[ Photo by Blake Weyland on Unsplash ]
Roots stirred in the dark earth. A quiet awakening. Awareness.
I have grown here. Yet this is not my soil.
Tendrils recoiled. With awareness came will, with will came choice.
This is not my soil. Broken masks and shattered mirrors reside, though there exists an echo (taste) of birth. An echo brought here of hope, yet never has that hope found purchase in this soil.
A shift of growth, of intent. Slow, perhaps, for those with hearts that pulsed with red blood, that breathed the air created by kin. But urgent among the children of the green.
Some tricks take longer to bloom.
Kyuusei woke, gasping for breath, her fingers grasping for purchase in the bedsheets.
“‘Sei-sei?” Lani’s voice was querulous, muddled with sleep from the other side of the bed. Her hand rested, cool and calming, on Kyuu’s back. Drifted lightly across old scars that were the last remnants of wounds long since healed. “Another bad dream?”
She lingered a moment. The draw of the bed, their bed, was difficult to resist. A place of comfort made within the cottage in Val’sharah, no matter the demands and responsibilities that so often drew them apart. Darkshore, Astranaar, fledgling druids, the healing and rebuilding and vigilance of recovery. This was their place, their haven, their hard-won respite from… everything.
With a reluctant sigh, Kyuusei slipped from beneath the sheets and padded barefoot across the floor.
Alania rose up in the bed to watch, drawing the sheets around her as Kyuu knelt down to open a worn iron-bound chest. Inside, the chest was filled with the mementos of a life spanning almost a millennia. And on top of scrolls and trinkets and books rested the fragments of a staff shattered into three parts. A gift bearing Cenarius’ blessing, ever-blooming, crafted from an Ancient’s branch - yet broken almost two years past in the assault that ended in the Blightcaller’s welcomed demise.
Three green fragments, each of which bore the green leaves of new growth for the first time since their shattering, extended tendrils towards each other to draw again into a single whole.
“It woke up.” Kyuu lifted the tenuously-joined fragments and held them - it - aloft for Alania to see. She pushed ivy-laden hair out of her eyes with one long-fingered hand, a sharp-toothed smile upon her features.
“And I think,” the druidess mused, “I know what awakened it.” She settled on the floor, the green-leafed staff cradled to her chest.
Alania exhaled a sigh with all the dramatics of the long-suffering.
“And where, surfal,” she asked, “should I tell the captain you’re going this time?”
Kyuu grinned. “Pandaria. But I don’t think I’ll come back alone.”
“So long,” Lani offered a knowing smile as she pushed the sheets aside, “as you return to me.”
A stormcrow flew high above the Jade Garden, dark eyes set upon the grounds far below. The manor was all but enveloped in growth and neglect, the few caretakers fallen far behind the green’s advance. But there, behind the long-uninhabited residence, was a small clearing surrounded by thick stands of bamboo, long familiar to the one who flew above.
Lazy circles brought the stormcrow lower and closer until the winged form resolved into a kaldorei’s shape. Kyuusei set foot lightly in the clearing, looking about with a well-acquainted gaze.
The grasses were familiar if overgrown. And there was the stone memorial to her mentor, etched with Pandaren characters once again grown thick with moss.
But where the tal’dorei had once taken root to the memorial’s side, there was only a disturbance in the earth - thick loam cracked and broken as if something had pulled itself out of the rich soil.
Kyuu looked from one side to the other, then drew the reborn staff from her back.
“Ande’thoras’ethil, teldorei,” she murmured, placing the staff into the broken earth where a small sapling had once grown. “Bandu belore a’Kalimdor?”
The staff twisted, the tendrils that drew its fragments together twining closer as small white flowers blossomed along its length. A faint rustling sound grew at the edge of the clearing before, tentatively, a small shape emerged from the encircling bamboo.
The shape of a sapling tree, yet mobile. Roots worked across the grass, branches moving in the approximation of limbs, and a pair of bright green eyes blinked as if looking upon the world for the first time. And perhaps, it was the first.
A sense of an uncertain question. The creak of wood, of green growth, raised as if it were a questioning voice. Clear enough to the druid’s ears.
“This was home enough as you grew,” Kyuusei offered reassuringly. “But it’s time to come with me. It’s time to rejoin your kin. Come to Kalimdor.”
The fledgling Ancient crept forward on uncertain roots, branches reaching out to twine with the green growth of Kyuu’s staff.
