The air stank of ozone and overripe fruit as the fireball consumed its target. Grunting in pain, the wizard — Ashford — grit his teeth and hunched his shoulders as another seething mass of energy gathered in his hands. Yet more corrupted dryads and Garden spirits tore their way through the trees and once neatly trimmed thickets.
With a snarl, the wizard threw the energy from his hands into the midst of the mob. This time, it exploded, tearing through their number in a blinding flash of mauve rage. The wizard, through the pain and the fatigue, couldn’t help but feel a small jolt of pride at this point. Knowing when to raise or lower the power of the blast took no small amount of skill. He even smiled a little. Yes, he was good at this …
The blast cut down many of the creatures, but a number managed to avoid it or somehow stumble onwards despite terrible wounds.
“Oh, if you must …” Ashford sneered, sarcasm dripping from his voice. He drew the gnarled wooden blade from his belt and charged forward to meet them, blotting out the pain within his stomach.
The things screamed as they fell upon him. The wizard roared back as he sliced one foe in half with his wood blade. Others tore at him frenziedly with their claws, some slashing through his robes or scratching his flesh. But the wizard was used to the pain and hacked and slashed his way through the mob, the faint power of his blade and its caustic sap lending him a strength a man of such slight frame would otherwise not be able to muster.
Finally, the melee came to an end. Splattered with mulched ichor and tainted blood, the wizard gasped for air, dropping down to one knee.
“Stay”, he said to himself. “Stay a little longer.” But the cancer spreading through his body seemed to resist, the pain peaking.
“Stay”, he hissed, and wobbled to his feet. His eyes narrowed and the pain was blotted out once more. He limped to a brackish pool of water. In its reflection, he saw a tall, slender man, beard well-trimmed, his receding hairline exposed, the cap he used to cover it having long since been lost. His robes were ornate, but crudely patched up and reinforced for the long journey he had taken. It was weathered, and soiled, torn and stained with the blood of these things, and not a little of his own.
He was thirsty. He looked long and hard at the water. Tainted, like everything else here. The wizard swallowed hard.
“Sod it”, he sighed. “Let’s carry on.”
• • •
The tower was as wide as it was vast, stretching high into the clouds and above. No building method of the time could achieve this, of course. But mages knew a thing or two about bending the laws of physics and ensuring the Tower of the Stars truly lived up to its name.
The wizard rose to his level via the great white disc which carried its passengers up and down the many levels of the ornate super-structure, where and as requested. Ashford had heard of some fellow mages who rode the air currents or who rose up to their level through sheer force of will, but he had no time for that sort of toil. He found it to not be in line with the proper dignity and composure of his Learned Society. More to the point, he liked the grace of it all, and since his illness took hold, he felt the need not to exert himself, except when he needed to.
He walked down a vast hallway, the gabled ceiling stretching half a mile above him. He walked past crowds of other mages, scribes, flunkies, apprentices, and menials. In some way, the tower was a small city unto itself in terms of activity and the sheer number of those who dwelt and labored there. Proceeding to a large set of double doors to the side of a side corridor, he knocked twice.
A pause.
“Enter?” As ever with Bronzefinch, the command always sounded like a question.
“It’s me”, the wizard sighed, as he entered.
Before him was a cavernous, sumptuously decorated study and surgery. It was lined with huge bay windows, through which one could see the dusk light and clouds below. A small, tidy, and almost simple-looking desk was at its center. There sat Bronzefinch, a creased, greying bespectacled man, consulting his notes.
“Oh, hello there, Ashford”, he said to the wizard. “How are you?”
“Ill”, Ashford replied. He walked up to the desk but declined the offer of the chair in front of it.
“Thanks, but I prefer to stand …” For a brief moment, Ashford gazed out at the vastness of the sky beyond the glass. Then he focused again.
“In any case”, Bronzefinch declared, laying his notes down. “I guess you’re here to hear the prognosis.”
“Go ahead …” Ashford sighed. He knew where this was going, but still entertained vague notions of a happy ending.
“Well, I have combined my science and craft”, Bronzefinch began, “and studied both the droplets of blood you provided and the patterns of your aetheric aura. I’m afraid …”
“I’m done for, aren’t I?” Ashford sighed.
Bronzefinch nodded.
“The … corruption, or tumor, is spreading through you. Soon it will be choking your every life function like an overly ravenous parasite …”
“Where would I be without your lurid metaphors?” Ashford said, trying to grin, but it mostly came out as a grimace.
“Erm … Yes,” Bronzefinch said and Ashford saw regret on his face.
