The part of us that is me lies in bed beside the king, and feels the little deaths of his cells, each of them a small but terrible thrill. All around, I feel us hungering, within the bone-white castle walls, within the tapestries writhing and breathing, in the moss-carpet slinking underfoot: a million mouths salivating—not that we have mouths (not in that shape) and not that we have saliva either. But the part of us that is me, that has been the Princess and is now the Queen, has been in this form so long I have begun to think in his terms, of meat and blood and single-ness.
“Not yet, not yet,” I whisper to the rest of us, through the thinner-than-thread bonds between. I feel our disappointment, our longing. These are the parts of us that were purest, most primal. The parts that are furthest from me.
Fifty years I have worn this form, and no longer is it a strangeness to me, this bipedal mass of pseudomeat and pseudoblood. Falseness upon falseness, I thought when first it was woven, and I was set apart from us, but it no longer seems so. It is just me. To take a breath seems so natural now, I do it even when he sleeps, when he is not watching.
I’ve grown to love this self, I think, because it is the self he loves, and I love him. Of course I do. Loving him is what I was made for.
There is no resentment in this. I was made to love, as leaves are made to catch the sun, as roots are made to drink water from the earth. Do the roots resent the water? Do the leaves flinch from the sun? Why then should I hate what I was made to be?
I brush a lock of hair from his face. Fine white, and thin. Once it was golden, and the lines of his face were smoother, the eyes brighter, the lungs stronger. He was more handsome then, in his eyes.
But I am still of us, even as I am me, and still I love decay above all things. Sometimes I dream of the whole world turned rotten, a magnificent crumbling under a reddening sun.
I look the same as I ever did, as I have since the day I budded and bloomed: skin white-pale, eyes a soft swimming blue, hair a falling night.
We are still such alien things from each other, my husband and I. And still, he does not know.
It was best he does not know, we decided at the start, and I and us were in accord, as we always were. But now, with all these long years shared, with this lie still a veil between us, I want above all to tell him the truth.
No. That is not it. I want, above all, to be known. To be loved as myself, and not as what he thinks me.
I want honesty, before death takes him. Before we take him.
At its root, my story is our story, as I am us, a flower on a reaching branch. We began in the dirt, in the dark, in the damp rotting of the world. This all was forest then, trees rising and falling with the sway of the valley. Our valley, where we were born, which now is our kingdom.
We were the mushrooms, growing between grasping roots. But more—the lichen crawling up the bark, the fibers reaching out in the earth, lines of burning thought. We were in everything, a single wholeness, untroubled by deep thoughts. Ours was a slumbering life, a slow life.
Our waking too was slow. Some of us began to reach into the things that scuttled above, tendrils grasping in their meat, in their minds. Insects first, using them to bear us, to birth our children. Then, by the unsteady steps of all life changing, into small animals: squirrels, and frogs, and birds. We puppeteered them, tugging on the strings of their muscles, their nervous systems, made them dance our death dances. And if they feared, if they screamed, that was not our concern. Those were the things of meat, and we were not meat.
We bloomed in the rot of them, split-open skulls and ribs picked almost clean. And around us, the forest grew brighter, grew stronger, and we grew with it, in every root, in every branch. We whispered, and we sung, and we became more than we were.
We learned, slowly, how to be gentler with our prey. How to cultivate them—letting them live long enough to bear offspring, to make more meat, more bones, more rot. We leapt from squirrels and birds to sheep and goats. And then to the wolves that preyed on them, tooth-and-claw.
We pulled less strings now. Killed less easily. All would die, in the end, and we would bloom. All we had to do was keep them until then.
The earth we made plentiful, sprouting green and gold, to keep our flocks fed. Parts of the forest we receded, rotting wood to feed plots of good earth—never more than needed, for the trees were our first home, our first love, and even the sweetness of their rotting we mourned.
We became farmers. I wonder at what those occasional travelers who stumbled through thought of us: livestock well-kept, earth rich and tilled, but no human to be seen. But they were few and far between, dotted across the long centuries, fleeting moments in our patient world.
Those were the good years, the years we hold fast to, in the depths of our memory, the places we dwell, in dreaming. The years of contentment.
All Golden Ages must end. Ours ended in smoke and iron, as so many do.
They were farmers too, these newcomers, but a different sort of farmer. Most were laborers, with no malice in their hearts. How could they know, as they burned us, as they felled us, as they poured their poisons onto us, that we were as alive as they, that we were screaming if they could only hear?
