Tender of the Garden

*"*
— The Tender of the Garden to Rei, believing her to be Ahrric

The **Tender of the Garden**, is a an Umbra Elder who died 4,291 cycles. In his life, the Tender was a gardener, like Ahrric and Gahrrlac, until he decided to become an Elder. The Tender is located in a cave in the Luminous Peak.

The Antecedent is the fourth Elder that Rei has to speak to in Ahrric's side questline "A Dark Pilgrimage".

## History

While alive, the Tender of the Garden, most liekly under a different name, worked as a gardener and took care of the Eternal Garden and the Luminous Peak, to ensure the safety of both the currently dead Umbra, plant life and other organisms currently connected in the mycelium network and the safety of any future life forms.

At one point, this gardener decided to become a leader for his people, taking up the mantle of Elder.

The Tender seemed to have loved life and to have viewed his life as an important thing, however once he finally performed the Ritual and passed away and let his consciousness join the mycelium network, his attitude towards life had changed, believing living to be a "mirage" and considered himself to have been "deceived" by said mirage. The Tender died 4,291 cycles ago.

Like the other Elders, safe for the Antecedent, the Tender of the Garden is disappointed that the current gardener, Ahrric, has not yet performed the Ritual and joined them in the mycelium network. He even consider Ahrric's love of life a curse and believes that the gardener is "deceived by the mirage of living", just as he himself once was, and has voiced this opinion to Ahrric before.

### A Dark Pilgrimage

When Rei came to see the Tender of the Garden in her quest to gain more knowlesge of the Ultravoid so she may save her own planet from it, she used the Spore Song blessing to awake the Elder, who, at first, thought Rei was Ahrric. Immediately the Tender addressed Rei as "sweet Ahrric, gentle Umbra, fellow gardener" and voiced his complaint that Ahrric's love of life was his curse, revealing that he too had once been "deceived by the mirage that is living." The Tender told her, still thinking her to be Ahrric, to take heed of his warning and reminded him that the purpose of Umbra is to cultuvate the dead and that only in the Eternal Garden can souls fijd lasting purpose, and then implored him to join the rest of the Umbra in the mycelium network "or be cast out for eternity."

The Tender then sensed that it wasn't Ahrric that he was speaking to. He sensed Rei's nature as "something out of life" and called her "an abomination" and "a blight on thr Garden." He told her that her "pungent ichor offends our senses" and demanded that she leave. What the Tender was sensing about Rei was that she had sort of been removed from time and life by starting a repeating time loop when she activated the Starseed in the past, and her constant repeating of it for eons had tainted the Ultravoid and corrupted it. Likewise, it meant that she was virtually immortal, unable to die and join the mycelium network, and to defy the natural law of life to death to life was the ultimate taboo in the eyes of the Umbra.

Rei was however not ready to leave just yet, without useful information to aid her in her quest, and told the Tender that her planet was on a collision course with the Ultravoid, and asked him if any planet had ever survived an impact with it. The Tender informed Rei that survival was not the end all be all of existence and that all lives that end in the Void has a place in the Eternal Garden, and assured her that there was nothing to fear in death. Rei, frustrated and grieving, told the Elder that his answer didn't help her at all and that her people didn't have to die. She implored the Tender to see things from her perspctive and told him that people grew gardens on her planet too, and that all of thet wouod turn to ash if she could not stop the Ultravoid from destroying her world.

The Tender, upset with Rei, told the Voidrunner "a poisonous aura chokes this place when you speak. The Hyphae quiver. The little mushrooms have seen you, and they wither in dread." He called her "the Bearer of null", "removed from the sacred cycle" and that she was "not fit to nurture the living...or the dead." He then asked her to leave, telling her that he had to see to the "little ones."

Rei then left the Tender's cave.

## Physical appearance

The Tender of the Garden's body is huge. Like other Umbra, he is tall and lanky, but far larger than any other Umbra, Elder or not, dead or alive, that Rei has come across. His body is all pale blue. The top of his head is covered by a very long and pointy mushroom cap, of a slightly darker hue of pale blue. The Tender's eyes are large and round, black and glassy while not awoken but glowing brightly when awoken by the Spore Song. When awoken, the Tender's head is surrounded by swirling glowing bands of golden-orange light.

The Tender hangs suspended upside down from the ceiling of his cave, his roots most likely growing into the ground of which it is made. The bottom part of the Tender's body is made up of a huge mass of long, thick, pointy root-like appendages that grow out of the spot from which he is suspended in the cave's ceiling. The Tender's dead body is positioned such that his arms are crossed on his chest.

## Personality

While the Tender was not as aggresive as some of the other Elders in his displeasure with Ahrric's refusal to die and join them in the mycelium network, probably owing to the fact that he related somewhat to him, having been a gardener himself while alive, he had a bit of passive aggressive, immature attitude towards him and his uneillingness nonetheless, going so far to literally threaten Ahrric with being "cast out for eternity" from the Eternal Cycle if he did not perform the Ritual then and there and join them.

While alive, the Tender had viewed life and living as something important, but at some point he had become disilusioned and changed his attitude on the matter to be that "living" was a "mirage", and considered himself to have been "decieved" by this mirage.

## Location

The Tender's cave is in the Luminous Peak, not far below the ledge on which the region's C.Y.D. node is located. To reach the Elder, jump from the ledge down to the lower land close to the lava, then steer right along the rock walls and you will find the entrance to a long tunnel at the end of which the Tender's cave will be.