Chapter Text
“To be honest, I don’t think he expected you to arrive so early.”
“What’s that?” Rory asks, sniffling a little in the evening light, because she doesn’t think she’s ever come across a place that so ardently makes her want to rip out her own blood vessels and aerate them, just to get more of that sweet air into her blood. She deserves that much, doesn’t she? Clean air, no smog, shiny hair, lots of other things too, like happiness.
Or so she tells herself. “Early?” the woman says, again. “Your grandfather?”
She had introduced herself as Robin, already; older, auburn hair, green eyes with what was decidedly an, if not, maternal, then aunt-like force behind them.
There’s sawdust stuck to her boots, some of which she’s tapping off onto Rory’s new porch. Rory’s new porch because Rory is now the owner of a new and very, extremely old, house.
It is falling apart at the seams. Rory wants to hug it back together. She bets that she could do it if she just tried hard enough.
“Early.” Rory says. She is trying not to cry. That’s why she can’t give Robin a straight answer, and that is the only reason. There are too many memories embedded in this place, fantastic ones yes, but consider the fact that Rory has never been good at making sure that she does not cry, and consider the effort it is taking her to exercise this unused skill right now.
“You can’t be more than 22,” Robin says.
“21,” Rory replies back, affecting an absent-minded state, so she doesn’t have to attempt making eye-contact. The evening is yellow, red, gold, and she wants to run her hands through the light but Robin does not know her well, and she does not know Robin well and even if they did, perhaps, know each other to any serviceable extent, she would still think Rory a little bit off-centre, a little off-axis with the correct axis of the world if she were to swirl her small, yet heat-swollen fingers through what would look to be the air. “College just wasn’t for me.”
“Understandable,” Robin says with a hint of a smile. “Wasn’t for me either. But can I ask; are you about to cry?”
“Oh, definitely,” Rory says.
And that’s how she meets Mayor Lewis; her body almost wracked with some sort of inexplicable grief and Robin patting her awkwardly on the back, the unfamiliarity of each other not permitting anything more.
***
The letter had been for when the mundanity of life had become too much. Had Rory let it become too much, too quick? If she had, then that was definitely because of her choice to pursue a business and HR related course rather than something she actually would have, you know, wanted to be alive for.
Was her grandfather giving a little sigh of disappointment right now (from heaven, god bless his soul) because she had taken on a whole farm at not the age he had envisioned for her?
Rory’s head is sore and she would drink water to combat this but the one sink in her grandfather’s old house is faintly rusted and the water faintly tasting like rust, and there is a box of parsnips on the floor beside her. This box of parsnips is the funniest thing that has ever happened to her. They are just sitting there, expecting things off her. Expecting to be planted and grown and maybe sang to if one was so inclined and so on and so forth until they produce some sort of material she can sell so she can survive.
She glances, or more so winces from pain, in the direction of the tools she will use to cultivate these silly little seeds. They are also rusted.
Rory might be going crazy, also, but she is almost sure that this house used to be bigger when she’d visit it during the summer, the windows thrown open wide so light could come streaming through in the summer, bathing the ground in a colour that is not fit for the ground to be coloured in.
Magic. It had all been magic. And now she is sitting here with a headache and a rusty sink, and no magic, actually.
Rory needs to calm down. She also needs to start making an income. She bites her lip for a moment, tastes copper on her tongue and then tells herself not to do that again. She picks up the packets of parsnip seeds. They rattle slightly as she bundles them in her arms and brings them outside.
Overhead, the sky has become a bruised purple-navy. It is late but Rory’s always been rather good at seeing in the dark and there’s the hoe leaning by the side of the house along with the other tools she's been given to get started. Rory drops the parsnips on the ground and picks it up. It’s heavy. She immediately feels the strain in her arms, the tension across her muscles. She swings it up and down into the ground.
