Chương 165: Ch157- Druid

After class, Cassian kicked the door shut behind him, dropped his notes on the desk, and sank onto the edge of the bed, holding the edges for his dear life. And just like that, he opened his eyes in a forest. The trees were tall and straight, bark worn pale with age, not even a trace of magic in their grain. Cassian stood still. Or, was standing. Sort of. It wasn't his body. The body he borrowed moved easily,. His staff was fresh, carvings light, not decorative but meant to channel something sharp.

Ahead, weaving through the trees with a quieter step, was another man, older. A druid. That one wore plain robes, cloth layered against the cold, frayed at the hem. His staff was smoothed from age, carved at the top with something Cassian couldn't place. He didn't walk fast. Every few steps, he tapped the ground and let the forest answer. A crow croaked somewhere in the canopy. The old druid turned his head slightly, then kept walking. Cassian's druid followed without speaking.

A patch of moss shifted under the old druid's staff, curling faintly as if breathing. He crouched, pressed his hand flat against the dirt, and waited. Then, "South," he said softly, as he stood again, shifted course, and moved through a hollow of stones so overgrown they barely held their shape. They felt something foul in the air. This magic wasn't laced into the air, it had sunk into the bark. Into the bones. Into whatever lived here long before the first spell was ever carved. Something moved up ahead.

Too far to see clearly. A presence, wrong against the rhythm of the woods. The old druid tapped his staff again. The ground answered back with a hum, soft, like breath through reed pipes.

"Closer," he murmured. Cassian's younger druid-body followed his line of sight. A rabbit darted across their path. Stopped. Looked up. The old druid paused. Knelt.

"You shouldn't be here," he said, soft and kind.

"You don't belong in this bit." The rabbit twitched its nose, then bolted the other way. Cassian's gaze shifted. His eyes followed the rabbit, but then caught something behind the trees instead. Low to the ground. Edgeless. Like it refused to let the world define it. The old druid saw it too. He turned the staff in his hands, pressed the base into the ground, and waited. Cassian almost had a heart attack in a borrowed body. At first, he thought it was a Night Crawler.

Same low frame, same dragging motion, like it pulled a weight behind it. But then it stepped into view. The creature was red, like someone had scraped the colour out of every spectrum and dumped it into a shape. Wherever it moved, the forest turned grey. Moss browned. Leaves crumbled. Even the bark faded. It leeched. Not light, like Crawlers did, but life. It stepped over a fern and the whole patch died mid-air. The plant didn't just wilt, it gave up. The old druid's brow pulled tight.

Cassian's body raised the staff too, by instinct. The voice that came out wasn't his, but it passed through him all the same.

"It is too strong." The old man nodded grimly.

"We should at least give it a fatal injury." Cassian wanted to argue.

'What fatal injury? Look at it. The thing bled famine.' But the old druid was already moving. Staff to the earth, dull light crackled outwards. The red thing hissed. No mouth, no eyes, yet the sound scraped the bones. Its colour writhed as it moved, draining moss and stone underfoot to ash-grey. The air stank of rot and iron. Vines began to twist from the branches above and the roots below, reaching for the red shape in a slow crawl.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation. As they neared, they withered. Bark blackened. Leaves curled. Sap hissed into steam. They touched its edge and turned to ash before they even latched on. The old druid clicked his tongue.

"Stubborn." He drove his staff into the soil again, harder this time. Bark cracked like dry kindling. The ground rippled. A dozen thornroots burst up like spears, jagged and fast. The red thing shifted. It flowed sideways, that colour dragging like wet paint. Half the roots missed. The rest hit, and dissolved like they'd dropped into acid. The old druid growled, low in his throat. Then his spine cracked. Shoulders hunched. Bones moved wrong under skin. His form twisted down, arms lengthening, face narrowing.

A wolf now. Black, lean, bristling. Thorns in his fur, teeth bared. He darted through the undergrowth without grace. Grace gone, leaving only the speed, force and rage. The red thing lunged at him. It opened like a cloak being flung wide, the red edge sweeping low across the brush. The wolf barely pulled back. The tips of the underbrush withered behind him, curling like they'd aged a decade in seconds. He twisted again mid-run, back legs digging in, then stretched. Fur shortened. Upright again. Robes settling.

The old man slammed the staff into the earth. Moss bloomed in a ring around him. The red thing stopped. It couldn't cross. The moss didn't wither. Cassian didn't know if that was luck or some deeper rule of nature, but the circle held. The old druid raised his staff again. This time, he pointed past the red thing. Wind snapped sideways. Birds burst from the canopy in a panic, scattering into the sky. The red creature flinched. Cassian's druid-body didn't wait. His robes pulled wide, and then...

