III. Where Are Your Roots

She asked her first real question a few minutes later, once he had begun, with the mild bewilderment of a man who had accidentally acquired something he did not yet know how to care for, leading her toward the warmer parts of his meadow.

"Where are your roots?"

He glanced back at her, surprised by the question's specificity. "I don't have roots. Not anymore. I used to. A long time ago, before I learned to walk."

She frowned — the first genuinely unguarded expression he'd seen cross her face, a small furrow of what looked almost like scientific concern. "That is incorrect data. You are a plant. I confirmed this from your domain's signature — the vines, the flowering, the botanical composition of your restoration effect on the environment. Plants have roots. Roots anchor a plant to soil and allow it to draw water and nutrients necessary for continued function. If you do not have roots, your continued function is at risk. This is a critical maintenance failure."

"I'm a person," he said, which felt, even as he said it, like an insufficient answer to the plain, earnest concern in her voice. "I was a plant. A long time ago. I'm not anymore. Mostly."

"Mostly," she repeated, filing the qualifier away with visible care. "Then your maintenance requirements are ambiguous. I will proceed under the assumption that residual botanical needs persist until I have gathered sufficient data to conclude otherwise. This is the responsible course of action."

He did not, in the moment, fully understand what "proceeding under that assumption" was going to entail. He found out roughly four seconds later, when her own domain — small, quiet, barely a ripple compared to the pale spreading rings of his — flickered to life at her fingertips, conjuring, with the same flat, methodical precision she brought to everything, a substantial quantity of water, which she then poured, without any hesitation whatsoever, directly over his head.

He stood there, drenched, blinking water out of his mismatched eyes, entirely too stunned to immediately react.

"A plant requires water," she said, watching him with the calm, satisfied expression of someone who has just successfully completed a necessary maintenance procedure, entirely unbothered by his dripping hair, his soaked collar, the small horrified noise he made as the cold of it finally registered. "I have addressed the deficiency. You may express gratitude at your convenience."

"I—" he started, and then simply stopped, because there was, he was beginning to realize, no version of this conversation that was going to proceed along any lines he recognized, and some new, entirely unfamiliar part of him — the part that had apparently just acquired a wife, or a possession, or some combination of the two that he had not yet worked out the correct vocabulary for — found himself, despite the cold water running down his collar, unable to entirely suppress the small, disbelieving laugh that escaped him.

She tilted her head at the sound, cataloguing it with the same careful attention she'd given everything else. "That vocalization does not correspond to any distress pattern in my available data. Please clarify."

"I'm laughing," he said, wringing water out of his hair with one hand. "It's a good thing. Mostly."

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"Noted," she said again, and he was beginning to suspect that this particular word, delivered in that particular flat tone, was going to become the defining feature of whatever strange new chapter of his existence had just begun.

She continued studying him for a while after that, walking a slow, careful circle around him the way she might have examined a piece of malfunctioning equipment, occasionally reaching out to touch the pale green light still faintly visible at the edges of his ring, or the last few vines still curled loosely near his feet, their closed-eye flowers slowly folding shut now that their work was done.

"Your domain does not correspond to a combat signature," she observed, crouching to examine one of the small heart-shaped fruits still glowing faint red among the grass. "I have surveyed several combat-oriented domains in the moments before my own collapsed. Yours restores. It does not destroy. This is statistically unusual for a soul of your apparent power classification."

"I have other forms," he admitted. "Ones that do destroy. I try not to use them unless I have to."

"Why not?" she asked, genuinely curious now, her head tilted at the small, careful angle she adopted whenever a question interested her past the point of routine data collection. "Destruction is, by most available metrics, more efficient than restoration. It resolves a threat permanently. Restoration merely delays the next iteration of the same problem."

He considered the question seriously, the way he considered most things she asked him, because he had already noticed, in the short time he'd known her, that her questions — however strange their phrasing — tended to carry a genuine, unguarded curiosity worth answering honestly.

"I think," he said slowly, "that if I only ever destroyed things, I'd eventually forget how to build anything at all. And I've spent a lot of my existence around people who needed someone to build things for them — a garden, a meadow, a room with a real window in it. If I let the destroying win, even just by using it more often than the other thing, I think I'd lose the part of me that knows how to make a room feel safe. And I'm not willing to lose that. Not for efficiency. Not for anything."

She was quiet for a long moment, processing this with the same careful attention she gave everything, and then said, in a voice that had lost, very slightly, its usual flat precision: "That is not an efficient answer. It is, however, a complete one. I will record it as such."

They walked together for a while after that, through the quiet gold hush of his meadow, and she asked him, as they walked, a series of questions delivered with the same flat, careful precision as everything else, though he was beginning to notice, even this early, the particular hesitant undercurrent that ran beneath her most literal-sounding inquiries — the sense that she was not merely gathering data, but gathering it because some new, unfamiliar hunger had begun, however faintly, to make itself known in her.

"How many souls has your domain restored," she asked, "since its creation?"

"I don't know. I've never counted."

"Why not? Counting would allow you to measure the domain's efficacy over time."

"I think," he said, considering the question honestly, "that if I started counting, I'd start treating each soul like a tally mark instead of a person. And I don't want that. I'd rather not know the number and keep loving each one completely than know the number and start loving them a little less, one soul at a time, because counting makes you start comparing."

She absorbed this in silence, walking beside him with her careful, measured steps, and after a while said, quietly, almost to herself: "I do not think I have ever met anyone who deliberately withheld data from himself. That is a very strange choice. I do not yet understand it. I would like to understand it eventually."

"You've got time," he said, and meant it, in the plain, uncomplicated way he meant most things.