Yep. The pain was back. If hit point meters were a thing, Angela would be in single digits right now. Any hope that auto-healing existed on Arenia was hella gone at this point.

Plus, her mouth was full of mistletoe.

“Blech,” Angela wheezed as she coughed and spat out the woody plant. Okay. Gotta get through this, she thought, clenching her jaw and scowling as she tried to will herself not to pass out. The goddess wouldn’t have left her in this situation if there wasn’t a way out—she just needed to figure out what that was.

Wait… didn’t Ennàd say she was giving Angela a spell?

Of course! That had to be it. Not that anyone had told her HOW to cast a spell—this world was shit for tutorials—but she should be able to work it out, right?

Angela summoned her Tome, and the stack of stone tablets thudded onto the branch in front of her. They slid sideways, landing in such a way that the top sheet was leaning against the others, facing Angela. It took a bit of squinting considering how close it was to her face, but as soon as she read the one-word title, a flutter of excitement rose in her belly: RUNES.

Druids use runic magic!

Angela skimmed the tablet to see what spells she had, only to discover that it was blank save for a single Rune:

Breath of the Forest

Goddess Rune

The name sounded awesome, and yeah, frikkin’ Goddess Rune. So that was cool. But the rune itself was just a simple hexagon with a circle inside it. Nothing else. No description of how to use it, how to activate it, where to put it… nada.

Well, it was a rune, right? That meant she probably had to draw it and power it somehow. And since she wanted it to do something to her own body, the logical place to draw it was on herself. All she needed was a medium to draw with. For better or for worse, that was something she had in abundance at the moment.

Since Angela had fallen on her left side, her right arm was in okay shape, and she was able to use the back of her sleeve to wipe the dirt off her forehead. She then dipped her index finger in the blood that was leaking out of her ear—probably not a good sign—and carefully drew the rune onto her forehead. Yeah, she couldn’t see what she was doing, but it was a hexagon with a circle in it. Not exactly Renaissance art.

Because Angela was drawing the symbol blindly onto her forehead, her eyes happened to be focused on the “Runes” tablet that lay centimetres in front of her face. As a result, she was able to watch as the tablet changed the moment she finished the rune, part of the stone seeming to crumble and blow away to reveal new words etched into the slab:

1-RUNE SPELLS

Breath of the Forest (Rank ∞)

This spell draws on the vitality of the forest to fully heal yourself or another creature.

Cost: Unknown

“Fuck’n A,” Angela said. Now all she had to do was work out how to power the thing.

“Breath of the Forest,” she said. No response. “Cast: Breath of the Forest?”

Again, no result.

“Summon: Breath of the Forest? Cast Breath of the Forest on me? Cast Breath of the Forest, please? Simon says: Cast Breath of the Forest? Abracadabra?”

Nothing. Shit.

It was time to try something new.

Angela thought about the wording of the spell description. It drew on the life energy of the forest around her, right? Maybe she had to do something to make it happen, not just trigger the spell as though it was a game.

“Okay, you can do this,” she muttered to herself. Closing her eyes, Angela tried to smell and listen to the forest around her. She could hear birdsong and smell the loamy richness of the soil she was lying on. The river’s trickling was also audible, as was the wind as it made its way through the boughs of the trees. Through it all, there was a sense of calm, but of calmness with energy to it. Of vitality.

Wait a second. Wasn’t that exactly what the spell description said?

Angela performed the same exercise and was again able to feel that sense of vitality in the forest. What’s more, sensing that vitality created a coolness on her forehead where the rune was, like dipping your toe into cold water on a hot day. Taking a cue from that sensation, Angela attempted to tap into the vitality and pull it into the rune, to use that power to regenerate her broken body.

Almost immediately, the coolness on Angela’s forehead poured into her body, flooding her like a mountain stream. Wherever that cool energy touched, it began healing her, realigning her bones and sealing her flesh shut. The experience should have been excruciating, but it was instead transformed by the benevolent magic into a mild body high that Angela decided was suspiciously reminiscent of pot brownies.

The process was over in moments. As soon as Angela’s body was healed, she felt a mild sensation of heat on her forehead—just a flash, signifying the spell’s completion. Curious about the reason for the heat, Angela wiped her forehead with her palm, discovering that nothing remained of the rune except a smudge of ash. Apparently, runes self-destructed after use on Arenia, something she’d have to keep in mind.

Angela got onto her knees and sat back on her heels, taking a deep, blissfully pain-free breath. She smiled, revelling in the feeling of her body being whole again.

