Chapter 211: Pristine’s Surprise
Annalise walked out from the back door of the kitchen and stepped into the backyard. Her destination being the orchard, she headed straight toward it. The weekend had arrived way quicker than she expected as the past couple of days went by rapidly while they all made several plans regarding their investigation of the Portal Hall incident.
Somehow, she kept feeling like they had come to a dead end with their investigation. First, they wasted a lot of time searching for a non-existent spell only to find out that no such thing existed in the first place. Not only that but her familiar had once again disappeared to someplace ever since the magical sphere incident.
Right now, even when they were constantly trying to find some possible way to dig deeper into the mysteries of those incidents, they barely had anywhere, to begin with. The only ideas she could think of were either her confronting her familiar or talking with the King to see if he could provide some information about what he knew.
Ezra, Kenric, Leela, and Marley had left in the early morning to meet someone that the Chief Commander of the dragon shifters’ royal guards believed would be able to give them some much-needed answers.
Damien and Valerius were in the basement as they wanted to strengthen the wards protecting the core and the original portal hidden in the depths of the castle. Though they didn’t mention exactly who this person was, it still gave everyone a slight bit of hope to learn something useful that would provide some sort of help for the investigation.
As for Elijah, the Crown Prince of the Mortal Realm had once again buried himself in the library, a place that he seemed to be really liking because of all the books and amount of knowledge that was hidden in there.
Since everyone in the castle was busy with their own work, Annalise decided to head to the orchard as it was time for her to find out exactly what sort of surprise Pristine had been planning for her all this time.
She entered the orchard and her eyes immediately looked at the mass of tall trees that had finally shed their grim and destructive states and were now in various shades of dark red, crimson, orange, bright brown, and yellow with light shades of green involved in different places.
She wondered if the abandoned and lost feeling would return to the castle once winter would arrive and there would be heavy snowfall almost every other day. Though she liked the season of snow, she still missed the greenery and the warmth that she couldn’t find until the end of the season.
She placed her palm against one of the tree trunks and grazed her fingers across its bark, her eyes taking in the beauty of the trees and the life that was thriving throughout the orchard. It was both weird and pleasant to see such a drastic change in the place that looked totally bleak when she last visited it.