Synopsis[]
Spurred on by the hope of an unspoiled elderwood copse within striking distance, the logging expedition pauses their travels just short of their target due to rain. Harisa tells a tale around the fire of a little old lady, a confectioner so brilliant that she built her house from gingerbread, who discovered two children nibbling on her home one day. Finding that they were lost and hungry, she invited them in for a meal, but these two ungrateful children had the audacity to shove her into her own oven with no provocation whatsoever. The moral of the story, Harisa says, is that children are not to be trusted, and looks can be deceiving.
With his permission, June embellishes the accidental tattoo she had given Guard, attempting to add swooping branches that blend into the surrounding filigree... but the artistic exercise does not go quite as intended, and Guard ends up with an approximation of a bush-shaped tramp stamp.
As everyone beds down for the night, Guard makes his customary rounds, and encounters a gecko that beckons him into the woods. After a moment, Guard follows, and though he feels like he's walking at a leisurely pace, he finds that he recognizes places he remembers from hours before in their travels. Eventually, he finds himself in a familiar clearing - the place where they fought the weasels. Over the spot where he had buried the weasels, he notices something that looks like veins - the deep red of dried blood, pulsing - but as he enters the clearing, they disappear.
Guard approaches the burial spot and listens, pressing his ear to the ground. He hears a pulse that seems to retreat from the place, and he asks it to stop. It hesitates, and when he asks it to return it vanishes, but in the following moment he hears the skittering of tiny gecko feet as they fill the canopy above him and begin to glow.
Guard regards the geckoes around him and asks why he was brought here, and in response a gecko falls out of its tree. Guard catches it, and from his palm, it puts its hands together and gives him a tiny nod. Uncertainly, Guard nods in return, and the gecko runs up his arm and to his back, beginning to trace something there. A half dozen of the other geckoes have picked up sticks and leaves and begun to perform a funerary procession around the burial mounds. Guard steps forward and the geckoes in the procession vanish, leaving their leaves and sticks hovering in the air for a moment before they fall.
Guard remarks that he does not think he is a gecko, but he understands that the geckos want something of him. He promises to try to understand what they want of him.
After a time, the funeral procession returns, and by the time they finish their ritual, tiny plant buds can be seen sprouting from the burial mounds. The gecko on Guard's back returns to his shoulder, touching his face and pointing him back in the direction he came. Understanding, Guard gives the gecko a little skritch under the chin and heads back to camp, settling under June's tree so that she can attack him in the morning. As he settles in, he realizes that for the first time he can recall, he feels a connection to a place.
Harisa wakes with a start in the morning, feeling that something is amiss. Looking around, she spots a shadow of something large that is stalking the camp. She hears a low rumbling sound, and then smells... chocolate? She cautiously nocks an arrow and waits, leaping out of the way just in time to avoid being knocked over by a charging Komodo dragon.
The giant lizard skids to a halt, knocking its tail against a tree and showering the camp with all the rainwater that collected on the leaves. Harisa thinks back to her childhood, when "Granny" Rossa would talk about the Komodo dragon that she once kept, recalling the advice to stand her ground and trust her familiar.
Harisa slings her bow and locks eyes with the great beast, standing tall. It charges again, knocking Harisa onto its back and carrying her into the forest. As Harisa holds on desperately, the forest seems to close in on itself, until Harisa is carried into a cave and thrown off the creature's back. She regains her feet, keeping her attention on the Komodo dragon, and it stands on its hind legs to face her.
The lizard speaks: "You can do better, Safra. Come, let us have a cup of tea."
While Harisa questions how hard she just hit her head, the creature produces a tea set and little tea table and lights a fire with its breath, continuing to coach her on her recent performance.
Certain she is hallucinating, Harisa goes with the flow, accepting a cup of tea. As she breathes it in, the chocolate and green tea scent overwhelms her with memories of Granny Rossa. The realization hits that this Komodo dragon is her grandmother.
