Bastian Everly's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

Bastian climbed the white hill at dawn with a wilting bloom in his fist. He had come to beg for more flowers. But he stopped at the last step. More flowers meant more rot for Maren, and the transplanted blooms would just die again. Begging would only trade her arm for one more week. He needed to learn why the flowers died at all. He found the goddess of seasons outside her radiant home, kneeling in the dirt. She wore a crown of living flowers. Her right hand bloomed with spring. Her left arm was black past the elbow now, cracked like old bark. She had spent that flesh helping him twice already. She looked up and smiled, though her breath came slow. "You came back," she said. "You want more." "No." Bastian opened his fist and showed her the dying bloom. "I want to know why this happens. Teach me how they live. Then I stop taking from you." Maren studied him. Her smile faded into something harder to read. She took the wilting flower with her blooming hand. "They live on me," she said. "Every bloom stays tied to the root that made it. Cut it away and it starves." "So the crossroads flowers die because they are cut off." "From the ring, and from me." She pressed the flower into the soil at her knees. It stood up straight and bright at once. "But a seed is different. A seed carries no debt. Plant a seed and the flower grows from the ground itself. It draws life from the earth, not from my blood." Bastian's chest went tight. "Then give me seeds. Not blooms." "I never gave you seeds because seeds take a season to grow. You wanted speed." She coughed. Dark dust fell from her cracked arm. "But seeds cost me nothing. The ground feeds them. Not me." She reached into a fold of her dress and drew out a small pouch. She dropped it in his palm. The seeds inside were pale and cool, like tiny moons. "Plant these along your path," she said. "They will grow slow. They will not die. And they will not take another inch of my arm." Bastian closed his hand around the pouch. For the first time, he had not spent her body to save his own. "You should have told me sooner." "You did not ask the right question sooner." She lay back in the dirt among her flowers and shut her eyes. "Go. Plant them before the old ones fall." Bastian ran down the hill. He reached the crossroads by midday and pressed the pale seeds into the earth along the dying path. Nothing bloomed yet. But he felt no door swing open, no divine eye finding him. The seeds were his now, fed by the ground. The path would hold. His warband could keep growing. But a season was a long time to wait, and the serpent god was watching the count.