We killed the first party. While they slept in the barren burning they had made, dozy on the meat of our prey, we sent our wolves to tear out their throats. They died, some sleeping, some screaming, and we fed on the rot of them, broke them down into the soil, and thought that the end of it.
It was not. A year later, the others came, this time not only laborers, but guards with heavier iron, with long cutting blades and blackened plates. Our wolves pounced upon them, and they tore us apart, splitting from skull to tail, and burning what was left.
They burned half of us in a single night. The screaming still echoes in us, if we listen for it. We felt it, our cries as parts of us died away, not slowly and softly, but all in an agonized moment.
We knew then that they would not leave.
Their lord came after that. Birch-like in his paleness, his tallness, dressed in the cold deadness of glinting metal and poison-ruined furs, with an ice-deadness in his eyes. From the shadows, we watched him and his servants as we healed.
They tore up the earth, planted their crops—not crops suited to our earth, but crops they would force it to bear. They dug deep pits, scratching about to tear metals from the rocks, to feed into their great furnaces. Always, always, they were burning, black smoke belching over us, falling with the rains.
They built a tower, amidst the furnaces, a structure of dark stone and dead wood. A marker, to say this place was theirs.
But still we grew, in the cracks, beneath their boards, in the guts and brains of their beasts. And still we watched. We remained hidden, for fear of their poisons, their fire.
We could not take them over, as we had our flocks. Their brains were too dissimilar. But we could reach into them, feel the shape of them, catch glimpses of their dreaming thoughts, learn to understand their words.
Words were new for us. We had never needed them, one as we were. So we learned slow, sitting on their tongues, about the edges of their lips, between their teeth, marking the passage of the air and how they shaped sounds.
And when we had learned enough, we made ourselves a one-ness, a singular being, as they were. It branched out from us, growing in the rot of an old tree-trunk, forming in a death-womb, reaching with fingers, long legs stretching. We were proudest of the brain, the honey-comb shape. More of them we grew, blooming like flowers in the dark, models of the enemy, and we delighted in the strangeness of their thoughts.
The first we made, of us and yet alone, died quickly. A few stumbling steps and it toppled onto the wet soil, broken and twisted. So we devoured it, devoured ourselves, and made another. And another. And each time, they were better shaped, better made, and each time, they took another step.
At last, we made one almost perfect. You might not have noticed, to look at it, that it was not one of them. Everything was in the right number, except maybe the teeth, and the fingers on the right hand, where we had, in our excitement, grown one too many.
But still, he was passable. He, yes, we had made it so, delighting in the gendering and sexing of this thing. Foreign concepts to us still, as were tongues and words and thumbs, but we were learning them. Despite our fear, we remember the wonder in newness, in novelty.
So we sent our emissary, with his brain full of words, to tell the invaders what they were doing to us, to beg them to stop.
They killed him, killed us. They stabbed him full of iron and, when that did not kill him, they covered the tips of their blades with their poisons and watched him wither and die.
Another we made, and another. Male and female and other, we created them. And still they slew us, some before they had even opened their mouths.
“Elves,” they called us. A word from their histories, or their mythologies, or the twining of both.
More and more of their poisons they fed into the earth, into the sky, into the veining rivers and streams, and more and more our kingdom withered and died, while they gutted it for glinting scraps.
But we knew now what they feared, listening to their whispers of elves and old stories. They feared prophecy and narrative and the coming of magic or of Heroes.
We had no notion of heroes as we had no stories, no sense of self. But we could find one.
This is where my story begins, separate from ours. I began as a dream, a passing thought, in a sleeping mind. The dream of the man I love, who lies now in bed beside me, withering in his age. He was different then, a young man, a spring-shoot of a thing still fresh blooming from the earth.
He would describe himself by the gold of his hair, by the sharp lines of his jaw, by the sculpting of his muscle and the fine white scars that crossed it, each of them won in battle. That was his way of seeing.
We saw him in other ways: in the heavy tread of his boots upon the soft moss, in the steady breaths he took, in the swarming multitudes within him, the legion of his microbiome.
He was a hero, we knew at once. We recognized the look of him from the stories the enemy whispered: a man of war, with his spear of dead wood and his bright iron sword.
Later, he would tell me the story of his life, as we lay together, as he twined my hair in his fingers and I felt the rise and fall of his chest beneath me, comfortable as the earth.
High in the mountains was he born, to a hard-working woman of no great repute and a father he never knew. No kings were his forebears, no warriors his kin. They took their living from the land, and a bitter and meager living it was. His mother foraged mushrooms, he told me, and taught him to do the same.
How wonderful, I thought with trembling, that we had nourished him even then. That we had loved him, even then.
