Aspen led Clover and Basil through another stretch of dark woodland and into a brighter copse.

The thinner trees swayed gently, rattling branchfuls of crescent-shaped nuts eagerly crunched by birds of all sizes.
Various stumpy rodents gorged on the fallen nuts and the occasional bug that found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“This place looks nice,” Clover remarked, curiously plucking a sizable nut from a low-hanging branch.
“Aspen, if nature can’t hurt me, then does that mean I can eat any fruit I find and it won’t poison me?” Clover asked curiously.

Basil’s face lit with sudden interest. “If poison touching our skin is safe, then surely poison touching our insides is safe… right?” He proposed timidly before immediately looking to Aspen for approval.

The older druid donned a coy smile and turned his gaze upwards to the rippling canopy.
“I will let you find out by yourself,” he answered puckishly.

Clover’s brows furrowed as she considered the various pros and cons of eating a potentially poisonous nut in the middle of the forest.
With a cautious sigh, Clover cast the nut into the bushes.

Aspen stopped at a particularly large tree.
It was old and coated with layers of moss, fungi, lichen, and bird droppings that put most rooftops to shame.
Its branching canopy was singlehandedly big enough to cultivate a spherical region of nightly dark.

Beside it stood an ancient rock engraved with primitive glyphs depicting several trees, birds, bugs of various sizes, and a monstrous creature Clover didn’t recognize.

“What’s that?” She asked, immediately interested in the carvings.

“This is a druid time-stone,” Aspen explained. “There are ones like it sparsely scattered throughout the wilderness.”
He gently traced the symbols without disturbing the resident greenery. “It tells us what kind of environment this is supposed to be.”
“That said, the kingdom of nature is defined by change – growth – and these are all subject to revision.”

Basil and Clover nodded attentively.

“However, I did not bring you here today to tell you about the time-stones,” he said importantly.
He gestured to the old tree grandly, “It is this tree that I have brought you to.”

Basil heard this bit before but – having never actually succeeded at the task – he nodded as if it was his first time hearing the elf’s words.
Clover seemed more confused but – being able to make an educated guess as to the connection between tree and druid – she still nodded.

“I want you to communicate with this tree,” he explained plainly before gracefully sitting down in a shaded spot under a tree.
He leaned back against a protruding root and seemingly drifted off to sleep.

Clover and Basil turned to one another and exchanged conciliatory smiles.
“So… how do we do this?” she asked her training partner.

The fishman shook his head sheepishly. “This is as far as I’ve gotten…” he muttered under his breath.

"This far, as in the location of the task…” she repeated, to which he sullenly nodded.

“That’s fine; now that there are two of us, we’re bound to figure it out,” she said, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

Confused – but comforted – the fishman nodded and blindly mirrored the gesture, “Okay…!”
“That’s the spirit, I suppose…!” he added with a shaky smile.

They slowly approached the tree.
Basil sat down and looked at Clover to suggest she do the same. “We’ll probably be here all day,” he stressed. “You better get comfortable.”

Clover found a flat patch of dry dirt to sit on.
After a moment of silence, she peered up at the tree and imagined a big face at the center of its trunk.
“Hello, tree…?” She tried to no effect. “How is the air up there…? Fresh! - I hope…!” She grimaced.

Basil cringed imperceptibly – having seen that whatever the druids did was more inconspicuous.
“I think you’re supposed to do it in your head,” Basil whispered around the trunk.

Clover gave a doubtful nod. “Okay, I guess I’ll give it a try…”

She closed her eyes. “…”
“…Hello, tree!”
“…”
“What’s your tree-name?”
“…”

She opened her eyes with a flustered groan. “This part isn’t super intuitive…” she grudged.

Basil grimaced desperately as he attempted to recall Aspen’s lengthy lectures. “Um, Aspen usually mentions something about ‘not treating the tree like something it’s not’…?” he drawled hesitantly.

Clover contemplated the cryptic quote and gave a resigned shrug. “It’s worth a try…”

Basil watched Clover stand with her toes shuffled under some leaves and her arms and fingers fractally spread in her best impression of a tree.

For a while she got into the groove of swaying with the breeze and developing grudges towards any and all things casting a shadow onto her fingers.
After about five minutes, Basil interrupted her, “Feel anything?”

“No…” she admitted and wilted on the spot. “And as if that wasn’t bad enough, my arms are stiff…” she murmured ruddily.

Basil nodded understandingly.
“Honestly, that felt more like treating yourself as the tree…”

“Well, what does a tree talk about?” Clover asked wearily.
After a short break, Clover returned and knelt down before the tree.
She tensely shut her eyes and attempted to communicate with the tree through thought.
“Hello… Plant…? Lifeform…? Being…?”

