Epsilon Twilight
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55. Flower
🕑 Added 2023-08-28 11:12:16 +0000 UTCA righteous tall flower graced Aloe’s sight.
Righteous, the word felt more than appropriate for the straight and blue plant. In just a few hours after she went to sleep – albeit more than normal as she went early to bed the night prior – the blue sprout had fully grown. She had once expected the Flourishing Spring to be a tree judging by the vitality it had needed to infuse it.
But no, the Flourishing Spring ended up being a gorgeously colossal flower.
Looking at its base one could already tell it wasn’t a normal plant, if the blue color of the stem wasn’t enough of a clue. From the base of the Flourishing Spring, a bunch of petals bloomed in a shape vaguely reminiscent of a bowl.
The stem wasn’t as simple as having a different color, though. The stem of the flower was laden with thorns and a few leaves, the build of the plant had a striking resemblance to that of a rose, even if they had nothing to do with each other.
At the top, the petals shone brightly. The Flourishing Spring was fully blue, but most of the shades it had were dark enough that they could be confused with green. That wasn’t the case with the petals. They donned a beautiful icy blue color, and they were shaped like a typical flower cup.
The more Aloe looked at it, the more she thought how closely the Flourishing Spring looked like a rose. Sure, the base was different, donning petals of the same color but of a different shape than those at the pistil, but the resemblance overall was uncanny.
It was as if someone had cut a rose and tainted it blue.
Aloe approached the fully grown evolved plant in pure fascination. Not only the plant was astonishingly beautiful, but its height alone was worthy of admiration. While not quite as tall as Aloe – which wasn’t a difficult task to accomplish to begin with – the flower easily clocked one meter in height.
If Aloe didn’t get the same mystifying aura she had gotten from the ter’nar with the Flourishing Spring, this fact was enough to make a scholar convinced this plant wasn’t ordinary. How could a flower grow this big after all? Most were barely taller than a hand, and the tallest ones Aloe had seen were maybe the size of her forearm.
In a certain way, it was terrifying how the Flourishing Spring could stand upright with a stem so thin compared to its size. A simple breeze felt like it would knock it over.
Adulterated in fascination, Aloe approached the flower and very carefully she caressed the stem with a single finger.
“Ouch!” And her mind instantly cleared. “Nince-damned heavens, those thorns are vicious!” No blood poured from her cut instantly, but the skin around it was irritated. “It isn’t poisonous, is it?”
Fear bloomed in Aloe’s mind. Children's tales filled her thoughts, she recalled how her father would sing of plants used by the assassins to make poisons. And some of them were common ones at that.
Without doubting it for one second, Aloe treated the wound as if it was a snake bite. She viciously sucked on the cut, opening the shallow wound and making it far worse, but that was preferable to poisoning. Aloe sucked and spat on the ground multiple times before stopping. She didn’t feel any poison, all the pain she was feeling was from her forcefully opened cut that now was pouring blood everywhere.
“Ugh...” Aloe groaned as the color of her finger shifted from pink and brown to a vibrant red.
With her healthy hand, she reached for the satchels on her waist. Those weren’t just for decoration. Aloe took out an old but clean piece of cloth and swiftly tied it around her finger. The white fabric dyed red in a matter of seconds.
“Note, whilst working with Flourishing Spring wear protection,” Aloe added as she squinted her eyes. More in annoyance than pain.
Then a rogue thought infiltrated her brain.
It wasn’t a bright idea, quite the opposite in fact, but Aloe was nonetheless obliged to try so. She sat down on the cobblestone path and closed her eyes. Even with days of practice, she had yet to accelerate the time it took her to change the flow of her vitality. It felt like doing so would take years of practice, and that made her uncomfortable.
She had years before her, but she was young, and therefore, impatient. Aloe didn’t want to wait for years to see her progress, she wanted results now.
After what felt like an eternity of introspection and darkness, though it was closer to five minutes, Aloe shifted the flow of her vitality, changing her internal infusion from ‘none’ or ‘default’ – she had yet to assign it a definitive term – to ‘toughness’.
“This is like what Mom says, humans are the only beings stupid enough to trip on the same pebble,” Aloe commented as she tripped on the same metaphorical pebble.
But unlike the saying, this time her skin didn’t tear.
“Oh, that’s a funny feeling,” Aloe said as she rubbed the prick. “I can feel the thorn clearly, it’s very spiky, but it’s not hurting me. Hmm...”
And then she continued to play with the spiky protuberance more than she would have liked to admit. It was somewhat intoxicating, a normal person would have been bleeding to death by now, but she was impervious. A sense of power and superiority washed over her.
It was... exciting.
In her trance, Aloe slid her finger down the stem slowly. The thorns tickled her fingertips, a funny feeling indeed. It was now that Aloe was noticing how wet the surface of the stem was. The greenhouse wasn’t dry, but it wasn’t exactly humid either. And Aloe didn’t water the plants enough for them to waste moisture with trivialities. As Aloe’s fingers reached the base of the Flourishing Spring’s base, she found the source of the wetness.
Aloe frowned as her fingers touched a cold liquid.
“Oh.” She removed her finger at looked at their tips. “Yep, that’s definitely water. But how...”
The questionable gardener knelt down and inspected the cup that was formed by the blue petals of the underside of the Flourishing Spring. Not only the cup was, indeed, full of water, but also watertight. It wasn’t losing anything.
Aloe frowned even harder and rubbed her good hand all over the dirt surrounding the plant.
It wasn’t wet.
All the water was contained inside of the cup, and not a single drop was spilled on the ground.
“Where did this water come from?” Aloe said as she stood up and dusted her knees. “I surely didn’t water it before it gained this cup, so the plant must have put it there... somehow. Did it take it from the ground or...”
As if the flower had divined Aloe’s thoughts, the Flourishing Spring kicked into motion.
The evolved plant started jerking slightly, rocking back and forth, and out of its pistil, water spurted. The discharge was sudden and sporadic, Aloe took a step backward as she feared the secretion may splash on her face, but it ended up being more controlled than it seemed.
All the water, no matter how chaotically was expulsed, ended up on the collected by the base cup of the Flourishing Spring. Not a single drop spilled, Aloe checked.
“Well, that answers my questions.”
Aloe looked at the puddle generated on the base of the plant. It was perfectly crystalline.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this, but... oh well, for science I guess.” Famous last words, were her last thoughts as Aloe grabbed a scoop of water with her good hand and promptly drank from it. “Mmm... cold. If this proves not to be a poison, then it’s very good water.”
Not only the water was clearer than glass and cold like ice– which was blessing-worthy in the desert – but also delicious.
“Should I boil it before consumption though? I know that you have to do that with oasis and river water, but... does that apply to water that comes from a magic plant? Hmm... that also raises another question. Is the Flourishing Spring reusing water like a fountain or... is it generating it?”
The words that came out of her mouth were stupid or borderline insane, maybe both, but it was true that evolved plants had shown very curious properties.
To test her ideas, Aloe carefully scooped the water out of the Flourishing Spring’s base cup, not letting a drop inside. And she poured the recovered water into the amphora she was going to use to water the plants in the greenhouse, so now there wasn’t even water in the ground. The last time she watered the Flourishing Spring was a day ago after all.
“Now, let’s wait.”
It was time to see real magic.
****
You can look at the Art section for a picture of the Flourishing Spring.
Comments
Alpenmann
Thanks for the chapter.