Bones snapped, feathers burst. Wings. He was shifting too now, an eagle, black-feathered, catching what little light filtered through the trees. He soared above the treeline. From up here, the red shape looked worse. A wound. Spreading. Killing everything it touched. Cassian dove. Talons raked across its back, tearing through that shifting red like slicing oil. The creature shrieked, louder this time. It lashed back. A ripple of red burst upward. Cassian's wing caught the edge.

Feathers withered to grey dust mid-flight. He dropped, streaked through a branch, and crashed into the ground hard enough to rattle every rib, changing back. The body he was in groaned. One arm was bleeding. The other clenched the staff like it was the only thing keeping him tethered. The red creature came on, dragging ruin behind it. Cassian's druid stabbed the staff again. Roots burst up, sharper, thicker, thorned. They speared from below, punching toward the red shape. It twisted, part of it tearing loose.

That piece melted into rot, but the rest kept coming. The wolf attacked again. Claws dragged across the red, smoke hissing off fur. The paw sizzled. The wolf yelped, skidded out, collapsed back into robes. Skin blistered. Breath shallow. Cassian could feel the cost of every strike. This wasn't a fair fight. Still, he got up. Raised the staff again. His hand shook. The voice didn't.

"Now." The ground split. Behind the red thing, a spear of wood tore upward. Thick as a tree trunk. It rammed through the red mass, lifting it off the ground before slamming it back down, pinning it. It screamed. The old wolf-druid was already limping closer. Staff pressed to the shaft of the spear. He whispered something. Cassian didn't recognise the words. But the spear shuddered, and then split. Dozens, no, hundreds, of branches unfurled. Piercing. Wrapping. Clawing. Wherever they touched, they blackened.

But more kept coming. Coiling like roots starved for something to bind. The red thing thrashed. The forest groaned. But the vines didn't stop. The old druid staggered. One last push. Then slumped against the wood, breath catching. He looked up at the sky. Smiled.

"Good enough." He exhaled. And went still. The forest moved again. Moss surged green. Roots coiled around the red thing and the bodies of the druids. The red shrieked one final time as the earth swallowed them. And then, silence. Cassian blinked. He was back in his room. Sitting on the edge of his bed. His hands were shaking. His breath was short. And the vision had burned itself somewhere deep. The interface blinked open in front of his eyes.

Sylvanima Temporarily grants sentience and motion to wooden material, carvings, trees, constructs, by sharing a breath of the caster's life-force, power scales with complexity, but overuse risks awakening hostile forest spirits. Cassian frowned.

"Ancient variant of Expelliarmus?" he muttered. Didn't make sense. It wasn't unarming, was it? He stared past the words still hovering in front of him. He'd felt it coming for days now, a pressure behind the teeth, like a sneeze of magic waiting to go off. Especially after the duelling club session, something had been nudging at the edge. And now this? Sylvanima wasn't Expelliarmus. Not by a stretch. This wasn't some flashy disarm, it was breath. Life-sharing.

A spell that didn't seize something out of someone's hand, but instead gave something yours to wood. Trees. Living things. He pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Right. Because turning a wardrobe into a sentient accomplice is exactly what I needed today." Still, his brain itched with it. The druids. Their magic hadn't been sharp and flashy. It moved like it belonged in things instead of shaping them from the outside. He couldn't stop thinking about the staff slamming into the earth, the moss responding like a pet being called home. Even now, he could still smell it. Green rot, old bark, something older than runes. That was the first time he'd seen a druid in action.

And it didn't work like the wand magic taught in schools. They didn't wave or flick or shout spells. The old one barely spoke at all. He walked, he tapped, he listened. Like the magic came from the ground up instead of top-down. Cassian rubbed his eyes. His heart was still thumping from the vision, but his mind had already pulled apart half the scene. Their staffs weren't foci, they were anchors. Extensions, not tools. The spells didn't ride on incantations, they rode on intention and breath.

No wonder Sylvanima needed life-force. He'd just seen it work through blood, bark and bones. And that wolf and eagle transformations? No wand in sight. Just old bones and older magic. Cassian sighed, slow. Sat forward, elbows on knees. The druids hadn't unarmed the red thing, they'd stripped it of place. Removed it. Wrenched it out of sync with everything around it until even the forest refused to hold it. So maybe that's what this variant did. Not unarm. Unroot. He stared at the spell again. Shared breath.

Living wood. Risk of forest spirits waking up cranky.

"Yeah," he muttered, "sounds exactly like the kind of spell I'd end up with." He reached for a pen, started scribbling in the margin of an open scroll, notes on druidic casting style, the use of fauna as indicators, shape-shifting mid-combat, and that moment where the moss wouldn't die. That was a threshold. Some kind of ancient line the red thing couldn't cross. A ward? A pact? Something older than wards, maybe.