Work Text:
There is a bloodstain above the doorway to the temple, a small skid mark on the ceiling that has darkened with the seasons. It blends into the stonework as if it was a natural imperfection in the rock or the faint fuzz of new lichen. It had never crossed Caduceus’ mind to wipe it away even when the mark was freshly made, red and bleeding. In the years that followed he would occasionally reach up, on the tips of his toes, just tall enough to run a finger across it.
It stayed there, beautiful to him, in the same way one would cut flowers from their garden and put them in a vase of water. Both the flowers and the bloodstain were traces of severed life—the flowers would remain colorful for a short period of time before beginning to wilt and rot and the bloodstain would eventually be worn off the stone, sometime in the distant future, into untraceable dust, along with his body, his temple, and his graveyard.
All things deserve a good death. Not all lives are granted a good death, but death itself is good, is necessary, is needed, like the body needs water to survive.
When people come to the Blooming Grove he sees loss hanging off their shoulders like an invisible, heavy blanket. It is a haunting ghost that whispers into their subconscious. Caduceus listens to the people that he invites into his home—mourners, all of them—each processing death in their own way. He focuses on the words—both the words that flow freely from their lips and the others he has to pull out of their mouths like rotten teeth. Each stutter and syllable and sound, each noun and verb and adjective, each movement and grimace and pause are like pieces to a puzzle. Those pieces fall from their mouths, their bodies, and pile high around them into molehills, into mountains. Most of it isn’t important. Some of it is.
He sifts through those pieces of human nature—letting them flow freely through his fingers like smooth grains of sand—until he feels something larger tickle his palm, trace the edge of his fingers, and he closes his hand around it. He blows off the remaining dust and uncurls his giant, bony fingers, leaving him with an insight, with an answer. Through all the noise lies the truth.
If you listen to enough people, if you dig deep past the piles of grime to the bedrock that your fingernails can’t seem to scratch, you reach the same conclusion—everyone is struggling with something, consciously or not. And why wouldn’t they? Struggling is the way of the natural world. Food, water, sex, shelter, growth, love, acceptance, power, partnership, money—nothing is gained without struggle, without effort, without wrestling with the world within you and around you.
Some deaths cause fractures among the living, loosening thoughts tucked tight between the joints of their bodies. He listens, with practice, with patience. I wasn’t a good child, I was a terrible partner, I cheated, I lied, I stole, I murdered, I hated, I loved. I was golden, I was wonderful, the best, I deserve more, I deserve less, I am sorry, screw you, I don’t care, screw this, I was hurt by them, I hurt them, I miss them, I’m so glad this is all over. I tried to be good, oh so good, and I worry that I failed, that I wasn’t good enough, that I was bad. What does that make me? What do I do with this sorrow, or relief, a burden upon my body? The same universal experience of death is repeated in this graveyard in a thousand varying ways, connected distantly, like spider silk, spun in a web, arching, catching the morning dew, all in scattered chords, but all pulling on a single, central point.
It keeps it interesting, for sure. There are an infinite number of possibilities of people. The Blooming Grove is the center of the web with hidden strings that draw people in, that catch them, entangling them in death. And his family? They are like spiders, who creep along those borderlines without sticking, wrapping the dead in the cocoons of their graveyard, and cultivate life from their bodies. But like some spiders they most often sit at the center of the web, waiting patiently, and watch until they've caught the next fly.
There are those that weep, those that lash out, and those who dance drunkenly on the graves surrounding his tiny stone church, trampling on his carefully grown garden.
“It’s all right, it’s all part of the process, to break down, and to reform,” he’ll say with a smile, and nobody knows whether he’s referring to this grief or his garden.
In the last few cycles Caduceus has been left to his own devices, holding down the fort and waiting for the return of his family. He prays to his god that they find what they are looking for, and while he is alone, he does not feel alone—he is not really alone. In the summer he lies down on the warm grass and listens to the wind in the trees, unflinching as ants and beetles and caterpillars crawl over his body—he is a feature of the landscape, a mountain to them, and if anything, he is the bother—he has decide to lie down in their space, on existing territories, and has flattened the grass below him, depriving it of the sun.
