Much of Anastacia’s day was spent roaming around the grove as the group of spriggans who had latched on to her showed her around. All of them seemed to have small nest-like hidey-holes spread out a bit further away from the grove itself, where they could mind their own business without being bothered by the stronger spirits for one reason or another. Though the nests themselves were nothing more than patches without undergrowth or worn spots in the moss that covered much of the ground, the spriggans were still very keen on showing them to the necromancer, and genuinely interested in the lives of the spirits in the grove, Anastacia was glad to be shown them. Each and every one of them also possessed a collection they wished to present their guest. Neat rocks, seeds and saplings they had gathered to one day move into the patches of land they looked over in the outside world, a few items someone must have lost or discarded while going through the spirits’ domains, bits that seemed to be either from simulacra or some other aureun constructs, nuggets of impure metal and a few things the necromancer couldn’t even recognize. Some of the spirits had even scavenged pieces of the quicksilvery armor from the unsuccessful incursion The Violet Sect had staged into the grove. As far as Anastacia could tell, they didn’t give off any kind of ominous feeling and it was probably safe to let the spriggans keep their prizes.

Having a hoard of her own both in her room and strapped onto her crown, Anastacia felt immediate comradery with these scavenging spirits, and was more than happy to help them identify the few pieces of their collection which had originated from the civilized places in the outside world. Most of it wasn’t worth keeping by any stretch of the imagination, but they were exotic and unique to the spirits who seemed to hold them dear – and to be fair, they were in possession of the only forks, horseshoes and nails in the grove.

After the nests, Anastacia asked the spirits to show their favorite plants from around the grove, which eventually turned into a search of a particular plant the necromancer had only seen drawings of when she realized that there was an opportunity to fulfil a dream of hers. Of course, the spriggans didn’t know it know it by its mortal name, but she was able to give a fairly good description of it based on what she had read. She described it as a relatively small tree or a bush with large leaves and tight clusters of sizeable red and green berries growing along the branches. After a few misses that nonetheless fit the description, they finally arrived to a cluster of tall bushes and small trees, one of which was exactly what they were looking for.

In awe, Anastacia stumbled across the few last meters of the mossy undergrowth to get a better look, but upon reaching the tree, she couldn’t help but to be disappointed, or at least puzzled. “That’s weird. This is definitely a coffee plant, but it doesn’t smell of coffee at all…” She muttered and sniffed a few more clusters to be sure.

“What’s ‘coffee’?” One of the spriggans, by the name of Serrula asked.

The necromancer took a moment to consider how exactly word the wonders of coffee to someone wholly unaware of them. “Coffee is a wondrous beverage. It’s morning dew after a misty night in the first days of summer that is turning into autumn, it’s liquid sunrise, it’s a comforting pat on the shoulder, it’s a hug from someone you love… It’s the drink equivalent of what I assume it feels like to have your head between a pair of smooth wooden-“ She stopped in the middle of the runaway sentence with her hands on her cheeks. “What’s going on with me?...”

A lengthy awkward silence ensued before the spriggan spoke up again. “Sounds nice, but what does that have to do with this matara?”

“Matara?” Anastacia frowned.

“It’s the plant’s name – or what we call it at least. There’s no sound for what it calls itself, since… you know, it’s a plant.” The spirit explained.

“Huh… “ The necromancer glanced at the coffee plant and decided to not get into a conversation about the level of sentience plants had and implications thereof. “Well, somehow you’re supposed to get beans out of it, roast them just right, ground them into bits, put them into hot water and that’s how you make coffee.”

“Sounds like an awfully complicated way to get a drink. Can you not just drink the water?” The spriggan confusedly asked.

“We can, but that doesn’t have the whole thing with the sunrise and shoulder pat thing I talked about. That comes from the beans, which are in this plant somewhere.” Anastacia reiterated and continued inspecting the plant, thinking that maybe the beans grew in is roots since there were no bean pods anywhere else. Unfortunately, the only books on the subject she had gotten her hands on had nothing but nice images and some barebones botanical information without going into the subject of harvesting beans from it.

