped from her elm into the nighted wood of the Grove around her had driven that difference home to her in ways that she had not even thought to consider before. When she had ventured to walk among the carefully corralled and managed substitutes for wildwood that the city allowed to remain within its borders, there had always been that moment that came to her. That moment when something deep inside of her reminded her that even though she might feel like she had all the right in the world to be there, that was just the failure of vision she had always possessed as part her heritage as a human. As far as the life that was scattered in its nooks and crannies around her was concerned she was nothing more than an intruder. That unconscious realization had saddened her when she was Cecil. The idea that theirs was a separation that was not only irrevocable, but that it was something done long before she ever walked with the earth beneath her bare feet saddened the man she had been. Knowing that though didn't stop Cecil from going back again and again to the tamed wooded areas that the city allowed to remain though. He may have been separated on the deepest levels from this part of the world around him, but it still drew him back to it. It was only when she walked in the Grove after her mind returned that she realized how thoroughly her former people forfeited the connection they once had with places like this. And how long ago that separation must have taken place when it only left a faint trace of its absence to exist as a faint longing on the consciousness of the few who sensed it. It had been an exhilarating and depressing part of the whirlwind of sensation that had buffeted her mentally when she began to emerge at last and the depth of the connection she had now was as a harsh halogen glare revealing completely the relationship that had been given up in favor of the one that her forebears had forged for themselves and all who sprang from them. It was intoxicating. Having stood on both sides of the divide she was acutely aware of that now in ways that she had scarcely suspected before. And by being aware of it, the loss that had gnawed at her before in the dim nearly unconscious fashion that she was not mentally equipped to recognize then was close hauled to her chest now and could not be ignored either. The time is out of joint, she thought, and cursed spite that ever I was born to put it right. The quote floated in her thoughts and she still didn't know where she had read it before, but it wasn't until now that she truly grasped the power of the idea that those words represented. Such an understanding of the contrast between the two states of being was just not possible to for her to convey to another. It was as if she had lived her entire existence in a world without sight or sound or smell or even touch and had all of those things thrust on her all at once; it just could not be explained to either M'Tehr or any of the humans that she had known before or met since her change. She stood apart from both of the halves of her being. Her dryad nature represented by M'Tehr would not comprehend it because she had always been part and parcel of what Selicia was now enveloped in and thus was not equipped to notice or explain it and the humans that she sprang from who were less likely to understand what she might say if she ever even found the words to express it to them. For them to comprehend what it was that she understood now would be akin to a blind person gaining full sight and striving to explain what sight was to those still blind. Even trying to do so would be a wasted effort; she was hobbled by what she knew and sick with the experience of it. The fact that she had stood on both sides of the divide meant nothing as far as being helpful to her in bridging the gap. It was just too wide for that already. Regardless of how the humans around her Grove viewed it, there was no returning to that path now that it was smoothed and paved and sculpted. Something new would have to be forged and to her regret she realized that her hands would have to be the ones to do so. A new bridge must be built between them, one long enough to cross the chasm and strong enough to stand until the two were knitted together once again. But the two worlds were so far from each other already. The one built by men especially so. What it was and what it had come to be was something that was altered beyond restoration. Altered and recast into something more pleasing to Cecil's former kind than to those who defiantly remained there in spite of what was done to their home for the convenience of men. But it could not remain so and survive. She felt the impending avalanche of the blooming looming over her like a falling star. When it fell it would be like a sledgehammer crushing an egg if things remained as they were. She knew the future and she trembled. She was as much Cassandra now as the woman that Homer had immortalized. And only now could she begin to grasp the depths of the curse laid on the ancient Trojan seer and like her she could only see what was coming with means inadequate to stop it, but unlike Cassandra she could do more than warn and even then that might not be enough when the moment came. Thinking on it as she walked now she realized that was part of her disquiet. The fear of what was coming and not knowing if there was anything she could do to mitigate it, in even the small way she had at hand. Before, when she had sensed that she was intruding, when she was Cecil, she had known something was wrong but even then, if she hadn't possessed the awareness of just what it was that she was interjecting her presence into, at least she was aware of the lack of what she knew. The woods were telling her then that it was so even if she was only faintly aware of it happening. Even something as solid and seemingly immobile as the forest around her had ways of communicating that much when she had been Cecil Barnes. Sometimes it would be something as small and simple as the silence that immediately fell as she drew too close to one of the denizens that resided there in that patch of wilderness that had been cut and coiffed so it was more presentable to visitors like she had been. Sometimes it would be more than that. When the whisper of the suggestion penetrated her human past's self-absorption it left a disquiet that hovered unexplained to her in the recess of her awareness. She had never considered that what she was doing then was an imposition rather than simply passing through and enjoying the same space as those she walked among. It was a nagging feeling that she was the one that was out of place and out of step in some deep fundamental way that she had now recognized and regretted. And even knowing that lack of connection and what it meant in regard to what was cresting did little to aid her in explaining it to others. It was a nothing that was just too big to speak of and nothing like what she experienced now. Her connection as Selicia was absolute if she wished it so and it made her weep to dwell on it if she let herself do so. The nocturnal creatures around her from the smallest insect to the small creatures of wood and wing felt her approach and welcomed her rather than falling silent in the hope that she would pass them by, leaving them unnoticed as they quivered in silence and waited for her to pass far enough away from where they were crouched. That was the real difference; the connection that was part of her and bound her to the Grove as part of whom and what she was. But even now there were still some things that reminded her that her past and her present were still not fully untangled from each other. The wall the men had set in place after they realized what was happening still remained and she could feel the restriction it imposed on her enforced by the cold iron running deep within in its core. But that wall would not remain in place for much longer thankfully. The men were already dismantling it, if less swiftly then they had erected it, but dismantling it just the same. She shuddered as she approached it, feeling the depth of what was contained within its core. It lay like a hot knife held fast against the flesh of her world and if it were not for her own self-restraint binding her; she would have moved to break it. If it had been allowed to remain in place girding her world and confining it much longer she would already have done so, but that was no longer something that she needed to consider doing. The wall surrounding her domain and the hostility radiating inward toward the Grove was finally lessening as it was slowly dismantled by the men who had placed it there. It was a good sensation, as she experienced those things now, to feel the hot prickly hostility of the metal becoming weaker as the circle cast around her like a noose that was broken. It was a feeling that she had never experienced until now. An absence of the neutrality that the metal held in regard to those that had shaped it and poured its present form from the raw ore it had been wrested from. Iron was not something that she was used to feeling hostility from and that was the only way that she could describe it now that indifference had become opposition. A deep antagonism that was rooted all the way back to their beginning loomed larger now in her existence in ways that it never had before. It was an unexpected consideration. One that she hadn't realized was even there at all. It was a transition that she did not expect to find and it was difficult to grasp when she understood that cold iron was hostile to her now. It was no longer her tool or building block or even a piece of the larger whole that she could accept and ignore because it was so ubiquitous. It was always glaring at her in its own baleful way now. Making certain that she knew down to her core that regardless of what had passed between them before when she was a mortal man, that time was over and there was malevolence about how it and she would interact with each other from now on. Something much more hostile in a way she had never suspected could ever exist. Her weird had recast her from its master to an enemy of the metal that had been so thoroughly integrated in her life before now. There was a true hate lodged there as well. Something basic and primal on a level she had never suspected existed before as Cecil. And walking in and out of the aether surrounded by the Grove her presence had resurrected, she thought she was starting to understand how deeply the foundation of that hostility was rooted. It was the earth itself that was their common foundation. That was what divided them so irrevocably and that was one of the things she was struggling to understand; how the common link between them, the earth they both came from, was also the chasm that separated them. Iron was something that was from and of the earth itself. Something that was connected to the soil under her feet in ways that she could never be until what she was before was changed down to the last particle of her being. Her change wrought a series of new connections in her as it burnt the old ones to cinders and brought with it as well an enmity that burned hot and fresh between them like a newly kindled bonfire. Whatever connection she might have possessed before the shadowy man's hands had warped her and set her feet on this path was erased. Whatever it had been before had depended on what was forged by other hands. What she had now she had forged out of herself. It was her own doing in the end of it and it was her decision alone how she would proceed. For now it was her burden to bear alone, but even though she would share it soon with those of her line, but it still remained hers first. Worst of all was the thought that those that came from that line may well be like M'Tehr and the other sisters of the Grove; they would be as blind in their own way as she had been before. But there was nothing to be done for it. Time would smooth the way and those that came from her would have their own path even if it was not entirely hers. As she moved through the trees that were part of her now and pondered the enmity that cold iron had for her she realized that those trees were also a part of what stood between them. The living lungs of the earth's surface that cleansed the air and the soil in turn and to iron; she and those she was part of now were nothing more than a victorious invader. Iron had been at war with her kind even before they finished forming in the aether. Even then, countless millennia ago it was as if iron knew they were fated to be enemies. The deep parts of the earth remembered. She only thought the trees of her Grove remembered deeply, but now that she was pulling fragments of information from every direction. All was one and her mind was racing and making connections that others wouldn't have been able to make and she beginning to see clearly why it was so. The iron remembered how things had been before. It held in its being the memory of what it was like before the first plants began to evolve beneath the raw skies of a world already old. It remembered when that world was lava and fire under smoke blackened skies and when the slime that was the forerunner of the trees she was bound to first appeared. Creeping, clinging and spewing the toxic oxygen they naturally produced wherever they took root. Each year slowly filling the air with the new gas the expanding greenery exhaled in ever increasing quantities. A gas that drifted and swelled and combined into the water that the plants needed, altering the shape of the world around the grasses and later trees that spewed it as they formed a new atmosphere out of the corpse of the old one. The iron remembered that the source of that gas drove their roots ever deeper into the earth's flesh then and still did so today. It remembered the feel of the roots that grew and crept into the cracks and crevices that the water made for them. Water that hadn't existed in such great quantities before the expanding swath of plant-life increased its surface amount geometrically. Water that was drawn from the oxygen the trees produced. Water that they drew on in turn for their own existence. Water that increased and evaporated and rose and cooled and condensed and fell and ate away again at what was beneath it wherever the winds pushed the newly formed clouds that held the vital liquid that the new life needed. Water that lodged there and once lodged made inroads that the roots exploited as they crushed the rock and forced it further apart until it shattered and split; crumbling into ever smaller pieces until all that remained was the pulverized remnants of the stone they had broken into more soil to serve as a greater platform of attack on the world as it was. Of course iron hated her kind. It hated all who were spawned out of the long ago conversion of the world from what it had been to what it was now; a land covered in greenery always advancing and conquering. It had hated her when she was a mortal man and now that she was Fae she could feel the enmity it had for her kind and her eyes and fingers could see and feel the manifestation of that loathing clearly where before she was incapable of doing so. It had a hot harsh prickling sensation that varied according to just how much iron was present she mused. But no matter how it reacted to her, no matter how deep it's hatred of those that had displaced remained undimmed; its power was still not absolute. Not any longer. The nails and the fittings in what had been her home before existed in greater amounts than she was aware of before her change; but they were not enough to produce more than a mild discomfort for her. She knew that was the case because she had already walked inside of several of the abandoned homes that the Grove was busy claiming before now. Out of curiosity she had walked in the aether after the wall barring her from entering was partially removed and she had rematerialized just outside of the barrier she had called into being. When she approached it she could feel the warning that the secondary ward was emitting as she drew closer. She would have to do something about that as well she realized. In a way she felt foolish that she should feel betrayed by what her own handiwork had done to her. She shouldn't have felt that at all the rational side of her mind told her. She hadn't had any idea when she crafted it that what she was doing would affect her the way that it had. At least it didn't have to stay that way she told herself though. Not long ago, just after she had recovered from the effects of the broadcast vision she had shared with them, M'Tehr had told her that it was common for a Grove to maintain a dwelling of sorts to act as a way station for visitors to the Grove to go to before they entered. At first she didn't understand why such a thing was of any importance and that lack of understanding remained so for a time until all at once it made perfect sense to her. The two worlds were different in enough ways that it was needed as a place of transition. A site placed aside to mark where the one ended and the other began. Once she understood what her sister was telling her and she grasped the full meaning of why it should be so, she resolved that the home that she had called her own before would serve as that gateway when the time came. It made sense to her to do that and there was something inside her that told her that decision felt right to her in some way, even if she would never spend more than a short time in those walls ever again. It would be through those walls that others would first pass as the Grove delegation had done when they entered Phar' Naqua a few days ago. The sisters of the Grove that had come to her were not like M'Tehr and Jacen had been when they had first come. They approached her from a place of deeper knowledge and it shaped how they saw her. When they arrived and stood before her they did so first out of deep reverential respect and as they stood beneath her throne it was difficult for her to process that sort of behavior from these others who were like M'Tehr. It was their clear deference that was disconcerting to her in its own way. These ones that were so much older that she and far more comfortable in what they were than she presently was, yet they were the ones approaching her radiating such an unfamiliar sensation of awe. All of it directed towards her. When they left her elm after the audience to welcome them was completed it felt different to her and not in a pleasing way. The place that had started to feel like a sanctuary to her no longer felt the same afterward. It was not like when she had used her home to work in and live in when she was Cecil; it was like her private space had been invaded by well meaning others and she could not feel the same after they had departed. Their view of her had left an echo of their feelings to keep her company in a way and whole of their adoration felt dirty in some fashion to her. Selicia felt it rolling off of them and it was disconcerting for her to be held up as a source of veneration this way. It was easier when it was just M'Tehr and Jacen in her Grove. She had grown used to them and there had been a little time for her to start to come to terms with their change in attitude toward her before coming face to face with others who only knew her through the shared vision of how she came to be. If there had been a gatehouse such as the one that M'Tehr spoke to her of, there would have been a separation that would not have seen them tainting and corrupting her private space the way their adoration had done. That was when she started to consider that M'Tehr's suggestion of establishing a gate house to be more than just a niggling little detail. There were no niggling details, she saw that now and resolved to not resent M'Tehr when she harped on them in the future. There was a good reason for each part of the blizzard of things that M'Tehr was trying to direct her attention to and that reason competed anxiously with all of the others eating up her time and attention. Especially since she was now known for what she was and not what she was thought to be. It made a great deal of difference that she could see immediately in their reaction to her. Jacen and M'Tehr had seen her before they had known how she was formed. They had seen her when her mind was wild and when she was driven by pure instinct. They were stepping back in their own way from her, but these others view of her wasn't like that. When they approached her was as if they were seeing the face of whatever it was that her people held sacred and if it weren't for her ability to shut them out to the degree that she could it might have been too much for her to take when it was staring at her in the eyes brimming with worshipful longing. M'Tehr told her that she would have to learn to accept how the Grove as a whole viewed her and she would perhaps grow comfortable with her new position in time. Selicia wasn't sure about that. All it did now was made her feel uncomfortable and she locked away her inner feelings where they wouldn't be able to sense them and be made uncomfortable in turn. It wasn't their fault she told herself. They were only responding to what she represented to them. She was the one who was adrift here. She was the one that was of their kind and at the same time completely lacking whatever it was that was the bedrock of their being. Or maybe she had too much of that foundation rather than not enough. It was hard for her to figure out which one it truly was. They were the same. They were one and at the same time she wondered if she would always be the outsider looking in on what it meant to be one of them. She hoped not. To be cut off from what she was and barred from what she had become would become a special form of hell she decided. One that she had no desire to experience for more than the briefest of times. M'Tehr hadn't let them linger overlong. She and Jacen had grown even more protective of her and she would not let them linger and tax her with their attention longer than necessary. They had come here for a greater purpose than to merely bask in her presence and Selicia was certain that once they were away from her that M'Tehr had wasted little time in reminding them of that. The forms had to be satisfied though and there were needful things that they required of her if they were to do their duty. Once they had finished being formally welcomed into