The resident was bent double at the waist, his attention fixed downward. “I still don’t—”

Grolion came up from his crouch, moving fast. One blood-smeared hand took the resident by the throat, the other covered his mouth, and both worked in concert to achieve the assistant’s goal, which was to spin the resident around and force his back against the lower reaches of the tree, where the thorns and barbs were thick and long.

Stray tendrils darted at Grolion’s arms, but he ignored the sucking mouths and held the resident fast against the trunk. Now heavier tubers leaned in from the sides, sensing the flesh pressed against the carpet of fine hairs on the tree’s bark. In moments, the man was a prisoner of more than Grolion’s grasp. The assistant took his hands from the resident’s throat and lips, but warned as he did so, “One syllable of a cantrip, and I will stop up your mouth with earth and leave you to the tree.”

“No new spells can be cast here,” the prisoner gasped. “Interplanar weakness creates too great a flux. Results, even of a minor spell, can be surprising.”

“Very well,” said Grolion, “now the tale. All of it.”

The telling took a while. Grolion considerately pulled away creepers and feeders, keeping the resident only loosely held and only slightly drained. I steeled myself to hear the sordid history of the resident’s treachery and the village council’s complicity, though I knew the tale intimately: how they had bridled at my innocent researches, conspiring to usurp my authority, finally using cruel violence against me.

“He was obsessed with the colors of the overworld,” the resident said. “I was his senior assistant, with two others under me. We were just village lads, though quick to learn. He established himself here because, he said, the conditions were unusually propitious — a unique quatrefoliate intersection of planes, a node from which it was possible to reach deep into two adjacent dimensions of the upper world, and one of the infernal.”