When he was fifteen he had set out, determined to earn a name and the wealth that would come with it. With the Grey Horde he fought, and in blood and battle was honored, till he came to join the household of the Grim Baron. Many deeds they did, some great and some terrible, some of which he spoke of with booming pride, and others he whispered in shame.
He was a hero, which is not the same as a good man. I did not judge him for what he did, for the innocents he put to the sword, for the blood in which he was steeped. Among my kind, there were no words for right or wrong, not until the enemy came.
Yet he judged himself, in the sickness of his heart, till he could bear it no more, and went away, down the mountain roads into the wilds between. Small quests would he do along his way, of the sort that made no great tales, and would be remembered by none but those he helped. And yet those were the stories he would tell with the most joy, of how he helped a farmer gather her harvest, of how he fixed an old woman’s house so it no longer howled with the winds, of how he helped a young girl find her way back through the tangled woods.
“It was destiny that brought me to you,” he whispered to me often, and I long to believe it. We know better, our mind wider and wiser. It was mere chance that led him down into our valley, among the ancient trees.
We marked his coming, whispering one to the other, the whole land a-song. In him we saw our chance. In him we saw deliverance.
As night fell, he laid himself down in one of our rings, white caps glowing beneath the rising moon.
He dreamt, and in his dream he saw a maiden dancing, pale of skin and dark of hair, with a ringing laugh.
We plucked the dream from his brain as we might a thread. And with that thread we wove, in the womb of a hollowed tree.
I remember my first steps, like the breaking of a cord. Like a hand holding mine, lifting me up, and then gently letting me go. We whispered still, all around, but I could feel me, a separate branching of the same tree.
He was still sleeping, when I came to him, lying between the toadstools. I lay down beside him, my skin moon-pale around the grass, and watched the stirrings of his breath, waiting for him to wake.
I remember the first flutterings of his eyelids, the way I felt when first those eyes looked into mine, and I saw my own face for the first time, reflected in him. I remember because it is how I feel even now, as he wakes and looks at me, his love undimmed by creaking decades.
“Nightshade,” he croaks.
“I am here,” I reply, brushing his cheek. Beneath my touch, his wrinkles and saggings are rivers and valleys, a new and wonderous topography.
“What time is it?” he asks.
“Not late,” I say, though the sun is shining bright and high. His wakings are growing later and later, his sleeping longer and deeper. There is in him a bone-weariness now, the death-longing that takes all meat.
Soon, soon, soon, whisper the walls, and the floors, and all the kingdom.
I kiss him, gentle, upon the brow, and taste him on my lips.
“I want to go for a walk,” he says, rising with creaking, with groaning, all of him straining and aching. He puts aside the covers, and pulls on his robes. “I want to see my kingdom.”
“Of course, my love,” I say, and take him by the hand, letting him lean upon me.
Soon, we hiss, all around. Soon.
Yes, I think, I know. Soon.
He was shocked, when first he saw me, but not afraid. Not repulsed either, as the enemy’s soldiers so often were by our strangeness, our almost-rightness. He reached to draw his blade, but I put my hand on his.
“There is no need,” I told him. “I will not harm you.”
He believed me. I am not sure he should have. Even now, I do not know if I spoke the truth, as he and I walk down the steps of the tower we grew and we hunger for the rot of him.
“I am called Nightshade,” I said. “I am Princess of this place. Daughter of the King.”
We knew the shapes of stories and had engraved them into the shapes of my brain, as I grew in the wet rotting dark, blooming beneath the moon. I was a function of narrative, a lure on a line.
“A wicked man has come here,” I said. “He poisons our people, kills our livestock, cuts down our trees. I know you to be a hero. Will you not save us?”
He looked at me, pale and naked in the light of the rising sun. “Take me to your people,” he said. “I will do what I can.”
And so I took him to them, to my newborn kin birthed from the rich earth.
They wait as he and I leave the hall, our loyal subjects, both we and not-we. Not as unique as I, but still off-shoots, lives in their own right.
We pulled them also from story, from observation. They also were part of the lure.
Even bent by age, leaning heavy upon me, he stands twice their height as they bustle around us, tending to our fields, to our livestock. They tip their caps as he passes by, wide-brimmed brown hats. Farmers’ hats, or a close as we could get from what we pulled from memory. They were grown even faster than I, bloomed all in a hurry, and though we have made others since, to replace that first generation long turned to rot, we have made little change to the shape of them. Their clothing was grown with the rest of them, and their caps also—easy enough, as we so often have caps in our most natural of forms.
