Tales from the Briar-Heart, Vol. 1
#1 of Tales from the Briar-Heart
A selection from the briar-heart...tales that will wrap their thorns within you and bloom.
...What rose will your heart grow...?
A Thorny Trap----and Its Imprisoned Source
_ She opened her eyes to find the worst of her dreams was not nearly over yet. Falling asleep with them peering into her window had been bad enough, but now---- If she squinted her eyes at some of the larger blossoms, they almost looked like skulls. Human skulls, faerie skulls, demons.... Barbarians.... Trolls, Wizards, Elves.... It almost seemed that a macabre trap had been laid and sprung for all who'd tried to escape._
And then Cassis blinked her eyes, leaned closer to investigate them----and one of the enormous blossoms toppled down onto the bed, clattering....
"AAAAAHH!" ...Oh lords above, it really was a skull...!
Venturing a shaking hand outward, she grasped it by the bowl, drew it in, and looked from eye to jaw.... Proportionately long jaws, but not slender like an Elf's. Not as wide as a Troll's or a Barbarian's, not rounded like a faerie's, and the third set of flat teeth in the rear told her they were a Wizard's.
But it was small...not large. Not as large as an adult's, anyway.... Comparing it to her head in the webs of her broken mirror, the Princess of Dveldheim discovered, "Smaller than mine. This child was maybe..., nine....? Ten at the oldest. And it wasn't one of those...spider things...."
She'd discovered Neptune's forbidden, forgotten cabal below Nhordae when she was eleven. Wading into the deep pools there after a laughing sound, a joyous sort of revelry, had brought her face to face with many creatures that appeared to be half-Wizard, half spider.... Not fetid or rotting like the Ghastly Dark. She was dead...but these children were obviously her spawn. One or two of them actually spoke----and the others were either mute or unwilling to. Catching eyes with who had to be the sire or the leader----a white-furry spiderling with night-dark skin, who called himself Arachne----she'd seen a bare hint of a girl...a Nhordae girl...back there....
Some of the younger Nhordae women had chosen to dwell in the dark, mate with those creatures..., and continue bearing spiderlings.... Just the thought drew Cassis's entrails into cold, stony knots.
She wondered. And she hoped those eldritch creatures weren't evil. What little she'd seen of Juonwae lately told her he was either trapped in another part of the castle, dead, or mounting yet another escape attempt for survivors. And....
The Brobdinian girl, Esme----she'd seen none at all of her, since just before the roses' strike. She'd married Janiu in the aftermath of the Ghastly Dark's destruction...but why did she not appear? Why was Cassis constantly told to quiet when she asked of Esme's whereabouts? She suspected it was a reason she would not want to discover...Janiu and Kimahn had left long ago. Janiu, she thought, might have come back....
But she hadn't heard anything as truth...except a whisper on the wind that told her the Planetaries had returned. And whether it was true, she didn't know----but she hoped. Her Papa Neptune would never abandon her.
"Cassi! Cassi, are you all right?" Thank the gods for Gwenna...she hadn't left with her sister when Amymone had departed. She'd preferred to remain on Terre rather than discover the unknown on Earth...and for that, Cassis had to be grateful. For Anna, and Bridgett, had escaped from the castle weeks ago to summon help....
Icarus, Anna and Mercury's son----He hadn't been so fortunate....
She wiped her eyes. It wasn't fair...certainly, the boy was alive. But he didn't talk much, not since the roses had walled off his escape....
He'd swallowed a blossom----how, she didn't know----and now lay sick since then. Anna and Bridgett had lost him in the fray to escape the roses; obviously those deadly plants hadn't wanted a blind (though ferocious) swordswoman in their briars for long. They'd allowed both Elves to leave...and now, anyone to try was either killed or blocked off elsewhere. Cassis had found four guards dead of starvation already....
"I'm fine, Gwenna.... Are you all right? Have you seen Juonwae?"