“It’s alright — I took no offence,” Ashford hastened to say. But he felt tired now, and finally took a seat. Then Ashford asked the last question left to answer. The one he dreaded.
“I assume you can’t cure it magically?”
“Alas no,” Bronzefinch murmured. “You see the tumor is a part of your body which has been warped with magic. Because it is a product of your own power and feeds upon it, healing magic wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. As far as the spells are concerned, you’re perfectly healthy.”
“What about cutting it out?”
“It’s spread so far through your body … I …”
“You did what you could, Bronzefinch. What more could I ask for?”
Bronzefinch nodded sadly.
“What caused it?” Ashford then asked. He realized how futile the question was. After all, it would make no difference either way. But he was curious nonetheless, and the scholar within him was still alive and kicking.
“Magic courses through us all”, Bronzefinch explained. “Mostly we can channel it through our bodies and minds, but sometimes the body reacts the wrong way.”
“And it combines with dross and magical residue to create a cancer.”
“Indeed.” Bronzefinch coughed. Ashford knew he was being polite, but still had to ask a difficult question. “What do you wish to do now?”
Ashford had heard of mages interned with their books and left to die and mummify, or others who attempted the 7 Trials of the Divine and simply turned to dust in the process. Others headed off to far lands in search of a cure, no matter how tenuous. Others simply fell into their armchairs, drank port and waited to die.
None of these were Ashford’s style, of course. He wanted to keep himself busy.
“I heard about The Garden”, he said.
Bronzefinch’s eyes widened in response.
“You know how dangerous that job is?”
“Someone needs to give it a try”, Ashford sighed. “It’s not like I have any other pressing engagements now.”
For a moment, the two mages sat quiet, not sure of what to say next. Again, Ashford looked out of the great bay windows at the clouds outside and the amber sky above them. He mused on the fact that there he sat, a man capable of impossible things in an impossible, vast tower, and yet even he couldn’t stop his body failing and death coming far too soon.
• • •
As fast as his tired legs could carry him, Ashford jogged through the grove. Already he could hear the Garden come to life, aware of the intruder that had entered its midst. There was the crunching and snapping of vines, thorns, branches, and sentient fungi coming to life clearly audible in the distance. Meanwhile the primal magical power being awakened pounded at Ashford’s temples and rippled through his body.
How had the Garden been cursed, however? Ashford found time to ponder this, even as he ran. Created by the First People, when humans were still pondering stone tools, it had sat, quite pleasantly, all the millennia since. Self-contained and serene, the Garden and its strange plants, beasts, insects, and nature spirits, ran with a smoothness that would have shamed even the most pedantic of mages. Why had it become bloated, monstrous, malign?
Suddenly the ground before him exploded and a thing made of bulging, half rotten roots punched up from beneath the soil. It was at least twice Ashford’s height, and its many tendrils writhed and jerked like snakes about to strike.
Ashford just managed to stop before the thing fully emerged, but its arrival still knocked him off his feet. Gritting his teeth, Ashford got up, pulled out his wooden blade and charged at the root-creature.
It slapped the blade out of his hand and nearly took off his head with another tendril. Ashford managed to dodge the second blow, but scores of other roots surged towards him, spinning themselves around his arms, legs, torso, and face.
Ashford felt the roots tighten. Realizing he was going to be crushed, he managed to get his left hand free. Biting through the tendrils which gagged him, his teeth crunching painfully as he did so, Ashford managed to spit out an incantation.
Red fire surged out of his hand and surged into the creature. Screaming, it erupted into flames, the rot that had taken it over making enough of its usually moist roots dry like tinder.
Ashford realized in horror that the flames had now engulfed the root-creature, and they were now quickly spreading along the roots that held him. He managed to pull himself free and pick up his sword, hurling himself away from the inferno. He could only hear the thing screech as it burned.
Ashford staggered onto his feet. Blocking out the pain, he ran around the still burning corpse and headed on his way. He tried to ignore the fact that the root-creature was once benign, a servant of the Garden. And it had just died screaming, as the fire ate it alive.
• • •
While the Garden was, for the most part, bound by its limits — the great walls which the First People built around it — the soil nearby was still permeated with its life-giving energy. This meant bumper crops even during famines, and so humans had long since settled the surrounding area. Just not too close. Not even the greediest farmer was silly enough to get near a place with that sort of magic coursing through it.
But now the Garden had been corrupted, and horrors had begun to climb over, tunnel under or simply gnaw through the walls, which were no longer able to magically repair themselves. There already had been deaths and missing people. This would only get worse as the blight continued to spread.
