No matter from what angle Aloe looked at it, the colossal tree covering much of the skyline was the Na'mul Ter'nar, the blue tree that Karaim had evolved whilst he was still alive, with its unnatural spring-shaped and ashen trunk.

  Everything was in flames when I left… Aloe reminisced about that fateful night when her Uncle Jafar was burned to death by the Blossomflame. It still panged her but just knowing that night had been centuries ago dulled most of her feelings. So how is it that not only is the tree alive but this… big?

  "Aloe?" Xochipilli tugged from her dress's skirt.

  "Is there something wrong, child?" She calmly responded, glamour doing her best to hide her true emotions.

  "I… I would like to know that," the boy inquired. "I've been calling you a few times already."

  "Have you?" Her visage still portrayed calmness, but now she was panicking inside. You can't lose your cool this way, Aloe. "I'm sorry then, the sight has been quite astonishing."

  "Yeees, it has been," Xochipilli answered unsurely. "It is a big tree."

  "Indeed, it is a big tree." The two of them remained looking at the mountain of a canopy for a moment.

  "Why is it blue, though?" The boy pointed at the dark blue leaves on the horizon.

  It was a surreal image seeing how the child's hand was incapable of blocking the sight of the tree even if it was kilometers away. It was just that massive.

  "That would be… my fault," Aloe attributed herself the merit. It was better if no one knew of Karaim. And most likely, it was her fault. For years the tree had never grown, so she doubted that it experienced such massive growth in only a hundred times that period. She must have done something without noticing, for she doubted the existence of another eminence in Evolution and Infusion. "One of my experiments, we could say."

  "I could do that then?" Xochipilli's eyes instantly lit up.

  "…Most likely," she replied cautiously. "But it will take time."

  The boy deflated upon hearing the answer, even if it was obvious. He was likely tired of hearing all the time by now.

  Hmm, but what has really happened? The only evolution that I know of capable of such outstanding growth is the Slowtide, and the veritas never said anything about the ter'nar growing to such a degree.

  "For now," she started, "we should get moving."

  "Where to?" Xochipilli asked as he awkwardly lifted the suitcase. It was mostly empty, but it was also as big as him.

  "That we have yet to see," Aloe said as she walked away from the station and her disciple followed behind her. "There are two reasons – well, three now," she said after gazing at the blue mountain, "why I want to be in Sadina, the city we are in right now."

  "Which are they?"

  "First, I used to live here, so I would like to so how the city holds up. But I must say that so far I cannot recognize anything." The vegetable woman sighed as she was unable to point herself anywhere in the city. If I could jump, the aerial sight would give me more context, but… I shouldn't do that. For a lot of reasons. "The second is that tree. I feel a lot of vitality coming from it, and I have heard something about monsters and 'dryads' that should be at the heart of the Evergreen, which should be that tree."

  Aloe's attention was momentarily raptured by a woman sweeping leaves off the street. They were blue. Dunes, the leaves of the ter'nar reach here? And sure enough, a mild breeze showed them how the wind was carrying several leaves. There were touches of green but most of them were cerulean.

  "Oh, it's so beautiful! It's as if it's raining!" Xochipilli commented.

  "Yes, it is quite the sight…" Aloe shared the sentiment, but there was a growing unease in her chest the more she saw the ter'nar leaves around. And it wasn't because she hated to see them treated like trash when she had greatly enjoyed ter'nar tea.

  "What about the third reason?" The boy snapped her again for her attention, even if he didn't notice.

  "The third one… Well, I've managed to identify where they have taken the people of your village, Xochipilli. They should be somewhere in this city."

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  "Really?" The young druid said agape. "Do you think mother and father will be here?"

  "I… sure," she answered with a warm smile.

  There wasn't anything hinting at the opposite, but her innate pessimism was warning her of the worst. Life tended to be… harsh, cruel, odious, and overall, the worst.

  Was I always this negative? Aloe found herself questioning her thoughts. Actually, yes. I think I've been always like this. Oh, well. She groaned and cracked her neck.

  "I still don't know where they could be at, and from what I've heard, they could already be somewhere else. The cotton fields if I recall correctly."

  "Yes, the slavers mentioned them a lot," Xochipilli said impassively. "They would always threaten and mock us about how we would spend our short lives picking up cotton."

  "Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that." Aloe knelt down and embraced the poor child. "There, there."

