207 — Book 4, Chapter 51 — Baking Magic, Pt 3

Professor Valen Graystalk frowned at the loaf of bread in front of him. It frowned back, which itself told him there was something terribly wrong with the bread he'd made. Or perhaps there was something terribly right with it? He wasn't sure which side Cale would fall on, now that he thought about it.

"Cale?" he called. It wasn't long before the human came over, wearing a huge grin on his face. Evidently, he was having the time of his life at Baking Day. A while ago, Graystalk might have dismissed this event as something frivolous, but he had to admit, it was a welcome change from all that had happened at Brightscale and on Utelia of late. Maybe a day like this was what they'd all needed.

"What's up?" Cale asked, wandering over. There was one of the new professors trailing behind him—Graystalk almost did a double-take at that, since he was a skeleton and was clinging on to Cale in a way that was decidedly inappropriate—but he had gotten used to events like these around Cale, and chose instead to ignore it.

He gestured toward the loaf of bread he'd made. The loaf of bread, in turn, gestured toward him. Cale glanced between the two of them with a raised brow and snickered. "What'd you do to make this little guy?"

"I did not deviate greatly from the provided recipe, if that is what you are implying," Graystalk sniffed. "I did, however, apply a working of balefire to the heating process."

"Balefire," Cale repeated. "And it caused the resulting bread to... come to life?"

"Indeed."

"Huh. Well, that's new." Cale seemed intrigued and delighted by the idea of it. "What sort of balefire are we talking about?"

A month ago, Graystalk might have been thrown by that question; he had not known, in fact, that more than a single type of balefire existed. Now he only inclined his head and elaborated without blinking. "The fire of the dead," he clarified, igniting a [Balefire Ember] in his palm. It was a lilac flame that burned steadily without a trace of smoke. "We use it often in funerary rites. It cleanses only decay, and leaves that which is alive—or that which mimics life—intact."

"But it's still giving off heat energy," Cale said, waving his hand above the flame. "Neat. Is there a reason you wanted to use this for baking magic?"

Graystalk shrugged. "Curiosity," he admitted dryly. "Does this count as a discovery?"

"Absolutely!" Cale said cheerfully. "I just wanted to know if you were expecting the result. I guess that means baking magic interacts with decay and death, too? We sort of knew that already, but it looks like you were able to create life, in a way... Well, depending on whether or not this thing is alive or just mimics nearby gestures. Might have to get Flia or Tarbloom to study it."

He waved them over, and in moments they had both joined them at the table, fawning with intrigue over the animate loaf of bread. Tarbloom in particular was delighted, and that seemed to finally get Professor Enqis to peel himself off of Cale long enough to examine their new subject.

I AM NOT SURE IF IT IS A NEW CRITTER, Tarbloom wrote. IT MAY SIMPLY BE AN ANIMATING SPELL! BUT A FASCINATING ONE, NONETHELESS. SUCH SPELLS OFTEN ATTRACT ANIMA SPRITES! PERHAPS WE WILL ENCOUNTER SOME OURSELVES?

"Anima sprites..." Enqis seemed thoughtful, though how he managed that expression on a bleached skull, Graystalk had no idea. "Why, yes, you're quite right! It may spawn a new species of them—did you know most sapient constructs begin as anima sprites of some sort? The sprites adapt to the substrate, forming new species entirely! We should be subdividing them if we wanted to categorize them properly, in fact..."

Tarbloom and Enqis proceeded to dive into a discussion too technical for Graystalk to cleanly follow. He shot a raised brow at Cale instead, who grinned. "Thanks," Cale whispered. "Enqis is great, but he's a little clingy."

Graystalk snorted. "Have you discovered anything significant, as yet?" he asked, changing the subject. "There must have been a specific magic you were searching for."

"No, no," Cale said. "I just like seeing what baking magic is capable of. You know, in general! There's been a lot of cool stuff so far. Did you know there's a variety of magic yeast that activates only when absolutely saturated with water? No heat required at all! I mean, the bread that results is kind of... soggy. Obviously. But if we could get waterproof flour or something—"

Graystalk listened as Cale rambled, amused and delighted all at once; he revised his earlier estimation from a guess to a certainty.

A day like this was exactly what Brightscale needed.

"Pollen," Cale repeated.

Thorn nodded at him. "Mm."

"Would you... care to elaborate?" Cale asked after a moment of the vinewalker staring at him as if waiting for something. Thorn sighed, as if this was something he should have known somehow, and gestured again to the bowl on the baking station in front of him.

"Pollen," he grunted. "Flour substitute."

"Are you feeling particularly unsociable today?" Cale asked, raising an eyebrow. "I know you don't normally like to talk too much, but this is very few words, even for you."

Thorn's shoulders seemed to sag slightly, and Cale concluded that this was, in fact, too much for the poor vinewalker. He supposed he should have expected it: Alina's kitchen was absolutely packed with strangers and unknown mages, and Thorn was reluctant to socialize at the best of times. The sheer number of people around them must have been overwhelming for him, even if the kitchen had been expanded to accommodate them all.

