Cultivating Plants

Rani pouted when Aloe told her she wanted to go to her greenhouse for a short vacation, but she didn't shoot her petition down. All the constant abuse had seemed to make the emir more… helpful. At least she wasn't on her or Lulu's throat now, that was all that mattered to Aloe.

As her liege granted her a full week of holidays, Aloe disposed herself to make the most out of her outing. Going out to the desert only for Fatima's antics wasn't precisely efficient, so she had Lulu gather more new seeds and also a pot with some soil.

That latter one she could have obtained in the greenhouse, but she evaluated that different soils may lead to varying results in experimentation.

The day past her encounter with the assassin was already the time to go out. She traveled light as always, maybe bringing more food variety as jerky, pita, and cheese became loathsome after a few days, but they were the travelers' preferred food for a reason.

Armed with food, water, seeds, and some treats, Aloe marched early in the morning.

She was partially displeased to become aware of Fikali's apparent decline. She had been painfully aware last time of her decline in age, even when she originally bought it, but it was becoming more apparent with each passing visit.

"Perhaps I should leave you on the oasis and come back by myself." Aloe offered the dweller once they stopped for the first time.

"Wro?" Fikali moved her head away from the pistachios scattered across the rock they rested on.

"Yeah, I don't know how I'll come back if that's the case, but you are wasting away on that stable. I would prefer to have you free and happy surrounded by lush grass until the end of your days."

"Wrooo!" That final statement made the dweller happy, and Aloe couldn't help to smile.

Such a simple gesture, yet Aloe couldn't recall when the last time she had done so. It feels like it has been awfully long. Her life hadn't been filled with happiness as of late. Even the precious metals that had energized her when she was little were nothing more than rubble to her now.

In the eyes of Aloe Ayad, even gold had lost its luster.

Because her body was perfectly healthy, even if she was unable to walk, Aloe infused Fikali with haste and she donned toughness. Now that her vitality was around the mark of five adults, the bumps the dweller encountered were only a vague suggestion on the back of the scribe's mind.

Fikali may be growing old, basically near her life's midnight, but a dweller's eagerness to cross the desert couldn't be underestimated. Especially with haste boosting her speed.

Aloe's lack of knowledge on external infusions – or rather, the flowing stance – made it so she was unable to ascertain how much of a boost the dweller benefitted from the haste infusion. The scribe herself would be six times as fast with her own stance, but the same couldn't be said for the monster.

Alas, the real number was beyond her for a lack of proof.

So many things to experiment with, yet no chance to do so. Time, she had plenty of; boredom and suffering were the two words to describe her miserable existence she almost didn't dare to call life, it was the opportunity to use that time that didn't arise.

Her outings, which this had been the only one in months, were the only time she could experiment without risking the sultanzade's overhearing her.

In just four hours, she and Fikali made it to the oasis. A far cry from her original full day of walking. But the scribe was sure they would have taken less time if Fikali wasn't this old.

As no one could watch her now, Aloe allowed herself to awkwardly walk to the shack and leave all the luggage there. She left Fikali to her own devices as she rested for lunch.

Aloe decided to leave the dweller to rest for the day, and she walked herself to the greenhouse when she needed it. She was slow, more than once stopping to catch her breath even if her destination was only a few meters away, but she safely made it.

There were multiple reasons why she wanted to go to the greenhouse this time around. First, to already start with the aphrodisiac production. Second, to get some soil from the parterres. For her experiments, she had bought 'premium' soil which was recently developed by the academic at the University of Sadina, though it was too expensive for grand-scale agriculture, it worked more than fine for casual botany and gardens.

There were two ways to extract nectar from the grace, one less intrusive than the other. As the top of the evolved plant had a cup shape, you could pour the glowing liquid out easily. But that was messy as everything flowed away and a single drop on her skin was enough to get her going. The cultivator had learned that lesson the hard way.

Instead, Aloe just made an incision on the stem where always and the nectar easily flowed onto the mouth of the bottle. And it was way cleaner that way as heavens knew what rested on the surface coat of the cup nectar. Dust for one.

Once done, she carried three flasks of undiluted aphrodisiac and a pot full of greenhouse soil back to the house. Taking advantage of the fact that she was standing up, Aloe picked up the cauldron and dunked it on the oasis. Carrying a full cauldron was hard, or that was what she had expected. She shifted into strength and the weight suddenly became trivial, her strength now far greater than any soldier.

