The next day and a bit is a wide curve of mainly silence, trying to recreate the runes she knows without guidance and getting to stew on her own thoughts. Without the sounds of the demon, Thalia's thoughts stay mostly her own, still loud but now self destructive as she constantly gets the urge to go back without the information. 

But she has fire bubbling in her gut like stress, forcing her steps onwards to see this whole thing done before she meets up with Honey again. Hunger is something that is chewing at her, though she did trade mending the energy circuit on a carriage for some dried fruit. The looks of disgust she had from those inside had her wishing she had not stopped though, even though it, and a vision-headache had combined to help her learn the demon rune for levitate. Fire, cease, levitate, very useful - honest.

She had cross back along the river more upstream from Natare, a natural stone bridge worn through rock over thousands of years, something that had reminded her of Xylos for a mere moment as she sought to encompass it in her mind.

Back into the Forbidden forest had led her past a massive tree stump, covered in moss and growing green through the gaps. It had a hut built into its hollow and the whole thing stunk of magic, but witch magic. Thalia grumbles, remembering each of the ladies she has met and decides to stay clear for the moment - even as her goal is going to take her back to the bookstore of Mrs Vesperine. 

She makes a very quiet past the hut, expecting at any moment a witch to burst from it and challenge her for existing, even as wet leaves and mud are just making her day. But then she is through and her path takes her towards the grove.

If the forest was lush and green, then the grove is hardy and tough, everything here is born to not just withstand fire but to thrive from it, and so is completely unlike the forests she leaves behind. Many of the plants hide among the forests of her journey in greener variants, however the black stumped and needle like round masses of one of the trees just defies sensabilities.

The whole place has a darker tone, like the moisture has just been ripped from the air, even as the grove follows a scar like pattern across the landscape. It dips in the more she walks, and the land beneath her is rocky and jutting. And in the centre is a Sakura tree, growing haphazardly upon a mass of displaced stone, except where the one in Natare is green and recently blooming with pinks blues and purples, this one is all black. Black trunk, black branches, black leaves, black petals. It weeps like unholy tears down the stone and into the hole that sits at its base, and Thalia knows this is the healing the land has done since the firestorms of her visions in the pool.

She passes grey barked paperbarks, twisted in their growing as they try to push through the heavy stony foundation, roots curling up like fingers that push into the ground for purchase as their 'skin' peels as they grow. 

Even the stone is blackened here, apart from flecks of red that stand stark through the stone like scars where things refuse to grow. She avoids stepping on those, for while part of her is curious, there are some signs that are so much 'do not touch' that even she knows not to try.

She touches the sakura tree, circling it slowly until she sees a small blackened stone that has slightly cracked to reveal the natural color beneath but the scorch lasting at least an inch through the surface. This would be proof enough. She has been here, she can show Mrs Vesperine that she can leave... but there is that hole. She could see what she could find in the area that is not collapsed, yes?

She breathes deep and then pushes herself into the hole beneath the black sakura, strutting making themselves known in their charred stability.

Even broken, the hole is not natural, like her sunken tower is it entirely built into the earth like someone pulling at a tear with their fingers.

She sees metal cables looping the down the sides of the tunnel, coming to little devices, that look broken and warped at regular intervals. They are completely unsalvagable now, but they were something - once. 

Eventually the raw face of the rock wall replaces the hewn stone, wooden shuts still holding everything together, the unnatural squareness of each wooden beam causing her to pause to rub her hand across it to feel its torture.

She can feel mages past would have come here to try to make something grow from these dead beams but this place is so antithetical to the foliad way that nothing could have come from said action. Nothing but grief anyways.

Fallen stone, charred black, blocks her path, scarred again with that red veiny cuts, and she can almost see a way through. She digs her feet in, widening her stance as her calloused and untended to feet scrape the stone as she reaches to tug a loose shard free and drag it in infernal lines until the levitate rune marrs the surface of one of the larger pieces over an area not marked with those red scars. Sparks fly from the rock with each stroke of her shard, peppering along her feet and ankles until they char in a way that reminds the eyes of scales.

Thalia slaps her hand to the rune, instinct more than requirement as the intent causes the rock to rise, leaving her enough room to squeeze through as she removes her hand. 

She sees branching paths now but continues down the larger central path, noting that the red scars get more obvious the more she progresses. Soon she has to enable her light circuit just to move, the pale green glow contrasting the walls around her.

She can't even illicit a response when she hears the voice again. <Careful. The powder in those cracks is toxic.  I don't want you disturbing centuries of rest just because you could not walk softly.>

<And it is harder to get me to do what you need if I'm dead.> She thinks, good will temporarily gone between them, as even as avoiding one rock ends up with the other slicing across her back, tearing the dress and into her skin as well. She'd need to mend that, else she'd only have one academy-worthy dress to wear.

