Wintergreen
Fandom: Diane Duane - Young Wizard series Written for: Gray Shadows in the Yuletide 2007 Challenge by Jewels
One book was very useful in writing this. "Meetings with Remarkable Trees". I would advise it if you want to see where some of the inspiration came from.
**
Note: This is set a few years in the future, where circumstances have changed for our characters a little.
**
"You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters." - Saint Bernard (1090-1153)
**
The tree was obviously dying, but that was about all they knew. It was spring, and the leaves of the trees should have been budding, green and lush and basking in the sunlight. But instead the branches were grey and bare, and what few leaves had struggled into existence were quickly withering and fluttering to the ground with the barest of movements. They would crumble, like ash, and leave nothing but dust. The ground was covered with a fine powder of what had been leaves.
Ronan listened hard to the trees, trying to hear what they were saying, but it all disappeared into silence, punctuated only by the occasionally incoherent sound of despair.
"I'm sorry," Iris said, as she pulled the end of the plait of hair she had been chewing on out of her mouth, "I really don't know what to do."
Ronan Nolan, Irish Wizard and a man who was at that moment very tired, sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. It wasn't Iris' fault. The young wizard was only in her teens, brought over from England to deal with unfamiliar trees and even less familiar wizardry, and she was clearly overwhelmed by the problem before them. The trees were dying. Not just one or two, but hundreds of them. It was starting to appear in patches here and there, and Ronan had only realised when a whole copse had succumbed to what the news could only helplessly refer to as some 'mysteriously blight'.
When Ronan had gone seeking information on who might be able to help, he'd been directed to a 'Leeves, Iris F. (Horticultural Specialist)' and considered it an omen when he'd discovered that the F stood for Flora. Unfortunately, that was where his luck had ended, discovering that in spite of an apparently very relevant name, Iris' helpfulness was limited.
"Is there nothing you can do?" he asked helplessly.
"I can't even give you a proper diagnosis," Iris said. She was short, and slightly overweight, and looked frightened. "I can tell you there's something wrong with all the trees, but I can't find any sort of reason for it. There's no infection or damage, no malicious wizardry that I can detect..."
Ronan sighed again.
"Ronan," Iris said, helplessly, one hand still fiddling with her braid as she clearly resisted the urge to start chewing on the end again, "This is way beyond my expertise. Come back to me in ten years and I might have the experience needed, but this... sorry."
Ronan tried not to sound cross. "Your listing has you as a specialist."
"In training," Iris said, uncomfortably. "I only completed my Ordeal two months ago."
Ronan wanted to curse in frustration, but he knew it wouldn't get him anywhere. It wasn't Iris' fault that she'd gotten roped into something beyond her.
Iris seemed to sense his unhappiness. "I mean, I'll help as much as I can. I'll start researching right away, see what might be the cause. I'll speak to my Seniors. But it's going to take sometime unless I get lucky early on."
The branches of the withered and dying trees creaked in the bare stirring of a breeze, and sounded like the pained groaning of an old man, weary and tired. It tugged at Ronan's heart to hear it.
"Right," he said. "I'll see who else I can dig up as well."
**
Juanita Callahan, known to most who knew her as 'Nita' stepped out of her car, wresting an armful of files out with her, and cursed fluidly when her grip turned out to be less than secure, and the papers she'd brought home to sort through tumbled to the ground in a mess of A4 and goldenrod.
"Paperless society my..." She sighed, heavily, and bent to pick them up.
Fumbling with stacks of paper and keys, it took her a minute to realise that once she had opened the door to her house and gone inside, she wasn't alone.
She stopped, and stared at her kitchen table. "What're you doing here?" she demanded, shocked.
Kit Rodriguez and Ronan Nolan, two fellow wizards and friends she hadn't seen in a long while, looked up at her, breaking off the conversation they'd been conducting. Kit grinned. "You know, when you left for work this morning, you forgot to lock your door."
