System note: Watch for soft refusals. They ripple.

William normally does not go looking for miracles before lunch. He prefers instead to follow his schedule as planned, in the same way one might arrange teacups before a gathering, or rake leaves before it rains. There is comfort too in doing things properly, especially in a house where things don't always stay where you left them.

This morning's task was simple too: find the kettle.

Not just any kettle, but the good one, the black lacquered pot one with the brass handle and the little chip at the spout that whistles sharper than it should. Eileen calls it temperamental and normally it could be found in the kitchen with everything else there. But today it hasn't turned up in the usual place, which means its probably hiding somewhere out of fondness, or spite.

Coming back into the kitchen for the third time today, he stops to check the stovetop, the drying rack, the basket with the herbs and eventually the pantry shelf where some of the spare teacups like to sleep. He finds a straw hat though like the ones in the outdoor shed, along with two wooden trowels, and a jar of dirt labeled "emergency preserves." But no kettle. He considers for a moment making a third loop of the garden having figured Audry or Ollan took it to water the plants outside but then he thinks better of it, "Perhaps I should ask them if they have seen it." William muses to himself.

The search for them takes him past the hallway broom closet, which no longer moans when approached, and the second pantry door just off the main hall which smells today of lemon peel and old mint. Searching it here, he doesn't find what he needs and is about to open the children's bedroom doors... when something catches his eye.

There is a door there on his left, that he does not remember.

It sits between the next two doors like a that's always been there. Modest, polite, utterly unassuming. Painted a calm sage green with a white trim, the door looks like it belongs in a garden or at least to a garden, not necessarily to the interior doors of a home. The brass handle too is shaped like a curled pea pod, perfectly smooth, and warm under his fingers.

He stares at it for a moment, eyebrows drawing together in thoughtful lines. The dungeon he had grown up in always had its quirks. Rooms shifted in the dungeon with little regard to efficiency and even some staircases were caught contradicting themselves. Hallways too could be even found refusing to be walked on unless someone placated it with an adventures corpse. But this door is not in dungeon, its in Eileen's cottage and yet it feels different. This time the door feels like the cottage having made a decision on its own layout.

William opens the door.

The smell of soil, wet stone and freshly hewed timber assaults' William senses. The scent wraps around him like a memory too pleasant to belong to any one moment and the space has a lingering draw to it. It's not the heat and humidity of a conservatory or the sterile chill of a mage's glasshouse. It is something softer, seasonal, and quietly alive.

The space before William stretches out ahead of him in long rows and trellised arches, tucked beneath a ceiling of mottled glass panes that don't quite reveal the sky. The room is easily fifty feet in depth and thirty feet in width, easily outpacing the confines of the cottage which William had circled twice just this morning.

Yet golden light too falls through the glass panes anyway, as if the sun itself agreed to be remembered rather than seen in this space. Raised beds of various shapes fill the space, some narrow and deep, others broad and shallow, each filled with soil that smells recently turned. Vines trace lazy paths across the glass, curling like ink lines in a forgotten letter, small berried pods wrapped around its length at various sections.

At the far end of the room, Audry and Ollan are working with the industrious calm of children who believe they've been assigned something important. Audry holds a copper misting can and leans in close to a cluster of blue stemmed plants with curled, tender leaves. She hums to herself, a crooked little tune that grows in its own direction, just like the plants who seem to almost sway alongside her. Her sleeves are rolled, her expression focused, and her eyebrows twitch occasionally as she remembers steps she was never taught but somehow knows.

Ollan himself is half inside a planter box, crouched on his knees and talking quietly to the dirt. The kettle William has been looking for placed neatly next to him, his muddy prints left all over the handle. His shirt too is streaked with something green and possibly bioluminescent, and he's arranged his seedlings in diagonals that make no sense unless you believe the soil can carry secrets sideways.

Ironically neither of them seem surprised to see him.

"You know tomatoes don't like being crowded," Audry says, not turning from her work.

"They're not crowded. They're competitive," Ollan answers. "I'm giving them rivals, young masters to compete against."

"That's not how any of the gardening books say it should be done."

"It is if you're plants are brave and you believe in them as much as I do."

William steps fully into the greenhouse, letting the door settle shut behind him. The temperature is warm but not stifling. It's a living warmth, the kind that settles into stone and wood and skin alike. The air hums faintly too, though not in any physical sense. It is the hum of a place that knows it has been seen by the right people and want those people to stay for a few moments longer.

He walks then towards the children, past planter beds where familiar herbs grow beside stranger things. There's a ring of luminescent mushrooms arranged in what might be an accidental pattern or a very old glyph. There is also storage hanging from above and on one shelf rests a bowl of smooth stones, each marked with a tiny characters that even William can't read.

"Hello, Mr. William," Audry says, glancing up from her misting. "We're doing a indoor garden day. Ollan dreamed about it last night and this morning, we found it next to our rooms!"

"So I see," he replies, "Did Grandma Eileen ask you too?"

Audry shrugs. "Not really. But the watering can was full and..."

Ollan pokes his head up from the soil bed. "The cottage gave us a gift!"

"A gift?"

