Of the ten Mournspire Pines, the rightmost one off to the far side of the clearing caught Gael's attention. Its bark was blackened, cracked, and rotting at the base, which was a stark contrast to the rest of the brown giants that stood proud and imposing. Something felt just a little off about it, but nobody else noticed. Or, if they did, they didn't mention it.

Liorin was already sprinting forward, his voice high and insistent.

"Follow, follow!" he called. He moved toward the largest of the Mournspire Pines, so the rest of them—still slightly dazed by the strange beauty around them—followed without question. Gael's eyes narrowed, but he didn't stop them.

The boy led them to the base of the giant tree, where a gaping hole was carved into the bark like the mouth of a giant beast waiting to swallow them whole. Gael peered into the darkness, only the faintest glimmer of sunlight from the outside world illuminating the tunnel-like hole.

They did bring bioarcanic lanterns with them, but Liorin didn't even give them time to take them out before rushing into the tunnel.

Well, whatever.

They passed through the tunnel in the tree, and it was a surprisingly long tunnel, at least a hundred meters in length. The pine certainly didn't look half as thick from the outside, but once they were through, they stepped in a world completely different from the outside.

The tree hollow was vast, stretching upward to the sky where bluish-green sunlight filtered through the gaps in the leaves, and all of it illuminated a beautiful village suspended in mid-air. Rope bridges crisscrossed between small thatch houses. Swings swayed in the breeze coming through air holes in the bark, and ladders made of vines and branches climbed the circular walls all around. Faintly glowing mushrooms and flowers were scattered around the ground and hung from branches artificially grafted onto the walls, casting a serene, almost ethereal glow over everything.

A Petalborn village.

"... I gotta admit, kid, you lot have got yourself a pretty sweet little hideout here," Gael murmured, looking around in awe just the rest of them. He could appreciate the beauty in the shitty and dangerous architecture. "It might even be more comfortable than my own clinic. How'd you guys build all the way up there in the first place?"

Meanwhile, Cara stepped up to a nearby plant, her fingers brushing the pinkish-purple petals lightly. "And these would look great at the clinic," she mused, examining the plant closely. "It glows by itself, it's not toxic to the touch, and it's large to boot. We could easily replace the unwelcoming iron lanterns in the clinic with these."

Maeve skipped next to Cara and poked the plant as well, eyes wide with curiosity. "Do you think we could grow them back at the clinic?"

Gael couldn't help but smirk. "Oh, sure. Let's turn our clinic into a bloody jungle. That's just what we need to get more people to come over."

"I didn't say we'd grow them in the clinic. We could grow them outside. Make a park or something."

"And are you gonna take care of the plants? Because I already got my garden to take care of, and…"

His voice faded as his eyes slowly swept the rest of the village. He hadn't noticed them before, but dozens of villagers—all Petalborn, given their tribal clothes and wooden masks—were sprawled out across the ground just right in front of him, lying motionless on makeshift thatch beds.

Elderly. Adults. Children. Eerie stillness was either for the asleep or the dead, but they didn't seem like they were either.

While the rest of them gradually took notice of the villagers, Liorin bounced over to a little girl resting near the door of one of the ground-level huts.

"Help!" he shouted, gesturing at them to come over.

"Help?" Cara murmured under her breath. "What's going on here?"

Gael wasn't sure if he wanted the answer, but Liorin had already bounced back to Maeve and was dragging her to the little girl. The rest of them followed. Once they were by the hut, Liorion knelt beside the girl and carefully took off her mask.

The girl's face was normal but for the deep, web-like bruises forming beneath the skin around her eyes.

Liorin pointed at the girl and tugged at Maeve's sleeve. "Help."

Maeve, though, was frozen, a furrow forming on her brow as she looked at the still child. Her fingers hovered above the girl's body, unsure. Liorin didn't seem to mind her hesitation. He simply pointed and repeated his plea for help again.

"Brain… destroyer… sickness," he stuttered, struggling to find the words to properly describe the villagers' plight. "Sleep, and then… no wake. Still breathing. But no wake. Brains destroyed? Have to feed and wash and take care of, all me—"

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"I'm not the Doctor here, Liorin," Maeve interrupted softly, raising her hands in defeat before pointing at Gael. "He is."

Liorin paused. Then he swivelled his head dramatically to stare at Gael, as though he couldn't believe the nice-looking, professionally-dressed lady wasn't the doctor he was looking for. For his part, Gael's lips tightened into a frown as he pushed Maeve aside, kneeling next to the little girl himself.

"Move," he muttered. "Let me handle this."

He flipped the girl over with practiced ease, her limp body twitching slightly as he checked her pulse, then gently prodded her neck as he noticed what looked like star-shaped bite marks around the back. His hands moved swiftly—more instinct than thought—before he straightened up and glanced at Maeve and Cara.

Maeve's eyes were wide, her face etched with concern, while Cara's lips were pressed together in worry. "Is it dangerous?" she asked.

