Weeks passed since their unexpected encounter with the wayward plague-seeker.

The lively green hues previously perforating every surface in the woods were gone or in the door; most plants have long since begun recalling resources from their deciduous domiciles - leaving them a tropical salad of reds, yellows, and oranges.
The blanket of fallen leaves was stirred by perambulating gusts of wind and unseen critters rooting around the litter for fallen nuts and fruits.
Clover recognised the gravelly clearing where she met Basil; only now the crunchy celluline carpet obscured all foliage shorter than the bulging fungal blooms surfacing above the litter.

“It is important for your duties as a druid to be able to assume any shape in the kingdom of nature,” Aspen explained, gesturing them both towards the smoothened stone.

Basil anxiously licked his dry lips while Clover listened attentively.

The elf slowly turned his head towards Basil.
“Basil, you have successfully transformed in the past,” he said, to which the fishman sheepishly nodded.
“I want you to explain the process to Clover.”

Clovers shimmied ninety degrees to face her substitute instructor while the fishman tumbled through the seven hundred stages of panic.
“W-Well, it’s not like I ever really pulled it off…!” she remarked almost pleadingly.
“I always end up stuck…” He dipped his head shyly.

“And yet you always end up unstuck in the end,” he countered lightly.
“Besides, I must tend to my duties.”
“Once you successfully transform into an animal and turn back, you are welcome to return to the henge.”
He waited for a response from Basil and eventually received one in the form of a reluctant nod.

“Good luck,” Aspen said and turned gracefully towards the rustling curtain of wilted leaves shedding in the wind.

When they sat alone – save for the chirping, buzzing, croaking, rustling, clicking, and squeaking of the wilderness.
A strong gust of wind momentarily brushed the clearing bare once more – exposing the damp gravel – before a wave of fresh leaves covered it back up.

Basil bashfully turned to face Clover. His eyes – when they met Clover’s – looked strigine with fear.
“Okay… the plan is to turn into an animal…” he said with a nod but only proceeded when Clover also eventually nodded.
“Okay, right… I know how to do that…” he muttered stiffly, to which Clover nodded again just in case he wanted her to.

“It’s all about… kind of… imagining yourself as the animal… until you just are…” he explained obtusely.
“Oh! I think it has to be in first person!” he remembered with a look of grave importance.

Clover nodded as a bird’s cry sounded over the clearing.
She closed her eyes and focused on distilling her thoughts only to those compatible with a bird’s.
The druid imagined how it would feel to stand on thick, taloned feet on the rounded rock, how the wind would feel in a coat of tiny feathers, and how the weight of a beak would affect her centre of mass.

As she turned back to Basil with a dismayed sigh, Clover found herself chirping out the lowest notes in her obnoxiously high range.

Basil’s face lit up nearly instantaneously.
“You did it, Clover! You’re a bird!” he exclaimed. “Of some sort…!” he added, his excitement melting away with every step, like an ice cube racing around a blistering pan.
The fishman slid down the stone and curiously circled the transformed druid.

Clover was a finch under twenty centimetres tall. Her coat was plumose with forest-green feathers tapering to amber at the tips of her wings and tail.
She cocked her little head quizzically and let go of any lingering disbelief when she found herself instinctually hopping to face her colleague.

“How does it feel?” Basil asked – only ever managing to transform into different freshwater fish.

Clover gave a few chirps before stopping and producing a hopeless little peep.
She had no idea how to communicate with Basil.
Her mind went to what Aspen taught them before about communicating with trees.

Despite her best attempts, Clover felt like a crumb of herself pickling in an ocean of birdly concerns.
Clover’s attention drifted away from the fishman and towards the fallen leaves behind him.
He had no idea what kind of tasty treats crawled around right behind him.
Clover’s consciousness snagged on the thought. “That’s not me thinking…!” she realised with a cold sinking feeling that set her plumage standing upright.

Basil noticed her obvious signs of distress.
“Is everything alright?” he asked, watching Clover jumping around and flapping her wings.

She shut her small, beady eyes.
“Meaty legs… grabby hands… bitey-teeth…” she repeated in her head as the urge to gorge herself on snails slowly returned to its standard amount.
When Clover felt her hands touch the sun-heated stone, she let out a small breath of air through her gratefully clenched teeth.

Basil was momentarily speechless as he absorbed Clover’s speedy success with a lagging smile.
“You changed back to human…!”
“How was it?”

“Strange…” Clover muttered distractedly as she felt around for all the limbs she recalled having typically.
“Like a drop of me in a sea of bird…” She felt a shiver run down her spine at the fuzzy memory of her time inside the mind of a bird.