  The caresses and the soft words seemed to help as emotion came back to Xochipilli's visage. That had been the problem: lack of emotion. Rage and sadness would have been perfect responses, but apathy was the worst one a person could produce as a response to their problems.

  "I don't know where these fields might be, or if your fellow villagers are even there yet, so our first course of action should be to look for a place to sleep in as I investigate." The old druid explained.

  Xochipilli popped his head out of her embrace. "What about me?"

  "What do you mean by that question?"

  "Will I accompany you to your investigations?"

  "Why are you asking if you already know the answer, child?" She patted him.

  "Is that a yes?" He asked hopefully.

  "That's a no," she flickered her finger on his forehead which prompted an ouch from him. "And either way, I do my investigations when you are sleeping, so you wouldn't be able to contribute."

  "I could…"

  "If you are thinking of faking you are sleeping, I will tell you that my senses are sharp enough to tell your heartbeat from all of the other inhabitants in the city from kilometers away." Aloe harshly interjected.

  "I wasn't going to do that…" Xochipilli pouted with an expression that screamed 'I was going to do that'.

  "But you are more than free to accompany me for the other two reasons. First, let us look for a lodge, then we can explore the city."

  Sadina was more alive than the last time she had been here. For her, it had only been years, and whilst that was technically right, in reality, centuries had gone by. The streets were wider than those in Selen, but the alleyways were paradoxically narrower. Of course, it was without saying that the buildings were taller than the frontier town. I guess it's no longer a frontier town as Ydaz covers the whole continent. Nor a town, for that matter.

  Aloe couldn't say that Sadina felt like home, but 'home' wasn't a concept she liked in the first place. Never did, even less so now. The architecture of this unfamiliar Sadina was even more reliant on glass than in Selen, which leaned more into brick than any other material, but the presence of metal couldn't be discarded either. Some of the taller buildings were connected by glass bridges between one another and had some curious sibling contraptions that moved up and down in opposite directions. One moved down whilst the other moved up, and people seemed to use them to travel between the many floors of the outlandishly tall buildings.

  So they've invented a device to avoid using the stairs as buildings got taller and taller, huh? Besides thinking it was ingenious, Aloe wanted to ride one of those platforms that were encased in tubes of glass. They looked like they would provide a great view of the city. An aerial view.

  Wanting to first find a place where they could leave that useless suitcase and rest once night came by, Aloe asked the first person she found.

  "Sorry," she stopped an old man. In her experience, those always provided the best directions. To a 'young' lady like herself, they were quite amenable, whilst old women may act cranky. Though it was more of a fifty-fifty, old people always tended to do that. "Would you happen to know a place where we could spend the night?"

  The old man looked her up and down and smacked his lips making a wet sound. "That building over there is a hotel." He pointed at it with his cane and went his merry way.

  "Thanks!" She shouted even though the man didn't bother to look behind. "People these days…"

  She groaned and noticed something that made her feel miserable. Oh no, that man was younger than me! Aahhhhhh… Aloe avoided a mental crisis by a hair's width, if only because she saw Xochipilli moving in the corner of her vision as he was already moving to the 'hotel'.

  The building proved to be nothing more than a fancy inn. Too fancy for her liking, in the sense that it made everything more expensive. She didn't need to sleep, and Xochipilli had been sleeping on a mattress on the ground these last days, so it wasn't like they didn't need much. Eh, one night can't hurt.

  The single room they rented ended up being one drupnarun a night – or one hundred drupnars as they said on this coinless age – and Aloe wasn't sure if that was a lot or not. She considered it was, but it was a single night, and had already made plans to search for a cheaper place tomorrow, though today she wanted to take things slowly.

  They settled in the single-bed lodging as Xochipilli left the suitcase next to the bed. Aloe took the free time and the lack of people to take undress partially undress so she could take things out of her Slowtide. Mainly money, which she handed to the child as it would be useful to have at hand; the rest of the things that they should have out she placed in the suitcase now that they weren't moving it around.

  "Do you want to go out and do a bit of sightseeing, or do you want to rest? I know the journey hasn't been the easiest." She asked after she put her dress back in place.

  It was inarguably the easiest journey in her life as they had covered hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers in just a handful of days, but she couldn't speak for the child.

  "I want to explore!" Xochipilli responded.

  "Let's do that then!" Aloe answered with a smile. Truth be told, she also wanted to explore this new and unfamiliar Sadina.