The next morning, Sophie woke up to another bright and sunny day. The weather was edging closer to heat, and the shrine itself was already getting a bit stuffy in the mornings. It was the fifth month here, apparently – the month of Blooming Flowers, if Sophie remembered correctly – and the seasons seemed relatively similar to the ones she was used to, based on Acacia’s explanations from the day before. If that was indeed the case, Sophie imagined it would only get hotter and couldn’t bring herself to look forward to that. She was pretty sure her little shrine didn’t have air conditioning.

After her morning tea and some pastries for breakfast, she almost considered going back into town to stop by the library to talk with the Historian and pick up some other books for Elowen to read, but decided against it. It wasn’t all that pressing to talk to the historian, especially since it seemed like she would need to wait for Linden’s return to follow up on her main lead. And besides, they did have two other books to try, even if they were both probably also romances going off the titles.

Instead, Sophie decided that it might be best to tackle some of the gardening work today, while the weather was still cool enough to be bearable. The grounds around the courtyard were quite overgrown with grass, and there was still the mess of dead plants in the shed. There was even a little garden plot behind the shrine, and Sophie was pretty sure she wouldn’t actually be able to grow anything in it, but it felt like a shame not to try to clean it up.

With this in mind, Sophie found the gloves from her previous gardening adventures and made her way out to the shed, Elowen floating closely behind. “Let’s clean this out today!”

Elowen seemed intrigued by the idea. “What are you going to do with the plants?”

Sophie shook her head. “I’m not sure yet.”

She pulled open the shed’s door, and the interior was just as bad as she had remembered. “At the very least, we can clean out all of the dead leaves and things that have fallen on the floor.”

That would be a good start – and then she could figure out what to do with the plants that remained.

Sophie found a rake amongst the other tools in a corner of the shed, careful of cobwebs and worse things in the dim space, and set to work. It was difficult to see what she was doing with the floor lit only by the open door at the entrance, but she scraped the metal prongs against the debris and began dragging it out of the shed’s door into a small pile on the side.

As usual, Elowen couldn’t do much to help in her current state, but she floated nearby watching as Sophie worked with a peculiar look on her face. Sophie was on her third or fourth pass with the rake, when Elowen finally spoke up.

“It’s awfully dark in there,” she said uncertainly. “Shouldn’t there be sunlight coming in from the roof?”

Sophie paused what she was doing and turned back to stare at the spirit. “From the roof?” Elowen’s comment made little sense to her, and the spirit herself seemed quite unsure of where it had come from.

Sophie set aside her rake and went back inside the dark space, peering up at the roof. In fact, with the sun so bright today, she noticed that there were indeed spots where she could almost see a faint glimmer of light.

There were windows on the roof! There had to be. Now that she knew what to look for, she could see the reflection of glass, almost like a greenhouse. But over the course of the decades, it had been completely covered up by fallen leaves and vines. “Drat,” she muttered to herself. “How am I going to clean that?”

She went back over to the corner of the shed where she had found the rake. Among the other tools there was a surprisingly sturdy-looking wooden ladder. She peered at it skeptically, and then reached out a hand to rattle it a bit. It felt solid. But… if it had truly been 80 years since Rosalie was alive, should she really trust it?

…probably not.

If she fell off of it, there would be no one to help but Elowen, and she wasn’t even corporeal. Maybe Sophie could have Briony stop by to check the ladder for her to see if it was still stable.

Sophie left the ladder in its place in the corner and went back outside to grab her rake. “There should be sunlight,” Sophie explained to Elowen. “But it looks like the roof’s been covered up over the years.”

Elowen looked oddly pleased at the explanation. “Are you going to fix it?” she asked.

“I’ll try,” Sophie promised. “But I think I’m going to need some help.”

Sophie took a few steps back to get a better view of the roof. From the outside, she really couldn’t tell what it was made of – it was simply covered in debris, just like the floor of the shed, but worse.

In fact, if it was a greenhouse, it was a pretty terrible location for one. Tall trees surrounded it, blocking out most of the light anyway. Was it possible that the trees had grown in the 80 year interval? Sophie simply had no idea.

Either way, she was going to try to clean it off. She hefted her rake above her head, standing on her tiptoes, and tried sweeping the roof – or rather dragging some of the debris towards the edge until it fell to the ground with a plop in front of her, splattering her with decaying leaves. Gross.

Elowen let out a surprised giggle from somewhere behind her, and Sophie shot the spirit a dark look. Okay so maybe that hadn’t been the brightest idea, but she didn’t really know what else to do. And she hated to admit it to herself, but ever since becoming a shrine priestess, she seemed to have developed this burning desire to clean things. Specifically shrine-related things.

Whatever. She wasn’t going to question it. Instead, she shuffled about a foot over and hefted the rake above her head again, prepared to do the same thing. This time, however, she was met with more resistance. Vines. She could feel them tangling in the prongs of the rake. She gave them a good tug, which turned out to be a bad idea as well when the tinkle of shattering glass followed soon afterwards.

Double drat.

She shielded her face quickly, before realizing that the glass had fallen through to the inside of the shed.

“Are you okay?” Elowen asked, obviously concerned.

