FMH ~10!

- Andre -

“This sucks.” Andre petulantly stated as they plodded along the seemingly endless plains.

“Yup.” His teacher agreed sullenly. He had his own reasons.

“Are we just gonna walk forever, or are you gonna actually teach me?”

“If you were paying attention to the land around you, you would possibly notice that you didn’t exactly come through to the safest area in this world.” His new master spat at him. “And you either call me ‘Master’ or ‘Xan’. Here, first lesson. Respect in all things, initiate.”

“Fine, Xan. Are we just gonna walk forever or are you gonna teach me eventually, Xan?” Andre grumpily demanded.

“You know what? I just realized! We can master your powers right now! Surely you can do it really fast, even though no one else ever has without a solid decade of study! Abyss, six times time dilation? Making it one of the most dramatically large time dilation so that you can learn properly? Who needs that? Tell you what, there’s a bugbear tribe over that hill. Go tame them, and learn what they offer the earth. Any questions before you become all-powerful?”

“Yes!” Andre angrily exclaimed. “What… is a bugbear?”

“Hopeless.” Xan sighed and looked at the green-tinted sky.

“Excuse me?”

Xan took a deep breath, “Can you not just wait until we get to a safer place?”

“C’mon man. Something! I’m so ready… I wanna do something cool!” Andre’s eyes were shining.

Xan looked at his pupil, “Do you ever wonder why they didn’t take people so young into training before? You. You are the reason, and are also everything that is wrong with this whole debacle.”

Andre waved that admonishment away, “I’m adorable. C’mon, you know you wanna show me how to blast people.”

“Blast people…? Do you know what being a druid even means?” Xan was working hard to keep his jaw from dropping. “They sent you here with no knowledge? Nothing?”

“Nope. Are you gonna… teach me?” Andre wiggled his eyebrows at the man that appeared to be just barely older than him.

“Fine! Abyss, but you are annoying! Sit down.”

Andre plopped onto his butt with a feces-eating grin spread across his face. Xan snarled at him, “You put the ‘suffer’ in ‘insufferable’. What do you know about druids? What we do, where we go, how our power works?”

“Nada.” Andre smiled cheekily.

“Great. Just great. Our Archmages make a deal to solidify the alliance and save tens of thousands of lives, and yet I’m the one stuck teaching you basic information that every child in my kingdom knows. You’re lucky I can’t die of old age or I’d be really furious.”

“Burning daylight, Xan.”

“Shut it, mouthbreather. A druid is a person inextricably linked to the land, with everything that entails.”

“Such as?”

Xan took a deep breath to collect himself, then spoke with gritted teeth. “Mouth. Shut. A druid can interact with everything natural in the world: dirt, water, metal, plants, natural forces, and animals. With the proper instruction, you can then be useful by interacting with these forces for the good of everyone.”

“Neat.”

“If you say another word, I won’t.” Xan looked at Andre until it was obvious that he was staying silent. Xan calmed himself with another deep breath. “Look… I’m not from your kingdom, but your survival has been entrusted to me. Not only that, but as a druid, you are very needed on our home plane. Do you want to know why there will be people trying to kill you?”

Andre nodded his head with a look of confused horror on his face; the warning about talking seeming to be taken to heart. “You were sent here by your kingdom’s Archmage, right? Where was your Archdruid? The leader of your druidic groves? You can answer this one question.”

“There… isn’t one? The mage guy said I was the kingdom's first druid.” Andre proudly announced.

“So what does that mean for you when you are trained?” Xan made a ‘come on’ gesture.

Andre opened and closed his mouth a few times. “What do you mean?”

“If your kingdom has no Archdruid, and you are your kingdom's first druid…” Xan leadingly taunted the lad.

“Me? You’re saying I’ll be the Archdruid?” Andre gasped as a look of glee appeared on his face. He had just realized that he was even more important than he thought he was!

“Correct!” Xan agreed patronizingly. “Do you now understand why I’m trying to get you out of an area that I’m unsure I can survive in?”

“Got it. Let’s make some tracks.” Andre hopped to his feet and walked in the direction they were traveling.

Xan gasped and put his hands over his mouth. “Look at that, Andre! You are learning!”

“Is your full title ‘Xan the grumpy druid’, or…?” Andre quipped in reply.

Several hours later, trees started appearing on the horizon. Xan and Andre started slowing down when they reached them, and Xan’s face started to relax. He pointed out a house built between a few trees which supported it. “Up you go.”

