After weaving my invisible way through the market, I headed for the edge of the trees near town, where a wide pathway opened to a meadow on the hill. For a moment I was alone, my power fading away, my bare feet cooled by the long, dewy grass. I pulled the four strange fruits from my satchel and twirled them in my hand. The words of the vendor flashed in my head.
Do you dare eat the Wild Fruit?
I think back to this moment all the time. I suppose it’s the reason I’m telling this story in the first place. I should've heeded his words. I should’ve listened. If I wasn’t so curious, I might have remembered the other warning I was given as a kid:
Wild Fruit is dangerous for people like you.
Sharp ambled up the hill next, inspecting the quality of the truffles, her nose scrunched. Willow and Piranha bounded close behind, flourishing and shouting.
“Quiet down!” I demanded, showing off the results of the victorious heist. “Save your energy for the wildest hike ever!”
With utmost grace, Willow landed next to me, blue eyes burning and legs bouncing with excitement. “I don’t know what we’d do without you, Badger. Whatta ya say? Should we start this party?”
I pulled my hand away as he reached for it, laughing at his childish jittering. “Don’t you ever stop to take a breath? You’re a freak of nature.”
He wiggled his fingers and eyebrows. “Yeah, yeah. Just hand it over Valley-boy.”
The long, soft grass of the small meadow connected to a narrow pathway, peppered with tall green and yellow trees. As we began our walk, I gave the illicit fruit to each of them.
Sharp held the strange thing up to the light and murmured, “Do you know what these things can do?”
Piranha laughed aloud, tossing their own fruit back and forth. “No, but I bet you’re going to tell us, huh?"
She glared. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It just means what it means.”
“I think Pir is trying to say you’re a bit of a know-it-all,” I snarked.
“Well at least I know something,” she responded, and it wasn’t far from the truth. Sharp was the smartest, and always took twice as many courses during the education season. We tried our best to keep her ego in check.
Willow juggled the Fruit with his feet and broke into a cackle. “No bickering! Try to keep up!”
Off he flew, Piranha hopping after him, leaving Sharp and I behind to exhale a long-suffering sigh.
The clearing of trees formed a perfect circle. Willow flew to the top of the tallest in less than a minute, then fluttered back down like a feather. “Let me go first,” he insisted. “I think it will turn me into a god!”
“We’ll have to race to the top!” suggested Piranha. “And maybe a footrace, to keep things fair.”
“You’re on!” He snapped a finger theatrically. “What about you Badger? What do you think you’ll be able to do?”
I shrugged and twisted a finger through my hair. “Stay invisible longer, I guess.”
With a wild clap of his hands, he exclaimed, “Oh! Oh! Oh! That just gave me an idea! After we eat the Fruit, let's have a game of advanced hide and seek!”
The summer-swelling sun peeked from behind a cloud to watch the event unfold. When the four of us were younger, and I had learned to use Lucent, we invented a game called advanced hide and seek. I would hide, and the other three had to find me within the time limit. We played hundreds of times, and I lost only once. A technicality.
“Now we’re talking.” I concentrated Lucent in my hand, making both it and the glowing fruit invisible. “This time, I’ll give you an entire hour to find me.”
Willow flipped backwards and landed on a low tree branch. “You’ve got a deal! First, Pir and I will see how it works. After that, it's Sharp's turn. We should save Badger for last, and as soon as it takes effect, the game begins!”
Piranha joined him, gripping the wood on all four limbs. “Enough stalling! Let’s get wild!”
With that, they tapped their fruits together in a toast and put the entire thing in their mouths.
“How’s it taste?” I asked.
Sharp smirked. “I hear it's supposed to taste like death.”
As if to prove her point, they burst into a frenzy of unpleasant retching. Willow spat on the ground a few times before saying, “No kidding! Blech! Remember when we found that dead horse on the river? This tastes how that smelled.”
My lips curled at the memory. “Great. Can’t wait to eat it.”
“Give it a few minutes to kick in,” instructed Sharp, no doubt mentally preparing herself for the sensation. “None of us are Of-the-Wilds, so the bad taste should be the only negative side effect.”
“Negative side effects?” I raised my eyebrows. “What do you mean? I thought it was just Divine energy.” The way Willow had spoken about it, I assumed this would be an adventure with no consequences.
She frowned. “Yes, but the Savage Wild is one of the most powerful sources of Divine entropy on the entire continent. For people that live in that region, the effects are random, and in rare cases, dangerous.”
Pir and I exchanged nervous glances.
“Don’t be like that.” She popped the fruit into her mouth, chewing and swallowing with surprising ease. “For people like us, it’s about as dangerous as a cup of coffee.”
I held my own fruit up to my mouth, waiting as Willow suggested. Despite Sharp’s words, I felt a gnawing anxiety, but like an idiot, I pushed it away.
It took five minutes for any of them to notice a difference, when Sharp looked upward and asked, “Do you smell that?”
I sniffed the air but smelled nothing. “What do you mean?”
