He stood on the edge of the world. He stood where the ocean ate rock, where it ate everything. And that which it did not consume, he did.
The cold haar was rolling in, the evening starting to blacken the edges of the sky. He walked carefully across the water, scattering petals as he did so. The soil was leached dry with the bones of a thousand dead gulls. He remembered his mother telling him that bodies could be used to grow the food they ate.
She'd killed the earth.
Now, there would be nothing to remember her by. He flexed his hands, dropping the very last of the pink-red flowers.
Skipping, running over the last few meters, he dropped the stems and stood by the water's side. They looked so pretty, those petals. He saw fiends whose names he'd long forgotten circling beneath them, and even they began to look pretty. The strange shapes they made, the flow of their fins, their unending desire to kill, kill, kill.
He'd imagined for a long time that it was those flowers that had been blooming in his body. That the blood that ran thick was not so red and not so liquidy and it wasn't that that squeezed out through his skin whenever something cut him wide open - it was petals and beautiful things because beauty came from the inside, as mother always said.
And as the flowers began to die out, as the worn temple's insides began to look just as worn as the outside - he realized how rotten that idea was. Everything was blood and guts or stone and dust, whatever way you looked at it or whatever things you covered it with.
And as the very last flower wilted and he stole the petals from it and any other that still had a little bit of colour, as he tossed them into the ocean and watched half-dead thing swim under them, he realized a very important thing. And softly, so softly he whispered,
This world can not be saved.
—
She was his garden.
She had roses in her breath, opium in her kiss (or so he imagined) and he wanted to cut her open so he could see all the little petals fall out of her. To prove that she was not human but from the fables he'd woven as a child. To prove that she was hibiscus. She was cyanide.
She grew out of the bodies of the dead, her roots glittering and tied to the sky, thrust up and thrust away with every turn and twist of her body and arms that were not, could not, be human.
And even as he grew hungrier by the day, began to realize the philosophies of the fiends, began to imagine nothing else but kill, kill, killing - she made him realize.
She was more bountiful than the overgrown shelters in Guadosalam, more open and wide and opulent than the fields of the farplane. She filled him with sap and made his bark skin crack open and let every living thing come spewing out of him, slipping through at first - but soon demanding, bursting, exhausting him. It was the bloom in her eyes, the way she stayed closed but he could see her wide open - like a flower bared only to the moon, the endurance of a bristlecone pine, but to be ended in the lifespan of white clover.
How could this world bare to survive when that flower withered and died?
He'd pick the last of her petals.
He'd scatter her on the Calm Lands. Those lovely, red-pink petals. And when the greatest fiend of them all circled above, he would stand in awe of its beauty. He would realize a very important thing. And softly, so softly, he would whisper,
This world can be saved.