She is as changed as the world around her. The flowers in her mane have all died, and the leaves have begun to wilt, turning dark with rot from the shadows that never seem to leave. When the sky changed she had not immediately understood what it meant - and even when no dawn woke her, no dusk carried her to sleep, she still had not understood.

It was dark, yes. But she didn’t mind the dark.

Except that it was more than just dark, more than a perpetual night. Without the sun, the plants were dying. She could feel them waste away, feel them yearning for sunlight that didn’t exist, searching a sky that had turned its back. There was no light, no warmth, no life. Petals turned brown at dimpled edges, turned darker as they caved in on themselves in death. Leaves wilted too, sickened with the same brown rot and it was all she could to not be sick with the stench of it.

It was worse, maybe, because she was the same. Reborn of a magic seed, a living monument that her magician mother had breathed life back into.

She is wood and bark, branch and twig. But she is no more made soft with leaf and flower and the odd ripe fruit hanging in her mane. She is like the winter trees stripped bare, a forest skeleton like the ones she sees before her in this dying place - and she cannot help but wonder how long it will take for the bark of her skin to begin to rot, how soon before the empty space inside her chest caves in and the skittering bugs fill her.

Soon, she thinks, from the way the sentient sorrow of the forest matches the ache inside her chest, the weary weight upon her shoulders.

Her strides slow and then stop, and her nose brushes the bark of the giant tree beside her. What will death feel like when it comes, will she even know when it finally takes her? She hopes it will be painless for all of them as she looks around at the trees crowding her, those petal pink eyes blinking slowly. Like sleep. “I’m so sorry you’re hurting.” She whispers, closing eyes incapable of tears as she presses her forehead to the silent bark.

linnea

these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape

She does not hear him come, or if she does then she mistakes it for something else, loses the sound of him in the dissonance of a dying world unraveling against her shoulders. It is so easy to lose herself in the pain and fear that mirrors her own so closely, to let their ache be her identity so she can pretend this is not her pain  and her fear, that it wounds her only because it wounds them. But then he speaks and that is not a thing she can ignore, not a thing easily mistaken. He has what the plants around her lack, what the trees and the flowers cannot use. A voice.

He is more than the emotions that strike her like electric impulses, and so, startled, she lifts that delicate face and finds only a pair of twin moons watching her. They grow infinitesimally larger, and it takes her a moment to realize that these are eyes, more yellow than any flower, and they belong to a face that makes midnight feel bright. She wilts in the dark of him, wondering at the way this feels like facing the yawning emptiness of space, at why her chest tightens as though there is still a heart inside it to protect.

There is not, of course. No heartbeat to pound in her ears, no thrum of blood racing through the spiderwebs of veins that should be tucked beneath her skin if she had any. The only thing left to signal her sudden worry is the widening of those pale, petal pink eyes as she blinks at him in silent wonder.

And then, noticing at last the edges of him so faintly when he tips his head, she says, “Because dying is terrible.” She whispers, searching for more edges of him but they are invisible in this dark. “It is long and drawn out and lonely. You know it’s coming and there is nothing to do but face it, nothing to do but wonder if the life you leave behind was worthwhile.” She falls quiet again, silenced by an ache in her chest that is more than muscle memory. Is she afraid? Yes. But of what?

Her face is a picture of perfect stillness, her brow frozen without muscle to run beneath it. Only her eyes change, change shape and shade, look at him and then away again. “I cannot imagine anything more lonely than knowing someday soon I will not exist anymore. I will cease to be.” The words come slowly like they need forcing, like they wound her to share, and there is a strange distance in her tourmaline eyes when they settle on his again. “I am afraid of what comes after death, but I hope it is kind.”

linnea

these wildfires grow and grow until a brand new world takes shape