Life, as it turns out, is always fond of surprising us. It delights in twisting our expectations into wholly unrecognizable results.

  That was the only explanation for how I ended up happily married to a lovely, crimson-scaled dragoness within months of leaving my family’s estate. I even had people in my life whom I would consider actual friends!

  I might have wished for something like that to happen when I made my escape from my Court, but I hadn’t expected it. I had expected to spend most of my life hiding on the fringes of a frontier town, apart from everyone, avoiding alchemy and any of my skills which might hint at my true identity.

  I had been quite wrong, obviously. On all counts.

  My reputation as an alchemist was growing. I had even come to enjoy the craft, overcoming the sour feelings inspired by my family’s training.

  And I certainly had not avoided using my other skills. That was why, the day after the grand unveiling of my future shop, I found myself busily attending to the consequences of those abilities.

  Specifically, the ability to force plants to grow.

  I was doing this because I was a responsible fae who didn’t want the local forest to be overrun by deadly plants. I was definitely not doing it because Alys had thrown me out of the house to cut off my lazy streak.

  My dragoness was stressed. The news of her grandmother’s impending visit had her worried to bits. She was obsessed with making our home as ‘perfect’ as it could be so her grandmother wouldn’t be disappointed in her.

  I tried telling her our home was already something to be proud of, but Alys just went on fretting over everything with an intensity I found intimidating.

  I would try again, of course. Hyel couldn’t tell us exactly when her grandmother would be coming, which I thought was the largest source of stress for my dragoness. I couldn’t leave her in such a condition for what might be weeks of waiting.

  It was still only a day since we received the news, so I doubted she would feel any negative effects from this distress yet. Still, such constant tension could be hard on the body, no matter how resilient the species.

  Setting aside my worries about my wife and mate (and it still made me oddly jittery even to think those words), I focused on the forest around me.

  I was surprised at the amount of greenery clinging on in the face of Winter’s arrival. I knew the Seasons’ change was recent, but I would have expected the plants to show some sign of withering away.

  The leaves hadn’t even fallen yet. The deciduous trees were still dressed in their Autumn colors. Or, in the case of a few local mutations, in all sorts of blues, purples, and crimson reds far too bright to be associated with the onset of Winter.

  This forest was unusual, at least in my experience. I kept looking around as I walked, pondering the different manifestations of the Seasons’ change in different regions. When would the leaves fall, if ever?

  Of course, one rather obvious alteration had gripped the world.

  It was cold. Bitterly cold. Snow had even managed to make it past the thick crowns of trees. At least the winds couldn’t reach me while I was under those trees’ protection, for which I was ever so thankful.

  Ever since the Season had bled over into Winter, my resistance to the cold had plummeted. The protection of Autumn, which I hadn’t even known I’d been enjoying my whole life, had faded. Every time I ventured outside, I was left shivering and grumbling about my lack of warmer clothing.

  I resolved once more to start making inroads with more townsfolk and find someone who could make me a proper coat. Seasons knew, pelts of all sorts were easy enough to come by on the frontier, so materials wouldn’t be an issue.

  Yet I wasn’t outside to enjoy the wonderful new ambient temperatures. I was there to mitigate the potential ecological disaster I’d unleashed upon the forest.

  And, as I drew near to the first ambush spot I’d set up against the invading agents of the Hergeiros family, I realized that I possibly should have acted a little sooner.

  In just two weeks, the odd, purple-colored stinging nettle had escaped the bounds of the field where I’d planted it. This confirmed my suspicion that the plant would thrive if I left it alone, infesting the entire forest in a frighteningly short time.

  The process would take decades elsewhere. With how healthy and thriving all plants were in this area of the frontier, it would likely be over in years.

  “Well, we can’t have that happening…” I muttered, looking at the nettles with great reluctance.

  Just killing them would be a waste,. Unfortunately, the only alternative was picking all of them myself. Anyone else would require potent antidotes for the neurotoxin that made the mutated nettle so deadly.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  I blamed my mana for that particular development. Normally, mutation or not, a simple stinging nettle should never have developed poison so powerful. Since it had been forced by my mana to mutate or die, the result was far from ‘normal.’

  In other words, the plant’s spread would mean death for nearly anyone who dared to enter the forest.

  Already, I could spot a few carcasses in the field. A deer, a very runty direwolf, and some kind of bird had stumbled upon the nettle and succumbed. I would probably run into smaller animals as I cleared the nettle, which stretched almost up to my knees.

  I considered grabbing a basket from my storage bag and getting to work, but I simply didn’t have it in me. I wanted to get back to Alys in a reasonable time frame, not spend the next few days visiting home only for sleep.

  So, with a final sigh, I unleashed my mana and sent it forth, tendrils of my powers latching onto the nettles.

  It was easy, really. They were linked to me already, having been mutated by my power. That did make them resistant to what I was about to do, but resistance went only so far, and I’d hardly been using the full potency of my mana when I made the nettle mutate.