Angry mobs of farmers with billhooks and calivers had begun patrolling the night. They had no hope in hell against the things coming out of the Garden. But they were a threat to anyone they saw as “weird”, and that included any mage, even those from The Tower. This aside, Ashford could already see rings of crude palisades put up with haste in the distance. They would not be able to hold those horrors back, not when the Garden’s own walls would finally give way. A great darkness would be unleashed on the land, with the people in this region first to be snuffed out.
It was late afternoon when Ashford arrived in the town. It was a mix of stone and wooden buildings, with a rough cobbled road and a stream, long since fouled with manure and human waste, running through it crosswise. It was owned by several hard-nosed, money-grubbing farming families who either rented the buildings out or outright owned the businesses within. They’d be a new caste of gentry in the land, Ashford mused, if they’d thought of anything beyond money and feuds.
“So, Sunflower,” Ashford said to his horse, “we’ll be at the inn soon. Shall I set you up some hay and water?”
The horse blew through its lips with no small measure of annoyance.
“Yes, I guess you don’t speak,” Ashford agreed. Uplifting beasts with magic was a controversial topic amongst even the more radical mages, mainly because — Ashford suspected — they were scared of what their dogs, steeds, and familiars might say about them.
“Still, I’ll make sure you get a good night’s sleep!” Ashford said, again to the horse’s bemusement.
They trotted into the courtyard where the Innkeep and his family were waiting to greet Ashford, almost like he was a minor noble. In a sense, he was, of course. The local mages had made sure his room and board had been booked in advance, and the town knew he would be coming. They also knew why.
Ashford climbed down. “This time tomorrow we’ll be back for dinner!” he whispered into Sunflower’s ear.
The horse gave Ashford the You stupid bloody human look that only a horse can give. Ashford nodded sadly in agreement. Horses were sensible, as a rule. Wizards, most assuredly, were not. The odds of him coming back were slim.
Instead, Ashford busied himself greeting his reception committee. This was made up of the Innkeep, a barrel-shaped burgher who’d built up his meaty frame in the fields before ordering his younger brother to do the dirty work while he ran the inn.
Then there was his dour wife who was like a scowl with arms and legs … There was a gaggle of cute, but nervous looking small children … And a rather short, plain, nondescript older daughter, who lowered her eyes, and looked like she was sorry for even being there.
“A pleasure to meet you!” Ashford said, offering his hand. The Innkeep’sthick, heavy mitt grasped it a little too tightly for Ashford’s liking.
“A pleasure to have you here, Master Ashford,” the Innkeep rumbled. He was trying a smile, but it had withered on his face with a frown. “We’re honored by your presence.”
Ashford was used to pain, thanks to what was slowly killing him, so managed to ignore the attempt to crush his hand. He put on a brave face — something else he had a lot of practice with.
“I will do all in my power to lift this curse that has fallen upon your area,” Ashford said. “Rest assured, the matter will be resolved, and I’m sure my stay here will be fruitful for all concerned.”
The Innkeep almost guffawed but managed to hold it back. “We don’t have trouble growing fruit around here.”
Well, the fruit’s now trying to eat you, Ashford nearly said, but he feigned a laugh instead.
Annoyed, the Innkeep turned to his family with a grimace.
“Wife, show our guest his room. And you layabouts!” he addressed his children. “Take his belongings and make sure they are all carried in WITHOUT BREAKING THEM!”
After they all collectively flinched, the children and the older daughter all quickly and efficiently moved to take Ashford’s bags and luggage off his horse he was riding. None of them dared say a word. Out of the shadows, a stick-thin, petrified stable boy emerged to take Sunflower to his lodgings for the night.
“Will you be joining us for dinner tonight?” the Innkeep asked as he followed Ashford and his wife into the dark, smoky inn. It didn’t sound all that exciting.
“No, I must apologize. I will be going to bed early tonight. I’ll be up at dawn, and heading off to … Well, you get the idea.”
Ashford couldn’t help but detect a look of relief on the old brute’s face.
“Yes, very good. Master Ashford. I’ll have your dinner brought up for you.”
“That’s very kind,” Ashford said, now feeling just a bit nervous.
He could feel the odd mix of deference and chippy sulk the big man greeted him with. His stay brought prestige, but also envy. It was always the worst snobs who looked down on some and scowled at others.
Ashford glanced over his shoulder. That went well, the horse seemed to snort sarcastically as the stable boy lead him away. Ashford couldn’t help but agree with him. Was this how he was to spend his last days?
