Chapter 10: Different
[The Moors — Morning, Day 15]
The water fairies were drowning.
Not literally—they lived in water, so drowning was a biological impossibility. But their pool, the deep crystalline basin where a dozen of them made their home near the eastern meadows, had been choked overnight by fallen debris. A massive branch from a neighboring oak had cracked and collapsed across the pool's surface, dragging with it a curtain of moss, leaves, and smaller branches that formed a dense mat. Underneath, the water fairies flickered—their blue luminescence dimming, pulsing in distress patterns, trapped beneath a ceiling of organic wreckage.
I'd been walking my morning circuit—a routine I'd established over the past week, looping from the hollow through the meadows to the waterfall and back—when the chittering reached me. Not wallerbogs this time. Higher, thinner, more desperate. Water fairy distress carried a frequency that vibrated in my sinuses like an approaching migraine.
The pool was maybe fifty yards off my usual path. I detoured.
The problem was structural. The fallen branch was too heavy to move by hand—easily a thousand pounds of green wood—and the moss mat had created a seal that was suffocating the pool's surface. The fairies couldn't break through from below. The debris was organic, not something I could target with precision gravity work without risking the fairies underneath.
So I did it the slow way. The human way.
I waded to the pool's edge, gripped the nearest section of moss mat, and pulled. The wet organic material resisted, then tore free in sheets. Underneath, blue light surged—fairies rushing toward the gap, breaching the surface, spiraling upward in trails of bioluminescence. I tore another section. Another. Working my way along the edge of the branch, clearing debris by hand, stopping only when my fingers cramped from the cold water and the repetitive gripping.
The branch itself was the real problem. Too heavy for hands, too risky for gravity at close range with living things underneath. I compromised: reduced the branch's weight by about half—a gentle application that cost me only a mild pressure behind my eyes—and then levered it sideways using a smaller trunk as a fulcrum. Physics, not magic. The heavy end pivoted, slid off the pool's edge, and crashed into the undergrowth.
The pool exploded with light. Every fairy in the basin surfaced simultaneously, spiraling upward in a column of blue that rose twenty feet and scattered into individual trails. They orbited me once—a full circuit, close enough that I could feel the moisture and the faint electrical tingle of their luminescence—before dispersing back to the cleared water.
I stood at the pool's edge, hands raw, boots soaked, and watched them settle. No fanfare. No audience. Just a job done and a problem solved.
I moved on.
---
[The Moors — Afternoon, Day 16]
The blighted oak was worse.
I'd been checking it every other day since the first healing attempt, tracking the blight's progress with the clinical attention I'd once given to post-surgical patients. The six inches I'd cleared during the first Verdant Communion use had held—the bark beneath was pale but alive, scarring over like a wound under a bandage. But the blight had continued spreading in every other direction, climbing another foot up the trunk and sending dark tendrils along the root structure.
The tree spirit was waiting when I arrived. Same slow assembly, same knothole eyes, same patient concern. It placed one branching hand on the sick oak and made that low groaning sound—the tree equivalent of a worried sigh.
"I know," I said. "Let me try again."
I pressed both palms against the bark. Cold flooded up my arms. The blight had a signature now—I was learning to recognize it. Not just cold, but a specific kind of wrong. An absence where presence should be. Like touching a limb with no pulse.
The warmth in my chest responded. Stronger than the first time—the well had been refilling over the past two days, fed by proximity to the meadow and the wallerbogs and the general saturation of living magic in the Moors. I pushed it outward. Down my arms, through my palms, into the wood.
The blight resisted. Pushed back. The cold deepened, climbing my forearms, and for a moment I was back in the ER, hands inside a chest cavity, feeling a heart stutter and fail and stutter again—the terrible intimacy of holding something alive that was trying to die.
I pushed harder.
The bark warmed. The black retreated—not inches this time, but a full handspan. The wood underneath was raw and vulnerable, but the vessels were open, the sap was flowing, the tree's own healing was kicking in where I'd cleared the path.
The warmth in my chest guttered. Low battery. I kept going—another inch, two more—and then my vision grayed and my knees buckled and I caught myself against the trunk before I hit the ground.
The tree spirit's hand landed on my shoulder. Heavy, wooden, gentle. A steadying weight.
"Okay," I breathed. "Okay. That's enough for today."
I sat against the oak's roots and waited for the world to stop tilting. The exhaustion was deep but different from the first time—less like a complete drain, more like muscle fatigue after a hard workout. The capacity was growing. Slowly, painfully, but growing.
The cleared area on the trunk was visible—a pale scar on the dark bark, maybe two feet across now, spreading from where my hands had been. Not cured. Treated. A foothold for the tree's own recovery.
