She'd started work on her winter shelter around the fall equinox, finding an underground cavern that was initially a bit cramped, and painstakingly used her first level spells to slowly excavate it into a spacious home for a teenager and her huge tiger.

It's an hourlong hike in the snow between her shelter and the bear cave, but Kaitiaki doesn't mind making it, and Damisa is usually happy to accompany her. 

If you don't like making hourlong hikes in the forest in any season of the year you're probably a fake druid or at least a desert one or something.

Huh.

"Have you ever met a desert druid?" 

"No, never been to a desert. Avocet has, though."

Neat! She'll try and ask him, next year.

The winter months pass by. Kaitiaki spends even more of her time poking at magic than she did in the summer months, simply because there's less to do and less daylight. (She's getting two first circle spells every day, which gives her one to experiment with even on a goodberry day)

After the winter solstice, she starts taking a hike south every few days, back towards the area where she first met Damisa. 

Frost. Evergreen needles and bare oak branches. Winter birds. Blindingly blue sky making the snow glitter.

It takes her a while to find the right kind of stones, the ones they used to make the kinds of grave her unlucky siblings and the other dead children of the village were buried in, growing up. (Mom never got one. She might not have been dead, after all).

She doesn't mind. She's not in a hurry. She makes a note of all the ones she wants to grab, and the next time she comes down here, she uses Ant Haul to drag them into place and bring the biggest one back with her. She'll carve it in her shelter. 

The rocks go where she puts them. They are, after all, rocks.

A few days later, she carries the carved tablet with "Kaitiaki Salvus" carved on it in large Halit script back down to her grave site, and sets it in place as the headstone. She digs out a hole, big enough to be a grave but a bit too shallow, and lies down in it, thinking. 

She would have died here, if she hadn't met Damisa, or if he hadn't run to get Zisel for help. Despite her planning and he's work, she'd been a kid trying to survive in a place that killed adults regularly.

Bitten by the snake, she would have been alone and in pain for a day, or longer, and then she would have died. 

Without the snake, and if she'd been able to slip past all the under dangerous creatures of the Forest, she could have maybe survived until the winter, and then froze to death. Or starved. 

And it still would have been better than if she'd stayed.

She fills in the grave, placing the last of the stones into place.

She kneels there, thanking the Forest (no - the Green, that's what they'd called it) for the first year of her life. I won't waste it, she promises the stone and the trees and the blue of the sky and the chill winter air. 

Zisel figures she doesn't have to call herself an apprentice any more after it's been about a year and a half, though they can still hang out.

She knows that Zisel isn't a druid who cares much for ceremonies, but she always liked making up her own, so Kaitiaki designs herself a druidic graduation ritual and does it that night with a bemused (and happily full, on her fresh kill) Damisa watching. 

She's happy to keep hanging out - far less often and less regularly than they did in the really early days, but enough for her. And though she's a full druid now, it's still the case that sometimes something comes up that she isn't sure how to handle alone, or isn't sure she can. 

Sure. "A full druid" doesn't mean "has all the circles or information she needs".

And she's really happy he's got her back, and that she can help him in return, even if so far it's usually small things like investigating things at the far end of their overlapping protectorates, or helping carry heavy things that would be hard to maneuver in beast form (Kaitiaki, eating well and using her body constantly, has grown quite strong.)

The relevant date rolls around and everybody collects to have their annual meetup. Nobody new this year, nobody dead. Someone saw a zombie lynx but it got away, everybody should be alert to that in case it's infectious. A ranger came through over the summer, heading northeast, he was reasonably polite apart from having a real weakness for peaches and picking multiple trees' worth on his way through. Someone received a request from an outside contact about introducing mastodons to the area. She's in favor but said she'd check with everybody else. (The mastodons probably don't want to come in among the trees, it's a bit cramped for them, but this particular druid ventures out sometimes and wants to know if anyone has concerns about their effects on the forest.) Same person got begged for Plant Growth, a-fucking-gain, here's how to find the people who are particularly desperate for it if anyone wants to go gouge them before the harvest is in for the year.

Kaitiaki is now a Full Druid and will force allow herself to participate!

She has a lot of questions about the mastodons. What do they eat, and how much of it? What kinds of things eat them? How far do they tend to wander? Will outsiders hunt them?

Mastodons are browsers - they will nibble on shrubs and branches at the edge of the woods. (There's a thorny sort of weed that grows in that direction and annoys the locals, which is why they want some mastodons.) People can eat them but most predators that aren't very lucky and cooperative can't manage it. They have a pretty big range.

Seems reasonable. No objections from her.

Does anyone seem interested in taking up the Plant Growth requests?

Not really. You have to be third circle, which already rules out half the complement of druids here, and the remainder don't have anything they want that bad that farmers can scrape together right now. Even if you take money and go spend the money somewhere else you have to have the money in your hand and it's frankly nausea-inducing to contemplate the process they go through to mine shit like that, whether they staff the lifeless pits with slaves or convicts or undead abominations or some combination of the three, and then all the burning, renewal-less and taking trees in their prime to make the fire hotter, and then they stamp some queen's face on it and you hold it in your hand and you trade it to somebody who tries their hardest not to live in the world that exists without their kind or the world that made their coins, and they give you some cool stuff, maybe, but ick.

Besides, if you keep doing it, eventually there's more of them and they start chopping down trees in a way they would hesitate before chopping down a house-shaped neighboring place but do not at all for a forest save that the forest might eat them.

...Not wanting them grow to the point where they'll destroy the forest seems very reasonable. 

(She'd never really thought about money like that and finds it kind of odd. She's mostly thinking about how awful things were at home, during the lean years.) She keeps quiet about both these thoughts.

...is the other apprentice still around? Does he have an animal companion yet?

He's still around. No animal companion but he's got this trick with creating tiny storms on the spot to drench and buffet a creature for a moment and will tell her a story about confusing a herne with this enough that he could get away from the situation.

Oh! She's impressed and also very interested in the trick, and will hesitantly ask him questions about it / see if she can watch using detect magic until someone stops her.

Yeah, he'll show it off. He can't do it all day long but he doesn't need to save them all for emergencies.