Life was, indeed, a series of punchlines, none of which were all that funny to those they befell. Ashford could feel the cancer again. It was gnawing at him, and the pain was getting a little too much to endure.
• • •
Hacking his way through the honeysuckle that was trying to glue him in place, Ashford realized he’d just walked into a trap. He could hear strange ululating cries and shrieks all around him. And then … Silence. What had happened? A stillness had befallen the Garden. Ashford strained to listen. He could almost hear the Garden growing and spreading like a wet, vile series of bubbles boiling and popping, and the strange croaks, belches and chirping of corrupted toads, insects, and birds.
Suddenly, they were upon him. Once elegant deer, of a kind refined by the magic of the First People, they were now emaciated, ulcerous things, spitting burning bile and shrieking as they rushed to crush Ashford underfoot.
Ashford replied with a cone of purple, blue, and red fire, cutting the head off the nearest deer-mutant, before whipping another into its peers with a telekinetic shove. Amidst the chaos, burning, smoke and screams, a great stag, sickened to the point of rotting, and yet bulging with perverse life and power, bounded towards Ashford. With a cry, Ashford set his sword and counter charged.
• • •
After the Innkeep’s wife had given him a joyless tour of the building, Ashford was free to go. With some relief, he then retired to his room, took out a carefully wrapped bundle from his travelling chest, and laid it out on the plain, old oak bed. It was a mixture of tools, tinctures, bottled herbs, and vials full of swirling, writhing and even oozing strangeness. It also had a small silver-plated dish into which he gently tipped small, measured amounts of each substance. Placing it on its stand above a candle on the simple, wooden table nearby, he carefully heated the mix with a stirrer made of black glass, reciting incantations, and bending probability to his will.
The philter cooled, but still glowed and throbbed with hot air and strange energies. It was now a bizarre, simmering liquid rainbow of color. With no small measure of reluctance, he lifted the bowl to his lips and drank. It tasted of fire, shocked his tongue, and felt like molten wax going down his throat. Ashford grimaced for a minute while it went down.
The potion worked, insofar as it held the cancer off, and held back the pain. But soon it wouldn’t work at all, and Ashford knew the time to do whatever the hell he was meant to be doing was now.
With a sigh, he took off his robes and donned a loose smock and hakama. Pushing aside the bed and much of the room’s furniture, he made himself enough room to begin his sword forms with the same old long, heavy training stick he’d used to train all these years. It kept him sharp and was still as good a form of exercise and meditation as it was when he first took up fencing all those years ago. Most of the old school taught learning to fight and — heaven forfend! — even light physical activity was a distraction from magic. But Ashford didn’t really care. It worked for him.
He then proceeded from one sword form to another, with enough speed and force to wear him out, though nowhere as much as when he was still well. This annoyed Ashford no end.
Finished at last, and soaked with sweat, he mused on how much of his health had already been lost. He’d managed two hours on good days. Now it was less than one. Looking up in a daze, Ashford then realized he was not alone.
It was the Innkeep’s daughter. Short, plain, nondescript. She was young, but dressed up like she was a grandmother in tones of brown and plain linen designed, it seemed, to help her blend in with the inn’s dark oak gloom. She stood squat, or perhaps, weighed down by everything. She looked tired, her small eyes blinking in the spluttering light of the room.
“Errm, Sir? I brought your dinner …” she said, apologetically.
Without prompting, she walked to the table and laid down a simple wooden tray. On it was a large bowl of rustic stew, some rough brown bread, and a small jug of beer. Simple fare for someone on a budget, but not too much of a budget. After all, Ashford wasn’t here for a good time, but he was hardly going to starve either.
The girl half nodded, half bowed and then scurried away. But then she stopped. Even with her back turned, Ashford could tell she was rubbing her hands, anxiously. She looked back at him, nervously.
“Y-you’re a wizard, aren’t you?” she asked.
So much for travelling incognito, Ashford sighed. The inn must have had a steady stream of wizards — be they of the Tower, amateurs, or half-mad hedge witches — passing through all the time. It’s easy to learn how to spot one. You learn to pick up the signs — the theatricality, the faint crackle in the air. And, sometimes, the odd, strange event. Accidental cantrips. Cats and furniture that start talking. Hauntings. Strange wisps in the outhouse. Ashford could still find it in him to cringe at the less discreet mages out there.
But then Ashford grasped what was going on. This girl watches, he noted. She asks questions. He sighed, realizing she was looking for honest answers, and obliged her.
