Sage
She had given herself a challenge to start her journey off right: walk out of the great big forest she'd protected all her life in a human form. Not only that, but Sage couldn't ask the animals or plants around her for directions! No, she could only use her gifts to hunt for food along the way; she would find her way out the hard way. It had taken much longer than Sage was expecting, and she'd gotten so lost even she couldn't figure out where she'd gone!
The druid knew every inch of her territory, no matter how big it was, so this meant someone had done something weird - or she'd somehow missed this part? Sage really didn't know, and touching a tree trunk here and there left her feeling like a stranger. This land had never known her... and that meant she was going in the right direction. She settled in to hunt and gather, part of the challenge, and get to know the locals! And by locals she meant birds and rodents and stuff. Sage took the shapes of burrowing things and climbing things to explore where the clumsy human body couldn't, and rested in a bough of branches.
The sun fell three times before she moved on to continue her journey, stopping here and there and encountering stranger places still. One had once been a thriving grove fed by ashen soil, now a burnt and battered ruin left by magic or monsters. Sage sighed in regret for not being there to protect it, then settled in to send thick tendrils of her own mana deep into the earth. She knelt in place at the center of the destruction and breathed deeply, drawing in nature and pushing out power. She became one with the broken land - a substitute heart to fill it with life until it was ready to be on its own. It took a two risings of the sun to set it on the path to recovery, and then the druid moved on.
She found then what she'd only seen in the distance with eagles' eyes from the sky: the big stone pillars where the humans lived. It made her way-too-small heart clench tight. So Sage took a deep breath, and sighed with a little forced smile. "Well, I knew this part was coming. At least I'll get to see if it's anything like the books!"
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It was sorta like the books, but not really. There were all sorts of big moving metal things, black clouds choking the air, way too many humans in one place, and almost no wildlife worth mentioning at first glance! She was getting looks too, some of them strange and others a little predictable. Sorry humans, I'm not in my mating cycle! Sage stuck to smiling and waving and trying not to look nervous even though she was twirling her human form's long green hair a bit at the ends with her fingers.
Too many.