Broken Lands

Rensyn pulled a chair up to the table where the five of them had settled down for dinner. There wasn’t really room, but he didn’t seem to care. “Are you five comfortable with each other?”

“Comfortable enough,” Amy agreed quickly. “No way to know if we work ‘til we try, especially not with the twins.

Sophia nodded. Practice was important and she thought she’d learned a lot from the time in the practice yard, but she wouldn’t really know how well they fought together until they did. For now, the plan was to have Raevyn on point, with Dav backing her up and Sophia acting as rear guard. Raevyn had the best senses, given her spirits’ help, and could hopefully warn everyone in time.

Amy would need to be protected for a moment if she had to shift without forewarning. If she didn’t shift, she could still fight, but she’d be using her bow or knives instead. Moti was effectively a mage, even though he still insisted it wasn’t magic; he could do his work without getting close to enemies. Sophia was similar, now that she had her spells, but her armor was better and she was at least trained in how to fight with her knife.

Rensyn glanced across the group. Sophia saw Dav and Moti nodding. She couldn’t see Raevyn from where she sat, but Rensyn clearly could. “Good. There are several options now. I can leave you to your own devices if you want; that’s what we normally do for relatively new Called.”

Amy snorted before Sophia could reject the option. “If you were going to do that, you wouldn’t be here.”

Rensyn inclined his head towards Amy. “If you want me to, I will, but you’re right. That’s not what I want to do. The second option, which a couple of you went through a few months ago, is large training groups. There’s another group coming together now; I expect we’ll send them on an expedition into the wilds in the next week or two.”

“Uh huh. You want us to accomplish something before then, don’t you?” Amy sounded distinctly impatient with Rensyn’s slow buildup.

“It would be nice,” Rensyn admitted, “but what I really want is for the five of you to be ready to take on your own expedition at the same time, preferably into a more dangerous location. You’ll probably want to advance your primary Sphere to level two before then, which means I need you to accomplish enough tasks the Guide recognizes to get you the Abilities you want to have before then. And yes, Amy, I do already have the place in mind and yes, you will be able to reject it if you don’t want to go for any reason.”

“But you’re not going to tell us where it is?” Dav sounded a little skeptical. “This sounds a little sketchy.”

Rensyn shrugged. “The last time I told a group of mentees what I had planned for the future, they decided they didn’t want to wait. Half of them died in a trap; they’d have all survived if they’d waited until they were the level I recommended. I don’t know you well enough yet to know you won’t do the same thing.”

Rensyn didn’t say anything more about what happened to the past group. The fact that he was no longer helping them probably said everything that needed saying.

Sophia leaned forward. They were never going to get anywhere at this rate. “Why don’t we do this one step at a time. What do you want us to do first?”

Rensyn smiled. He clearly liked the invitation. “I want you to look into a problem and see if it’s actually a problem or if it’s just people jumping at shadows because there used to be a problem. Almost ten years ago, the West Conservatory had a corpsevine infestation. It was bad enough that it spawned a Domain and took a concerted effort from the Registry that included everyone we could task who was past their first Vocation upgrade. We destroyed it; to make sure it was dead, we killed everything in the conservatory. It’s been empty since then; it’s thought to be haunted by those the corpsevines killed.”

Sophia nodded thoughtfully. Plant monsters could be sneaky if you didn’t have someone who could tell them from ordinary plants that didn’t want to eat you. At least it was a vine instead of a fungus; nothing was as bad as a fungus. Sophia could still remember the lessons her father gave her on how to deal with creeper rot. She didn’t have the right spells to deal with something like that, and she wasn’t certain she remembered the rituals well enough. If she ran into it, she’d try, whether or not she could get all the details right. The stuff was just that nasty.

“Lately, there have been rumors of people going missing in the area. It’s not quite the worst part of town, but it is outside the Casterville Nexus’s reach, so there can be monsters. A lot of Casterville is and the Conservatories have to be. There are a lot of reasons people might be disappearing, but it has reignited the rumors of deadly plants walking the streets. Personally, I’m hoping it’s something moving into the area; a quessik or a flying sheet could do the same thing and either one would be far easier to handle, even if there’s a Nest.” Rensyn paused and reached into a pouch that hung from his belt that was definitely not large enough to hold the tome he pulled out of it. It would fit through the entrance but there was no way the whole thing would fit. That was good enchanting work, even if Sophia thought her backpack was still more practical.

Sophia frowned, distracted by the mention of a City Nexus. She remembered that neither Fallen Kestii nor the unnamed village they fought the flame beavers in had one. They were supposed to make a safe space for Professionals, weren’t they? Why would Casterville’s Conservatories have to be outside the Nexus’s area? For that matter, why did Casterville have Conservatories? What did they grow there?

She wasn’t sure if she should ask or not. It didn’t affect the current problem, but at the same time it seemed like something she should know.