"I did? Dammit." Nita dumped the papers in her arms on the kitchen countertop, and glared accusingly at her keys, as if they were at fault.
"Hi guys," Ronan said, grin pulling at his mouth. "Nice to see you again. How long's it been, a while, huh? Want some coffee?"
Listening to Ronan's accent mangling an attempt at mimicing Nita's, she couldn't help but smile. "I'm sorry," she said, with a tired smile, passing a hand over her face, "Really. Where are my manners, of course, it's great to see you again."
She approached them, held out her arms, and they each tried to squeeze the breath out of her body with a bone-crushing hug. Feeling squished, but somehow feeling more cheerful than she had in months, she sat down at the table with them and asked, "So what's going on? I mean, Kit, I thought you were off somewhere-"
"Europa," Kit said, grimacing dramatically and shivering for effect. "Trying to mediate between two groups of competing photoluminescent bacteria. It's... tedious... trying to explain to single celled organisms why they need to consider how things are going to work out in the next few hundred thousand years."
"Europa..." Nita shook her head. "For some reason I thought Europe. How very 'normal' of me."
She laughed, but Kit and Ronan exchanged glances. "Yeah, you haven't been actively practising wizardry for a while, have you?" Ronan said, cautiously.
Nita frowned. "Well, sure I have, I mean... there was that time..." She waved her hand in the air vaguely, and then frowned, as her memory escaped her. "Um..."
"The reason I called Kit all the way on Europa," he continued, "Was because I couldn't get a hold of you. You've not been answering any messages."
Nita's hand snuck into her pocket, to pull out her mobile phone. She glanced at the blank screen and frowned.
"In your manual," Ronan prompted, with a small smile, "I don't have your phone number, remember?"
Nita flushed in embarrassment and got up, crossing over to the nearest bookcase. Shoved near the back was her manual, which felt, for some reason, lighter than she remembered the last time she'd picked it up. Opening it up revealed a list of messages waiting for her attention.
"Ah," she said, awkwardly.
Kit said, "Since I knew where you lived, I left someone else covering the glowing plankton and headed back. Apparently there's a bit of an errantry situation that needs some attention."
Nita smoothed out the page in her manual thoughtfully. "I haven't been given an errantry in a long time."
Kit and Ronan exchanged glances, and it was Kit who tried to reassure her, with a smile and a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders. "You've been busy, Neets, what with your job and college and everything..."
"Yeah, I just..." Nita tried to smile, but it was thin and unconvincing. "I figured I'd always have time for wizardry."
Ronan reached out and put his hand on her wrist. She looked at his hand like she'd never seen anything similar before, and let him pull her back into her seat.
"It's not just your wizardry that makes you specially suited for this problem," he told her, "Have you heard about this blight?"
"The tree blight?" Nita frowned. "I think I heard something on the news about it. Something about it spreading all across the east coast..."
"East, west... worldwide in fact," Kit said, leaning back in his chair, "According to Ronan's source, the infection is spreading at different rates in different countries, but it still affecting trees all over the planet, and they're all being really uncommunicative."
"I think they're in too much pain," Ronan said, quietly. "But you're not just a wizard. You did all that horticultural training."
"For all the good it did me," Nita said, tiredly, pulling her hand free to fold her arms. "Going to work in an office, filing bits of paper day in day out in order to pay for college classes I have to take part time."
"It still makes you the best qualified to help us," Ronan said. "I spoke with my Seniors, and they spoke with some of the others, and while they're trying to help look into the cause of this blight as much as possible, they're also underqualified. Maribeth Kind, who was the last tree-specialist wizard on Earth, passed away last year. I've been working with the next best thing but... she's not even thirteen yet."
Kit continued, "Apparently the trees aren't all dead yet. They're going into some sort of extremely withdrawn state, and no one's been able to determine the cause yet. Might be something utterly mundane."
"You don't think so..." Nita said.
Kit frowned and shook his head. "No, not since Ronan explained to me what was going on."
