Thoughts In The Night

As Lem observed the harvest tree, he thought its gnarled branches seemed desolate. Did it care for the wolves because it did not have kin of its own?

The tension had been completely diffused. Even the wolf kings no longer felt like dangerous beasts. 

His simulated self had never worried that they would try to take the spiritual lily from him. His fears were directed elsewhere. 

There seemed to be fewer items on the ground around the pond. In particular, all of the spiritual crystals were gone.

Lem was sure that his simulated self was thinking about the items he had left at his camp. 

[You feel that the matter between the wolves and the harvest tree has come to an end, so you begin walking back to camp, hoping that nothing from your possessions will be missing.]

As his simulated self walked, Lem thought about what he had just seen.

Another gift had been given by the harvest tree. Strangely, this gave him a sense of comfort.

Perhaps the harvest tree was just a benevolent figure in the forest, giving aid to those it deemed as worthy of its friendship.

This begged the question of how it distinguished between friends and foes.

Was it on a whim?

As Lem's simulated self drew closer to his campsite, he saw that the pouches were roughly where he had left them, but there were wolf footprints all over the ground. He felt a moment of crisis.

Were the spiritual crystals still there?

He scrambled, opening the pouches one by one, before breathing a sigh of relief.

Everything was as he had left it.

[You return to your camping location, and are relieved to find that nothing is gone. You wonder whether the wolves had passed by during the previous night, as you suspect that you were in too impaired a state to notice…

You fall back asleep, the water lily in your arms…]

As the curtain of darkness fell over his surroundings, Lem's mind was still fixed on the harvest tree.

He replayed the moments he had seen and considered the attitude of the harvest tree.

Why did it like both him and the wolves, but not the martial elder?

Was the harvest tree friendly towards anomalous creatures and evil, the so-called strangeness that had infected the world?

If this was the case, then did it like him because he was infected, and carried the aura of evil, and the wolves because their entire race had been incorporated by the anomaly.

Of course, this assumed that the theory about the wolves being incorporated was correct.

Keeping this motive in mind, it made him wonder whether the harvest tree itself was an anomaly. Its proximity to the evil flower appeared to support this notion.

Would this mean that the barrier represented the borders of a persistent anomalous phenomenon, one that did not disappear in the daytime? If so, then what were the rules of the world that were being broken?

Apart from the warding effect, he had not noticed anything that differed from ordinary reality.

Lem also remembered that Master Brightflame had said that he could sense plant anomalies from afar.

If the harvest tree was an anomaly, why hadn't he been able to sense it?

Was it because it was a plant anomaly contained within the bounds of an anomalous phenomenon that could distort his perception?

Eventually, Lem was forced to put aside his thoughts because they were too speculative. For now, it was enough to focus on his survival.

He began meditating on the visualization diagram, as he waited out the waning hours of the night.