Page 5 of May: Bloom & Bane

The one who smells like your spring. My son senses her. She sleeps, but she pulls you toward her even now. Find her, Solvernah, before the balance tips.

Her amber eyes study the center of my chest.

I see you, she whispers. The humans have names for the skin, but the earth has names for the spirit.

I look down at my body. At the green skin, and leaves sprouting from my arms.

“And what does the earth call me? A monster? A mistake?”

No, she says softly, reaching out to thump a heavy paw against my knee. The earth calls you by the scent of the leaves that survive the frost. The herb that eases pain and clears the mind. She pauses.

You are Sage.

The name feels like a key sliding into a rusted lock. It may not tell me who I was, but it tells me what I am.

“Sage,” I whisper, testing the weight of it. My voice doesn’t rumble like an earthquake this time. It sounds… peaceful.

Go now, Sage, the mother rabbit says, tucking her paws back under her honey-colored fur. The peonies have been waiting longer than you know. Only you have the breath to wake her.

* * *

We’ve been walking for hours. Maybe longer. Time feels slippery when you have no memory of it. The forest begins to thin. The trees here are older, their bark bleached like exposed bone. Even the ground is silent beneath my feet, as if it were sleeping.

Sage? Droot’s small voice calls. Why did the growing stop?

Something isn’t right. The trees thin ahead, opening into a clearing. I push through the last of the silver branches, and something moves at the edge of my vision.

Droot goes rigid on my shoulder. Sage⁠—

I freeze. Droot’s claws dig into the green flesh of my shoulder, his tiny heart hammering against my neck.

Something staggers in our direction. It may have been a man once. Thick, oily black vines wrap around its frame, weaving in and out of its ribcage, pulsing with a sluggish heartbeat that makes a wet squelching sound in the silence.

Schlorp-thud. Schlorp-thud.

It has no face. Where eyes should be, there are only clusters of pale, sightless fungi. In place of a mouth, there’s a slow dripping curve of the same black sludge, leaking onto the sleeping earth, killing the soil on contact.

“Is that…” I whisper. “What I was supposed to be?”

No tether, Droot whispers, his voice trembling in my mind. No spring. Only hunger.

The creature turns, its movements jerky and unnatural, like a puppet swinging on rotten strings. I see no ears, but I think it can feel me.

It lets out a wet, wheezing rattle of air.

It lunges gracelessly, falling short of us. It moves with the frantic desperation of something that’s starving.

I don’t want to kill it. If it weren’t for the sleeping woman I haven’t even met yet, that hollow, screaming thing would be me.

“How do I help you?” I ask, while it searches the ground aimlessly for something to eat.

The creature doesn’t answer. It gives a violent, wet shudder instead.

At the sound of my voice, the black vines across its chest begin to distend, swelling as they gorge on the sludge inside its ribs. They tighten until I think they may break the creature in half.

The ribcage of vines snaps open like the jaws of a monstrous man-eating plant. The black tendrils shoot outward, lined with jagged thorn-like teeth. They pulse as they attempt to pull me into the hollow center of its chest.

Hungry, the thought scrapes against my brain. Fill… the… void...