FINALLY - Lol...hate having to write info chapters but now I can get back to posting some main story goodstuff :D

Chapter Nine

Alexis Filia Alocarta Cortez was as always in the library and as a member of the Librarian’s Guild it was her duty to help maintain it organized and clean. The tomes in this library were all made by the pilot of the black tree but the content inside of them were not all his. Students, if they discovered something they wanted to share, could submit their content in memory stones forged of core that once processed would either be erased from the stone or transferred to a tome.

“Where would you like these?” She asked the headmaster of the academy motioning to the cart full of new tomes.

She was actually the only one who even had contact with the headmaster, the famous pilot of the black tree. She had applied for the school early on but because she had been only six years old she had to wait for the opening of the elementary school building. Back then she had no real hope of actually entering the academy, not because of her lack of skill, but because of her disability. When she was younger, barely three, she had been blinded in an accident involving a poisonous parasite. It had entered through her tear ducts and by the time it had been detected and destroyed the parasite had ruined her nerves all the way near her brain. Repair was impossible and parts of her nerves had to be removed. While she would retain control of her eyes they would never see the light of day again.

When she sent in her letter she had sent a letter of her disability as well requesting and hoping for a class for someone like her. What she received in reply surprised her, it was a tome, a book. At first she was flabberghasted by the reply and in her apprehension of it she left it untouched for weeks until, finally, curiosity won over.

Fingers trembling she opened the book and felt the pages with the tips of her fingers feeling for the familiar sensation of bumps running across her fingertips but felt nothing but smooth glass like pages. Disappointment and sadness crept up into her as confusion erupted throughout her mind as she sought an answer to this gift. Then it happened. Her brain felt as if it was being tickled by thousands of feathers much akin to the crawling of an army of ants.

In her first moments of sight she became unbalanced and panicked, she was seeing in a whole new way and her mind was processing everything in ways it had never done before. Just as she was learning to see again she was also forced to learn how to walk again. Her perception was not the normal standard of bi-optical perception, instead her new sight was a visual display of a three hundred sixty visual range in every direction including up and down. There was no telling what was front and back, top or bottom, nor even side to side. Each time she attempted to take a step she found herself unable to find her “front”.

It took weeks of trial and error to finally start walking forward.

When she was accepted into the academy long before the elementary school building was finished she wondered if her case was exceptional. As it turned out she was, the headmaster even told her so.

What she had received was a form of sight so advanced that the tome she had was written with a self erasing memory download packet that had only a one time use. The headmaster told her that he knew of only two people with the ability she now had, including her the headmaster was the other.

He explained that the universe was layered by an inconceivable number of dimensions with no real known order or purpose to them all. The skill she had learned tapped into the forces of one of the dimensions most attuned to the ethereal energy of psions to see the echoes of reality. Or that is what she roughly understood. What it really looked like though was that she received a sort of amazingly detailed sonar skill, so detailed that she could “see” the letters on a book by the differences between the ink and paper.

She suspected that the reason why she had been taught this skill was the fact that no matter how hard she tried she could not see the headmaster, she perceived him as a mobile force that for two meters around itself it distorted her visual abilities. It was like he was a glowing sun.

“For now leave them there,” he told her. His voice always rang in her head, he never communicated verbally, always using telepathy.

“Sir…,” she began but couldn’t bring herself to ask. Aside from the one time he talked to her when she arrived in the academy and was assigned library duty by request of the headmaster, their conversations were always short and to the point. He intimidated her and he seemed to enjoy his solitude.

“What is it child?” the voice in her head asked.

“Why are you always like this?” she asked gathering her courage. “I mean...alone?”

“I am not alone,” he replied.

“Aside from me I never see anyone come here,” she pointed out. “I...m-mean, I don’t think anyone besides me even knows about this room in the library.”

Among her duties of bringing down the books the headmaster forges and sorting them out she would also bring up his meals to the top most room in the library through a series of intricate hallways. The library was probably the single largest of the buildings largely built by the black tree and its amazingly tremendous power.

“Are you bonded?” he asked after a moment of quiet.

“N-no,” she replied. It wasn’t the fact that she didn’t want to bond with a tree, her bondlessness was mostly due to the fact that spire seeds from the black tree were so highly valued that the Disputes Arena was constantly full of students fighting over the right to the next batch of seeds. Alexis doesn’t like confrontation which is why she actually loves her librarian position and because of that tidbit of her nature she never bothered with winning a seed.

“Here,” without moving the headmaster opened a vault where he kept some of the more important tomes that he said he would not yet move to the library or ever. Inside it were also hundreds of spire seeds including three of the largest Alexis knew of. The largest of the three moved towards her. “I was planning to use these for myself later on. I am going to need you for several more years, so in consideration of this I think it is best that you and I get to know each other a little bit.”

The spire seed was dense with energy and it appeared to contain the same kind of bright energy as the headmaster did.