I closed my eyes. Just for a moment. Just until the spinning stopped.
---
[The Moors — Late Afternoon, Day 17]
I was three hundred yards from my hollow when the path was no longer empty.
Maleficent stood between two silver birches, wings folded, hands at her sides, positioned with the deliberate precision of someone who'd chosen this exact spot for this exact encounter. She wasn't blocking the path—she was occupying it, which was a different thing entirely. One implied force. The other implied authority.
I stopped. My body was still carrying the residual exhaustion from yesterday's healing—a bone-deep weariness that made my movements slower and my reactions duller. Not the best condition for an unexpected audience with the ruler of the Moors.
"You heal things," she said.
Not a question. Not an accusation. A statement delivered with the flat certainty of someone who'd confirmed it through personal observation, not secondhand reports.
"When I can," I said.
"The water fairy pool. The blighted oak. The wallerbog in the brambles." She listed them without inflection, each item a data point in whatever analysis she was conducting. "You did these things without being asked."
"They needed doing."
"Many things need doing. Few act without instruction or expectation of reward."
I didn't have a response to that that wouldn't sound like self-congratulation, so I said nothing. She studied me. The green eyes moved across my face with that surgical precision I'd learned to associate with her—not reading emotions but cataloguing reactions, building a model of the thing in front of her, testing it against every framework she had for understanding strangers.
"Why?" she said.
The question was simple. The answer was complicated. I could have said something strategic—something designed to advance my position, to accelerate the trust-building, to move one step closer to being useful when the crisis came. I'd spent two weeks building toward this moment. Every act of help, every demonstration of power, every hour of patience had been pointed at this exact question.
But when she asked it, standing between silver birches with the late afternoon light catching the iridescent green in her feathers, what came out wasn't strategy.
"Because I couldn't save the ones that mattered." My throat was tight. The old wound, the real one, the one underneath all the planning and positioning. "In my world, I was a healer. People came to me broken, and I put them back together, and most of the time it worked. But the ones it didn't work for—the ones who died on my table, or in the fire, or before I could reach them—" I stopped. Breathed. "I save the ones I can now. Because I couldn't then."
The forest was quiet. The birches held their silver light.
Maleficent's expression didn't change. Not the mask—the thing behind it. The calculation remained, the assessment, the ruler's pragmatic evaluation. But layered underneath, visible only because I'd spent twenty years reading faces in crisis, was something that looked like recognition.
"Rest," she said, "before you kill yourself being useful."
It wasn't warmth. It was the coldest possible version of concern—a command rather than a request, authority rather than care. But the fact that she'd said it at all, that she'd stood in my path specifically to say it, that she'd watched me work for three days and concluded that the appropriate response was to tell me to stop—
That was something.
I swayed where I stood. The exhaustion chose that exact moment to announce itself properly, my vision narrowing, my balance shifting. Two healing sessions in two days on top of a week of daily gravity practice and inadequate sleep.
Maleficent's wings twitched. A micro-movement—feathers adjusting, the involuntary response of a body preparing to act. As if she'd considered catching me, or at least positioning herself to do so.
She didn't. But the twitch was there.
"I'm fine," I said, which was a lie and we both knew it.
"You are a fool," she said, which was the truth and we both knew it.
I made it to my hollow before my legs gave out. The moss bed caught me. The oak's warmth wrapped around me like a blanket made of wood and centuries. Outside, wings beat the air—large ones, not raven-sized—and then silence. Someone circling once before departing.
I slept deeper than I had since arriving. No dreams. No planning. Just the black, restorative nothing of a body that had pushed past its limits and was collecting the debt.
When I woke, someone had left food at the hollow's entrance. Bread, cheese, roasted roots. And beside it, a clay cup of water that glowed faintly amber—infused with something, some Moors herb or fairy essence, that tasted like liquid warmth and made the lingering headache dissolve in seconds.
No note. No attribution. Just provision, delivered in silence while I slept.
Author's Note / Promotion:
Your Reviews and Power Stones are the best way to show support. They help me know what you're enjoying and bring in new readers!
You don't have to. Get instant access to more content by supporting me on Patreon. I have three options so you can pick how far ahead you want to be:
🪙 Silver Tier ($6): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public site.
👑 Gold Tier ($9): Get 15-20 chapters ahead of the public site.
💎 Platinum Tier ($15): The ultimate experience. Get new chapters the second I finish them . No waiting for weekly drops, just pure, instant access.
Your support helps me write more .
👉 Find it all at patreon.com/fanficwriter1