Phar' Naqua, M'Tehr had hustled them away and assisted them in melding with suitable trees elsewhere in the Grove. Like M'Tehr there was no telling how long they would be staying and without her home anchoring them while they were here their task would not be feasible if the negotiations took too long to conclude. She had begin to feel a closer connection with them once they had done so and as a result she found herself closing off more of what she was so they would not become as aware of her own discomfort with her own changes as she came to grips with them being here and what they meant for her. It was good that they were busy negotiating the recognition of the Grove and arranging the details of removing and relocating as many people as they could from the area. Doing that kept them apart from her while they were meeting their counterparts. Doing that kept them away from her. It was strange to her to consider that, because of her this part of the city would be almost depopulated in the very near term and she couldn't help but feel a burgeoning guilt over why that was. Choosing her old home for the role of gatehouse made some vague sense to her in that context. She didn't feel any pangs of guilt over making that decision. Her doing that had not resulted in any one needing to be uprooted by doing so. There would be no objection from the owner now that it had a new purpose and it could be done quickly and quietly. It was still a thin salve on a wound she had not been aware she possessed though and it did little to ease her inner tumult. She may not be directly expelling someone by choosing what had been her home before, but she was still responsible for indirectly doing so on a large scale just by being here. She was responsible and she was sorry that she was the cause of what needed to be. Because of what she had done and what she had become her actions had resulted in a tremendous mess. A mess that the Grove was diligently cleaning up but a mess just the same. When whatever agreement was reached was finally nailed down it would still just be only the first step. The next step would be moving those who were here elsewhere and that was what pricked at her guilty conscience. If they knew about it, really knew about what was happening and why, the homeowners likely wouldn't welcome what was coming even for boatloads of money she told herself. Not all of them anyway. And then there were the renters that some of the homeowners in Olympia made no secret of the fact that they despised. The renters may have been their neighbors but Selicia had already understood the fact that the owners didn't consider the renters to be of their own almost immediately when she was Cecil. How good or bad they actually were as neighbors didn't matter to the ones that owned their own roof. As far as they were concerned there was nothing that they held in common and in that they were wrong about the neighbors that they wanted to remain apart from. It didn't matter to them that while the renters may not hold the title to the roof they lived under, they still had to give up their homes just as certainly and that was only an easy thing for those who didn't see it as a home in the first place. If she had a choice she would have opted to remain silent and not disturb the lives of the people living around her. She would have let them remain in ignorance of her changes and opted to let them go on with their lives unaware of what she had become. But that was never a choice that was available to her. M'Tehr, Jacen and detective Singh all told her that, for now, distance between Fae and human was necessary to preserve the need for concealment of what was. Selicia understood the need to do so. Far more than they did. They might sense the mass of the blooming towering overhead but she was the only one who could begin to grasp its true scope and if they had known what lay in store they might well be paralyzed now when action was needed most. She hated it, not being able to communicate the depths of her awareness almost as much as she hated having to rip this small corner of Stafford away from it. Taking this step, doing what was going to be necessary to maintain as much concealment as possible of the Fae that would soon be living here in greater numbers grated on her, but it was necessary she told herself. Still she couldn't help mourning what was passing away. One of the reasons that she had chosen to live here was the kind of neighborhood that it was already and it was ironic that, as much as she loved what it had been before this chain of events was set in motion, now she was going to be responsible for destroying in a way the place that she loved. She could feel the immense power that connected her with the land around her every moment and she was helpless to change even that one thing. As if thinking about it had drawn her toward it she found her feet coming to a halt just outside of the ward around her home. She stood at the edge of the ward and felt its reaction to her presence. A gradual increase as the energy built up at her approach. If this house was going to serve its new purpose it couldn't do so if it remained the way that it was right now she told herself. Not with the ward ready to strike friend and foe alike indiscriminately. She would have to enter the dome and make her way to the hearth she realized grimly. It would let her do so, she knew that much. But it was going to be agony for her until she could convince the ward that it should make an exception for her and those like her now. If she couldn't do that then this home would stand empty and there would be nothing anyone like her could do about it. She was the sole author of what was writ here now and only she had the right to change it. She looked down at her distended stomach. She couldn't attempt that now. It would be too much for the developing sister that she carried within her to take she realized without surprise. If she were to try to do so she might well destroy her before she ever saw daylight and that might tip her back into the madness that she had so recently emerged from. She couldn't take that chance, not for something that could be done later on when she was alone within her skin. She turned away from what had been her home and made her way back into the depths of the Grove itself. As she crossed it the wood of the fence parted for her and she passed through it without thought and she left no mark in her passing. When she had done that before while fleeing from the shadow man, it was an instinctive action and she had no idea of just how she had accomplished it. Looking back it seemed like such a momentous thing to her to do while she was in the physical world. She knew better now. It was only an illusion, the truth of which was far more intriguing for her. A microsecond before she actually made contact with the wood she shifted her physical form into the aether and then back again once she was past the barrier. It was that microscopic shift that made such a thing possible. She simply allowed the part of her body that was in contact with the physical not occupying the same space. It was as if she was allowing a line of light to pass over her body. They would interact with, but not intersect and to the observer she appeared to walk through walls when in actuality there was no wall barring her path at all. The shadowy man had learned the same thing somehow she realized once she was aware of what it was that she was doing. Once just learning how to do something like this and understanding why it was possible and that she could do it at all would have energized her for days with delight. She would have immediately gone to her lotus explorer's forum to announce what she had done and detail for them what made it possible. It wasn't just for bragging rights when she did that. She learned as much from others as she had shared and that was one of the reasons that she had been in the top tier of her group before she encountered the dark man. She looked back at the fence behind her and as she wandered deeper into the woodlot she knew she had to come to grips with what it was that he had done to her as well. Coming to grips with that wasn't anything new; she had been struggling with that need ever since he had captured her and had his way with her. The fear that coiled in her heart in the aftermath of that encounter and again when he returned wasn't the same as before though. She could recognize that now. It was fading and something else was taking its place. Distance, which was the key to what it was that she felt now. She had true distance from what he had done to her before. Losing her mind and sinking into what she had become after she had been brought to bay had given her the distance that she needed to come to grips with what he had done to her and now that it had done so it also filled her with anger. She was not the only one that he had done this to. There were others too. She knew that for certain without needing evidence showing her that it was so. His actions had been too polished for her to be his first. Thinking about that encounter with him, she had to consider just what it was that he did and while she couldn't deny that he had great power she also realized that the lion's share of how she viewed him before rested on a foundation of fear. And fear was a treacherous foundation. As long as it was maintained what it supported would stand, but there always was the moment when fear was no longer enough and something else replaced it. When that happened it dissolved into mist and was burned away by what had replaced it and it couldn't help but fall to dust. Selicia was burning now but that was something she would not allow to blind her. There were more important things than just a lust for revenge animating her. M'Tehr's mention of what happened to Phar' Dormath when they failed to distinguish between what needed to be done and what they chose to do was something she kept in mind now when the anger flared inside of her. What she needed to do next was beyond her own feelings and that required the cold analysis that she had relied on when she was Cecil. The why of it all was what she needed to know first. He had chosen her for a reason even if she didn't know what that reason was and she didn't think that he was the sort to just allow her to remain as she was now that he knew more completely what she was capable of. He would come for her again. Indeed he already had indirectly. She was certain of that just as she was certain that when he couldn't get her he tried to strike at her in other ways. She couldn't prove it, but she was convinced that the vision that she saw of the Grove burned to ash was somehow his doing. How it was his doing she didn't know yet, but she was certain even so. The threat was gone for the moment though. That much she was sure of. For the time being the reality of the Grove as reflected in the aether reflected the reality of the physical, but he would already have something else brewing. He couldn't allow her to remain as she was. Not after what he had done to her and what she had in turn done to him. If it were just what he had done to her that would be reason enough to search for him by itself, but he had gone beyond that; his attempt to destroy Phar' Naqua demanded a response from her. The imperative of what her Grove was to be made her need to retaliate certain. His actions had spawned within her an abiding determination to find him and deal with him as its reaction and she would fulfill her purpose by focusing what she needed to do. She felt a drawing sensation within her and for a moment it distracted her from her thoughts. It was not the first time she had felt that particular sensation. It had been coming more often the last few days and each time it did so it was stronger. At first she could not recognize what it might mean, but the longer that it persisted the meaning of what she was feeling became clearer. She is getting ready Selicia realized. Her sister within her was nearing the moment when she would need to leave her and join with the tree that would become her Phar' Ador. Ever since the rapid changes of her gravid state manifested in her physical form as a human pregnancy she had been curious about why it was that it would manifest in this fashion. She asked M'Tehr to explain it if she could and M'Tehr had done her best, struggling with an unfamiliar need to use words to do so. But words were insufficient things in this instance and M'Tehr was as puzzled by why she manifested her state in this way as Selicia was. She could have joined minds with M'Tehr and embraced what it was that the hamadryad knew about nymph parturition on that deep level, but there was reluctance on her part to do so now and M'Tehr was not the only one who had that reluctance. None of the sisters of the Grove had attempted to meld with her since she had ended the broadcast vision that she had shared with them. They feared her on some deep primal level she realized. Not the fear of what she could do to them, but a fear that was something more akin to standing too close to a fire on a Siberian night in deepest winter. The warmth may be desperately needed, but stand too close and you would be consumed by the blaze. They craved her, but they forced themselves to remain apart from her at the same time. She moved deeper into the wood. It was another thing that set her apart she realized. As a dryad she was connected to all others of her kind as was the way of their nature. But she was still set apart from them. It was like she was transmitting and receiving on a frequency that was just close enough to the one they all were operating on, but not close enough to blend in fully with the main signal. It wasn't that she couldn't connect with them; it was that when she did so she was not wholly there and she needed to be careful that her greater connection with the life beneath her feet didn't overwhelm them. She was a singularity that remained part of and separate from the whole and she would never blend with it no matter what. A living black hole that must remain separate lest it drag all that was into herself because of her greater density to what they all were. Her own birth had set her apart from them even as it joined her with them. She wondered if it would be the same for the sister that she carried within her when they were no longer physically joined or if it was just her alone that would feel this separation. It was possible that her connection with them was the way it was because she was more like the original first dryads and if that was so then her sister may prove to be like her in this way. Or it may be that she was separated from that connection because she was Arath' Mahar and her sister wouldn't ever know the sensation of belonging juxtaposed with separation that she felt. Selicia didn't know if she should pity her or be grateful that it might be so if that were the case. Either way she would know soon enough. Selicia laughed. It wasn't what she had expected to do when her thoughts turned down this path but it was all the more welcome just the same. Separate juxtaposed with belonging. It might have been an alien feeling for a dryad, but it was all too familiar for a human and that made her eminently qualified to live with how she felt now. She felt another wave of pressure from within her being and paused to let it pass. Her sister it seemed was anxious to leave finally. She had not given thought to what it was that she was going to do when the time came to link this sister with the tree that would sustain her as a separate being. Not the way that she would have before her own transformation. She didn't use logic or reasoning or any of the tools she would have reached for mentally before. They were ill-suited to what she needed now anyway. What she was relying on now was a deep instinctive feeling; one that had been growing inside her along with the formless essence of her sister. As she had felt this moment approaching she had found herself being drawn to various trees in the Grove. When she reached each of them she found herself standing beside the thick trunk and waiting for something she wasn't sure was there for her to find. At first she didn't know why that would be so and she was surprised to hear what it was when she had given up trying to puzzle it out on her own and just asked M'Tehr about it. The answer seemed simple when M'Tehr told her, but as with all simple things there were layers of complexity that you didn't need to see for them to be there. As she stood before the tree she understood the concept that M'Tehr was trying to convey to her and her great frustration she had been unable to do so to using words alone. In a way it was like trying to explain light to the blind. You could talk around it, but you couldn't make them understand it. The basis of understanding just wasn't there. When Selicia began moving between the trees and opening herself to them she finally started to get a glimmer of understanding of what M'Tehr couldn't make her comprehend before with words alone and once she started to unravel it on her own from there what she was doing made perfect sense to her. She was being courted by the trees around her. They sensed that her sister would leave her soon and they wanted her approval and her blessing. She had never been courted before but when it clicked together she recognized that was what it was that she felt. The trees of the Grove were competing with each other for her attention and the strange thing was that she had a deep feeling, a certainty, that when she finally did chose one, that there would be no feeling of disappointment or rejection from the ones that she passed over. She would have thought that would be a factor, but she told herself that she was still thinking like a human when she puzzled that out. The only jealousy that the trees had in them was their jealousy over what they needed to grow; space and soil and water they would be jealous over, but not this. In this case what they sought was the honor of what she would bestow when the time came, but they would not resent not being chosen either. That was a realization of surprising relief to her and once she comprehended it she allowed them to draw her close and deep inside her she allowed the unconscious part of her that was responding to their entreaty to guide her in what it was she needed to do. The oak that she had eventually chosen hove into view. She didn't know why it was that this one was the tree that her sister needed when she was ready to leave her, but it was the only one that felt right when she slipped into it and allowed its essence to wash over her. The others were close to what she was looking for each in their own ways. That much was clear to her as she passed in and out of their woody flesh in her search for a home for her offspring; but this one was the one that was what her sister wanted. It was only after she had merged with the oak that she realized that the choice had never been hers at all. She was merely the vessel that gave access to her sister so that she could sample which one it was that she would eventually join with. The absolute darkness that was the interior of the tree rose around her again. She was growing used to the darkness and the more that she partook of it the more she felt that she could no longer conceive of not being part of it any more. The oak welcomed her and she sank down into the earth and opened her eyes. Light danced around her. The light that animated the living essence of the oak itself. She watched as the life force that encompassed all of the oak from farthest root to smallest swelling leaf bud moved in illuminated brilliance all around her. She turned to the heart deep in the earth and moved to overlap it until it was centered within her own form and then she turned inward. She thought that she might need to coax her sister into leaving her now that it had begun, but once she was in the center of the tree's life and it overlapping that of her sister's unformed consciousness she felt her leave her and join with it without hesitation. This is what had happened to her she realized now that she was an observer and no longer a participant. There was something that was missing in each dryad when they were created she realized. An empty place that they were formed with and that missing part of them needed what the tree provided to make her kind whole. When she had taken the elm's heart into her own it had acted in the same fashion, it had filled the bleeding space that had been torn in her being by the shadowy man. That raw aching emptiness that threatened to swallow her whole was completed and complemented and she was locked thereafter on the paths that lead her here. Her daughter also had part of her being missing as well, but in her case it was not a wound inflicted on her as it had been with Selicia. It was a part of her and matching that missing part of who she was was just part of her development path. That was the difference between her sister and herself. Selicia's empty place had been inflicted on her by an act of violence and her daughter was born with that absence as a part of her being. She felt her sister anchor her being in the oak and at the same time release from her. Selicia moved away from her in awe and hovered in the earth from a short distance away from her watching as the light around her grew richer and more brilliant as the essence of the tree melded with the essence of her offspring. Selicia reached out her hand toward the ball of light that blazed in front of her; its brilliance banishing the darkness of the earth surrounding them. In the electric blue light that illuminated the earth around them her daughter for the first time whispered her name to Selicia in the darkness. "Sakura," she whispered back to her. "Are you certain that is the name you want to choose?" she asked. Deep inside the heart of the oak her sister wordlessly reassured her that that was what she wanted. This was the name that spoke to her on the same instinctive level that was guiding her now that they were separated. Selicia understood and nodded to her sister and then withdrew her hand from the blaze of light that was the nova marking the melding of oak heart and dryad. "If that is what you want then I'm happy for you," she told her and in the shadows cast by the inner light she knew that it was so and as she watched the two become one she felt the tears begin to trickle unbidden and stream