They discuss Harisa's "familiar" - which she thinks she has never had, but Granny Rossa insists that her familiar is with her, in her heart if not in the way she might expect. Harisa wakes in the camp, drenched by the water falling from the canopy.
Isaac dreams of running with Dale, running for years, running as they age - pursued by a figure that is only ever walking, but never loses ground. They transition from the field to the forest, and the figure is harder to spot among the trees, but it is still always there.
Isaac says he thinks they can take their pursuer, and Dale counters that they need to find a place they can live - not for themselves, but for the others. For June. They keep running.
This time, they find themselves in that first copse of elderwood trees. They discuss the possibility of using the elderwood trees to make a living - sap is valuable and highly sought after, maybe even enough that the Empressar might overlook their past? Maybe not. But they could build a town on the industry, a community for June to grow up in. Just as Isaac expresses his horror at the prospect of raising little June amidst nature, his attention drawn by a flittering bug, he hears a gurgling and choking sound - and turns back around to find Dale dead. Their constant pursuer is there, face still shadowed, wielding a curved sword. The figure walks up to Isaac and points his sword at Isaac's chest.
Isaac instinctively goes for his shield, knocking the blade away, and attacks in the momentary opening. The silhouetted man dissolves into what can only be described as a circulatory system and sinks into the ground, and Isaac feels the point of a sword sink into his back, hearing the words: "Axedrummer? You can't run forever." - and Isaac wakes with a gasp and a shout.
An alarmed Whiskers asks if the camp is under attack, and Isaac reassures him that everything is all right. Whiskers warns that dreams can be portentous and should be treated with proper gravity, which Isaac entirely disregards as he spins a yarn about the sort of dream he had, causing Whiskers no end of anxiety.
June dreams of training with her mother when she was younger, talking about the potential need to fight in a ball gown, and whether they might one day return to Agravar. Kataryn gives June a pair of sapphire earrings that had once been June's grandmother's, and since June isn't allowed to pierce her ears until she turns 13, also hands over her sash for June to attach them to so they don't get lost. They begin training again, and in an exercise where she is supposed to leap over her mother's staff, she instead lands on the staff and backflips off of it, clocking a look of pride and peace on her mother's face as she lands - which coincides with her waking up as she falls out of the tree.
As has become custom, Guard catches June, who is still reorienting herself from the dream and asking for her mother. When she gets her bearings, she checks for the remaining earring she still has from her mother - and realizes it's missing. She drops to the ground, searching frantically and wailing. The search goes on interminably, but eventually, June realizes that the last time she saw the earring was a couple copses back. She put her father's scarf on quite energetically, and the earring must have snagged and been thrown aside.
June insists that they have to go back, but is reluctantly convinced by Isaac and Leah that they need to make it to the elderwood copse first, and they'll pass that clearing on the way home and search for the missing earring.
They arrive at the elderwood grove, finding many large trees, and they set up camp and begin their woodcutting work. Isaac gives June permission to not participate in the logging, knowing how she feels about it, and June doesn't need to be told twice before she disappears into the forest. By nightfall, the first tree is felled, and they begin processing it into moveable chunks for transport back to Rally.
Harisa strikes out that evening to see if she can encounter June, and as she reaches the edge of the copse, spots a flash of red robes. The monk looks at the stump of elderwood left by the day's efforts, throws his head back, swears loudly, and and attacks the group.
June, deep in the forest, hears the start of the kerfuffle and beats feet toward camp, but she is far away.
Harisa asks the monk why he's been following them, and as she does, his hood falls back, revealing a boar's head. He replies that they've been cutting down the forest, and asks impatiently whether they're going to cooperate or not. Harisa indignantly reviews the chaos of the last several days that she associates with the monk, but he doesn't seem particularly interested in her concerns and is primarily giving his attention to the elderwood stump.
Harisa shoots the stump in an effort to redirect his focus, and he raises an eyebrow, claps his hands, and transforms fully into a boar. To each side of him and in front of the stump, three more boar appear.