  In less than a blink of an eye, a wave of death began to spread out before me. It jumped from plant to plant, causing them to wilt and shrivel before reducing them to little more than fertilizer for the forest. My power sank into the soil to eliminate even the roots, ensuring the plants would present no further threat.

  In spite of my precision, it wasn’t only the nettle that died. Whatever grasses or other plants were clustering under the stinging nettles died with them. I winced at the spreading patch of empty land, but at least it was not permanently barren.

  True, my poison would linger for a short while. Yet with all the nutrients from the newly deceased plants, something else would be growing there soon. That was to say nothing of the corpses I’d sensed and infected with my mana as well. The poisons in my mana liquefied the flesh and made the bone crumble away, further enriching the soil.

  Soon, I was ready to do one final walkthrough to confirm the nettle was gone. Then I could turn my attention to the manchineel trees, which I’d also grown nearby…

  Looking at those manchineels, I froze.

  The trees were different.

  This difference wasn’t like the twisted specimens of manchineels I’d produced in another location. Those trees’ spiral-like, gnarled limbs had been the result of a momentary lapse in my emotional control. But, while certainly startling, those differences were merely cosmetic. The resultant manchineels were still highly poisonous in all the traditional ways.

  Right now, I was staring at glowing, vein-like patterns that stretched from the trees’ roots up their trunks, fading slowly among the thinner branches. And when I hastened over to press my hand against the nearest tree, I realized these changes were definitely not cosmetic.

  The blue veins stretched throughout the tree’s insides, soaking up almost all the poison the manchineel produced and concentrating it within themselves. The resulting poison was far deadlier, that much I could tell, but it was also entirely alien to me. Neither my family nor I had ever come across this poison before.

  Paradoxically, the change made the trees less dangerous.

  Cutting into its branches would release this new, deadlier sap. That much was true. However, whereas manchineels were typically coated in poison, I could detect not a single bit of it on the tree’s surface or leaves. In fact, the leaves were entirely free of the poison, both inside and out. Anyone could brush against any part of these trees without suffering harm.

  I also sensed another difference. The manchineels were storing some kind of new substance, in addition to the strange poison sap. Yet figuring out its properties would have to wait until I was back in my lab. At the moment, I was thoroughly distracted by the unnaturally advanced mutations within trees I’d planted only two weeks ago.

  This sort of change should have taken decades, at the very minimum. Centuries would be a more reasonable time frame.

  Careful not to damage the tree, I pushed my mana deeper in, probing and examining.

  I went upwards first, sweeping through the tree’s trunk and into its highest branches. My thought was that some kind of parasitic plant had latched onto the manchineel, altering the tree to suit its own needs.

  When I found nothing, I went in the opposite direction. Down towards the roots I sank, combing the tree for any sign of tampering.

  Except my mana kept stretching, and stretching, and stretching. The roots were far, far too long and deep, even for the oldest manchineel trees I’d encountered back at my family’s estate.

  But something was there. A presence. A source of power. I could almost taste it on my metaphorical tongue…

  Suddenly, a pulse of something ancient reached back to me.

  It didn’t seem angry. If anything, it seemed amused. I felt a phantom sensation of something tapping me on the nose.

  Panting and wide-eyed, I jerked away from the tree like it had scalded me, my mana probes scattering into nothing in an instant.

  What in all the Seasons was that?

  I had felt powerful, ancient things before. One couldn’t avoid it while living in the Autumn Court. But this presence felt… purer, somehow. Which was saying a great deal, considering I had been in the presence of Autumn himself.

  The Autumn King was one of the very first fae to come into existence. I would have expected him to be the epitome of what nature spirits embodied. And yet, this presence had him beat.

  My mind spun. I didn’t linger on the fact that whatever I had accidentally blundered into contact with could have chosen to be far less kind. The puzzle of it all was far too fascinating.

  Is it because of the way our Stories have changed us? I mused. Fae are still connected to nature as strongly as ever, but we are not just creatures of nature anymore. Perhaps…

  For the second time that day, my brain slammed into a proverbial wall as my eyes caught on something that shouldn’t have been there.

  A single, gigantic hoofprint, of the kind I’d seen once before.

  The image of a massive stag invaded my thoughts. Its antlers were crystal. Its moss pelt was dotted with plants of every description, with not a single specimen appearing twice. Its giant hoof left a distinctive mark on the ground.

  A mark identical to this one.

  For a moment, I felt a pang of regret. The stag I’d seen months before had left behind plants in its wake with every step. The one flower I’d collected still defied my attempts to understand it, though my concern about damaging it had kept me from pushing too hard.

  Had I carelessly destroyed a similarly valuable specimen when dealing with the nettle?

  And something else was troubling me. I remembered the stag’s majestic presence, and it wasn’t what I had encountered underground just moments ago.

  An urge seized me to visit the other areas I’d set my traps in. Had the trees there mutated as well? Would marks of the stag be found there also?

  I needed answers, and I set out to get them posthaste.

  the ebook launch, so time for reading it on here is running out.

  https://www.royalroad.com/amazon/B0GDH1KQ13?maas=&ref=