Chapter One: A Wounded Visitor

Yukinari felt bright sunlight seeping in past his eyelids. He registered the arrival of morning as he drifted up from the unconsciousness of sleep.

He didn’t say anything, but blinked twice.

The sunlight seemed different, somehow, from usual. Perhaps he was imagining it? He had never been awoken by the morning light like this. He had been living in his “sanctuary” for months—maybe the changing seasons gave a new quality to the light.

“Hm...?” Yukinari sat up and scratched his head.

He took a deep breath. The air was cold and damp; it was probably still very early in the morning. It was already bright outside, but he had the impression it was a bit earlier than he usually got up. He swallowed the yawn that welled up in him and got out of bed. He looked back toward the window the light was pouring through—and froze.

A girl was standing there. Ten years old, or maybe a little older—or anyway, so she looked. She was facing away from him, so he couldn’t see her face, but her body made it clear that she was still growing; she gave a distinctly childish impression. She didn’t even appear yet to have secondary sexual characteristics.

“Ulrike?” Yukinari muttered, furrowing his eyebrows.

Even from behind, there was no mistaking her. She was the only one in the sanctuary who looked so young. Not to mention, no one else there had the strangely shaped “horns”—like the horns of a stag, or perhaps the branches of a tree—that she did.

The horns were in odd shapes, but they had a certain symmetry; once you were used to them, they didn’t look bad.

All that was well and good, but...

“What are you doing?”

“Mm? Yukinari, you’re up?”

The girl Ulrike turned her head, her long, flowing hair following. It was a rich green like a budding leaf. Her hair and her horns made it clear that the girl was not entirely human, but even so, these were her only unusual features; from the neck down, she looked like a perfectly normal person.

That only made this situation all the worse.

“I am absorbing energy from the sunlight,” she said, giving him a quizzical tilt of her cherubic face.

“Absorbing energy? What, you mean like a plant?”

“I am a plant.”

“...Oh yeah.” Yukinari let out a bit of a sigh.

Ulrike was not human, as she appeared. Or to be more precise, she was no longer human. She had once been a typical village girl, but the human Ulrike had died long ago.

When she spoke to Yukinari, the words and actions of the “original” Ulrike were placed front and center, but the thoughts behind them belonged to Yggdra. Who was leading and who was following was not always immediately apparent, and Yukinari sometimes wasn’t sure how he felt about that. It was obvious, though, that this girl didn’t always think of things the way a normal person might expect.

Part of the problem was that the erdgod Yggdra had developed out of a plant, an organism whose way of being was so different from that of a human that the deity used her familiars as intermediaries when attempting to communicate with people. But whatever the outward expression, the thinking behind the familiars’ words and actions was ultimately influenced by Yggdra, which meant Yukinari sometimes found her just tangent to what he would think of as sanity.

Say, for example, sunbathing, naked as a jaybird, in front of the window.

“Plants gain energy from light and water. I am myself a part of Yggdra, you will recall. Thus I am here to absorb light.”

Ulrike explained all this, not showing a hint of embarrassment even though her still-developing, totally naked body was in full view of Yukinari. Across her pale skin ran a web of green lines, much like the veins in a leaf. Perhaps her body ran not with blood, but with chlorophyll-laden sap.

Whatever the case, it was clear that the plant cells in Ulrike’s body were energized by this act of photosynthesis, of exposing the green veins to the light.

“I get the logic, but put on some clothes,” Yukinari said.

“Hrm? Why?” She offered another curious tilt of her chin like a bird, the very picture of innocence. She didn’t appear to have the slightest hesitation or qualm about being buck-naked in front of Yukinari.

That’s a plant for you, I guess...

Plants feel no embarrassment at having no clothes on, so maybe it was only natural Ulrike wouldn’t, either. But as we’ve said, from the neck down—her green veins excepted—her body was very much that of an immature girl. It was understandable if Yukinari had some doubts about being exposed to this.

“This just... isn’t good. In a whole bunch of ways.”

“Not good? What isn’t?”

“Well, I mean—”

He was just trying to figure out how to explain when...

“Lord Yukinari, good morn—”