Nita bit her lip. "I... I have work I'm supposed to be getting on with."
Kit and Ronan looked at each other, and then at her. She heard what they wouldn't say. If she didn't want to be involved, they wouldn't force her. Wizardry was not for the unwilling. That thought seized her with a vague sense of panic. Ok, so maybe she hadn't been as busy as wizard as Kit, who was talking to alien bacteria, or Ronan, dealing with sick trees, but she didn't want to lose that... didn't want to risk losing that...
"I'll call in sick," she said, quickly, "Or take holiday or something. They owe me. I'll take care of it."
They both looked relieved, and Nita tried to look like she didn't have a vague feeling of panic in her stomach. When was the last time she'd even tried to write a spell?
"Great!" Ronan seemed fairly enthusiastic, then winced. "I just have to tell Iris that she's off the case."
**
Iris, it turned out, was more than happy to relinquish control of the situation to Nita.
"I'm better with smaller flowering plants anyway," she confided quietly to Nita, as she handed over a ring binder with all her notes in it. "I was a bit shocked when I got called into dealing with this. It's beyond my expertise. Are you an arboreal specialist then?"
Nita opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again, smiled and shrugged. "I guess I am," she said, finally.
Iris seemed somewhat confused by the indefinite answer, but bade the group farewell, and left to make her way to the nearest gate in order to head back home without dealing with the rather awkward shufflings of wizardry that would be involved in trying to open a personal gate in the middle of Ireland.
Iris apparently kept very good notes, and was an astonishing researcher. She had handed Nita a carefully alphabetised, indexed and cross-referenced set of notes, with a claudication spell on it so that the apparently small binder could hold much more than was immediately apparent. The first several pages summarised the research so far, and the rest of the content dealt with which trees had fallen ill, where they had fallen ill, what the symptoms were, the precedents, all with accompanying maps and illustrations.
Unfortunately, all this research had failed to come up with an explanation, and Nita was quick to pinpoint the problem as she read the notes through.
"We need to talk to the trees," she said, thumbing through Iris' copious research. "See if we can get information on what's going on from them?"
"That was our problem," admitted Ronan, "We couldn't get anything out of the trees. Every time we tried, they seemed to be... I don't know... too much in pain or too distracted to answer."
"We were trying to figure out how we might be able to alleviate the suffering of one of the trees long enough to get them to speak to us," Kit added.
Nita shook her head, hair falling over her face with the motion. "It'd take too long. If you haven't figured out how to allieviate the symptoms yet, then it's unlikely that we'll be able to sort it out at all before we get to the point where it's too late."
"Then what do you suggest?"
Nita shut the folder decisively. "We," she declared, "Are trying to talk to the wrong tree."
**
They needed to talk to an old tree, Nita told them. The older the better. It seemed that the younger trees had succumbed faster to this strange blight than the older ones, and there was more chance that they could get sense out of a well-aged tree. It was Kit who made the very logical suggestion of:
"Well, what about the /oldest/ tree?"
Old Methusaleh, as Humans had decided to call it, was over four thousand years old though, if Nita had been pushed, as she stood there in the middle of a clear-skied Californian night, she wouldn't have put it a day past its third millennium.
"You don't often meet beings this old on Earth," Kit murmured to her, when she paused on the slow clamber up towards the old tree. They'd arrived from Ireland via Gate only a couple of hours earlier; they'd wasted no time in locating the object of their search and coming here, deciding that it would take far too long (and cost more money than any of them could reasonably afford) to use planes to get around.
Old Methuselah wasn't what one would call an attractive tree. Its branches were short and stumpy, and the trunk was fat, bloated and striated. It looked like someone had been overly aggressive in pruning it, and then stuck it in rocky ground.
Ronan was trying to talk to it, and all he seemed to be acquiring for his trouble was a frustrated expression. "I can't get any sense out of it," he said, annoyed, as Nita and Kit came up to him. "You try."
