***** Zona’s POV *****

Well, I didn’t see that coming. I thought to myself as I carried our guest back to my ‘new’ tree. Now I have a project to work on and a guest to take care of, both of which make life so much more enjoyable.

Not that the project I had been given truly changed my plans for the immediate future. I still had to adjust to the tree I had woken up in and make it livable again before I could do anything else.

I was used to living in a beautiful, ancient Brazilian Cherry tree that had grown to monumental proportions even by the standards of the Amazon jungle. Except the Amazon jungle wasn’t just a jungle anymore. It was also home to the largest spaceport on planet Earth thanks to Broohn’s father and my parents. As such, my old tree was also a smallish skyscraper in the same location, but in a slightly different layer of reality.

My new tree is both a building and a tree at the same time, just like my old one, except this tree was grown into the shape of a building instead of the reality-bending shenanigans of my old tree. I rather liked the artistic flair that someone had put into creating my new tree. They managed to make the whole thing look elegant and natural without compromising the basic structure of the tree. Not that this was particularly difficult. My new tree was a truly massive red ironwood tree with an equally massive set of exposed roots cascading around the lower floors, allowing the upper floors to be built in the hollow interior. It even had an absolutely wonderful view of the jungle since it was growing on the peak of the same mountain Bud was built into.

If only the previous tenants hadn’t left such a mess behind.

Whoever they were, they had clearly lived here for a while, and then one day just up and left for some reason. As far as I can tell, they left almost everything behind and then added a coating or three of grime for some reason. Sure, some of it is the sort of dust and dirt you'd expect a building to accumulate after being abandoned for several centuries, but underneath all of that was some sort of black ick that covered everything. Even the sixteen-meter ceiling in the foyer!

Even without the grime everywhere, I don’t know what most of their junk is, nor do I particularly care at the moment. Why would I care when I have a heart full of someone else’s junk that I haven’t had time to clean out?

Not that I’m going to just throw it all away. Broohn would be rather annoyed with me if I did that. Between his dragon’s tendency to hoard things and his fascination with other people’s tech and gadgetry, he would see all of the “junk” as “treasure”.

Not that I’m all that much better than he is. If it wasn’t scattered all over the interior of my tree like this, I would be right there with Broohn nerding out over all of the artifacts. Having similar interests is pretty much a requirement for marrying a dragon or an enchanter of Broohn’s caliber. If you cannot join them in pursuing their passions, you’re going to end up fighting for their attention, and that is no way to build a stable marriage. It is a much better idea to find someone who you can share your passions with, as I ended up doing with Broohn, and he with me.

For now, though, everything they left behind is all junk that is cluttering up my heart. I cannot bring myself to care about it enough to even ask what kind of junk it is. It is simply junk.

Fortunately, Broohn understood this quite well and took a moment to clean up all of the obvious junk from the rooms on the first three floors while I carried the orc over here. I feel so much better now as a result. It isn’t perfect, the other seven floors still have quite a bit of junk on them, but it will do until Broohn finishes the water wheel for Bud.

As I walked through the front door of my new tree, I was struck again by how elegant it is, especially now that Broohn has cleaned up all of the things that were scattered across the entryway. The grand staircase leading through the second floor and continuing up to the third actually looked like a staircase rather than a waterfall of junk. I can actually see the railings around the second and third-floor balconies now, and there is even a hint of some sort of pattern on the floor, buried beneath all of the dirt and grime. Now that I noticed it, there were hints of similar patterns on all of the other surfaces poking through the multiple layers of grime.

“Wow. I can’t wait to see what this place looks like once I have time to clean it properly. What sort of people expend the effort necessary to build– I mean grow a magnificent palace of a tree like this, then cover the entire inside of the tree with some sort of black crud?” I asked the air around me. “Part of me wants to call them idiots, but if they were truly idiots they wouldn’t have been able to grow this in the first place.”

I received a sense of grudging gratitude from the tree, almost as if it was grateful for the compliment, but didn’t yet know or trust me well enough to trust me with more.

I froze for a moment, not expecting to actually be able to communicate with the tree yet.

Yet it was only for a moment. In the early stages of moving into a new tree like this, especially with a forced move like this one, the opportunities to talk to the tree properly were few and far between. I did not dare waste this opportunity.

“You’re welcome!” I said to the tree. “I’ll get to work cleaning you out as soon as I get my guest situated.”

This was followed by grudging acceptance from the tree before the connection went back to sleep.

Well then. I thought to myself. I knew this was a special tree, they grew a house out of it after all, but I didn’t think it would tell me even that much so soon. This is promising to be quite an adventure.

I vaguely remember someone telling me that there is no adventure in life. Hogwash. There is plenty of adventure in life, you just have to look for it, and be prepared for it to come from the oddest places.