Then she got bitch-slapped by the rules of magic.

“AAAAAHH!” Angela screamed as intense pain rocketed through her skull. She grabbed onto the sides of her head in a desperate attempt to keep her brains from shooting out her ear holes, dropping to the ground and rolling in the dirt as she moaned in agony. The pain built to a frightening crescendo, then, abruptly, it was gone.

Angela lay in the dirt, moaning. “Nope. Nuh-uh. I’d rather get stabbed in the eye than go through that again. Fuck spellcasting; it is not cool enough.”

Something had to have gone wrong. There was no way the pain she’d just endured was a normal part of using magic on Arenia.

Grabbing her “Runes” tablet, Angela looked to see if anything had changed. Sure enough, an entry had been added.

DRUIDIC SPELLCASTING:

Druidic spells are cast through the construction of runic patterns consisting of one or more base runes. If the spellcaster does not use a spell-appropriate component to absorb the backlash when the runes are destroyed, that cost will be borne by the druid’s own body.

NOTE: Just as with weapons and crafting, the rules of spellcasting must be discovered through teaching and discovery. Have fun! Try not to get killed. Or try! Death is a great way to learn what doesn’t work. And it’s much more fun to watch.

Below that, the spell description had also been modified:

Breath of the Forest (Rank ∞)

This spell draws on the vitality of the forest to fully heal you or another creature.

Cost: A single sprig of mistletoe (we’ll give you this one as a freebie because it’s funnier to tell you now)

“You asshole planet,” Angela said. She’d had mistletoe in her mouth and spat it out! If she hadn’t, it would simply have been consumed by the spell. Instead, she’d forced the magic and absorbed the backlash herself. And that was from a Rank 1 spell! What the hell was the backlash from something with an actual kick to it? A full day’s vomiting? A week? Something even worse? Whatever it was, she wanted no part of it.

Wait a sec… Angela looked at the description again. Huh.

While it was a 1-Rune spell, its rank was listed as ∞ not 1.

Infinite rank? What the hell does that mean?

Meh, not a mystery she’d be unravelling any time soon.

Angela struggled to her feet and took in her state. Her clothes were torn and dirty, but she was alive and on the path to becoming a druid. And she’d just done magic.

Holy shit, I just did magic!

Angela clapped her hands in glee and danced around. Then she set about stripping all the mistletoe she could find off the branch she’d broken from the tree. Chances were good that she’d be needing that spell again, and she sure as hell didn’t want to suffer through backlash again if she could avoid it.

Once she was done, Angela put her hands on her hips and looked around. She was ready to go but was faced with a bit of a quandary. Namely, whether she needed a weapon. This was the forest, and she was some kind of druid trainee, so would animals attack her? If so, was it okay to defend herself? It was kind of a gray area, and Angela didn’t want to appear to be going out hunting if that wasn’t cool with Ennàd.

Fortunately, druid lore had given Angela a cop-out solution: the shillelagh. Effectively just a walking stick that doubled as a club, the shillelagh was both practical and simply dripping with druidy goodness. And a hell of a lot better than a pocketful of rocks.

Speaking of which…

Angela looked at the base of the tree where she had left the rocks and the book she’d taken from Earth. Strangely, while the rocks were still there, the book was gone. Some animal must have dragged it off, which was more than fine with Angela. Better it dragged off the book than her.

That meant it was shillelagh time.

Traditionally, a shillelagh was a stick of blackthorn wood with a knob at the end that doubled as a handle when walking and a bonking tool when fighting. However, given that blackthorn grew in deciduous forests on Earth and Angela was in an evergreen forest on Arenia, it was probably okay to stretch the fiction somewhat.

Angela’s eyes fell on the branch she had just been stripping of its mistletoe and took note of the lumpy boles that protruded where the parasitic plant had messed up the hemlock’s growth.

Yep, that would do.

With a bit of effort, Angela was able to break off the ends, leaving her with a crappy stick just over a metre long that was splintered on both ends and would probably bend in half if she tried to hit anything with it. Hopefully, that would be enough to scare away anything that tried to attack. Unless it was like, forest trolls or something, in which case she was screwed no matter what weapon she was carrying.

“Doot dee doo, off we go,” Angela hummed as she hiked over to the river. “I’m a badass, don’t mess with meeee, or I’ll hit you with a piece of treeee!”

After about 20 minutes of Angela singing and walking along the riverbank, it occurred to her that maybe singing in an ostensibly monster-infested forest wasn’t the best of ideas, so she opted to shut the hell up and try not to get noticed.

