Ryn of Avonside

“Shit! It’s still growing!” I blurted as I concentrated on it with my magical senses.

How was it growing, though? What was causing it to shoot into the air like this? Large amounts of growth energy were rising up from the roots to expand all through the tree. Following the stream of power down into the ground, I began to understand.

Letting out a strangled squeak of a laugh, I turned to look out to the edge of my grove.

Sure enough, because I’d designed those windbreak trees to be a certain height, they hadn’t grown past that point. The smaller shrubs hadn’t stopped pumping them full of storm-fuelled growth energy though, and with nowhere to go but to follow the water down, it had all pooled in the aquifer down below the plateau. Right about where the roots of my now enormous happy tree were able to get at it.

The store of growth energy below us was truly staggering to my eyes, and with the tree still sucking it up and growing at a frankly alarming rate, I knew what I had to do. It was time to shape this thing into a house.

“Guys, I need to work— magic stuff. Please don’t disturb me,” I said quickly, sitting down cross legged and closing my eyes. Distractions could very well ruin what I was about to do.

I vaguely heard their alarmed voices around me, but someone shushed everyone else up and I was able to concentrate. I needed to change the internal blueprints of the tree first, so I got to work, frantically reshaping it in my mind’s eye. First, I created a ramp, made out of a root that led up to the base of the tree. From there I created an entry hall. The entry hall would have two large rooms coming off it that I intended to be storage. I didn’t think we’d want to cart things too far up the tree.

I then created a central imperial-style staircase— a stair that ramps up from the middle of the floor until it hits the back wall, where it splits in two to travel up each side. The landing at the top wrapped all the way around the second story of the room. It was then connected to a balcony outside the tree by several open archways. This was where I got a little tricky. All across the outer edge of the balcony I created twisting supports that curved up, and then back in to contact the trunk of the tree.

Spanning between these supports, I formed windows made of the same plantlike crystal that I’d used for some of my first plants, effectively creating an indoor living room balcony area. I wondered what the plant-glass would look like at that scale. Would it have little plant veins running through it?

Opposite the imperial staircase and above the doorway on the second floor, I began a spiral staircase that would be the spine of the structure. I carried it up, creating simple floors with windows as I went. Each window was different to the broad sheets of crystal I’d used earlier though. These were several overlapping leaves of crystal that could be pushed open to allow air to filter in. It wasn’t perfect—I couldn't make openable windows that would also seal properly—but it would have to do for now. As for the multiple stacked floors I was creating, I left out any internal walls— I'd add them later, on a storey by storey basis.

My next addition was an important one, because I'd made a promise— bathrooms, and how to make them work. The baths were the easiest to build, and I created three in total. They worked in a similar way to the windbreak trees, collecting magical energies from the nameless garden and transforming them into water to be poured into the tub. From there I mimicked Esra’s bath, with the water constantly flowing rather than using an on-and-off tap.

From there, I realised I had another opportunity. Separating the baths from the toilets, I created different rooms and ran that bathwater along channels into a group of stalls that would serve as toilets. I closed the channels off, apart from holes above where someone would sit— the toilets themselves. Now, to deal with the waste.

Ideally I’d purify it and allow it to join the lake I wanted to create, but I had no idea how to do that right now, so instead I ran that channel all the way down the tree and into the ground, where at least the waste would feed any plants that needed it. I would almost certainly be running into problems later, but for now, it would have to do.

Bathrooms and toilets designed, I moved on up the tree some more. I began to straighten out some of the branches at a level that would be quite high up, flattening out their tops and producing broad walkways. The same as I had down at the second story balcony, I wrapped those in plant-crystal and the supports that it needed to stay upright. There, I now had the start of some greenhouses!

Lastly, I needed kitchens, lights, and a way to heat the whole place. It was just— I had no idea how to do any of those things right now. Wait, I could do the lights. I’d seen the leaves of the outside ring of trees glowing as they collected energy, so maybe if I created some flowers internally that took in energy and… possibly converted it to heat?

I just had to be careful with how much heat I allowed them to take in, because too much and it might overheat and damage the tree. I decided to stay safe and have them more as dim ambient lights rather than anything solid right now. Except in the case of the bath water, where I allowed them to collect more. The flowers there were fully submerged in the upstream side and would hopefully keep the water warm. They would also dissipate their heat into the structure of the tree itself, keeping the place warm. Ideally, the tree itself would regulate temperature using its own instincts and base processes, but with so much of it hollow and circulating air… well, hopefully this would help.

