“Are y’all worried?” Zana asked. She sat next to her sister high up in the Aziza mound and they looked out over the jungle. It was a wondrous sight to Zana who had been in the Fonlands for a while by that point, but it all still looked so new to her. It was hard to accept that the wonder of the Fonlands was real and she could, and often did, sit for hours in the jungle just taking in the beauty all around her. Being in the Fonlands and embracing the magic of the Divine Essence had significantly slowed her aging as it had her sister’s, and even though she was over a hundred years old, she looked to be in her thirties by human standards; though the human standard by that point in the history of Prime 5 Earth had been drastically altered by the increased presence of Divine Essence and it wasn’t unheard of for humans to live for almost two hundred years. The mere presence of the Essence had the effect of strengthening the human body when inhaled through the lungs even though humans don’t possess the ecstatic gland that Fonlanders possess to manipulate Divine Essence into magical abilities. There are documented cases of human Earthers developing ecstatic glands, but those have mostly all been identified as the manifestation of Fonlander lineage.
“I think we should all be worried,” Ariel said. She was still sullen, not her whole self since her encounter with the Detritus Witch. It was hard for her to recover from the ordeal the Death Witch had put her through; she’d been made a slave in her own body and she was aware the entire time as she attacked her sister and others that she loved like family. It was hard for her to trust herself with the awesome powers that she’d discovered only because Detritus had manipulated it out of her. She mostly kept to herself in the Aziza mound and studied the Book of Soil and Persuasion, also known as the Green that Ahdis had created with help from others. It helped her to regain confidence in her ability to wield magic and she learned to tap magic that she didn’t generate herself. She quickly became the most knowledgeable mmoatia of arcana of her generation of supremes that included her sister, Coffey who was the eldest and leader, Leilar, Agiel and Zazel.
“I can’t imagine something coming and messing all this up,” Zana said and then more softly, “but I couldn’t imagine what happened to you before it did. And that was the worst thing that I could’ve ever imagined short of you dying.”
Ariel nodded.
“But you was there for me.”
“Like you always been for me.”
The two sat in silence for a moment.
“Zazel gone fight,” Zana said.
“It’s good, we need a strong army to defend the Disc,” Ariel said.
“No, I mean, she was picked by Agê to go with her to the root of it all. Pultine will lead them, she’s the strongest, but Agê hand picking other Fonlanders to be her support. Zazel can use a lot of power. She say I can too. They want me to meet Agê.”
“Zazel?” Ariel looked at Zana with a mix of anger and confusion. “She ain’t recruiting nobody. If Agê wanted you she would’ve called on you. That’s some big shit, Zana, you ain’t been using magic long enough for that. And God forbid something happen to you, you got kids.”
“I’mma take this as you still shook from the Death Witch and not you saying I ain’t good enough, ‘cause I went back in time with Tracia and Ahdis with that Death Witch, I supported them when they saved you.”
“No,” Ariel shook her head mournfully and her face soured to sorrow. “I didn’t mean it like that, Zana, we Supreme Mmoatia for a reason and you ain’t one just cause you my sister. You bad as hell with your light fists, but the kind of thing they doing is a kind of magic that even I’m not that familiar with. You have to know how to accept magic from the Green. Can you talk to trees?”
Zana looked at Ariel with a look of derision.
“You mean to tell me in all this time you been in the Fonlands, you ain’t never heard a tree talk?” Ariel was offended.
“I’ve heard them talk, but I don’t talk back,” Zana said with annoyance, but she chuckled. “It’s a lot of fucking trees, I didn’t assume they was talking to me.”
“Girl, you better listen to them trees. You can learn the first language of the Fonlands and be more powerful than most. If you really want to go volunteer for Agê, you at least have to be on speaking terms with the trees. And some more stuff that you have to let me teach you. And why do you want to do this exactly?”
Zana shrugged. “After we brought you back and all them Death Witches flew out of the Time Eater, seeing all that was crazy. And I realized all these Fonlanders we interact with got so many more crazy stories like that, they go on adventure and shit and they see the kind of stuff that we used to watch in movies. Since all that time travel stuff, I been going on quests with Zazel, sometime Agiel come with us and he make it more fun, but its fun without him. Zazel put it out that she would do missions for people, find stuff or other people, as a way to get to know the Fonlands better and that’s what it is. I went to the Disc of Gu recently, we had to get back some armor that these pythons from Gu’s Disc stole. Girl, them snakes was strong, bigger than you and me on each other’s shoulders and they had tiny arms! It was crazy. We got the armor back, the family was happy and paid us with a feast. It was good. I want to see as much as I can. I want to have stories. And this is a big one.”
Ariel hugged her sister and they started to plan so that when Zana went to Agê to volunteer to face the enemy to the multiversal structure, she would be a true master of the Green.
PRL Serials 