Another spriggan stood forth from the group to voice their question. “What’s a ‘shoulder pat’?”

Anastacia stopped. “Asimina, was it?” She tried to remember the spirit’s name. “Do you seriously not know what that is?”

“I know what a shoulder is and what a pat is, but I don’t have shoulders most of the time so how should I know what that means?” The spirit explained, trying to hide the excitement over the necromancer remembering their name.

The necromancer beckoned Asimina closer and put her hands on the spriggan’s shoulders. “So, is there anything you’ve done recently that you’re proud of?” She asked and stared into the slightly misaligned eyes of the spirit.

“I guess I’m pretty proud of this one flowerbed I managed to grow in a bit of tundra I look after. Usually, you only see one or two flowers out there but my spot has over thirteen in this one little cluster. If no one eats them, that place will have hundreds of them in a few summers!” The spriggan gave an answer without having to even think about it.

Anastacia didn’t really know if the feat was particularly impressive, but she did see a few of the other spirits share surprised whispers, so it must have been more difficult than it sounded. However, whether or not it was remarkable wasn’t the point, all that really mattered was that Asimina was proud of it and that the necromancer congratulated them on it since the spirits did see her as some kind of an authority figure. “That’s amazing, I bet you worked hard on it!” She gave a fairly boilerplate response to it and a couple of swift pats on the spriggan’s wooden shoulder.

For a good while, no one said anything and Asimina simply stared at their shoulder in silence. The silence continued for a long enough time for the necromancer to start thinking their demonstration had been for naught and that the spriggans simply didn’t understand the point of an encouraging pat on the shoulder.

“H… how is it?” The slightly bird-like spriggan, named Adansonia, asked quietly.

“Pretty great so far. Honestly, I was expecting there to be more impact to it, but then again, the necromancer is very small.” Asimina reported matter-of-factly. “Not sure how, but it’s making me want to work even harder.”

Naturally, things only escalated from there, and the next half an hour was spent patting each and every one of the spriggans on the shoulder one by one. The reactions it received varied from the fairly deadpan appreciation of Asimina to a couple of the spirits almost losing control of their unfamiliar shapes over sheer delight. Though the act was unanimously decided to be pleasant, a consensus was made that the necromancer should have put more strength behind it. In the end, the whole thing made Anastacia wonder if the spriggans had ever been praised for the effort they put into obeying their supposed purpose, or if it was simply viewed as a duty that deserved no praise – but then again, she wasn’t sure who there was to praise them. Greater spriggans like Acacia and Ulmus didn’t seem to be handing out any orders or even organizing anything, so maybe giving feedback wasn’t a part of their purpose either.

With the errant round of shoulder patting completed, they could finally return to the matter of the coffee plant. Not having a shovel to allow her to inspect the roots, Anastacia turned her attention to the fruits growing along the branches, which definitely weren’t beans and didn’t even resemble the ones Rosie had in her kitchen.

“Does the plant mind if I take some of these fruits, or a branch as a keepsake?” She asked to avoid breaking any rules or angering the spirits.

“If you can take a branch, it’s your right to do so.” Salix said in a way that suggested that the idea didn’t particularly bother them. “If it matters, taking a single branch isn’t enough to harm it, not in the grove. It’s in the outside world where you should consider your actions more – but even there, if no one can stop you, it’s your right to do as you wish.”

“I see.” Anastacia muttered and plucked out the reddest fruit she could find, which came off its stem almost on its own. She tried to smell it once more, as if that would somehow tell her if it was going to be poisonous or not, and then bit into it thinking that surely a plant that made coffee wouldn’t betray her.

Under a very thin layer of slightly sweet but not particularly pleasant tasting fruit flesh, was a hard lump of something. Pampered by the innkeeper as she was these days, the necromancer always received her cherries already pitted and was in no way prepared for the idea that there could be something hard in a fruit that was so much smaller than a peach. Feeling immensely betrayed, she made sure she hadn’t somehow dislodged a tooth before looking more into what she had discovered. Peeling away the fruit, she found a hard, greenish white nugget of something that looked eerily familiar.