The only real problem was her constant shortness of breath when walking.

"Now that I think about it, I haven't given an Infusion-name to strength. Hmm…" The woman hummed in thought as she walked with heavy feet on the sand. Mostly a product of the cauldron heaving her down. "I'll give it some thought, now I can't be bothered."

If it weren't because she had the foresight to bring some coal, she would now have been forced to go out again and pick up some shed thatch to light the kitchenette's hearth as she found out there wasn't as much fuel for a fire as she thought there was.

After lighting the hearth and leaving the water to boil, Aloe finally sat down with a sigh of relief and began her experiment.

In front of her laid two pots with soil. One normal and the other one an enriched version. But in both of them, a burrowed Blossomflame seed lay inside.

"I'm not sure how this is going to exactly work, so better if I water them first." Aloe wasted a glass of her precious potable water irrigating the two small pots.

As always, she was nervous when practicing new aspects of the vital arts. She would have expected her heartbeat to remain constant as her heart only continued to freeze and petrify as time went on at the court, but the vital arts were an exception. That irregularity in her pulse was perhaps not fear born from the unknown, but the excitement of chartering it.

The girl dipped her fingers in the wet soil, her fingernails slowly scratching the surface until they found a kernel of warmth. Such was the magic of the Blossomflame, able to produce heat out of nowhere.

"Okay, okay," Aloe told herself. "There's no need for intent here, only the manipulation of my inner flow of vitality, and the outer one I want to project. I can do this; I've done so before. It's just a matter to determine what is the prolonged exposure."

Her flow of vitality was unstable, indescribable. Cool at one point, then vicious at one. If there was one epithet of constancy she had to give to the sensation it was: expansive.

It was as if the veins outgrew from her skin like roots and settled on the pot as if she herself had become a plant, expanding as much as possible and consuming the nutrients from the ground.

This was, of course, just a mental image. None of this happened, but the shivers on her skin were very much real to her.

Like the first and only time she had used the flowing stance, Aloe put a cap on the amount of vitality she used. She didn't understand if it was a necessary step of the process, but for the first attempt, it would do.

Now that she had fice as much vitality as when she first poured vitality into a plant, it was trivial for her to drop on the seed a whole human's worth of vitality into the future blossomed Blossomflame.

The triviality of the action scared her and elated her in equal parts.

A part of her told her that no person should have this much vitality, but a more conscious part of her reminded her that her enemies were leagues ahead of her. Unnatural as it may be, accumulating more vitality was the way forward.

Her lack of active concentration allowed her to pour vitality into the seed without much effort. That's the thing, the flowing stance of Nurture is subconscious, whilst the external infusions of Infusion are a conscious effort.

There was still much fog in what unique flowing skills were and how they worked, but it was instinctual to use the one Aloe had originally found whilst practicing with Fatima.

The reserve of one adult's worth of vitality…

"I need a specialized name; this is getting tedious to even think every time," Aloe interjected her own thoughts only to focus once again on the task.

She wielded the massive deposit in her fingertip, allowing the vitality to slowly pour into the seed. Unlike Evolution, she could control the speed, even better than with Infusion, which only planted more seeds of doubt into her theory of the flowing stance and external Infusion being the same.

The Blossomflame didn't refuse the vitality, nor the flow that guided it. There were no visible changes, but Aloe could feel it quite literally at her fingertips.

The seed was growing.

The walls of the spheroid unborn plant ever-so-slowly parted to sprout. But the growth was cut short, even before the faint hint of a sprouting root appeared when the external vitality deposit drained a few seconds later.

"O-kay…" The cultivator added between pants. Not fully out of exhaustion, but it certainly was a part of it. "That was a shitty growth for that amount of vitality… but how much?"

The scribe had little to no knowledge of the aspect of sprouting seed as their natural habitat was many fingers under the soil, but as she unearthed it, she could estimate the growth wasn't as bad as she initially thought.

"Maybe a day of growth?" Aloe expressed with more uncertainty than a strategist watching the fog of war on a map. "Parting from that asspull of a number… I could do a month of growth in a day with enough rest and without even needing vitality pills."

The sheer idea of growing plants in a few hours excited her, but she didn't permit herself to show it. Not until she verified her hypothesis was right. Disappointment could only be born of expectation.

She repeated the same process for the lower-grade soil of the greenhouse, but she failed to notice any visible difference in the growth of the second seed.

