Astrie evolved today. It happened quickly and without theater. One minute I was refining it, the next I felt the worlds mana flow into it and start to change it. I wasn’t able to do anything to the plant while it was in the process of evolving.

From there Mest and I experimented with the newly evolved plant. Mest proposed the name Spellwood for it, and I couldn’t come up with anything better.

The first thing that happened was Mest tried to manipulate it, with a little bit of instruction from me. He failed completely, of course. He doesn’t have the right parts to manipulate plants, maybe with years of study or a lucky evolution he would be able to but both of those things are years away.

The first thing he tried to get me to make was a small teleportation circle. I do not understand anything about teleportation and his explanations went over my head. I think he was getting a little overzealous in his approach. So we dialed it back down.

The first thing I successfully made was a fire pit. It quickly ran out of mana. I needed to figure out how to allow it to either store a larger amount of mana or draw in ambient mana, otherwise, it would be mostly useless. Lucky for me I created the Ents, I know exactly how to do both of those things, other plant manipulators will not have that luxury.

Even knowing how to do both of those things it took me about an hour before I managed work out all of the kinks. From that I learned something important, working with Spellwood stretches my capabilities close to their limits. After it’s evolution it is easily the most complex plant I have ever worked with, by several orders of magnitude, on top of that it is just innately powerful. Trying to do anything complicated with it will tax me, similar to how actually building the Ents taxed me.

The upside of that is once I have figured out how to do something with Spellwood it becomes incredibly simple to do it again, though again, that is due to how gifted I am at plant manipulation.

I am excited about the possibilities of this plant, and even more excited about the opportunity to stretch my magical prowess.

Mest is a little bit disappointed though. Prior to me completing Spellwood he used his contacts to compile a list of skilled plant manipulators that he could hire. The only ones skilled enough in plant manipulation to actually work with the stuff are those like me, Sprites and Nymphs in charge of a grove or forest, they can’t exactly leave, and even if they could they would be losing a major part of their ability to manipulate plants, making it pointless in the first place.

I mean one of the Ents could definitely do it, but none of them have shown any interest in anything relating to plant manipulation. Mest knows me well enough that he won’t try to force the issue with them.

I can work with this plant, but I don’t know enough about magic outside of plant manipulation for it to really be useful.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.