The king smiles at them as he passes amongst them and they smile back. He does not see—cannot imagine—the hints of hunger beneath those smiles. Beneath even mine.
He is dying. I am certain of it now. He has lived a long time, but now his days are drawing to an end.
Endings are different with his kind than with mine. We are not truly born, and we do not truly die, for even in the perishing of one, the many endure. Death to us is just another change, natural as the seasons. Not so with them, with him.
I have been as one of them so long that the death-fear has taken a root in me, and I sorrow for his loss, even as I long for him to be one with us.
He looks at me, as though he knows what I am thinking. He cannot. Of course, he cannot.
“My dear,” he says, “I love you very much. You know that, don’t you?”
“Of course,” I say. “Of course.”
“I’d like to climb up to the peak of the hill,” he says, looking at the swelling mound at the heart of the valley. “I’d like to watch the sunset.”
“Of course,” I say again. “I’ll help you climb.”
There is little weight left in him as he leans upon me, and we begin the long walk. The sun beats down upon us, golden and bright, blazing with summer’s warmth. But summer is ending now, and I feel already the little deaths of autumn.
It was cold, the night he killed the enemy. The rain fell, a patter upon the leaves. We drunk it, thirsty, as we waited.
I had sent him off with a kiss, with a promise. My heart, my love, my self, if he set us free.
But I knew what heroes were. I knew the shape of the story. He would kill the enemy, would set us free, and then he would leave. He would find another story, and another, and I would cease to be, would rot back into the rest of us.
Iron-song echoed in the dark of night. Different now than the hammerings of the forge. This was iron with teeth in it. With death in it.
I listened, and we listened, until the iron fell silent.
The dark tower stood, high against the night, and the smoke turned to steam, to nothing, in the pouring rain. It became a torrent, a flood, the river swelling.
I went to the forest’s edge, to watch. We waited, to see who would come out. But I knew. I had known from the start it would be him.
The doors of the tower opened and our hero descended, bloodied and weary. In his hand, he held aloft the head of the lord.
I ran to him. I had never run before, had not known my legs could do such a thing, but I ran then, ran and almost leaped into his arms. He threw the head aside and caught me, kissed me with bloody lips.
I tasted him on my tongue, the sweet iron, and longed to taste nothing else, so long as I should be.
“I am yours,” I said. And I was.
But what I knew, when he looked back at me, was that he was mine, that we were tangled up together, an ecosystem of our own.
“I want to stay,” he said.
“Then stay,” I answered, and kissed him hard.
His breaths come heavy as we reach the top. Wind whips green grass blades, amongst which we bloom, dancing between their roots, whispering our secrets.
Soon, soon, soon, we sing again.
My heart makes the same sounds, pleasure and sorrow mixed.
“Let’s rest here a while,” he says. The sun was falling now, and all the sky is bleeding. We lie down together, he and I and we.
He is part of we also, I realize now, only now, only at the end. He who I love, who we love, who breathes in our spores, who eats the fruit of our labors, who drinks of our rivers and streams. We are all a we-ness, all singular, all together. We are the roots tangled in the earth and the branches reaching for the sky.
“I need to tell you,” I say. “I need you to know.”
“To know what?” he asks, a smile upon his face. As if there is nothing to know that could ever matter.
“To know me.”
“I have always known you,” he replies. “From the moment I saw you.”
“No.” There are no tears in my eyes. There should be, but we never made me with tears. We never thought there’d be tears to shed. How little we knew, in our vastness. We did not understand then the smallness of things, how they could fill us utterly. “I’m not what you think I am.”
“Do you think I’m stupid?” he asks. And laughs. It turns into a cough, but there is mirth even in that. “Do you think I don’t know already? That I didn’t guess?”
He knows. All this time, he knew. And before I know it, I am laughing too, my voice joining with his, and the hilltop is ringing with us.
“Show me,” he says, stroking my cheek. “Show me how beautiful you really are.”
I nod and stand up, stand over him. He is so small now, so thin, so hollow, a valley in himself. He is beautiful, in every way.
I stretch out my arms, a bursting, skin pulling back and billowing out, all of me unfurling and unfolding. I show him me and us, white tendrils reaching, mushrooms and spores blossoming from within me and without me.
“I love you,” he says, as I change and change and change.
As I bloom.
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J.A. Prentice (he/they) was born in the UK, grew up in the California Bay Area, and currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with their family and three cats. His short fiction has also been published with Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Cast of Wonders, amongst others. He also wrote the audio drama episode “The Undying Truth” for Big Finish Productions. You can find them on Bluesky as @japrenticewrites.bsky.social. |