"Your structure. My chaos. His gardens are all magic—illusion and enhancement spells layered so thick you can smellthe artifice from the street. We give the judges something real. Geometric precision that breaks into wildflower meadow. Clean lines dissolving into living color. Order and disorder in conversation."
"Conversation."
"That's what good design is. A conversation between control and surprise."
The golden light catches his runic tattoos. They pulse once, faint, like a heartbeat under the skin. His amber eyes drop to the fence line between our yards, and he does the math. Linear feet. Board count. Labor hours. The cost of dismantling something he built with his own hands.
"I have conditions."
"Of course you do."
"The pergola stays. The boxwood border stays. And we use my grid system for spatial planning."
"Deal. But I pick every single plant."
His tusk catches his lip again. He extends one massive hand.
I grab it. His palm swallows mine whole, calloused and warm and solid as packed earth.
"We start at dawn," he says. "Bring your worst."
The ravine behind Cedarbrook Estates doesn't appear on any official map. The subdivision's glossy brochures show a gentle slope of native grasses tapering into a decorative creek, which is a lie so aggressive it should qualify as a felony. What actually exists back here is a sixty-foot gash in the earth where raw magical runoff from the old ley line junction has been pooling since before the neighborhood was built. The trees grow sideways. The moss glows. And the soil at the bottom, according to Flynn's dog-eared copy ofPractical Geomancy for the Home Gardener, contains the only naturally occurring vein of shimmerloam within forty miles.
"We need shimmerloam," he'd said at 4:47 AM, standing outside in his shorts and a headlamp, holding a laminated trail plan he'd drawn sometime between midnight and now.
"We need coffee," I'd said.
"Shimmerloam is a pH-neutral magical binding substrate that will fuse your acidic orchid soil with my alkaline turf base without chemical amendment. Coffee is a diuretic that will compromise our hydration on a Class Three terrain descent."
So here I am, pre-dawn, no coffee, following an orc down a goat trail that exists only in his imagination.
The headlamp on Flynn's forehead bobs with each precise step. He moves through the undergrowth like something that was raised in it. Each footfall lands on root or rock, never loose soil, never the thick carpet of luminescent fungi that lines the trail margins. His machete hangs from a carabiner on his belt loop but stays sheathed. The path he's chosen threads between the magical growth zones with surgical accuracy.
I, on the other hand, am being actively consumed by the landscape.
A vine wraps my ankle. I yank free. Another one snakes around my wrist and tugs me toward a bush covered in berries that pulse with a soft, inviting lavender light.
"Don't touch the gloamberries."
"Wasn't going to."
"Your hand is six inches from a gloamberry."
I jerk my hand back. The bush rustles, offended.
The trail steepens. Dew-slick rock replaces packed earth, and the trees close overhead until the pre-dawn sky vanishes behind a canopy of branches that twist and interlock like knotted fingers. Bioluminescent lichen paints everything in shades of cold blue and chemical green. The air tastes like copper pennies and fresh rain.
Flynn stops at a ledge. Below, the ravine floor opens into a shallow basin where a creek runs silver-black over stones that hum. The sound isn't water. The stones themselves vibrate at a frequency that buzzes in my molars.
"The shimmerloam deposits are along the north bank." He points. "Between the quartz outcrop and the fallen oak."
"That's a thirty-foot drop."
"Twenty-seven." He pulls a coil of heavy-gauge climbing rope from his pack and loops it around a boulder with a knot so complex it looks like origami. "I'll anchor this before going down."
He ties several complicated knots in the rope as he wraps it around the boulder. Thankfully, the rope is nearly the size of his forearm, so I’m confident it will hold him. The climbing harness is military surplus, orc-sized, and he steps into it with ease. He cinches the straps with quick efficiency.
"Secure?" I ask.