"Yeah. The cottage makes rooms when it feels like it, just like the dungeon, I saw it happen in my dreams."

William looks up then, scanning the walls, the seams, the places where joints and beams should be. There are no lines, no creases, no construction marks. As if the room wasn't added by workers but was instead grown. Rooted not in blueprints or spellcraft but in need.

He steps over to the trellis near the west wall. A vine wraps itself lazily along the wood, its leaves curled like little ears, as if listening. The warmth of the glass, the faint breath of mint in the air, the way the soil holds shape without collapsing it is not Dungeon construction in the way William knows it. And yet he recognizes the form of it. It has the bones of ritual infrastructure, but stripped of hunger. Rewritten instead in a litany of patience.

Ollan dusting off his hands, walks over to William's side. "Its helping me be a farmer," he says. "Like a real one but my garden will have mushrooms and bees and tomatoes that fight back."

"Sounds like a plan," William replies only half coherent to Ollan's plans as he analyzes the room surrounding him.

Audry snorts. "You're gonna get lost in your own garden silly."

"No I wouldn't," Ollan says, indignant. "It knows me, just like the cottage knows grandma."

William doesn't speak again instead he walks back towards the door, fingers grazing the frame of it. The wood is warm again not from sunlight, but from intention. The Cottage has given them something but not out of obedience to a ritual or as reward to contract completed. But because it saw what an occupant, Ollan needed and it gave in a way that would echo to Eileen.

Was the house too, understanding the merits of Eileen's kindness, was it growing in the shape that they all needed of it, even if they weren't asking... A space to grow things... A place where monsters feel safe... A room for the children to believe in more then just the life of sacrifice...

"It grew a room," he says, softly.

Audry looks over, tilting her head having moved a dozen beds closer to the front of the greenhouse, "What do you mean?"

William shakes his head and lets the smile come slowly. He doesn't answer her directly. Instead, he steps aside as Ollan passes by with a handful of seed packets and something shaped like a teacup bell pepper.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Nothing, child," he says. "Just admiring the harvest."

William waits until the children are elbow deep in basil and disagreement before drifting toward one wall with a particular shape in it.

A large panel sits here, that is hard to miss once you're looking for it. It's mounted above a cluster of shallow planter beds near the back of the greenhouse, square and softly glowing, framed in pale metal that doesn't quite shine. The screen itself is quiet amber, filled with lines of text that shift when he steps close. It's too high for Audry or Ollan to reach. Which may be the point.

He hears Audry mutter something about companion vegetables and Ollan corrects her gently and then flicks a bit of compost in her direction. William ignores them both with practiced ease and retrieves one of the sturdy stools stacked beside the seed cabinet. It's wide legged, built for balance, and still smells faintly of lemon polish. Its an exact duplicate of the one Eileen keeps in the kitchen for things she doesn't quite trust ladders with.

He steps up, rests one hand on the edge of the panel, and the light responds.

Text sharpens, icons flicker into focus. The whole thing opens without hesitation, like it remembers him.

GREENHOUSE NODE: RITUAL LAYER ACTIVE Matron-Echo: External Anchor Caretaker Access: Confirmed (W. William)

Per Day Resonance Workforce: 936 Daily Motic Hours Available Mote Composition: 43% Comfort, 28% Memory, 15% Labor, 7% Grief, 4% Defiance, 3% Undefined

➤ Allocate Motic Resources ➤ Assign Care Tasks ➤ Adjust Environmental Settings ➤ Perform Substrate Analysis ➤ Manage Companion Flora ➤ Open Science Panel

William exhales slowly, not out of surprise but out of something nearer to relief. He hasn't seen an interface like this since leaving the dungeon and even then most rituals had become automation, and meaning only gave way to metrics.

Behind him, the children continue their task.

"I prefer to sing to the basil," Audry says, misting a leaf with precise flicks. "But a little tea in the soil helps it feel respected in the same way Eileen likes her evening tea."

"You're giving the plants tea now?" Ollan asks, clearly scandalized.

"Just a splash." Ollan glances over to Audry's workspace. "Well, if the carrots ask for sugar will you add it in too?"

William smiles without looking back. He leans slightly closer to the panel and opens the Resonance Allocation Menu.

A new window expands across the screen.

Allocate Motic Resources Workforce Available: 936 Hours / Day

➤ Nutrient Restructuring ➤ Adjust Wind flow Patterns ➤ Calibrate Humidity Levels ➤ Modulate Sunlight ➤ Flora Germination ➤ Growth Guidance ➤ Harvest Preparation

Each task glows faintly beneath his fingertips, annotated with small icons, a curled leaf for one, a soft eye for another, a gloved hand for a third. It's intuitive, in the way good systems are built not to impress but to be understood by its audience and William selects his inputs with care, letting his instincts do most of the thinking.

He assigns hundred motic hours to Nutrient Restructuring, letting labor and comfort soak into the root beds where soil settles unevenly. Another eighty go toward Adjusting Windflow, to ease the air across the greenhouse rafters in a way that will keep the basil from curling too soon. Finally, fifty to Flora Germination, not because he knows what will grow, but because he's curious what the cottage thinks they might need the setting for.