“Yes, Miss. I am a high sorcerer of The Tower”, he said, in a matter-of-fact way. For all the wonders he had seen and taken part in, it all seemed a bit embarrassing now. Almost day to day.
The girl blinked at him, surprised. The Tower of Stars had a reputation that preceded it. But she probably never imagined that one of its mages would end up before her, looking like a half-drowned ferret in baggy clothes, and waving a wooden stick about.
“Erm, I—I’ve never seen one of you before. I guess —”
“You expected a little more …” Ashford pondered the right word. “Gravitas.”
“I’m not quite sure what that word means, but I guess”, the girl frowned.
A silence. Ashford gingerly laid his glorified stick on top of the dresser, next to his dinner.
But then the girl lit up for a moment. “What’s it like?” she asked. “Being one of you.”
Ashford was caught off guard. Being a mage was so natural to him that putting this into words had never crossed his mind. What he found himself saying surprised Ashford as much as it had shocked the girl.
“I’m dying,” he breathed. “The magic … It caused a great illness we can’t cure. Not even us, with our knowledge. I don’t have long. You could say being a sorcerer has killed me.”
An awkward pause. The girl looked to the ground, nodded, and began to turn away.
“I guess it was too good to be true.” She looked up suddenly. “I mean — sorry — I do get all sorts of silly notions in my head, that’s what mother and father say. I shouldn’t pry. No.”
But then Ashford realized something, at the same time as he said it. “I have no regrets.”
The girl’s small eyes become like saucers for a moment, her eyebrows arching up in surprise.
“But, if you don’t mind me saying, it is killing you.”
“Yes, you have a point there,” Ashford mused. “But it’s also let me see and do amazing things. Help people. Bend the elements to my will. I —” Ashford blinked. “… Don’t regret it.”
“Do all sorcerers die like you will? I — oh bother. I’ve said something stupid again.”
“No,” Ashford said, shaking his head. “Not all of us. Most die of something else. I’m just, well, unlucky, I guess.”
“But doesn’t it come at such a cost? I mean, well, is it really worth dying for?”
“Everything comes at a cost,” Ashford sighed gently, as much to himself as to the girl. “The only question is whether that cost is worth it.”
“And is it?” the girl asked. “I mean, are you sure?”
• • •
Ashford left early the next morning, taking only his horse and saddle. Slipping out of the stables and setting forth at a near gallop, Ashford went forth on his mission, determined and mournful.
The road gave way to a track, then a trail, and then, finally, open fields and grasslands. Ashford couldn’t help but notice how the corruption in the Garden had begun to warp the grass and patches of trees and shrubs. He saw twisted and sickly plants, with strange and unearthly colors.
The vast, high walls of the Garden finally loomed in the distance. He slowed Sunflower down, dismounted and patted the side of the horse. The rest of his journey would have to be by foot.
“Hang around if you want”, he murmured. “But you don’t have to stay. Whatever you do, don’t eat the grass.”
Within the hour, Ashford was upon his objective. Burning his way through the diseased vegetation that blocked one of the cracks in the wall, Ashford finally entered the Garden.
It was now overgrown and made into a nightmare of vile mutation and grotesque verdancy. Already, he could feel the place come alive as if ready to destroy this invader. Long-haired things, once the nemoral apes that helped tend the Garden, now red-eyed, tumorous savages, swung down the branches towards him.
Ashford sneered and pulled out a small twig from his pocket. It was somehow still weeping sap, and budding leaves. The last uncorrupted part of the Garden. Focusing his magic through the cutting, it began to grow and take form as a wickedly sharp, long saber, made of living wood and pulsing with green energy.
Several of the ape things hurled themselves at Ashford. He blasted them apart with magic from one hand and slaughtered the rest with his sword. He considered their corpses, noting how their insides were riddled with growths like his own. Casually, he walked deeper into the overgrown and diseased avenues, terraces and bosquets of the tainted Garden.
• • •
For a brief moment, Ashford pondered the girl’s question. “Yes.” he said, nodding now. “I’ve lived a good life. Perhaps one that you’d have to be mad to choose. But sometimes it’s right to be mad. I’m just sad it’s coming to an end. Do I sound arrogant for saying that?”
“Well, you are being honest, I suppose” the girl said. “How old were you, when you started?”
“Ooh, a good question …” Ashford said. “I was young. Ten or so, I think. My parents thought it would be a good idea — it stopped me blowing their house up with my experiments.”