"Soil makes no difference, at least in the short term." The scribe noted down. "How about trying the flowing stance in tandem with the accelerated growth infusion? Would it even work, or would the seed repel the vitality as it is already infused?"

So she did that.

Infusing evolved plants was always expensive, but because the base cost scaled somewhat linearly with the final size of the plant, she was able to infuse the flower in a single go without artificially replenishing her deposit after only taking a rest.

As she didn't want to wait more or waste vitality pills – as easily cookable as they were – so she went directly for the forced growth of her flowing skill as soon as she had enough vitality to spare.

The cultivator panted heavily as she transferred her vitality to her fingertip. In less than an afternoon, she had already consumed more than her full vitality, which was led to exhaust her.

But now that her vitality was out, she no longer needed to suffer more drainage in her body and instead steeled her will to force the growth of the Blossomflame seed.

The seed didn't refuse her vitality.

"Good…" The words came muted from her lips. "Does this mean that flowing is not an infusion?"

Plants and creatures – she mostly guessed the last one – could only take a certain amount of vitality, or rather, infusions. Karaim had made a rough guideline, but in summary, external infusions like accelerated growth took the whole space of a plant, whilst simpler ones like drought resistance only took half of that space and allowed for a second lesser infusion to be applied.

Therefore, the inception of her confusion. Accelerated growth was a 'full-size' infusion.

"Well, let's first see if the infusion has affected the forced growth rate."

Like before, she let the flowing stance drown the seed with her vitality. Her fingertip became hotter as the time went on. It only took a handful of seconds for the external deposit she provided the plant with to disappear, but the exchange wasn't without its results.

Aloe frowned and unearthed the seed again, this time she could clearly see signs of early sprouting. And longer ones than she could have expected.

"Two days instead of one?" She guessed basing herself on the fact that accelerated growth duplicated the growth of plants. "I need to test this with the other pot, but before… this batch of aphrodisiac has been in the fire for too long."

Fortunately, judging by the beverage's color, the aphrodisiac hadn't lost any visible potency. Though she wasn't going to try it on herself. She had no energy to deal with the consequences of consuming grace's nectar, nor in the mood to do so.

This time around she had brought dedicated waterskins for the aphrodisiacs, so she poured the finished product into them and then decided to do another batch before it grew dark outside. Maybe it was because she had been able to sit without being thrashed around like a sack for a while under the harsh desert sun, but this time around it was easier to carry the water back to the shack.

Fikali lazily grunted as she passed by her, but beyond bellyflopping once, the dweller was more than happy to stay in her bed of grass. It would certainly beat her stable pen.

With one more pot of diluted nectar boiling, Aloe focused again on her Blossomflame seed experiment. She next experimented with infusing the one in poorer soil with accelerated growth and forcing growth on it, but if there was a difference between the two pots, Aloe didn't feel it.

Not greatly, but she was inclined to believe that the premium soil was producing slightly better results if just to justify her expense.

Now, logic dictated that she should go to sleep after the aphrodisiac started boiling because she had just come from a long and arduous journey and she still had six days ahead of herself, but logic had died with her innocence months ago in a golden palace.

The cultivator decided to push herself and instead see how far she could get the Blossomflame to grow before sleep caught up with her.

Another experiment was to try if using two adults' worth of vitality into forced growth would linearly duplicate the relative growth time, or if somehow stacked synergistically and gave greater values.

Short answer: no.

Long answer: still no.

But she believed it was because she was working with such small quantities of vitality. If her flowing stance skill was the same as the sultanah – which she still had no idea if that was the case – then that meant that the Blood of the Sultanah worked in orders of magnitude greater than her. Whether that magnitude was a deca or a kilo, she couldn't tell. Heavens damn her if it was somehow in the megas or greater.

But unit conversation was something more characteristic of a scholar, not a failed banker.

Further testing was required. And greater vitality quantities were imperative for that.

To not overexert herself – or more than she was already doing – she opted for one adult deposit worth at a time as she had been doing already instead of squeezing her body out of vitality.

Twilight came fast and as the chilly night of the desert threatened her, she decided to pressure herself a bit. She lowered her total vitality to only a tenth – or half of an adult – and then started taking vitality pills.

Because she hadn't had any dinner yet, the pills were hastily processed and consumed by her stomach, regenerating her vitality to one point five adults each time.

Her mathematics professor would kill her with the following sentence as you couldn't split people in half, but she poured one and a half adults into the Blossomflame seed and then consumed another pellet to recover the lost vitality. Only to pour it again.

