Page 79 of Monster's Mystery

“I should start explaining,” he said sheepishly. “Have a seat.”

The common room was nicely furnished with large couches and tables. There were doors around the exterior that led to bedrooms, based on what I could see through a doorway. I took a seat on one couch and Aiden sat next to me. Bruce and Hazel sat opposite us.

“I was born in 1644,” Bruce began. “I met the love of my life, my soulmate, in school in France. We were married after our second year, about four months after we met. Her parents performed the joining ceremony. They were so happy that their daughter had found her soulmate like they had. It brought Clarissa and I even closer together. I could feel her every emotion...” He trailed off and took a deep breath.

“I knew that we would face some dissidents when I brought her home, although my family was fairly open-minded. Unfortunately, I didn’t anticipate just how intensely she would be hated. Someone hired a roc to turn my Clarissa to stone. Ifeltit, you know.” He bit his lip. “Her fear rising, and then nothing, as if someone had ripped my heart out.”

“Hey man, it’s okay,” Aiden said, reaching out to offer support to Bruce across the table between them.

Bruce took a deep breath and said, “I reached out to all my teachers, desperate to find a cure. There were rumors... My Herbology teacher found a reference to a fairy tale where a roc had turned a human to stone. It was the only copy, and it was incredibly old. The scroll frayed even when handled with delicacy. I’ll skip the full tale, but the cure was to grow a golden spirit tree from seed for the lifetime of five men and then harvest the golden fruit when it ripens on a night of a full moon. The fruit is to be given to twelve willing siblings, who will give the gift of life to the person encased in stone.”

My eyebrow rose. “Give the gift of life? What does that mean?”

“My teachers and Clarissa’s parents studied that part intently. They think that each of the twelve need to encase the statue in fire and breathe on it.”

I shook my head. “What if they were wrong? What if the fruit takes their life to give it to Clarissa? Are you really willing to kill twelve people?”

“Of course not,” Bruce snapped. “I won’t let it come to that. That’s where Hazel comes in.”

“You haven’t finished explaining the riddle,” Hazel said gently. “Or how you got here. The order is important.” She glared at me for interrupting.

I nodded sheepishly. “Please go on.”

Bruce smiled faintly. “It took a while to find a seed of a golden spirit tree. They’re not exactly common.”

Aiden snorted a laugh. “Understatement,” he muttered under his breath.

“I finally heard a rumor of one in the south of China.”

“There’s a nexus point there,” I said suddenly. “One of the big ones!”

“Right,” Bruce grinned. “I wish you had been there with me back in 1665. It would have been a lot easier with your brain. I won’t go into detail about my adventure to retrieve the seed now, but I got it and brought it back. I planted it under the best conditions that my teacher and I could manage. The timing was a little more difficult to figure out. Based on when the fairy tale was written, the best guess we had was that people usually lived around seventy years at a maximum. So I took a time travel portal—”

“A what?” I interrupted.

“You heard him,” Aiden said with a chuckle. “How else would he have gotten to this time?”

“I thought maybe he took an immortality potion or something.”

“Those are illegal,” Bruce said with a frown. “The portal isn’t common knowledge, and for very good reason. I won’t be traveling back to my time. I said goodbye to my family, left the academy in the capable hands of my cousin, and came here. The first thing I did was check on the tree.” A proud smile graced his face. “I was only early by two years. I enrolled in classes, got assigned Aiden as my roommate, and you know the rest of my history.”

“Except I don’t. Not really,” I said. I leaned over and slapped his knee, the closest part of him that I could reach. “Why didn’t youtrustany of us?”

CHAPTER22

Bruce ducked his head.“I’m sorry. When I got here, so much of my time and effort went into figuring out this era, finding the information left for me by my parents and cousin, and that’s only the mundane parts of my current life. I also had to check on the tree and run tests on it to make sure that it was growing properly and when it would mature. I needed to come up with a plan. I was so involved in my own thing that I missed out on really getting to know anyone.”

I stared at him and finally saw him for who he was; a terrified young man who had lost his wife and was all alone in an era he didn’t know.

“Okay,” I said. “I understand. Can you explain the technical side of things?”

Brightening, Bruce launched into an explanation of the magic involved. “I needed a place to work that wouldn’t be discovered in the meantime, that would survive without care in three hundred plus years. Once again, my Herbology professor came to my rescue. Together, we chose a sapling tree and planted it at the edge of the dark forest. We heaped so many spells on it.” He shook his head with a slight smile. “Protection from storms, animals, unruly students... And then we hid any signs of our spells, tying them into the ley lines themselves so that they would continue to grow and protect the tree.

“I planted the seed of the golden spirit tree within this tree. Do you know why the golden spirit trees are so hard to find?” he asked abruptly.

I shook my head, but Hazel wiggled excitedly in her seat.

Bruce grinned at her. “Care to explain to the class?”

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