The Sleepers of Saint Garfir

     Her findings had amounted to three skinny books and one travel pamphlet—not surprising, given the hamlet’s size and remote location. Most interesting had been the dusty ledger detailing the town’s founding. The writing was illegible—a common attribute of most ancient texts—but Miphie’s eyes had been drawn to the heralding Garfir illustrated in the bottom right corner of the page. She had traced her fingers over the familiar lines, over the frozen, roaring grimace and the slashing claws, certain they were identical to the ones etched into the doors of the town municipal centre, carved above the entrance of the Sleepy Aroota Inn. A symbol of protection.

     The Garfir had been on every page of that ledger.

     Looking up at the sleeping giant, Miphie couldn’t help but wonder if she had overlooked any other clues to its legendary existence.

     “What is that?” Edith said again, her insistent eyes calculating the sheer size of the creature’s claws. “A Petpet?”

     Yes, Miphie supposed that the Garfir’s official classification would be that of a Petpet. But she could not imagine house training a specimen of that size.

     “That pull I felt through the roots is emanating from it… I think it’s the guardian of the forest,” she responded. She gazed reverently up at the beast. “And the inspiration for the town’s name.”

     When they had stepped into the sleeping Garfir’s grove, the magnetic force which Miphie had sensed from the lily in her hands had abruptly ceased. The atmosphere was so oppressively still, it made her ears ring. Silvery particles drifted through the air above them, occasionally winking in the moonglow.

     She planted her Aurora Lily in the soft earth and took one tentative step towards the creature. Like other Woodland Petpets, the composition of its hide was wood, rich in colour. Heart-shaped crimson leaves created vibrant spots along its carved mane. Some, she saw, had turned ashy. Miphie was no expert in arbology, but the shape and hue of the bark reminded her of the linden trees growing in the moonlit clearing. And much like those trees, pale trails of dead wood curled up its sides.

     “It’s been similarly affected by the penumbra—like the other trees,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper. She placed a careful hand on its muzzle, and she felt the hushed pulse of its heartwood. She perceived something else too, further away. Frowning, Miphie placed her other hand on its muzzle and willed all of her concentration to her fingertips, imagining herself an extension of the Garfir. Yes, she could sense them now. Thousands of energetic pulses, resonating from within the beast, radiating in every direction like a great cobweb. Just as it had been with the mycelia networks underground, the creature was connected to every tree. Or, rather… “I think,” she said, “I think the entire forest is tied to the Garfir.”

     Miphie was overcome with an urgency to leave the clearing. This place was sacred. They shouldn’t be here.

     “What? How can you tell?”

     Miphie took Edith’s hand and pressed it beside hers on the Garfir. “Can you feel their energy? The trees?” After a breath, the Kyrii nodded slowly. “I think that every tree in this forest is an extension of—a part of, a child of—the Garfir.” A reckless idea occurred to her. “What if we woke it up?”

     Edith’s eyebrows crept up her forehead. “You think that if we wake it up, it’ll be able to help the trees?” Miphie nodded. “Alright.” There was a stony resolve in Edith’s inflexion.

     Miphie’s gaze traced along the clusters of penumbra clinging to its sides. If the beast was like the other trees in the forest, they would need to rid the Garfir of this blight before she could establish an empathetic link with it. Could they really spend all night pulling the flowers like weeds?

     Weeks ago, on Presentation Day, Miphie had coaxed an oak sapling to grow from an acorn: could she do the same, in reverse? Entice every last flower to regress into sprouts, into seeds?

     “Miphie, whatever you’re about to try, please tell me.”

      “We need to get rid of those flowers. Maybe I can…”

     “Miphie!”

     It all happened so quickly. She was pressing her hands into the ground, feeling for the roots of the nearest penumbra. Anumatum: she had only to think it. She made contact, and the shock bit into her fingers. Oh, she had anticipated the cold—but not the wintry pain that followed. It raced up her arms, set every nerve ending afire, and pooled like agonizing, frigid treacle in her chest. Miphie gasped for air. She would tell the flower to wilt, to close, to sleep. Her lips would not form the words. Her lungs heaved. She opened her mouth again.

     And screamed.

     Someone grabbed her arm and yanked her to her feet. Then, warm and steady hands clamped around her clenched fists, and she was being shaken. Miphie blinked groggily. Edith’s furious gaze became clearer.

