Manning

“It’s got to be expected, Manny. The Sylvas’ tricky mannerisms are one of the reasons that they are frequently mistaken with fairies, it’s not all about the looks.”

“I get that, Ash. What is bothering me is that she knew more about what I created than I did! I want to communicate with her, but every time I do she just floats off. If I’d been told I created some sort of fire mana cultivating aid, I would have stored it deeper in the forest instead of leaving them lying around the road.” I’d finished filling Ash in on the Sylva’s antics and was now venting my frustration with the situation. There was no doubt in my mind that she knew exactly what that pepper was going to do to the kid.

“It’s in their nature. Don’t be angry with her, she is still just a child.”

“So are you, technically. Besides, you didn’t act like that when you got here. Didn’t you mention dryads coming from Sylvas?”

“It’s different and you know that, Manny. You know how you can force evolutions in your dungeon creatures and I’ve already explained that creatures naturally evolve on their own out in the wild. The evolutions usually aren’t as drastic, and take much longer, but the process is there.

“When I told you that dryads came from the sylva I was talking about the original dryads. When your Herboars-”

“Hedge-Hogs.”

“Ahem.” Ash cleared her throat and rolled her eyes before continuing, a bit more annoyed than before. Still, I wasn’t going to let her rename my beautiful bush babies just because she didn’t appreciate the genius. ”As I was saying, when your dungeon-evolved species reproduce, the children don’t come out as normal baby boars. The same thing applies in the wild, if two evolved creatures reproduce the offspring is always going to be evolved as well.”

“If that’s the case, then why is it that there are still so many normal creatures and so few powerful beasts?” I had given a lot of thought to the fact that most of the creatures I captured when starting out were so weak. Ash had explained it away by saying everything will look weaker compared to a dungeon raised beast because of the amount of ambient mana they absorb and process living in the rich environment.

“Hunting and reproducing. It takes years for a beast to accumulate enough power in normal circumstances to evolve. In order to ensure that the power is passed down to its children, the beast then needs to find another beast of a similar species and evolution. Even then it has to be one of the opposite gender and they have to reproduce together. A lot of creatures who gain enough power to truly become powerful don’t exactly have friendly dispositions.

“More often than not, if the beast wants to have children it will just settle down as the alpha of a pack of its non-evolved kin. Take for example a Direwolf leading a pack of regular wolves. It gets all the mates it wants and has followers to do work for it. Unfortunately, the odds of it passing down its evolutionary traits to its children are astronomically small if the mates aren’t also Direwolves, and they usually aren’t.

“As a sapient creature, your first thought would probably be to lead the pack to greatness and help the other wolves evolve as well. Beasts aren’t that smart though, or at least if they are, their animalistic instinct usually suppresses those thoughts. They push down the other wolves to maintain their status as the alpha.

“I’m getting off track here. That is how evolution works in the wild, but it is different for creatures of magic. The Sylva are pure spirits of nature and have several evolutions. One of those is taking on a more human-like appearance in the form of a Dryad. Most, if not all, dryads these days are spawned from an already existing dryad, as it has been since the first Dryad.

“A long time ago a sylva fell in love with an elven child who came into her forest every day and sang to the trees. It was said that his voice was the voice of mother earth and father sky dancing together in the breeze. The sylva fell head over heels for him and spent her entire life following him through the forest and yearning for his affection.

“One day he just stopped coming into her part of the forest. The sylva did not know why he stopped coming, only that her heart ached for lack of his music, and that she was too constrained to the forest, tethered to her hearthtree. She decided then and there she would evolve, become something that he could love and go out and search for him.

“She entered her tree, the type of tree varies depending on the breed of dryad telling the story. Turns out my people are a little self-centered, who could have guessed. Anyways, she entered her majestic ash tree and begged the other trees of the forest for the power to evolve. Through the root system that spanned the entire forest she absorbed enough power to push her over the threshold for evolution and push for something no sylva had done before.

“Although the trees only donated to her a silver of their power, a mere splinter of a splinter for them, there was more than she could possibly fathom. By the time she emerged from the tree, she was something new. The beautiful maiden sylva was almost elven in appearance, but maintained her power over the trees. More importantly, she could now leave the forest for periods of time.”

Ash paused her storytelling as she gazed into the lake. I thought about asking her more but figured she was taking her time and I didn’t want to ruin her flow. Luckily for me, it only took her a few moments to collect herself.

“The village the boy lived in was located a day or two away from the forest, and the ex-sylva managed to find it. It was then that she learned a valuable lesson as well. The boy who she had grown to love had died many years ago in some pointless war over a pointless border dispute. She’d lost over twenty years of her life inside the hearthtree while she was evolving.

“The trees do everything in their own time, and it doesn’t affect them in the same way it does the bipedal sapient races. She felt like she’d only lost a day or two in the tree, but the passage of time was much worse for her. So she returned to the forest and she mourned her loss.

“She climbed her hearthtree, no longer able to enter it in her new evolution. She would have given anything to enter its stoic embrace and become catatonic as she had in the past, but it was no longer an option. Just one of the many sacrifices she’d made for her new form. She cried for days. Those days turned to weeks, turned to months, turned to seasons. Leaves fell, the snow came, and then departed.

“When spring came, there were two new bulbs on her hearthtree, which until that point hadn’t been a flower bearing tree at all. The bulbs grew into small two small children, a boy and a girl, born with small sprouts in their hands that would one day grow into their hearthtrees. She poured her emotions into her new children and raised them to the best of her abilities, teaching them the way of the forest and what she could still use of her powers as a sylva. Imagine her surprise when years later, her daughter was the spitting image of her and her son looked exactly like the man she’d loved.

“Her name was Dryad, and she is the ancestor of all dryads as far as I know. Sylvas don’t generally evolve because they don’t care to. They are innocent nature spirits, only changed through great loss or gain. That is what I meant when I said dryads were evolved from Sylvas.”

I wasn’t really sure how to respond to such a sad and compelling story so I sort of just thanked her. I couldn’t imagine how much pain that sylva would have had to feel to give up most of her power and change her entire being just to follow her love. And then to find out he was dead and she was years too late… it was too much.

My sylva was currently near the edge of the woods so I decided to pay her a little attention. Had she fallen in love with the shit-headed kid?

Rocky wasn’t with her, which was unusual, and she was approaching a tree with a dazed look in her eye. I didn’t recognize it at first, it was just one of the many willow trees planted along the bank of my river near the village. For a while she just floated in front of it tilting her head back and forth every few seconds, the willow branches reaching down around her and dancing along her dress. The entire time I was trying to figure out why she was staring at me.

Then it struck me. Before I could warn her away from the tree she flew forward and put both of her hands against its trunk. The little sylva shined very brightly and I saw a massive influx of mana pour out of her into the willow. The tree absorbed the mana entirely and not much else happened. The sylva wearily nodded after inspecting the tree again before slowly floating back to her pear tree for a nap.

The willow tree she’d been inspected was none-other than the very same one that strangled the elven ranger. It was the first of its kind and the father of all the other dark-willow trees I’d replanted since then. I watched the tree for hours until the sun finally set, waiting for something to happen.

Then, as the sun finally set, something changed.

A sliver of the willow tree started shining very brightly before splintering off and falling to the ground.