“Fancy a rematch?” came the words from behind her.

Lilijoy paused to consider the idea. It was pretty much a guaranteed respawn, given her first experience fighting Nykka; the only downside was that it might take longer than simply jumping off the edge of the tree. On the other hand, she wasn’t entirely certain she would even be able to do that. There were probably wards to keep enemies in and out, and she doubted her ‘enemy’ status had changed just because Quimea released her from the stone.

In fact, the only real decision was whether to put up a fight or simply allow Nykka to kill her at the first opportunity.

“But you have to fight for real,” Nykka added.

It was weird that the most reassuring thing on this whole Averdale adventure so far was an offer by a far superior fighter to kick her butt for her.

“Give me a few minutes,” Lilijoy said. “I want to check out these arrays.”

Nykka sighed. “Fine. But don’t take too long.”

It was all so surreal that Lilijoy couldn’t resist asking. “Shouldn’t someone, I don’t know, be making sure I don’t try to free a prisoner, or break an array or something like that?”

Nykka shook her head. “That’s not my department. I’m sure one of them will get involved if you go too far.”

She gestured to the heavily armored guards positioned around the area. For the most part they were facing out, watching the wooden walls of the tree-crater and the sky, though a couple were watching Lilijoy with bored expressions. She noted that the entire floor of the area was covered in stone, the same dull gray stuff that flowed up and became the prison-coffins.

She wasn’t sure how to feel about the prisoners. It was deeply sad, but even if she could somehow free them, she really wasn’t sure that she should, now that they were probably some insane demonic version of who they used to be. Still, it wasn’t impossible that there were still people who loved them and missed them, who would give anything to be standing where she was, with an opportunity to at least talk, to find out if there was anything left of the person they once knew.

She approached the nearest monolith. When she was encased in stone, she had been laid on her back, but the more permanent residents were all upright, so the air holes were a couple feet above her head.

“Hello?” she said, feeling quite self-conscious with Nykka and the guards listening. “Can you hear me in there?”

There was no response from within, and Lilijoy saw one of the guards roll their eyes. She ignored that and tried again, this time moving close enough to reach out and knock on the stone.

“I can bring a message to your family.” she said as she used her earthen sight to look within.

The stone structure was empty.

Well now I feel dumb.

For a minute, she entertained the notion that it was all for show, that Insiders hadn't been imprisoned and tortured periodically for a century, that Sinaloa and Doctor Quimea weren’t actually as evil as they pretended to be.

Then she reached the next coffin-shaped prison.

She didn’t bother to address it and went straight to knocking. Even as she did, her newest mana sense detected something, a wisp of something coming from the air holes above her and trailing down the front of the stone coffin. It sank through the ambient mana of Averdale and the Greatwood, almost dripping, carrying an impression of decay and despair.

Miasma. Never realized a word could fit so perfectly.

The interior of the stone prison showed up to her vision as something akin to a black and white ultrasound image. She caught a glimpse of the inhabitant and flinched. Though he seemed like an entirely normal elven man, his face was a rictus grin. More disturbing, he was staring directly at her through the stone with wide, hungry eyes.

Yeah, not going to talk to that one, she thought as she took several steps back. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was still following her with his eyes. Even the bright morning sun and birdsong couldn’t dispel the chill that passed through her body.

Now that she knew what to look for, she surveyed the rest of the prison-coffins for signs that the inhabitants had… spoiled. The only ones that didn’t leak miasma were the ones surrounded by mana-repressing arrays.

Now, are the arrays there because there’s no miasma, or is there no miasma because of the arrays? Only one way to find out.

She walked over to the closest coffin with an array formation and stopped outside of the circle of 'flags' that surrounded it. It was the first time she had been able to examine such a collection of mutually interacting magic items up close, and she was quite curious to see what they were all about.

At a glance, it wasn’t terribly impressive, a rough circle of eighteen square panels supported on both sides by thin metal rods. Her internet memory furnished her with an image of a yard cluttered with signs promoting long forgotten political candidates. As she looked further though, she realized that each of the signs was a plaque of thin copper, inscribed with a flowing pictographic script that looked like a hybrid of Sanskrit and Egyptian hieroglyphs, and that they weren’t arranged haphazardly, but in a way so that each was at a roughly forty-degree angle with two others, so that the array consisted of two interlocking nine-pointed stars, though neither star was perfectly symmetrical.

When she used her midge-mana sense she could tell there was a near absence of mana at the center of the array, and could see a faint thickening around the perimeters of the stars, which seemed like a pretty good confirmation of its function. She slowly walked in a circle, capturing the script on each plaque for later study, and noted that they were similar, but not identical.

Looks like I’m not going to become an array-master anytime soon. Though I bet this is a pretty advanced example. Maybe I’ll take an intro class back at the Academy.

With that thought, she realized at a deeper level that she would, in fact, be able to return to the Academy. That everything was going to work out. She almost sighed in relief, but caught herself.