He apologizes aloud to the plants in his garden before he cuts them with shears, rips them from the ground, and eats them to sustain himself. He is thankful for the bees who stand aside and take over his body—crawling in a massive swarm up his arm and across his shoulders and face—accepting him into their hive, so that he can taste their sweet labors in exchange for growing flowers they like. He asks politely if a bird may give up an egg or two so that he can make bread. He’s aware how hard it must be to give up a potential child when you’ve worked so hard on building a crib for them, but he is allowed—most of the time—because he asks so nicely.
He lies there, with little concept of time, and his eyes open and shut. When he awakes he doesn't remember how long he’s been there. All he knows is that the grass is taller around him and snakes have found shelter in his flowing pink hair. One of these days he wouldn’t be surprised if he woke up from these midsummer naps and found that roots had taken hold in his body, that he had flowered, and that an ecosystem had grown on his body more than it already has. It’s a realistic daydream that he finds pleasant. He knows he will be beautiful in death, in decay.
He sits up, sleepy-eyed, after what feels like eternity, and sighs.
When autumn comes he picks up a leaf that has fallen and rubs its fresh death over his lips. Although it is smooth and pliable he can feel the raised veins that fan out from the central stem. Some particular leaves are nice, so nice against his lips, that he tucks them into a pouch or into the breast of his shirt for later, for when he remembers them, and does it again. The next time, there’s a little more wilt, more wetness as it loses such a rigid form, then it becomes drier, less pliable, and before long he pulls it against his mouth and it crinkles, cracking into pieces, and falls aimlessly to the ground as dust.
A body came to him this season. It was interesting to watch the daughter as he prepared her mother’s burial by himself. She was agitated, she talked, he listened. It was nice to have someone to share a cup of tea with again. She felt better once the body was underground.
Her two bodyguards, however, were incredibly distracting to him from the moment Caduceus looked them in the eyes—they both were clearly in love with each other, pining over a love they both viewed as unrequited. Caduceus decided he should say something about it. It went over badly at first. Then, after some screaming, some throwing of stones, it was fine. The daughter was dumbfounded to find her two hired companions holding each other and crying into each other’s arms, kissing, with Caduceus towering over them, a few paces away, enjoying the work of his words with an alien glee.
It is always so strange that people react so negatively to their own truths.
He prays and his prayers are answered. The Wildmother speaks to him between whispers of wind and the twinkling of leaves in the sun. He expresses his worry as the cursed forest that surrounds his home grows closer, faster, as thick and pointed thorns continue to pierce through the three stone gates, reaching farther and farther as they have done for many seasons. He does not know how much longer this place will be safe but he is assured he is on the right path, and he must wait, alone, as the darkness surrounds him. The gates, although nearly overtaken, are still intact.
This is the season of violence—historically—at least. The animals become restless, hungry on the cusp of winter, and Caduceus is a meal—he may be thin, bony, but he’s a meal nonetheless. He prefers to teach them a lesson, to invoke fear and tell them there’s no battle to be won, sending them off with scrapes that will heal. But some monsters are filled with rage, too set in their ways, and he beats them into the ground until their last breath expires, still warm, body twitching with unused electricity. Caduceus touches them and they decay, blankets of fuzzy mold and colorful rows of shelving fungi blooming almost instantly, sucking moisture from the body and desiccating the corpse.
It is beautiful.
The season ebbs and fades. Caduceus gives and takes, harvests and replants, walks among the gravestones and prays, sitting cross-legged in unruly, uncut grass, tall enough that it tickles the bottom of his chin.
He communes for hours, in meditation, in focus, reading the pulse of the planet beneath him—until it is cut short, suddenly, violently, as a thick wide club bashes into the side of his face, knocking him to the dirt. He can taste both blood and soil on his lips. He is dizzied, stunned, and his body fails to move when commanded.
