The Little Terraformer That Could

From Galateya’s slowed perspective, the change was rather dramatic.

In real time, it took many days for the first pale tendril to emerge from the frozen floor. A thin, barely there, thread of brilliant green pushing upward through the ice like a needle through cloth. The tendril was translucent at the base, darkening to a deep emerald at the tip, and it carried within its cells a faint violet luminescence that matched the color of Galateya’s eyes.

She stared at it across the long, slow hours of her self-imposed near hibernation with a slightly thawed eye. Her heart beat once. The long silence. Her heart beat again. The tendril grew a fraction of a millimeter.

She lowered her hand to the tendril, moving at a glacial pace and hummed the note once again, focusing on innately guiding the little newborn plant towards breathing in stale air and producing something she could breathe.

The tendril thickened.

Over what felt like nearly a day to Galateya and was in reality weeks or months of real time, the thread became a shoot. The shoot became a stem. The stem forked, producing two leaves the size of her thumbnail, each one a deep violet-green with veins pulsing with bioluminescent light of violet stars.

She could barely believe it.

Her Taniwha heart understood the complex things that her conscious mind struggled to assemble. Her tears carried mana along with salt, despair and hope. Raw, Syntropic energy drawn from the deepest reserves of her Fractal Engine heart.

Galateya poured herself into her tiny seedling. She pictured rain. She pictured the stories the room whisper-sung to her about what rain sounded like, about water falling from a sky she had never seen.

She pictured rivers mentioned in Belle’s novels, described in passing as the heroine crossed a stone bridge to meet the monster in the moonlight. She pictured oceans she had only ever read about and imagined, vast and blue and endlessly alive.

The seedling drank her imaginings like a sponge.

From her frozen vantage point, the growth was magnificent. The stem thickened daily, darkening from pale green to a rich, woody brown. Branches emerged in slow spiraling patterns, each one tipped with clusters of violet-green leaves. The roots spread beneath the ice in fractal networks she could feel through the floor, a mirror image of the branches above, reaching outward in all directions.

The tree needed air. Carbon dioxide, specifically, though Galateya did not know the word for it then. She simply felt the tree pulling at the atmosphere of the sealed bubble, drawing the stale air through its leaves and converting it into a breathable atmosphere.

From Teya’s perspective, in the glacial time of her self-imposed hibernation, the tree grew like a bonfire.

Soon enough, the seedling stood two feet tall. The air in the main room tasted different when she drew in the rare, shallow breaths.

Cleaner.

Her lungs, compressed and operating at minimal capacity, expanded a fraction of an inch more with each inhalation.

The tree was feeding her atmosphere. A closed loop. Her tears fed the roots. The leaves cleaned the air. She breathed the air. She cried more tears. The cycle turned, slow and fragile, powered by a dragon girl who refused to die alone.

The tree needed more.

Galateya felt its hunger through the root network. The seedling needed more than her tears to bloom. The roots were spreading, searching with increasing urgency, seeking external elements.

Life. Life came from death. The little dragon knew that much from Yulia’s stories.

Galateya suddenly realized where the “more” was available.

Instructor Vossir stood frozen to her left, one foot raised mid-stride, fur rigid with ice crystals, eyes open wide. Kirrath and Sennya loomed further away.

Three bodies.

Protein, minerals, water, bone, fur, mana. Everything a growing tree could want.

Galateya did not feel guilt. She was long past guilt. She was past many things. Guilt required the energy to care about the feelings of the dead, and she had no energy to spare.

She hummed the note of Magisynthesis and directed the roots.

From her slowed perception, the process unfolded with the grandeur of a cathedral being built. The root tips reached Vossir first. They touched the frozen wolf’s foot, tested the frozen fur and burrowed past it into the icy flesh beneath.

The roots were gentle at first. Exploratory. Thin white filaments threading through ice-locked muscle fiber, finding the minerals, the calcium in bone, the iron in blood. The wolf’s body was a mine and the tree was a patient excavator.

Galateya taught the little tree how to devour, melt the ice, molecule by molecule.

Over the days or perhaps weeks of Galateya’s subjective time, and months in reality, Vossir dissolved.

The tree consumed her in layers. The outermost tissues went first, fur and skin breaking down into component nutrients that traveled up through the root network and emerged as new growth.

The mana-rich bones, organs and crystalline heart of the wolf fed Galateya’s tree the most, providing it a boost of magical power and life far beyond what the little dragon’s tears offered.

Soon, where Vossir’s frozen arm had been, a branch sprouted, thick and strong, bearing leaves of deep crimson tipped with violet sparks. Where her torso had stood, the trunk thickened dramatically, the bark taking on a faintly striated pattern that, if examined closely, resembled the grain of wolf fur.

Only the Lazarus bracelet remained behind, the immovable metal impervious to the tree.

Galateya watched and hummed and cried and breathed.

She guided the tree onto its next meal.

Kirrath went next. The wolf against the wall provided a different mineral profile, had a slightly different flavor to her and the tree responded accordingly.

The branches growing from Kirrath’s remains produced the first flowers. Small, five-petaled blooms in shades of violet and black, brightening to a luminous amethyst at the tips.

Sennya was consumed by roots that climbed the walls like ivy. By then, her tree reached upward, branches pressing against the ceiling of the main room, leaves spreading across the surface in a living canopy. After devouring the third wolf, the tree produced its first fruit.

A single sphere, the size of Galateya’s fist, bloomed from a sturdy branch directly above her head. Its skin was smooth and dark violet, with hairline veins of bioluminescent green running across the surface. It grew slowly, ponderously, swelling over weeks of real time as the last of Sennya’s compressed mana and crystalline heart was drawn up through the wood and concentrated into this single, heavy offering.

