It was a busy – if formulaic – evening for the druids of the local henge until, all of a sudden, they all sensed Basil’s return.
Like he only just shed some cloak of invisibility.

The druids’ immediate response was to bring Basil back to the henge.
Several druids, including Clover, Heather and Aspen, beelined for the woods and scoured the wilderness for any signs of their missing colleague.

The druids spread out to cover more ground.
Aspen took to the skies with Heather, while Clover searched the ground.

The golden light of the setting sun percolated through the rustling canopy in glimmering shafts.
The cool, musty air of the forest was abuzz with imperceptible activity.
From clicking and chittering to hissing and droning, the skittering orchestra spanned every shaded inch of the world surrounding the searching druid.

“Basil!” Clover cried as she peered inside the cavity of a rotting log.
“Basil! …Where are you?!”

As she opened her mouth to call out his name once again, she heard a rustling in the bushes behind her.
“Clover…!” he exclaimed breathlessly, taking a few unassisted steps in her direction before stumbling and falling down onto a thick cushion of matted moss.

The relief that lit up her face was short-lived as she processed his sorry state.
“Basil!” She dashed towards him and helped him back onto his feet.
“What happened!? Where were you?!”

As the fishman gathered his wits, the woman looked him over for any obvious injuries.
She spotted a particularly hard-to-miss spot on his neck, where the invisible prick from before swelled to a red, veiny crater.

The sight of the wound made her gasp, but before she could ask him about it, Basil managed to choke out his warning.

“No time to explain…!” He said between groans. “We have to warn the druids about the alchemist…!”
The ex-alchemist grudgingly gave in to his dire warning and nodded.

“Then talk as you walk!” she demanded, shouldering most of his weight on their way back to the henge.
“What alchemist?” she asked one question before another one cut the queue, “Are they the one who did this to you?” she asked, winding herself up with her own enquiries.

“Y-Yes… he’s mad…”
“He scattered a tonne of crates with apple-mites… He’s drip-feeding them some sort of growth serum…” he explained breathlessly.
“If the ones he made in the cave are anything to go off of… Then his giant apple-mites are going to start wreaking havoc as soon as they grow big enough…!” he warned.

Suddenly a small red bird swept down from the sky fast enough to whistle.
“You found him!” Heather exclaimed as soon as she was back to her human self.

Just like Clover, Heather’s expression started off relieved before quickly falling away and leaving a look of veiled distress.

Before any of the three could speak, a bird that would soon reveal itself to be Aspen swept down and gracefully transitioned into his elven form. Such that by the time he was standing upright, he was able to deliver his curt diagnosis.

“Basil, you’ve been poisoned.” There was a dire edge to his voice that Clover didn’t like.

The fishman gave a painful nod.
“It was some alchemist… He shot me with a blowgun.”
“It was the same alchemist that held me captive…” he said, growing progressively more dazed by the second.

“We should bring him back to the henge,” Heather proposed, looking at Aspen for his thoughts.
The elf nodded wordlessly, but before either of them could help Clover carry her companion, the fishman mustered the strength to deliver his warning.

“W-Wait…! Before that… I have to warn you about the alchemist…!”

The entire time that the fishman recited the alchemist’s insane scheme, Aspen couldn’t stop his eyes from drifting to the unnatural injury marring the fishman’s neat scales.

Heather nodded diligently. “I’ll pass the message on to the others at the henge,” she said and shifted into her fastest feathered form.

As Heather sped off with a bat of her wings, the elf quickly turned back to the fishman.
“Do you know what poison he used?”

After a moment’s thought, the fishman nodded hesitantly.
“It sounded like alchemist talk…”

The elf looked at Clover, who immediately nodded and glanced at the fading fishman.
“What chemicals did you hear, Basil?”

“He definitely mentioned some… saya-something… and die-murry-melty-mercury… or something like that…”

“Cyanide?” Clover guessed quizzically.

His face lit up. “Yes…!”
“Is that a bad one…?”

“Quite bad…” she admitted with a nervous grin.

Aspen shook his head.
“Cyanide is a natural substance,” he reasoned shortly. “It should not be able to hurt him…”

“Okay,” Clover sighed anxiously, trying to maintain a façade of competence.
“And what did you say the other things were?”

“Dye-me-tall-mercury I think…?” She shrugged and immediately regretted agitating his burning injury.

“I am not familiar with anything of the sort in nature’s kingdom…” he said, looking at Clover, whose expression was hardened in a thoughtful frown as she considered every chemical candidate that she could think of.

Suddenly, her eyes shot open.
“Dimethylmercury?” she hazarded another guess.
“…That’s bad, right…?” he asked dizzily.

“Horrible!” Clover replied without concern for how panicked she may look.
“The worst!” She continued – being only slightly hyperbolic.

Right on cue, Basil’s legs gave out from under him, and he crumbled to the ground below.

The two other druids immediately caught him and gently laid him down on the bed of moss.

Clover looked up at Aspen desperately.
“Isn’t there some kind of druid magic you can do…?” he pleaded.

As if he were snapped from a trance, the elf nodded.
“Yes…” He replied, but Clover picked up on the uncharacteristic hesitation in his voice.

Aspen knelt down and wrapped his long elven fingers around Basil’s neck; he waited and waited, but nothing happened.
Clover knew things weren’t going as they should when she spotted the corner of the stoic elf’s lip tighten.

“What’s wrong…?”

The elf tried one more time before answering.
“Nature isn’t letting me heal him…” he confessed, attempting to stay calm even when every micro-gesture betrayed his inner turmoil.