     “What were you thinking? Fool!” She gruffly released Miphie’s hands. All loftiness had melted away, and Edith’s north Altadorian accent became so pronounced that her words were crushed together. “Do you know what you almost did? You could have—you stupid girl,” she barked. A volley of synonyms for ‘stupid’ followed. Miphie’s teeth were rattling so hard, she could not unclamp her jaw to retort. “You aren’t fit to use your power, you don’t know what you’re doing! You almost—I was almost—”

     Edith stepped back and yanked at the ribbon in her braid. Her long hair spilt across her face like a curtain, and only then did Miphie see the glister of wet cheeks, the tremour in her hands. She numbly observed her own dirt-caked fingers. There was no doubt about it: they were well and truly blue, going on white.

     “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. Miphie swayed a little, feeling like she had just been ripped out of deep sleep. She made an aborted attempt to reach for Edith’s quivering shoulder. “Thank you for saving me.”

     Edith sniffed and pulled her hair to the side. Miphie realized that what she had always mistaken for fury in her glacial eyes, was in fact fear. The Kyrii had been afraid, to the point of tears. She took the thermos from her bag, uncapped it, and pressed the steaming cup into Miphie’s hands.

     “Drink.”

     Miphie made a show of sipping the Aurora tea. It warmed her throat, and she could already feel her wakefulness returning. “I don’t know why I did that. I thought… I guess I imagined the flowers would…”

     “Do not ever do that again,” Edith said simply.

     “Okay. Hey. I’m alright.” Miphie forced a wobbly smile. Edith blinked a moment and then attempted to return it. She managed to sculpt an odd grimace into her features. “I don’t think the penumbra want to be turned back into seeds.”

     Edith pressed her lips together, and a funny look crossed her face. “No, they don’t.” The Kyrii gave her a steely look. “You should rub your arms vigorously to warm up.” Miphie would have rolled her eyes if only her shivering hadn’t been so violent.

     Wordlessly, the Kyrii found her bag—which had been tossed to the ground—and from it, took out her silver lyre. Miphie had only seen Edith perform her musical enchantment once, during her presentation, when she had manipulated a small shrub to grow into a wall and produce dangerous-looking barbs.

     “Perhaps I can… enchant the flowers to let go of the Garfir,” she said when she caught Miphie’s quizzical expression.

     Her shaking hands strummed a dissonant chord, which resolved in a minor key, and the flowers quivered. And then they stopped quivering. Nothing happened.

     “I don’t know them well enough,” Edith muttered, frowning. Her voice rang hollow at the admission. “I don’t know their melody.”

     “Edith look.” Miphie gestured upwards, toward the moon, just shy of being full, winking in between the branches. The penumbra growing on the Garfir had begun opening their petals in greeting. “Maybe you could have learned and charmed them into… letting go during the day, but I don’t think they’d respond to your music now. There are too many. You know: strength in numbers.”

     The Kyrii shot her a dubious glance. “Strength in numbers.”

     Miphie shrugged, bizarrely unsteady under the weight of her attention. “Think of it this way. The flowers wouldn’t let me touch them. Now, they’re ‘waking up’. Look at how closely they’re growing together: their roots are all connected, so they’re drawing strength from one another.”

     At that, Edith stiffened. “Their roots,” she echoed, nodding absently.

     “What?”

     “Miphie: their roots. Don’t you see? We must connect with the mycelia in the ground, find a way to cut the flowers off from their anchor.”

     Miphie felt her jaw slacken. If they could speak with the network of fungal roots, compel it to cut the invasive flowers off from the rest of the forest and block their nutrients, then the penumbra might be weakened enough to remove.

     And yet, the thought of destroying so much native vegetation did not sit steadily with Miphie.

     All the same, she acquiesced. “If I.. if I fall to the somnolence again…”

     “I won’t leave your side.”

     ⁂ ⁂ ⁂

     The most direct way to connect with the mycelia was—of course—to find a mushroom. The sun had since set, but they managed to spot a tight ring of chanterelles a few paces from the sleeping Garfir. Miphie kneeled, and felt a hand to one of their stems. Again, the Draik closed her eyes and imagined herself an extension of the lifeform. She did not recite the anumatum spell right away. She paused, giving herself the time to sense the whispers of its energy. They radiated up her fingers in wavelets. Mushrooms weren’t quite the same as plants, but they did have ‘roots’—the fine mycelium threads that wove themselves into the roots of neighbouring vegetation.

     “The mycelia let plants exchange nutrients with the fungus and with other plants,” Edith had explained, “so focus on finding the mycelia that are in a direct relationship with the flowers.”

     A task easier said than done. Miphie’s consciousness traced the fibrous path of the mycelia, but they threaded and stretched their feathery fingers every which way. It was impossible to pick a direction, there were too many branching paths, too many options.