She tills fifteen decent-sized squares of land and presses a handful of parsnip seeds into each one, making sure to bury them under the dirt. At this point the stars are out, and the night wind has snaked its way under her woolen fleece, chilling her skin. But she brings the watering can to the pond just down from her house and fills it anyway. When she waters her crops, it splashes against her leggings. She tries not to think about how most of her dry clothes are still packed away and that her new home has no central heating.
Then she is done, and she does not feel much of anything, because all these actions feel divorced from what is meant to come later; the parsnips. She has this brief flash of doubt that shocks her for a moment, and settles into something of a pit in her stomach, teasing out the idea that perhaps she has made a mistake. But then she hears the hoot of an owl in the distance, a round and soft natural sound, and she thinks that the stars must be brighter here than they ever were back in the city and she begins to believe that maybe she will be okay.
***
When Rory was very young, maybe two years old or so, she had jumped from the top of the stairs to see if she could fly.
She could not. She did not have wings. Instead all she got for her efforts was a nice knock on the head and the terrified shriek of her mother who had just watched her toddler catapult herself down the stairs. It’s a wonder she didn’t injure herself more seriously.
The point is, there was no magic around. But now there is a funny little green creature peeking out at Rory from behind Mayor Lewis and either there is magic around now, or Rory’s head trauma from that incident had only decided to manifest now in the manner of a hallucination of a round leafy thing.
Lewis does not seem to notice the creature. Rory cannot seem to notice anything but it. He continues talking about the community centre, how Joja will overtake it soon and Rory thinks that capitalism is terrible, she really does, but how can she not be distracted right now?
When they are back out in the weak spring sun, Lewis stops for a second.
“How are you getting on?” he asks.
Rory turns around from where she’d been looking over her shoulder, back at the centre. “Sorry?” she says.
“Getting on,” he repeats. “With the farm.” He is speaking slowly, giving her ample chance to understand him.
“Oh,” she says. “Well. I’m getting on well.”
Lewis nods. “Your parsnips should have been fully grown today. Did you put them in your shipping bin?”
Rory blinks. Had she known that meeting this man for the first time with tears in her eyes would have prompted him to treat her like a child for any other interactions, she would have done a getter job at wiping them away. “Yes. I did do that.”
“Great! I’ll be there to collect them in the morning. Goodbye, Aurora.”
Rory chews at her lip as she watches him go. Then she turns around and goes right back into the community centre.
It is well and truly dilapidated. There’s moss growing over the rotten floor-boards and parts so worn away that soil of the foundation is showing through. Rory glances at a centipede crawl out from beneath its dark, moist, home beneath a cracked wooden plank. She wrinkles her nose. She never has liked centipedes. Too many legs.
It is desperately quiet in here. She’s aware of her own breathing to an extent that doesn’t occur often. Her boots squidge against the floor as she pokes around the place, her heart beating solidly in her ears.
She doesn’t remember the centre from her earlier visits to the valley. Mostly, they had been confined to the farm, with her grandfather showing her around and picking her up and turning her the other direction when she seemed in danger of either damaging some of the crops or injuring herself. She had loved it.
Now, she turns the corner and walks into a room. It is smaller than the main area. There’s something glittering on the ground in the main area, a rectangular tablet of some sort. Rory walks towards it and looks down, noticing a lengthy inscription. But it’s indecipherable. She cannot make out a single word of it and that’s because there are no discernible words. It looks like some other fantastical language. She wants to pick it up and take it with her, maybe bring it to the museum to see if Gunther knows what it is, but it’s stuck firmly to the ground. Which is odd, seeing as the ground isn’t very firm at all.
Rory hugs her arms to herself and sighs. She doesn’t have time to waste here, trying to understand what this thing is, what the thing she had seen is. There’s too much to be done on the farm, what with all the wild trees and grass and rocks. She should be clearing out space, tilling more land, doing anything but going gallivanting after fairy-tales. She’d promised herself once that she’d grow out of the escapism. Now that her life didn’t beg quite so dearly to be escaped from, she intends to keep her promise.
When she leaves the community centre, she closes the door slowly, so as not to make a sound.
***
The next morning, Rory finds a letter in her postbox.