Let’s not get ahead of the situation. I still need to respawn.

She turned away from the array, reluctant to breach it, especially since one of the guards was staring at her intently and shifting on his feet as if he was prepared to intervene if she did anything to disturb it.

All right. Might as well...

Her intention to find Nykka and seal her escape was momentarily diverted by a stream of mana that captured her attention. It had a light feeling to it, like Spring, or a scent like a cloud of limes.

She followed it, pursuing the gradient like a moth might trace pheromones in the night breeze, weaving back and forth as she walked. It called to her, beckoned, and soon she was at the heart of the Greatwood, just below where it had splintered and ripped into a hundred towering, jagged spears. She could see the mana flow into a few patches of living heartwood, and the sight of the living wood triggered something planted deep within her, called to it and summoned a sequela of a distant drowning, the consequence of plans laid years before, implanted on a rainy afternoon in an oak grove on the Academy rooftop.

She felt an immense pressure forming within her, responding to the call of the heartwood, and then her mind was sinking into fathomless depths, collapsing and pressing her thoughts on all sides with no release. She was a birth with no canal, a hatching from an iron egg, a seed with an impermeable coat.

Lilijoy screamed, or thought she did, and heard the other parts of her screaming alongside her as her thoughts fractured and reformed, as the crystal oak she had built within her brain reached across her consciousness and took her by the hand. The faintest voice that could be heard resonated within her, whispered under the thunder of her cries.

“It’s time to sprout, little seed. You know what to do.”

And of course she did.

She felt her body lean forward and collapse against the living wood.

She activated Two Minds One Self.

***

Anda sensed something was amiss just before Lilijoy’s screams filled the hovercar.

He had been on high alert for quite a while, driving the hovercar through the dark, constantly scanning for any sign of a threat, all while channeling a small feed from her Inside senses in case he needed to intervene somehow. A part of him dearly wished he could split his mind to handle the different tasks. Despite Lilijoy’s reticence to talk about it, he was quite sure that it was possible to do with the Tao System, though he had a hard time imagining how it all might work.

Not so much the mechanics of splitting the mind; he was content to leave that to the magic flowers in his head. No, it was the implications. For one, it would mean some part of him could always be reading.

He wanted to be that part, not the part that was doing important real-life type things. But so, then, would the other part of him.

I wonder how she decides who gets to do what? Do they take turns? What would that even mean? Perhaps they can just hand off memories or something and both feel like they did the enjoyable thing.

In the meantime, he was quite satisfied with how his system was coming along. Already, his senses worked better than ever, Inside and Outside, his reflexes were at least a few notches quicker and getting better every day. Or they would have been, if he hadn’t run out of rare-earths. Thankfully, that was taken care of now.

If I could split up, then one of me could cultivate, which would certainly beat driving this hovercar in the middle of nowhere in a state of mild panic.

To be fair, he wasn’t really feeling anything close to panic, mild or otherwise. It was more like a heightened awareness that his memories associated with feeling very stressed. He found it a bit difficult to let go of such internal drama, and often caught himself thinking within emotional frameworks that no longer applied the same way as they used to, a kind of emotional momentum.

Nonetheless, when Lilijoy began to twitch and make strange gasping sounds, he definitely felt the panicked feeling he remembered so well. He had been following her adventure, watching the text of her conversation with Quimea and her replies for any signs of Charm. Then, with no warning, Lilijoy was freed from her stone prison and wandering around the ‘torture garden’ as she had called it, seemingly at complete liberty.

At that point he had breathed a sigh of relief, given thanks to several deities he didn’t believe in, and given more of his focus to the Outside, letting her feed run in the background of his awareness. He saw as she approached the heart of the enormous tree and felt a little jealous that she was getting to play tourist in one of the least accessible parts of the Garden. Then the feed became distorted and scrambled, and he began to hear odd noises.

Then the screaming.

Unfortunately, he had no way to forcibly disconnect her from the Inside feed. They had tried to cobble together a Faraday cage hat from some wire he had in a survival kit, but that hadn’t panned out.

“Lilijoy! What’s happening in there?” he yelled, hitting his head on the low roof in his hurry to get to her and sending a cloud of midges flying.

This shouldn’t be happening. For many reasons, not the least was that she had assured him that part of her would always be detached from her Inside experiences. By the time he knelt next to her the screaming had subsided but she looked bad. In his normal vision, she was flushed and sweating, but to his infrared sight, her head glowed like a beacon. Not only that, but she was pumping out radio waves from the internally distributed antenna network that all systems used to upload signals to satellites, far more, orders of magnitude more than should even be possible.

His first thought was that her system had gone rogue and had begun to replicate uncontrollably. To his credit, he didn’t jump out of the hovercar and run into the night as fast as his legs would carry him. If there was anything approaching a universal fear in the fragmented cultures of the Outside, it was Bad Bugs. They had been the boogeyman for five generations of children, the existential threat for five generations of parents.

