Not-Actually-the-Author's Note- Once again, Laura here, posting on Ash's behalf. She'll complete and update the finalized version of this fic once she's able to get back online, but for now here is another preview of her Reverb 2015 contributions!
He is five years old, and his father shows him how to ring bark the trees in the forest. With a blade so fierce that he can see his own reflection, he carves away a garish grimace in the face of the wood, his father only stopping him to readjust the tool in his small hands.
His father tells him, "If you do it just right, when the wind blows, you can hear them weep. Nothing that's worth anything dies in silence."
That night, the air licks at the wounds he left, the protection peeled back from the raw flesh of pines, of maples and of ash, and they cry amongst themselves, for themselves, and for each other. His father's words make it seem almost like music.
With those bones, homes will be built. Fires will rage, roasting the fowl and warming the bed stones.
They weep the weeks after their skin is torn from flesh, their leaves shrivel and shudder with windy sobs before they fall, and he wonders why it is they have to suffer if they are to die for the sake of others anyway.
.
He is nine, and his lungs rot the way the souls of the trees his father fells do. His father tells him, "God is punishing me. I give the witch lily of the valley so she will bless our woods. God has turned his back on me."
As his father swallows sorrow, the boy coughs scarlet into his sleeves, and realizes that god is dead.
.
He is ten, and he learns of beauty for the first time.
She wears the shadows and devours the stars, and when she pushes the breath back into his chest, he feels the light burning away the rot, cleansing the sores and soothing the rawness that had been ripping the life from him little by little.
She's only a child, but so is he, and if she can be his salvation, surely he can serve her well.
She's no God, but she's become his queen, someone he can speak to who responds, tangible and real and far greater than any God he's ever heard of.
.
He is thirteen, standing at the base of a young tree with her by his side. She hands him an aggressive toothed saw, tells him to cut the tree at it's base, and it screams as his tool bites into it, but a few strokes is all it takes to make it fall, and its whimpers fade quickly, its suffering soon come to an end. He quarters it, brings it to the stone pit near the cave where they like to hide when the adults of the town react to the moon at it's fullest. When he tries to stoke a flame, the wood crackles, hisses, steaming and screaming, and his father's words lace themselves in the poisonous, sticky smoke that rises from the wood.
She stands beside him, her smile sweet as the blood of the maples, blowing smoke rings around her little smoke spiders, his soul blissfully paralyzed in her open palm.
.
He's fifteen, and she asks for his help. "It's something I think you'll like," she says, and he doesn't even mind the way her hooks sink into him. She tugs his strings, and he obeys because he wants to, he must, and she drinks his adoration like the finest spirits. He follows her to the cave, its mouth glowing faintly the way the sky sometimes will at twilight. She enters, but he stays in the filtered light of the sun, his gaze never leaving her.
When she returns, it's with a ball of flaming violet light, and when she places his hacksaw in one of his hands and the ball of light in the other, tells him to swallow the light, he doesn't hesitate. It tastes like smoke rings and maple blood and sorrow, and it courses through his veins like fire. His fingers, curled into a white knuckled fist, bite into his palms the way needles pop through thick leather, and he howls like the trees he maims do when the wind bends their bare spines. He crumbles like coals settling to ash, and she stands above him watching curiously. The saw is gone, and the light burns in his core, and he silently hopes that this is exactly what she had been hoping would happen.
A rib cracks, the joints of his toes pop, and then he is at peace.
The rib doesn't hurt.
Nothing hurts.
His eyes peel open and reveal her, staring down in muted awe.
"I was right," she says reverently. When he tries to respond, his tongue is shredded by something jagged in his mouth, and when the blood leaks from his lips, she wipes it away with a soft handkerchief and says, "Don't worry, there's an adjustment period for all changes. You're destined for greatness, and all things great involve suffering."
He smiles, feral and fierce and fed with flames, and remembers to never forget the truth of those words.
He's seventeen, with the fluttering, tiny yellow soul of a snake in his bloodied, brutal grip, and she's grinning her approval. He doesn't swallow it whole. He tears it to pieces in his teeth and tastes echos of the creature's death rattle on his tongue, savoring the sorrow, letting it brace in his bones.
"More?" he asks.
"More," she agrees.
.
He's eighteen, with the quivering, bright blue soul in his sap sticky, scarlet coated hands, and she says,
"Perhaps a bit too much."
She takes it from open palm, inspects it, learns it, and hands it back to him with a sigh of, "Though you may be on the right track. Proceed."
He does not smile as he chews, his heart steeling with every clench of his jaw, his father's suffering bitter and fermented in his mouth.
Surely, this will be worth something, he thinks as his soul swells with barely bottled rage for the world.
.
He's twenty, marrying a frail, breakable little blonde thing by the name of Abigail, and she wears the shadows, observing his matrimonial union with a conspiratorial, predatory smile curling her stained lips. No one else notices her, no one else ever does unless she wishes it, and he smiles back, disguising the gesture as joy for his forest wedding.
They consummate the marriage that night, and he is gentle, as one would be while handling the veiny skeletons of leaves. His peripheral focus never leaves the black widow spinning her intricate web in the corner of the bedroom.
.
He is twenty-two and the father of twins, Alexander and Roderick, named and loved desperately by their tiny mother, the frail woman whose birthing bed nearly became her death bed. They adore her, and he finds he doesn't quite care that they don't smile or laugh for him. Their teeth grow in slowly, pearly white and blunt, and he's selfishly grateful that he is the only one of his kind, the only one that she needs.
As he slips from his shared bed, through the back door and to the cave which is truly home, the person who is truly home, he begrudgingly, silently acknowledges the fact that she is not a woman who finds herself in need of others.
He supposes that makes his existence within her attentions all the more meaningful, but words like 'meaningful' and 'attention' and 'need' make him ill, sick with self-pity, so he reminds himself that he is hers willingly, marching into the den blindly, faithfully.
.
He's twenty-five, his wife pregnant, his children scared, and his lungs filled with blood.