Xan pulled out a rope ladder dangling from the small building and handed it over. Andre looked at the rope in his hand, then up at Xan. “A tree fort? What, are we stopping for the day?”

“Yes and no. This is where you’ll be living for roughly the next… oh, ten years or so.” Xan grinned at the horrified expression coming from his student.

“That? It looks like it’ll fall at the first sign of wind!” Andre was seething at the unfairness of the situation.

“Would you rather sleep on the ground? I’m sure you’ll survive the nocturnal predators.” Xan offered hopefully.

“You have a sick sense of humor, don’t you?”

“Just move, ya abyssal brat.”

“Fine!” Andre climbed the twisting ladder, squeezing himself into the opening at the top and becoming instantly and thoroughly unimpressed by the accommodations.

“Home sweet home.” Xan fondly stated, climbing up behind him.

“This is… ‘home’?” Andre irreverently scoffed.

“You’ll come to love it.” Xan clapped Andre on the shoulder. He seemed far more relaxed now that they were off the ground. “Took me a while too, a couple hundred years ago.”

“Hundred…! I thought druids were supposed to love nature?” Andre looked at the man askance. “Why are you adamant about getting away from it?”

“Look, yes, I love nature; but nature really loves to kill and eat you. So,” his words were steel, “Let’s stop getting snarky with the guy keepin’ us alive, hmm?”

“I mean… fair enough.” Andre sighed but then perked up and looked over hopefully. “Ready to start teaching me to druid?”

“Wow. ‘Teaching me to druid’. That’s… that's a new one. Yeah, may as well. The faster you learn, the faster I’m free of you. Lesson one: get some food. This is an apple tree, convince it to grow some apples.” Xan ordered his initiate offhandedly.

“Ok!” Andre stared at the tree for a long moment, then looked back at Xan. “How?”

“Establish a connection to the tree, open your mana to the tree, and politely ask it to give you apples. You will be giving it everything it needs to grow them, so it won’t matter that it is out of season. If the tree accepts, it will give you apples. Depending on how much power you give, it will produce more apples. Contingent upon how much it respects you, the tree will give you better tasting apples.” Xan explained verbosely.

“Whoa. That’s a lot of words for you.” Andre earned a glare with his attempt at a joke. “What do you mean by ‘ask it’?”

“If you have mana going into it, the tree will be able to understand your intentions.” Xan replied frostily. “I hope you succeed, as I just decided that you will be getting all your own food from now on. Hope you brought something in your pack.”

“Well, that’s just plain rude.” Andre put his hand on the tree. “How do I open my mana channels?”

“Carefully.”

“You know, the sooner you are done teaching me, the faster you can go back to being a lonely curmudgeon…”

“Insufferable little… you had better knock that off. Respect in all things. This is your last warning. Listen, initiate, mana has certain qualities, and can act like water or gas. Theoretically, it could be a solid, but that has never been seen before. When mana is passed directly, it goes where it is needed in that organism to increase its natural functions.”

“Is this going somewhere, or…?” Andre was getting grumpy from lack of information, and he was hungry.

Xan was visibly restraining himself. “You need to learn patience. That is the art of the druid. Seriously, you don’t understand anything. The backlash of the things you’re asking for could crush you like an insect-”

“Any time now, old man.”

“That’s it! You’re an infant playing with blasting rods! Time for you to be taught respect, since you won’t give it!” Xan glared at the wood Andre was standing on. In an instant, two spikes shot up and impaled Andre’s feet. Andre screamed and toppled backward, but never touched the floor. More wood rushed up, wrapping around him like vines. One went around his mouth, tightly, cutting off his screaming. Andre stared at Xan in horror, appalled and shocked at the sudden brutality.

“I did warn you.” Xan stood up and walked over to the ladder, and started climbing down. “Tomorrow I’ll see if you have a new outlook on being a druid. Until then, think about something for me: you have always been large, yes? Muscular? The girls fawn over you, people laugh at your mindless ‘witty’ banter? Even at your choosing ceremony, you were the ‘extra-special druid’?”

He scoffed and moved downward. “You have no respect for the power you have the potential to wield, and apparently none for me. You won’t die overnight, but you had better decide what kind of person you’ll be. If you choose wrong… I’ll kill you myself and deal with the consequences of that action. The world has no need of a rogue druid, and this place does not suffer fools. I refuse to lose my life trying to teach you. Sleep well, initiate.”

With that, Xan climbed down the ladder fully, leaving Andre with tears streaming down his face, blood dripping out of his feet, and eyes begging not to be left alone.