"More importantly," Fergal said, narrowing his eyes at the rest of the villagers, "is it infectious?"

Gael barely spared them a glance. His gaze was fixed on the girl's neck as he spit into his palms, disinfecting them with a good rub. "Nah," he said. "It's a common sleeping curse, actually. Nothing too bad. It's not a 'brain-destroying' curse by any means, because it's slumberfinch induced."

All eyes flickered to him in confusion.

"Slumberfinch?" Maeve asked.

"It's a rare, black and green-streaked bird that you can only find in Blightmarch, but it's supposedly super easy to encounter in this forest. Its saliva's a hell of a drug. If they peck at you, you'll drop into a coma-like state before you know it, and you'll sleep for days and weeks and months and years—while fully conscious—until someone finds you a doctor that can whip up a small medicinal broth."

He tilted his head to the side, considering the rest of the villagers.

"A flock of slumberfinches must've flown through this village and pecked everyone while they were sleeping," he concluded with a nonchalant shrug before tapping a finger lightly on the girl's neck. "Thankfully for them, the medicinal broth really is an easy thing to whip up. I just need a few ingredients from around here."

"Like what?" Cara asked, already reaching for her notebook.

"There's about two hundred or so Petalborn in this village, so I need ten full satchels of violet bloodroot, twenty bundles of duskberries, and about sixty ghostshade fungi, preferably all grown on twisted old tree stumps. Put them all together in high heat and they'll burn away the curse," he rattled off the list while Cara quickly jotted down the ingredients and sketched them out on pieces of paper, then tore them from her notebook and handed them to each of the Repossessors. "Don't stray too far from the clearing, now. I'm sitting here to monitor the rest of the villagers, so I'm not gonna fetch you if you get lost."

Fergal nodded, turning to his goons.

"You heard the doctor. Get to it."

Immediately, Fergal and the Repossessors—Cara included—sprinted back out through the tunnel and scattered into the forest, each heading in a different direction. Cara aside, it really shouldn't take those system-enhanced gangsters long to find all the ingredients he needed.

The only thing Gael and Maeve needed to do now was sit where they were and watch over Liorin.

Suddenly, without warning, the boy rushed over and grabbed Gael's hands, shaking them with a force that startled him out of his thoughts.

"Thank! Thank!" Liorin repeated over and over, his voice high with excitement.

Gael blinked, caught off guard by the fervor. He looked at Maeve, but she only stared, a slight furrow in her brow, at Liorin's skin.

Now that they were mostly alone and Gael had the luxury to pay attention to things he hadn't bothered paying attention to before, he noticed the boy's skin really was rough, scarred all over with what seemed to be old, man-made wounds. They weren't recent, but they were too deep for a kid, let alone one who seemed so innocent.

His eyes flickered to the other villagers and noted none of them had the same scars. The grass and the thatch beds they were all lying on had the colors of single shades of metal—mostly silver with a few zinc yellows and moss green in them—but the grass beneath Liorin's knees, where he was kneeling, had same rainbow, oily shades of metal they'd all seen outside the village when he first commanded the wall of vines to part for them.

A strange thought gnawed at the back of his mind.

And why's the kid the only one not affected by the sleeping curse?

If a flock of them flew through the entire village, then he must've been pecked by more than a few.

Is he just immune to the curse?

Gael had been to the Fogspire Forest a few times now, but he'd never been so bothered by it before. He couldn't connect the dots. Between the horde of halfling Myrmurs, the living trees, that rotting Mournspire Pine off to the side of the clearing, and the sleeping villagers who could give plants metallic colours and control them by touch—and the sleeping villagers was the one that surprised him the most, because there was no way they could've survived this long in the forest if they didn't have a way to repel or deal with threats like a flock of slumberfinches flying through their village—he had no idea just what in the Saint's good name was going on in the forest.

… Well, he did have one small theory that could connect all the dots, but frankly, he wasn't here to play detective. He was just here for his stones.

And since I still don't see a single aero-resonating stone in this village…

He had time to spare while waiting for the others to return.

"Whatever," he muttered under his breath, then tossed his satchel to the side. The heavy bag thudded on the ground with a satisfying weight, and he reached in and dumped out all the imperatoria cicada parts he'd stashed inside, laying them out in front of him.

His fingers worked nimbly, picking through the pieces, assessing what he had. At the same time, Maeve glanced down at the pile, her eyes lighting up in that same weapon-obsessed way they always did when something caught her interest.

"What are you doing?" she asked, leaning forward.

"After that horde of halfling Myrmurs, I think I've got an idea of the kind of bioarcanic equipment these scrap parts can be turned into." He looked up with a grin, catching Maeve's eye. "I think it's time to add a little more bite to my arsenal."

Her eyes gleamed with enthusiasm. "What kind of bite?"

His grin widened. He tossed an etching knife at her, and she caught it out of the air. "You'll know when we finish it. You're helping me out now."

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