Still getting no reply, Clover felt around for one of the bare roots in an attempt to better connect herself to the tree.
“Tree stuff… Tree stuff… Like, getting sunlight… and nutrients… or getting enough water…”

“You don’t have a throat to speak… or a brain to think for that matter…” she observed impolitely.
“But that isn’t the format of your existence, tree…”

Clover opened her eyes and looked at the tree.
As her mind drifted to relevant queries that she would never ordinarily think to consider, the information simply arrived at the tip of her tongue.

The soil was fairly moist, the air access was decent, and there were too many nutrients – but by the time it was wet enough for the nutrients to be an issue, the water would wash them all away.

“The tree’s fine,” Clover declared sounding unsatisfied with her findings.
“Well, it looks okay,” Basil confirmed – mostly to attenuate her certain shame – not to actually support her conclusion.

As Clover approached, Aspen awoke.
“The tree said it’s okay,” she declared with borrowed confidence.

Aspen gave a groggy but satisfied nod.
“Good work,” he praised through a yawn.

Clover was momentarily stunned into silence.
“Aren’t you going to check if I got it right?”

He nodded. “I have, and the tree is indeed okay.”

The casual ease with which the druid conversed with the tree seemed almost insulting to Clover, but she nodded.
“What do we do now?”

“We still have to wait for Basil to succeed,” Aspen explained.

Catching a glimpse of the fishman’s guilty grimace out of the corner of her eye, Clover nodded certainly. “That shouldn’t be hard,” she said turning and walking back towards Basil – who was still seated by the tree.
“I’ll explain how I figured it out,” she offered easily to the fishman’s radiant gratitude.

Halfway there, Aspen spoke and stopped Clover in her tracks. “He should discover it by himself,” he said – not commanded.

Where Basil’s smile merely faded, Clover’s soured into the seedling of outrage.
“He explained stuff to me,” she argued.

The elf nodded. “Indeed, ‘stuff’ that I explained to him ad nauseam,” Aspen explained matter-of-factly. “Having Basil tell you seemed like the perfect place to test his memory.”

Clover hesitated, her gaze torn between Basil’s resigned despair and Aspen’s implied wisdom.

As the charged moment went on, Clover gently gnawed on her lower lip.
Eventually she looked at Aspen with apologetic defiance.
“We’re meant to be training partners, right…?”

The elf sighed tiresomely and leaned back against the root.
“As you wish,” he said quietly and gracefully closed his eyes once more.

It only took around two hours for the abstract concept of communing with the tree – as articulated by an aspiring alchemist turned druid – to stick.
“I think it’s working…!” He sounded hesitantly jubilant.

“That’s it, just stay focused on the tree’s mechanisms,” Clover encouraged.

Aspen slowly opened his eyes, having heard of the duo’s success from the tree itself.
“Good work, both of you.” He pushed himself up to his feet with one of his long elven arms.
“I’ll take you both back to the henge to rest,” he explained.
“I still have my own duties to fulfill.”

“We could come with you,” Clover proposed, but Aspen shot her idea down with a shake of his head immediately.

“You are not ready yet,” he declined. “Besides, you would mostly be sitting around waiting for me to finish.”
“Unless either of you can enter a mousehole,” he teased and gestured for them to follow him.

Leading them back a different way from before, Aspen was the first to detect the odd fragrance in the air.
His ears stood up curiously. The smell visibly confused him, neither familiar nor alien.

Basil sniffed the air. “It smells like fruit here,” he remarked pleasantly.

Aspen nodded suspiciously.
“Except that there are no fruits here,” he said quietly.

Clover’s face spontaneously lit up. “Isoamyl acetate!” she exclaimed.
The two other druids looked at her silently.
“It’s a fruity ester we made at the alchemists’ guild before!”

“So, it’s the alchemists’ doing?” The elf squinted derisively.

Clover suddenly felt guilty for potentially implicating her friends from the guild.
“Well, anybody could have bought or made some…!” she reasoned.

Aspen followed the building stench down to a ditch.

One by one, the druids gathered around the foul-smelling pool of murky waste and bleached muck.

Clover felt guilty for wanting to study the effects of the chemical cocktail on the surrounding environment.

He turned to face Clover and Basil.
“I will have to speak with the other druids about this,” he said firmly. “In the meantime, I will give you a list of tasks to complete at the nearby town of Moorwell.”

Clover’s eyes lit up in instant recognition tempered only by the subsequent fear of being recognized. “That’s where I worked at the alchemists’ guild…!”

“Good, then you will know your way around the town,” the elf nodded.
“Basil will go with you.”