The memory places you in a quiet, scenic riverside village nestled in verdant woods, and more particularly, a space within that's been decorated and prepared for a quaint but nonetheless festive wedding celebration which is now well underway. Everything feels utterly perfect, and you couldn't be happier.
Your friend, Cibark, has become wedded today - and to the twin brother of another friend, even. You watch as he and his now-husband Aeryn dance, the wedding now reaching the portion of the evening where it truly becomes a party. From nearby, your friend Dae sets off illusions and what he's begun to call "pyrotechnics" energetic as all get out. Elsewhere, two other friends, Sian and Aerie - Aeryn's twin sister - are conversing rather jovially, a sight which fills your heart with warmth for how severe the latter tends to be.
Now and again, you're greeted by villagers or other guests from more far-flung places, thanking you for your part in helping save the river - and for thwarting the greater plot it all played a part in, too. Each time, you thank them, until it becomes a little exhausting, until you're joined by yet another friend. Mellon, who practically stumbles into the seat next to you, just barely managing to deposit a cup of wine into your hand without spilling it all over your gown. You level a knowing, teasing, and somewhat exasperated look at him.
"I'm not going to keep casting Lesser Restoration on you just so you can keep drinking."
"I wasn't going to ask, but you know... If there's any night to do just that, it would be tonight."
You shake your head, roll your eyes, but you chuckle anyway as you take a drink. It's... nice, to have everyone around again. It's been months now since you all defeated great evils together and saved the realm, but most of you have gone your separate ways in the time since then. As the wine spills down your throat, you cast a sidelong glance at Mellon.
"How's it been? Traveling with Dae and Sian. Being the new Alchemighty...?"
"Well, it's great, though we're having to pick up random warriors and healers at every stop, since we lost ours," he casts a knowing, sidelong glance back at you before he adds, "How are you and Colin doing? Rebuilding Duskvale going all right?"
It's only then that you avert your gaze, instead casting it across clearing, to where the newlyweds and others dance - and to where Colin sings and plays along with the village bards. You feel your lips twitch into a smile; he looks like he's happy to be reunited with everyone, too, despite his sarcastic complaining while you two traveled from his home city.
"It's going well. Um, to both questions."
Mellon chuckles as he pours another serving of wine into his cup. Where did that bottle even come from?
"Are you going to stay in Duskvale after it's all good? It doesn't really seem like your kind of place. Too... city-like."
There's the question you've been dreading answering all night. You knew it was going to come eventually, from any or all of the rest of the party. But even knowing doesn't stop you from heaving a sigh upon hearing it.
"...No, I don't think I will."
"Ahh..." Mellon's trails off. You dreaded this sort of reaction, too. "Does Colin know?"
"No, not yet."
"Mmm." The ever-dazed yet measuring look he gives just bears into you. "It was never going to be easy for the two of you, huh?"
"No, it wasn't."
Of course not. He is the literal prince of the kingdom, after all, and you're... you.
TL;DR: Months after their world-saving adventure, the Alchemighty reunite at the wedding of one of their own after having spent the time since their adventure ended split off. Ori, who has been helping rebuild Duskvale, Colin's home, is approached by Mellon. In catching up, Ori insinuates her doubts around the sustainability of her and Colin's blossoming relationship.
You are so, so exhausted, down to your very bones.
The sort of exhaustion that simply will not go away with one night's rest. The sort that weighs down on your heart, too, keeps you from doing anything but stare at the ceiling when you wake, even knowing that there are things for you to do, people that await you. You close your eyes once more, drawing in a deep breath. Something in your eyes sting, and as you exhale, your entire body quivers.
"Ori," you hear Colin's voice from beside you, soft but uneasy. "You should go back to sleep. You haven't rested nearly enough."
"I can't." You barely manage to say the words as you push yourself upright, willing yourself to at least swing your legs over the edge of the bed. "I'm going to check on her."
You rise to your feet, but Colin's hand snags onto your wrist.
"Wait," he says. "I'll go with you."
Your sight slides over to where his fingers are curled around your wrist, but you don't dare to meet his gaze. You feel... ashamed. You're afraid of what you'll find in his eyes if you look.
"No, I..." It pains you just as much to pull away from him. In years past, it would have been the other way around. "I need space. I'm sorry."
And so you go, quietly meandering through the wood-laden walls of your party's... stronghold, a structure painstakingly rebuilt and regrown from your very own efforts, your very own magic. Your magic flows through these halls, and beyond it, through these woods. Though it may simply be a stronghold for many of your friends, to you, it's home. And it's her home now, too.
Soon, you enter another room, dim but bathed in moonlight. In an armchair, another tiefling with crimson skin and snow white hair sleeps - your younger sister, Valphi - and she stirs upon your arrival, but doesn't wake. Atop the bed is a young girl, sitting up with her knees drawn to her chest, her face pressed into her folded arms. Her long, disheveled brown hair has fallen around her like a curtain, disrupted only by leporine ears which lay flat against the top of her head.