“What… but this doesn’t make any sense…” She uttered, completely mortified as she stared at the two halves of the seed she had discovered. “These aren’t beans at all…”

“No, those are different kind of seeds.” Salix said without understanding the problem. “I know where you can find some beans, if that’s what you wanted.”

“No… You don’t understand. They’re called coffee beans! I thought they were only hard because they were dried. I…” Anastacia sat down on a nearby rock to lament the cruel trick that had been played on her. One of the many coffee-related dreams she had harbored for months now was to have a bag of fresh coffee beans she could just snack on without having to do the whole roasting and boiling water parts of the process every time. The rock-hard lumps not only didn’t taste anything like coffee, they also appeared very hard to eat. Not only that, but she had also left behind the means to brew coffee when she and Xamiliere had left Valor and the reality that it might be days before she would be able to get some was starting to hit her amongst the related turmoil. “I just want coffee…”

None of the spriggans had even heard the plant to be referred to as coffee, or that the seeds were called anything but that, or that one could make a drink out of them, so the outburst of emotions thoroughly confused all of them – not that they would have been of much help in even during distress that wasn’t entirely nonsensical.

“If they can lie about this, what else are they lying about?! Do we mine milk and cream out of the ground? Are there sugar-beasts somewhere out there and do we grind them to dust to make sugar?!” The necromancer ranted and let out a frustrated scream when she realized she actually didn’t know where sugar came from and her own hyperbole just dealt a new blow on her.

It took a while for the mixture of rage, sorrow, regret and few other emotions to pass, during which Anastacia picked out a few more fruits and with enough spite to fuel the effort, managed to slowly grind the seeds to bits with her teeth. Whether it was just the time or the caffeine in the raw seeds entering her blood, she was eventually soothed enough to focus on something else. While bending a branch off the coffee plant to take it with her as proof of the nonsense that was happening behind the scenes in the coffee market, the necromancer noticed that her new friends had started to nervously pack closer together like small animals, and move to the side in an effort to put the necromancer in between them and something else. The faint clacking of metal against metal from the distance should have clued her in earlier, but such was her agony over her crushed dreams that she had failed to notice it.

Now alerted to the noise and the presence of something that worried the spirits in her company, Anastacia turned to the direction of the noise only to immediately lock eyes with the third member of the trio she had been interviewed by earlier, Picea. The massive tortoise lumbered towards her at a determined pace, but considering their bulkiness, there would have been ample time to run off. Though she was in no mood for a chat with what had seemed to be the least hospitable of the three greater spirits, Anastacia did remember Picea asking for a chance to talk before they had departed from the meeting. She quickly conjured up the remnants of her regal self and stood up to greet the turtle head-on.

“What is this nonsense?!” Picea immediately barked at the spriggans trying to cower behind the necromancer’s small silhouette.

“Whatever might you mean?” Anastacia asked to draw attention to herself and didn’t budge even when the turtle finally reached her and was forced to stop.

“This is no concern of yours, necromancer.” Picea gruffly responded and lifted their head over Anastacia to see the spirits hiding behind her. “What accursed guises are these? Have you stumps finally rotted from within and forgotten yourselves? Or have you started to seek for a place outside of our home as well?”

“Are they not free to look as they see fit? Besides, this is all for my sake, so it very much is my concern.” The necromancer gladly took the blame to spare her new friends from whatever Picea’s problem was.

The turtle grumbled. “So this is your doing then? Just know, nothing good comes from forcing the form of people onto a spirit. Mortals have their meager lives and we have our duty in eternity, mixing the two breeds madness – listless spirits and broken mortals.” They then addressed the spirits again. “Your duty is to the grove, not to this necromancer – and you would do well to remember that.”

Picea’s attitude didn’t help with calming Anastacia for a useful conversation, but she did realize she had put into an awkward position. The brief friendship with the lesser spirits wasn’t about to overwrite their habit of looking for the most dominant being to follow, and she could feel them desperately trying to read the situation to figure out if they should run for the hills or if their temporary shepherd would question the turtle’s authority just as she had done with the other strong spirits.

