...The healer's apprentice gathered the lichen from stones near the old watchtower, working while the dew still clung to the morning. This batch was meant for a cloak commission that had come with an unusual request, black to honor a death, but green to honor the life that continued after it. She'd watched her master work with such commissions before, understanding that the colors carried weight that words couldn't quite reach. The process took weeks, separating the true color of summer from the pressed plants, layering it with blacks born from ash and charcoal.

An old woman came to receive the finished cloak, and her hands shook as she held it up. Her son had died in the last plague, along with half her household, but she'd survived and her remaining family had survived, and she was learning to walk in a world remade by grief. The cloak settled across her shoulders like a benediction. The black held her sorrow steady and true, but the green whispered something gentler underneath. The season still turned, that gardens could grow again from burned fields, that she would tend to both the memory and the future. She wore it openly through Neverwinter's streets, and those who knew her story understood it as an oath. The Druids' Circle recruited her as a novice that spring, recognizing in the colors a promise of understanding that took most people years to learn...