"Juniper?" You say quietly as you sit on the edge of the bed - no, it's her bed now. "Is something wrong?"
Immediately, you feel foolish. Of course something is wrong. Everything is wrong. But the young girl tips her head, looks up at you in question.
"I'm Ori."
She'd forgotten your name again, it seems, but she can hardly be faulted. She'd been trapped in the Feywild for so long...
"Oh. Sorry, Miss Ori. I can't sleep."
Your hand reaches out, but hesitates. You wonder if it's all right to touch her. In some ways, you are her mother now - but you barely remember your own mother, you have nothing to look back on like a guiding star. At length, your hand alights upon her head, brushing her hair back so you can see her face better. Verdant green eyes bear into you, confused, alone. You offer an understanding look.
"I can't sleep, either. What are you thinking about?"
"...I'm scared."
"What are you scared of?"
"Of me. What's going to happen to me? Am... Am I going to turn into one of them?"
You hear something shift in the walls. Vines begin to encroach into Juniper's room, through the very walls which you conjured so long ago, when you rebuilt this place.
"Oh, Juniper..." Perhaps against your better judgment, you climb into the bed proper, and draw the young girl into your arms, resting your chin on her head, right against her ears. "We won't let that happen to you. We'll find a way."
Or at the very least... Dae will find a way, having hailed from the Feywild himself. Your own magic may be drawn from the selfsame place, but... what use is it, now? How could you possibly use the magic taught to you by the very same being that took Juniper? What use are you to the Alchemighty, like this?
"Miss Ori? The magic - again, it's..."
But it's not about you. You realize this, now, as Juniper's trembling hands reach around you and curl into the fabric of your sleeping clothes. Quietly, softly, you hush her, gently card your fingers through her hair, where vines have begun to sprout.
"It's all right. You don't have to be afraid. I'm here..."
And with a wave of your hand, flowers bloom all over the vines in the young girl's hair, and all over the vines that have crept over the walls. She gasps, her eyes widening in wonder, even though your sister startles awake in her chair.
"What— Juniper—"
"Shh, Val, it's all right." You say, holding Juniper's awed face between your hands, wiping away the tears that had spilled over. You never really knew your own mother, but... this, you think, is how it feels, to realize you could love a child so deeply that you would do anything for them.
TL;DR: Ori struggles to get proper rest after a particularly harrowing venture which has left her questioning the nature and value of her own power. Restless, she visits the young girl she and the Alchemighty rescued, and realizes that while she has lost her own parents, she has the chance to become one for Juniper. That her magic yet still has a use, to quell Juniper's fears and to take care of the young one.
The ground, the walls, everything around you rumbles.
You lift a hand over your head as rocks and dust fall from above. You tremble with the very movement of the earth, feel its weakness beneath your feet. Low on spells. And what little you have left in the tank... you'd better save for healing.
"Dae?" You call out. "Any ideas? Any spells?"
Dae always has something up his sleeve. He always has a plan, and contingencies for that plan, and contingencies for those plans. But when the white-haired elven man before you instead responds with a fit of hysterical lafter, you fear that does not bode well.
It all happens too quickly. One moment Dae is saying nonsense, and the next he calls forth his sword, tracing the leylines that flow beneath your feet with its tip.
"Don't forget, June-June. Use everything in your arsenal."
"Dad?"
Beams of light slam down through the collapsing caverns, and at once, you are engulfed in it. Damn it. Damn it. You hear Dae laugh, something delirious and crazed. Why do wizards always laugh this way, when they're about to die?
The light engulfs you, and at the very last moment, you reach for the young girl with your party, pulling the dark-haired bard along with her. He and you both wrap your arms around the girl while she cries out, again:
"Dad!"
The next few moments feel like a blur. When next your eyes open, you are all outside of the ruinous caverns once more, though its entrance has collapsed entirely in on itself. Already Juniper is sobbing in her disbelief; never has she been on a quest with you where things went - well, utterly tits up, as one of your party members might say. But your heart breaks, for how close Juniper is to Dae, the one whose surname she took. Everything she had learned about the world, about how to make it better, about how to live, she'd learned from him. Your arms wrap around her more tightly, squeezing, before you let go and glance up at the Colin, the bard, giving him a nod.
You all have had close calls before. Time and time again, the Alchemighty comes back from the impossible - intact. But this time... This time— you feel despair starting to sink in, even as you grasp your staff tight, knowing you have little left to give. You still have to heal. You still have to get everyone home.
And then - you find him. His body a mangled mess, entangled with great, broken roots and rock and earth, you find him. Juniper finds him.
"Dad. Dad. Please—" Juni cries out, followed by two others in the party, before Colin winds an arm around you to guide you to where Dae lies unconscious. You reach out to steady Sian by their shoulder; they are panicking - they're all out of mana, all out of potions.
"Juni, please— space—"
"Fuck, fuck, he's—"
"Colin—" you call out, your voice trembling. He's not lost. Not yet. Not yet. But at once Colin and Mellon both are flinging back rocks and debris and whatnot, in search of something.