That lasted all of 30 seconds.

“Okay, super hungry. Need something to eat.”

Angela peered into the trees. They had grown thicker as she progressed, and the riverbank was now full of mosses and low ferns. And mushrooms. She walked up to a patch and stared at them side-eyed.

“Will you kill me if I eat you?” she said to the mushroom. It didn’t say anything back. She evaluated it closely and came back with the determination that it was… mushroom-like.

Angela was torn. On the one hand, she liked mushrooms, and she was hungry. On the other hand, she liked being alive. Not poisoning yourself was a tried-and-true method of staying that way. Unfortunately, she had always bought her mushrooms from the farmer’s market, so her identification skills were nonexistent.

That said, this particular mushroom looked a lot like the white mushrooms you could find at any grocery store, so chances were already high that it was okay to eat.

Angela resolved to play it safe. “Alright, Mr. Mushroom. I’m going to eat a teensy, tiny piece of you. If nothing happens in ten minutes, I’m going to assume you’re not poisonous.” She plucked the mushroom from the ground and carried it to the river’s edge, where she washed it in the crisp mountain water. Being as careful as possible, she took a minuscule bite and then sat down on a rock to evaluate the effects.

When the vomiting finally stopped 30 minutes later, Angela glared at the mushroom with a sea of hate in her eyes. It laughed at her and shook its head.

“Oh man, you are so fucked up,” the mushroom said. “You were so worried about getting poisoned that you never stopped to think about getting high. You’re talking to a mushroom!”

“Because you’re the asshole who did this!” she snapped.

The mushroom held up his little mushroom hands. “Hey, I was just hanging out under a tree, lady. Ain’t my fault.”

Angela squeezed her eyes shut. “This is so messed up. Getting high on mushrooms shouldn’t make them talk to me.”

“And yet it did. Next time don’t mow down on Mushrooms of +3 Anthropomorphization.”

She opened her eyes. “Is that a thing?”

The mushroom shrugged. “How the hell should I know? I’m your hallucination.”

“Ugh. Leave me alone,” Angela said. “I just need to pull it together enough to cast a heal spell, and then it’s bye-bye mushroom guy.”

“Snrk,” the mushroom chuckled. “Good luck with that. You’re still on cooldown.”

“Please. I don’t know that, so how would my hallucination?”

The mushroom wagged a mushroom finger at her. “Tsk, tsk. Not admitting something to yourself isn’t the same as not knowing it.”

She glared at the mushroom but realized the little shit might be onto something.

Feeling the forest around her, Angela noted that while she could still feel the vitality, she couldn’t touch it the way she had when she’d cast her spell.

Calling up her stone tablets, Angela sifted through them and noticed that she now had one labelled “RUNES” and another labelled “SPELLS.” Apparently, the information had been split up at some point. She grabbed the one labelled “SPELLS” and focused on it. As soon as she did, she saw more information appear.

Breath of the Forest (Rank ∞)

This spell draws on the vitality of the forest to fully heal you or another creature.

Cost: A single sprig of mistletoe. (17:08 remaining)

As she watched, the timer at the bottom of the entry changed, ticking down a second at a time.

“Seriously?” Angela said. “There’s more than an hour cooldown on my only spell?”

“Yeah. Total balls,” the mushroom said, nodding its large white cap. Angela glared at it before picking up a different tablet, this one labelled “CONDITIONS.”

CONDITIONS

Hallucinations:

- Anthropomorphization: Stage 3 (-2 WIL)

- Auditory: Stage 1 (-1 WIL)

- Abrasiveness: Stage 1 (+1 CHA)

Hungry: Stage 1 (-1 CON)

“Oh, goody,” Angela muttered. The lack of a conditions timer sucked, but so did most of her experience on Arenia. “Alright. I’m getting out of here. I’m still hungry as shit, and Palmdale, or Pullman, or Palmyre, or whatever the hell that town is called isn’t getting any closer.” She used her shillelagh to pull herself up off the ground, groaning at both the upset in her tummy and the hunger that warred with it.

“What about me?” the mushroom said. “I’m good company.”

Angela looked at the partially-eaten mushroom, who was now giving her big doe eyes.

“I’ve got friiiiieeeeends,” he said, gesturing to the other mushrooms growing under the tree.

“Yay! Take us! Whee! We’re a good time! Hurray!” they shouted in chorus.

Angela rolled her eyes and looked skyward. “You have got to be kidding me.”