“Ten?” the girl said. “You were so young. Not like me. I’m an old maid. I turned 15 last week.”
Fifteen! Ashford remembered looking up to his older sister when she was 15. She seemed so tall and mature, like their parents. A grown up. Now, in his prime, 15 looked like a fetus. Had he gotten that old? He had outlived his sister twice over. She never got to be a grown-up, just a memory.
“Fifteen is not that old”, Ashford said to the girl/fetus. He’d never had the chance to be a parent, but he’d taught enough ‘fetuses’ at the tower to realize how wizened he was getting.
The fetus almost gasped at the scandal. “My mother was thirteen when she married my father”, she said. “I mean, I was going to end up a spinster until my father arranged for me to marry Perkin, the blacksmith’s boy. He’s a good enough groom, I guess.”
Ashford imagined something half-way between a loping sweaty oaf and a slab of rock.
“Did your father even ask you first?” he asked, taken aback. Deep down, his sphincter clenched at the impertinence of his question. But still, he had to know.
“Oh, Father doesn’t need to do that,” the girl said. “It helps the family, you see. He gets a lot of land for the dowry. And some extra sheep!”
The Innkeep, Ashford realized, was the sort of person that liked putting fences up, and kicking anything that didn’t get behind those fences. Did he even see his daughter as anything more than cattle? Ashford knew the most powerful magic wasn’t being able to raise the dead, or cast fire and lightning, or travel across the land with a thought. It was being able to forget that other people had minds and souls too. Or not even care in the first place.
“I hope it works out well for you”, Ashford said, as politely as he could.
The fetus blinked. “I think I can hear Father calling. He must be wondering where I’ve gotten to.”
“Thank you for dinner”, Ashford murmured, as the girl slipped away to meet the loud, ugly voice downstairs, wondering where the hell she had gotten to.
She closed the door behind her, gently. Ashford took a deep, cleansing breath. He closed his eyes, raised his head and lifted his arms up to his side. Green and blue and white-purple fire began to orbit his hands and forearms. It felt good, even as he could faintly feel the cancer begin to burn inside him again. He was ready. It was time.
Then he opened his eyes and shook his head at the wretchedness of being young and at the mercy of others.
• • •
As Ashford drew nearer to the Garden’s heart, the Grand Arboretum, the plant life became ever more impenetrable, misshapen, and actively hostile. The constant flow of magic energy through his body and sword were taking their toll. He felt dizzy, hungry, parched — all the signs that his magic was now wicking away his own life force.
Worse, this was making his cancer burn even more than ever. He could almost feel it spreading now. Ashford had hoped that the mission would not worsen his illness. Now he knew the strain meant he had days, not months, to live if he even had the good luck to survive at all. Ashford guessed he should have torn at his breast and lamented. Instead, he just swore a lot.
Suddenly, a vast black shape flew out of the tree line and swooped down towards him. It was an insect, like a stag beetle, but far too bizarre and huge to be truly called as such. Seconds before it clasped him in its pincers, Ashford could see the thing was a strange mix of lucanid and mutated plant life. He saw ferns, fungi, and grubby small trees with sharp branches growing out of its carapace, and faint hints of leering, ugly faces in the bark.
Then he was in the air, the great creature carrying him who-knows-where, its pincers crushing his already sickened insides. Ashford snarled as he thrust his sword into the brute’s one good eye.
He scrambled out of its loosened grasp and hauled himself up its back, even as the beast writhed and lost control of its flight. Casting a fire spell, he ignited the plant parts of the beast. His nose stung with the smell of burning, rotting wood and chitin. The beast reared up in pain, hurling Ashford in the air, before it crashed into the ground below, wrapped in flames.
“This doesn’t look good,” Ashford thought as he felt himself falling. With a supreme act of will, he managed to slow his descent with his magic, but still slammed into the ground with a hard thud. This alone would have hurt, but now he could feel his cancer blazing inside of him.
In pain, Ashford slowly rose to his feet. He found himself in a vast, empty clearing … ‘Empty’ — who was he kidding? Sure enough, strange mists surged into the clearing, and began to take form. He grit his teeth when he realized what had finally come to confront him.
Once, the Twelve Custodians of the Garden were beautiful amalgams of plant, spirit and automaton, each hand crafted by the First People to oversee their Garden. Now they had become hideous parodies of themselves, more dead than alive, yet growing, always growing …
Now fully formed, they stood before Ashford, glaring at him with utter malice. Clutching his side, Ashford readied to fight, knowing he would not be able to prevail against these beings alone. But then he smiled.
