The worst make homes beneath your skin
Rubinia Ashborne trustsplants more than people.More than herself most of all.
Plants obey laws older than kingdoms. Older than grief. Older than memory itself. They do not lie. They do not hesitate. They do not fail because they are tired, or afraid, or distracted by warmth and laughter when vigilance is required.
They simplyare.
Root. Leaf. Resin. Bloom. Decay. Renewal.
Predictable. Reliable. True.
Things she cannot say about herself.
Her workroom smells of crushed green things and heated glass—sharp oils, bitter tinctures, mineral smoke, and the faint metallic tang of distilled elixirs. The air hangs heavy with humidity from the simmering, bubbling elixirs lining the back wall where narrow glass coils spiral like translucent serpents.
Light filters through high arched windows of rippled crystal, fracturing into bands of gold across the stone floor. Every surface holds evidence of work in motion—drying bundles suspended from rafters, mortar dust ground permanently into the grain of the central table, stains of amber resin hardened like preserved sunlight.
She reaches blindly for the half-empty flask beside the mortar and takes a sharp swallow of brask without tasting it. Bitter heat slides down her throat. Familiar. Necessary.
Some nights she drinks to forget Tali’s blood. Other nights she drinks because she wants to pretend Nalya is still here.
She forces her attention to sharpen, focus, and drags her eyes across the apothecary.
Nothing here is decorative. Everything heretransforms. Rubi prefers it that way—transformations that obey. She’s been this way since Maldrak’s Purge. Since she was meant to protect Teddy’s wife and unborn daughter. Since she was trusted to do something other than get in the way and drink unfathomable amounts of liquor.
Just be predictable for once.
That’s what Teddy had said.
She failed, of course.
Let her boredom win over duty.
Plants are predictable. People aren’t.
People are driven by an undeniable need to not be alone in the end. It makes them unpredictable by nature. Driven to seek out the warmth of another, the touch of someone safe, the comfort of a shared experience.
Because loneliness is its own kind of death. Not sudden or bloody or dramatic. Just a slow erosion of the self. A quiet voice that asks, night after night, whether anyone would notice if you disappeared. Whether anyone cares if you’re hurting. Whether anyone cares at all.
Most deny their needs for duty, service, a promise. But not Rubi. Rubi was weak. Selfish. Unable to withstand another night of loneliness. Now, she rots slowly. Quietly. From the inside out while everyone around her mistakes survival for healing.
She stands at the main workbench, sleeves rolled past her elbows, hands stained a faint green at the fingertips—the color of living chlorophyll pressed into her skin through long-held familiarity. Before her, a shallow stone mortar holds a cluster of pale-veined leaves, their flesh thick with suspended oils that glisten faintly beneath lamplight.
She grinds them slowly. She’s not hesitating, she’s controlled, precise. If nothing else, she could be that. For a while.
The pestle moves in measured circles, pressure precise, rhythm steady, each turn releasing another thin ribbon of scent into the air. Bitter first. Then sweet. Then something sharper beneath, like the layers of scent when rain meets earth.
Her breathing matches the motion.
Inhale.Press. Turn.Release.
She does not rush extraction. Rushing leads to instability. Instability leads to unpredictability. And unpredictability—Rubi has learned—is where catastrophe takes root.
A thin curl of steam rises from the distillation basin beside her, carrying the pungent aroma of a plant changing states. She does not look at it. She feels its behavior the way other people sense shifts in temperature—an awareness honed by years of watching substances alter beneath her hands.
Transformation has rules.
Everything has rules.