Looking back William watches as Motic resonaces float down from the ceiling above and respond to his request without resistance. There's no draining sensation of will like there is in the dungeon and no spark of spell work sings in payment to the request. Just a subtle shift in the light through the leaves, a slight flutter in the pattern of the hanging vines, and a sense, felt more than seen that something has begun in earnest.

He steps down from the stool and lets the interface dim to a resting glow. The children have moved on to a debate about wrap fillings for their lunchtime planning, Audry insists that too much cheese is a structural risk and Ollan defends the accusation on moral grounds, the basil now receiving a steady stream of passive encouragement through words traded between the. It makes William think, they should be thriving by evening.

Slowly the cottage, he realizes, is not merely responding to Eileen anymore. It is participating in the routine of care they are all offering to the place. And the motes those little fragments of kindness and grief and ritualized attention are working not because they've been commanded, but because they've been trusted with the routine, trusted to carry it out.

For the first time in years, William feels like a caretaker again. Not a manager of dying dungeon systems or a footnote in someone else's rituals, but a steward of something living, something earned, something good.

He looks back at the panel. It waits quietly, ready when needed, untouched when not. He leaves it be for now.

From the other side of the room, Audry lifts her head.

"William, how much cheese do you want in your wrap?"

He doesn't hesitate, "Too much."

Ollan nods approvingly. "That's how Grandma likes it too!"

Lunch is quiet. The children argue cheerfully over the proper ration of tomatoes and cucumbers. William eats his wrap in three bites thanking Audry for the meal before slipping back to the interface in the greenhouse.

It's still waiting for him of course, amber light calm and the pulse of energy steady. Still it does feel lower on the wall, like it had expected him to come back for this time he doesn't need the stool to reach it.

Back in the Main Menu he finds himself selecting Settings, then Advanced Configuration. He had a haunch that the Motic Resonances had taken the greenhouse design directly from the dungeons archive of templates and though he did not understand how the Motic Resonances had bypassed the privacy protocols the Ebony Quills had in place, the fact that they had done so, was likely enough. Perhaps then he could use this panel, more like an administrative console and bypass some of the pesky systems he normally had to deal with.

"No password..." He muses softly to himself.

Instead he finds what he is looking for and in a moment the interface prompts him for input.

Would you like to engage the Root Interface?

(Note: Blending of Soil Substrates is irreversible. Proceed only if system integration is desired.)

He doesn't hesitate though, for it would always be his job, a steady, sacred business, to bind things together. Just this time, he would do so, gently enough, so that no one breaks from the fall out.

He confirms.

The interface expands. The screen dims, then blooms pale greens, rich browns, a curling spiral of root networks that extend beneath the greenhouse, weaving out like veins beneath a sleeping forest.

A single node pulses at the center: Cottage Core (Attuned)

Surrounding it are dozens of latent lines labeled Dormant Vascular Pathways each of them faint and waiting. Some taper into silence. Others reach downward, thin as thread yet faintly they shimmer at the edge of the map.

Root Network Analysis Substrate Density: 43% viable Dormant Channels: 18 Active Life Threads: 3

Recommendations: ➤ Conduct Soil Memory Scan ➤ Initialize Vascular Probe ➤ Establish Taproot Linkage

William scrolls through the options. Every line is familiar in concept but alien in tone. He has little understanding of dungeon overview diagnostics from the standpoint of an administrator but he had centuries of dungeon level diagnostics from his time as a caretaker. And though these new recommendation are ecological, agricultural and nature bound. Their was a language of familiarity within the compost pretext, that made them feel like command lines. But this network was built not for power, but for coexistence.

He runs the Soil Memory Scan first, the query finishes immediately, as if the Motic Resonances had already performed the action and was simply waiting for him to choose the action.

The interface pulses once and beneath his feet the floor seems to breathe.

Soil Memory Scan Results Residual Ritual Echo's: ➤ Grade III Anti-Scrying Ward, ➤ Grade II Thermal Buffer, ➤ Grade I Shrouding Ward, ➤ Grade CI Dungeon Anchor

Substrate Type: Hollow Core Attainment Level: Condensation - 21% Emotional Scar Tissue: ➤ Unknown & Unresolved ➤ Unknown & Unresolved ➤ Unknown & Unresolved ➤ Unknown & Unresolved ➤ Unknown & Unresolved Host Status: Eileen, Human, 84. Taproot Access: Permissible

He stares at the word: Permissible. Not granted, not secured, not earned, just… offered, in the way one offers a cookie to a child who is crying.

He opens the Taproot Access menu.

Another screen unfolds, this one feels like layers of soil, like dandelion seeds along the edge of a chasm and includes a soft vibration huming through the panel as the interface finishes loading.

Taproot Access Menu Motic Hours of Labor Required for Stabilizing Integration: 3000 Hours

System Impact: Greenhouse access to ritual substrate Passive resource gain from underlying dungeon. Future construction channels open to Cottage

Proceed?

He leans forward slightly, studying the readout. If his calculations were correct, the work would be completed by tomorrow morning and when Eileen returns the two of them would be able to discuss how best to spend the resources.

He confirms.

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