“They already use these forms when doing their jobs in the outside world. What does it matter what they look like anyway?” Anastacia asked without backing down.

“The others have deemed it worthwhile to avoid conflict and in doing so, handed over the world to the mortals without so much as a whimper, I do not subscribe to such beliefs. No spirit should seek to appease mortals with familiar looks, here or in the outside world. People once survived through nothing but the pity we and other primordial beings gave them, they wandered the wilds because we allowed so – this current, twisted state is an insult to all of us, but most no longer have the pride to recognize it as such.” Picea explained their views and dispelled the mystery of why Xamiliere and Sorbus were asked to leave from the meeting. “The moment we began mimicking people in form, we began to forget ourselves. Only The Grove remains as a place where we are remembered as we were, where we remember ourselves as we were, and to bring weakness in here is the beginning of the rot that cost us the rest of the world.”

Though all spriggans were ancient, only a few of them carried an aura fit for their age. Acacia’s unsettling presence conjured images of a horror from before time, and Ulmus’ graceful, wise gaze made their primordial knowledge known without so much as a word being spoken. In Picea’s being, there was unchanging pride. Whether they liked it or not, both Acacia and Ulmus had changed with time, through experiences and new knowledge, but Picea had not – the turtle had survived the passage of time rather than accepted it. As much as she tried to fight it, being stared down by them did invoke a sense of awe in the necromancer.

“Though the spark of Sir Alabaster lives within you, it is plain for all to see that the necromancers have forgotten themselves. Do you too cower in the shade of a grove of your own, pushed into recluse by the lesser mortals? Willingly hide from them to avoid conflict with people you once towered over?” Picea mockingly but fairly accurately predicted what had happened to Mournvalley over the millennia based on what little Anastacia had told them in the meeting. The hint of reverence in their voice when speaking of the first white one immediately vanished when moving on to the one before them, and though they didn’t directly threaten or challenge her, it was overtly clear they didn’t think much of her. “But, answer this for me: what good has avoiding conflict done for either of our kinds? I spoke in great length about such a fate with Sir Alabaster, and our views remain aligned to this day. Should our kinds join forces as they once did, this decline may still be halted and reversed, so why is it that you have not so much as inquired about re-establishing the old covenant?”

“Re-establish it for what, conquest?” Anastacia scoffed at the idea.

“Should the people of this world not recognize our rightful place over them, perhaps. I fought great many battles by the side of Sir Alabaster after our covenant, and would gladly do so by yours as well.” The turtle nodded and briefly dozed off to reminisce about the wars of the past.

It was hard to say what the outcome of such an alliance would even be. Anastacia had none of the required information about the political or military matters of more than a couple of nations she had been in contact with, but the recent summit she had attended as security had made it clear Mournvalley was not in a shape to tackle even a few of its neighbors, and there was no telling how much her own or the grove’s powers would have changed the equation. This was all purely hypothetical for the necromancer though, as she had not one fraction of a passing intent to get involved in such a thing.

“Then we have very little in common as far as opinions go, but I do agree on one thing: the reason for our shared downfall was our self-imposed recluse from the world. According to you, the necromancers are here to guard balance in the relationship between mortals and gods, just as you spriggans are here to guard the balance itself. Yet both of us got up and left the table where the decisions were being made, pretending like we could just control everything from the outside. Beating everyone else into submission may have worked when the world was young, but those days are long over.” Anastacia struggled to word her thoughts as eloquently as possible, without insulting the spriggan or cursing. “If we are to resume our work, we must both shed the image the world has of us, show them that we aren’t the boogeymen that stalk the forests and graveyards. Mingle with the people of this world and gain their respect instead of have them fear us. The start might be a bit rough, but that is what we deserve for leaving our posts empty for so long.”

Picea quietly stared at the necromancer as it chewed the comment. “I had not expected an actual argument out of you… However, what you suggest suggests that we are to be equal with people, and that is quite simply not the case. It is not our place to lower ourselves to their level, as our purpose is to oversee. To equal us, immortal spirits ushered from the void when it all began, to a mortal with a fleeting life and no clear purpose in this world would be admitting defeat all the same.”

