***** Broohn’s POV, 5:45 AM *****

[Mmm. Sure, Grandma! I’ll fix your stove for some of your apple pie!] I said dreamily.

{Broohn!Broohn!Broohn!...}

[Wait, what did I do Grandma? Why are you yelling at me like some sort of claxon?]

{Broohn!Broohn!Broohn!...}

[Grandma! That noise doesn’t tell me anything!]

{Broohn!Broohn!Broohn! It’s an emergency!}

[Oh wait, I’m having the apple pie dream again. That must mean there's an emergency. I guess I’d better wake up.]

{“I’m awake,”} I said groggily. {“What’s emergency? How you always wake me in middle apple pie dream?”}

{There are four assassins headed your way going after The Prince. I don’t know about the dream thing though.}

Suddenly I wasn’t so sleepy anymore.

{“Assassins? How good are they and how soon do you think they’ll get here?”} I asked.

{I put condensed recordings of their visit to my dungeon in the usual place on your smart wrist bag. I think one of them is a low mid-rank who is responsible for training the other three who are clearly noobs. If you take out Leader first the others won’t be a problem since they tend to lose all of their discipline without him right there to sit on them. I don’t know why they are using The Prince as a training mission though. Maybe they had poisoned him so thoroughly they thought he wouldn’t be a challenge? Regardless, they just left my dungeon less than a minute ago. I want them alive if possible. I already killed two of them and captured a third.}

{Roger that. I’ll deal with them.}

{You’ll have to keep them for now as Tracey and I are rebooting as soon as I hang up with you and I don’t know how long that will take.}

{“I’ll figure something out then. We have plenty of empty rooms over here.”}

{Good. Oh, by the way, Broohn, you do realize that neither of your Grandmas has ever made apple pie?}

Then he hung up before I could come up with an answer.

As much as I hate to admit it, he has a point.

Anyway, right now it’s time to go hunt some assassins! This is going to be fun!

Then I tried to roll out of bed, only to realize that Zona had unconsciously wrapped us together with vines again.

“Zona dearest, please wake up,” I said, gently rubbing my cheekbone on the top of her head in an attempt to wake her up without annoying her too much. When that didn't work, I got a little more aggressive. “Come on Barkface, wake up! You need to let me out!”

“Uuhhh…” she groaned, “What’s going on? Why was your grandma asking me to fix her oven?”

“I have to go to the baaathrooom!” I sang to see if she was actually awake or just sleep talking again. I cannot tell you how many times I've had entire conversations with her only to realize that she was asleep the entire time.

“Huh? Oh, right. Sorry!” She said as she unwrapped us and reabsorbed her vines.

“You’re fine. As for the oven thing, you were getting an echo of one of my dreams again. I get that one anytime Bud has to wake me up for an emergency. Speaking of which, I should be back in less than an hour.”

“Wait, what kind of emergency is it?”

“There are some low-level assassins who are going after The Prince.”

“Ooh, ooh! Can I deal with them? It’s been a long time since I got to play with some assassins!”

“Sure, why not,” I shrugged, “However if they use shadow step or something similar to get away, I call dibs.”

“That’s fair. Now let’s go confuse some assassins!”

***** Leader’s POV *****

Well, this wasn’t working out anything like I had planned. First off, I thought we would have found The Prince by now and second, I got saddled with some of the less promising trainees as opposed to the cream of the crop like I thought I would be getting.

At least the foolish Commander that’s trying to set me up for failure couldn’t take Tracker away from me. Without him, this mission would be completely impossible. As it is the jungle is making it rather difficult to get the job done.

“Leader, I think we got a problem,” said Tracker, who had stopped about 6 meters away from a large cluster of vines in front of a small cliff.

“What kind of problem?” I asked.

“If I remember correctly, those are mummy vines in front of us, yes?” he asked.

I took a closer look at the vines, then swore quietly under my breath. There was no mistaking that plant for anything else.

“Yup, that’s a thorned mummy vine. Why is that a problem? We can just go around it,” I said.

“Whoever ran off with The Prince used them as a staircase to get up the cliff.”

“Oh. Now that is a problem. Looks like–”

“GREETINGS MEAT PEOPLE!” yelled a voice from the vines in front of us. “WHAT BRINGS YOU TO MY FOREST?”

I looked at the vines again and then did a double-take. There was a new lump among the vines, but instead of being featureless like the rest of the lumps, this one had taken the shape of a woman and was slowly sashaying towards us.

“We seek a lost soul who’s trail led us to these parts,” I said, holding up an unlabeled sketch of The Prince. “Do you know where he might be?”

“OF COURSE I KNOW THAT MEAT PERSON! HE IS IN MY FOREST AFTER ALL! MY QUESTION TO YOU IS WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH HIM ONCE YOU FIND HIM?”

“That depends on what condition we find him in. It is our job to ensure that he is in proper condition.”

“AND WHAT MIGHT THE PROPER CONDITION BE?”

Oh, poop. I thought to myself, There is no way that we’re prepared to deal with this if it comes to a fight. I've seen people with significant plant magic pull this stunt before and unfortunately, we have no way of finding her actual body. Not in this forest at any rate.

