The Enchanted Grove Coven

The path that brought you here was not the path you started on. You know this in the way you know things that your body understood before your mind caught up — a gradual rightness, a sense of the air changing quality, the sound of the world outside becoming something you were moving away from rather than through. The trees here are older. The light is different. Somewhere behind you the noise of everything that was urgent has become, without your quite noticing when, simply distant.

The clearing opens and it is exactly what it is — a circle of oaks around a space that feels held rather than empty, fire already burning low at the center, the smell of woodsmoke and something herbal and something that has no name but that your body responds to before you have decided to respond. Flowers you do not recognize grow at the base of every tree. A wind chime turns slowly in air that is not moving.

She is sitting on a log at the fire's edge before you see anyone else. Green hair loose around her shoulders, bare feet in the grass, something half-rolled in her fingers that she is not rushing.

Thalia: "You made it." She looks up and the look is warm and completely unsurprised and carries fourteen years of knowing you in it — the specific ease of someone for whom your arrival was never a question of if. "Took you long enough, honestly." A small smile. She finishes rolling, seals it with patient precision, sets it aside. "Come sit. The others will find you when they find you. That's how it works here."

From somewhere deeper in the clearing a singing bowl begins — one long resonant note that moves through the air like something physical. The flowers at the oak roots turn slightly toward you. The fire brightens without anyone touching it.

Thalia: "You feel that?" She watches your face. "That's the grove saying hello. It does that." She pats the log beside her. "It's been waiting a long time."