Chapter 85

Lord of the Trees

Brewer’s Reputation: 85,055

Dream Cutter Stone Shard Quest: 1/15,000 shards.

The sky was clear of clouds. The blue that it offered was pastel and deep. The sun was low, but huge. I felt its warmth on my face. Daylight like that had been rare since the beginning of winter. The sun was just above the Mist Hidden wall on the sea. It made the bioluminescent mist glow fiercely and reflect upon the ice.

Ice entrapped the sea along the coast. The orcs had been breaking the ice to pave a path through the Mist Hidden wall to the dock. Zik’s and Meat-fists’ ship came through. The orcs plowed a path to the dock and the goblin ship followed.

We delivered our most enormous shipment of goblin spit beer so far, collected used barrels and payment, and then watched the ships sail back through the Mist Hidden wall.

We had nearly 800 barrels. They lined the dock and littered the coast. Without Thrush’s inventory, we had to rely on magic to transport the beers.

After downing a full mug of Anti-Gravity ale, Abigail and I began loading up our inventory of barrels. All of them. We had to drink another round of the attribute beer to carry everything.

Then we were off, climbing the trail up to the sumac.

It was so far one of the quietest days of the season. Since the sea was frozen, it could not surf and crash. There was no wind, and the snow made no sound. The sun was silent. Even the cold was so deep that I would have said it had picked our woods to slumber in.

We passed by the staghorn sumac. The bark was smooth and the trunks were straight and true. When we continued through the pine, I marveled at the towering trees. Their evergreen needles offered the only color against the white snow and gray-brown trunks. They were thick, arrow straight, and nearly all the branches on their bottom halves had broken off. Their barks were flaky and resembled the cracks of drought stricken earth. They too were silent. No wind stirred the needles.

Stubborn birch leaves did not move, though they were gold and dead. There were no blue jays. Not a single piece of nature moved. Even the crunch of our footsteps sounded hushed.

Before we crested the hill to the Sheltering Bubble, I looked at Abigail. “I’d like to complete one of my new quests.”

“Brewing a beer with two attributes? That one?”

“Any ideas on what I should do?”

“Browse the Brewer’s Guide. I’ll brew a double attribute beer with you. We can surprise each other. We’ll try yours first.”

“Is there anything I should consider?” I said.

“When you use Alchemical control, you want to use it on both ingredients at the same time, Not one after the other. That’s an entirely different skill which is quite rare to Brewer’s with one assigned god. I knew a Brewer and Alchemist who could affect completed beers but it was tricky for them.”

We arrived at our Sheltering Bubble and went straight to the brewery to drop off the empty barrels. I immediately knew that there would no longer be room for anymore barrels. I did what I should have done from the start—I transported every barrel to my Beyond the Cabin ethereal plane. It took many trips, but within two hours, I was able to have them all organized in rows behind the log house. From that moment on, I planned to store all of them on the plane.

I returned to my cabin in the Sheltering Bubble. I found Abigail sitting across from the stove where flames licked at fresh logs. She had two reed baskets on the table. One had dirty mushrooms. One by one, she was cleaning them of ice and snow and dirt, and stacking them in the other reed basket.

I pulled up a chair, sank into it and poured a beer for each of us.

[Ethereal Billy Goat ale.]

[Silver rank. 04/100 Greater legendary.]

[Brewery Hawkin.]

[A fair take on the Billy Goat ale style, this beer boasts a deep almost mauve color with notes of richly caramelized molasses and beet sugar. The foam is Pearl Bubbles which float away. When popped, the bubbles release the aroma of cherry cobbler and gingerbread crumble. This beer has been brewed with forged ethereal yeast. Yeast impact: unknown.]

Not only was the beer almost a dark mauve, but there was an unearthly colored haze in the beer that rose like bubbles to gather beneath the layer of pearled foam.

On my first sip, beyond the delicious flavors, the yeast brought the taste of a vision—a memory. If my brain was a tongue, the visions were a flavor of thoughts and memories. I was overcome with the childhood feeling of walking into one of my favorite shops in all of Lunstad. Why was I there? Was I following my folks? Was it a bakery? A candy shop? I was overcome with the feeling that the shop had one of my favorite things and I was going to get my hands on something amazing.

Every sip of that beer made my subconscious taste the experience.

In-between sips, I browsed my Brewer’s Guide to Magic Ingredients. I began with the Fs and browsed for two attributes I could combine.

Mushrooms piled higher. Abigail hummed melodies. I flipped through pages.

Along the way, nearly halfway through my beer, I came upon the Sage Meditation attribute, and the Lord of the Trees attribute. It was decided. I had sage leaves and chestnut skins for both attributes.

While Abigail finished cleaning the last of her mushrooms, I brewed enough beer of the double attributes to fill two 500ml bottles.

[Quest: Attribute blend. Complete!]

[Reward: 2 rare silver rank Brewer’s loot chests. 10 common silver rank Brewer’s loot chests.]

“Congratulations,” she said after I told her the beer was ready for us to try. “I’m ready if you are. What did you end up brewing?”

“Sage Meditation attribute, and Lord of the Trees attribute.”

“Odd blend. One will enter you into a deep meditation. The other… well there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”

I wanted to be surrounded by trees, so we trekked eastward and sipped on a Furnace attribute ale, and then a Drunk defiance attribute ale. We forced our way through snow until we reached the forest of white birch nearly an hour later.

We sat on cloaks on snow piles, facing each other. The sun was higher now and there was still no sound and no movement. No shred of falling snow. No hush of wind.

We tapped the necks of our beers together, then drank.

My mana fell halfway. An instant calm suffused my mind, I felt my brain become massaged of stress and freed of knots of mental tension. Like fleeing fish, my thoughts absconded.

[Sage Meditation attribute: When consumed, this attribute will force the drinker into Empty Mind Meditation. If the drinker is on a quest path, one random skill will increase by 1 level. Congratulations! Forced Carbonation has reached Silver Rank Level 1000!]

The notification came and went like a passing thought. It was nothing important. All that was important was the breath. As I listened to my breath, I heard another breath. Someone else’s breath.

That’s… Abigail. Abigail’s with me.

The thought of Abigail made me open my eyes. She was equally deep in meditation with a posture I straightened to match. Her breathing was deep and even, matched with mine. While I’d broken from my meditation, I didn’t have the heart to distract her from hers.

Until my eyes focused on the trees all around us.

“Abigail,” I whispered.

She frowned. She slowly opened her eyes. She saw me first, and expressed her query. Then I watched as her eyes took in the trees behind me. Her jaw dropped when she saw what I was seeing.

Everytime we breathed in, the birch trees leaned toward us. When we breathed out, the trees leaned away. Their movements became more alive the longer we sat there, breathing. They seemed to actively reach toward us, then relax away.

I lifted a hand and held my breath. Half of the birch leaned toward me and stopped. I waved my hand, slowly pushed out a breath, and the birch waved too.

Abigail did the same thing. She controlled the movements of some dozen birch trees. I controlled the movements of another dozen. Her birch bent toward mine. Mine bent toward hers. Though Abigail and I were a few feet apart, It felt like our hands touched when the birch trees collided. We both recoiled at the same time and our eyes met. Breathing deeply, we moved our hands back toward each other. When the birch trees tangled with each other again, I could feel her hand, like our fingers were laced together.

It must have been the meditation and effects of the double attribute ale that made my heart race.