With everything I could think of in that moment accounted for, I ran through the whole tree to make sure that the normal base functions could still do their job, and where necessary, rerouting important channels and arboreal processes. Water and nutrients still needed to flow up and down the trunk, after all. In the process of double checking everything, I noticed a problem that the tree was already having. 

The thing about trees, is that there’s a limit to the height each species of tree can achieve, based on how high they can pump water upwards. My fir tree had run into this problem as it was forced to become far taller and wider than nature would've allowed. The tree would die unless I changed something, so I did. I copied some of the mechanisms I used for my windbreak trees— specifically their active pumping of water, but ran the process in the other direction. It seemed to work, at least in my mind simulation, so with a few final touches— like some small extra balconies at various points, I pushed the new instructions into the real fir tree.

Opening my eyes, I stared upwards and watched the immediate and explosive growth that my meddling had created. The staircase up into the entry hall burst out of the side, grinding up the soil as it pushed through like a bulldozer. Rippling up the tree like a wave, my alterations took hold. Windows formed, the second story balcony erupted out in a ring, and high above us the greenhouse branches twisted and changed into my intended patterns.

“Holy shit!” Grace exclaimed, her neck arching upwards.

“Did you just turn your tree into a… a fuckin’ house?” Adam asked incredulously.

“That isn’t even a house!” Kit laughed in excitement. “That’s a full-on tree wizard’s tower!”

“Yes! You’re right!” Grace grinned, turning to me excitedly. “When can we go in?”

Seeing their reactions had me grinning like an idiot, and it set my ego to prancing around like a show pony in the grass nearby.

After chasing my ego down, then forcing it to sit still, I told them, “Let’s give it like an hour or so, I’m hoping it will slow down a little, because otherwise we might all end up as tiny people in a giant’s house.”

“This is the most ridiculous shit,” Troy said with a disbelieving shake of his head. “Like, fever dream levels of weirdness.”

“It’s amazing, is what it is!” Grace burbled, taking a few steps towards the bloody-great happy little tree.

“I have to warn you all though, I wasn’t able to get any sort of kitchen in yet. I didn’t know how to create enough heat to cook with while keeping the whole place from burning down,” I said in warning, then I grinned at Grace. “There are baths though. I made sure of that!”

Grace gave a wordless cry of happiness and lunged for me, sweeping me up into a hug that had my feet dangling uselessly an inch or so off the ground . Startled, my arms went around her shoulders for support and I held on for dear life as she carried me around in a quick circle before placing me back on the ground.

“I can have a good bath! Civilisation, at last!” she yelled up into the sky exuberantly.

I wandered away as Grace celebrated her impending bath, trying my best to recover from her woman-handling of me. I’d only felt it a few times now, but there was a warmth spreading through my lower body that was pleasant in some very unique ways. Arousal was… nice, even if I was feeling it because my friend had just picked me up like I weighed nothing. I decided to go and check up on my other plants, just to cool off a little.

Approaching the edge of my plateau, I found much of my previous hard work destroyed. My water collection trees were much like Grace’s hair had been this morning— a mess. A few had been torn out by their roots and flung over the edge into the mists, while some were broken and dead. I even found a branch from my big fir tree that had impacted one section like a meteorite from space, crushing everything in its path before it came to a stop teetering on the edge of the cliff.

My growth energy plants had been whipped to within an inch of their lives, but they were bouncing back. I suspected that the massive excess of growth energy had sustained them, along with the trees that hadn’t simply snapped in half, or whatever. All in all, about sixty-five percent of my plants were still alive, which was bad, but also better than I’d feared.

Deciding to be useful, I picked up a few of the dead branches with my telekinesis and began dragging them back to the others. We may as well cook our food over an open fire in the middle the grass fields until I figured out our kitchen problem.

“Hey, I have firewood,” I called as I got back to them, dumping the broken remnants of my trees nearby.

“Oh, ouch,” Adam said with a sympathetic laugh. “Guess the storm wasn’t just the tree version of viagra.”

“Nope,” I sighed. “A bunch of my work was wiped out, but I mean… I got that thing out of it, so I can’t really complain,” I said, gesturing to my enormous wizard’s tree. It was slowing down now, the energy required to make my changes using up a lot of the growth energy that had been stored in the water below.

“I’ll start a fire, then,” Troy said, bending down to pick up a twisted and broken piece of tree. Then he paused a d looked up at me with a smile. “This is amazing Ryn, crazy, wild and amazing. Good fucking work.”

“Thanks,” I grinned, turning up to look up high into my tree’s branches. I really had done good work.

Wait, oh no, my ego! It was hopping away again! Huh, now it was a bunny instead of a show pony— strange.