     Anumatum… radici, she thought, and she saw the forking paths in her mind alight. She was at the centre. Miphie conjured a penumbra bloom behind her eyes: take me to them. A branching thread brightened, and Miphie imagined herself following its trail. Eventually, she felt a chill curl around her wrist: the flowers were close by.

     “Ok,” she breathed. She spoke delicately, afraid to shatter her unsteady connection with the mushrooms. “I think I can sense the flowers. Now what?”

     She sensed Edith shift beside her. “The mycelia must unlink from the flower roots. Can you ask them to… let go?”

     Let go, she implored, let go, let go… Something snapped. Her hold of the mycelia quivered. Let go, she begged again, and a sound like carbonated water filled her mind and stung her fingers. She could feel her hold of the penumbra weaken, grow brittle. The mushrooms were unlinking from the flower roots, but hundreds more held their grasp, and Miphie sensed her concentration slipping as the popping and snapping became unbearable.

     She hissed. Her damaged fingers could not maintain their tether with the fungi. The energy exchanging between them quivered and popped, like a frayed wire.

     “Please,” she gasped, her eyes snapping open, “Edith…”

     The Kyrii took Miphie’s outstretched hand and placed her own free palm on the chanterelle. Their fingers intertwined, and they formed a circle. Miphie released a shaky breath. The quivering slowed, the link was steady once more. Edith’s presence was an anchor, mooring her and guiding her all at once. The snapping persisted, insistent and strange, like shattering bone. Her blood ran cold, but a burning terror settled in her belly. As the mycelia untethered from the flowers, Miphie felt as though she were losing something essential. Some part of herself was being torn away. She squeezed Edith’s hand.

     “I’m here,” Edith said softly, squeezing her hand in return. “And you are here too.”

     And then it stopped. And the space beyond the feathery ends of the mycelia wisps became a void.

     Miphie blinked her eyes open, shivering. She could only distinguish Edith’s silhouette in the darkness. “I think it worked,” she said.

     With the help of a luminescence spell, they picked their way back to the slumbering form of the Garfir. Was it her imagination, or had the penumbras’ gleam dimmed? If she had successfully unmoored the flowers from the forest, then their hold over the Garfir should have weakened as well. But the creature did not stir.

     A wave of panic crested over the Draik. If the Garfir did not wake, then the forest was doomed. She had told her father they would be back by sunset. She could see him now, pacing along the tree line with Vaso, deciding to push his way into the gloom. Her mind spun frantically: if the Garfir did not wake, then the penumbra would thrive, and her father would fall to the somnolence—

     She felt Edith’s hand graze her icy wrist.

     “Miphie,” she whispered, “you said the Garfir was a part of the forest. Was the forest. Can you revive it?”

     She let herself be guided towards the Garfir’s great head, where she could feel it exhale weakly through its nose. Revive it. She touched a hand to its muzzle and did the only thing she could:

     “Anumatum, Garfir.”

     At first, nothing happened. Miphie held her breath. Her fingers ached, but she pressed them against the Garfir. Please wake up, she pleaded. Anumatum…

     She imagined herself a root, anchoring the Garfir to its source of life. She was its mycelium.

     A memory pooled before her eyes. She was in the school conservatory, the ravaged stems of yarrow and nightshade in her hands. For the very first time, she performed the homunculus spell on the plants, hopelessly imagining their tangled roots and vascular paths as extensions of her own self. Insisting on every flimsy connection tethering them to her hands. Begging them to tell her how she could heal them.

     And oh, the plants had responded in kind. She had poured her warmth, her lifeforce into their mangled roots, into their stems, their leaves, their petals, and she had invited them in. Lights had blotched behind her eyelids, like fireworks, and the herbs had pulled their strength from her hands. And the torn leaves had healed, and the broken petals had fallen, new ones taking their place. And as Miphie had eased them back into their planters, into the earth, she could feel their fluttering energy, and she hadn’t realized it then, but she knew it now:

     She was meant to use this magic. This power belonged to her and trusted her, and with it, she could restore that which had been lost.

     The thrum of the Garfir’s heartwood became steadier, clearer. Miphie surrendered to the pulse, offering what little power she could through her hands, feeling the energy within the Garfir strengthen just as her hold was slipping.

     Then, the beast yawned.

     Miphie sprang backwards, releasing her hold of its maw. Two enormous eyes like moons blinked open, bathing her in silver light. She swallowed and stepped backwards again, directly into Edith. It was uncanny. Those celestial eyes were blank, and yet they contained cosmic depths. They reminded her so much of the Ghost Ixi’s unblinking stare.

     The Garfir rose to its full, terrifying height, and the ground shuddered. The penumbra vines clinging to its sides stretched and snapped, showering the two awestruck girls in a flurry of iridescent petals. Miphie fixated on its scorpionesque tail, which swished hypnotically from side to side. She realized her legs had tensed, desperate to flee before the beast lashed out.