“Admit defeat… in what exactly? In a pointless struggle against your pride? Let me ask you this, when was the last time you met mortals before I stumbled into this place? Because they aren’t anything like you imagine, skittish or insignificant. In the time both necromancers and spriggans have spent in our respective little nooks of the world, the people have built kingdoms, studied magic and explored sciences to better utilize them. I am not ashamed to say that there are many I suspect could go toe to toe with me, in one way or another, and I am more than glad to demonstrate that I would go toe to toe with anyone here for the third time.” Anastacia smirked and twirled one of her remaining bone spikes in the air with menacing intent.

“A bold claim in several ways.” Picea chortled when the conversation took the turn to a path more familiar to them. Rattling the array of weaponry stuck to their wooden shell, the spriggan bolstered its body with stronger branches and fully extended their somewhat slumped stature, as if they weren’t already massive in comparison to the stunted necromancer. The lesser spriggans almost panicked at the sight and scurried behind nearby trees to still keep a keen eye on the situation.

The temperature of the air around them fell sharply as Anastacia channeled its warmth into the stone she had been sitting on by placing her hand on it. The moisture in the air turned into a mist and began collecting on the mossy ground and Picea’s body as a layer of frost, but was largely counteracted by the brilliant green energy swirling within the mighty spriggan.

A sudden fit of bellowing laughter filled the air, a proper hearty chuckle that almost reminded Anastacia of Gilbert. “It has been great many years since someone has stood firm against me, little mad one, great many years indeed. We may have our disagreements, but stand firm behind our thoughts much in the same way. The thought of these mortals who supposedly might rival either of us is invigorating just as it is insulting, and perhaps a time will come for me to seek them out…” Picea spoke with a tone a little bit softer than before. “I will let this travesty of yours carry out without intervening, as long as this is its full extent.”

“Then I will make sure you won’t know it’s true extent.” Anastacia said in a way that could be taken as a joke but most definitely wasn’t.

“I had hoped I could talk some sense into you without the interference of those two, but maybe all sense has already left this world and I am the odd one out in this age – but I have not lost the hope for our kinds, more will come after you and all this can still be reversed a hundred years from now. You live your life with your lofty ideals, and when those fail, mine will still be there.” The turtle said disappointedly but was at least slightly humored by the fact that not all fight had left the necromancers yet. They then shook their head and started to depart at their normal leisurely pace to dream of future conquests.

Though she never actually represented necromancers as a whole, in fact even the idea disgusted her, the brief debate had made her realize the similarities between Mournvalley and the grove, and she couldn’t help but to wonder if a time would come when the spriggans freed themselves from the old ways of thinking that clearly weren’t working out. The elements that wished to get along with people were clearly there, just as they had been in Mournvalley before the revolution without her knowledge, but it was hard to say how such a change would come to be after so much time.

Suddenly Picea stopped their lumbering. “I almost forgot, but I heard from that pesky cat that you might be heading to battle against the wretched things that invaded our grove some time ago?” They asked without turning back around.

“Unless they heed my warnings, it’s starting to look more likely by the day.” Anastacia answered as their surroundings started to thaw.

“Though I would not call it an alliance, a common enemy would do in these quiet days – should there still be a chance to fight alongside what remains of Mournvalley’s might. This sentiment is no doubt shared by all here… Keep that in mind.” The turtle remarked and continued waddling deeper into the forest.

Calling it mutual respect would have been a bit much, as Anastacia still mostly just thought Picea was a prick, but if they were itching to have a fight, she would be more than happy to oblige. It was also a relief that even the most stubborn among the spriggans weren’t about to take whatever deal the sect was peddling.

As she was pondering about the situation and slowly releasing warmth into the ground, the necromancer felt a sudden strike on her shoulder which almost tipped her over, followed by another one that did. She only barely managed to stop herself from instinctively throwing a fireball at whatever had attacked her as she tumbled onto the moss and stared up in confusion.

“Good job on standing up to them!” Asimina cheerfully praised the necromancer after bruising her shoulder with what all the spriggans now agreed to be the proper form for pats on the shoulder.