Blind and whistling just around the corner
And there's a wind that is whispering something
Strong as hell but not hickory rooted
To the girl who would rather eat her own flesh than submit to Famine, the thing – the things – had said, and inside her something bloomed.
Inside her was a seed, a thing apart from her history, unburdened by the weight of it. Inside her was a power – not a power given to her by her parents, not a thing borne from blood, but a thing uniquely hers, a thing earned as she swallowed seals and the world thundered to an end around them.
Plants bend to her will, grow and wilt as she decrees it. She grows flowers in her mane, blowing life back into them when they begin to wilt.
(She doesn’t know which she likes more – the creation, or the destruction.)
She grows a tree – a hickory, her namesake. She thinks it’s in honor of something or someone but no names come to her lips because there is no one, not anymore. Hickory is the last in a long line of lasts, she is childless, without lovers or even friends.
(And once there had been a mare who smelled like the earth or the grave and Hickory sometimes remembers how she’d felt.)
The tree is a touchstone. The tree is where she carved the seals, to remind herself that it was not a dream. That there had been seals shattered and melting in her mouth as she bled for a cause, for a purpose.
(She had been so hungry, and ate her own flesh so she’d have something to spit in their face.)
She is quiet under the tree but all around her twigs snap, and someone’s breaths huff hot in the stillness of the night air.
A demand, made to the wind: Who goes there?
Strange, she almost knows the voice. Almost remembers how it once said her name.
She could grow nettles between them, foxglove, an array of beautiful poison stretching between them. But she does not. She is not a fearful thing.
Instead, to the wind and the demanding voice, she says, “Hickory.”