“I know exactly what you’re going through…” Basil nodded understandingly.
“I actually managed to get over that bit myself…” he said with a coy grin tinged with a note of pride.

“How?” asked the other druid. “It feels like I don’t have any say over what I think…”

“Aspen said that’s not you thinking; it’s your animal body thinking,” Basil carefully recalled.
“You’re like… a voice in its head…”

Clover slowly nodded. “So… I have to command the bird…?”

The fishman hesitated to just nod.
"Um… I think you’re supposed to treat your other mind as an equal…” he murmured Aspen’s stale advice hesitantly.

“So, I have to manipulate the bird?” She intuited with a thoughtful nod.
“Like: ‘oh, we should fly over there; I heard from another bird that there are some tasty snails hiding over there’ or something,” she suggested and watched Basil’s paling face for feedback.

He tilted his head with an uncomfortable grimace. “I guess… but isn’t that kind of tricking yourself into doing something…?”

Clover’s expression remained unchanged as she nodded along to the question.
“Exactly. Everybody does that.”

“They do?”

“Yeah, you know, like if you put a bunch of time and effort into something only for it to go up in flames, you don’t have to cry about it.” She folded her arms.
“You can just tell yourself that that’s what you wanted anyway,” she declared confidently.

“Has that been working…?”

For a moment she sat on the answer before giving her training partner a little hitch of the head that he quickly interpreted to be a nod.
“Uh-huh,” she breathed quietly, not quite meeting his eyes.

By the time the sun was in the setting mood, it was long out of the practising duo’s sight.
The morning song of passing birds was just a distant memory as the distant droning of nocturnal insects took over the receding silence.

Clover sat on a rock, valiantly keeping the look of boredom off her face as she spectated Basil’s ongoing struggle in the pond.

He wasn’t even a fish yet.
Basil was kneeling waist-deep in the water.
Any other species would have long since started shivering from the cold.

“It’s getting dark,” Clover observed patiently. “Want to wrap up for today?”

Basil stood up with an immediate splash, followed by the wet percussion of trickling water droplets returning to the pond.
“You can go ahead without me,” Basil said, sounding less like it was a suggestion and more like a request.

“Are you sure?” Clover asked wearily.
“I don’t mind keeping you company a little longer,” she maintained, but the fishman shook his head.

“It’s fine,” he insisted.
“I think having an audience might be making me more nervous,” Basil explained bashfully.

Clover nodded reluctantly.
“Okay…” She slid down the stone and patted her robe clean of any dust that wasn’t there.

Before disappearing from his sight, Clover looked over her shoulder and gave Basil a small smile.
“Alright… Good luck.”
“I’ll be waiting for you at the henge,” she added.

“Midnight,” Basil groaned impotently.
He was floating on his back in the same body of water that he stewed in for over half of that day.
As he exhaled, his body lost its buoyancy until it gently slipped beneath the rippling surface of the water and into the soft embrace of a bed of rounded stones.

When the bubbles stopped coming from his mouth, he closed it and tried to go through his procedure like he always did.

He gave up right around the part where he tried to squeeze his legs into a finned tail.
“Ghish ghish ghoshesh…” He gurgled miserably and rolled over onto his side.

Basil felt exhausted from the day of tireless training. The gentle rocking of the waves threatened to lull him to sleep until he remembered what Clover said.

The last thing Basil wanted was for her to walk out here in the dark and find him moping at the bottom of a pond.

He sat up with a splash and began to stand up.
Rivulets of water raced down the creasing valleys of his hydrophobic robe.

As he ambled through the pitch-black woods – serendipitously avoiding all obstacles in his way – he saw a light.

“…why doesn’t he just invent a chemical-waste-destroyer at this point…!?” Daniel – the warlock – ranted in a whispered shout.
“This is getting ridiculous…!” he groaned, swinging his torch in the direction of every potential threat.

He was rolling a corroded metal drum down the gentle side of the ditch.
“No, this has been ridiculous for some time now…!” He hissed, wrenching the dented lid off the drum with a rusty knife.

The concoction was a chunky blend of frothing white foam and pungent sallow solvents.

Basil watched in mute disbelief.
This was it – the perpetrator of the crime – he had to do something.
Only the one single thing Basil could think to do in the moment was tell the other, more capable druids about his discovery.

A dead twig crunched loudly beneath his foot.
Basil went completely still, his breath catching in his throat as he desperately attempted to stay as still as possible.

Glacially, the fishman turned in the direction of the unmoving light.
By the time his head was turned enough to see that the torch was no longer being held by anybody, he was too distracted to hear the rustling of the bushes immediately beside him.