from her earth covered eyes. Selicia emerged from the earth in the aether and looked at Sakura's Phar' Ador. The tree seemed larger now. Its boughs spreading wider and somehow more vital. The trees around the oak seemed almost diminished in comparison, but that was an illusion for now. She turned her attention away from her sister's heart tree and focused on herself. Her body no longer showed any indication that she had ever carried another life within her. Her flat abdomen was now as smooth and untouched as if her sister had never been there at all. But she was not untouched, not really. She knew what had passed even though others could no longer tell at a glance and that was not all that had touched her either since she had begun to walk this path. Selicia looked down at her arm; to the twisted rose that wound around her left arm and ended in the center of the soft hollow of her inner arm. She was not untouched and she could not remain that way any longer. She began walking aimlessly and found herself drawn back to the spot where she had been made almost before she realized it. There was something that was part of this spot that kept drawing her back to it and she looked at it trying to puzzle out what it was and why she was here. Now that she was alone in her skin and none were watching her she could try to think through the other things she was still keeping to herself. --------------------------- Phar' Naqua: Day 12, 0700 hours The sun had broken over the horizon not long ago. She had emerged from the earth beside Sakura's oak and sat watching it as it shifted from a darker mass against the predawn gloom to a barely visible outline of shadow and oak in the burgeoning light of morning. The darkness slowly lightened and gloom faded into the wavering light of early morning accompanied by the first cries of morning birds mingled with the last cries of those that preferred the night. As she waited Selicia sat unmoving on the duff covered earth and watched as the light seeped through the trees around her. It was a good time of day, she had always liked the times when she could sit and watch the morning sun move as the world inevitably spun from darkness into light. The crackle of the upper dry leaves overlaying the mat of wet leaves and humus that made up the forest duff beneath her exuded a faint odor of decomposition as her weight crushed against it. Before, when she was Cecil, she might have wrinkled her nose at the scent, but now she paid it no more attention than she would have paid to any other thing of little consequence before. The smell of the duff was just part of what was and her senses registered it as nothing more than that and dismissed it almost as soon as it was detected. Her eyes remained focused on the day beginning in front of her, which was one thing that hadn't changed even if everything else within and around her had done so. There was something comforting about watching the world slowly wake up around her. For her it was like she was privy to something that was always there, but never really seen. It was a trait she had carried over from when she had been Cecil. Mornings were her own time, the one part of the day when she was apart from everything and connected to everything. A sacred something that she reserved as a solitary pleasure for herself. It was a communion that she kept for her own but it only lasted for a short time each day. Before long the wavering early morning light had strengthened into the more solid light of the day ahead and when it had done so she rose and began walking again in the gradually lightening Grove around her. Some people that she knew shared her appreciation for this time of day had said that they regretted keeping this to themselves but not Selicia. There was no room in her to worry over feeling misplaced guilt because she was keeping to herself and not sharing it; even when she was human most people around her looked at mornings as something that was necessary to put up with. Something that was to be gotten through rather than recognizing it as a pause to just be. To gather yourself before beginning a fresh journey. Every morning she was taking the first steps on the path to wherever that something would lead to and even more so these days. It seemed fitting that she looked at doing this in the mornings remained unchanged when so much else was so fluid. Without planning it to be so it was critical in its own way for her in some unspoken fashion. Mornings hadn't changed, but she had. For one thing she didn't sleep anymore, she didn't need to. She rested instead and even in her rest she was still aware of things happening around her in a way that had made sleep impossible for her to recognize as an activity she would choose to indulge in. Even if it was possible for her to actually sleep anymore she wasn't certain that she could chose to do so. There were too many things that had started to catch her attention as her mind settled into the new existence she had been thrust into. The faint touch of a squirrel as it scaled her elm would enrapture her for hours as she contemplated the length and width and depth of it. The bird that slept with its talons firmly locked on one of her branches and the feel as it woke and then released its hold on her bark just before it left to dance in the air would play through her mind throughout the day. The warming of the sap rising in response to the unseen sun about to crest the horizon. These were the things that served her as companions since her mind had come back to her again. It was noisy in there sometimes she realized as her path wound through the trees. Coming to grips with the totality of what she was now and what was now part of her could have easily left her buried beneath the rockslide of sensation that buffeted her daily but she was learning to navigate that part of herself finally. The dazed and hesitant time that dominated her thoughts and self identity immediately after Sakura was forged inside of her being was slowly being washed away from her mind. Like a sand castle succumbing to the relentless waves of an incoming tide she was feeling surer of herself moment by moment. And that was just some of the new sensations that clamored for her attention now that she was able to hear them separate from the din. Along with the lesser sensations there were all of the new people she had met since her change that she needed to fit into what her life was reshaping it into. But the one person that she needed to know the most was the one she still needed to come to terms with. The one that was looking back at her whenever she caught her own reflection staring back at her with dark eyes crowded with infinite depth. M'Tehr and Jacen had soon learned to leave her to her own thoughts in the mornings. She had not needed to raise the issue with them nor was their respectful distance a result of them sampling her thoughts and responding to what they found there. M'Tehr had tried to merge with her in the early days when they first were thrust together but that was more from necessity than from a desire to pry into Selicia's innermost being. And neither of them would dare attempt do such a thing now. Since they had recognized her and hailed her as Arath' Mahar there was a noticeable reluctance from both the hamadryad and the satyr to be too close to her and she doubted that they would opt to even join with her if she were to invite them to do so. A distance had sprung up between them all at once and neither of them would venture to breech that boundary even by invitation it seemed. Selicia wasn't sure how she felt about that even now. She had come full circle in a fashion. When she was driven by her nature and her shattered mind, she was alone with only the fragments of herself; cut off from everything and yet connected to the whole at the same time. M'Tehr and the others of the Grove network were aware of her. How could they not be when her presence was like a blazing star hovering overhead; drawing and focusing all of their attention on it? But she was not aware of them on a conscious level. And it was not something that was recent either. Joining the communal mind of her sisters with hers as she had done was not the seed of their connection, only its latest flowering. Her eyes darted down to the winding rose that bloomed on her left arm. Now that Sakura was safely away from her she was free to do the things that she hesitated to do while they were joined. What would this mark mean for her growing sister she wondered? Would it too be passed on to her as well? This brand was part of her at the moment. It's twisted form was an apt representation of what he had done to her she mused, but did that mean that it would in turn also be passed on to her offspring as well? Sakura may be separated from her now, but the earliest stage of her development had been under this mark. There was no reason to assume that it did not lay on her as well and what that could mean for them both was something that Selicia had to consider now as well. It would have been easier for her to accept if it had been what the Grove thought it was when they realized that she was who she was. Some of them had even ventured to suggest that she had tried to create a mark unconsciously and was simply not aware that she was doing so. Selicia knew better though and she looked down at the design marring her flesh with utter loathing. She had done nothing to cause this design to score her flesh regardless of what some of her sisters speculated. This was connected to him; she was sure of it and knowing that she couldn't allow it to remain and possibly taint her and her line. She wouldn't allow the dark man that sort of victory. M'Tehr and the other sisters had been good as their word in their search for the origins of the Grove markings, but their efforts, sadly, were of little aid to her. Too much time had passed for the few scraps of knowledge that they had preserved to be of any use and what little they did know that had survived the years and the Withering told her even less about how such a thing came to be than she thought she knew already. The thing she was coming to think that it was not time that she was contending with, nor was it a search for what was lost but it was her needing to discover in herself something that was never shared with the Grove at all. The ones that suggested that she might have done this herself might not be completely wrong she admitted. The more she thought about it the more she suspected that creation of a Grove mark was something that was intensely personal. A property of the Arath' Mahar and as such not something shared with the daughters that followed. It was a puzzle in its own way. All of them had the pieces that were not missing, but none of them had what they needed to see the whole. She focused inward deliberately calming her thoughts and pushing aside her hatred for the dark man and his mark. Before such a thing might have been more difficult for her to do, but before she was less than she was now. That was something else that she realized as well. When she was first exploring the aether. When she was blissfully ignorant of just what it was that lay in store for her, she had haltingly begun to recognize that she thought more clearly when she was here. That mental boost had only increased after she had joined with the elm in desperation and as she reflected on it when her mind was healing after mating with Jacen she began to understand why that was possible. It may have been a move that was chosen in desperation, but it had been something that was done willingly on her part. And in doing so other things were set in motion by her actions that she had not considered possible. Even if they had been explained to her as she was groping in the dark for answers, she didn't think that she might have been able to accept the truth of what it was that she had done to herself. Her mind was operating the way that it was because she had made it that way. Her choices had dictated her development into what she was this morning and the frightening thing for her to contemplate was that it was an ongoing process. Looking at it now it the steps that led from then until now were not hard for her to identify. There was a very real reason for why and how her thinking process was restructured into what it was still becoming. She had tapped into it in a small way the last few days before the dark man came for her, before her mind shattered and she was lost in her new nature. Without being aware of it, the existing network of minds that made up the population of the Grove was even then increasing its connection with her. It was of little surprise to her that her mental capabilities had increased once she realized that was what she had done. She was no longer using just her own mental resources, but the mental resources of countless minds running in parallel with her own all working on the same goal. She was tapping into them in a way that was little different than the massed supercomputers that she had once wished that she could work with when she was just a program developer. The difference was that when she was doing so, albeit unconsciously, neither she nor the minds that she was linking to were aware of what she was doing at the time. M'Tehr had told her that the first indication that they had that made them aware of her presence was manifested as a pressure that was puzzling to them since it couldn't be identified and was something outside of their experience. They only had a few days of that before her rage had announced who she was with the summoning of the deluge in Stafford that marked the rebirth of her Grove. The truth was that if they had been aware that they needed to be looking for her they might still have not known she was there. That was another difference between her and M'Tehr as well. While she was aware of the vast circle of minds that composed the Grove network she was not one of them. Not the way that M'Tehr was. She could feel them and when she concentrated she could interact with them singly and as a whole, but they were not a constant presence in her mind as they were with the hamadryad. That difference was something she would have to consider more completely as well she decided. There was an answer there. She just wasn't seeing it yet. She was in a unique position and she supposed that she needed to get used to that notion. She was one with them and she was one of them, but she was not the same even so. Perhaps if M'Tehr's own Arath' Mahar had survived down the years until today she might have a different experience than the one that Selicia was coping with now and if they were to meet they could compare notes so to speak. But with all of those others who might truly be like her long in the past that was forever going to remain an unanswered question for her. It was more than their physical differences and she suspected that she would be determining just what and why those differences were presented in the way there were for the rest of her life. There was just enough change between what she was and what they had become that it took effort for her to mesh her mind with theirs and even when she did so she had to take great care when she did. The amount of power that she drew upon tended to overwhelm them if she didn't actively work to reduce it. When she did reduce it by in effect creating a blockage in the natural conduit as a means of stepping down her power to a level that was bearable to them, it was in turn draining on her in ways that she didn't expect it to be. The Grove network had learned a healthy respect for what her mind was capable of now. The mass vision she had drowned them in had done that favor for her as an unintended outcome. But in drawing back from her out of respect and in some ways fear over what she was capable of, she was in some ways the most isolated member of the dryad race right now. And that was something that she didn't think wise to share outside of the small circle that was composed only her, M'Tehr and Jacen for now. She looked down at her now undistended form and wondered if that would remain the case when this sister finally emerged from her Phar' Ador. And maybe she was looking at this the wrong way. Maybe this was exactly as it was supposed to be. That was something else for her to consider. Was that how it started she wondered? Was the first one; the Fae that set this pattern in the aether that she followed now as separated as she was? Was she like this? Was she truly like Selicia? Alone and connected at the same time. Did that long ago first Arath' Mahar also feel the separation and at the same time the constant awareness of the group that Selicia felt? She looked back in the direction of the oak that housed her sister now and wondered if she would be linked in the same way or would there be the same difference between her and the rest of the Grove that Selicia felt right now. But that was a consideration for another time she decided. M'Tehr had been gentle with her when she first ventured to probe Selicia's thoughts. Her efforts like those of a blind person gingerly reaching into a bag filled with shattered glass and groping for the one solid fragment that would bring the whole into focus for both of them. Jacen was focused on her in his own way even though he had relied on tactile contact rather than mental. For the first few days while her mind was beginning to come together she had instinctively reached for him and he had been there for her. She had spent almost as much time being cradled in the arms of the big satyr as she had spent floating in the center of her elm. His presence calmed her then and now that there was this distance between them she realized that she had begun to miss that contact and the comfort that it gave to her. She wondered now if he would ever be able to overcome the deep reverence she sensed from him regarding her now. When they thought she was a revenant that deference had been present in both of them; she remembered sensing that from them clearly. It had been part of what had started to ground her as her mind spiraled down from the heights that her nature had spun it up into. The reverence was there then, but both of them were focused on bringing her back to herself and the need to do so overcame the inbred separation that they would have maintained with another like her. She didn't know that for certain but at the same time she was certain of that much. Perhaps if she had been a revenant as they thought she was they would have overcome that part of themselves and remained closer to her. That possibility ended though once she drew them into her broadcast vision. Both of them changed in their demeanor towards her afterward. A wall had dropped between them and she didn't think that it would ever be breached. She had gone from a damaged queen to a goddess in a manner of speaking and with that change she was once more as she was then; cut off and connected. Set apart and drawn close. That was why she drew her comfort from the early morning communion that she indulged in daily now. Perhaps she was the distant deity made flesh that they saw her as now, but the flora and fauna around her accepted her as whom she was at the most basic level and that was suddenly more precious to her than even the devotion of the entire Grove network. A few days ago; while passing amongst the foliage of the Grove she had again met the big timber rattlesnake she had encountered that evening when she was first drawn to elm just after her change. This time she had sensed him and knew immediately where he was and what he was doing long before she saw him in the flesh. He had returned to the vicinity around the king elm and was coiled beneath another fallen tree. He, like his kind had an inborn association with places like that and this time when she approached there was not even the warning buzz from the big snake's rattle at her approach that would have warned others off. She had stopped a few feet from him and looked down at the yellowish scales that made up the majority of his markings. The big snake's flat wedge shaped head merely pointed in her direction as his long forked tongue licked out and tasted the air in her direction. He seemed to be waiting for her in some fashion and this time there was no fear in her as she knelt and bid him come to her. The snake immediately moved toward her in liquid strength and flowed across the fallen leaves that smothered the earth beneath them both. When he reached her she felt the dry smoothness of his scales as he wrapped himself around her arm and used it as a means of climbing her. The heavy weight of the living rope of muscle reached and lay across her shoulders and she felt his head dip down over her left shoulder and loop around until he was securely perched on her with his head hovering just in her line of sight. As she rose to a standing posture his head bounced but only faintly; he balanced as she rose completely upright so that even so he barely moved. She felt the light tickle of his tongue as he tasted her up close and there was nothing in what she sensed from him that gave her pause in having him there. She looked at the slitted eyes as they regarded her and for the first time she appreciated that there was nothing for her to fear from him. Even if she were to accidentally tread on him he would do nothing to her; the will to do harm to her was no longer present within him. "The sun will be rising high enough for you soon," she told him and she almost could feel agreement well from him in some deep fashion. "There's a rock nearby," she continued speaking to him as she began moving through the woods at a leisurely pace. "The sun will strike it almost as soon as it rises. I think that you will enjoy greeting it there." The rock in question was a big slab of granite that protruded on the edge of the open field from the dark earth around them. Whether it had broken up from the depths or had been left there for some reason by the Alagosta Mills she didn't know. It was enough that it was there at all she decided. When she reached it she had extended her hand to lie upon the rough granite and as she did so the snake looped his coils around her flesh and traveled the bridge she had made to reach the flat rugged stone. As the last dry touch of the snake's scales left her she watched as the big snake looped his length across its upper surface so as to gain the most benefit when the sun's rays finally fell on and began to warm