5. The Unseen Seeds

The godly fern waved a yelling desert fox high in the sky. As if it were a balancing scale which couldn’t decide how heavy she was.

Then it spit her out.

Minneka landed among the regular ferns, covered in slime, and rolled against Chef’s paws. “I found one,” she said in a croaky voice. “But the moniker Dinodear was a bad decision.”

The giant fern had vanished. Chef could not remember which one it had been. Minneka took off her cloak: it had protected her, but was now dirty and torn.

“I felt something odd about that fern. When I placed my paw on it, cautiously, it turned into … that monster.”

You’d think animals remembered that. That they’d tell everyone the Dinodear was dangerous, a monstrous thing that ate you. Unless … it always adapted in a different way.

Carefully, Chef stepped into the field. She made sure her paws never stood on a fern, which felt like walking on stilts and losing balance every heartbeat. She studied the floor, a swimming pool of green with rare patches of brown mud.

There.

She knew wat ferns looked like. She knew what every plant looked like, even if they were sick, or not fully grown, or receiving too little water. This fern was a good imitation, but it was wrong. As if someone had tried painting a fern, but lacked enough skill.

Should she grab it, faster than it could respond? Or should she approach kindly and slowly? Could she talk to them?

“Erm, hello, Dinodear. We need you. Can I pluck you? Become, erm, red if I’m not allowed, and green otherwise. No, blue—you’re already green.”

Minneka sighed from behind her back. “Even a Primas wouldn’t understand what you just said.”

The fern turned red.

It didn’t grow into a monster. It did nothing else—but it clearly turned red.

“This one, erm, asks us not to pluck it, that it does.”

Minneka’s jaws opened wide. “You listen to a plant?”

Chef walked onwards. “If you want to pluck it, be my guest.”

What happened was completely expected. Minneka leapt forward, but the fern dodged her. She rapidly swung her tail from the other side, but the fern graciously dodged back into the dirt. With each attack, the fern turned a brighter red, as if it was on fire.

Minneka pulled back and joined Chef, who smiled from ear to ear.

“It’s as if … as if these plants are also demigods. They still have some of their magic. Oh I must have one to study it, I must!”

“Once we’ve caught some of these,” Minneka said in a whisper, afraid all the ferns had ears now. “We lock it in a tight cage. I won’t sleep for a second more with these plants in our wagon.”

“Where do you think I can suddenly get a cage?”

“Oh, you probably happen to know a friendly stork you helped one day, who just happens to have a cage you can borrow.”

Chef laughed loudly. She thought back to the smiling, joyous sketch on her passport. It felt as if that was the real Minneka, before something happened that made her angry and impatient. Was it Anniwe’s abduction? How could she ask her for the truth, without revealing that she nosed around her personal belongings?

She saw another malformed fern. She asked if she could pluck it; the answer was no.

Minneka yelled. She’d accidentally stepped on another fern. The plant grew five more stalks to twist around her ankles and bind her to the ground. The extra fern tentacles slithered around her body like snakes and restricted all her movement.

They rapidly pulled her away from the wagon, towards the abyss that lead into the Saursea.

Chef jumped on Minneka’s back and clawed at the stalks. Her nails cut through them, but for every one that snapped, two new ones appeared.

Minneka bit all around her and managed to keep the largest stalks away from her mouth.

The next fern shapeshifted into a predator bird and circled overhead. Another fern turned into a building, maybe a palace or a pyramid. The final fern before the abyss turned into a statue of one of the original godchildren.

Chef only saw the approach of dizzying depths and had no time to decipher which of the godchildren it was.

“Leave her alone! She means you no harm!”

That wasn’t true, she realized. They came her with the express purpose to pluck some Dinodears. But that could mean the same as killing a plant.

The recipe only said they needed its seeds.

“Stop! We don’t want to pluck you! We merely need your seeds for a medicine!”

Minneka’s head already hung over the edge, a long emptiness below her ears tempting her to fall. The fall was long enough that the wild Saursea seemed a peaceful blue dot in the distance.

The fox shut her fearful eyes, somehow accepting what was about to happen.

All ferns fell to the floor, back to their shape as an innocent green plant. The stalks that held the desert fox down, shrank and retreated back into the earth like worms, until Minneka was free to move around.

A pile of seeds was left behind, spread around Chef’s paws.

She grabbed them all and ran back to her wagon. Once there, she threw the seeds in a jar, joining the Bumpbarachts.

Minneka was eager to follow, unsteady on her feet.

Soon after, Chef turned the wheel to get her wagon moving again, and they fled from the monstrous ferns.

Along the way, Chef collected some water from the Mouth of Din and used it to start a new recipe in her cauldron. She always did that when she was stressed. Her fingers itched and wanted to create food again, always create more food.

As night fell, they had reached a Wilderness territory. With no city nearby, predators were still free to hunt and kill for their own food here. To live in the “old ways”.

Minneka pushed open the door.

“I am going to hunt for food. I am dying of hunger.”

“Don’t busy yourself, eat some fruit.”

The Chef walked around her mandarin tree, which would soon grow too tall to be kept inside her wagon. She could keep her roof open at all times … but no, that would be a disaster once it started raining.

She selected the most ripe mandarin she had.

Minneka didn’t trust the round orange object before her, but took a bite anyway … and kept chewing with a passion.

“I’ve never seen such a huge mandarin! So much juice!” she spoke with a full mouth. “My apologies, that was very improper.”

Chef proudly presented her other fruit trees. “I learned the secret of domestication from the shepherds. Any time I had some new mandarins, I only kept the seeds from the biggest and juiciest among them. I planted those again, and none of the lesser seeds. I’ve been doing it for years. And that’s why I only have seeds left that produce really strong fruit trees and tasty fruits. Less peeling, more content!”

She leaned forward to whisper in Minneka’s ear.

“That’s my motto, it is. I yell it when I try to sell fruit on the market. It’s good, right? Right? What do you think?”

“Less peeling, more content? Fine, I guess. I have no experience in these matters.”

Chef nudged her side. “Oh come on, Minnieminnie, stop being so serious. Tell me about yourself. I’ll bake you a pumpkin cake, very tasty, you should try it, you should.”

Instead, Minneka shut down. “We must continue. The bells could ring at any moment! Figure out the location of the Turnbacktulips.”

She ate the whole mandarin and returned to her warm cloak, draping it over the floor like a blanket. For a brief moment, she seemed to bite at the new plant Chef had discovered, then walked in a big circle around it. Minneka must have also noticed it was a weird, new plant and didn’t trust it.

Chef’s recipe book had already opened itself to exactly the right page, as always.

“Turnbacktulips. They used to be planted everywhere and used for rituals. Now they are banished everywhere because they supposedly bring bad luck and setbacks. Maybe they could still be found in the Wolftunnels or on top of the Impossible Wall. But you’ll have more luck purchasing them from an … illegal trader.”

Illegal trader? Why, in Somnia’s name, would they collect Turnbacktulips? Were they really worth that much?

The Palace of the King was still a long way’s away and she wondered whether the Wolftunnels would be a faster shortcut. These tunnels were built underground during the First Conflict, covering almost the entire rainforest, but were mostly deserted these days.

Chef turned the wheel to send the wagon through Traferia. Once they’d crossed the borders, they’d meet some traders and merchants eventually, illegal or not.

That thought immediately turned to truth.

A little later, in the middle of the night, they hobbled over the row of stones that marked the border. With Gallo the Giant as a beautiful sight on the horizon, somebody knocked on the door.

“Hello? Do I speak with the Good Chef? My my, I have an assignment for you!”