By now she didn't even need to dirty her hands with the soil as a few green sprouts finally broke through the soil. Still quite pathetic for the sheer amount of vitality she had used, which led her to believe that she was somehow doing it wrong, even if she had no proof to go off.

Hunger still avoided her, perhaps because her stomach was literally full of grass, so she just lit a scribe's light and continued forcing the evolved plant's growth. By now it was taking a full minute for a vitality pill to be fully squeezed out, which made the process painfully tedious.

As no one would force her to wake up in the morning, Aloe just continued pressing on against her best interests.

After all that had happened, not only in Asina but also in Sadina, the scribe found comfort in simply experimenting in the solitude, darkness, and coldness of her stranded shack.

For the first time in a long enough time that she couldn't recall, Aloe… was having fun.

It was an awkward fun. She had never been a joyful person. Because of her privileged yet not fully bourgeois position, she had never made friends. Her fun normally came from crunching numbers on an abacus, but only when no one told her so. Inspecting a bank's ledger was only fun when someone had already gone through it before, not when she was the one redacting it for the first time.

The vital arts were a source of entertainment like any other. All that knowledge accumulated into something greater. Something powerful. Much like the backlogged vitality each time she evolved a plant.

She refused to admit it, but in a very twisted and gut-wrenching way, she had enjoyed every Nurture training she had endured.

But only the vital arts part. She would never lose herself to another person. Staying true to her own mind and heart, no matter how broken they may be, was how she wanted to live.

Without noticing it, Aloe had almost gone through all of her vitality pills. She almost wanted to puke, and by the passing minute, it seemed like a more sensible idea as her stomach was bursting with grass.

It was probably past midnight, but Aloe didn't care. The only real rest she had had was when she poured the second aphrodisiac batch on the waterskins, but as the fire kept going, she emptied one of the good waterskins in a kettle and made herself a tea with dubiously old and dry chamomile.

Probably one of the many seeds in the pantry would work for tea, but she wasn't a teamaker, just a tired teenager with an unhealthy obsession with arcane mysticism and plants.

Tea, as awful as the flavored water was, did help her with her madness outburst. By now the Blossomflame had taken shape and the petals started appearing. Fun fact, early Blossomflame petals were apparently white.

Aloe continued infusing, too tired to get out of her chair, her eyelids too heavy to be kept open. Her flow of vitality was erratic, refilling and disappearing, all of that mystical energy redirected to the equally magical plant.

Her consciousness, much like her deposit, dwindled. Until…

"Hroooo!"

A growl awoke her. Aloe's head unlatched from the desk; a string of drool was cut as saliva had been pouring from her open mouth.

"Eh? I fell asleep?" The scribe mouthed slowly, her eyes blinking heavily still laden with drowsiness. Then wariness settled into her. "Fikali?" She asked. "Fikali?" She reiterated louder. "Is there something wrong?"

The cultivator pushed her chair backward to stand up, but her arms froze as she saw the door of her shack. It was slightly ajar.

She almost didn't react in time, but she had trained toughness specifically for situations she didn't have time for. Something grabbed her head from behind and drove it into the desk.

"Do not resist, Aloe Ayad." A shadowy voice spoke. The epithet was more than adequate, for the voice was undecipherable and foggy as if no person truly uttered those words. "You have made a mistake with your visit."

For a moment she thought the voice was talking about her vacation in the greenhouse, but soon realized she was talking about her visit to the apothecary. As soon as she wiggled her head to see the person who was holding her, it was obvious that it was an assassin.

Shadows oozed from their being, making it impossible to discern their gender, and that was without taking into account their heavy black robes. But one thing was clear, they were tall. And their strength matched their height.

Aloe carefully thought about her next course of action. The assassin hadn't instantly killed her, so that meant they didn't want her dead.

"Who are you?" She asked in feigned ignorance as she internally changed the flow of her vitality.

"You know who we are." It wasn't surprising to find a non-committal response.

"My bad," The cultivator snickered as the assassin continued driving her head into the desk. She hadn't noticed until now, but the shadowy figure had locked her arms behind her back. "I think the better question would be, what do you want?"

"You, Ayad." The assassin answered taciturnly.

"I fear I cannot accept that commission." Aloe maintained a jokester tone. "How about you send a letter to my office, and I will attend you between one or two business days?"

They certainly didn't want her dead going by the shadow's last words, the only thing she could do was gain time. If she escaped from their clutches and shifted into haste, she was sure she could reach Fikali and run away even with her faulty legs.