“It is not my place to say, fair lady.”

“THEN YOU SHALL BE MY GUESTS UNTIL YOU ANSWER MY QUESTION TO MY SATISFACTION!” she said as the plants behind us suddenly and noisily wove themselves together into a wall.

“We won’t be your prisoners!” declared Trainee #5, who had yet to earn a proper name. He reinforced his statement by throwing one of his daggers into her throat.

“FOOLISH MEAT PERSON! YOU CANNOT HARM ME BY STABBING ONE OF MY PLANTS!” she replied as she pulled the knife out of her "throat" and hit him over the head with the hilt, her arm stretching and retracting like a spring as she swung.

And that’s what I was afraid of: we’re dealing with a dryad that Is strong enough to control the forest around them rather than just their own tree. We might be able to kill her if we chop down her original tree, but finding a specific tree in the middle of this jungle would take divine providence. Even if we did find her tree and started trying to chop it down, she'd stop playing around and completely tie us up with plants.

That left me with only one option.

I spun around and used shadow-step to get past the wall that she had woven around us, which wasn’t hard since the sun had yet to start rising. As soon as I stepped out of a different shadow 200 meters away, I dove for another shadow and relaxed slightly since there was very little chance that she could catch me now. Yes, I would still be inside of her forest once the shadow step was over, but I was almost guaranteed to outrun her awareness as long as I kept going.

Then something grabbed the back of my jerkin and yanked me out of the shadowlands, giving me a sinking feeling in my stomach that had nothing to do with my sudden change in direction.

“GREETINGS CRUNCHY!” said a different voice that could have shaken my bones with either its incredibly low pitch or its immense volume. Both of them together took my breath away.

“TRYING TO RUN AWAY FROM MY WIFE WERE YOU? HOW RUDE!”

“Can’t… breathe…” I managed to wheeze as I was dangling by the back of my jerkin.

“GOOD NIGHT CRUNCHY! WE’LL TALK AGAIN WHEN YOU WAKE UP!” said the voice, and then I passed out.

***** 90 minutes later… *****

I woke up gradually, blindly reaching for the flask of water I kept hidden by my bedside. It took me several moments to realize that I wasn’t in my bed but laying on a cold stone floor in just my underwear.

Darn it! I must have gotten captured!

“Oh good, you’re awake!” said a voice that I knew all too well.

“Go die a hole, you miserable Prince!” I swore at him. I can’t hide anything from him, not with his A ranked Judicial Intuition abilities. My only solace is that he can’t use it to force answers out of me unless he asks the appropriate question.

Then I looked at the room around me, which had perfectly smooth stone walls boasting a significant lack of openings of any kind. Connecting this with the very unique light strips on the ceiling and the odd feel of the ambient magic, I realized that I was probably somewhere inside of the dungeon we’d stumbled across earlier.

The Prince was slowly pacing on the other side of the room, with what looked like a glass wall between the two of us. I have no idea how I can hear him so clearly with the wall in the way, but I have more important things to think about at the moment.

“Curious, very curious…” said The Prince. “Your head means exactly what you say, but your heart is trying to wish me well.”

“What sort of baldershig is that? I’ll never cooperate with you!” I said.

“Oh really? You would continue to serve a master that hid a dozen suicide runes upon your person?”

“WHAT?! How can this be?”

“Half of them would have triggered by now if not for an enchanter of considerable skill who removed them from your person. The other half were set to go off if you ever discovered some sort of oath that had been hidden from you.”

“What oath? I haven’t taken any oath–” Then a vague memory from decades gone by floated through a wall in the back of my head that I didn't know was there. I was being held in my mother's arms as a teenager so many decades ago, and the Me in the memory was far more content with his lot in life than I thought I ever would be.

Something about the memory was setting off alarm bells in the back of my head, but I couldn't put my finger on what that something might be. The really odd thing was that it was because of the alarm bells that I knew this to be a true memory with every fiber of my being. I was so moved by this memory that for the first time in I don't even know how long a heartfelt prayer escaped my lips.

"Oh Momma, what am I supposed to do now?"

I don't know why I used Momma's name when she too is mortal, but someone responded with a wave of comfort and certainty that this is where I was supposed to be.

This wave shattered the wall inside of my head, causing a tidal wave of memories to come out of nowhere and swallow me whole and I passed out again.

***** Elsewhere *****

KRISH!

Impossible! The crystal! It is shattered! That spell should have kept functioning for centuries! With all of the emotional dampers on his mind, there is no way he should have been able to generate the emotional waves needed to break free!

Without that crystal, there is nothing to hide that unfortunate piece of truth, and I cannot let that happen!

I cannot let The Prophecy come true!

I yanked open my workroom door and yelled, “Guardsman! Summon your General at once! I have a mission to assign!”

“Sir, yes sir!” replied the young man on duty directly outside the door as he bolted down the hallway.

“Oh, and tell him it is time to kidnap the alchemist," I yelled after him. "His skill will be needed.”