Before the Custodians could attack, he called forth his trump card, a mighty rubric which summoned a hoard of blazing knights from the Realm of Plasma itself. No single mage could have done this. Ashford knew other mages had been waiting for his signal and were now channeling their magic from afar. With a thought, he reached out to one of them — thank you once more, Bronzefinch, my dear friend. He felt a deep sadness then, before rage took over, and he led the charge.
The melee was a sight to behold — burning knight and corrupted Custodian alike torn apart and destroyed in the battle. Half blind with pain, Ashford himself fought savagely, hurling jets of flame and hacking furiously with his sword, which seemed beside itself with rage at what its kindred had become. For a moment, it seemed the Custodians had won, having cut down the last Fire Knight. But they were much weaker now. With casual ease, Ashford blasted them to ash, or slew them with his sword.
Suddenly, it became too much. Ashford fell to his knees, barely holding himself up with his arms. He was now coughing up blood. How long could he last? Weakness swept his body, as he fought to remain aware. But with a sneer, he got to his feet and, somehow, began to jog towards the Arboretum that he could now see in the distance. Sensing the end was near, ever more fouled dryads and flocks of mutated birds attacked. He hacked through and incinerated them all with barely a thought.
• • •
The next morning, the Innkeep’s daughter woke early. There was something in the air, she sensed, but her parents were hardly the kind to pick up on it. She was always too fanciful, her head in the clouds. That’s what they told her, in any case.
Still, curiosity made her creep out of the inn and into the courtyard where Ashford had first arrived just days ago. As her eyes got used to the dawn gloom, she found the wizard’s horse standing there in that casual way of its kind, almost as if it had been waiting for her.
The horse looked up at the girl, half forlorn and half sanguine. If a horse could sigh like a stoic, the girl thought, this horse would have done precisely that.
The stupid bastard finally did it, Sunflower’s face seemed to say. You wouldn’t happen to be looking for a horse?
Despite everything, the girl found herself saying yes.
• • •
Much to his own surprise, Ashford finally made it to the Grand Arboretum, soaked in sweat, blood and butchery. The Arboretum’s last line of defense was a now filthy, green scum-laden moat broiling with Who-Knows-What swimming in its depths. The only way in was via a bridge of living thorns that had, if anything, become even sharp, barbed, and vicious since the corruption had taken hold.
With a faltering but dogged voice, Ashford commanded the bridge to let him through. The bridge fought back, spawning ever more barbs and thorns. With a snarl, the wizard muttered a spell composed by the First People themselves, and bent the bridge to his will, its thorns yielding. Blood trickled out of his mouth as he crossed into the main structure. His vision became ever more blurred. Was it blindness, or tears?
The Arboretum was the heart of the Garden, an ornate frame of wood that had been grown into a grand structure, its ‘glass’ in fact membranes of transparent, magical chlorophyll. These had become slimy and misted over by the malaise, the structure itself a distorted parody of its former delicacy and grandeur. Here, the corruption was at its strongest, and the once mighty insectoid and arachnid defenders of the Arboretum had become too bloated and weakened to pose much of a threat.
Even on the brink of death, Ashford could tear them apart with casual ease. How anticlimactic, he tutted to himself, through the pain, as he cast them aside with contempt, powerful telekinetic spells doing their work, even as they made his heart strain and his veins hemorrhage.
Finally, he reached the center of the Grand Arboretum, and saw the cause of the horror. It dwarfed him.
“What to do with you?” Ashford mused.
Once, the epicenter of the Garden was a great, beautiful ebony tree, barely possible in this reality in its proportions and intensity, and crowned by a vastness of emerald leaves. But now it oozed and fruited before him, some sick amalgam of weed, tumor, fungus, and malignant spirit. A Hobgoblin Presence! No wonder even the magic of the First People could not resist it.
Knowing it was under attack, the Goblin Tree hissed as it spat poison spores of rage and contempt, hurling spines and spells in equal measure.
Blood erupted from Ashford’s mouth as he repelled some attacks with his own spells, deflected others with the force of his mind, and blocked the rest with his sword. But he knew the Corruption had over-extended itself. He could defeat it. He would.
“How do you like them apples, you rancid git!” Ashford coughed, as he drew upon every last ebb of strength, every ounce of hatred and fury, and even the toxic magic of the cancer itself, hurling it all at the Goblin Tree through his sword, which blazed with green light as it erupted with the full force of its power. Slowly, horribly, Ashford tore the blight apart with brute force, his bones snapping and his organs failing under the strain.