it. She stood there feeling the distant warmth of the rising orb as it gradually lit the Grove and heated all around her. The snake merely lay there and one of its baleful eyes remained cast on her only a few feet away from him. "Sing for me," she said to the snake. The big flat head raised and looked in her direction as if asking her why she should want it to do such a thing. "It's all right," she told him. "I know it's not something that you do in this way. I just want to hear it is all." The snake looked at her and with a slight dip of his head it seemed to her that he acquiesced to her request although she could tell that he didn't understand why she had asked this of him. The dry buzzing of his tail began, hesitant at first and then rising to a steady threatening roll as the timber rattler's tail reached its full range. She let the harsh sound of it wash over her and was fascinated by how she could see the movement of the loose interlocking buttons that made up the rattle. They stood most clearly at the farthest range of motion and seemed to hover there and at the same time she could see it moving in between the two extremes. All the while the snake rested pacifically on the stone and made no move that matched the seeming threat that its rattle was making in the early morning hours. After a while she told the snake he could stop and thanked him for indulging her. The whirring sound faded and ceased. Before she left him there on the rock she asked him that if he were to encounter people in her Grove that it would please her if he were to refrain from harming them in as much as it lay in his discretion to do so. She told him that she wished it to be so and even though doing so was not in his nature she felt him agree to abide by her desire. She laid her hand on the warming flesh of the big reptile and thanked him again. The tongue lingered one last time brushing against her skin and then the head drew away and lay against the gradually warming stone as the big snake turned to the more important task of soaking up the morning heat the stone was absorbing. Selicia's hand fell to her side and she returned to her wanderings. Each morning thereafter she made certain to stop by the rock and pause there. Most mornings the snake would be there waiting for her. As before she would ask him to sing for her and the snake would comply without understanding why it was that she asked for what would have stirred fear in the heart of those that she now merely resembled. Each morning that she did so she thanked him left him to enjoy the lingering heat preserved within the granite and feel the warmth of the sun's rays on his scales as the day began anew. The first time she had asked him to sing for her she wasn't quite sure why it was that she had asked him to do so but finally she thought she was beginning to understand that as well. It was the fear, or rather the lack of it that she now felt. When she had first encountered this beast the sound of his warning had frozen her heart within her breast. The lingering instincts that were animating her then were screaming that death was here only inches away and there was no escape for her no matter what she did; but that was no longer true. Fear she thought to herself. Fear was what had animated her almost from the moment she had regained consciousness after she met the shadowy man. Fear had ruled her and driven her and she realized that it had only begun to leave her when her foot was placed inadvertently in front of the fangs of this serpent. That was the moment that she had unknowingly begun to grasp that things had changed for her and at the same time she had begun to see possibilities that she hadn't been able to recognize before because fear was driving her. The snake had punctured her fear in his own way and little by little it had begun to drain away from her. When the dark man returned for her she wasn't free of it, but enough was gone that she was able to see and seize opportunities that she wouldn't have considered earlier. In a way she was grateful to the big serpent for showing her that she was more than she had been before. The fear that had animated her shattered mind when her nature held sway over her wasn't what M'Tehr and the others thought it was either she realized. It was the memory of fear that was locked like a fly in amber when her mind shattered. But fear was not the only memory preserved in the shards of her psyche. Rage was there as well and exhilaration; but because fear had loomed so large in her life over those last few days that was what was easiest for M'Tehr and the others to see and they looked no deeper at the time. Selicia didn't have the luxury of doing that now. Looking deeper was part of her imperative. Her whole focus since her mind had begun to take form from the splinters was distilled down to a single root; a touchstone from which all she was going to be would flow. She needed to know herself and only in knowing herself would she be able to move from where she was now to where she was going. Fear was no longer part of that she decided. It wasn't that she no longer felt fear; it was rather that she no longer feared as she had done so before. When she contemplated who and what she was now fear seemed a pale flicker of flame compared to the rage she felt towards the author of her path. When she remembered striking at him when he brought her to bay, the blaze of the rage she felt as she drove him from her leapt up inside of her again as fresh and hot as when it was first ignited. That was a part of her that was truer than the fear that was there before and part of that was because fear was what he had wanted her to feel. Fear would paralyze her. Fear was intended to bend her to whatever design he desired for her when he had first shaped her in this way, but he had miscalculated and she no longer feared him now. She looked down at the flat smoothness of her belly again. Her eyes had been drawn to the contrasting shape of it repeatedly now that her sister was no longer there to distort her form. She couldn't help doing so and the closest that she could come to understanding why it was that she was compelled to do so was recalling when she had changed her look when she was Cecil and she first rose from the Florida room's floor with this face waiting for her to see in the bathroom mirror. She felt the same need to look at what she had become until the new faded into the familiar. The difference in her form now was not the only thing that drew her eye; the patch of grassy soil she was standing over gained and held her focus now that her eye had fallen on it. Just as she had every morning when she separated herself from the others she had been drawn back to this spot. She knelt on the now cleared earth. The spot where she was conceived and born. The terror she had experienced here was fading, it was being replaced, but some small part of that original impression still lingered and always would she realized. She could feel its meaning changing and resonating in her being now that she was on top of it The trace of fading fear was not all that lingered. She swept the grass away and rested her palm on the earth where she was forged and closed her eyes as she remembered until she needed to remember no longer. The name of the Grove radiated out from here and the meaning contained in that name rippled with it. Vigilance it promised. Protection. A commitment to stand against what it was that the shadowy man represented and in light of that, this design that he had imprinted on her had no place marring her flesh any longer. Not on her flesh and not on the sisters that would spring from her either. It had to go and it had to go now that she could remove it. Whatever else was clamoring for her attention she was resolved that this would be done now that Sakura was apart from her and protected from what removing it might do to her. She had to center herself first. Logic might have not driven her actions when she was seating Sakura, but she was more likely to need it to deal with whatever it was that bound the twisted rose to her flesh. She focused inward and reached toward the connection she had with the life below and around her. If she breathed still it would have noticeably slowed as she strove for balance. When her eyes opened she lifted her hand from the earth and she held the spot in her mind until it no longer had an edge with which to cut her. It was taking less and less time to do so each day she realized. This was not just the spot where the dark man had warped her into what his purpose intended for her; not any more. This was the spot where she had called her Grove into being now and that overlay what he had done to her more and more each time she visited this place. The weight of what was becoming slowly obliterating what had been. He had brought her here for his own purposes, but she had taken it from him and made it her own. Here was where she had named her Grove and given it purpose. Here was where she had bridled her rage and tempered it into something else. She hadn't thought that was what she was doing when she stood here with M'Tehr but what did that matter? What was important was that she had done it the right way. Of that she was certain. Even so she was grateful that M'Tehr was beside her when she did so. Without her to warn her away from allowing the rage to dictate what was to be rather than suborning that rage to her own purposes she might have made a grave error and cast herself and all who came after her into occupying the Siege Perilous without knowing why it was that they were doing so. It was still her seat though, but at least now she occupied it open eyed, knowing full well what it was that she was here for and moreover what was at stake when she did so. As Merlin had set aside that seat for one who was to come long ago, this seat was set aside for her in its own way. She was coming to understand that and to accept what that meant more and more as she made progress in finally truly knowing herself. She had spoken more truthfully than she realized when she had dedicated the Grove to its role as protector she realized. It had been a sudden clear of understanding at the time. Something that was understood without knowing the entire why it was so. But now she was finally starting to grasp just what it was that she had committed herself and all of her line to doing. Action not based on fear or rage, but on a need for justice to be meted out against those like the shadow man. She would be the shield and sword that stood between him and those he hunted. And that was only one small part of her purpose she had come to realize. She looked down at her body and her eyes rested on the earth that she was borne from. Somewhere the shadowy man was lurking. Somewhere he was hunting another she thought. It was meaningless of her to stand here and declare that this Phar would stand against him and those like him and then do nothing afterward. Without action those words were empty and she had no intention of her words remaining as only words. Her eyes lifted from the spot and rested beyond the treetops on the distant buildings that loomed over them. He was there, not here and she would seek him there. He was in Stafford somewhere and she needed to find him or risk being nothing more than words on the wind. It was time to begin hunting him in earnest she realized. She could no longer allow the Grove and what was happening with the humans delay her any longer. The sisters were taking care of that and she had greater things to focus on now that her sister was safely deposited in her Phar' Ador. There was no reason to hold her back any longer from pursuing him and she would not allow the hunt to be delayed now that she understood that simple truth. But the hunt could not begin as long as she remained as he had marked her. --------------------------- Phar' Naqua: Day 12, 0945 hours At first, when she had started to regain control of her mind she had found herself aping the way that M'Tehr spoke and even as she did so, she felt out of place adopting some of the turns of phrase she used. It felt false to her; a role she was playing because it seemed the right thing to do now that she was set adrift in unknown waters. But that was not it entirely. She had the impression in her discord that she needed to do this. That for some reason it was expected of her; a compulsion almost and some of that may indeed have been true. But realizing it and understanding it just wasn't the same as she soon realized. The connection she had now with the Grove network was there in her mind the whole time while her personality was weak and wounded; the thoughts of the whole creeping silently into her own and shaping how she was seeing and interpreting what she had experienced and recasting it unbidden in foreign terms. As much as she feared that the shadowy man's touch was still active in her in some way it did not dispel the disquiet over how the touch of the Grove and how it viewed things was acting on and through her now. When she was confronted by the earth weaver Singh and the two men who accompanied him she found herself under a compulsion to think and behave in the tittering way she had and even as she felt foolish doing so, she couldn't stop herself from embracing it at the time without knowing why she did so. When she recovered from that meeting she sealed her mind away and left seeking solitude to contemplate what it was that she had known and learned in the previous hours. The silence in her own mind was a revelation to her as she walked there in the pre-dawn hours and it was only then that she realized that there was more danger in leaving her mind open as she had been doing than from any lingering touch of the shadowy man. The broadcast vision that she had imposed on them all had in its own way begun the process of breaking the thrall of the Grove that her mental connection with it had imposed on her own mind. She hadn't been aware that the entire time since M'Tehr had contacted her and secured her permission to enter the Grove the network had been using the connection against her. That it wasn't even deliberate meant little compared to the result that would have flowed from that action. They meant well, she understood that, but in their understanding the best thing to do was for her to be integrated into the whole as rapidly as possible and that would have meant her own elimination. It answered other questions that she hadn't realized that she had as well, such as why she was separated from them the way she was mentally. If she was cast in the image of the first dryads then there was a reason why she was the way she was. M'Tehr and the other sisters were generations removed from their own source and once she focused on it, the probable reason for that difference was clear to her as one who was of them and separate from them. With her mind driving their collective mental focus she was more certain of what it was that had gone wrong with them since one like her had walked among them and how they had come to be the way they were now. Their interconnection was their strength but it was also their weakness as well. Physical form was not the only change the long years had wrought in her new kind. As she walked each morning in the dawn's growing light she contemplated what it was that she knew about them. What she had gleaned from seeing them as they were and what the group mind of the Grove network had tried to flood her consciousness with and all of it had come about for good reasons she was certain. But good or bad those reasons had produced changes in them that had set in motion the journey from what she was to what they were now and she began to wonder if there was not some sort of purpose to her being the way she was other than blind random chance. The Withering had been an evolutionary bottleneck. Only random chance and circumstances had dictated who and what species of Fae survived, the ground she walked on now was proof enough of that. Some random factor that perhaps would remain forgotten or had never been known was the reason that M'Tehr's forebears had survived while this Grove had fallen and Selicia shuddered as she tried to contemplate what those factors might have been. Changes come to a species because they offer some evolutionary advantage. She was not well versed in that field, but she did remember that much and thinking along those lines some of what she saw from her position inside and still separate began to be clear to her in ways that the communal mind of the network would not contemplate. The communal mind itself was one of those things she realized. There had to be a reason for how she was mentally connected the way she was now and why they were different and she was certain that every difference that she had indentified so far had to stem from the Withering itself. It had done more than just reduce the numbers of the breeds of Fae that lived then. It had recast them in their present forms and it had been so long ago that only now that she was here could the width of the divergence be grasped. Maybe it was an accident she reasoned. Maybe it was desperation but the effect was the same now. Sometime during the Withering the surviving dryads must have voluntarily abandoned the degree of mental separation that was part of them; the same separation that was part of Selicia now and absent in M'Tehr. She could see the advantage that might confer on those desperate sisters struggling to survive and trying to comprehend why it was that the world itself turned against them all at once. But once started down that path the road led inexorably here to what the Grove network had become now. Selicia's behaviour when she met the men who stood beside the earth weaver was another part of that legacy as well she realized. Maybe being playful in the way she had felt compelled to act was part of the original dryad pattern as well, or maybe it was something that had become exaggerated because of the Withering. It seemed so to her when she thought about it. Even as she tittered and presented herself the way she had she was completely aware that she was doing so in a way that she couldn't understand and only when she was separated was she able to turn her mind to focus on it and begin to deconstruct it mentally. It all led back again to the Withering in some fashion she decided. She had asked M'Tehr afterward if dryads behaved in that fashion with other breeds of Fae and M'Tehr had been most emphatic that it was only with men that particular compulsion manifested. There was some advantage inherent for her kind in dealing with men that way and considering how weak her people must have been during the Withering and immediately afterward and how aggressive her former species was, the pretence of being helpless and attractive and inoffensive and alluring must have been a powerful form of defence in its own way; so powerful that it reached forward through the years and effected Selicia now as well even though she was cast in the original form and not what her people had become. And then there was their physical form itself. Selicia had seen M'Tehr's three faces and now that she contemplated that, the Withering again loomed large in the explanations of why that was. M'Tehr's first face was the glamour she adopted when she ventured out of Morleth' Phar. The human woman that she appeared as to human eyes. The camouflage that she used to blend in and remain unseen in the midst of a crowd. It was something that Selicia herself had failed to do. She had tried countless times already to give the appearance of clothing over her naked form and each time it was like it just was not there for her. The potential was there of course. If M'Tehr could do this then the seeds of the ability were lying dormant in Selicia as well, but thus far she had not been able to make them sprout let alone bloom. Did the ability to form and broadcast glamour stem from desperation she wondered? It seemed that it might be the case to her. If you were weak and unable to retreat into other forms of defence, concealment made perfect sense. Not standing out meant not coming into danger and that would be enough in its own way to ensure survival. Being able to see through the glamour would also be an advantage she reasoned. M'Tehr could do it easily and Selicia could penetrate one with some effort so maybe that was how it began for the first ones. She knew that she was already gaining greater facility with seeing what was really there rather that what the eyes were told was there and maybe that was the key itself. That you first had to be able to see through the shadow to learn how to use it for yourself then. If that was true then she may well succeed in learning to conceal who and what she was in time after all. She hoped so anyway. There was too much that she didn't know and with the task she had assigned herself she needed every tool she could lay her hands upon to turn to her advantage. The second face that M'Tehr showed her made greater sense to her as well once Selicia had begun to understand how the glamour that produced her first face might have come about. The glamour may have protected her kind against men, but it would not protect them against more aggressive breeds of Fae she reasoned. From what she could tell being able to use some degree of glamour was common among most Fae and so to was the ability to see through one. But where glamour may fail to conceal what had become M'Tehr's natural form would succeed. She had passed by M'Tehr's temporary Phar' Ador during the few times that she had withdrawn into its depths and when she had done so it was almost impossible for Selicia to determine that she was there at all. The statue-like appearance that M'Tehr possessed when her glamour was dropped blended into the natural wood so completely that it made the ultimate blind and even if she was out in the open it was easy enough for her to disappear into a stand of trees by remaining still with unearthly patience until the threat had passed. That was a smooth form, pared of almost all human appearance and it had to be the result of necessity she reasoned to herself. Realizing that, she set down the mental burden that she hadn't realized that she was carrying; the thought that this was only the first change that was part of what she was to become and that she wouldn't in time share M'Tehr's shape as well. Both of her false faces served to protect M'Tehr and that left only her true face