Nita frowned and stepped forward, brain trying to take into account how old this living thing was. It had to be one of the oldest things on the planet that still lived. That alone was enough to be intimidating. She tried to think how it must have been to have seen so much pass you by so quickly, and the slow heartbeat of life was the way you passed through existence.
She stepped close, and tried to think that way.
It was like listening for a single thread of a melody in a room where everyone was playing different instruments at different tempos. Nita stroked the bark, closed her eyes, and concentrated. "Please," she whispered, putting as much subtle force into the Speech as she could, "We need to talk to you."
There was a pause, and then the creaking of an old creature, stirred to wakefulness.
"Want... to... rest..."
"I know," Nita petting the tree, her voice entreating, "Please. Just tell us what's happening to you all."
There was a long silence, and the branches of the tree shook faintly with the extertion of trying to form the words of Speech.
"The Paragon," the tree finally said, "Is dying."
**
"Paragon..." Kit was using his fork to push his fries around his plate. "I think I've only ever heard that in the phrase 'Paragon of Virtue'."
They'd decided to grab a bite to eat before they headed back for the gate to Ireland. They'd stumbled across what looked like a fairly ordinary place to eat, but turned out to be a bit of an upmarket affair. In the centre of the table, along with the usual assortment of condiments such as salt and pepper, there was a a selection of matchbooks available for people to take away with them. Nita picked one up and turned it over in her hand. It had a psychedelic swirl for a design looped around the name of the restaurant.
"Sounds familiar," Ronan said. He'd already finished his food. "Something to do with philosophy."
Nita looked at him and raised her eyebrows, mouth twitching into a smile.
Ronan rolled his eyes. "I know. Me, studying philosophy. Who'd have thought it?"
Nita bent down, rummaging around in her backpack for her manual, shoving the matchbook she'd been holding into the depths of her pocket. "Let's have a look," she said, pulling the manual out and browsing through the index.
"Still can't get over the whole book thing," Ronan muttered, then grinned as Kit gave him a friendly push in the arm.
"Aha!" Nita put her finger down on the page in her manual. "Listen to this.
"The premise of Archetypes existing for every being and object is an abstract one. An archetype is supposedly the original 'perfect' ideal from which all others are created, the template for design. For example, the archetypal apple would be perfect, and all apples in so-called 'normal' existence are simply flawed copies of it.
"Archetypes exist as Paragons; the ultimate ideal from which all others follow."
"So..." Ronan rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "If by 'the Paragon' then the tree meant that it's the Archetypal Tree that's dying. The perfect tree from which all the others are copied."
"But how does that make sense?" asked Kit, "They're separate entities."
Nita was absently smoothing her hand across the page of her manual. "All living things are connected," she said, "And there are few stronger bonds than between parents and their children. Maybe whatever's killing the Paragon isn't affecting the trees directly, but they're sort of... reacting in sympathy."
Kit leaned backwards in his chair, a faint smile of remembrance on his face. "I remember when my mother once slipped down the stairs and tore her ankle. Three days later, my sister, even though she was at college at the time, did the same thing. They joked that it was sympathy injury. I wonder."
Ronan was simply nodding thoughtfully. It was a reasonable hypothesis in the lack of any greater evidence for a different conclusion. After all, they had all seen much stranger things.
"Where would we find the Archetypal Tree, though?" he said. "I'm not sure it'll be marked up on Google Earth. And I can't remember anything in the Knowledge that would give us a hint where to start."
"Silly," Nita rolled her eyes at him, "We're wizards. How do you /think/ we're going to start looking?"
Ronan at least had the good grace to look embarrassed.
**
The whole business of sitting down with her friends and working out the components of a wizardry, what props and phrases were best suited, took Nita back to the days when she was a teenager when she had done this all the time, when it had almost started to feel normal for her. She found herself working with a vague sense of giddiness, and had to keep resisting the urge not to giggle. It seemed to be different for Kit and Ronan, who hadn't found themselves drifting away from wizardry the way she had.
