Ephemeral Reverie #1 - The Silence Between

Chapter Four - Secrets

The first week passed by in a haze of climbing, gathering fruit, carrying said fruit to the shipping bin, and returning to repeat the whole process dozens of times on the next tree. Oh, and pain. Lots and lots of pain. Enough pain that, on her sixth day she didn't leave her bed at all save to use the bathroom and throw together a sandwich or salad.

But of course, the pain didn't stop there. The kitchen was on the opposite side of the house. She didn't know how she did it—trekking all the way across for food and back—but she did. Thank Erde the bathroom was attached to the room, or else she'd have just let her personal hygiene go.

A typical old farmhouse, the placed had more space than Charlie could ever hope to use—two floors with four bedrooms, three full bathrooms, and a massive garage with a full-length upper room. Charlie loved the sheer amount of space the home offered and wondered how she hadn't gone crazy in her shitty, small sixth floor walk-up in Drasil, but just what did she need with almost three thousand square feet of space?

Even if things didn't go well with the orchard's business under her care, she could easily see herself living there well into the future simply as the next Guardian. According to documents she found in her grandma's boxes, the power bill was surprisingly low and living so close to large natural sources of water kept the water bill of the house at almost nothing. There wasn't any plumbing that far from the town itself, so there was a septic tank to take care of.

Fortunately, all her grandma's furniture seemed recent and well-loved, and she had a bed to sleep in, a stove to cook on, and a fridge to keep her food. The television, however, was the same old clunker she remembered and despite it having more than twenty years on her, it still worked. Charlie quickly settled into the routine of scanning the four channels it picked up—weather, a cooking show, local news and tips, and some odd show featuring what looked like a masked fortune teller—as she sipped her morning coffee.

The chest of drawers in the master bedroom was more than enough to hold the clothes and personal items she deemed important enough to bring. All the necessities were taken care of, and after throwing some fresh linens on the bed and airing the place out, it almost felt like the cozy and welcoming home she remembered. Almost.

She missed her grandma dearly. But she also missed the internet. It always had all the answers when Charlie didn't know what to do. More than once she found herself typing in her phone's search engine, only to remember mid-sentence that there was no 4G in Miner's Cove. There was a Wi-Fi connection surprisingly, but neither her phone nor laptop could even connect with how far away her house was. No 4G, no pizza delivery, no caramel crunch Frappuccino... Drasil may have been a shithole, but damn if she didn't miss the convenience it offered.

Well, whatever. Nothing had really changed in the nine years since her leaving, and nothing seemed to be different with Marianne's passing, either. Aside from the absence of a certain immortal. Tal and Lori both vouched to her for the trees always bearing fruit like clockwork even without constant tending.

The only strange thing they noticed in the three-month span without a tender was the sheer lack of rotted fruit on the grounds. Not once the day before did she see even a hint of rotten apple on the ground. That made her worry—were wild animals a problem? If they were, worrying wasn't going to change anything. Or perhaps it was the sprites keeping their living areas clean? She had no clue... She'd just have to ask around. It would be fine.

Determined to stay optimistic, Charlie decided to spend the day away from the orchard and its vanishing fruit, instead focusing on giving the house a good, deep clean. Sure, Tal and Lori had done that for her the day before she arrived, but she wanted to do it again all on her own. Something about having someone else clean your own home felt so...temporary. Like she was just staying in an oversized hotel or something. Maybe not the real case, but that's how she felt about it. And if there was anything her grandma did teach her, it was how to clean.