remaining. The face that Selicia had glimpsed deep in the aether itself; the face that was rarely shown at all. M'Tehr had an unearthly beauty there that belied her physical appearance Selicia realized and in comparison Selicia herself was plain in a way that she was just coming to understand. When she first saw her shorn completely of both of her faces Selicia was struck by the sight and when she had time to process it he couldn't help but ask M'Tehr if she thought that the reason that she was the way she was had some connection with how she was made in the first place. The idea that she was the way she was because of the shadowy man's touch dogged her thoughts and it made her feel lesser in some ways for a time. It was only later when she had recovered further that she ventured to ask her about those differences and just why it was that she was so different in these key ways from what the two of them were now. M'Tehr had clearly been thinking about this as well, as had the rest of the Grove it seemed. It wasn't surprising to Selicia that was the case. She was in some ways like a fossil brought to life for them and her presence had already spawned countless debate between the minds that made up the network itself. She was still an enigma to them it seemed and so far the only reasonable course they could take was to accept her difference for what it was. The influence that was thrust over her mind and thought patterns, the influence that prompted her to begin withdrawing from the group mind as she was doing was not deliberate she decided, but was just part of who and what they were now and as such was something that needed to be guarded against. Until it could be minimized it was a part of her sisters that she needed to keep at arm's length for now. There would be time to breech the subject with her sisters at another time she decided but now that she was aware of it she decided that it was necessary to pass that information on to Sakura as well. She would need to know to guard against this part of her sisters mental influence. When she emerged she would be even more vulnerable once she was out into the open and no longer focused inward. But there was still the lingering thought that part of what she was now was also part of what he had determined she was to be when he had raped her into this form. Her reaction to Singh and the other men had been the seed of that particular fear and it only began to ease when M'Tehr told her that, as far as she and the other sisters could determine, what she felt was natural and stemmed from her nature itself and not from something the shadowy man might have done to her. That was of more relief to her than M'Tehr was aware of and Selicia was certain that M'Tehr still did not know just how grateful that Selicia was to her to find out that the compulsion that gripped her stemmed from a source outside the control of her prey. It made contemplating the hunt for him much easier for her as she began mapping out in her mind what she needed to do now. When that first happened, when she found herself behaving the way she did, she had been afraid that it was something that he had hidden inside of her. A bit of psychic sabotage that was only revealed to her when it was too late to compensate for. A failsafe of some kind to keep her from turning against him. Finding out that it was not another way he had devised to mark her as his was of greater relief that even she thought she could feel. But her relief at that knowledge was dampened by something else and that something else was standing out for all to see on her left wrist and forearm. The winding rose that bloomed in the pit of her left elbow waited there demanding her attention and now that her resolve was set it could not be ignored and she realized that ignoring that was something that she was guilty of. She had good reasons to do so. You could always find reasons to justify not doing something, but now that Sakura was no longer with her.... The thought trailed off and she refocused on the design. She shook herself out of her reverie and looked down at the twisted rose marking her arm and was seized with the certainty that this was his doing as well. She had assumed when it was happening, when she was changing that it was part of what she was becoming and connected to her that way, but in this idea she was wrong. He had done this. He had desired that she be identified as belonging to him and this was nothing more than his brand. As long as it remained there she was still identified as belonging to him and the thought made her flesh crawl and her insides writhe with hatred at the thought. If she could have torn the marking from her skin she would do so without hesitation and even now she was barely able to restrain herself from visiting such harm on her own flesh. I won't belong to him she thought forced her eyes to travel down its lines until each detail of it was etched in her memory and she could have drawn it in perfect reproduction with her eyes closed or open. She had been mistaken she realized now that she allowed herself to focus on it and accept what it was rather than what she thought it was. Because it had grown as she had changed almost like a plant would grow her mind had associated it with becoming a dryad and why not think so she told herself? It made some degree of sense at the time and when her raw healing mind was still knitting together again the focus M'Tehr had paid to seeking her Grove mark had reinforced that thought deep in her developing mind as well. But it wasn't that at all she told herself again and now that she understood that it seemed more obvious. When he first entered her house as she was straining against the pain her ward inflicted on both of them he hadn't noticed her until the mark had been exposed. Then he had focused on her without hesitation she reminded herself. Whatever it was, this mark was connected to him in some fashion and for all she know it was connected to him even now. She focused on it and tried to see if there was something lingering in its composition that she could detect. Something that might give her some clue to just why it was that, in addition to changing her the way he had done so, he had also chosen to mark her in this fashion as well. She might no longer fear him the way she had before, but she understood that he didn't do things that really mattered without a good reason as he reckoned it. There had to be a purpose to this design and try as she might either that purpose was dormant now or she was not skilled enough to ferret it out yet. She slipped into the aether and concentrated on it again and this time there was something for her to see, but it was only a trace, a fragment of the whole and not enough remained of it for her to divine its purpose, but there was one thing she was certain of and that was that she was not going to allow it to remain as part of her any longer. Not as it was. As the snake she encountered had first started her thinking of the weaknesses that he might have, what she had done when she fought him informed her of a possible solution now. The sphere that he used could be turned against him and so too might this as well, but the question remained how that it could be done. It had to have something to do with seeing her, she knew that much and if he used this to see her, to possibly track her even wouldn't it be possible for her to turn that against him? The idea didn't seem impossible when she considered it, but the question remained how and to answer how she needed to know more about what it was and why it was there. She bent over it in the aether and focused on it more intently and as she did she reached into the earth beneath her to draw more of its strength into herself. The fragments that made up what it was were tantalizingly just out of reach for her but the longer she examined them the more certain that this was in some ways like the tether she had used to maintain the connection to her physical body when she was still Cecil. It was broken she decided and not just dormant. When her mind shattered and she was recast in the aether to become what she was now this link had been shattered as well. And as she examined it she was gradually beginning to understand why that was so. She had changed the code. Every project that she had ever worked on as Cecil constantly ran into connection problems because of bad code. A mistake here, a bad architecture design there and a request would hit a brick wall and result in an error code that had to be tracked down and worked around if it was even possible to do so without re-writing the entire section and that was what happened to her she decided. This was linked to what she had been and once she no longer was that person then it became a null signal and ceased to work properly. The only way that she thought the shadowy man could restore it would be to return her to what she had been before she entered the elm just after she had fought him and there was little chance of him attempting to do that to her now. Not after she had risen so successfully against him the way she had. It eased her mind to realize that but she wasn't going to share what she had discovered with the others yet. It was enough that she knew it, but that did nothing to purge this visible remnant from her skin though and she was not going to allow it to remain if she could do so. In the aether she was created so in the aether she would have her best chance to change this she reasoned. Broken or not it was a reminder of what he had done to her and she needed to remove it from her. As long as that stained her she could feel his touch and even if it could do nothing to her that touch was enough to make her feel dirty down to the centre of her being. At first she tried to draw it out of her reasoning that now that the connection was broken it would be weak enough for her to do so, but it was more resistant to that approach than she expected it to be. She thought that she might be able to in effect lance it and let it drain forth from her but when she attempted that she was barely begun when it began to become more painful the longer she maintained her attempt and she quickly ended it. The sun was higher in the sky above her even in the aether and she focused and allowed the wound she had carved into her arm to heal and end the gradually increasing pain her efforts had caused her. She couldn't force it from her it seemed. That was probably part of the make-up of this mark. It would resist being removed if the target became aware of it and why it was there at all. That part of its code seemed to be functioning fine even if the rest of it was broken. Selicia paused and looked at it again. What do you do with partially functioning code she asked herself? The answer seemed obvious to her when she considered it that way. You use it. You bridge the parts that you need to use and create dead end traps to isolate the parts you wanted to keep from malfunctioning. She couldn't remove it but she realized that there may be a way for her to use it instead. Now that she had part of the key to what it was staining her flesh she concentrated on it again and she was pleased to see that she started to begin to understand what it was that she was seeing. There was the subroutine to cause pain if someone attempted to remove it. It wasn't really a subroutine as she understood it but thinking of it those terms was useful for her to grasp what she was seeing here. The pain to cause aversion to removal was clearly intact, but what else was there she wondered and looked further into it. As she suspected when she examined it more intently there was a broken connection there now. She could see the end of it just inside of her that were torn free waving without direction now that the connection was severed. Perhaps she could use that she told herself and left it alone for now. That was a null connection for the moment and she was going to track her way through all of this mess first before she decided how to use this if she could. Null connections she mused to herself. If this were a program why would a null connection happen? The most obvious reason was the one she was seeing here where part of it was broken, but that was not the only source of a null connection. There were null connections that existed by design as well. A feature intended to trigger some purpose and now that she was thinking along those lines she went looking for something like that as well. It didn't take long to find what she was looking for now that she was aware of it and as she looked it over it made little sense why it was there in the first place. If she was looking at it right then the only deliberate null connection that was deliberately placed in this matrix was one that was connected to the image itself. And that was connected to that part of her deep inside that the elm had healed when she was joined with it. It made no sense to her why that would even be there at all. If she was reading it right, the moment that she was healed the mark began to rapidly manifest fully and thinking back she seemed to remember that when it first developed it was not represented as completely as it was now. In fact she was certain that the design had stopped not when it manifested as a full bloom but rather as a tightly wound bud. The full bloom had come later when she emerged lost in her nature and when she regained her mind it was as it was now. But why? She asked herself. It served some sort of purpose or the shadowy man would not have included it so what was it meant to do she wondered. She couldn't figure out what it was right now the way she could other parts of it. There was another broken section that was even more difficult to put together than the one she thought was intended to connect her to him and looking at it she wasn't sure what it was intended to do either. It was intended to influence her though, that much she was sure of. She looked over it in the aether and asked herself why. Why would he have designed whatever this was in this way? And thinking of her brief contact with him she started to put together the hazy outlines of what this might be. The pain circuit was intact. That had not been broken at all she thought and as she looked at it again she realize that wasn't entirely the case. The part that prevented her from removing it was intact but there were other connections that now were broken as well and those connections led to the ones that were now severed and waving inertly. There was always a reason for any kind of design she reminded herself. It might work extremely well or poorly but there was always a reason for it. The pain she felt trying to remove it was self-explanatory. He wouldn't want his prey to remove it at all and pain that increased in proportion to the effort to do so would be an effective tool to prevent it. But a connection that caused pain seemed like something that he would make other uses of as well and as she traced the now severed connection she thought that was a multipurpose subroutine as well. The shadowy man wouldn't hesitate to use pain in other ways as well and having a direct means of inflicting it would be exactly what he would gravitate towards. That must be the purpose of the broken connection she reasoned. When she was separated from what she had been his ability to inflict pain on her remotely was broken as well. She thought back to when he first had changed her, when she emerged from the vile egg he had cast her in and it seemed that the tremendous pain that she felt them might just have been exaggerated as well even though she was not able to recognize it as such. He seemed to take a great deal of pleasure in baiting her and taunting her while the pursuit was underway and looking at what happened dispassionately in her mind she thought she could see spikes of where it increased at certain points during the chase. She knew he was driving her at the time, but until now she hadn't been aware of just how much of what was happening was directly linked to what he was doing. She carefully examined the ruptured ends where they led from the intact subroutine and once she had identified each of them she sealed them in individual loops so that there would be no way for him to re-forge the connection. She had no intention of allowing him to have access to this ever again. It took time for her to create the blind paths, dead ends and traps like so many ant lions waiting to channel any attempt into fruitless and faulty paths, but eventually she was satisfied that she had found them all and sealed them away so he would find them useless if he ever attempted to reconnect her again. Mentally she paused and examined what she knew about the mark to make certain that she had winkled out everything it was intended to do. There was the pain circuit to keep her from removing it from her, there was the subroutine to connect him to her so he could find her and the additional subroutine to allow him to inflict pain on her remotely and lastly there was that null connection that seemed entirely focused on what was happening inside of her almost like it was measuring her in some way. Why she wondered again. What reason would he have for wanting to know that about her? It was complete as far as she could tell and other than that it had no other connection to the other circuits as she was seeing them. Maybe it was a visual clue she thought. Maybe it served to let him know that she had indeed fallen fully under his control as was not biding her time under the pretence of doing so? It seemed like something he would do she reasoned. He clearly wanted her under control and a quick visual check would tell him if she was still resisting him or not. She decided to leave it alone for now. It had obviously already run its course and shut down so she didn't think that it was something that she needed to fear as much as what the remaining aspects of this mark had in store for her if she didn't neutralize them completely. Now that she grasped it she thought she might have a way now to turn it against him as she had turned his sphere against him. The connections were severed now, but they may still be re-forged under the right circumstances. He would seek to do just that, but not if she could repurpose them. If she could turn them outward so that they were seeking him instead of seeking to re-connect to him then they would repel his efforts and if she did it right it might serve as an antenna to track him instead. If she could get close enough to him it might warn her of that and let her track him before he was aware that she was doing so. If she could do that then it would be something that would give her an advantage when she faced him again. She bent back to the broken connections and concentrated on them, holding them in her mind and exploding them so she could understand its design and purpose as completely as possible before she could turn it to her own service. Even as the data flooded into her mind she didn't think that she could tune it specifically to him or even if she should. There were too many broken connections there for her to do that and looking it over in her mind she didn't think that it might be such a good idea to do so after all. If it was too close to what it was before it might function as a bridge for him to repair and use it for his original intention if she were to do that. Better to keep it more general she decided. It might pick up others who were similar to him but it would be different enough that he wouldn't have time to turn it against her. And that might not be such a bad thing after all she considered when she was rerouting it to serve its new function. When she had pledged Phar' Naqua to vigilance it was not just against this one threat but against all who shared what it was he was in the depths of his existence. He was a predator and she intended to prey on predators. When he was gone there would be others and then this part of her work would still serve its purpose in that case. She smiled as she turned back to work and lost herself utterly in what she was doing. It felt good. Like she was back doing the software architecture that she was immersed in back when she was just Cecil Barnes. Time held no meaning while she was thus engaged and when she looked up from what she was doing she realized that the day had come and gone without her noticing it. The stars were rising overhead as darkness lay over the Grove like a warm blanket. She paused and looked around her taking it in. She needed to break away for now she decided. Getting lost in what you were doing was something that was only good in small doses. Allowing it to take control was an invitation to find you were wearing blinders and then missing small details that were more important than they appeared. She rose from the ground and slipped back in the physical world. M'Tehr, aware that she was back sent her a query mentally and Selicia broke her silence long enough to reassure her and tell her that she would explain later why she had been silent for so long. She wandered through the Grove and found herself passing the granite block she had passed this morning. The snake was long gone at this point. She didn't really think he would still be there. Perhaps he had gone hunting now that darkness had fallen. Somewhere an unwary squirrel or slow rabbit would cross his path and that would be the end of either one. The thought didn't bother her she realized. Before it would have and not because she was squeamish either. When she was human she had always had revulsion for watching a reptile feed. Maybe it was personal or maybe it was the lingering sensation of solidarity between mammals against those who preyed on them who were reptiles. She didn't feel that now though. There was a separation that hadn't been there before and she saw it as no different than when the rabbit ate the grass it needed to live. Something was going to eat the rabbit in turn even if it was nothing more than ants and fly larva. So why not the snake she had encountered? She made her way to Sakura's oak and laid her hand on the rough bark. Her sister was still focused inward, but she sensed Selicia's presence and pulsed in response. Selicia reassured her mentally and left her alone after that. There was nothing there for her right now. The earth was cool beneath her bare feet and the crunch of fallen leaves seasoned the air with the brittle crackling sound they made as her weight crushed and splintered them underfoot. She