Shaking myself out of my reverie, I went up to the guest room I’d prepared earlier on the second floor and gently tucked the old man into bed. I then strapped a medical wrist monitor on him and set it to page my smart wrist bag when his condition changed. Having done everything I could do for him at the moment, I tiptoed out of the room and started to gently close the door.

Then I noticed the portable partition wall I’d thrown up earlier on the far side of the room to hide the two extremely large pieces of junk so that Broohn could deal with them later. Except now my tree had absorbed the wall and replaced it with a wooden one.

How did that happen? I thought to myself. That partition wall wasn’t even there for half an hour!

I quietly walked over to the wall to investigate further, finding nothing at first. Then my husband walked in quietly, so I gave him a quick hug before turning back to the wall. He placed a hand on my shoulder to get my attention, then cocked an eyebrow at the wall. I brought up the inventory on my smart wrist bag, pointed at the other partition walls I had, then made an aborted throwing gesture at the one my tree ate. I didn't want to accidentally place another one in front of the first, that would just be annoying.

Being as curious as I was, he opened his eyes and truly looked at the wall as an enchanter rather than merely a slightly confused husband. In the meantime, I went back to quietly examining the wall myself, not expecting an answer from Broohn for several minutes. Before I even finished crossing the room, he touched my shoulder to get my attention, glanced at the sleeping man, then nodded to the hallway outside.

Once I had shut the door behind us, I looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

“I think I know what is going on here, but I would like to clarify some things first,” he said. “Why did you choose that room to stick him in?”

“It was the cleanest. There were only two things inside of it that were too big for me to move, so I threw up that partition wall to hide them from our guest,” I replied.

“That’s what I thought you were going to say,” he replied. “It seems to me that whatever those two things are, they are very, very important to your new tree. When you threw up that wall to hide them from our guest, the tree saw an opportunity to protect them from you and jumped on it with both hands.”

And that is why he is such a good enchanter. Because he can look at the magic field around something and quickly figure out what the magic field is doing. Even so, it isn't uncommon for the magic field to be complicated enough that it takes even him a couple of hours to figure it out. In this case, the territorial nature of the magic made it much easier for him to figure out since he is a dragon and territorial magic is one of the things dragons do best.

“So, you’re saying that I have to earn the tree’s trust before it lets me near those two whatever they are?” I asked.

To my surprise, the tree sent me a feeling of confirmation at the same time my husband said, “Yes, that is exactly what I’m saying.”

“Broohn, I’m starting to think that this is not a normal tree,” I said, turning towards the nearest wall and briefly bowing my head in acknowledgment before turning back to Broohn. “It is communicating with me far too quickly and with more intelligence than I have ever gotten from a new tree before. If I had been living in this tree for at least ten years, I would be shocked if it hadn’t progressed to this level, but for a new tree like this one, I’m lucky if it notices my existence in less than two weeks.

“Then there is the whole thing with it claiming a wall like that. While it is possible for one of my trees to do something like that, normally they can only do it when I command them to, and it also requires me having lived there for several months, if not years,” I told him because I needed to think out loud. He's a good husband. He should already know all of this given how long we've been married.

“I’m not surprised,” he replied. “Whoever grew this place put a significant amount of effort into it. Also, based on the sections of the building I’ve seen so far, the entire interior is covered in runes of some sort. They even chose a tree that is so fire-resistant it's almost fire-proof, implying that they were expecting enough power flowing through here that things would start to overheat.”

“What!?” I demanded. “That’s insane! What would they be doing with that kind of power? For that matter, why would they be routing it through a tree? Aren't there a whole host of better energy conductors out there?”

“I don’t know what they're doing with all of that power. For that, I would need to inspect the runes on the upper floors,” he replied. “As much as I would like to simply run up there and inspect them, my Foresight says this is not the time. We have plenty of things that we need to do at the moment. Solving the mystery of the tree can wait until later.”

The phrase “after you have earned the tree’s trust” went unspoken.

“Darn.” I said. “Speaking of time, I thought you were in a rush to get the 3D printer set up for Bud. Why did you stop to pick up all of the junk on the first three floors?”

“There was so much junk that it was faster to pull out one of my spare bags of holding and tell it to pick up everything that was sitting on the floor than it would have been to wade through it all,” he replied. “If it picked up everything, I’m assuming that means all of the doors were still open?”

“You got it. Good thing I closed the door to the guest room before I left then,” I said.

“Yup. At the moment, I am waiting on the 3D printer to finish doing its thing,” he agreed before pulling out two of his enchanted cleaning wands. “In the meantime shall we begin?”

“Absolutely.”