He can feel his body being dragged by his ankles and through his doubled, shaky vision he reaches, frantically, for the familiar damp wood of his staff. Empty-handed, he instead flicks a finger towards his toes, directed at one of the pairs of hands he can make out through his hazy vision, and he whispers out a word as his nose and mouth drip with blood. There’s a sudden spark and he can see the light of ethereal, radiant, unburning flame. The figure screams, a leg is freed, and Caduceus manages to use the newly freed one to kick himself out of the grasp of the person. He rolls over, crawling on his stomach, frantically searching for his staff in the long grass. He finds it, grasps it, but fails to rise to his feet before a long blade is driven into his side, as a boot stomps on the back of his neck, sending him face first in the dirt again. The blade turns, twisting into his skin, and Caduceus can’t help but howl out in pain as he feels his flesh breaking open further, severing, snapping, bleeding, and he taps his staff with his fingernails wildly. Wake up, wake up, he begs, as the blade is pulled out of him, raised, and ready to strike again. Please.
A familiar buzzing cloud rises out of the knotholes of his gnarled staff, pouring, crawling over his hands before taking flight. The blade comes down again and Caduceus screams, but his screaming is soon echoed by the figure above him—the iron sword that pierced again into his side becomes relaxed, sticking through his abdomen but with no driving pressure, the foot frantically steps off of his neck—and for the first time Caduceus is able to stand, shakily, blood pouring from his mouth and down this chin, and through his bloodied teeth he snarls and points with a crooked finger.
“Feed,” he spits, a delayed order that is already being carried out, as a swarm of iridescent beetles covers the man who had stabbed him, biting him, crawling into his ears and up his nose and bite through the soft skin of his eyelids to bury into his eyes, ripping flesh with their powerful jaws, eating him, eating him alive.
Caduceus leans on his staff, hunched over, breathing heavily, and turns to the other—a woman, he can now see, with her dark hair tied up high—who has stomped out the remaining flicks of his spell, who looks at her partner—writing in pain on the ground—and back at Caduceus with his hand clenching the sword’s blade that has run him through.
“Leave,” Caduceus wheezes, slowly, coughing up more blood, blood that spills out of the corners of his mouth. “Leave, and I won’t kill either of you.”
She takes out her bow, pulling an arrow out of her quiver—he holds a hand out as if to plead with her again to stop—but she draws back, ready to fire. With a wave of his hand her eyes go white, unseeing. She panics, fires without being able to lay eyes on her target, and misses, the tip of the arrow only grazing his cheek and cutting a few strands of cascading hair.
Caduceus sighs, and then coughs.
“Well, then.”
He points at her, whispering words, and again she is bathed in flames that are not quite flames, licking up her body and searing her flesh. She thrashes around in the grass, screaming, but the plants don’t burn with her, unaffected—and as she falls still, unmoving, the flames evaporate into the sunshine. Turning back to the man Caduceus watches as the beetles continue their relentless assault. A few of them lie dead on the ground, swatted and squished, but there are too many of them to fight off. The man who stabbed him dies a few moments later, tongue half chewed and lolled out of his open mouth, and slowly, one by one, the beetles start to fly, glistening wet with blood and saliva and slime, returning back to Caduceus and climb back into the inner depths of his staff. A few land on the very top of it, atop the large hunk of uncut amethyst embedded into the living wood. They move their tiny mouth pieces, clicking.
“I’ll be fine. Thank you for your concern,” he mutters, smiling, finally pulling the sword out of his chest and immediately placing a hand over top of the wound, focusing, whispering, as pink lichen grows furiously over the opening, growing deeper inside his body, stopping the bleeding and beginning to reform his torn flesh. As it covers his injured skin like a strange birthmark he moves to the second injury, doing the same, his already pale and gaunt face looking much less so as the lichen grows, healing.
The last of the beetles crawl back inside as Caduceus tends to the throbbing in his head, the pain in his jaw, in the same manner, placing his hands on his cheeks and whispering words—and while no lichen visibly grows the blood stops flowing out of his nose, the pain stops aching, and he breathes easier. From a distance the pink lichen on his chest—poking out from behind the tears in his shirt with its rough, varied color—looks just the same as an old scab on the body.
He goes up to the man, the woman, touching a finger to their fallen forms, and watches with a relaxed sense of joy as they decay in front of his eyes, as mold and mushrooms and flowers begin to grow, as seeds from their breakfast burst out of their stomachs as flowering, fruiting plants, roots snaking their way through their veins, wrapping around organs, and utilizing every nook and cranny of this new food source.