     The air began to rumble. Or was it the Garfir?

     “I think it’s purring,” Edith hissed next to her. She watched the creature with a similar mixture of bewilderment and wild terror.

     The Garfir kneaded the ground with its paws. Its stone claws scraped against the Earth. Then it turned and approached the nearest tree, its scapulae slinkling like two great shields on its back. It rubbed its sides along the fossilized bark, snaking its tail around the trunk. The gesture struck Miphie as nurturing. They watched, well out of its path, as it repeated this action along every old-growth tree in the sacred grove. And slowly, delicately, under the glow of its celestial eyes, they witnessed the budding leaves and fronds appear along the branches, and the scale of new bark creep over petrified wood.

     “Twelve heroes… It’s reviving the trees.” Edith turned towards the Draik, giddy: “Miphie, that was incredible!”

     Miphie, for her part, blushed. She was still reeling from her revelation, delirious and exhausted beyond measure, her spell having cost every ounce of strength from her muscles.

     The Garfir sniffed the air and descended its steady gaze upon them. It blinked, slowly, and then padded towards the creek at the entrance of the grove. Miphie understood they were being summoned to follow.

     For every tree it brushed past, new leaves emerged, creating a verdant path for them to follow. It led them back to the clearing where they had first discovered the penumbra. But they were much too late: the moon had risen to the centre of the meadow, and the blooms leaned into its glow, sparkling with vivacity. Their lunar-kissed petals shimmered in the breeze. Skirting the edges of the field, the Garfir began bunting the decaying trees, its winding scorpion tail arching through the branches.

     “Miphie, look.”

     There, in the dead centre of the clearing, the Ghost Ixi gazed at them imploringly. She opened her arms, gesturing to the flowers that surrounded her. Then, she vanished.

     “Edith,” Miphie stammered. “How can we stop this?” The task at hand seemed monumental: the blight had to be expelled from the forest lest the somnolence return, but how, when Miphie could not risk casting an anumatum spell on them? She wasn’t strong enough. Not yet.

     The Kyrii eyed the surrounding trees. Flecks of living colour had begun seeping into their pale trunks. The Garfir’s waking presence alone seemed to be reviving the forest, and the invasive sprouts shrunk away from its proximity.

     “I have an idea.” She tightened her grip on the silver lyre. “We will animate the trees. Seal up the clearing and any other clearings in the forest so that the penumbra can never thrive here again.”

     Miphie felt her chest tighten. “I… I can’t.”

     “What? Why not?” Edith watched her quizzically. Her expression was not unkind.

     “What about… the other flowers? The wild Aurora Lilies need the clearings to live too. If we close them up, we’ll be destroying their habitat.”

     Edith pressed her lips together and considered this. “Look, I understand,” she said, “it’s a difficult line to cross. But you saw firsthand what uninhibited penumbra does to a forest, to a village. If we don’t act, they’ll only come back more resilient than before. It would only be a matter of time before the Garfir fell asleep again.”

     Miphie pressed her arms tightly around her chest. She nodded softly, but couldn’t pry her eyes away from a cluster of closed Aurora Lilies growing nearby.

     “What I said earlier—about you not being fit to use your power—I didn’t mean it. It was… in the heat of the moment. And I admit, I’ve been jealous. But I’ve seen what you can do with your abilities, and they’ve only grown more remarkable since I arrived. So please,” she said, her voice dropped in quiet resignation, “we need your power right now. To save your home.”

     Miphie laughed, but the sound was soft and strangled, “thank you for saying that. You’re so…” her voice wavered, “you just keep surprising me.”

     “Why, because of that time I made you fall into a pond?”

     “No! Well, maybe. But… since the first year at Academia I always thought you were so… unreachable. You and your friends always behaved like you were so much brighter and better than everyone else. I—I hated seeing you on campus. But I see now that that’s…” Miphie shook her head, wishing she could find better words to explain how she felt. “You’re kind.” As soon as the words left her mouth, she wished she could take them back.

     Edith watched her for a long moment, and a small smile tickled the corners of her mouth. “Thank you, Miphie.”

     “I wish we could have been friends. At school,” Miphie uttered like a secret.

     “We could be friends now.”

     The Garfir growled, the sound resonating from deep in its chest, breaking them apart. Edith held up her lyre:

     “Right,” she cleared her throat quietly, “I can make the trees spread their roots and their branches with this.” The instrument’s silver coating glinted in the moonlight. “But I can’t reach the entire forest with my music… You can help with that.”

To be continued…