xxxa solo (1500 words) of thorne dealing with the shadows that lurk in the garden and getting injured in the process.
- Once, when Thorne had been young, he’d gotten cornered.
It had been the first, and the last time he’d ever let it happen.
Here in this part of the Garden, the shadows did not whisper. Here in this part of the world, the shadows were something else. Living, breathing, exotic creatures. They had a harmony to them, a deadly edge Thorne had always played with like fire. He had waited to be burned, had thought it would come of delving too far into their depths, letting them drown him with their might. He had never thought the fire would come to him instead, black flames licking, cold as ice and cruel as an inferno. Here where he had never belonged, they did not whisper.
They screamed.
The Garden had turned itself into something hungry and breathing, changing and shifting. It was a beast – when he had wondered how extensive it was, he had not known of this. Of the ivy cages, the trellises of earth and rock and
stone that shunted the scarce light from view. The plants that crawled it, hungry and searching. The shadows that seeped and dripped and welled in the crevices and cracks they left behind. Thorne stood in a maze made of deep earth and soil, growing things, breathing things. Shadows and darkness. There were no stars that grazed their light across the earth to be found here.
Everything might have been quiet, but here the shadows sought him out.
Little thief, little liar, they were saying in their foreign language, their tongue made up of liminal spaces and fractured images, a thousand hymnal sounds pressed together at once like the clanging of bells, like the sheer and hungry force of a wave crashing down, an undertow dragging someone beneath the surface of the sea. You speak our language, but you do not know our song. How would you like to play? How would you like to run?
Thorne is in a maze, and he runs. He tries to map the turns, the hedges, the growing trellises that cut corners from nothing, drag him through small four-way sects of rose bushes and lily ponds. The world around him smells of nothing but the overwhelming presence of flowers in bloom, in death, of growth and decay. It would not bother him normally, but as the shadows switch and turn with him, laughing, jeering, their voice a sirens call, Thorne cannot help but feel it choking him, clawing his very breath shallow in his throat. They push him, prod him, trip him, their very essence turned physical in their horrible state of play. They are guiding him, herding him. He is nothing but a lost sheep, a dog on the run, leash snapping in the wind, collar cinched tight as his throat as he falls again, tripped by the living darkness, its inky blackness crawling up his boot, along the inside of his leg.
Once when Thorne had been young, he’d gotten cornered in the ugly gray corners of a city, where the shadows all pooled. They had been bigger then him, stronger than him. Thorne had always been wiry, a dog with too much bone and not enough meat. They’d always loved to pick at the darkness of his skin and the white of theirs. The difference, the exclusion. They’d wanted him to bark and show his fangs, and bullying had never bothered Thorne enough that he’d wanted to scream from it, that he’d felt like he was choking on it, but they’d hit him then. Kicked and jeered and played like they were mulling over a piece of rot-ripe meat, not a living thing.
Never again, never again.
Thorne runs and runs and runs, but the darkness still herd him, still lunge and jolt after him. In his peripheral he sees them and their sliding, incorporeal form like some form of shadow puppetry, making shapes and figures that dart inside of the trellises. That weave between the gaps the plants leave, that the ivies create. They bleed into the running water of fountains, of pools that Thorne splashes through where lilies grow and drown in a cycle of endless rebirth.
They turn visceral and hungry, shaping their inky blackness to the likeness of wolves, of animals with gnashing teeth and wild, wild maws. They howl after him cruelly. They laugh wickedly in his wake.
Tell us, little thief, have you any right to be our friend? They croon and cry and snicker, why should we show you anything of ours? You have already taken so much! Greedy little thing, wouldn’t you like to go home?
But Thorne doesn’t have a home. Not really. He has Coalsmoke, he has Ashdown, but even that is something he can leave if he really must. Thorne only has Chris. And Chris is all he wants. The shadows jump and snarl and there is another thrust like a shove. It comes glancing and painful against his feet and his shoulder. Sends him stumbling, falling, out of the maze of ivy and darkness and into the shadow of a grove of trees.