"How about this, then?" Cale suggested. He cast [Isolation].

Now, technically, he was abusing a high-tier spell in order to make his friend more comfortable. [Isolation] was the sort of spell one used to bypass the universal rules of the cosmos, and not the sort of spell one cast casually to make a friend slightly more comfortable. Still, Thorn seemed to relax marginally as the prismatic flame swept around them. And wasn't that what magic was for, in the end?

Making friends more comfortable, specifically. Not the part where he was technically abusing high-tier magic. Though it was about time this spell was used for more frivolous purposes, in his opinion.

"Thank you," Thorn said, letting out a breath. "I apologize. I am not used to crowds."

Cale gave him a thumbs up. "Tell me about it. I've had lives where I just kind of live in a wizard tower for three hundred years."

"Three hundred?" Thorn asked, then looked immediately chagrined; Cale could tell he hadn't meant to ask, and was annoyed with himself.

"You're allowed to be curious about me, you know," he teased. "Yeah, three hundred. It's a wizard tower thing. If you don't leave the tower, it prolongs your life."

"I am not used to curiosity, either," Thorn grumbled, muttering the word as though it were a curse.

"What have you been doing all this time, then?" Cale asked, moving to sit on the table and looking at Thorn. There was no trace of mockery in his expression, though Thorn squinted at him for a moment as though searching for it. Cale, for his part, was mostly thinking about how the vinewalker was eye level with him when he was sitting on a rather tall table.

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"Searching," Thorn grunted.

"The Vekorax thing," Cale said, and Thorn nodded. "But what about before that? I mean, you can't have spent all your time at Brightscale or trying to repay your debt to Akkau."

"Are you trying to learn more about me?" Thorn asked suspiciously.

"Would that be so bad?"

Thorn grunted. "No," he muttered eventually, though he said the word so quietly that Cale could barely catch it. He grinned, but decided not to push the matter; it had clearly been hard enough for him to admit, and if he teased him about it there was a risk Thorn would just walk through the prismatic flame surrounding them and out into the Abyss.

Or something. He really wouldn't put it past Thorn, in any case.

"Or you could tell me about the pollen," Cale offered, gesturing at the bowl, and Thorn stared at it like he'd never seen it before in his life. It took him a second to remember what it was and why he was here in the first place, after which he schooled his features and pretended he hadn't done that.

Cale, for his part, decided it was probably in his best interests not to point out that that had been cute. For now.

"...Used to eat pollen-baked pastries, when I was still a sapling," Thorn said, moving back toward the bowl and staring intently down into its contents. There was, Cale noted, some mixture of pollen and flour. "You can partially substitute some flour with pollen. And pollen is a good... magical aggregator."

That, Cale knew a thing or two about. "Because of the bees," he said, and Thorn nodded.

"It is a good representative sample of the ambient mana in the area," he said. "Vinewalkers can produce our own. Adjust the ratios. Might be good for baking."

Cale slipped off the table to join Thorn, standing just a little too close, mostly to see if Thorn would move away; the vinewalker glanced down at him, but didn't move, though some of the flowers on his shoulders and back seemed to shiver and bloom just a little. Come to think of it, Thorn seemed decidedly less (physically) thorny today; Cale wondered if there was a special cause for it, beyond the whole Baking Day thing.

"Huh," he said. The mixture in the bowl was fascinating. Like Thorn had said, the pollen within held a surprisingly diverse mixture of mana aspects, though in this case it was representative of Thorn's mana core rather than the ambient mana around them. There was a great deal of nature aspect, mixed with the bloom and growth aspects, and then a smaller variety of exotic, specialized aspects relating to various rare magical plants...

Cale stuck his finger into the mix, tasting it, then made a face. "Should not have shoved raw flour into my mouth," he muttered. "The pollen tastes good, though. Kinda crunchy."

Thorn stared at him.

"I think it's a good idea," Cale continued. "We might have to adjust the type of fire we use in the oven—actually, Damien's Verdant Flame might do well here. Really make use of the sympathetic magics, you know? I don't know if I want to let him in here right now, though. The heating charm on the table probably isn't going to cut it... Oh! I've still got [Elemental Vineyard]. How about I try casting that, and we see if we can get some sort of natural plant oven using a fireblossom or something?"

"You wish to—cast a growth spell of your own?" Thorn asked with a slight jerk, his voice oddly strangled.

"Well, yeah, if that's okay," Cale said. "I know letting outsiders cast spells like that is a bit of a thing with vinewalkers, so I won't if you'd rather I didn't."

"...I would like to see," Thorn said after a moment, his gaze surprisingly intense. Cale met that gaze for a moment, slightly puzzled by its intensity, then shrugged and nodded.

He cast [Elemental Vineyard]. Alas, he was slightly distracted by Thorn's proximity, and injected a little more power into the spell than he'd planned.

Mana overload detected!