As the thing began to wither and die, it revealed the fragile, stunted remnants of a stripling tree underneath its receding filth. Here remained the last vestiges of the True Garden.
With a horrible shriek, the Goblin-Tree finally dissolved into nothingness, waves of destruction sweeping throughout the Garden, devastating it, but also purging every last trace of corruption. The chlorophyll panes of the arboretum exploded as it did so, and even the rot that had spread beyond the walls withered and died.
Ashford swayed, all but delirious amidst the total havoc, as the Arboretum partially collapsed around him. He fell to the ground, but somehow crawled to the stripling, finally pulling himself toward it by seizing its trunk with his hand and dragging himself as close as he could, managing to stand one last time.
“Still life in you …” he rasped, pressing his sword against the stripling, melding the two and giving it just enough energy to not only live but, slowly, gradually, grow again.
He’d done it. Ashford laughed, as he fell to the ground once more. The Garden had been saved, and perhaps the world itself. Not bad for a retirement do, he mused to himself.
But now a great tiredness fell upon him. He closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.
• • •
Everything comes at a price.
The girl found herself pondering what this really meant as Sunflower cantered along the road away from the town she’d spent her entire life in. She’d miss her siblings.
Still, at least she wouldn’t have to marry Perkin, she sighed. That was always a plus.
But then the girl gasped when she saw where the horse was taking her. The Garden!
Almost as shocking was the land surrounding it. She’d heard rumors that the grasslands, copses, and hedgerows there had become “wrong”, and she dared not find out any more. But now they all looked like they’d been harrowed by fire, blackened and burnt.
Then Sunflower carried her through the shattered gates and fallen walls of the Garden and into its interior.
The girl was stunned as she witnessed the utter desolation within. What had not been burned to ash had been left scorched and stripped of life. Even now, a pall hung in the air, and ash still softly fell from the sky.
Yet here and there, the girl could see tiny flecks of green as life slowly returned to the Garden, and even hints of weak sprouting and seedlings somehow poking through the ash.
The girl knew enough about farming to know plants didn’t grow this fast normally, even in the fertile soils her family and their like had farmed for years beyond count. No, magic was at play here, but it would surely take decades, even centuries for even the Garden to heal.
As the horse continued its tour through the desolation, the girl could, out the corner of her eye, see tiny movements, and even forlorn figures flitting between the scorched trees in the distance.
A tiny number of the Garden’s native magical creatures had survived, purged of their blight, alongside its wildlife. In time, creatures from outside would join them, and the Garden would host a new forest, perhaps wilder and more chaotic than the First People had intended, but a rebirth for all that.
Even the shattered shell of the Arboretum showed signs of recovery as Sunflower trotted over the now-harmless thorn bridge and into its heart. The vast frame still looked like a blackened ruin, but hints of clear chlorophyll had begun to regrow in its grills. In the coming years, the branches of the arboretum would slowly come back to life and reshape themselves, if a little less perfectly than they were before. Nature had its own symmetry.
Sunflower reached the shattered center of the Arboretum. Ash and wreckage were all around. Then the girl covered her mouth and all but cried out. The Wizard!
Before her, a strange stripling stood before her — weak and frail, yet already showing signs of shoots and budding growth. Part of it looked strange, almost like it was a sword or similar thing that had melded with the rest of the young tree, but the girl knew that it was sometimes easy to see shapes where none existed. Right?
Yet what shocked her was the skeleton lying face down in front of the tree, the side of its skull turned towards the girl and what was now her horse, as if it had expected her. She knew that, ordinarily, it would take weeks for a body to decay to this point. But there was nothing ordinary here.
All traces of flesh had gone, and even the robes the wizard had once worn had been reduced to only a few tattered remnants. The girl was only barely able to recognize the patterns she’d seen on Ashford’s clothes a few days before. The Garden had already made good use of his body. Soon, his bones would break down and in turn be absorbed by the healing soil. In every sense, he had helped the Garden not only break its curse but live again.
Sunflower hung his head, perhaps sensing that his own worst fears had come true. The girl wept but still patted the side of his mane. “It’s all right,” she said, gently. “He’s free now.”
Wiping her eyes, she took a deep breath. She understood now what price was worth paying.
Time we left, Sunflower seemed to say as he turned to leave. The girl agreed.
Slowly, the horse trotted out of the Garden’s ruins, and back onto the road. Gently, the girl tapped his sides with her heels. And so, they began their journey towards The Tower of Stars, and whatever the future held for them there.