Bloom & Blood

[hearth_ 1023]

[The following is a hallucination - some elements are fictionalized.]

 

Spoiler

 

 

The Druid worked a bundle of ponderlot over in his hands while we spoke. About Mani. The Eternal Forest. Whatever came to mind, really. When we finished he handed it to me with a warning that only came from the glint in his eye. The dried petals were wrapped in a piece of tattered cloth that seemed as old as the land they were sown from.

 

Made my preparations in a silence that clung to the low valley of my failures like a nauseating smog. I was told three things - to ingest the herb, bring only a spear, and come back with the pelt of a wolf. 

 

No armor. No torchlight. Just instinct.

 

Twilight had taken the pale canopy of the Ivorywoods. Greyish leaves hanging from the birch mirrored blazing hues cast by the setting sun. Beneath it somewhere quiet, deeper than I’d gone before - I found a lone maple. Leaves were stuck in autumn. I’d seen ones like them before, but only in some Valah land to the south.

 

I sat with my back to its stump. After unraveling the ponderlot I placed it on my tongue. Let it sit for a while. It was bitter. Resinous. Like a syrup that’d gone rancid. When I tried to swallow it clung to the back of my throat in chunks that made me heave.

 

Once I’d gotten the last of it down I took a swig from the wineskin I brought with me. Some nameless, shitty brew found alongside the road. Nothing happened for a while. Birds sang their goodbyes to one another, squirrels scrambled away back into nests high up in the trees. 

 

As that last sliver of sunlight settled beneath the forested horizon, I felt it. My stomach dropped. Breath was ripped clean from the center of my chest.

 

The bark of the trees began to move. Like they’d taken the air I struggled to find - rising, falling, rising, falling. Roots that I sat on started to whisper names I hadn’t said in decades. 

 

I closed my eyes in disbelief.  A flash of my mother’s hands folding a slice of bread came. I heard myself, younger, asking if it was the last piece.

 

I opened them again. The trunks surrounding me seemed to bend now, creating archways and tangled windows. They seemed to beckon me forward. At least, that was the only thing I could surmise as I rose. My feet started to carry forward without permission. I left my cloak behind, crumpled in a ball and thrown into the moving tangle of the Maple’s base.

 

The spear’s weight seemed like it shifted with every step I took. I had no trail to follow but those warping gates before me, and so I followed. Not in the way I would a game-trail. But as a castaway does a shoreline.

 

Bark on the trees started to split in my passing. They didn’t burst with blood. Just opened to reveal a flesh that seemed woven by starlight itself - like the heavens were absconded with by the forest. In one I could see something. A memory? No - at least, not mine. Whoever’s it was they were looking at me, as a boy - standing at the edge of a river with a stone in my hand.

 

I felt it before I saw it. A pitter pattering weight in the underbrush. Something small. Quick. Familiar.

 

A hare broke through the bushes. Its legs kicked too hard for how gently it moved. I blinked, and already it was dying. Its body twitched in a clearing I recognized - the same as the one I took my first kill.

 

Its eyes were open. Glossed over. Red trickling down its side. Back then I missed my first shot. I remembered hitting it on the second. I remembered how sorry I felt for surviving.

 

The hare stared up at me like it knew.

I turned away.

 

The forest kept me close anyway. The air thickened, pulsing light shooting across the canopy like veins. They were shades of gold and copper and red, like the sunset before was immortalized in the forest’s heart. I shambled through another one of the windows and was met with a torrent of heat.

 

I was in Caurost.

But not the one I woke up in earlier that day.

 

It was too still. The light across the structures was too golden. The stone made into shades too warm. 

 

I was standing in a garden. Aduiladyr was there, kneeled beside a child. Ours, though no words confirmed it. She had her nose. Her perfectly white hair. My laugh, though - obnoxious as some call it. Curls like mine too, eyes like pondwater in spring.

They were trying to put braids into Addy’s lengths of hair, somehow even longer here than in the present. The girl tried to twist the strands into a knot. Aduiladyr corrected her wordlessly, only moving her hands over our child’s to guide them again.

 

A basket of tools lay nearby. There was a toy horse lying next to it, leg missing. A bowl of berries half-crushed under a book left open to dry.

 

I reached out. As I did, I felt ash move over my palm.

 

The treetops above us glew a sinister red. Smoke curled like fingers between towers along the walls. The city stood untouched - but everything else burned.

 

The fire didn’t roar. It watched us from the canopy. From the gaps between stones. It didn’t rush toward them. It curled at the edges of the garden. Waiting.

 

She didn’t look up. Neither did our child. They didn’t see the flames, only each other.

 

And I -.. I couldn’t move.

 

The distance between us grew every time I tried to walk forward. The warmth turned to a boil. The light began to dim. Just as they turned into a pinprick in the distance, I found myself standing, sweat pouring down my shoulders,  in the cold air of the Ivorywoods.

 

Groaning branches around me pleaded for my attention. There was movement in the periphery - like a breath being pulled in before a scream. Then, stillness. Not peace. The Ponderlot hadn’t had its way with me yet. Stillness in the way a noose waits.

 

The trees thinned, stilled - but it felt smaller now. I stepped into a clearing that bent toward the center at its edges. The trees were crooked here - bent like backs that’d carried too much for too long. Their bark was split like the rest, but these wounds bled that odd cosmic sap. The moss beneath me started to reach toward me - clinging to my bare feet like mud.

 

There was a wolf waiting in the center. It was seated.

 

Its fur was shades of ash and cold iron. It watched me with eyes that weren’t silver like my father’s, nor green like my mothers. They recognized me. Because they were mine.

For a moment, I didn’t know who the intruder was.

 

I took one step forward and it mirrored me.

One step back. So did it.

 

We circled each other. Slowly. Like two thoughts swirling in the same mind, trying to decide which would speak first. The spear still felt strange in my hand, shifting between something that was as light as wind and heavy as memory.

 

Its ear twitched.

Its maw slowly opened. It wasn’t a bark that came, no growl.

 

It was my voice.

“You walk like you’re still waiting for permission.”

 

I felt my blood turn cold. My body became still.

 

It took another step forward. The trees seemed to reach lower.

 

“The grave wasn’t deep enough.”

“You carried silence like a gift.”

“You called it mercy.”

 

The wolf blinked slowly and I felt the judgement behind its gaze. The frigid clarity of someone who knows what you are and doesn’t care about flattery. 

“You’ve been dying for a long time.”

 

It rose. My grip on the spear tightened - and we charged. We came together with the weight of inevitability and I struck. The spear entered clean. It hadn’t fought. It let me.

 

But it stared at me the whole time with wide eyes. Its breath was shallow, but its mouth moved once more. It was some sort of raspy sound. Laughter? 

 

When it fell, I dropped to my knees beside it. I pressed my palm against its fur and whispered old folk lullabies. Phrases of gratitude.

 

The blood steamed and the forest fell silent. Hallucinations were subsiding, branches contorting back into their original shape. I skinned it as instructed. Each cut was a memory freed. A weight lifted. 

 

When it was done I buried the body with my hands. Dug until my fingers bled. I left no marker. I knew the forest would remember where it broke my chains.