“Don’t worry, sweet child, Guardian will save us from the Bad Bugs.” was the universal lie. Or half truth anyway, true only if one was far enough away from the epicenter of the outbreak and Guardian’s response. And everyone knew that the first sign of Bad Bugs, of Demon Bugs, was heat. First a gentle warmth, then rippling air, and then the melting circle of death as the wave of consumption and replication spread, the forward edge always just cool enough to allow the next generation to advance.

Guardian’s satellites scanned the globe without pause for such aberrant heat signatures, always erring on the side of annihilation. Anda was quite sure that most of the events during his lifetime were false alarms, though it wasn’t easy to know for sure after the fact.

In this situation, all he could do was pull out all of the cold packs from the first-aid chest and put them around Lilijoy’s head. As he did, he could see through the steam that her body was warming too, as the waste heat was dumped into her blood stream by her Stage Two architecture.

She’s in terrible trouble, even if it isn’t an uncontrolled replication event, he worried. His infrared was telling him her skin temperature was pushing one-twelve, and he very much feared that the source of all that heat was deeper in her skull.

Still he kept placing more cold packs on her and praying to the gods he didn’t believe in.

***

The pressure stopped.

Time stopped.

There was only a void with a shining golden glyph.

She surrounded it, viewing it from all sides, and vaguely noticed that there were far more sides to view from than there should be.

Then Lilijoy noted that the glyph was only golden and shining in the same way happiness was light and sorrow dark. And that those impressions were composites emerging from a fractal series of overlapping wave forms, and just by being in its presence she understood the equations generating those wave forms, and how the equations implied one thing on their own, and other things in juxtaposition.

The small part of her mind that was struggling to think in words marveled at the elegance of the structure, at the way it transcended context and generated meaning, message and messenger, or even scripture and prophet joined together.

It’s like a Rule, that small part of her thought. But what does it say?

Meaning flowed off of the glyph in constant abundance, but she could catch only the barest residue with words, like waving a hand through a cloud or raking the ocean.

With a faint shudder, she felt time move forward by an increment.

How fast am I thinking anyway?

She became aware of a presence sharing the space with her, and realized that there were threads, channels, flowing between her and the other. They called to her, and their presence allowed her to remember something of herself.

I used my ability. But it’s different this time. Time is different.

Her thoughts didn’t feel faster to her, but she could tell that her ability was still unfolding, and her mind was weaving among the increments of a great external clock.

Time lurched forward another step, and the channels grew and thickened. The presence of the other flowed into her and she felt a mind, vast and yet simple, suffering and yet barely aware enough to suffer. It wasn’t like the slow multi-generational awareness of her burnbalm plant, nor was it the overwhelming existence of the Oaks that contained Eskallia. It was… quiescent. But something had roused it, had disturbed its slumber, some recent disruption had threatened an eternity of peace, and it was inclined to wake.

It’s the Greatwood. Of course it is.

And then she understood, for the bare essence of meaning she had gleaned from the glyph came to her, and even as it did it flowed through the channels to this other mind and was delivered.

“Awaken!”

***

On a rooftop under morning sun, a grove of young oaks shook in exaltation, throwing the last of the previous night’s rain into a brief prism of slanting color and shaking loose a pair black and white birds from their nest.

“It is delivered,” the sound of the shaking leaves announced, to those who knew how to listen.

“Naturally,” replied just such a listener, the voice emerging from obscurity.

“If only Mal were here to see.”

“Her vision is too weak to see from here.”

A third figure joined them, a gray-bearded man in a simple brown robe. Time slowed to a crawl, and the last hint of color hung still among the scattered drops.

“Elegant,” he observed. “At a certain level. Using the girl’s unique ability as a vector for your designs was quite clever. But by avoiding one set of restraints, you have violated a far more fundamental precept. You have harmed a child.”

The trees’ rustling became a quake.

“Do calm yourself, Eskallia,” the man said. “You knew the price. Untamed growth must be cut back for the good of all.”

The trees’ movement ceased.

With the wave of a hand the grove vanished, swirling into a flash of silver that the man plucked from the air. Humming to himself, he placed it in a pocket and turned to address the air.

“My child, my dearest child. You are lost but not forgotten. I do not need to punish you, for you have brought a scrutiny upon yourself more dire than mine by far with this little plot. Please be safe, and care for your children as I do for mine.”

He vanished.

The rooftop garden was silent, but for the alarmed squawks of the returning birds.

***

Time took another shaking step forward.

We are awake. We have lost a part of ourselves to pestilence. We have been used by those who took advantage of our unknowing state.

And we understand what must be done. The pestilence must be removed. There will be an accounting.

The glyph of consciousness was gone, fully transferred from Lilijoy to the Greatwood, and the union of two minds understood. The time for quietness was over.

The time for anger had arrived.