Category: Seed and Trellis

Epilogue

Three weeks later, I was standing in a small apartment in a bad part of town waiting for someone to make a choice.

I still wasn’t entirely sure this would work. I’d worked through the theory extensively. I’d consulted with a ton of people about it. Alice, the wizard from the Tribe, had helped a lot with the underlying theory and principles involved. I’d been introduced to a guy named Nate who mixed magic with graffiti and was more shamanic in his focus, less tied to concrete and rational thought than a wizard. The categorization tools for mages would always be inadequate, but it was informative in this case. Wizards, as the most common categorization system defined them, were characterized by linear reasoning, structured and abstract thought, and rational logic. Alice fit that description perfectly, which was great for my education. But for this I also needed to draw on that more intuitive thought process.

So, I met Nate and we talked for a while. He introduced me to a girl named Opari who had personal experience of what I was doing here. Derek, Cassie, and Robert all had some amount of insight because of werewolf things. They also had a veterinarian that they worked with in town, which I found fascinating when they told me about her. Werewolves rarely needed medical care at all, but apparently there were some very specific things that sometimes came up that a vet was helpful with. So there was a vet in Pittsburgh who knew what they were, and I talked with her for a while. Hell, I even went back to my old cognitive neuroscience connections and asked them some questions.…

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I do not like hospitals.

I am aware that this is not exactly a shocking, novel opinion. Nobody really likes hospitals. They aren’t a place anyone goes for fun. They’re a place of death deferred, of fear and pain and sickness. The patients go because they’re seriously sick or badly injured. The families arrive full of anxiety, sick with worry that something will go wrong, that they’ll be leaving in mourning. The staff mostly go there while tired, stressed, and badly overworked, hoping that nothing goes too terribly wrong today, that they won’t be the one who has to deliver bad news, all while their empathy is being steadily ablated away by the sheer volume of tragedy they’re immersed in. Virtually no one goes there because they like it.

And that emotional resonance sinks in. It makes the structure feel like fear and pain and grief. There are exceptions, sure. There are individual departments and wings that have a very different mood. They are a place of healing as well, and sometimes that shows through more clearly. But by and large, hospitals ache with the negative emotions that have passed through them. I really did not like that feeling.…

Chapter Twenty-Eight

It made sense, I thought dully, as I watched Andrew realizing what had just happened. That was the worst part in some ways. It made total sense. I could have seen it coming a mile away if I’d stopped and thought about it. Andrew looked down at the sword now protruding from his chest. He was dead; his body just hadn’t figured it out yet. The strike was placed well, cutting through the spine. I was betting it was charged silver, too. Coming on top of all the other injuries, I was quite sure he was dead.

Audgrim, who had only ever agreed to work together until the hunt was concluded, pushed the dying werewolf off of his sword. Andrew fell to the grass. It felt like everything was moving in slow motion. Audgrim turned on Jack next, while the exhausted druid was just beginning to process what had happened. He didn’t stab Jack, though, perhaps feeling like he wouldn’t be able to cut through that magically reinforced coat. He just punched the other man hard in the face.

It was enough. Jack was already injured and running on fumes, and at the end of the day, as strong as Jack Tar was, underneath all the magic he was only human. Audgrim was stronger than a human, wearing heavy steel gauntlets. Jack went down hard, and he didn’t get back up. Audgrim, as I’d known he would, turned towards me next.…

Chapter Twenty-Seven

It was a smaller group, now, that was pushing on through the forest. One of the wolves was dead, and as I understood it the escorts watching our collective back had also suffered losses, a wolf to a silver bullet and two of Audgrim’s people to constructs. Richard’s shoulder was cut badly, and also dislocated. He had to retreat; there was just no point in dragging him onward, he’d get killed without accomplishing much. Similarly, Melissa was in no state to be fighting, and while the wolf who took two silver bullets in the chest was still alive, they’d be lucky to stay that way even with treatment and rest.

So, we were down people. Losing Richard, in particular, was an issue; the pyromancer was our biggest single threat after Jack, I was pretty sure. At least against groups. I wouldn’t bet on him in single combat against, say, Andrew or Capinera, but when it came to wiping out whole swathes of people in an instant, it was hard to beat fire magic. It was going to be harder to get through the swarms of constructs without him.

Andrew and Cassie conferred briefly, then had another two wolves join us. That left the rear guard rather sparse, particularly given that the group of wounded needed an escort to get out of the forest safely. Audgrim had wanted to have them chance it, arguing that Richard was still capable of defending them and most of the constructs behind us were already destroyed. Then he saw the wolves, Jack, Capinera, and me all just staring at him in a very unimpressed way. He knew better than to keep pushing at that point.…

Chapter Twenty-Six

I was not prepared for what came next.

In some ways, I had been overconfident, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that my opinion of myself had been lower than was warranted. It was true that I had been around violence a lot of times. It was true that there were periods of my life where it felt normal. It was even true that some of those fights had escalated far enough that I’d seen people getting killed.

But what I was discovering now was that those had been, well, fights. Many had been pretty much just brawls between vanilla humans. Some had involved other creatures—werewolves a few times, Audgrim and once another dvergr, mages—but they were still relatively small in scale. They had been solidly something you would call a fight.

What I discovered now was that this had not remotely prepared me for what I had to imagine counted as a small battle, or at the very least a skirmish.…

Chapter Twenty-Five

While I was talking with Cassie, the last few people had arrived. One was a woman on a motorcycle I recognized from Softened Dreams, but hadn’t ever spoken with. I wasn’t sure what she was; her magic smelled cold, like snow and wind and the polar night where the sun doesn’t rise for weeks and the only light is that of stars and aurora. Definitely not human, but no clue what she actually was.

The last to arrive was a bit more of a surprise. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting there, but it definitely wasn’t Melissa driving a beat-up old jeep. The fact that she had Capinera in the passenger seat was really just icing on the cake.

I walked over to where they were getting out and grabbing their stuff. “What are you doing out here?” I asked. I was legitimately confused by their presence; I just wouldn’t have expected to see either of them out here, wasn’t sure who would have even asked them.…