Demesne Patron EX SS 42 – Trees Are Evil!

Trees are evil. This was just fact. They were wastefully tall for most dungeon farms, and each one took up precious space, soil and sunlight that could be going to valuable, life-giving crops!

Unfortunately—or possibly fortunately—not all trees were created equal. Some did more that just grow wood and make a mess for everyone by dropping leaves all over the place. They could also grow fruit. However, even in this trees revealed their evil by only growing their fruits high up where retrieving them was dangerous!

However, this had long been a solved problem, the meaning one that Taeclas—Tae to most, ‘moonlight’ to her wife—was well used to taming! She only had to look it up in her notebook sometimes!

Life was complicated after all, and always found a way to do almost anything else if you weren’t really careful or really used to letting it do so.

Deadspeakers felt they were justified in believing—and many Dungeon Binders through history had agreed with them—that their magic was the most difficult, complicated, and sensitive of the four. The range of possible applications were so broad there were four distinct disciplines within it, although many liked to say there was only three because… well, it can be argued that there was only so much one can do with dead wood.

Working with dead flesh—and occasionally bone—was both the easiest and simplest to work with, unless one counted working on dead wood, which most don’t. One can either fuse wood to other dead things or collapse it to become denser, but not the other way around.

However, just because dead flesh was easy and simple to work did not mean deadcrafting was the same. Yes, undead were much simplified because they didn’t need to breathe, digest, have functioning excretory systems, but that also meant every single function on them was a meaning that needed to be tamed and balanced. And since all the Life is dead, they can’t be altered to improve or change the function of the cells anymore. Easy and simple, but required very complex whole-corpus meanings that needed to all be placed precisely, including in the brain for rudimentary function.

On another point of the square—or triangle, because dead wood wasn’t that complex unless you were trying to make some kind of pseudo-abomination with it—there’s working with living flesh, which is complex and complicated and have several independently active systems that affect each other. If something was done incorrectly, the effects would slowly propagate and start making the affected area sick, until it started to  affect the entire body. Working on living flesh required one to know exactly what they were doing, where it needed to be done, for how long they needed to do it, what it would affect, and when to stop doing it.

Which is why Shana’s meaning made Tae want to cry sometimes, because how did it do that? Given it’s limitations, the meaning must somehow be referring to the cell’s spirals so it was healing instead of just causing growths of blight and she’d heard of meanings that could do that, but she’d never expected to run into one in this lifetime! Meanings like that required flow diagrams too big to fit in the pages of a book, usually drawn on sheets that were a pace or more wide in really tiny illustrations and sidebar boxes, and had to be tamed over several days because they needed to be exact! And Shana just… touched people, made a face, and then she was done! Sometimes she didn’t even make the face!

Yes, there were stories about Dungeon Binders being able to do that, but there were stories about Dungeon Binders being able to do anything! And yes, Shana was a Dungeon Binder because there was no way any Deadspeaker without a bead in their stomach could imbue that much magic that quickly, but…

Tae decided to just stop thinking about it.

Then there was the last point, which was working with living wood. While many of the complexities that came with living flesh also applied, the metabolism of plants was more forgiving of mistakes, and could survive the use of cruder meanings such as fusing or molding. Their metabolisms would also be accelerated far more than living flesh, with less damage to their spirals.

The last was the skill set Tae had been using to keep herself and her wife fed for the past few years… which was why she was seldom able to stay employed as a carpenter. Fortunately, except for a few exceptions, that wasn’t her lot in life anymore. Now she got to grow crops raise her sweetgrass, and see to it that the evil of trees didn’t intrude on Lorian Demesne’s Dungeon Farm!

Tae knelt at one of the farm’s plots, looking at the little saplings before her. Each was surrounded by large swaths of bare dirt, and small sticks had been used to make a small knee-high fence to keep people from accidentally trampling them. They were a mix of types, although someone—probably Rian—had put up signs on the edges of the plots with drawings of various fruits. There were saplings for hairy blueballs, mikans, golden buds, pink ladies, and happy fruit. With their slim trunks and small leaves, they almost looked like respectable crops and not the beginnings of vile and leafy trees.

And if she did this right, they would stay that way!

The saplings were all shorter than they should be, and it was clear someone was pruning them to keep them at a pace high. Unfortunately, whoever was doing it was getting a bit overenthusiastic, and clearly not familiar with proper pruning practices. They were taking off too many leaves—most of them the new growth that would be on the highest, youngest part of the saplings—and some of the plants were starting to wilt.

Fortunately, she knew how to deal with that. It was an unfortunately common problem in city farms trying to grow fruit, since they sometimes just asked any day laborer to prune the crops, whether or not they actually knew how. Really, just do your own pruning, or at least make sure the one your order to prune things actually know what they’re doing.

First, Tae looked over the sapling with a critical eye, noting where new buds were already forming. Unfortunately, this sapling was still a bit too delicate for her to use notching on it, since it would be so easy to accidentally cut through the whole thing if she used a knife, so she’d need to use magic in this instance. Take deep, even breaths, Tae began to draw in magic as she touched the sapling just above one of the buds. It was a happy fruit—the leaves were distinctive—and she almost claimed everything before she remembered to draw back and only claim one small spot at first. Working with Shana… Shanalorre had really spoiled her, she’d started falling into bad habits. It was all well and good to do that when she had a Dungeon Binder ready to step in and imbue a truly absurd amount of magic into the claim, but she needed to keep in practice!

Taking the slim bone needle that she used as a wand when she was dealing with delicate plants—and these saplings that were less than a year old were still very delicate—Tae carefully touched the tip to a spot just above a bud. She reached through her finger, through the life in her own body, and claimed the life of the bone needle, binding it so she could reach through it and claim the life at the needle’s tip. Controlling her breathing, she imbued a miniscule amount of magic on the spot and carefully sealed the veins of the plant just above the bud, pinching them closed about a quarter of the way through the stem.

That done, she focused on the bud, claiming the life of the growth. Tae very carefully tamed the life of the bud into a meaning. It was a simple meaning, one that didn’t require any specific alterations or making the cell do something different from what it would have normally done. All it did was accelerate the cell’s natural processes, allowing the cell to grow and split slightly fast than normal. It was the basis for the various meanings used to grow crops quickly, the imbuement of magic acting as a catalyst for the cell’s natural alchemical reactions.

It was something Deadspeakers tried not to mention to alchemists, since the alchemists either got upset or started trying to come  up with ways to get alchemical reagents inside living flesh so that Deadspeakers could catalyze whatever process they were trying to react, which only ever lead to the poor test animal getting poisoned.

With the meaning complete, Tae gave it a burst of imbuement but didn’t activate it yet. Instead, she went all over the sapling, finding more buds and carefully repeating the procedure. It was essentially a Deadspoken variant of notching for when the plant was either too immature or too delicate to use a knife on. Severing the vein would cause the flow of sap to stop at the bad, providing ample nutrients for the buds so they can grow more new leaves than they would have otherwise. The meaning insured that they would grow quickly so that when the leave the sapling currently had fell, it would have more than enough replacements.

There are some who would have just tamed a meaning that would induced new buds to form, but this wasn’t an industrial farm, and these saplings where still several years too young to grow fruits. Today, all she had to do was to keep from dying for a lack of leaves. However, in a month or two, she was going to give these things a proper pruning to keep them from growing so tall. Hopefully by the time they started bearing fruit, they would be two paces tall at most and properly shrub-like so all the fruit growing on it could be easily picked.

Nodding in satisfaction, Tae turned towards the next sapling…