"Do you think this is a joke?" As soon as she was going to answer to irate them more, the assassin continued. "You have nowhere to come back, Ayad."

The sheer confidence in their voice made her stumble. Whatever they were going to say, Aloe paused to hear it.

"What do you mean?"

"We have sent spies to Asina to poison the sultanah's information networks. For what Aaliyah respects once the sun is up, you, Aloe Ayad, are now an assassin."

Others may have failed to comprehend the severity of the claim, but not Aloe. She knew it well deep in her being what that meant. Aaliyah hated assassins with her heart, she had forcefully burrowed that idea into her body.

"Oh." Aloe moaned in pain.

No… She bit her lips.

"You seem aware of what that entails." The shadow added, their grip on her as strong as before. "You won't be able to hide behind your emir, nor seek refuge anywhere else. If there is one person who hates us more than anyone else, it is Aaliyah-al-Ydaz. And now you've joined that group."

She almost wanted to cry; nausea was assaulting her already.

There was no escape. No hiding. As much logical as Aaliyah may appear to the whole sultanate, Aloe knew she was a creature of raw emotion. What would she do to get her? The sultanah had already processed scorn for her, only letting her away because she was inoffensive. But now that she was an 'assassin'?

At this point, the question wasn't how many resources she would spend to catch her, but what she would do once she was inevitably caught.

Bile gathered in her throat as she realized that the fateful night at Asina would look nothing more than a nince-damned joke in comparison. Her erratic breath and heartbeat threatened to kill her on the spot.

"Have you finally agreed to go out of your own volition?" The assassin asked sweetly, which greatly irritated Aloe.

They had destroyed her whole life with a single lie, and now they expected her to go with them?

She would never be able to see her family again, not Uncle Jafar, not Aunt Mirah, and especially not little and sweet Aya. She would have to abandon her family house, most of her fortune and savings, and any relationship in the palace. The court had been a place of pain and boredom, but she regretted not being able to say goodbye to Lulu and Nesrine. Maybe Idris and Fayruz too, her assistants had been supportive unlike everyone else.

The only saving grace from the outcome was the death of her evolved plants in the house, now thankfully, no imperial would find them.

Aloe laughed at the sick joke, her tone not one of madness but of comedy. Perhaps that was the true madness in herself. That was what it took to destroy everything she and her family had built, a single lie uttered to the right person.

The assassin became irritated, they pushed their brawny arm harder into the scribe's skull, but the time she had been asleep was enough for her to recover her full vitality deposit. Simple attacks like that wouldn't affect a woman with the durability of six men.

She had had a mountain sat on top of her that didn't care if she died or lived. A drug addict that didn't even want to kill her couldn't faze her. And now such a mountain was chasing her, shadows didn't even factor in her thoughts now.

Aloe chuckled again; then finally the assassin's irritation reached its zenith. The moment when their guard was the lowest.

The cultivator shifted into the strength stance and pushed the shadow off with all her might. Not only her hands slipped free instantly with the sudden burst of strength, but she was surprised to find that her neck had more than enough strength to repel the arm pushing it down.

She flayed one hand against the assassin's torso and another on the desk to support herself. The shadow grunted at the inhumanly strong half-assed punch and Aloe was able to stand up. She turned around to face the assassin, but she didn't run instantly. Until she was wielding the speed stance, she would have no luck in escaping from them.

She felt it in her blood.

The assassin was hunchbacked, a hand pressed against where she had hit them. Considering all her strength training had gone to her arms, she couldn't even estimate how deadly one of her punches could be. But the shadowy figure showed no pain, instead…

"You can walk?" Surprise. The assassin professed surprise. "Why didn't you tell me so?"

The words confused the scribe. Why would she have told the assassin stranger that she could walk? Aloe took a step back, her flow already halfway gone to activate the speed stance. If she could make it to the door whilst the assassin was distracted, then it would be impossible for them to get her. She would jump into Fikali and disappear into the desert, saddle be damned.

"I didn't want to do this, I really didn't want to, but you forced me to." The assassin pulled an object from their belt. Aloe's eyes open like plates at the sight.

It was a dagger.

It didn't matter she was impervious to edged weapons when donning toughness, she was but a civilian, and the sheer sight of the weapon made her commit a lapse in judgment, making her rush for the door.

With her back facing the shadow, she didn't see the dagger flying toward her. Only how it punctured the door after it had shallowly sliced her arm.