listened to the sound as she moved through the night. One sound amongst many and not even the most common one at that. There was a halo of light around the Grove; lights shed from where Stafford encircled it. It was later than she realized she thought to herself. Most of the lights intruding into the Grove proper were coming from things like streetlights rather than cars and late night businesses that were still open. She wondered as she walked how long that would remain true. How long would it be before the Grove expanded to such a level that those lights would struggle to even pierce this deeply? And would she mind it if that was the case? She decided that she did in her own way and made her way back to where she was born again. The open field should remain open she told herself. The trees around it would grow taller and in time their thickness would block more and more of the surrounding city out of sight except on the edges, but this place needed to remain more or less open. There was more to a forest than just its trees she thought and when she communicated her desire to the Grove around her she was not surprised when she found that it agreed with her in this decision. The trees themselves might be greedy individually, but they also recognized that there was more to the Grove than just the part that they occupied. She thought of Jacen as she walked into the open space under the moonlight. Satyrs were the Grove's link to the beasts that lived there. They may defer to her as the prime dryad but they would listen to him. The seeds that fell here would be collected by the smaller beasts now she thought instead of simply sprouting as they would have done if left unmolested. Balance would be maintained that way. As she reached the place of her birth she knelt down and slipped into the aether again to resume her work. Phar' Naqua: Day 13, 0250 hours When she returned to the aether Selicia was able to keep her focus on what she was doing but not to the same degree she was operating at before. It would take time for her to build up to that level again, but she was less likely to overlook something now. She turned her attention back to the rose marking and allowed it to explode in her mind again. Tracing the different sections now that she understood them was much easier now and she could see where the changes that she had made blended in and superseded the original work, but there were still some things she didn't like about this remnant of what the dark man had done to her. For one thing she didn't like that it was out there on her arm the way it was. It wasn't just that it marked her that bothered her it was that its location gave an outsider access to it via direct contact. How could she be sure that if the shadowy man got close enough to grip her wrist that it wouldn't allow him some means of access by doing so? That wasn't a risk she wanted to take she decided. And what about something else? When he was no longer a threat how did she know that another would not pose as much of a threat to her when she encountered it? Something needed to be done to prevent that and since she couldn't remove this without being possibly crippled by the pain it was hard wired to produce maybe she didn't have to. When she tried to remove it the intact directive had responded, but would it respond in the same way if it were relocated? She wondered if it even would and if so would it be lessened? Would it remain afterward constantly inflicting pain on her as well? If she could move it she would have an advantage and she was all for hording every advantage that she could lay her hands on before she started looking for her author. When she had tried to draw it from her earlier she had managed to detach a small section of the design and even though she was no longer trying to pull it out of her she could feel it throbbing where it was no longer connected. A dull aching lingered like a sore tooth in her wrist. It only increased its level of pain when she tried to draw it away from her, but what if she drew it inward she thought. She hesitantly reached out to it and gingerly grasped it. There was a slight spike in the level of pain when she did that. But as she began drawing it deeper into herself that fell off until she ceased to be aware of it at all. This might work she told herself but she needed someplace that he wouldn't' be able to reach easily and it needed to be where he wouldn't notice it as well. She needed it to be hidden in some fashion but still accessible to her own touch and then she thought of M'Tehr and how her Grove mark was centered between her breasts. Selicia had no intention of placing it there but somewhere else on her torso was an idea that held out some promise to her. An adversary could seize her wrist and even her arm if they had the chance to, but seizing one small spot on her torso was much more difficult. Still it didn't seem wise to her to relocate it in such an easily seen place. Her back maybe she asked herself? Or maybe someplace else? She was over-thinking it she realized suddenly as she watched the long stem detach and follow where she was drawing it inward. She was allowing the size of it to dictate conditions that did not exist. As long as it was intact there was no reason that it should remain in the same pattern that it held at the moment. Watching it slither along her arm she had another thought as well. There was no reason that it should remain the way it was at all. The snake was a beast that occupied a great deal of area except when it didn't want to. She drew where she had detached the end down her body until it extended across her torso up her shoulder and moved to her upper arm to end in the blossom that was no longer anchored in the pit of her elbow. She drew the end down and centered it in the darkest portion of her navel and anchored it there. The rest of the design was still detached and she began to recast it; looping and winding it around itself, gradually filling the navel and extending in a knot around it until it coiled like the snake around itself with the blossom turning downward and inward facing the mass beneath it. She exploded it again in her mind and liked what she saw there. It was much more compact now. Twisting and turning inward on itself it seemed to suggest that there was shadow locked in the coils and trapped there. The blossom that overshadowed it seemed as if it were poised to consume what was now trapped in the thorny stem that held it fast. It was a nice touch she realized. She hadn't intended that it would have that final appearance since she was more concerned with minimizing the area that was seen and placing it where it would not draw attention now that it was less noticeable. The bloom was still too large she told herself. It stood out too much and if she were not able to cover it in some way either with clothing or a glamour when she realized how to create one, then all she had done was provide an aiming point for someone to strike her in the belly. Although she wasn't sure what doing that would do to her if it were to happen. She sensed that there wasn't anything there now that was there before so would she still feel the blow in the same way she asked herself? Or would she just register the impact the same way she would register feeling something slap solid flesh like she had before? Either way it wasn't placed in an easily accessible spot like it was before. She still needed to do something about making it smaller as well. As she had seen right away that bloom was just too noticeable as it remained. If it was smaller though it might be overlooked she reasoned, but to make it smaller would require her to draw part of that somewhere else and if she did that she might make it more noticeable than she intended it to be. Perhaps she could make the winding stem thicker she told herself and started drawing it down in that manner. The stem thickened and she was pleased with what she was encouraging the design to do be. Even after the thorny stem was thickened until it lay in heavy coils the bloom still remained a little too large for what she wanted it to be. She looked at it again. With the crisscrossing stem and the thorns it suggested even more that there was shadow caught within the coils, but as she looked at it there was no good reason that she could see that it shouldn't be that way deliberately. She began drawing more off of the blossom and was gratified to see it began to shrink as the formless shadow filled in between the coiled twisted stem. If this was actually a tattoo, it would have become black and indistinguishable by now, but because it wasn't you could pick out the details there even though it was darkness layered on darkness. The bloom narrowed and flattened until it was hanging over the mass of shadow confined and helpless within its coils. It was also a lot harder to see now as well. Before she managed to do this the design that grew on her arm was open and reached out for the eye to focus on. This was a knot of darkness that you had to look for and even then because of the way it turned onto itself, it was still much harder to see clearly. Someone could see at a glance that there was something there now, but without focusing on it they would likely overlook it if they were in a hurry and that was precisely what she wanted to happen. She looked at it again now that it was recast more to her liking and as she did it struck her that it was better than she had hoped for and more to the point she was pleased with the idea that it was projecting as well. Now instead of the winding stem of a rose that sprawled over her arm it was coiled like the rattler she had encountered and poised to devour the shadow trapped in its coils. The rose was still there to see, malevolent in its own way. The thing about its malevolence that she approved of was that it was not turned outward but focused on the shadow confined within and that was the part of the image that pleased her most. She hadn't intended to recast it in this specific way but now that she saw it she wouldn't have changed it. She released it and let it settle into place, waiting for it to trigger the pain the intact directive was still capable of inflicting. But there was nothing there now. She exploded it again, this time to examine it closely. It seemed alright to her from what she could tell and the changes that she had made already seemed to be functioning. The null command was still inert, the outward seeking tendrils seemed stronger to a degree though. She could sense a stronger connection now that the whole thing had been relocated, almost like because it was closer to her center it was able to function better in some way. As she stood in the aether and moved in a slow circle she had the sensation that there was more response when she faced Stafford than when she faced away from it. It might not function the way that she had hoped it would, but it wouldn't operate the way he had intended it to either. If only she could neutralize that ability to inflict pain she would be much more comfortable with leaving this here now. She looked at it again. There was no way that she could disable that nearly intact mechanism. If she even seriously tried it might activate in such a way that she might not be able to reverse it. She shuddered at the thought of that happening. If it did it would be better to tear it away from her and accept the pain that removal would result rather than try to live with the alternative. Or maybe not. Pain was something that was transmitted to the brain by the nerves. Overload the nerves and pain no longer registered. Destroy the nerve cluster and again it didn't register even if the damage remained. She couldn't keep the command to initiate the pain sequence from happening, but what if she could render it meaningless? She thought of what was inside her body as nerves, but they really were not the same thing anymore. Her physical form was converted into something more akin to a blending of plant and mammal with the plant part of her nature being more dominant in certain ways. The placement of what had replaced her nervous system was more a matter of matching what had been there before rather than what was needed now. She looked deep into herself and saw no reason why it needed to remain that way. She took the image of that part of her form into her mind and with a deep mental intake to steel herself; she exploded that part of her body. There was the design where she had recast its shape. Compared to where it was before there were less connections that it was in proximity to now, but there were still enough there to cause her trouble. She reached out and tentatively started to move the ones that were in range further away from it. She began gathering them in more distant clusters just out of reach of that part of the design. When she had moved all that she thought she could move away the only thing remaining for her was to see if it had the effect that she desired. She allowed her exploded form to return to its original size and waited for the changes she had made to settle into place. Already being in the aether sped the process up considerably. She felt the last of the nerve clusters move into where she had directed them to go and felt them sink into place. She looked down at the coiled rose and nerved herself to take the next step. She plunged her hand into herself and grasped to dark man's mark. As she tried to forcibly detach it, she could sense the intact pain directive begin to activate and while she could feel it there was nothing in its actions like what it had done to her before now. She could feel it swinging into motion, but now rather than sharp agony there was a distant muffled aching. She gave it one final tug and felt the whiplash as the pain level increased only slightly. It was enough she decided. She released it and sighed as the aching abruptly ceased. She'd done it, she hadn't been able to remove that part of what he'd done, but she had neutralized it to an acceptable degree. She rose from where she had been sitting and made her way back to Sakura's oak. Her sister was part of this and if there was anyone that she could share this with it would be her. Sakura was busy making herself as Selicia expected her to be. Before when she checked on her there was only the acknowledgement that she was there in their connection, but not this time. Selicia spoke to her and didn't really expect that there would be any response. When she felt Sakura's full attention turn from what she was doing and rest on her she realized that what she was doing might have more relevance than she had considered. There were no words that passed between them, but from the level of her focus what she had done was more than just ridding herself of something unwanted as she thought she was doing. She had been thinking selfishly she realized. This was more than just her own personal focus this was something that might be more useful than she thought it might be. This whole time she had been thinking as an individual. She had been looking at what she was doing as just another tool she could wrestle from the shadowy man's fingers and turn against him, but it was more than that now. The mark she had crafted into a weapon against him was one that would outlast him. She wasn't certain, but by short circuiting the infliction of pain she might have also had the effect of blunting other forms of pain as well. That was how it worked she remembered as her mind flashed back to when pain danced with boots of knives on her nerves. It didn't actually cause pain as much as store it and amplify it. It still did that, but now that there were no nearby nerve clusters to affect, it acted as a pain sink. Drawing pain away from other parts of the body and centering it here where it could have a severely reduced effect. Would it be as useful when the time came she could only speculate, but it seemed that it might be. The ability that she now had to sense in a general way someone like him would carry over long after he was gone as she intended it to do, but keeping such a thing to herself seemed a waste as well. If she truly was going to bind her Grove and her line to the purpose of its name then this should be the means of doing so she realized. She asked Sakura in silence what she thought of this and when her sister responded she felt her acceptance of what Selicia was proposing. She reached into the oak and until both hands were submerged into Sakura's essence and then opened herself to her sister and allowed what she had done to flow to her as well. "Let it be." The thought echoed in her mind, but it was not solely her own. It was Sakura's as well and it was more than only the two of them. It was an agreement that echoed along her line and in that moment Selicia heard the assent of all those who were to come afterward and she froze as it rebounded along that line and returned to her far stronger now than when she had spoken. "Let it be", thundered back to her. M'Tehr had spoken to her when she asked about how a Grove mark was created and even as she tried to explain it and to relate what little was preserved in the oldest archives it still made no real sense to her until now. It was not a brand or a sigil of ownership the way the shadowy man had tried to inflict on her flesh. It was much more than that. It was a burden willingly taken up by all. It was a responsibility to live up to and to live by. It was a symbol of all you were and all you could be. A light meant to rally all who lived under its illumination and a terror to all who stood against it. And Selicia understood that now. It was as if at that moment, somehow all who would ever bear this mark were gathered together at once to give their assent to doing so. They were not here and yet they were. As the founder of the line, she set the tone, but as the inheritors of it they would have to accept it or not. "Let it be." She felt the ringing of the mark as it was taken into Sakura and by extension all that would follow them now and she froze in awe as she contemplated just what it was that she felt being created here. The feeling washed over her and spread out from her as well, rippling through the physical and the temporal. She felt the Grove responding, as if it had been waiting for this and for all she knew that was what had taken place. "Let it be." She glanced down and she could see a difference already in what she had wrought on herself. The darkness of the design was still there, but now it was surrounded and picked out in details that were not there before. It was as if those details were now outlined in by the delicate strands of a spider's webbing made of the thinnest silver, but it didn't overwhelm and subdue it either. "Let it be." The darkness was highlighted by the light and the two moved in balance with each other. The darkness contained by the light now where before it had only been suggested. "It is done." The words echoed in her mind and she was not certain that she hadn't spoken them as well. The timbre of them reverberated in her mind and hung there long after they were spoken. Selicia withdrew her hands from the oak and felt them fall to her sides. "Thank you," she said to no one in particular, to everyone who mattered. ----------------------------- Phar' Naqua: Day 15, 1210 hours Selicia felt the weight of what she had done fall from her. In truth she had not been aware that she was even bearing such a load until it dropped away from her and was no longer there to shadow every action beneath it. There was more to it than that but for now it was enough that she was finally able to set this burden aside for now. And with the setting aside of one burden there was time now to shoulder another. There was a promise that she had made that demanded her attention now and it was a promise she intended to keep although at present she had little idea of what she needed to do to keep that promise. What she needed for now was rest. That need alone was an indication of just how much her actions had taken a toll on her already. In the days that had passed since she had emerged from the wild churning froth that had marked her nature there had been little time that had been given over to just rest. If she had not been drained so by sharing her mind with the Grove itself it was likely that she still would not have rested yet. But rest was what she was in need of. Sakura was no longer her pressing all consuming need and the demands placed on her by her own actions in naming Phar' Naqua were also slipping into the past for now; those ripples would reverberate back in time but for now they trended outward. She relaxed utterly and allowed her connection with the elm to draw her back unseen by either man or Fae and in moments she was ensconced in the utter darkness that was the deepest centre of her elm and there her mind drifted in the suspension of consciousness that was the closest that she was able to come to sleep now. But even there it was not entirely peaceful as she hoped it would be. There was a faint whispering that sang around her. A melody that she could just barely hear and one that she thought she should recognize even as she knew that it was not really any song she had heard before. The sound picked at the edge of her mind; at once maddeningly familiar and still yet unknown. She turned her attention toward it and thought that if she could just identify it she could settle her mind and let it slip into the background and there it would trouble her no more. Her first thought was that it was the Grove connection itself that she was hearing. That now that she had settled the need of her Grove for a name and a sign that now she was hearing the voices of her sisters growing in strength around her, but that was not it she realized. Nor was it the feather thin touch of Sakura now off in the heart of her oak speaking to her either. The voices of the sisters were like a rushing river; albeit one she could tune out at need and Sakura's voice tasted of butterflies dancing on blossoms in its lust to emerge from the home she had just placed her in. No, this was another voice she decided and though she did not recognize it she believed it was also one she had heard before. Calling for it would do little good she realized as well. The source of this whisper was not a pet to be summoned and it was not a thing to be sought for like a misplaced possession, but she had a growing need to hear it even so. All her senses could tell her was that