Clover’s response wasn’t shock or despair – but outrage.
“What do you mean!?” she demanded, donning a livid scowl.
“He’s a druid, isn’t he?!”

When she looked back down at her colleagues, she was met with dull, unblinking eyes.
His chest rose and fell slower with every passing moment.

As the elf began to move back, Clover supported the limp fishman by herself.
“This isn’t fair!”

Clover quickly cupped her hand over Basil’s injury and tried actuating the magic any way she could think of.
She shut her eyes and imagined the glow.
She imagined the wound closing.
She tried imagining the chemical being excreted through his skin.

“Come on, nature! This can’t be right…!”

For a while the forest went quiet. The wind and the bugs all went silent in unison.

Like an electrical shock straight to the mind, Clover and Aspen immediately knew Nature’s answer.

For a second Clover was dumbstruck – cemented in an eternal moment of stillness and shock.
Then, all of a sudden, she erupted.
“No!” She roared defiantly.

Aspen, typically nature’s ardent defender, could only watch in silence as Clover refused nature’s command to cull her colleague.

For a while, Clover kept trying to heal Basil.

“Clover…” Aspen eventually spoke up more softly than usual.

Anything he might have wanted to say was cut short by a vehement shake of her head that sent her head flying every which way.

“That’s not how that works, Clover…” He sighed, nodding in the direction of her futile healing attempts.
“Nature has a budget; you can’t make something out of nothing…”

She looked up at Aspen with a bouquet of conflicting emotions.
“A budget for nature’s plan?!” Clover demanded, tightening her grasp on the fishman’s numb body.

She cupped a hand over his wound once more. “What was this for?!”
“What was worth this!?” the druid demanded.
“Why wasn’t he in on this deal?!”

As Aspen failed to answer any of her questions, Clover knew that she shouldn’t be screaming at him.

The idea of culling a field of wheat – a nest of bugs – maybe just one hunt’s worth of pig – could be enough to bring her friend back to life.
Or maybe she could track down the alchemist that did this and take from him what he took from Basil.
She disregarded these ideas. After all, spending other people’s lives is exactly what her problem with nature was.

With a decisive set to gritted teeth, Clover conjured her sickle and raised it into the air.
Aspen’s jumped as Clover plunged the golden sickle into her own hand.

His shock was twofold.
Partially, he was shocked to see a druid attempt to go this far to defy nature.
Secondarily, Aspen was beyond speechless to see her skin resist the ethereal tool like steel against steel.

“Clover…!” Aspen managed to choke out as the woman desperately brought the sickle down on her hand over and over again.

Specks of fizzling light shot out from where Clover’s determination clashed against nature’s absolute law.

Overhead, the sky darkened with heavy thunderclouds as the trees began to sway in unison, like a funeral procession that was intent on happening whether Clover was still there clutching a defibrillator or not.

The wind picked up and the noise grew louder while Clover kept hacking away at her unscathed palm.

“NO!” She screamed into the tempest, “Shut up!”
“You want to use people as your stewards because of our humanity!”
“Because we can think long-term!”
“Because we can think abstractly!”
“And because we can care beyond primitive mental pressures!”

As Clover continued to rebel against nature’s will, the angry clouds above rumbled dangerously.

“If you want to use my sentience and my sapience for your bidding, then I WILL NOT let you trample over them!”

While most druids were scrambling around the woods to deal with the incubators, a couple of the older druids gathered to witness this historical act of insubordination.

“If you want unfeeling agents that you can churn up and spit out, then make your own! I’m not that!”

Lightning split a nearby boulder, only succeeding in making Clover flinch but failing to intimidate her.

“What does your budget offer me in exchange for the humanity you expect me to relinquish?!” she demanded.
“Or is that just something you feel comfortable robbing from us?!”

More thunder and lightning pleaded its ancient case from every direction, to which Clover lifted her sickle high one more time.

“My life is my own to spend!” he bellowed into the storm.
“You don’t get to keep it from me, and you don’t get to spend his life either!”

She swung the sickle at her awaiting palm.
On the way, an unseen force attenuated the speed of her hand until, by the time the sickle was close enough to cut her, it only nicked the skin.

As soon as the tool pierced her skin, Clover was overwhelmed by a feeling of utter cold.
It was a branching chill that felt like the very antithesis to life and energy – less cold than un-warmth.

She knelt there, shocked still as the sickle continuously skimmed more of her energy for Basil.

“That’s enough!” Aspen suddenly shouted, snapping Clover from her trance.

“R-right…!” she said hoarsely.
She dropped her sickle, allowing it to fizzle away into nothingness.

Cold and out of breath, Clover wrapped her hand around Basil’s neck and almost immediately felt the skin beneath her frigid palm shift.

The sky above cleared as soon as it darkened, giving way to the star of the show for another hour or so before it could set.

Second passes from the moment that Clover felt Basil’s wound disappear fully.
Even so, she kept her hand around his neck in case there was still some internal healing left to be done.

As she went to check his breathing, Basil awoke with a choked gasp.

She and Aspen let out a collective sigh of relief.
Before they could celebrate, Clover’s body decided that this was the perfect moment to pass out.

Elsewhere, the fleeing alchemist ran through increasingly thick and uncooperative foliage until eventually he had to shut his eyes to protect them from the thorny bushes.

It was in this moment of vulnerability that the ground beneath him gave way to a manhole-sized shaft.

There wasn’t a scream – only a brief “Oaughh!” that followed him down into the bottomless pit.

Then, as silence returned, the sinkhole began to seal shut with an earthy rumble.