Isaac, having heard but not seen recent events, asks Harisa why she's attacking boar. Harisa calls out that this is sandal-man, disguised as a boar, and Isaac notices that of the four boar, only one does not have flowers growing up around it. He raises his shield and begins to approach the boar.
The party trades blows with sandal-man as he shifts repeatedly between his humanoid form and that of a boar, insisting that Isaac and his people should lay down their arms. The monk seems able to endlessly summon additional boar to replace the fallen, and when he transforms, able to resume his form from the position of any of the remaining boar. Each time a boar is killed, it dissolves into flowers, and Isaac questions repeatedly whether he might be dreaming or drugged.
Although the boar seem ephemeral when killed, the poison inflicted by their bites is quite real, and the monk's glaive packs a punch. When Isaac strikes the monk with conviction, however, the monk looks startled and exclaims, "an OATH?"
The battlefield finally comes into view for June as she hurtles through the branches, just in time to hear this exclamation and watch the monk vanish, reappearing on a high bough of one of the elderwood trees and begin casting a spell on the stump below.
June pauses to get the lay of the land, seeing that Harisa and Guard each face a boar on the ground, but marking the sandal man as her target. She rushes toward him in the air, bounding from branch to branch, flinging a dart in his direction as she approaches, and immediately starts lecturing him about his mischief in town before striking him with her staff.
The boar and people on the ground continue to fight, new boar appearing with a clap of sandal man's hands each time one is killed.
The sandal man quips to June, "Kid! You like the woods, right? You like the trees and shit? Hold this for me." - and he takes his spear in both hands, thumping it against the branch he stands on, and a new elderwood tree splits the stump below and begins to grow - ten years' worth of growth in six seconds. He holds the vibrating spear out to June, who grabs it after a split second's hesitation. The tree, she realizes, will continue to grow only so long as she focuses on the spell.
Sandal man drops to the ground before Guard while June is consumed with internal conflict and Isaac tries to play off a rather grievous boar bite as unconcerning. Harisa makes as if to shoot the monk, but redirects her arrow to the boar engaged with Isaac at the last moment, discorporating it. The monk claps again, and this time it is giant weasels that make an appearance.
The monk remarks that he "didn't think [he] was going to see one of you" before taking a misty step to appear in front of Isaac. He swings, but Isaac grabs his glaive and goes in for a headbutt. Guard suggests to June that the monk's magic may not be trustworthy, and charges toward the monk, bringing down his axe and trying to interpose himself between the monk and Isaac.
Frustration with the sandal man's onslaught finally overcoming her dedication to regrowing the tree, June chucks the spear at the monk. The growing sapling withers, and June turns her attention to the weasel aggressing at her.
As the weasels make their attacks, Isaac steps in front of Harisa, turning the weasel's brutal blow into a glancing one. Harisa takes aim between the sandal man's eyes and looses her arrow. She hits her mark, but rather than falling, the sandal man yanks the arrow out and tosses it aside. The weasels on the ground descend on Isaac, and he falls to the ground as the monk whirls on Harisa, striking her with the haft of his glaive until she falls as well, only then turning to tap Isaac with his weapon.
Guard's filigree flickers and turns red as he steps toward the monk, invoking the power of the geckos as he swings his axe. The monk, quickly accumulating wounds, remarks quizzically on the writing on Guard's back - "I fight for the trees" - fully taking the wind out of Guard's sails as he realizes he was lied to and his filigree flickers back to blue.
June leaps to the ground just before the branch below her breaks, dropping the weasel in a pouf of flowers as the fall kills it. She slams her staff into the ground and calls out the monk, demanding a conversation. He agrees, but says he will speak to Axedrummer first. He slams his glaive into the ground, summoning a hazy darkness as he begins running around the glaive, whipping up a black funnel cloud that picks up Harisa and Isaac and Guard as he passes by them. Even the remaining weasels are swept up, and June is left alone as the vortex and all its passengers whip off into the forest.