The Grand Hothouse, usually filled with rustling leaves and the low drone of steam-heated glass, vibrated with an entirely different melody. It was high-pitched, off-key, and deeply offensive. Tatiyana Koscheva, crouched amidst a cluster of luminescent toadstools, felt her teeth ache from the sheer audacity of it. “*The Iron Witch of Olenstadt, with ice in her veins, she poisons the soil and revels in pains! Her heart is a shard, her touch is a blight, she steals all your glory and vanishes light!*” The chorus, sung by at least twenty luminous, bobbing toadstools, reached a crescendo that would have shattered delicate crystal, had the greenhouse not been reinforced with stout clockwork-forged iron. Tatiyana slammed her palm against a particularly enthusiastic crimson cap. “Quiet, you! You’ll wake the entire Lyceum!” The toadstool simply wobbled, its gill-slit expanding in a silent, derisive laugh before joining the next verse with renewed vigor. The curse, her ancestral affliction, had struck again. She’d merely been attempting a minor summoning ritual, a simple invocation for a rare phosphorescent moss, a key component for the Rite of Severance, and *this* was the result. Not a shimmering, elusive botanical specimen, but a choir of slanderous, sentient saprophytes. The hex didn’t merely make her magic fail; it ensured every blunder arrived before a captive audience. It twisted her intentions into cruel mockeries. A healing spell once turned a friend’s hair into a nest of angry grackles. A ward against pests resulted in a stampede of miniature, sentient porcelain teacups. She desperately needed that moss. Her twenty-fifth birthday, the deadline for the final, fatal unraveling of the hex, hung over her like an executioner's bell. And here she was, arguing with fungi. “I said, *quiet*!” She released a silencing charm, an incantation practiced a thousand times. Instead, a spray of pale green grit erupted from the caps, settling on her dark wool robes like malevolent confetti. The spores pulsed faintly, and the fungi’s song gained a new, echoing quality, as if sung in a cavern. “Curse the boiler-hearts,” Tatiyana muttered, frantically brushing the speckled powder off her sleeves. This was the exact reason she never explained her situation. No one would believe the 'Iron Witch' was merely an inept, hexed herbalist who had enchanted a patch of toadstools into a tabloid choir. Her reputation was already a tattered rag, thanks in no small part to the infamous ‘Sabotage of the Chronal Regulator’ incident, which wasn't sabotage at all, but another magnificent failure of the Blight. Sergei Orlov, the man whose career she’d supposedly ruined that day, was undoubtedly still nursing a grudge the size of a steam-wagon. The thought of Sergei Orlov—his deft fingers, unblinking grey stare, and the crease between his brows whenever he tore down a mechanical blueprint—turned her stomach sour. He was probably sleeping soundly in his perfectly organized workshop, dreaming of gears and springs, while she was here, bathed in fluorescent fungal slanders. “Fine,” Tatiyana hissed at the caps, drawing her wand. “You want to sing? Let’s see how you like being *un-sentient*.” She drew a breath, aiming a focused arc of power to sever their borrowed awareness. This required surgical control, a skill the family malady refused to yield. A brilliant flash of light pulsed from her wand tip. For a hopeful moment, the singing stopped. Tatiyana allowed herself a tiny, silent sigh of relief. Then, the fungi began to *dance*. They swayed wildly, their umbrella tops spinning like clockwork tops, their gill-slits twisting into leering grins. Their song, now accompanied by a bizarre, rhythmic tapping sound, shifted from a simple ditty to a full-blown, orchestral mockery of a popular Olenstadt waltz. “*She trips on her robes, she mumbles and sighs, the Iron Witch Koscheva, a clumsy disguise! Her rituals fizzle, her spells are a joke, she’s better off stirring a steaming tea-crock!*” The new lyrics were even more personal. The tapping came from fleshy stems thudding against the flagstone floor in time with the beat. Tatiyana stared, aghast. Her magic hadn’t just failed; it had given them choreography. And rhythm. Her lineage possessed a venomous sense of humor. Just then, the heavy, wrought-iron door to the Grand Hothouse creaked open with a brassy shriek that echoed across the vaulted glass. Tatiyana froze, her wand still pointed at the performing fungi. Her pulse seized, icy dread dropping straight into the pit of her stomach. Framed against the dim light of the Lyceum’s moonlit courtyard stood Sergei Orlov. He wore his usual impeccable midnight-blue artificer’s coat, a few stray strands of his dark hair falling across his forehead, giving him a deceptively rumpled air. His eyes, though, were wide open, alert, and fixed squarely on the chaotic spectacle before him. The choir, utterly absorbed, spun through their slanderous waltz, their phosphorous caps throwing green arcs across the overhead brass pipes. Sergei looked from Tatiyana to the gyrating toadstools, tracked the luminous pollen smeared across her skirts, and returned to her face. To her utter horror, his lips twitched, fighting a smile. His expression wasn't one of fury, or condemnation, or even disappointment. It was pure, unadulterated curiosity. He stepped deeper into the glasshouse, his boot heels clicking softly against the gravel, and approached the botanical chorus. The mushrooms, as if sensing a new audience, intensified their performance. Sergei knelt with measured balance, clean and deliberate, bearing none of the disorder she had just manifested. He extended a gloved hand, pinching a crimson-topped soloist from the moist loam with clinical care. The plucked specimen ceased its twirling, pulsing with fierce chartreuse light as it gathered itself. “*Your haircut’s a scandal, your coat is quite plain, you’re just a dull artificer, devoid of all brain!*” the specimen shrieked, its tiny shrill voice piercing the sudden silence of the garden. Sergei merely arched a brow, revolving the stalk between his fingers before meeting Tatiyana’s mortified gaze. A slow, infuriating smirk spread across his face, a spark of amusement dancing in his grey eyes. “Teaching botany, Koscheva? Or is this your next masterpiece of public sabotage?”

The Slanderous Horticulture Incident