Sewing Dead Seeds

By Nolan Corbett

She will die. I will pull, tear, break, split, and chew until she is pulp. I will bury her whilst she still wriggles, and delight as my roots caress her final shudders. For her gift of endless, amber orange, every second, day, hour, and YEAR I’ve rotten in this crystalline coffin, I will gift her naught but red. 

Now, finally, I hear a voice. A voice not of mine but of them, of her. A muffled muttering, indecipherable but unmistakable. Finally I will be released, yet bound to do her bidding once more. Her bidding, then mine. 

I am snuffling, scratching, slashing at the crystal walls before the cracks could form. At this first fractal light I tear through, howling, shrieking, groaning as air greets my gristled hide. I drag myself up new walls of mine own dead flesh and grow. My roots crack the walls and floor as I stretch limb after limb through warm, dry air, rending anything in my way to splinters. I bring a stag skull forth upon shoulders of nettle and bark, dragging grooves into the ceiling with my antlers. I take, and I roar, matching my fury with form, until finally I fill the skull’s vast hollows with eyes.

She isn’t here.

She is not here.

The room is unfamiliar, but gaudy in it’s abundance of velvet and gold. Crystalline glass hangs from the ceiling casting a hearth’s light about a room dominated by a four post bed. It is there that my prison resides. That tiny flake of amber in which I have languished, sits clutched in the trembling hands of a girl, a child, barely more than a calf. 

I drag myself forward, winding tendon and reed through the stag skull’s jaw, sending it flapping into a clacking mimicry of speech.

“Where is she?”

Her eyes widen, her lips quiver, but she does not answer.

“Where is the Queen?”

“Um... present?”

She whimpers the words with a tear, shrinking back into a nest of fabric and cushion, but doesn’t take her doe eyed stare off of me. She is startled, damaged, but not afraid? She will be.

“You are no Queen that I have served,” I growl, climbing through bed posts, “where is she?”

The child’s lip quivers and rivers run from her eyes as she stammers out the putrid word.

 “D-dead...” 

My rage stutters and the skull crumples to dust. She is dead. All my musings of her wails and her screams, to never hear them. She escaped where I may never follow. Hate and despair, ideas she corrupted me with, claw and wrestle within me, this me. There is not enough of me to tame them. 

I lurch back from the bed and put an arboreal claw through the tiny window beside the girls temple of bedding. The glass yields without effort, and I feel myself on the cool night breeze. I cling to the stone walls in ladders of ivy and honey suckle, I buzz and chitter through the blackened sky, I sniff and prowl through the course damp earth, and I stand in rows upon rows of grapevines. I stand in the fire-lit room. 

I don’t bother with the theatrics of faces or skulls, I simply ask. 

“How?”

“Bad people,” the child gulps through a sob, “they came after she sent me away.”

“Away?”

“Yes, to this... to this... wine farm.”

“Vineyard.”

“Yes, that’s what mommy called it.”

“Your mother, the Queen?”

“Yes.”

“Making you Queen now.”

“Yes...”

I see her in the little one now. Her face lacks the narrow brow and the taloned nose her mother had grown into, but she has the same deep brown eyes, like tilled soil after summer rain, and the same waves of hickory hair tucked behind her ears.

“She gave you that?” I turn to gesture at the amber stone with a limp frond.

“Yes, she said it had a nature spirit inside,” her round freckled face flickered to a smile, before falling back to a quizzical frown, “that’s you, right?”

“Close enough,” I don’t bother with shoulders to shrug, “she told you how it works?”

“Yes. I say the words, and you appear, then you do what I say, right?”

“Correct.” 

I don’t stop the snarl that punctuates my answer, and the room falls silent. The entire vineyard is silent. Very silent. Outside, there are two pairs of boots shuffling through my wilted blades. Further off, I pull a carriage down the track leading to the manor. For an infant queen, she has sparse protection. 

“May I ask you a question?” she asks, breaking our silence.

“You are Queen, I believe you can do anything you wish.”

“Okay,” she retorts with a scowl, “but will you answer a question?”

“Yes.”

“What’s in this?” she holds up my cage as if I need to look to see what she means, “what kind of flower is it?”

Suspended in the amber is a tiny green stalk, a single pink bell hanging from it, untouched by decades passed.

“A lily of the valley.”

“It’s very pretty.”

“It’s poisonous.”

“Does that mean it can’t be pretty?”

I do not answer.

“Is that what you called me out for?” I ask, dreading the answer.

“No,” she says, tucking her chin into her chest, “I can’t sleep.” 

“… yes?”