She could justify it to herself, tell herself that she was busy. She could tell herself that the fact she had to hold down a part time job in an office to pay for college classes, and then, in the few hours she had free, she had to study, meant that she simply hadn't had time for such things as wizardry, but she knew, in her heart of hearts, that she should have made the time. This was one of those things that was too important to forget about.
Magic would not live in an unwilling heart. Nita's heart wasn't unwilling, but it was dangerously close to forgetting.
So she tried not to think about it, and focussed on the wizardry.
"We need something close to the trees, which is probably paper... and probably ink would be useful if we're going to have it drawing a map... hrm..."
The paper turned out to be a sheet of A4 that Ronan pulled from his printer, and the ink came from an old battered fountain pen that had stopped working sometime ago, though still had ink in the reservoir. Nita nodded in satisfaction as she looked at the items, and then glanced up at Kit, who was muttering to himself, and drawing on the carpet in chalk, which Ronan hadn't been too happy about. Nita hadn't been too happy either, but it was pouring with rain outside, and the ink would have run too badly in the water. She was reluctant to put an umbrella wizardry in place for fear of interfering with what promised to be rather a rather taxing endeavour.
When they were done, Nita looked at the rendition of her name in Speech, and marvelled at how it had apparently changed without her being aware of it.
"Neets?" Kit prompted, frowning at her. "Is it ok?"
She shook her head, breaking the spell of seeing the totality of her existence summed up in the flowing, looped characters that was the written version of the Speech. "Yeah," she said, "It's good. Let's get on with this, shall we."
She sat down on the floor, crosslegged, in the portion of the circle that Kit had drawn that was adorned with her name and set aside for her. Kit and Ronan each took their own places.
Kit led the actual enaction of the wizardry. Nita was a secondary focus for her affinity with the trees, while Ronan was providing more of the raw power needed that Kit would refine and weave into the wizardry. The sound of his voice, reciting words and phrases in the Speech, had an almost hypnotic effect, and Nita found her mind drifting along.
She thought of trees, and of a shadow passing over them, blocking out the light. She tried not to shiver.
As Kit's voice reached the final key phrases, Ronan broke the fountain pen, and the ink splattered down over his hands and onto the paper in the centre. Ronan frowned at the way his hands abruptly turned blue, instantly dyed by the ink, and gave a brief sigh of exasperation.
Ink spread, sinking into the page, and for a moment seemed to have disappeared. Then patches of the paper darkened, and it slowly spread, lines forming and leeching into one-another. Letters and delicate shapes unfurled like leaves uncoiling, and when it was over, the simple piece of A4 had transformed into a delicately drawn map that wouldn't have looked out of place in a museum. It even looked like it had letters inked in by hand. Nita was reminded of olde-worlde-esque maps she'd seen in tourist shops, mimicking maps drawn centuries ago by people who only had their eyes and hands to create such things.
Kit fell silent, and Nita shook her head to clear it of the fog created by such a subtle but intensive wizardry.
"Well," Kit said, forcing joviality against the tiredness the spell had caused in his bones. "If nothing else, you could probably frame that when we're done."
Nita smiled slightly, and picked up the paper, squinting at it. "It's pretty zoomed in," she said, "Can't tell what country it is, but there's some towns labelled here... don't recognise them though."
Ronan held out his hand, opening and closing his fingers in a beseeching fashion. Nita handed it over and he looked at it closely, scowling with thought. "Now this," he said, with a grin, "Is where Google Earth comes in."
He got to his feet, and he disappeared out of the lounge and into another room, leaving Nita and Kit alone for a moment.
Kit looked at her, breathing heavily and trying to catch her breath, like she'd just overexerted a muscle long gone unused, and reached out to take her hand. "How're you feeling?"
"Ok," she said quickly, with a flash of a smile. "I'm fine."