Rensyn flipped the thick book open to a page he’d bookmarked with a small piece of cloth. He flipped the book around so they could all see the image. “This is the best drawing we have of someone infested with corpsevine. As you can tell, it was drawn after everything was over and it’s highly embellished, but it’s still good enough to know what you’re looking for. Don’t fight them if you can avoid it; run. The five of you can take one or two, probably, but they can call for help if any others are close enough. We need to know if they’re there; that’s all.”

Strangely, most of the drawing seemed to be almost like a picture frame made of plants; it was elaborate and detailed, even if Sophia couldn’t identify any of the actual plants involved. There were several different leaf shapes, which seemed to indicate multiple different plants, and something that looked more like a sort of yellowish string. A plant fiber, maybe?

Inside the frame, a man wearing a head covering made of a bundle of vines a lot like the ones around the edges of the frame looked off to the side. Vines from the bundle draped down both sides of his head onto his chest, which was covered by something that looked a lot like a woolen vest. His sleeves appeared oddly leaf-like, which made Sophia wonder exactly what was supposed to be happening there.

Sophia shook her head. “I don’t think I’d recognize the vine from that picture. Is that supposed to be one of the corpses?”

Rensyn nodded. His face seemed to turn to stone, like he was suppressing his emotions, but Sophia could see pain hiding in the tightness around his eyes. “Derek was a scout. At that point, it was just a request to the Registry; the Gardeners’ Union knew their people weren’t coming out but not why, so they came to the Registry. Most of the time, missions like that are easy enough; a team is sent in, they find the monster that’s hiding and kill it. If they find a Nest, they either take care of it or come back for more people. This time, we sent Derek in alone to scout. When he came back, we didn’t realize he wasn’t Derek anymore. Not at first.”

“We?” Sophia leaned forward, caught up in the tale. “You were there?”

Rensyn’s eyes narrowed for a moment before he forced his expression to behave, then he nodded. “Yes. It was my team. Derek was a friend. He died in there and we didn’t know until the corpsevine he carried out moved and attached itself to Yobhan. I sometimes wonder if there was enough of Derek left that he was the one who chose the target; I’m not sure any of the rest of us would have realized what was happening in time.”

Sophia shivered. Monsters that could masquerade as allies were the worst. “Could it talk, pretend to be Derek?”

Rensyn shook his head. “It didn’t say anything. I don’t think it could. It’s a plant, after all.”

Sophia shook her head. She knew that being a plant didn’t mean you couldn’t talk; true dryads were basically plants, after all. “It’s better if they can’t,” she muttered. “Plant zombies are bad enough, talking plant zombies would be terrifying.”

Dav chuckled and shook his head slightly. The grin on his face seemed to say that he wasn’t taking this as seriously as Sophia was. “That’s not quite what I think of when I think plant zombie, but fair enough. Is someone with plants on their head what we need to look for? Can I use a sword on them or do we have to use fire or something?”

“They can be chopped apart; that keeps them from doing anything,” Rensyn answered without any hesitation. “It doesn’t kill them, at least not immediately, but that’s enough to let you run. Unlike most monsters, they don’t have shield, but the corpse they’re puppeting seems to act almost like a shield; you have to get through it before you can hurt the part of the plant that matters. Cut apart whatever plant you see and dismember the bodies; that’s what we had to do until we could get someone to burn them. It takes a really hot fire; an ordinary spell doesn’t do it.”

“And that’s why you want us to report back instead of taking them on ourselves.” Sophia bit her lip. Rensyn’s personal past with corpsevines was probably the real reason he wanted them to retreat, but it was also probably the reason he wanted the task handled. It was obvious that the more information they had, the better. At the same time, Sophia wanted to survive.

She went over the information Rensyn had given them. She had questions. Most of them could wait until later, but there was one thing she probably needed to know before they went. “What’s a Domain? How is it different from a Nest?”

Rensyn blinked, then nodded to himself, as if it was to be expected that she didn’t know the difference. “A Nest is the creation of a single monster, usually either one of a mated pair or a pregnant or brooding mother, depending on the creature. It’s a place centered on the creation of young. If you can kill the central figure, it will fade unless one of the young is strong enough and old enough to recreate the Nest immediately. A Domain is both more and less than that. It won’t help raise young; instead, Domains seem to aid the other properties of the creature or creatures that establish them. For the corpsevines, the biggest thing we saw was that they could infest a creature in minutes without being noticed unless the creature had an Ability that counteracted it.”

There was a haunted look in his eyes that had to be related to Derek and Yobhan. Sophia decided not to ask what became of the rest of Rensyn’s group in the fighting; whether they survived or not, it was clear they weren’t a team anymore. If they were, Rensyn would undoubtedly not be working as a mentor for the Registry.

In fact, he’d probably have taken the mission himself if he could. Sophia doubted he was happy with having to ask someone else to take care of it. She knew she wouldn’t be.

“The other thing to know about Domains is that they can be hidden. Most of the time they aren’t; it seems to only happen with monsters that are either actively hunting or use some kind of disguise or camouflage.” Rensyn made a sound that was almost like a choked laugh, like he tried to suppress it but couldn’t quite manage it. It didn’t sound like the laugh would have been happy. “We were in a Domain the whole time, but we didn’t know that until later."