"Oops," Cale said. "Uh, I put a little too much mana into it, so it's going to become something else. Give me a second."

Adjusting spell construct...

[Elemental Vineyard] has evolved into [Nature's Whim]!

[Nature's Whim, Level 1] [Tenth Tier, Active (Unique)] [1.0e37 Mana]

Conjure a concentrated expression of natural power. This spell draws from your innermost thoughts to build a garden from your very soul; plants that grow from this garden will be imbued with a fragment of your elemental potential and may be otherwise rare or extinct. They may also take on unusual forms.

Plants grown within this garden may be harvested, but may not be planted and grown elsewhere.

This spell creates a Soulspace. The garden you create may be integrated with your soul and manifested at will at no additional cost. Note that if this garden is allowed to degrade too far, it may demanifest, requiring the spell to be cast again; a second casting of this spell may not produce the same selection of plants.

This spell may not be cast again if an instance of Nature's Whim is already active, whether physically present or held within your soul.

"Apparently I'm making some sort of soul garden," Cale said out loud, and Thorn jerked forward, remembering himself only belatedly; he forced his hand back down before he could grab Cale (well, presumably. Cale wasn't sure why he'd reached out, exactly) and turned his gaze instead to where Cale's magic was manifesting.

It was a good thing, really, that [Isolation] created an ample amount of space, because there would not have been enough room otherwise for the manifestation that followed. There was the brief impression of an infinite field of shimmering grass stretching out before them, lasting for only a moment before it shrank back down into a space perhaps the size of four of Brightscale's classrooms.

Conjure a concentrated expression of natural power, the spell had said. It certainly seemed like that entire infinite field had been compressed into a small fraction of itself, teeming with nature mana. Cale felt the spell pulling something from him, and then a rich, dark soil filled the garden's boundaries.

From that soil, a number of bizarre things began to sprout, not all of which could reasonably be called plants. An old, gnarled tree sprang from the soil, fully-formed at first and then seeming to age in reverse until it was no more than a sapling disappearing back into the soil; a great blossom grew and opened into a sticky, slavering maw, only to wither and die; what seemed to be a phantom army of flowers marched across the soil only to fade away.

The spell was going through his history, Cale realized distantly. The comparisons were abstract and difficult to parse, and he struggled to properly map each manifestation to something that had happened to him, but he was almost certain that was what was happening. The spell wasn't designed for a soul as old as his. It didn't know what to draw from or how to represent him, and it was trying and discarding a thousand different things.

Eventually, though, the cascade of attempts began to slow, and a brighter array of flowers bloomed. Cale heard Thorn's breath catching beside him as crystalline blossoms sprouted along the edges of his garden, each one reflecting and refracting a different aspect of his magic. A tree grew again, this time young and sturdy, its bark twisted in fractal patterns that seemed to lead ever deeper. There was a bush, too, whose fruits and flowers resembled birds, and Cale jumped in surprise when those birds chirped and leapt off the bush, flying in a circle before returning to their home.

That was new. He wasn't sure he'd even seen a plant like that. Thorn might have, because at some point he had reached out to grab Cale's hand—to steady himself or simply out of awe, Cale had no idea—and he very nearly squeezed his hand off when he saw the birds.

"The jaybush," Thorn murmured. "Long extinct. You brought it back."

"Ow," Cale said in response, at which point Thorn finally noticed what he was doing and released his hand, embarrassed.

"I apologize—"

"No need," Cale said. "Besides, look! It's not done."

In the center of the garden was... well, it was a great big nut, as far as Cale could tell, although it wasn't growing attached to anything. More importantly, though, there was a twist of wood on its side that looked very much like a handle. Cale walked up to it and pulled—

—and the blast of heat that followed very nearly knocked him over. Cale beamed.

"It's an oven!" he said. "An oven-nut! We should try baking your bread in this thing."

"I... believe I still need to knead the dough," Thorn said, staring at the nut, then at Cale.

"Well, what are you waiting for, then?" Cale asked, shutting the door and hopping off the nut to rejoin Thorn. "Let's get kneading! I think this garden has a little stream, too, so we can get the water from there."

"I do not know why you continue to surprise me," Thorn said, shaking his head. There was an unmistakable edge of fondness in his voice as he said it, though, and Cale responded with a bright grin.

"Well, it wouldn't be fun if I didn't, would it?" he said. "Come on. We need to make that bread you said you used to have as a sapling."

"That bread requires at least one extinct herb."

"Is it in my garden?"

"...Yes."

"Then grab it!" Cale waved toward his garden airily. "Take whatever you want, I don't know. I have no idea how to garden anything. Actually, I might need your help with that after all this, because apparently, I need to maintain this place."

"I would be glad to," Thorn said softly.

They were both pretending, in a way, that there wasn't something developing between them. Neither were quite ready to acknowledge it yet, but Cale was loathe to repeat the mistakes of his past.

This time, at least, he would try to understand what he felt. No more running.

What a strange, wistful thought.