Briar Rose's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

The consort's despair had begun to seep into the dream. Briar Rose walked the tea garden and found the briars sick. The thorn stems had gone black. A gray rot climbed them, soft as ash. She touched one vine and it crumbled. These briars held the man asleep. If they died, he would slip free, and so might she. A thousand years of sleep hung on stems now dying from the inside. She followed the rot to its source. The man sat where she had left him. His silver cart had tarnished. The rose she grew for him had wilted to slime. His grief poured out of him and ate everything it touched. She could not sustain his wish for ending without also feeding the rot. Every night she fed him, the poison spread further. "You should not be down here." The voice came from the garden's edge. A girl stepped out of the dead roses. She carried a dark staff carved with painted marks. Braids, an apron, a leather pouch. She looked twelve and moved like she had killed before. Briar Rose knew her at once. A living dreamer, drawn down uninvited, hunting. The girl who burned witches. "Your rot woke me," Gretel said. "I smelled it from above. Rot smells like their houses." She looked at the man, then the black vines. "You're killing him wrong. Whatever you're doing." "He wants to die," Briar Rose said. "I keep him just short of it." "Then stop keeping him short." Gretel's face did not change. "You can't hold a man by giving him half of what kills him. He'll rot till you both go." Briar Rose looked at the dying briars. The girl was right, and the truth was simple and cruel. To hold him, she had fed his despair. Despair was the poison. She had to give him something else to want, or lose him and herself both. She raised her scepter. The roses at its crown opened wide. She reached into the sleeping man, past the wish for ending, and searched for anything beneath it. She found a single thread. He did not truly want to vanish. He wanted to be missed. He wanted someone to notice he was gone. So she gave him that. In the dream she built a figure who wept for him, who called his name into the dark. The man stirred. His grief turned from rot into longing. The black vines slowed. Green crept back up the stems. Gretel watched the briars heal. "You changed what he wants." "I found what was under it." "That's a leash, not a cure." Gretel turned toward the light above. "He'll want the one who misses him. Not you." She climbed and was gone. The briars held again. The rot was stopped. But Briar Rose stood in her garden knowing what she had made. Her consort was bound now by longing for someone who did not exist.