The flesh-spider tree was the final, hearty meal, along with the rest of the magitek life-support garden.

The dead garden that had once fed Galateya and her instructors sat in the center of the time bubble, branches frozen and dull. Galateya guided the roots toward it with utter determination, humming her note with more intent, shaping the direction of growth the way a sculptor shapes clay.

The flesh-spider tree’s remains held a vast reserve of condensed mana meant to feed four for twenty years time. Syntropy, crystallized in its trunk, designed to produce the combat-ready spawning spiders at regular intervals. Galateya’s tree absorbed this mana greedily, feasted on the corpses of spiders frozen within its creepy fruits.

The trunk surged in diameter. New branches erupted in succession. The canopy filled the main room, then pushed tendrils through the doorways into the adjoining chambers. Roots cracked through walls, threading through pipes, feeding on crystalline hexagrams and dead magitek artificery.

Violet flowers and green moss bloomed in every room. Fruit appeared in clusters, heavy spheres hanging from sturdy branches like lanterns. The bioluminescent glow intensified until the entire five-room bubble was bathed in a soft, living purple light, the glacial white of Galateya’s frozen domain slowly giving way to the vibrant warmth of her creation.

The tree had consumed everything dead and turned the bubble alive.

Galateya looked up at the fruit above her head. She had likely been frozen for a long time. She did not know how long exactly. A year? Two?

The singing in her mind had continued throughout, a constant companion, sometimes loud, sometimes distant, always plotting terrible things for her Frontenachii Masters. The dragon girl had absorbed more songs than she could process, filing them away in the depths of her memory for future examination.

She began to thaw herself.

It took days. She reversed the process, letting warmth creep back into her fingers and toes. The sensation was excruciating. Pins and needles evolved into fire, her nerves screaming awake after their long hibernation. Her circulatory system sputtered back to life like an engine turning over after years of abandonment. Her heart accelerated from its glacial rhythm, the beats coming closer together. Ten minutes… Seventy seconds. Sixty. Fifty. Thirty.

A beat every second, the normal pace of a living Omnid in linear time.

She gasped.

The first full breath hit her lungs like icy water… except it was clean and warm and alive. The air of her prison was… delicious, fresh, absolutely wonderful.

Galateya moved her fingers and arms.

Stiff, creaking, the joints protested after so long in one position. She uncrossed her legs and fell forward onto her hands and knees, gasping, trembling, tears streaming freely now, hot and fast, each one dropping onto the living floor where brown roots and green moss embraced them.

Many tasty looking fruits hung above her.

She reached up with a shaking hand and pulled the nearest one from the branch. The stem separated cleanly with a soft snap. The sphere was heavy, warm to the touch. The bioluminescent veins pulsed beneath her claws.

She bit into it.

The flavor exploded across her tongue like a symphony she had never heard. Sweet and tart and deeply savory all at once, with an undertone of mineral richness that her starved body recognized as pure, compressed sustenance. Mana flooded into her body. Her liminal heart began spinning faster, then faster still, generating warmth that spread through her chest, her stomach, her limbs.

She ate the entire fruit in six ravenous bites. Seeds and skin and juice and all and let out a happy whimper.

Energy poured through her. Her scales, dull and brittle from the long freeze, began to solidify, harden, to take on a new depth of radiant, colorful luster. Her claws, which had been thin and fragile, thickened and curved. Her horns, barely nubs when she had frozen herself, ached as they pushed a centimeter further from her skull.

She ate a second fruit. A third. A fourth.

Each one carried the compressed mana of the consumed bodies and garden, refined through the tree’s living chemistry into the most perfect sustenance designed for her Taniwha biology. She felt herself growing, changing, her body catching up on years of arrested development in a single ravenous feast.

When she had eaten every fruit within reach, she stood on unsteady legs and walked for the first time, feeling reborn.

The tree filled the bubble. Branches and roots and flowers occupied every room, creating a living lattice of violet and green and deep, woody brown. The air was warm and oxygenated, a small biosphere sustained by the tree’s closed-loop Magisynthesis. Water condensed on the leaves and dripped into natural collection points the roots had carved into the floor, forming small, clear pools. She reached into one with cupped hands and drank greedily. The water was cold and fresh.

The bubble was no longer a nightmarish prison.

It was a garden. HER garden.

Galateya moved through the living landscape touching the bark, the leaves, the flowers. Every surface pulsed faintly in response to her presence, a biome attuned to its creator. She pressed her palm against the trunk and felt the heartbeat of the tree, slow and deep, synched with her own.

“Stats,” she said, tapping her Lazarus bracelet. The hexagonal bracelet did not respond, something broken within by what she had done. She shrugged and decided not to bother with it further. She didn’t bother to try to unfreeze the bracelet, didn’t want to know how weak she was, such numbers would likely only depress her since she was never able to meet the high level expectations of her great-grandmother.

She found her V-ring, lying on the moss, framed by a lattice of fine roots. The ring was dead, cracked where Vossir stomped on it, encased in a thin layer of ice.

Galateya picked it up and held it in her claws.

She had frozen it with everything else. The anger had been indiscriminate, total, a child’s tantrum amplified through the engine of a Taniwha’s conceptual power. She had locked the device in the same absolute cold as the wolves and the walls and the air.

Unfreezing it required the same skill she had used to thaw herself.

She concentrated warmth into her palms, letting heat seep through the ice, millimeter by millimeter. The frost retreated.

Then, she poured mana into the ring.

The internal magitek crystals flickered. The projection blinked on, appearing in the air. It was distorted, fuzzy, but thankfully still working.

“G-Galateya?” The AI’s voice was gritty, glitchy, syllables dropping in and out. “Is… What’s going on?”