She can almost feel the call of the thing she is seeking to find, the clue as to what she is supposed to resist. She finds it finally around the next bend, body aching and the cut on her back just stinging. 

Her hands dig into rumble scattering the edge of the tunnel, avoiding the patches of red as powder nether-less flows over her fingers, numbing them, burning them, leaving them withered and calloused as she keeps digging with will more than strength.

<You realise that finding whatever is proof you can't leave alone? That all you had to do was reach the tree and go?> She keeps digging, following the call, up to her wrists now. <You are damaging yourself. What do you expect to find? Proof of humans? Proof of a grand conspiracy? I'm calling someone. I'm getting you help.>

Xylos goes silent and still she digs, mind focussed on her new relic, on her rings, on all the discoveries she's made off her own back and how this will be the same, a victory. And yet, the more she digs, the more nothing she comes across and the more the feeling of certainty begins to fade. Will her moment of sureness of wanting to do what she wants be the thing that does her in?

Hands curl around her and pull her up slowly, carefully, too much hair framing the world as dark skin wraps hers, even as gloves are the things to touch her hands, even as they wither from the contact. 

"My sisters twisted in your head, stoked and smothered that flame of yours so often you don't even know what it is like to burn properly. Shhh. We'll get you back to my cottage, get some soup in you and have a talk, you and I. Does that sound nice?"

Thalia briefly struggles, knowing with her heart if she just dug a little longer she would find what she needs to prove to everyone she can be trusted with the path she chose. And then she smells rich spices and the world grows dark

She wakes to her hands in a bowl of thick warm fluid, submerged almost to the elbow. A cauldron bubbles beside her and Thalia realises she is propped up with so many pillows. 

"If I keep collecting troubles someone is going to owe me. But whichever of my sisters put that lure there was cruel. Especially with all this." She moves and feels something around her middle and that she is in a different dress. "You are about my size and I can call an old friend to me."

For a moment Thalia is tempted to look for a Br1n terminal but then realises magic and witchcraft. She reaches for her circuits to find her arms scrubbed clean even as the skin that she pulls from the fluid is pock marked with tiny scars. She curses and returns her hands to the liquid even as her gaze takes in the cottage.

Thalia really pays attention to Astrid the witch, noting the grace at which she moves around her space. "How did you know to help me? I assume you protect your mind against Xylos and similar."

"Oh dear, your demon was loud and messy and tried screaming through my divination table. He is now nursing some burns of his own, but he is a big boy. He will heal." Astrid is practical in her tone but regal in her look - even with the cloth tied around her forehead to try and pull her massive mane back for a moment. She seems to be making something in a tub of clay like substance.

"What is that?" Thalia asks with a hungry tone to her voice.

"I would say your thirst for knowledge will cause you damage one day, but Don't Move, that day is too late." Astrid's chide has Thalia put her hands back into the salve before her, noting how bone like her arms still appear to be.

"I'm going to help you. But I'm going to slow it down. You are going to stay with me a touch, I'll have your garden moved here and you'll do some practical magic until you learn a touch of patience. Not servility, just the ability to be content in moving the speed you need to. Do I need to bring anything else from your home?"

Thalia bites her lip. "Can I get my relics and research notes?"

"When your arms heal I will send you with my helper and you will do all the things you need to."

Thalia sighs, shaking her head. "I never got proof for Mrs Vesperine."

"That is a task best left in the to do list for now. We have to focus on your healing for now."

Learning to heal hasn't been a straight forwards thing for Orion. Not since the fire. Sabotage.
He had spent way too long discovering all the failures in his tower and his body, and the agonising pain in his face, ribs and down his leg. He'd tried to get his best researchers on the human medicine needed to fix him, take him back to the best he could be and.... nothing.
"The body will heal by itself" One had said.

"The best we can do it stop body-rot." Another had offered as answer.

Expert after expert after expert and nothing could do better than the backwards magic and potions from Levis.

The academy had offered things that could numb the pain, and stop things getting worse, but no one could heal him, not back to before. Same as his tower - they could grow atop but nothing would stop that ugly scar reminding him with angry frustration that he wasn't good enough.

He looks at the holo of his parents, so loving, so successful and he is reminded how the last discovery that had brought VRPI success was theirs. They had also traded for the funding to make the Crystal Spires the magnificence it was today - was three weeks ago. But they had funded the Sky Terrace - and taken VRPI right to the edge of owing someone else and letting the outside world see in to this den of failure.

<You could let me in. I could help your organisation. You might even feel a little less pain if someone was sharing your mind.> Xylos says, the presence has been with him since the fire, prodding and poking away to seek a way out of the encagement he has let slip he is in.

