Ruins and Renewal

"Go to the ruins, I dare you."

"You go."

— Children, before visiting the ruins

There is a place nearby, practically before you see the first houses of the town, where an old mansion in ruins makes you wonder, why is this in such state?

Okay, maybe not. Maybe you have seen abandoned houses before, and understand how cruel the time can be with them.

Maybe you are an outsider who, in the back or your mind, assumes that the owners fell in disgrace or moved into an even bigger house right next to the town hall.

Nobody's old house

But if you have visited the town enough times—if you have paid attention—, have you really never wondered why there is one, and only one, house that was abandoned? And precisely one this big and ostentatious? Why it is also the only house of these proportions and style?

If you are a local, and therefore a member of The Two Families, you must have questioned why nobody fixed it. People don't just trow things away in this town, and they have no reasons to leave a beautiful building in the hands of decay. Everyone here has heirs —usually biological children— and enough resources to keep their houses in the best condition. Some might neglect them, true, but there is no reason to abandon them.

And, lets say someone did it. Because, why not? Is not really important if a person or family didn't have the hearth to destroy their house, or the magic or permissions to move it (after all, it's been a while since the last time a granter allowed to move a house, it's basically forbidden to do that kind of magic this days) but they needed to move inside the town, close to their job or a relative. Even then, why didn't anyone fix it? Why didn't anyone bought it or asked to inhabited it? And more important: why there is no record or memory of who build or own that mansion?

They disappeared without anyone making any mention of it? It could be. Or the records where lost. Or something else happened.

Yeah, people wonder.  But not so much that they investigate. Some won't even talk about it unless somebody else mention it. Is not that important, whatever reasoning is here, that was a long time ago.

New life in the ruins

What everyone talks about, the little mystery that the Keeper himself has tried to figured out in many ways, is the forest that surrounds the mansion. 

Once again, it might seem more than ordinary for outsiders. Poetic, at most, because nature is recovering terrain and the fight lose to humans turned out to be just a brief retreat, meaning that decay is actually restoration.

The thing is, decay has been happening for while now, and nature taking over took the shape of high grass trying turning brown and trying not to die during the dry season. Yes, the same unruly grass you seen in this whole area, at both sides of the road.

The evergreen, tall trees? The big lawn that invites to play or have picnic there?

That appeared at some point a couple of years ago. One day, people who took the road noticed them for the first time. Those aren't exactly fast growing threes, either. Nobody keeps the grass in that shape.
It's just there.
Like magic.

"It wasn't even worth it. It's nothing there."

"I know, right? It doesn't even feel magical or scary."

— Children, grounded over entering the ruins.

Nobody's spell

"Like magic", is nothing but a expression in the city, but in this town, is a legitimate theory.

The keeper tried to track the caster but no known spell can determine where it comes from, and the area doesn't even feel charmed in any way. 

The "renewed forest", as many call it instead of using the official name, is indeed magical. It's not magic working every day, though. Those are magical plants keeping themselves alive. One would say it was the keeper doing, if he wasn't so puzzled by the whole thing. He was even worried, at first. He interrogated everyone with notable abilities or knowledge that could be related, and made a campaign to remind everyone that such displays of magic are bad for the magic, the world, and the Two Families. That it would be bad to the caster too, if not because of the energy it required, at least because they would be in big trouble with the authorities.

There has been no other situations like this and, with time, the novelty passed.

Just the mystery remains.

Type

Grove

Location under

A distant town

--Most know as: The ruins--

Official name

Unnatural forest

Other names

Renewed forest
Reforested mansion
Summoned forest

Most likely origins

While the main theory for the un-explainable forest is that someone broke the rules and made it grow from seeds collected somewhere else, there is a chance it could be something less exhausting but way more complicated: someone could have teleported the plants to this place and altered their properties to make them able to restore themselves, and adapt to the new environment and the weather changes

Coincidentally, the very few people that would be able to something like that, are some of the wizards that would have been interrogated due to the main possibility. Including the future keeper and her younger brother, as well as a few other suspects that weren't so likely to be the culprit.

The thing is, the keeper and his researchers are convinced than none of these suspects cast that or any spell of such magnitude.

For everyone to guess

With no one to take the blame, it's impossible to ignore other explanations, no matter how scary or ridiculous those might be.

Could it be the doing of a mythical being, extinct ages ago or supposedly false? There are as many stories about forest guardians as cultures through history, and maybe more related to tricksters that simply live in the forest. Not many of them are supposed to carry their forest from place to place, but in most cases nobody said they don't.

Maybe the trees themselves are a magical species that we didn't know about. Maybe they are normal plants affected by all the magic that is used in town.

The stranger, less accepted and most worrisome theory is, naturally, that it was casted by someone who doesn't belong to the Two Families. The idea of other wizard culture surviving in secret might seem endearing, but don't forget that one of the most likely reasons of the disappearance of almost all magic population are the confrontations that used to occur between them.

The less likely, but still most believed theory, is that the magic comes from the house's ruins or the people who used to inhabited it. . If that was the case, why the sudden manifestation after so long?

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One way or another, just like it happens with the ruins, we know that there has to be a logical explanation, we can mention some possible ones, and in the end, we simply don't know.