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Ooo intriguing!
A dozen letters were found lying unoccupied on the Head researcher's desk by an intern looking for their supervisors, the letters were sprawled out across the desk, like leaves on the sidewalk after a strong breeze. The intern had no intention to read them but their curiosity got the best of them and they started to read...
Dear Head Researcher Pliffnur of Crystalarian Magic,
It would be greatly appreciated if I could use a small piece of the sample that your research team has collected from your latest experiment. I've read your empirical paper on the sample in your latest scientific journal and the samples properties sound absolutely brilliant! It's crystalline properties makes the sample brittle yet the shards from its breakage have a unique property which makes plants grow almost immediately! It would be a great honor if you were to provide me with some of the sample for further research in its catalytic properties.
Eagerly awaiting your response,
Planterian Magic Researcher,
Lion Fernspore
Just a fun little story I'm coming up with to write this is just the first bit. I really want to introduce a lot more characterization of these characters and their world effects them so I decided to write it as a series of letter between 2 previously mentioned characters! I want to flesh them out more and see where it goes.
Also Sorry for being away this long, so much had happened in my life and I fear I couldn't keep up with this so I decided to stop as I have more time now I will continue to update this blog as much as I can as I'm still constantly expanding this world in my spare time and I want to share this joy with all of you!
Happy Reading!
-K
Beautiful!!!
DOVES ON OUR ASHES
It was very simple,
you held my hand
when I was smeared in dread,
but I had to let go of you
and the world was at peace.
Now that I held them,
when I was strong enough to admit,
soft hands over my rapid pulse,
I still had to let you go,
AND THE WORLD WAS AT PEACE.
(Where you can find my Aelarias story in order, will be updated as the story is! This will eventually be replaced by an actual intro and master post)
Prologue-https://www.tumblr.com/paleoartt/781755173952487424/this-is-the-prologue-to-a-story-i-need-to-write?source=share
Chapter 1-https://www.tumblr.com/paleoartt/781840106421157888/chapter-1?source=share
Chapter 2-https://www.tumblr.com/paleoartt/782117864389885952/chapter-2?source=share
Chapter 3-https://www.tumblr.com/paleoartt/782199363887841280/chapter-3?source=share
Gorgeous! I loved it. Very vivid imagery.
There is a field in my head that never ends
It's filled with purple, pink, and blue flowers
that cushion me when I lay down to rest
Their petals take all of my weight
and save my skull from the ground
The sky above me is dark
then it's light
the change happens every time I close my eyes
Oooo this was beautiful!
Here is the first lesson we can learn from the wandering druids: every grove is a sacred grove.
It does not matter if it is an ancient copse nestled in the heart of the forest, or a handful of shrubs sprouting anaemic from the oil-clogged veins of a city.
A garden that springs up on the rooftop of a building by mistake is still needful and worthy of our veneration. It will also need a little more help, since its connection to wider nature is much more tenuous.
An ecosystem cannot exist in isolation after all, so it is the work of those mortals who fractured it to kintsugi the fragments together. It is the work of the leafwalker to *show* the grove how to be sacred.
We see this in the roadside orchards planted by the druid Richmond Crabapple. Turning the highways into snaking green creatures, her trees offer shade to travellers and fruit to the needy. It is easy to remember a thing is sacred, after all, when it so obviously gives you life.
Here is the second lesson: everyone and everything is nature.
We are animals. Our towns and cities are animal habitats. The separation of the urban and the rural is as much a mental one as a physical. It is a mind game we play to give us the illusion of mastery, and to excuse the damage we do.
A good earthspeaker will tell you to listen to those who have stayed in conversation with the world. Those people who know the give and take of blood and bough and mulch. Those peoples who, so often, we have called savage. Those who we looked down on from our towers made of bones.
Listen. Listen and follow, if they will have you and if they will teach you.
We see this in the truce the druid Cambridge Ironweed made with the Skullcluster. This spirit takes the form of a pack of skeletal cats, and was thought to be a genus of demon predator. When Ironweed planted his feet in the dirt offered them his throat, he made himself a conversation between two worlds that should always have been one.
Now everyone in its domain lives with a skeletal cat. They know that, one day, they will die and it will eat the flesh from their bones. This is how their flesh and spirit will return to the earth.
Remember Ironwood's dying words: “Oh, you think we are special because we have souls? Here, let me show you how widely the river of the anima flows…”
Here is the third lesson: we tend that which we would see flourish.
If you would see people fed, grow food. If you would see forests thrive, tend trees. If you would see the a community safe from predators, grow thorns.
But never forget that anything that cures can also kill. Crops can choke a landscape and a sick landscape kills its creatures. A forest grown thick is fuel for wildfires. A town that is safe can forget it is part of a wider world and turn thorns into spears.
We see this in the work of the druid and rootweaver Devonport Blackwood.
The many buildings created by Blackwood are things of beauty not because of their aesthetic, but due to their function. In the towns and cities Blackwood traveled, they planted webs of needroot beneath the foundations. Needroot is weed-like in its dormant form, a wispy white root happy to live in pavement cracks and kiss the boots of commuters.
But if you need shelter? If you are desperate and vulnerable and cry your needs out like burnt offerings to the heavens? Well, if the heavens don't need you, the needroot will.
The structures it builds are strange things, bulbous and pale. They use whatever materials are to hand. They claim whatever space is unused (though not necessarily unowned). They look like nests built out of discarded tarmac, copper and mycelial strands - a mix of turnip-pale rubbery organic matter and urban detritus. As if someone had reconstructed the mythic roc from mushrooms and given it a building permit.
Everyone who needs a home in these places has one. This is the need Blackwood sought to tend.
But, because local landlords were rarely happy about this, they also left a twist in the tale.
So the needroot also provides every settlement with a communal poison garden. They are lush, lovely and deadly.
After all, many natural things need teeth to flourish.
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This particular story was inspired by this post about druids, which y'all should read.
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