it was all around her with no indication that it was greater or lesser in any direction and thus no reference for her to focus on to try to gain its attention. Could it be the voice of the dark man she wondered? Was that what she was hearing she asked herself? Was he exerting his influence on her now and if he was what could she do about it even so? She concentrated on it and tasted the sound and then rejected that possibility. This was nothing of his she decided. This tasted like mountains rising and stars burning and it was old she decided. Something of his would not taste like this; nor would she find herself drawn to it in the way that she felt now were this still part of him. Look inside she told herself and turned inward not to focus on the sound that hummed around her but to still her mind instead. If there was something there for her she would find it by not seeking it; it would come to her on its own terms and it was up to her to make peace with that idea and not try to rush it just to satisfy her own desire. She turned inward and lost herself in her own being feeling her separate nature dissolve into all that was and still remained. "He spoke greater truth that even he suspected," one said to her. "You are a clever girl." For a moment the phrase seized her heart and she felt it freeze into immobility thinking that it was him after all and hot on the heels of that feeling followed an aborted flash of anger. Aborted because while the One who spoke used his word it was not him after all. This was something else that was speaking to her now; something much older than the one she wanted to find could hope to become and far more than what she herself might begin to comprehend. "Do not fear my words, daughter of Elm and Ashes," the voice said to her. "They are only the expression of pride in what you have done paying tribute to you and not anything more." "Are you the elm?" she asked knowing even as the words left her mind that the answer would be no. "In part I am, just as I am you and your daughter and the sisters who have reached out for you. We spoke before but you could not remember it and until your daughter was apart from you it was not wise for us to speak again." "Who are you?" she asked not quite sure what it was that she would hear in response. "One who loves you," the voice answered her. "One that has waited for you far longer than you could understand. Before now I have only whispered to you faintly, but now it is necessary that we speak with no shadow between us." "But who are you?" she asked again. "I am the deep part of you and through you we are one," the voice answered. "More I cannot tell you now; you are still too young to bear it." Selicia had a suspicion of who it was that spoke with her but she was hesitant to say so and force a confirmation. Instead she bound her curiosity and bid it have patience for now. "Why do you speak now and not before? She asked and waited for the voice to respond. Patience was coming easier to her now it seemed. Not that she had been all that impatient when she was Cecil Barnes, but since awakening in the Florida room after escaping the shadowy man she was finding patience easier to cultivate. "Because what I must tell you is for you alone to know. Before you were mad with the froth of your birth and then you were grasping at the lifeline your sisters held out to you; and after that you were focused on the essence of your daughter. Now you are yourself and you are ready to hear what I have to tell you. What is meant only for you to know." Selicia felt the urge to ask, but she bridled that desire as she had her curiosity and waited for the voice to continue instead. "You will need to prepare yourself for what it to come daughter of elm and ashes. There are many around you who would seek to bend you in directions that they think you should go into and they will not do so with malevolence when they do. At least most of them won't though it might now feel that way at the time." "You have your own path to forge. An oath was accepted by the earth. An oath you made and it will hold that oath close to its heart until it is fulfilled. Do not allow others to turn you away from that promise even when they mean well. There will be consequences if you allow this to occur." "Is it that important?" she asked projecting her humility into the question that the voice might taste of it as see that she was in earnest. "The earth is wakening," the voice said. "The winter is almost passed and spring has begun. As the winter was long the summer that follows this spring will be longer still. Your sisters think they understand this but they are mistaken. You and those of your line will understand this better than they will and the others will not understand at all at first. It was for this that you were called." "Before now the help you have known was silent so you would be prepared for now, just as this is preparation for what comes after. You are the guardian chosen for this spring as the lines of your sisters were the guardian for the one that is past. They will be a strong shield for you, but they are not the arm that bears it. That is for you and those that come from you. That is the seed of the oath you offered. The oath we accepted. You must not fail in the keeping of that oath." "And if I should?" she asked not wanting to hear what that might be and not able to turn away from it. "Then the earth will spit you from it as it did before when the shield failed and all your line will tear at itself until it is consumed and nothing will remain to mark where it was, but the ruin and the sorrow that remains." Dormath 'Phar, Selicia thought to herself. The One is speaking of Dormath 'Phar. Do I dare to ask them to say more? She asked herself and then decided that she would not. M'Tehr would tell her of that if she needed to know more and it would be better to sup from the well of M'Tehr and her sister's knowledge first before asking about such things from this one. "I won't fail," she said steadily to the voice, "We will not fail, but I need to know where to begin. I know who I should find first, but I don't know where." "Your feet have already found the path," the voice told her, "and others already come to you. Some of them you have already met, others will be there for you if you have the wit to recognize them when they appear." "M'Tehr and Jacen are here as you say they are," Selicia said. "But I am not sure that they understand as I do what needs doing. They are both more focused on what they came here for. How can I win them to my cause? What can I tell them that will sway them wholly to my side?" "Your sister and her brother are not the ones you need to concern yourself with now daughter of elm and ashes. She heard the voice respond. "They are already there for you even if they do not realize all that entails just yet. You must become the protector you swore to be and to do that you will need another; one you have already met. His are the hands that will guide you to the one you seek." That was interesting, Selicia thought, and not at all what she expected to hear. "One is already drawing the one you seek closer to you. He will be the one to place the focus of your desire in front of you. Do not lose your taste for what you seek once you have had your fill. This is only the first taste of what is coming and your oath binds you to the end of it. It may be that you would choose to be there for the full course of what is to be, but it is also as likely you would pass out of the rest of what you can do as your true sister did before when she stood on this path as you do now." "Who is this one?" Selicia asked and as she did she felt the tension over who it was that she should include in her plans here emerge for within her. "There is an earth weaver caught in this web. He is the one that will draw the one you seek to you. He is a friend of old to your kind and if you ask it he will be your friend as well. Seek the earth weaver and stand with him when the time comes in the hour of his need as he will stand with you in the hour of yours." There were more questions that Selicia could feel forming in her mind but before she could move herself to do so the voice bid her to sleep and she felt the touch of who it was speaking to her fade into the background as her consciousness drifted into silence. ---------------------------------------- The sun was directly overhead, but in the Grove below, the strong noon sunlight was scattered and diluted. Reduced to streamers of light that pierced like lances through the heavy canopy overhead. There was little else that the light could do and as she walked between the shafts of light M'Tehr considered suggesting to the Grove that the canopy be thinned so that more of it could reach the forest floor. "A Grove is not just its trees," she said in a soft voice to herself. That was one of the first things she had learned when she had emerged from her own Phar' Ador and it seemed self-evident, but it was not. Trees could be selfish at times and had to be reminded that they were not the sum total of the life that gathered here. As she walked she found her feet following an aimless path that looped and crossed over itself. Arath' Mahar Ts'Lh'sia had still not returned. Three days ago she had slipped into the aether and walked away from her tree. This was noon of the fourth day and M'Tehr was growing concerned over her absence. She had never stayed apart from her or Jacen this long before now and when M'Tehr faced in the direction of where she was in the Grove she felt the same foreboding that clutched at her like tangled vines holding her back when she resolved to go to her again. It was not a force exactly that held her from going to Arath' Mahar. There was nothing physical or aetherial about what it was that barred her from joining with her, but it was there nevertheless. However it was that she had done so, Arath' Mahar had forbidden all from coming near her after she seated her sister. As the Grove's eyes what she was experiencing was cause for greater concern with each passing moment. As she saw, they saw. As she felt, so too did they and the growing anxiety that M'Tehr felt was fed by theirs as well. She was near the narrow part of the Phar' Naqua's border now. The section that formed the narrow wedge that had been occupied by a single home framed by the main road in front of it and flanked by a connecting street to the left and the road leading into the cul-de-sac on the right. There was a groaning as she approached the hump of vegetation that now marked the edged of the Grove itself. The house beneath the thick vegetation was reaching its maximum stress point and would collapse soon under the weight of vines that grew twelve centimetres a day and doubled their size every three days under normal conditions. With the Grove to feed them they were growing at four times that rate and with that pressure placed on it the old house smothered beneath the greenery would not remain for long. Even if the Grove were to agree to cede this part of it back to whomever it was that claimed this place it would do them little good. If the Arath 'Mahar wished it so the roots and vines would retreat within hours, but the damage was already too much for this place to ever be restored now. All that could be done with it would be for the ruin to be torn down. It was unfit for anything else and if not for the iron laced fencing that the men had butted against its walls it might already have fallen. M'Tehr looked at the walls and felt the hostility of the iron contained in them reflected back at her. In appearance they were wide footed sheets of red plastic, little different from those purchased for use whenever there was a need to erect a barrier in the least amount of time. In ordinary circumstances the plastic would be filled with water to provide weight and solidity, but this was not one of those situations. These barriers were filled not with water but with powdered iron alternating with bands of sand instead. Heavier to be certain and much more useful in repelling those like her from approaching too closely. M'Tehr watched as a root snaked toward the wide footing and then dove deep into the earth beneath it. She might have difficulty approaching such a concentration of cold iron, but the trees and other life around her were not in the least deterred from doing so. She reached out with her senses and felt the furthest rootlets already reaching out to the green area on the other side of the barrier. She felt them tunnelling under the man stone of the road and snaking over and around the buried piping and insulated lines that were buried deep in the earth. That area had already been ceded to the Grove in the earliest part of the negotiations and with that agreed to it had been difficult to restrain the life around her from moving ahead and claiming it immediately. But she needed to attempt to do so. The trees might not understand the idea that the men speaking for their kind would not accept vegetation moving in to claim what they had already given up just yet, but she did. That was the most pressing concern of hers right now other than what was happening with Arath' Mahar. The Grove itself didn't comprehend that agreement was conditional until all of the particulars were laid out and the accord signed as a mark of acceptance. To the vegetation of the Grove things were either allowed or forbidden with no middle ground that they could understand. They were very absolute that way and that was only one of the difficulties that she faced that ate up the majority of her time when something else was demanding it as well. M'Tehr reached out and reined in the growth. She had already had to speak to this part of the Grove before about this. Perhaps it was because it was confined in this narrow corridor that caused it to need to be constantly hauled back within the boundaries. It had already been difficult to control this part before men had ceded the area across the road in the early part of discussions. Since they had done so it was becoming a constant effort on her part to keep it within the current borders until the formalities were concluded. The trees that made up this portion of the Grove were unusually stubborn as well she thought, more so than those who grew in the more open area north of here. Again M'Tehr thought that it was more than likely a result of them being confined here, packed into this narrow point that encouraged that aspect of them. When the time came to slip the leash after the final agreement was formalized this would be the least hesitant part of the Grove when it came time to expand from here. M'Tehr finished speaking with the trees and moved on paralleling the border wall. As she did so a bobcat hooked its claws into a tree on the other side of the wall and ran out on a branch until he was over the fence and then dropped down with silent grace to land in the duff a few meters away from her. M'Tehr watched the buff colour feline shake off the impact and then pad away into the underbrush. She sent Jacen a warning about its arrival and continued along the barrier to restrain the next clump of forest that was threatening to break through the wall. A secondary wall of ordinary sand and water in the same red plastic containers was already being erected just outside of this inner wall. A preparation for removing the cold iron that ringed the Grove and no more than a masque that would be maintained afterward. Once that had been done all that would remain to physically restrain them would be their word that they would abide by the terms they had agreed on already, but the wall itself was going to be removed. That had been the first demand that the Grove's representatives had made of their human counterparts and it was the easiest one for them to agree to. Jacen acknowledged what she told him about the arrival of the bobcat and then turned his attention back to what he had been doing before she spoke to him. Jacen was, if anything even busier than she was. M'Tehr began walking again. Every moment since Arath' Mahar had withdrawn into the aether for a purpose she hadn't shared with either of them they had been rushing around constantly trying to contain the Grove from expanding and convincing the various types of animals that were making their way here to either leave or keep back for now. Without Arath 'Mahar's will and her focus to enforce the decision and with no other nymphs who were of the Grove to calm it and convince the life there to restrain it's desires, she and Jacen were all that were there to keep everything from collapsing into chaos. The Grove's representatives would have lent their hands to her, they had a link to the Grove by virtue of their temporary Phar' Ador's and their link was at least as solid as M'Tehr's own. Some of them had offered to do as much already, and even though M'Tehr knew their hand would be welcome now, that was not their purpose she reminded them. Whatever help they could offer paled in comparison to the help they could offer sitting across the table from their human counterparts and bringing the status of Phar' Naqua to solid footing. She reminded them of that and thanked them for the offer. She would just have to soldier on until Arath' Mahar ended her absence. Up until the point that Arath' Mahar had slipped into the aether she and Jacen had been able to manage the needs of the Grove within reason and it was easy enough for the two of them to find the time to withdraw into their own company for a short time. There had been no opportunity for either of them to do anything of the sort the last few days and there were times that came more often now that she wished that Jacen was here with her. Even with the increase in demands on him to chivvy and cajole the beasts present in the Grove he had been able to find time to do so before today. That bobcat she had seen scaling the barrier was not the only one to do so. Animals that had begun to gather in greater numbers in the wildwood adjacent to the Grove. The section of wooded land that bordered the river near rust spattered Railroad Bridge that spanned the water below. They were gathering sensing the shift already from what was to what would be and like the trees of the Grove they were impatient as well. The sheer number of creatures that were being drawn to this part of the city was increasing just as the pressure on the barrier by the plants contained within the boundaries of Phar' Naqua to escape was increasing. The birds were explainable, there was literally nothing to stop them and some of the branches were already heavy with them. Jays, starlings, and even crows had found their way here easily enough. They were fairly common even in the city, but others not so common were also present. To say nothing of the nocturnal birds that were present and keeping quiet while the sun was overhead. A turkey buzzard had roosted in the upper branches of one of the larger trees and had declined to leave. And then there were the tree rodents and insects and serpents. All of them could pierce the wall easily enough and make their way past it and for the most part none of these were trouble yet in any serious fashion. It was the larger animals that were more likely to cause the most problems. The deer that had already gathered here had little trouble bounding over the fence. Considering that they could easily top barriers three times their height, M'Tehr doubted that they even noticed it. The larger tree cats, as she had already seen, also could find their ways over top of the walls as well, but there was one that confused her to no end. A small brown bear that had appeared two days ago. How it had even scaled the wall and gained entry was a mystery to M'Tehr and that was the beast that had absorbed so much of Jacen's time and effort recently. The number of animals seeking a place in Phar' Naqua was increasing too much in her opinion. At least for the area that was contained while it was still sealed behind the barrier that was erected to hide it while its status was secured. Once it was safe the walls would come down for good and then they could shift to other means of containment of those who were drawn here while the nearby human homes were relocated. That was going to be difficult to say the least but it was needed to create the distance that was necessary for now between this place and the human city around them. That was the tricky part. This whole endeavour was a series of firsts and this was probably the most delicate of them. A Grove located in the midst of an established human city was unheard of and there was no precedent for what they should do to balance the needs of both humans and dryads under these circumstances. Every step that was raised for consideration by the human council and the Grove's negotiators could only proceed at a snail's pace as the two groups tried to match what was needed with what was possible. She didn't envy her sisters efforts and she was glad that she was not included in their number. She reached out for Jacen. He was with the bear again she saw. She touched minds with him and heard him conversing with the ursine trying to convince him to leave for now and return later when there was greater area for him to range across. Jacen had his hands full in his efforts to convince that one and she didn't envy him. She liked bears herself and wouldn't have minded if this one stayed, but at the same time she knew that it was too early for one to think of making this Grove part of its range. Even with the protection of the Grove the humans were still too close to its borders and the certainty that the bear would find his way into areas of town that were more thickly inhabited were too certain to encourage him to stay. Maybe later when the area that the Grove covered was increased it might be possible, but not now. Jacen wasn't the only one that was in the area attempting to stem the tide drifting toward here. His brother satyrs had arrived with her sisters and now they were positioned outside of town to turn others who were drawn here away for now. Every beast within a nearby radius it seemed was being drawn here and the effort that was needed to stem the tide for now was becoming more pressing by the moment. She withdrew from Jacen and let him continue speaking to the bear. He didn't need her in contact with him while he was doing that, if there was time later then they would speak with each other, but for now she had her own concerns to attend