From the headmaster’s vault a small stacks of books also floated towards her.

“B...but these...,” she opened her mouth wide in shock as they dropped into her open arms. “I...I can’t t-take these!”

“Take them,” he insisted. “Read them, learn from them, and grow your seedling.”

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Alexis found herself later that day sitting on her bed looking at the seed floating in front of her as her trembling fingers slowly slid from side to side of each page. These books were written down, there was no virtual graphic memory data like many of the other tomes, these contained writing and pictures like normal books.

So far she had read a handful of pages and found the writing easy enough to understand. They dealt with perfect harmony of synchronization with a bondmate, the truth of bonding, and what really happens to the consciousness inside the core. So far she had only read about how to properly bond and how to best encourage the growth of the seed.

Hours into the night she eventually forced herself to close the tome in her hand and head outside to officially bury her seed. She was living in the elementary dorms which were the closest to the river that runs through the academy. Once outside the dorm building it was only a few hundred meters to the river’s edge where the most fertile of the soil could be found.

Again she trembled, only this time her entire body shivered and not just because of the chilling night air as she found the spot where she wanted to plant her seed. With the strength of her mind she took hold of a chunk of earth and guided the seed inside before enveloping it with the same soil. She grew nervous as she did the next part, the bonding was rather quick, but important.

She took a seat atop the spot where her seed rested taking a cross legged position. She did as the books instructed and opened her mind to receive the mind of the seed, it was a chaotic mess of swirling energy. Imposing her mind on it she took the energy inside the core, the deepest part of the core where the self of the seed resided and pushed the energy out replacing it with the purest energy of herself. It felt like she was peeling a piece of herself from her own insides and yanking it out, except without the excruciating pain that should have followed.

The core was no longer a swirling chaos, it was a small burning ember, she looked at it and realized that she was seeing her own soul. A piece of it anyways.

Now and forever she was the tree and the tree was her, the death of one would be the death of both.

“Ok…,” she said smiling proudly. A sharp gust of wind made her shiver as it chilled the cold sweat on her body.

Applying Forced Growth she could literally feel the seed taking root eating the soil around it and pushing up what would become its trunk.

She stood and dusted herself off before heading back inside to the dorm.

“G-good night little seed,” Alexis said as she looked outside her balcony towards the spot where her seed was steadily growing. The dorm rooms were large containing the bedroom itself, a kitchen, bathroom, living room, and yes...even a balcony.

Goodnight mother…

Startled Alexis looked around but failed to find anyone else in her room, figuring that she must have heard the noises of the wind she headed for the bathroom and started warming the water. She would hate to catch a cold from being outside in the chilly air.

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The next day she woke up early in the morning and started breakfast preparing some eggs and a grilled chicken sandwich with everything on it. It was the headmaster’s favorite.

Ever since planting her seedling Alexis felt good, as in happy, for some reason and she liked it. It even got her in the mood to whistle and dance about as she prepared the breakfast. Once the meal was ready and stuffed in their proper containers she took her bag with her tomes in it and headed for the library.

First things first though, she headed for the river to water her seedling.

She was surprised by its grow, already the beginnings of the trunk poked out of the soil displaying four large leaves. The green trunk of the tree was barely a foot off the ground but the leaves were already three or four feet long spreading out like an X. Each leaf was at least a foot wide and at its lowest the leaves were off the ground some six inches. They were thick and strong but moved like muscles in accordance to the Alexis’ thoughts.

After watering her growing tree she headed for the library.

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“Are you insane?” she heard a voice inside the headmaster’s room shout. It was a voice that she did not recognize and sounded like it was coming through the loudspeaker of a phone.

“The legion is ready,” the voice surprised her, it sounded childish, it sounded far too young for the words it spoke and with the authority one could feel in them. “Have your fleet ready, they are going to go regardless of what you choose. The only thing you can decide is whether the legion goes by ship or takes to the water and swims all the way there.”

“B-but…” the voice on the speaker sounded like he wanted to say more, instead the voice let out a long sigh. “Fine, give me two weeks and my fleet will take anchor in Gran Domingo.”

“Good and goodbye,” the childish voice said. There was a loud click and then...silence.

“Uhm…,” Alexis barely whispered.

“Come in Alexis,” the voice she was accustomed to spoke in her head.

“Who was that?” she asked looking around for the source of the childish voice. It was easy to find another lifeforce but she was finding nothing and it was making her worry that she was going mad.

“An elder,” the voice inside her head replied. “So how was it? Did you plant the seed and bond with it?”

“I have,” she replied giving up on finding the source of the other voice doing her best to dismiss it as overlapping memories where she had overlapped a child’s voice over the voice of the headmaster. A temporary lapse in concentration. “It...I don’t feel anything different.”

“It will,” he said. “And I believe it is already synchronizing with you. Remember, the bonded tree is not just a suit of war when one truly opens itself to it.”