Kit still looked concerned. "I know it's been a while since you've done this sort of stuff, you didn't have to-"
"No!" Nita shook her head sharply, "I had to. /Because/ I haven't done this in a long while, see?" When Kit looked slightly confused, she sighed. "I think... I think I was starting to forget what wizardry was like. Growing up, it... it started to get easier to lie to myself and tell myself that it was all just some sort of childish game. I... I think I needed this." Nita laughed softly. "Maybe it's the powers way of reminding me that there's still good I can do in this world that isn't impressing my boss with my ability to alphabetise quickly."
"That was never in any doubt," Kit said, kindly.
Nita bit her lip, looking at the boy she'd known for years. "Kit, I-"
"Found it!" Ronan reappeared, brandishing their map and a printout. "You're going to love this."
**
The tree that the wizardry had directed them to was a rather odd looking thing. It defied the usual convention of branches being on the top half of the tree by being almost bell-shaped, where the branches spread out from the trunk and then touched the ground several meters away. Nita peered through gaps in the branches to see that there was some sort of room-like space inside the shelter of the branches. They'd been sent to Scotland, somewhere Nita had never been before, and she wished she had time to appreciate the locale.
"According to this," Kit was thumbing through Ronan's internet printout and looking thoughtful, "This is where the murder of Lord Darnley, consort to Mary Queen of Scots, was planned. Local legend has it that the ghosts of the plotters can be heard here some nights."
"Oh," Ronan said, rocking back on his heels, "I get it now."
Nita looked at him curiously.
"Murder," he explained, shoving his hands deep into his coat pockets, his breath misting up in the early morning air. "If someone really is trying to kill the Paragon, then this tree, by association, is closer to it than any others. Add into that all the emotional residue floating around..." he waved a hand in the air, "I suppose it makes sense."
Kit shut his manual with a snap, shoving it back into his backpack and fastening the clasp. "So what now?"
Nita thought for a moment, and shrugged, "I guess we go talk to it," she said.
They stared at the branches that reaches all the way to the ground. Nita sighed and got to her hands and knees. "No staring," she muttered, as she found a small gap next to the ground and started to crawl inside the overhangs of branches.
Ronan glanced at Kit, who looked back, and they both grinned, forcibly restraining themselves from making any comments.
"Wouldn't dream of it," he said, trying not to laugh, and dropped to his hands and knees, following Nita into the web of branches.
It was tight, and not a little awkward to wriggle their way into the space formed by the overhanging branches, and there was a certain amount of swearing involved in the process. Kit got to his feet, convinced he'd caught his sleeve and torn it at some point during their short trip, brushing off the dirt from the ground that had gotten all over his hands, wiping them against his shirt. Occupied as he was, it was left to Ronan to notice their problem.
Ronan looked around, and frowned. "Where's Nita?"
Kit froze and looked around. They were in a a curved space underneath the branches of the tree, forming a rounded cone-like space, wide and clear, save for the trunk. There shouldn't have been anywhere for Nita to go, but she wasn't there.
"Nita!" he called out, in case she had backtracked and left the tree's branches. "Neets!"
There was nothing but a still silence. Ronan was muttering a quick "find what I seek" spell, but after a minute, his voice broke off, his eyes tight and expression closed.
"I can't find her," he said, his voice anything but calm. "Nowhere on the planet."
In spite of the fact that it had been years since either of them had spoken mind-to-mind, Kit reached out, trying to find that familiar presence that had shared a bit of his brain for so long while they were teenagers.
'Nita? Where are you?!'
**
Nita stood up, brushing her hands off, and looked around for the tree, trying to decide what it was she would ask the tree, but the place where she was seemed so far removed from where she had been a moment ago, that it was obvious she had been moved somehow. She dropped her backpack in surprise, and some of the contents spilled out.
"Ronan?" She called, her voice vanishing almost as soon as it left her throat, disappearing into dead air, "Kit?"
They weren't around, or if they were, they couldn't answer her. Nita was standing on a dirty ash-grey island, barely larger than a small car, and all around it, rolling and undulating with small waves, was an inky black substance that might have been water, but which make a sound like tearing metal when a wave passed through it. There was no light, no stars, simply darkness overhead, and the only week light came from the only other occupant of the island.
