25. Call (Patreon)

Aloe was tired.

Maddingly so.

After seeing the dwellers rush into the horizon, her legs buckled, and her body fell onto the grass.

“Wro?” Fikali asked nuzzling her snoot against her arm, worry present in her visage.

“It’s nothing, Fikali. I just need to rest.” And she was being truthful, this wasn’t any excuse.

Her legs hadn’t faltered out of fear from the incursion of the dweller couple – her ‘toughness’ infusion had proved stronger than she had even thought – but out of sheer exhaustion. Only a sliver of energy remained in her system.

The sun hadn’t fully come out yet!

Her eyelids weighed her down as barrels full of wine. A sleep lesser than eight hours wouldn’t magically vanish the numbness of her calves or the irritation of her hands. Nor the pain of the mind.

Grimacing, Aloe stood up. She didn’t have the strength to check if the whole oasis had gone to the shitter in the span she had been gone. It had only been three days, but worse things had happened to her in a shorter span.

Aloe gritted her teeth, dispelling her thoughts with each heavy step.

By the time she made it to the house, she couldn’t almost walk. Forcefully yet simultaneously weakly, Aloe removed her boots and fell onto the hard bed still clothed.

{·}

When she woke up, it was well past noon. Her stomach didn’t protest, surprisingly enough, but she knew better than not to eat. The last time she had had a bite was two days ago. Even if her body didn’t scream for it, Aloe forced herself to eat.

No one would tell her to, otherwise.

Even after having slept for more than half a day, Aloe still didn’t have the strength to walk outside. If not for checking the plants, to take a walk and a fresh breath. But she couldn’t be bothered.

“I need a ‘recovery’ infusion, or something like that...” Aloe mumbled on her bed, a piece of jerky lazily hanging on her hand. “And pillows. Though those will be a pain to get here...”

The only pillowy materials she had were the single pillow of the bed, the sheets and blankets, and her clothes. Maybe Fikali. But she wanted an indoor seat, and the dweller was twice as wide as the main door.

So much for good ideas as investigating a new internal infusion, Aloe simply didn’t have the strength to continue. And it wasn’t the type of strength ‘strength’ could resolve.

“Oh...” She groaned in realization. “I should deactivate ‘toughness’, it’s making me recover slower.”

In her dazed and dusted mind, Aloe had forgotten how internal infusions worked. She hadn’t made herself tougher, she had just made every other quality of her body slightly worse to improve that of toughness. She didn’t have a number or percentage of how much she downgraded her natural recovery, but she didn’t need one currently. Everything she could scrape would be welcomed.

Aloe closed her eyes, for a second fearing that she would not awaken until tomorrow but ignored the fear and continued. It wasn’t as if having more sleep would kill her.

It was difficult to shift her vitality flow to normal. It was equally complex to put it into words. This was an approximation of what she felt, but as the vitality inside of her became more rigid and less malleable, it was as if it had grown used to the ‘toughness’ infusion.

“So, there were side effects...” She sighed. Her ability to meditate had grown a bit, and she was able to talk without breaking her progress. “At least they aren’t as bad as they could have been. It’s just harder to shift infusions if I have had one up for too much time.”

It took her a lot of time, way more than normal, but she managed to shift back to her default non-infused state without difficulties. She blamed part of this extra time for her exhaustion.

If she had been in peak condition, this would have not been as much of a drag as it had been.

“Alright.” She stretched her arms as she still sat on her bed. “What now?”

No matter how much energy her body had saved up, her legs still felt like soggy pita bread. She also remembered to change her bandages. An infection was the last thing she wanted.

‘Toughness’ might make her body stronger, maybe even to sickness, but she had no longer that internal infusion active.

She didn’t have boiled water around, so she sat on the doorway of the house, pulled out her bandages – which made a sickly noise as they slowly peeled away – and poured water from her waterskins onto them.

It was far from enough to clean the whole wounds, especially since some tough had appeared, so she grabbed nearby sand. Carefully to not let any grain drop into the closing wound, Aloe rubbed the scorching sand against her skin. Not only was it clean, but also hot; and hot things did wonders with wounds.

After removing most of the grime from her hands, Aloe cleaned her hands with the remaining contents of the waterskin to wash off the dust.

“Not perfect... but it looks way better than before.” Then she took out some more bandages out of her satchels and wrapped them around the clean wound.

Aloe groaned, stretching her arms as she peered into the falling sun.

“I’m beat.” A sigh filtered through her half-open mouth. “Even though I’m sitting down, and I haven’t used much strength, I almost feel like sleeping again.”

One thing was clear to her now, if she wanted to make a non-stop ride from the greenhouse to Sadina, she needed to ready herself. Or do some stops. That could also work.

Groggily, Aloe overwatched the oasis. For some reason, it was more beautiful than ever. She attributed that change to the reflection of the sun onto the waters. It gave it a truly mesmerizing look.

“Now that I think about it...” Aloe talked slowly, deep in thought. “I should remove the Myriad. If it’s going to be a useless plant, having it around will only attract attention, and I definitely don’t want that. If wild dwellers are able to find their way here, who is to say that humans won’t?”

And to Aloe’s experience, humans could be way more dangerous.

“If they only see the oasis, they may mistake the Flourishing Springs for weird roses, but if they see the Myriad – and not gonna lie, that isn’t that difficult – then I might have a problem. I don’t want to get any unwanted guests or questions.”

Aloe wasn’t yet to reveal Evolution to the world. The words in Karaim’s cultivation technique echoed in her mind. I fear that these are secrets not for ignorance or lack of research, but because they are being suppressed. Her grandfather had written in the last pages of the diary he left behind. That was enough to make her paranoid regardless of whether the man was right or not in his suspicions.

“I may have lost some pistachios with wild dwellers, but they honestly gave me something better,” Aloe observed the oasis, it was as if the whole place was sleeping. It didn’t have much activity, not even insects, but today it felt even more tranquil. The main inhabitant, Fikali, was peacefully sleeping under the shade of a palm tree. Aloe smiled, though it quickly turned sour. “A wake-up call.”

The no-longer-banker-turned-cultivator-possibly-future-scribe rubbed her hands together. They itched, but the wounds didn’t hurt. It was number than anything else.

“It only takes a single stray person lost in the desert to dismantle my secrecy, my investigation, my plants, my magic, my... what I like.”

She had decided to be a banker because her father had been one, and not only she loved her father, but also the drupnars and fajats, the weight of the coins in her hands. And even if that was nice, had she even once had fun as she wrote ledgers or organized loans?

No.

She hadn’t.

What she had here wasn’t just diversion, but happiness. Actual happiness. She was enjoying herself, a feeling that had been alien to her most of her life, especially now.

And she didn’t want to give that up.

“The Myriad and the greenhouse... I should do something.”

Before, that one day of travel to get to the oasis had made her think that her veil of secrecy provided by being in the middle of nowhere was enough, but those dwellers had shown her that it was not.

It wasn’t enough.

If she wanted to have this slice of paradise to herself, she had to fight for it. It wasn’t enough to pray for good fortune. If she wanted to nurture her happiness, she had to keep everything away from the oasis.