<The day I trust you, is the day nothing else works. And I have so many other things to try before I get there, but keep selling your wares Xylos, I'm sure someone will pick up.>

So he had invited an apothecary in from Saburra, more costly than using the one here, but the local woman was rumoured to be a witch, and with how his company bent the natural order, risking that was less safe than waiting a day or two.

The days of healing that followed were filled with judgement and potions and masks, and almost a nice night out watching a fashion show, he had even worn his nicest outfit, and a custom made mask filled with a salve that helped with his puckered face. The cane had been a new and gloriously painful thing, but it must be better than the prosthetic Verdan Blackwood was forced to wear, even if walking constantly pulled that 'healing' skin in his leg in new and gloriously painful ways. But the night out was mostly nice until the end, and he had only been forced to see the human cause of his pain from far away.

The next morning he had contacted the designer and ordered a new suit in the foliad style, his human obsession cooling under the salve being rubbed into his leg every morning by someone he had to hire. Shoes were just not a thing anymore with the way his toes had fused wrong in the heat, and he had donated those to one of the market stalls just to get away from the imagery of it all.

Things just seemed to be growing back wrong - not unnatural, burls and ugly bits in nature were natural, but Orion had always felt he was above all that, and it was humbling knowing that he wasn't. He also brought in a combat mage, someone to teach him how to move again.

He'd also started visiting Moonlit Melodies again, taking the long walk from his estate or the tower down to Deluna's place, to listen to her play, to relax in the music and the tea and the calm. Deluna had even made him a tea mixed with Moonflower extract - a lovely night of psychedelic visions, but also a complete absence of the pain that was slowly just becoming part of his life now. He could not stay in that magical place, even less than he could take up the honeyed offerings of Xylos. But visits, visits were ok.

Orion had heard of Thalia's fleeing into the forest and that had put a dampener on all his plans, his body healing to a stable pain that would still be tended to, but not have the uncertainty of what comes next - these scars and pain would just have to be a part of him now. 

But with the tower like it is, the next week is just Orion learning how to deal with the pain. He had hired a young combat mage from the academy to work as his physical therapist, Cirice, and they had experimented with many mobility aids and magic spells before returning to the cane and a nightly dose of the apothecary's salves. 

It wasn't a fix, but more and more Orion Valtor was having to learn that fix was not going to be the message going forwards - well apart from eventually getting VRPI back to prosperity, that needed a hard fix.

But now Thalia was back, refreshed and getting in contact with people and so L-dlew1se sends Orion a message that Thalia is looking for him. He sets a meeting in the garden for later that evening, certain neither of them want to be near the towers, and sets about seeing if he can talk to Verdan or the academy.

An afternoon of messages, and painful walks between offices to attempt to spritz palms, leads to the depressing answer - co-mentorship. The fire has burnt away alot of the image of prosperity that VRPI used to represent and trading for the freedom of Thalia had been, painstaking. Still, every instinct in Orion said that Thalia would build or discover something that would bring them back to prosperity.

Still, hobbling back to his mansion on his cane, the salve wearing off, he sees a small little floating lantern stall on the side of the walkway. He takes short steps over, soon leaning against the support struts of the stall. A small wizened man looks at him with a mix of pity and knowing and a part of him is tempted to return to his old mask of sly aloofness, but his leg is killing him and all he can manage is a bitter smile. "I don't remember this on my way home last week." Orion starts, feigning disinterest in one of the smaller lanterns just bobbing around behind the older foliad. Orion felt old sometimes, but this man oozed ancient wisdom, and it sent rot-tremors through his soul.

The old man just grinned, popping the collar of his maroon jacket that traced a way in double breasted way down his chest and gave Orion further envy issues. "I move to where I am needed, Mr Valtor. You're still so determined to enforce your way on things you'll resist the very magic of our own realm. Humanity is not going to bring you the joy you need - creativity is."

"And what do you know of the creativity in my life?" Orion growls out, sore and tired and feeling the skin pinch in his jaw the more he scowls and just wanting to get away from what's causing that now but stuck due to 'politeness'.

"I know word on the wind was you were dating the most famous bard on Levis. I know you keep hiring art students to construct things for you - for trades. Yet here you are, with your company and your cane and a sour look on your you."

"And you think just indulge in creativity?" Orion says with a tired scoff.

"You have grown up in a place that is not of the world you live in, not even the coastal towns, or the river settlements. Nothing like what your family has built itself around exists in this world, and alone, and without the community that our world builds - you must be so lonely. You haven't even asked for my name Mr Valtor, so yes - embrace community. Embrace art! Actually look at all the works inside your home and really think about what you want to bring to this place. Then maybe you'll appreciate all the privilege you have in your life and know how to go forwards."

Orion pauses for a moment and thinks, and before he is done, a gourd filled with steaming tea is pushed into his free hand. "Green. Drink. I'll not have you faint at my stall."

"Thankyou Mr Kaito."