She doesn’t even know how it got there, unless the postman around these parts liked getting up supernaturally early. Gods above, Rory herself was up at 6am, no matter how much she despised it. Were the post rounds done before even then? That seemed ridiculous, and yet there it is, a letter, tucked in very neatly towards the back.
She reaches in and pulls it gently out, thinking it may be from her dad, in a sort of old-fashioned novelty way. Robin had mentioned that the townsfolk liked to send letters every now and then but Rory isn't nearly close enough with any of them to be receiving a letter from one.
The letter has a purple wax seal. Not from her dad, then. She doesn’t think he’s ever even thought of the concept of wax seals, let alone having the equipment needed to create the design present in this one. It shows a pine tree in the centre of the wax. Rory frowns and breaks the seal.
The letter inside is written on dark, starlit paper. She wonders at it, almost in awe at the way it glitters.
In the corner is a crude representation of the little thing she’d seen. It's green, and had slightly longer legs than what she’d remembered, but surely they were meant to be the same.
But the letter itself is… strange, speaking of towers and sources. It has the peculiar feel of a summons. It asks Rory to pay a visit to the tower in the west of the forest, for help with her ‘problem’ in the community center. She can't figure out what to make of it.
It's with the name ‘M. Rasmodius,’ which is a little ridiculous sounding in and of itself, but the added ‘Wizard’ afterwards really sealed the deal for Rory. Not even a week into living in the valley and she's already getting sent spam mail. She hadn’t even known this still occurred with physical post.
Still, the stationery the perpetrator had used is too pretty to throw away. Rory folds the letter back up, places it in the envelope and then places it very carefully in her pocket. She wants it with her, just in case.
With the intent to ask someone in town if there's something of a junk mail problem in the valley, Rory gathered her first earnings from her shipping box (which she had gripped with such excitement that the ridges on the edge of the coins left marks on her hands) and set out for the town.
***
A week later, there is a man with purple hair at Rory’s door.
She is so taken aback by his appearance that she doesn't even respond when he asks her where she’s been.
He is wearing a wizard’s hat. This should be the most odd thing about him, but even his beard is purple so it never had a chance in being awarded that title.
“Aurora,” he says, sharply. “I sent you a letter last Friday. Why did you not heed it?”
Rory blinks. This morning, she had been planning on affixing her green beans more firmly to their trellis. She worries about the way they hang so low to the ground sometimes.
“A letter…” she says. “Oh! Did you send this one?” She fishes the strange glittery paper out of the pocket of her work trousers. It is wrinkled and dirtied beyond belief at this point as there had been an incident involving Rory, her fishing rod, and the local river. The letter had dried where it had stayed in her pocket, but the wax had crumbled off the envelope and the words themselves were blurred and water stained.
“Yes,” the man says. “I am Rasmodius.”
“Did you come to take your letter back?” Rory asks. She holds it out to him, not entirely sure that she’s acting in a normal way but unsure of what else to do.
“No,” he says, a hint of frustration edging into his voice. “Why did you not come?”
“Last time I tried the door it was locked,” Rory says. Admittedly, this had been before she had received the letter but admittedly, this man had also labelled himself as a wizard in his signature.
Rory tells him this, in an effort to make him realise she has not fallen for his peculiar joke.
“Yes. That would be because I am a wizard.”
To his credit, he does seem quite dedicated to this bit of his. Rory laughs awkwardly, hoping this is the reaction he wants.
Rasmodius, the wizard, scowls. Extremely deeply. Rory is amazed at the depth of his expression. She stares for another moment, before remembering the mentioning of the ‘rat-problem’ and the appearance of the little creature in the corner of his letter.
She holds the letter out and points to the left corner. “How did you know about them? Do you know what they are?”
The scowl is not completely wiped from his face but it does soften considerably. “So the junimos have appeared to you,” he murmurs. He looks back up at Rory, then, his eyes roving over her face. Rory averts her eyes. Her skin grows hot.
“If you want to know more about them, then follow me,” he says, at last. Then he turns on his heel and begins walking away.