The door opened a crack, revealing Gwenna's wan young face. She wasn't as pale as Amymone, but very near; by a narrow grace, her ginger-copper hair had not bleached like her older sister's, or fallen out like Laetitia's. What Cassis recalled of her mother's tales told her Laetitia of Lésa had been a weak, sickened, though very lovely woman..., whose mournful gift for scrying had led to her death. Amymone had seen Valamor first, but nearly too late....
"I haven't seen Juonwae...but I've heard crying for days in my sleep, Cassi. I thought it was you." Carefully she stepped into the room, stared wide-eyed at the invading briar runners (skulls dangling from their curled ends like fruits), and continued with knocking knees. "One night I followed the sound, and it----The.... The crying was coming from the spirits cellar...you know, the deep dark one with the glowworm nest in it, where those sunwater casks were kept...."
"Sunwater...?" Cassis's heart shattered in her chest. "Oh, Mother, no.... Gwenna, we have to go down there. I think I know what's crying...and who...." This must have been why they couldn't speak of Esme..., why she wasn't allowed to look for the kindly Brobdinian maid, who had become a noble lady and a wife...And, in certain rumors, a mother....
Esme was probably very near to the source of the roses....
* * *
"You...have to eat..., Summermoon.... If you die now, I'll...I'll be alone in h--hh-h----" She held out her hand, covered in a thin layer of spores and blood. "Please.... Eat...y-you can make it...." Weeping, the Brobdinian held herself tightly, curling into a ball. The floor here hadn't given way easily, but where she'd been able to, she'd laid down a patch of life-stones, and tried to set her own spores to grow.
She had to.... Every one of Janiu's babes was----
The sunwater was rotting down here. The roses had broken one cask into kindling, spread their foul pollen everywhere else, and any cask to see a mote of it was moldering and growing rose runners. Esme couldn't escape, not even to find a latrine...and in her partum fevers, she hadn't been able to do a thing as all those children---- As every child she'd borne had...died....
_ Died...in its own blood and the chamber's stagnant filth, rose blossoms opening where _eyes should have been....
Esme racked with painful coughing. That pollen had been thick as smoke down here a day ago. Summermoon had made the mistake of nibbling at a patch of it...and now the poor little glowworm lay weakly on her side, her wings barely fluttering with her sickly drone.... If Esme could get her to eat something else, expel the pollen, she might live...but spores, and thick, reddish-tainted milk, were all the Brobdinian could produce without consuming her own blood as fuel....
"Oh, Malliu...." She lowered her head, looking down at the last of her surviving children. "It's all right.... B-Be brave, little one----" Her breaths came short inside her chest now----Mal's eyes...one of them...was still there. It rolled weakly up as Esme reached out a trembling hand to stroke his forehead, sobbing. The rose runner his body had grown wound thickly from the back of his skull...most of his brain was still inside, oozing like wet, sick jelly. But she didn't need to be a healer to know he'd never live a year. Life-stones couldn't kill the roses, neither could the rare magic she knew...nor could fire, praying, Altair's Spring....
Janiu...when he'd bred the roses inside of him, he'd become both a garden plot and a fertile flower. With the conception of those children----all those ill-fated, poor little children----Esme had taken the seeds of the deadly rose into her womb as well. She now bore children who themselves were as afflicted as Janiu, but she could not feel the briars inside of her....
Was she a garden now----? Her nausea threw her flat against the ground in a greasy flood.
_ "Hkkkhhnk----JANIU----!"_ Esme's panting scream shook the roses around her. "JANIUUUU! HELP ME, JANIU----SOMEONE, ANYONE----OH GODS, MY CHILDREN, MY CHILDREN ARE DEAAAAADD----" Her vision bloomed with black, roaring and twisting----The stench----
The stench----the dark, the agony----
----The blood----
The death----Oh gods, the deaths of all those little children----
_ "......Someone...,"_ Esme whimpered, her arms holding Malliu tightly as his eye bulged outward---- The briars that quickly overran that bursting eye, up his wetly splitting skull, the wall...The casks, the ceiling.... She was going to die, she could already feel a runner wrapping slowly around her legs....
_ "...Smmm...nnn......lp meeee----"_