"Diamond. Fuck, where's his diamond? We're going to need to Revivify him."
"Use mine—"
Not yet. Warm, healing magic weaves through the woods around you and gathers at your fingertips, and the incantation is upon the very tip of your tongue. Vis medicatis, that's all you need to recite - but instead you watch as Dae's breathing slows, stops in the span of two seconds before your spell can take form.
TL;DR: The Alchemighty find themselves in a seemingly inescapable situation after a quest has gone "tits up." Dae, their fearless leader, has one final trick up his sleeve, a powerful spell of his own making that he's never dared to cast before - but its cost is unfathomable. Miraculously, they manage to find him in the aftermath, but perhaps too late.
This is home base for the group of adventurers known as the Alchemighty, but the structure built into the hollow of a great, majestic tree in the woods is simply home, for you.
The Hearth is uncharacteristically empty today, with most of your party away to far-flung reaches of the continent, fulfilling their own quests and duties to other parties. You are left, as usual, somewhat in the company of the old wizard Philostenes, though you try not to disturb him and his work as much as possible.
Still, as you tend to some plants in the conservatory that you made, his voice booms throughout the hold: "Oriphi."
You know why it is he's called out to you, too, and likewise, he feels no need to say anything else. You've felt it in the wind, in the air - something is amiss.
A young woman bolts through the door, though her voice, too, is audible even from outside.
"Mom! Mom! We've got—" She huffs, "Company!"
It doesn't take you very long at all to take your staff and meet Juniper outside of the Hearth, closing the door to that great tree behind you.
"I know, Juni. Remember your training. And do not stray from the grove, okay?"
With an affirmative nod, the young warrior renews her grip on the handle of her greataxe, striding over to the center of the forest clearing, and you, with your staff, join her, dragging the tip of the staff along the ground purposely before firmly planting it into the earth. With a grand sweep of your arms, you feel the spirits of the very woods you grew and cultivated come to you.
"Ab spiritu humoque aculeus vitisque." By both the spirit of the earth, and the thorn of vine. There is a rumbling in the ground as four trees awaken and uproot themselves, seemingly poised to defend the grove. From afar, you can see that a group of red-robed cultists are approaching in a somewhat gaseous, misty form.
"Mom? Should we take one of them? Dad 3 might want to talk to them, right?"
You consider it for a moment. But you know what these people stand for, and though decades have passed, you still remember like yesterday the day you returned to these woods and found that the cultists' predecessors had utterly razed it to ashes.
"No," comes your answer, "Stay back for a second, little sprout."
The mist coaleces into the shape of people, poised too, to attack, with some preparing to cast spells, some charging forth with their weapons, only to be entangled in vines that sprout up from the ground, or flung back by the branches of the awakened trees. The ones that press through...
Ori twists her staff further into the ground.
"Morta est tuo!"It is your death.
A wall of ice sweeps across one side of the clearing, encasing some cultists fully within. The others are launched into the air rather unceremoniously, to be caught - or worse, spiked - in the waiting claws of the trees. You look to Juniper.
"All right. Go wild."
TL;DR: Vestiges of an old enemy from decades past pay a visit to the Hollow Wilds; whether they seek retribution or anything else, Ori never bothers to find out while she stands to guard their home alongside Juniper. Harnessing her command over nature and the very woods that she herself brought back to life so long ago, Ori displays her druidic power at near-full force, having never forgiven the cultists for what they did to the wilds in the past.
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"Ceremony"
The setting is picturesque, idyllic.
TL;DR: Months after their world-saving adventure, the Alchemighty reunite at the wedding of one of their own after having spent the time since their adventure ended split off. Ori, who has been helping rebuild Duskvale, Colin's home, is approached by Mellon. In catching up, Ori insinuates her doubts around the sustainability of her and Colin's blossoming relationship.
"Druidcraft"
You are so, so exhausted, down to your very bones.
TL;DR: Ori struggles to get proper rest after a particularly harrowing venture which has left her questioning the nature and value of her own power. Restless, she visits the young girl she and the Alchemighty rescued, and realizes that while she has lost her own parents, she has the chance to become one for Juniper. That her magic yet still has a use, to quell Juniper's fears and to take care of the young one.
"Heal"
The ground, the walls, everything around you rumbles.
TL;DR: The Alchemighty find themselves in a seemingly inescapable situation after a quest has gone "tits up." Dae, their fearless leader, has one final trick up his sleeve, a powerful spell of his own making that he's never dared to cast before - but its cost is unfathomable. Miraculously, they manage to find him in the aftermath, but perhaps too late.
"Druid Grove"
The memory places you in the Hollow Hearth.
TL;DR: Vestiges of an old enemy from decades past pay a visit to the Hollow Wilds; whether they seek retribution or anything else, Ori never bothers to find out while she stands to guard their home alongside Juniper. Harnessing her command over nature and the very woods that she herself brought back to life so long ago, Ori displays her druidic power at near-full force, having never forgiven the cultists for what they did to the wilds in the past.