Published at 3rd of August 2024 7:48 am

Book 2 Chapter 17: The Relief of Absolute Oblivion

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He wasn’t sure how he made it back to his garden with Jacopo, but he did. He shivered, but felt hot. He retched, but had nothing left to come up. He curled himself into a ball on the dirt a half-dozen feet from his bedroll, and lost consciousness.

He stood in darkness, still in tremendous pain even though he was dreaming. He heard movement and turned just in time to see a flash of someone and feel the sting of cut flesh deep into his side. He heard movement again, and again saw only a flash of movement followed by pain. It happened a third time, and he attempted to reach for whoever was striking him, but they avoided his grasp.

He reached out his branches and vines, thick with blood red leaves toward the source of the pain, but felt his connection to them quickly sever as they were diced by a long spear-tip. The intruder was getting closer and closer to his heart, the center from which he spread.

When the intruder had first attacked, he’d thought it was a dozen men at once. He’d been able to spread so quickly, so beautifully, since they had stopped attempting to halt him. He’d nearly reached the center, where his brother was able to spread high into the sky and reach toward the sunlight. He felt that his brother was under attack as well though, his mighty trunk being cut deeply as he bled ichor down to the ground.

He redoubled his efforts, sending branch after branch at the man, but the man moved too quickly. Dodging with a speed far beyond anything he had encountered before. He struck with his spear, jumped off of the wall of the cavern, leaving craters behind he pushed off with so much force. Worst of all was the man’s laughter. He was enjoying the fight. That disgusted the garden. He wanted the man to tremble in fear, to run in terror, so that he could pierce his back and drink deeply of his blood.

Dantes regained consciousness, and found himself divided between his own perceptions and those of his old garden in the underprison. He tried to focus, to determine more clearly what was happening. The garden fought for its life against a single man. He was familiar, though he could only sense the man and not see him due to the garden's different senses. He clutched his heart, it was beating so quickly he thought it might burst from his chest. He looked to Jacopo who was curled next to him, struggling to stay alive and conscious as well.

The garden had grown, had become something different and uncontrollable, just as the other druids had warned him it would. He thought he’d have more time, but he’d struggled to find consortium contacts since the most recent prison break. They’d gone underground and so he’d had no way to know what was happening. Even when he’d attempted to follow the thick thread that connected him to the garden so that he could get a better picture of what was happening, it had been as if he was blocked from it somehow. His connection at that moment seemed to be only possible due to the distress the garden was experiencing which was amplifying his connection to it. As he struggled to connect all these threads in his mind, the edges of his vision darkened, and he lost consciousness again.

The man had made it through to the heart of the garden. He had sliced through a wall of vines, thorns, and wood to get there, barely being slowed down by any of it. The garden felt exposed, its beating heart blood red and beating against the far wall of the chamber in which it was born. It kept sending more and more at the warrior in an attempt to slow him down, and as it did so, three chambers on the heart slid open.

From within it, three tall lean figures emerged. They were covered in bark, and their eye sockets sat empty, but they looked at the man nonetheless. One of them raised it’s arm and formed a long daggerlike thorn. The other did the same to create a sword, and the third stood their behind them, weaponless, but began to move its arms in a wide sweeping motion, and thorns began to rise everywhere around it, and fire at the spearmen.

The spearman dodged and parried every thorn, launching himself at the two armed creatures that attacked him. He drove his speartip into the heart of the one with the dagger, but it simply grabbed the haft of the spear and attempted to pull him closer as the other one took a swing at his legs.

The spearman stomped on the edge of the blade coming for his feet, ceasing its movement and leaned into the one that pulled him in, and twisted his spear, muttering words under his breath. The tip of his spear began to glow white hot, and the creature let out a terrible scream as the bark that was its skin caught fire and began to blacken.

The other creature released its blade and formed two new ones, but the spearman simply cut through both of them, and the creature's chest, in one smooth motion.

The last one raised a four fingered hand and launched a never ending salvo of small thorns at the man, who began running in a weaving pattern to avoid it. Before the spearman reached it, it looked away, and somehow Dantes felt the void where its eyes stared at him.

He regained consciousness, and brought his full attention to the blood red thread that connected him to his own garden. He grasped it, in his mind, and tried to pull it out of himself, but found that it wouldn’t break. He hacked at it with his will, but made only nicks in the thick root of the thing. Finally, he began to cut it more gradually, as if sawing through it inch by inch. It was agonizing, as if he was sawing off his own arm, but in his split focus he could see the spearman reach the garden’s heart, and he knew instinctively what would happen if he pierced it. He doubled his efforts, hearing a roar that he didn’t even realize was his own as he sawed.

The spearman lunged for the heart, his white hot spear in front of him.

Dantes finished cutting the connection, feeling the last fiber of it sever as if it was a nerve, and he collapsed not sure if it was death or sleep that was coming for him as his eyes closed.

…

There was blackness for some time, the relief of absolute oblivion, then Dantes found himself floating above a familiar table, with a scale sitting in the center of it. He looked to his shoulder and was relieved to see Jacopo there with him. They both turned their attention to the table.

The green woman and the man in blue were each taking coins off the scale and placing them to the side of it. They removed each coin simultaneously, and the scale itself never shifted even a hair, until it was completely emptied. At that moment, it disappeared.

The coins they placed down were then picked up by someone new, a woman wearing a black veil that hid her face, and an elegant black and white dress. Her hands were gloved, but clearly delicate. She would take each coin and slowly work it into thread which she then then extended further and further. Once she was done creating a long golden thread, the man in blue and the woman in green each took an end of it, and threaded a needle through it.

The green woman’s needle was more like a thorn, and the blue man’s needle was steel. They approached the table again. The Woman picked up the rat that she’d been petting, and drove the needle through him, though he didn’t even flinch as she did so, then she moved on to the roaches, then a large bat that was clinging to a branch extending from her shoulder.

The man in blue began to produce objects from his blue cloak, even Dantes’s trained eye unable to determine where they came from. Dice, a deck of cards, a fine piece of silk, he wove the thread through all of it, calmly and expertly.

The woman in the veil let the thread slowly unspool, there was a warmth to the woman that made Dantes feel oddly comforted. He looked around more and saw that the man with the cruel smile was still sitting in a corner, watching the proceedings. His eyes on the large pile of gold thread. He tried to look closer at the scene, to make sense of everything that was happening, but his vision blurred and the dream vanished to nothingness.

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