It was a tree, tall and looked almost like an apple tree, except the leaves were wrong. In fact, each leaf was different from its neighbour; no two were alike. One looked like an oak leaf, another looked like a sycamore leaf. Nita imagined it must have looked very beautiful at some point, but the leaves were grey and fragile looking, and the bark of the tree was a dirty off-white. The tree looked sickly and weak.
"Oh," she murmured, "The Paragon of Trees, I assume."
She stepped forward, hand outstretched, to touch the tree, to try to talk to it, to try to figure out what was going on.
"That's far enough, thank you."
Nita froze as an oily voice reached her ears. She couldn't tell where it was coming from, exactly, there wasn't enough light. But she thought it came from somewhere out in the darkness of that strange and disturbing lake, and, sure enough, if she squinted, she could just about make out some sort of shadowy form moving around, almost out of sight.
"Who are you?" she demanded, feeling the shadow crossing other senses than her vision. She fought the urge to shiver, and put her hands in her pockets in a gesture of studied nonchalance, but partly to ward off the chill.
Laughter, like withered leaves. "Surely you know me, of all people."
"Sorry," Nita said, frowning into the darkness. "Don't think we've been introduced. I think I'd remember if I met you before. I'm guessing, though, that you're the one who's been affecting the Paragon and causing the trees on Earth to suffer."
"It's not that much of a stretch to work out, is it?" the shadow's tone was mocking, sarcastic. "Here I am, a sinister presence and all, attempting to engage you in distracting verbal banter. Yeah, it's fairly obvious I'm responsible."
"It's a particular vicious thing to do, I think," Nita said, "To abuse the sympathetic resonance the trees have for the Paragon, and then to stand by and watch. I'd imagine it takes a lot of power, a lot of strength, to take down something as powerful as one of the Archetypes."
"And what would you know about it?" the shadow laughed, an echo of a sound that sent a shiver down Nita's spine. "Without your friends, do you even remember the simplest of wizardries? How long has it been since you did a proper bit of spellcraft? Years?"
"I do know more than a few things," Nita said, "Like, for example, how forest fires can, sometimes be good things."
She pulled her hand out of her pocket and opened it to show the matchbook that she'd taken from the restaurant in California.
"And I also know," she said, "That you're not the Lone Power. Not even close. You're just one of its servants, little more than a metaphysical vandal who thought it'd be a good idea to pick on some trees."
The shadow sneered at her. "I don't see you stopping me," it said.
Nita contrived to look hurt. "Only because I haven't started yet."
With that, she struck the matches into light, and tossed the book into the black water.
The way it caught light, she briefly wondered if it /was/ some sort of oil, and she'd miscalculated. There was an incoherent shriek somewhere not too far away that sounded like it might have been the shadowy figure, and then the weight of that oppressive oily feeling vanished from her mind, so quickly that she almost gasped, except... it was getting harder to breathe...
Nita had a brief moment to worry that she was going to burn to death, when she abruptly realised that she wasn't feeling any heat from the flames. The flames licked higher, becoming white-bright and too painful to look at...
Nita squeezed her eyes shut, and shielded her eyes.
The sound of birdsong caused her to open them again.
"That's surreal," Nita muttered to herself.
The weird black ocean was gone, and in its place were endlessly rolling hills of neatly manicured green grass. The sky was blue and cloudless, and in spite of the fact that she could hear birds, there were none to be seen. Instead there was only the Paragon, and the transformation was remarkable.
Gone was the sickly and deathly ill looking tree, in its place standing a tree with a white bark that almost glowed with its own internal radiance, and the multitudinous leaves shone golden in the sunlight. Strange. Nita couldn't see where the sunlight was coming from, either.
"Aaaah..." The sound was a sigh, a whisper of the breeze through the branches of the Paragon. Nita was startled, and then she recognised the sounds of the speech, and realised that the Paragon was speaking to her. "So much better. Thank you, my young friend."