It is the scent that catches him first, that chokes him on its wet humidity, its overbearing stench. Thorne catches the ancient heart of a tree and slams the ground. Something wet bites into his side, his back, slushing down and gutting open beneath him. An apple, Thorne realizes as he stares up into the darkness, the boughs of a tree somewhere up above.
But then he nearly vomits, the stench swelling against him like a tide. It is the too-sweet scent of overripe fruit, of rot and rain and decay. The heady scent of something bound intimately to the earth. This is the part of every garden that is carefully cultivated, cut down quietly, quickly, and not left to its own devices. This is the part of the Garden that carries the heart of all of its death with it. Another apple falls from the tree, rotted through and smashing into the ground. A wet, ugly slap of sound.
It is an orchard of sorts, a binding of trees and the liminal spaces in between. The shadows whisper, this is our home. This is our playground. We feast here, we breathe here, we are here. Thorne does not go back the way he came. He moves forward, blind and slipping on the too soft earth, the humidity clutching the air not from any rain or wetness but from the overgrown canopy of apple trees, the slaughter of fruit past the point of saving, to the point in the cycle where it is only natural to decay.
His mind circles back to Chris even as the shadows bite and n** at him, hungry and demanding, playful and dangerous. He needs to find him, because the shadows are after him but the Garden is a creature of its own sentience, and it had separated them for a reason. Was Chris in danger as well? He had to know. He had to get back to him. He had to –
Oh little thief, little wolf, the shadows sang and screamed and hollered. Something pulled at his ankle but Thorne kicked and lashed out this time, his throat forming around a snarl as he turned, his back hitting against the too-hard anchors of one of the vast, swollen trees, their roots upheaving the earth, collecting pools of rotted fruit and waste and wetness.
Oh little creature, we are so old, so old, so old, and you are so young, they said, we could teach you, but what could humans learn from us? Greedy thing, frightful thing, you ran and did not fight.
Thorne struggles to swallow with the taste of rot and fruit cloying his mouth. Another apple falls. Another, another. Raining down around him in this shadowy place, this dwelling that was never meant to be shared. What was a Garden without its secrets, after all? How silly of him to have thought that a Garden was only a place of kindness, or roses and wisteria – living, loving things?
Thorne bent his head forward, willed himself calm. For Chris, for Chris. He had to calm down. He had to tame himself. His body bent beneath exhaustion, legs trembling, lungs in atrophy. He hurt all over, body bruised, abused, lashed by shadow-play. He sucked in a deep breath, and then another. He shoved the urge to vomit down, the soft-wet patter of a different sort of rain. Apples falling, leaves rustling. Shadows in wait, waiting on his very move to strike out, to end this game with a win. He could see them in the corner of his eyes, the peripheral of his vision. They swarmed and swam the darkness like an undertow. They shifted in between the ugly leaves.
They moved.
Thorne lifted his head.
“Stop,” he said. It was a voice that could not be denied. A prince’s voice, a ruler in the making. Something golden, something that burned holy, even here in the dark. The shadows paused, Thorne could see them. They wavered, wondered, marveled. He did not know that they would listen. Had never tried. But he was desperate, he was cornered. He had promised himself never again, and here he was.
Time stilled for a heartbeat.
And then it breathed.
When it was over, Thorne felt something warm and burning slice down his cheek, drip from his chin. A great, arching spear of darkness had shattered the bark of the tree next to his head, like the too-long limb of a spider. Like a knife-edge that had only barely missed.
The shadows leaned in from everywhere, from nowhere, from all corners at once. They crooned to him mockingly. They crooned to him like a monster, like a villain, like something that in of itself could not be commanded, because it did not know what command was.
Little princeling, they said, whispered, sang, little king-to-be, try harder. Try again. Pick yourself up.
Thorne breathed the scent of death, decay. Of rot and ruin, blood and uprising.
Try again.
- word count: 1682