Sophie nodded. “I am – I think I broke a window, though.”

She set her rake aside again and made her way back to the front of the shed. A clear beam of light lit up the place from a hole in the ceiling where a large glass panel had completely shattered. Below it lay a pile of glass, some shards had found their way into the plant pots and some larger pieces remained cushioned on the remaining piles of debris.

Well, somehow she had managed to make the situation worse. She sighed. At least she had light to work with now.

She decided to give up on cleaning the roof off for now and, instead, spent the rest of the morning cleaning the broken glass out of the shed and putting it into a separate pile from the plant debris. At least she had scheduled trash pick up.

When she was finally done, there were eleven large pots left that all held the quite dead-looking potential relatives of the plant that sat in the shrine’s entryway. She decided she’d wait to do anything with those until she had a chance to talk to the florist. Even if they did look dead, she still felt a little bad at the idea of dumping them all out.

Besides, as soon as Sophie had finished, Elowen darted in between the plants with glee, reaching her hand out to hover over each one. “I’m not sure they’re dead,” she explained. “I feel some remnants of mana.”

So there was that.

It was probably around lunchtime, but Sophie felt far too gross to just go inside and get some food. Instead, she left Elowen to her exploration of the plants and made her way along the back of the shrine to the well to get a buck of water. It would be quite cold, but it would be better than tracking dirt and potentially bits of broken glass into the shrine.

When she got to the well, however, she was surprised to find the little dragon creature sitting on the roof like a sentinel. It peered down at her with interest as she carefully approached.

“What are you doing up there?” Sophie asked.

It blinked down at her, not replying, of course. Sophie laughed a little to herself, as she pulled the wooden lid off of the well and lowered the bucket down into the water. As she began pulling the bucket back up, she heard the slide of the little dragon’s leathery wings and then suddenly it was sitting on the edge of the well, close enough to touch.

“Be careful!” she warned, slightly startled at its boldness. “You don’t want to fall in.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, she realized how silly they were. Of course – the little thing had wings. It probably didn’t need to worry as much about things like falling into wells. Although she doubted it would be good for it either way. She hefted the bucket over the side of the well, getting ready to begin her unfortunately cold outdoor bath when –

“Is that a wyvern?”

Sophie jumped at the sound of Elowen’s voice, and the bucket of water sloshed over the side as Sophie dropped it with a thud. The little creature froze in response, but it didn’t fly off this time.

Sophie was afraid to take her eyes off of the thing just in case it did fly off. “A wyvern?” she asked, only vaguely familiar with the term. She had never bothered to ask Elowen or anyone else about the little guy, she realized.

Elowen floated up alongside Sophie, and Sophie was even more surprised to see that little dragon creature – err, wyvern’s gaze followed her. In fact, it appeared to be staring directly at Elowen.

“It is!” Elowen said, and she sounded quite fond.

“What’s a wyvern?” Sophie asked, pronouncing the unfamiliar word carefully. She was pretty sure she had only ever read it in books, and even then, rarely.

“Many see them as pests,” Elowen explained. “They are said to be spreaders of corruption, but it’s not quite true. They consume mana, and they can also channel it much like a mage or a priest might. So they can spread corrupted mana that way, but only if the mana they’ve consumed has been corrupted in the first place.”

Sophie remembered the little creature landing on the little markers and lighting them up. “Ah, are they very common then?”

Elowen shook her head. “Not so common, no. Although far more common than dragons, which haven’t been seen for centuries.”

Sophie felt slightly embarrassed by the fact she’d been thinking that the wyvern was a dragon this whole time, but how was she supposed to know the difference?

The wyvern tilted its head at Elowen as if it could, in fact, see and hear her. Sophie pointed at it. “Look at that! Can it see you?”

Elowen stared at the little thing for a moment and then floated side to side. The creature's gaze followed her. “It does appear to be that way,” she replied.

She seemed quite nonchalant about the idea, but it completely flipped Sophie’s world view on its head. She thought she was the only one who was able to see Elowen. “Um…” she said, not sure where to begin.

“Are they… dangerous?” she settled on. It seemed like the more important question, given the circumstances.

Elowen shook her head. “Not in the slightest. Especially not to a priestess. Although, you haven’t quite learned how to purify mana, yet, this little one poses no harm. The potential for wyverns to spread corrupted mana is the largest of their dangers. This one doesn’t have a whiff of corruption about it, though.”

Sophie was quite glad to hear that. She didn’t want to be consorting with corrupted wildlife after all.

The little wyvern seemed to be bored of this conversation, however, and with a flap of its leathery wings, it took flight and circled around them once before zipping back into the forest. Sophie was sad to see it go. “Is there any way I can convince it to stay longer?”

Elowen giggled at the question. “Well they do like mana. Perhaps when the shrine’s mana levels improve it will want to stay on its own?”

Sophie nodded and stared off into the depths of the forest that the wyvern had gone. They like mana, huh? Perhaps the next time she saw it she could entice it with some of Acacia’s mana bread or something. Although she somehow doubted the baker would appreciate her mana bread being put to use in that manner.

Well, what Acacia didn’t know couldn’t hurt her.