"I'm just glad you're ok," Nita said, bending down to pick up her backpack, shoving the items that had fallen out back into it. Her manual was lying open on the ground, and she caught sight of the text before she picked it up.
'In life's name and for life's sake...'
Nita smiled, closed the book and put it in her pack as she stood.
"I'm not even sure how the servant of the Dark One managed to find me here," the Paragon admitted, almost sounding embarrassed. "I have been content for millennia to exist in this small dimensional offshoot, content to live out eternity in the sun. Perhaps it corrupted one of my children, such as the one who sent you here. Perhaps we shall never know."
Nita looked thoughtful. "Could it have killed you?"
"That is not the way of life..." The Paragon said, gently. "Even if I had succumbed to the shadow's spread, and my leaves fallen and branches dead lifeless, it would not matter. For my children are many and well spread, and though they would have grieved my loss, the trees of your world would have survived, though, perhaps, they would have taken many centuries to recover."
Nita nodded slowly, understanding. Even if the death of the Paragon hadn't resulted in the death of the trees on Earth, they would have been severely wounded by the experience. It ecological balance of the planet would have been thrown out, and the damage would have spread.
"But still, I am grateful. A gift for you," The Paragon said.
Something fell out of the branches and hit the soft earth with a thud. Nita blinked in surprise and bent down to pick it up. It was a shiny, misshapen green apple.
"Thank you," she said, turning the apple over in her hands. "What shall I do with it?"
The Paragon sounded amused. "It's an apple. Generally you Humans eat them. I promise you it's quite tasty."
Nita took an experimental bite. Sure enough, it was crunchy and fresh, and ever so slightly sweet. She couldn't help an inarticulate expression of delight.
"Just in case you were hungry on your way back," The Paragon said. "And you should get going. Something tells me your friends are besides themselves with anxiety."
"Ah..." Nita turned the apple in her hands, and frowned. "I'm not even sure how I got here."
"Oh, of course, how silly of me." The branches of the Paragon seemed to vibrate with amusement. "Turn around."
Feeling vaguely foolish, but having experienced too much in life to argue, Nita did so.
... And she found she was standing behind Kit and Ronan, who were both calling her name frantically.
She cleared her throat, awkwardly, and they whirled.
"Neets!"
"Nita, you ok?"
"I'm fine, I'm fine," she assured them quickly.
"What happened?" Kit asked, anxiously.
Nita blinked, and looked at the shiny apple in her hands. "I think we won," she said, slightly stunned.
**
Nita had decided she wanted apple pie for some inexplicable reason, which was why the three of them were sitting in the nearest pub that sold food from the plotter's tree, waiting for the waitress to drop three slices of pie in front of them in celebration of their (or, rather, Nita's, the boys insisted) success in figuring out what had happened to the trees.
Nita was watching the news on the TV high up in the corner of the room, while Kit was thumbing through his manual.
"Hey, Nita," he said, after a few minutes, "You seen this?"
He'd turned to her listing in the back of the manual and, when she shook her head, turned it towards her, pointing. It read:
Callahan, Juanita (Arboreal Specialist)
"Cool," she murmured, running her finger over the listing and smiling.
"Hey," Ronan nudged her, and pointed to the television.
"... experts at Kew are baffled at the sudden disappearance of the mysterious tree blight almost as much as they were at its appearance. Mister...."
Nita grinned and shook her head. "I think we did good there."
"You did good," Ronan corrected, shaking his head. "We just kinda tagged along."
The waitress appeared with their pie slices, dropping them on the table with a vague, distracted smile before wandering off again.
Nita picked up her fork, looked at her apple pie for a moment, then smiled. "No," she said, "We all did good. Thanks for coming to get me."
Kit reached forward and squeezed her hand, and after a moment, Ronan followed suit.
"Seriously," he said, "What are friends for?"
- The End -