"Agh!" Aloe grunted at the attack, but she continued moving. It was but a scratch. Speed was almost prepared, she could do it, she could…

Her body slowed down. It didn't take her more than a blink to notice what was wrong. The dagger! She realized. It's poisoned! I have to shift into toughness or… But it was too late, she fell to the ground. She let go of the speed flow and focused on the defense stance. If she died then the increased movement wouldn't do her any good.

"Don't be so scared," The assassin told as they stood over her. "It's only a paralytic age…"

Fire.

The shadow was cut off as flames drowned them.

The assassin screamed in pain for the first time as the searing-hot flames knocked them to the ground. Yet as hot as the flames were, when they reached Aloe in her immobilized state, they felt only warm to the touch.

As surprised as she was, the cultivator knew right away what was happening. The Blossomflame. She was awestruck. Did I manage to grow it enough to sprout flames? Her surprise didn't end there, as she was swallowed by the healing fire – unbearable itch notwithstanding – she found herself able to move.

The fire of a Blossomflame also purges poisons, good to know. As much as she wanted to experiment with the plant's properties, especially the offensive ones as she could finally see them in action, Aloe didn't hesitate to run away at the first opportunity.

Fire may be very painful, but she was aware that it scarcely killed instantaneously. She started limping away from the shack, her body still numb by the paralytic poison even if it had been removed and flew the vitality inside of her to form the speed stance.

The cries of agony of the assassin unsettled her greatly, but she didn't stop. The fire only grew louder and brighter even if her eyes were fully fixated on the oasis.

"Fikali! Girl!" Aloe shouted. "Where are you? We need to go!" The scribe shouted for her mount, but the dweller gave no response. "Come on, this is no time to play hide and seek!"

Aloe wondered for a moment if she should change her internal infusion to acuity to peer into the nightly darkness, but without the speed provided by haste, she was as well as caught. Heavens knew if that was the only assassin.

"Fikali!" She continued shouting as she ran across the darkness of the oasis. Neither the stars nor the moon brought any light, the source of light was that of the bonfire growing in the shack. "Come on, please! I need you! Come out now…"

Her words died as she found the silhouette big lump in the oasis between a few trees.

"No. No, no. Nonononono!" Aloe rushed to the lump only to find an unmoving Fikali. The dweller's leathery coat was cold, and a violent spurt of fire from the shack illuminated now the scene, letting the petite woman see the slice in her dear mount's neck. "NOOooOOOO!"

Her scream was raw and guttural, and her body collapsed on the corpse.

"No…" The scribe let out a whimper. "No…" The tears threatened her vision to become blurry.

The steps she heard behind her impeded her from mourning the loss of her companion and pet as the assassin appeared behind her, their body completely charred yet somehow still moving.

"She didn't have a season more on her body." They said as if apologizing, which only made the rage in her body grow more. "I knew you would have tried to run to your dweller, but that was before I knew you could walk again. Why didn't you tell me so?"

The assassin asked the same question as before, and Aloe still didn't understand why that was supposed to be her problem.

"I'm sorry, little plant." With those words, the assassin collapsed on the ground.

"Eh?" Aloe blinked in confusion; her sights set on the unmoving figure.

Against her better judgment, she crawled to the charred assassin, the shadows now gone from their body. She led her hands to the man's face and neck, and she felt no pulse nor breathing.

"Ah." The petite woman let out a pained moan as she recognized the nearly charred face. She gestured her mouth open again, but no words came out as her throat became knotted. Only tears poured down her cheeks.

For she had just murdered her uncle.

Aloe stood paralyzed in the oasis, soot and blood on her hands, her mind incapable of processing the last few minutes. Behind her, lay the corpse of her trusty and lovely steed Fikali. In her hands, lay the charred and unbreathing body of her Uncle Jafar. Before her, flames grew without a stop, the fire of the Blossomflame unnaturally crawling on the sand and burning everything it found and she owned, shack or greenhouse, the flames minded not.

In a single instant, all she held dear and possessed was gone. Not just the ones the flames had consumed, but those she could never see again. Her family state, her family, her connections, her savings…

No words nor sounds came out of the scribe's mouth.

Finally, something snapped. No healthy body was useful when one's heart and mind were shattered. Something had broken, and its name was Aloe Ayad. Daughter, banker's apprentice, heiress, scribe, cultivator, victim, broken mess, fugitive, and now… murderer.