to. Her loop took her close to where Arath' Mahar was located. She was still unable to approach closely, but she was able to reach out to her sister now seated in her oak. Whenever the demand for her attention allowed her to come this close to whatever Arath' Mahar was doing in the aether she made certain that she stopped and laid her hands on the wood to let her know that she was near. The sister in the oak had not responded to her yet when she did that. M'Tehr didn't expect her to; she wanted only to let her know that she was here and had paused long enough to let her know that she had been here. The idea that a sister this newly seated would turn her attention away from building herself as she solidified her merger with her tree at this stage was not likely. But M'Tehr did get the impression that this particular sister would not remain in her oak for long. She was anxious to taste the world, M'Tehr could tell that much about her from the aura that radiated out from her. The hamadryad lingered long enough to caress the oaks trunk and then turned back on her path to investigate the next area of concern. She had to admit that she had her doubts over whether Arath' Mahar would be able to do this without her assistance. From what she could tell there had been nothing that had hindered her when the time came and for that she was relieved. Even if she was not as familiar with human parturition, even she could see that Arath' Mahar was nearing the fullest expression of gravidity when she left. If her appearance was any indication she had left only bare hours before it happened and each moment that she was away after her departure stretched against M'Tehr's nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard. She had paused when she felt this sister forge her connection with the Grove and she had ceased what she was doing and turned in the direction of the oak that would house her from this point. It had been a sombre moment followed by a deep wave of satisfaction that this benchmark had been reached seemingly with little trouble. When she felt that happen, M'Tehr thought that the Arath' Mahar might return now that she had successfully lodged her sister within her tree, but she still didn't return. And now, two days after she felt the first of the Grove's daughters born she was concerned that there may be something she needed to see, but when she tried to focus on where the lady of the Grove was her mind skittered away and she couldn't fix her position in her mind and she couldn't force herself to approach either. For some deep reason of her own, Arath' Mahar still forbid either her or Jacen to come to her. Her absence picked at M'Tehr like fingers plucking at the strings of a banjo one by one. A sudden start with each twitch and then just as the sound finished fading, another single plucking and the sensation began again repeated over and over until each moment was a long drawn out anticipation of the next note clashing against the silence and never allowing her to settle into it. It wasn't all anticipation though; there had been satisfaction as well even though she was not there to witness the source of it. One of the things that bothered her was the knowledge that Arath' Mahar was nearing her time when she slipped into the aether over three days ago. The hamadryad had starting to worry that she might not recognize the need to seat her sister when it came. She knew that the time for it was rapidly approaching and even if she didn't spend a lot of time with humans as they approached their parturition, that didn't mean that she wasn't aware of just how much Selicia, had come to resemble them in her appearance. With her single-minded focus on unearthing what was needed to create a Grove mark she had almost forgotten, it seemed, that she would have to place her sister in her Phar' ador soon. She was frustrated she realized. The lack of information available to her grated on her and combined with her increasing need to take that step it seemed that she was forcing herself to focus solely on this one aspect of who she was and ignoring what else was taking place as she did so. She had lost interest completely; it seemed, in the negotiations that the Grove's envoys were conducting. M'Tehr was still in constant communication with them as they negotiated and compromised and stalled over various details, but the one thing they wanted; the reassurance that this was the proper approach, she couldn't give to them. Arath' Mahar was the only one that could do that and she was focused inward, floating in the aether. She was not going to answer either while she did so and that left it in M'Tehr's hands. As each aspect of the developing agreement was nailed down, the envoys reached out to her and asked her to speak with Arath' Mahar and gain her approval of their actions. But that was something that M'Tehr had no way of doing. All that was left to her was to tell them that she would pass on what they wished to tell her when she returned and to continue to negotiate as they saw fit to do so. They were unhappy with such latitude, but they accepted the need for it. Arath' Mahar Ts'Lh'sia was distracted by her inward focus and she had made it clear that she allowed them full reign to do what needed to be done in order to ease the human's acceptance of what was to come. Such neglect of this part of what she needed to concern her attention with made it a little hard to hold her as a serious leader. Not entirely, just in some small ways. Things that M'Tehr thought she took less seriously, since she paid so little attention to the minutia that made up that part of her role. But that was unfair of her she told herself when those thoughts bubbled up. Arath' Mahar Ts'Lh'sia was more than just a prime dryad of a Grove and she was not like her own Prime Dryad back in Morleth' Phar. She may have more power in her fingertips than any sister she had ever known, but she was still barely weeks old and there were so many conflicting needs competing for her attention. More importantly, when she had those thoughts, M'Tehr forced herself to remember that Selicia was experiencing something that was so far out of M'Tehr's experience that even if she had an idea of what she needed to do to assist her, she didn't even know how to go about doing so. Arath' Mahar was not concerning herself with the mundane aspects of settling the status of the Grove, that was true. But that also was part of why M'Tehr was here and it fell on her shoulders to carry out the will of the Grove in this matter. Still, she had wanted to follow when Arath' Mahar vanished this time into the aether. She may not want to remain too close to her out of deference to her position, but that didn't mean that she didn't want to be nearby now. Arath' Mahar made it clear to her that she was to be left alone for this though. When M'Tehr had moved to follow her as she left three days ago she had only taken a few steps before she felt the strong discouragement emanating from Selicia and she opted to honour the Arath' Mahar's wishes and remained behind. Still she wished that Selicia had allowed her to come with her this time. She may not have any idea what it was that Arath' Mahar sought by herself, but she knew that if she had been allowed to come, that something that was priceless to behold was in the offing. Being excluded from it was something that she did not expect. Until now she had been the guide, the mentor, the one that Selicia had looked to for guidance in coping with what she had become, but with each day since the vision she had unleashed she had less that she could convey to her. Arath' Mahar was soaking up information constantly and just as constantly she was readjusting who she was becoming as well. The thing was that it was not just from the Grove network that she was absorbing who and what she was. There was another source, M'Tehr had realized. It was the only explanation for some of the actions that she was taking now. The thing was that M'Tehr was strongly inclined to think that other source was her connection to the aether itself. She was learning who she was from the source of who they all were. She was getting her information firsthand and not passed down through many hands the way M'Tehr and those like her did and considering that possibility was in its own way even more frightening to her. She was councillor still she consoled herself even if she was no longer mentor and model for what it was to be a dryad. Selicia listened attentively to what M'Tehr had to say when they were together and she mostly followed her suggestions, but even she could see that she was becoming steadier in her own judgement with each passing moment. M'Tehr looked in the direction Arath' Mahar was haunting. She had not moved very far. If M'Tehr concentrated she could narrow down where she was without much effort using her own connection to the Grove, but she was reluctant to do so. Instead she wandered where Arath' Mahar was not. The Grove was small enough that she could sense where she was and still large enough that she could avoid her while she wished to be alone. M'Tehr froze. There was a reverberation that was washing outward from the centre of the Phar' Naqua. M'Tehr looked in that direction in surprise. Something was happening near the heart of this Grove. Something important. Something connected to Phar' Naqua in a visceral way. She started to slip into the aether, to go there and see what it was, but the feeling radiating off of Arath' Mahar was still warning her away. Whatever it was that was happening that hadn't changed Selicia's mind about not wanting another close by. Her desire to remain alone was still emanating from her and that was as good as a spoken command to M'Tehr. She stopped moving toward the source of the reverberation and as much as it grated against her need to know what was happening she remained where she was. She was beneath the bulk of the trunk of the king elm when she first heard it. A faint crackling sound that sounded like cracking glass. M'Tehr's head swivelled as she rotated her senses in every direction to make certain that it was indeed stemming from the king elm and not from some other source. But there was no other source that drew her attention and M'Tehr found herself drawn back toward it. Step by hesitant step she approached the thick straight trunk until she was only inches away from it. She reached out her hand to lay her fingers on the rough bark and then withdrew them quickly almost as soon as they touched. Whatever it was that was happening at the centre of the Grove, the Arath' Mahar's Phar' Ador was in no mood for any hand that was not attached to her to be in contact with it. Now M'Tehr was certain that something important was in the offing. Something that she knew was part of why she was supposed to be here in the first place. She stood beneath the tree unsure of what it was that she was supposed to be doing and not liking that feeling one bit. If there was something that she didn't expect it was that she should be in that position. She had been beside the Arath' Mahar every step of the way until now and to be excluded from whatever was happening was inconceivable to her. "Let it be." M'Tehr's head jerked toward the elm's trunk. The words were clear and they hung like stone carved in the air. There was no obvious source for them but instead they seemed to come from all around her. "Let it be." A second time and this time the words thundered in her mind. A chorus of unearthly voices that blended together and made it impossible to determine just how many were speaking at once. M'Tehr looked upward, her eyes tracing the rough bark of the elm. The shattering glass sound was growing more noticeable but there was no apparent source that could be seen. It was just there and it wasn't there at the same time. "Let it be." The voices again, old, young, all at once and all stemming from nowhere and everywhere. M'Tehr raised her hands and covered where her ears would be if she still had them. The sound of the voices was growing louder with each syllable. "Let it be." The volume of the voices thundered around her and she was driven to her knees by the force of it. A scream of pain slithered out of her throat and her eyes reflexively closed in a vain effort to keep the source of it away from her. Still no one was there to be seen, but that didn't matter, because she knew what it was that she was hearing and somewhere deep inside her there was an echo of the assent. An echo that did not come from her adding her voice to the words still echoing around her, but from a deep memory that she was not aware that she had even possessed. "Let it be." The force of the words drove her to retreat into the earth. There was no other place she could think of that might protect her from all of the voices speaking as one. Deep in the earth her lips moved in echo of the acclaim, but it was not as part of what she was hearing now. For a flash of an instant she recognized what the voices were and who it was that made them. She had made a similar assent once and until she came face to face with this one she had forgotten that she had done so. The connecting link was too much for her mind to hold on to when she was part of it happening and she had forgotten it until she stood next to it as it happened for another of her kind. The pressure eased from her and she went limp in the earth in relief at its absence. She released her hold on the earth and allowed her body to rise above it. Her head broaching the surface of the earth like a whale broaching the ocean waves. Her body was still sunk deep and she looked if any were near enough to see her immersed in the dirt like a swimmer treading water with only her head and part of one shoulder above the surface. If there was someone who could see they would see her as she truly was. She had dropped her glamour when the words were spoken the second time and when she plunged into the earth she shed her woody appearance as well. When the words were spoken a final time it was her true face that emerged from the soil and it was that face that was gazing upward at the elm's trunk now. "It is done." The words were hollow like the peal of a bell and she froze where she was suspended in the soil, her eyes fixated on a point midway up the elm's trunk. When she arrived she didn't see at first what it was that had drawn her there and then the words were spoken the first time while she looked in vain for the source of the strange glass shattering sound. Now as she looked she saw a faint ghostly trace of movement on the gnarled skin of the tree and her eyes could not leave that spot once she saw it. She stood silent in the earth, reverently watching as the image inscribed itself there line by line in the elm and as it moved into completion she felt something unfamiliar happening to her face. Tears began streaming from where her true eyes stood revealed for the first time that she could remember. She didn't think that she even had the ability to do this and in truth they were not like the tears that men shed. Those droplets were salty, but that was not the case with M'tehr. Her tears were sweet like maple sap and they tracked from the corners of her eyes and traced their way downward as she watched the lines form and shift and finally resolve into the single form of the mark of Phar' Naqua. She could not help but look afterward from the image blazoned on the bark of the elm and compare it to her own. As she did so she saw the changes that had subtlety altered her own mark and for a brief moment she knew what her original blazon had been like. There had been changes over the long years that altered her own Grove mark. Shifts of line placement that reflected what the dryads of her line had endured over the long centuries leading down to now. The changes were earned by hard experience and she wouldn't have dreamed of suggesting they should be changed back to the original template, but there was one thing she was sure of. It had to have been like this new blazon at the very first. Over the years that which identified her as a nymph of Morleth' Phar was not as it was in the beginning. It had changed and adapted and become in some ways abstract as years separated what it was from what it became. She looked upward at the devouring rose that marked the centre of the king elm and realized that given enough time, it too would do as her own mark had done. It would change to reflect how these sisters would change. How it would change would be in the future's hands and for a moment M'Tehr was gripped with a desire to see what her own mark had been when it first showed itself as Phar' Naqua's did now today. ------------------------------------ Jacen found her seated still in the earth staring up at the symbol that was now sunk deep into the bark of the king elm. She heard his approach, but there were no words of greeting that she had that she could have offered to him and none were needed. She felt his presence behind her as he approached and then sensed him as he settled in to contemplate the design as she was doing. "You felt it?" she asked him in a nearly inaudible whisper and sensed him nod rather than saw it happen. "The beasts fells silent just before it happened. From the time they first broke voice here after Arath' Mahar regained her mind there has not been silence from them all at the same time save once. Only when she gifted a name to Phar' Naqua did they fall silent and now they do so again. What she began she has completed I think and even the men who could recognize such things comprehend what has happened here just now. They will not fail to note the difference when they come here again." M'Tehr merely nodded her assent. There was nothing she could say and in her mind the sisters connected to her were silent as well as they had beheld the mark of Phar' Naqua come into being with her. "She will return now," Jacen said to her. "She has done what she was meant to do for now and reaching this peak will only give her a hunger to reach for the next one." "I thought I had angered her," M'Tehr whispered. "With everything competing for her attention I kept bringing to her the things that I felt she was ignoring for her own reasons. When she left I felt her forbid me to follow her. I didn't know it was for my protection. How did she know?" M'Tehr asked. "How could she know when we didn't even suspect?" Jacen didn't answer and M'Tehr didn't expect him to until he did. "She knew because she is Arath' Mahar. Something that none but her told her that neither of us could be close to her while this was done. If we had been it might well have been the end of us both," he said to her and there was nothing that M'Tehr could say that could offer any better explanation. "It nearly was," she said quietly and then she lapsed into silence beside him instead. She waited for Arath' Mahar to return and tell them what was next for them all now that this part of her path had ended. ------------------------------------------ Phar' Naqua; Day 15, 1500 hours They felt her return to the physical world rather than saw her do so. One moment she was not there and the next she was. Her dark hair was the first to emerge from the depths of her tree and then her face followed. M'Tehr was not aware of the rest of her form once her face broke free from the wood of the elm. It was her eyes that fixated her now that she had returned; something in them had changed and she found herself gripped by them and couldn't turn away. There was power there now that had only been latent before. There was resolve in the cast of her features and in that resolve a purpose was reflected that was lacking before. M'Tehr was so consumed by the change in her since she had departed only a few days before that she didn't see that when she emerged from her elm she emerged slim and undistorted with no mark upon her body save the devouring rose now centred on her abdomen. It took a further few minutes before she realized that Arath' Mahar Selicia was clothed as well now. The clothing covered the minimal amount of what humans around this Grove would consider decent, but it was there now. Around her upper body was what appeared as a shirt knotted just below her small breasts and she was wearing what she believed men called cut- off jeans. Her feet were still bare though and there was not need that M'Tehr could see for her to appear to be doing so. Selicia didn't move, but the throne the Grove had provided her rose from the earth behind her. As it grew level with her she sat down in it and allowed it to lift her upward until it ceased to move and left her resting there looking down at them both. "The gatehouse is prepared," she told them. "I have removed what it was that prevented it from serving as such. It should be no trouble for it do so now." There was firmness in her voice as well that M'Tehr hadn't heard before. Whatever it was that she had done over the last few days while she was separated from them had left its mark carved deeply in her. There was no trace of the confused woman who was the focus of all their efforts since they had arrived on Magnolia Circle. There was only the Arath' Mahar. She had never summoned her official seat to speak with just the two of them before and even when it had been necessary for her to seat herself on it the effort it had taken from both of them to aid her in understanding why it was needed each time was almost always in the nature of a reminder that she needed to uphold her position each time it was needed. They looked up at her as she leaned back in the chair as if doing so was the most natural thing in the world for her. There was no trace of the obviously uncomfortable dryad who clearly felt that she was merely playing a role she was unsuited for in the first place. It was no longer a role to her; it was who she was now. "You should resume your glamour, Lady M'Tehr," she said quietly. "A man is coming to meet with us. He will be here in a few moments and I don't think you would desire to show him your true face." M'Tehr jerked as if she had just snapped out of a trace and nodded. Her wooden form reasserted itself over her aetherial one and then with only a moment's effort the two of them saw her favourite glamour slipping into place. Arath' Mahar nodded in approval and then they heard a rustling behind them as the Grove began to rearrange itself to grant entry to the man that was coming to speak with the mistress of the Grove. ------------------------------