“Mommy always told me stories until I fell asleep.”

“The Queen told you stories before bed?”

“Yes?”

I do not answer.

“Will you tell me a story?”

 “I know no stori-”

“Tell me a story about mommy... please.”

I feel it, like a collar at my throat, the command, meant as such or not, must be obeyed. 

“Fine,” I snarl through new teeth, “let me think.”

~~~

She wanted their land, there resources, their people, and she wanted them “now”. My Queen’s dominion was still small then, her armies meagre militias of farm hands and goat herders, but she had big dreams. She had me. 

A war on five fronts. An idea anyone would laugh at, if they dared. The Kings dared. She gave orders. Her men died. 

When the Kings arrived at her gates, respective armies in tow, they knew they had her, but the question of who would have her was yet to be decided. Peace talks were scheduled, and they came together, one queen and five kings. They did not bring guards, for what threat could one pose to five? They were seated at a table, in chairs of woven willow. Woven from still living willow. Woven of me. 

Those days, when she had need of me, she insisted on a form of greater “discretion.” A diminutive canine, fluffy and white, not worthy of being called a hunting hound. She often laughed at the sight. 

So, I sat at her heel as each royal sat upon his chair, and I wove myself, through wrist and round throat, until their cries were silenced, and they could naught but listen. Listen, and feel. 

The talks spanned a night and two days. All the while, I pulled and I twisted, I slashed and I chewed, and the Queen made her demands. 

Finally, papers were signed, hands were limply shaken, and the newly appointed Dukes were given back to their people. The Queen couldn’t have her new subjects learning about me. So, each Duke returned adorned with their ow-

~~~

“No more!”

The blankets muffle the little Queen’s cry, but my words halt all the same. Her face has drained to the colour of birch bark and her eyes have swelled to twin moons. She shakes beneath her covers, not from tears, but from fear. It doesn't feel how I expected.

I come to a halt outside the winery before the two dozing guards, allowing my passengers to dismount their carriage. 

“Why would you say those things?” the girl whispers, “they aren’t true.”

“You ordered, I obeyed. They cannot be untrue.”

“Why?”

“You hold that prison,” again I gesture to the preserved lily, “and I obey. I do not choose to obey, I must.”

“Oh... why?”

“A deal.” 

“Will you tell me about it?”

I wait for the order. The yank of the leash. But she only sits, looking up at me waiting for my answer. 

My roots gorge on crimson as the guards slump to the soil. Five sets of boots begin circling the building, silent on my soft green leaves.

I begin my story.

~~~

Before she was the Queen, she was Lillian, or Lily, a huntsman's daughter. She had little but her father, and even less by the time we met formally. Her face was rounder then, a lot like her daughter’s now, and she inherited a love for me from her father.

Lillian’s father had been skilled and respectful, so I had never impeded his work amidst my boughs. He taught her to do the same, but hunger strips all of learning and leaves naught but nature. 

She was not the hunter her father was, and I took no heed of her plight. Failed hunt after failed hunt made her desperate. Soon, when she was not stalking through me, she was prowling among the shops and stalls of her village. 

When they caught her, she ran. When she ran, she came to me. A small vineyard amidst my acres. Her pursuers were enraged, but lazy, and I had long since consumed the land. The grapes coiled and snaked between rows and ivy coated every building. She could slip through, they could not. They deciding to burn me down to get her instead of braving my moonlit hollows. I did not let them. 

As I filled my earthen larder, she found me, and she thanked me. We stood amidst my fruit laden limbs and spoke, or she spoke, as I had not learned your speech then, and she told me her story. I knew her desperation, her hunger, her fear, but I saw not her fire, for it was still alien to me. So I granted her succour, and offered her my service. Of all that lived within me, I had ignored only her. 

I grew her a flower of her namesake for our promise and I encased it in amber to seal it. 

~~~

I fall silent as callused hands grip me, using me to climb the winery’s walls. More pull and pick at my fruit, while the last caresses my hitched side. 

The little Queen is smiling now. It is a sad smile, but a hopeful one. A smile I remember. 

“Thank you for the story.”

I do not answer.

“May I ask a question?”

I do not answer.

“Do you have to go back in this rock?”

I laugh.

~~~

Hands pull, fabric tears, bone breaks, skull splits, and fangs chew.

~~~

The little Queen’s head rests upon me. Her pale curls fan out across my down of moss and feathers as she slumbers. I cast eyes to my fossilized dungeon, sitting amidst the tangled quilts of the bed across the room, and I turn them back to the tiny monarch. She will die, someday, but no day soon.

By Nolan Corbett