“Where was I?” Caduceus asks himself, aloud, forgetful, then remembering. He finds his place again, among the high grass, between the two bleeding, blooming bodies, wipes some of the still-wet blood from his chin and nose onto the back of his hand, and resumes his prayer to the Wildmother.
There is nothing more holy.
In a few days the last of the lichen flakes off his now healed skin. He is sad to see it go but he knows it will never leave him. The same lichen grows on his shoes, on the armor he keeps inside the temple, it winds around his staff—but the feeling of it on his flesh is comforting, warm, and he feels loved by his god by seeing the physical manifestation of Her work upon him. The Mother is everywhere and he’s thankful that She’s always with him. This holy place, that his family has cultivated and grown for generations, will always be a place of comfort.
The Bone Orchard—the name he has heard his home be called when he’s gone into town with his sisters—it has a certain ugliness to it, even though he knows there is nothing ugly about an orchard of bones. All trees have bones in them, the bodies of the fallen are eaten by fungi, who trade those nutrients to the trees for food, and the trees thrive due to this relationship. Every tree is an amalgam of souls and bodies, twisted, transformed, broken into something beautiful.
He puts a hand up to the largest tree in the grove and runs his fingers over the knotted, flaking bark, imagining what lies inside it, the countless people, his ancestors, animals, plants, recycled, renewed, trapped in this other living thing. When a windstorm breaks the tree in half, he sits there, for hours, counting the rings, and can see the reflection of his actions in recent history. There’s a year where his family fed a large band of graverobbers to this tree, placing their bodies where the roots could get them, and in that year, the tree swelled with size and life. And there, in the last few years, in leaner times—few visitors, little rain, less food for both of them—the growth is tiny, small.
The Bone Orchard, they sneer, but they don’t realize everyone lives among orchards fueled by bones.
The bodies of the two bandits he killed a few days ago get torn apart by vultures in his yard. He stands in the doorway of the temple, drinks his tea, and watches them scuffle, making off with organs and ripping his work apart in front of him, sending stalks flying and the heads of mushrooms tumbling across the ground. He’s not saddened by this, not at all, but he may have to rethink his plans for dinner. The vultures turn and look at him, all at once.
“Oh, don’t mind me,” he waves in their direction.
They stare some more.
“Next time, I’ll let you know when this happens again, so you can get here earlier.”
They seem placated, going back to tearing and ripping, producing horrible noises, and to Caduceus this is no different than watching sweet-singing songbirds come to a feeder for seed.
When they leave he grabs a basket he weaved himself and gathers up what remains, what is useful to him, the broken bits. One body, picked clean, has tiny mushrooms growing directly on a rib.
He sniffs them, curiously, before ripping them off, one by one, and popping them into his mouth.
The Savalierwood turns white when winter comes, blizzard after blizzard rocking through the cursed trees, icicles covering the needles of the ashen, purple pines surrounding his home. Nature, this season, will be like a fortress around him, with more and more snow piling up over the three crumbling fences and the wicked thorny vines that have taken over each of them, burying them. The blight of the forest that has loomed closer and closer over his lifespan seems to have halted—but it will only be temporary, resuming once the ice melts.
He’s never felt claustrophobic about this place but this winter sure comes close. Since his last sister left in search of a cure for the curse he’s been stranded on this inland island. He’s always has the option to leave—as foolhardy as it would be—but the high snow covering the gates and many of the billowing, overgrown, vines hidden beneath that cover would make it difficult to leave unscathed. It would be impossible to see the cross-stitched patterns of needles that lie dormant underneath. By the time he’d make his way past all three fences, his hands, for certain, would be shredded to bits. Even if he sewed his own wounds back together the smell of blood would still linger on the snow and there is an insatiable hunger in these woods.
It keeps everyone out.
It keeps him in.
His little patch of woods is warmer, still humid, and the snow melts quickly after it falls, a never-ending patch of summer, in stark contrast to everything else around it—such is the blessed nature of this place. When he walks around the perimeter, poking his head through the invisible holy barrier, the cold air immediately burns in his throat, in his lungs. He draws his head back inside for another breath and the iciness of his breath melts. He scoops a bit of fallen snow, carefully, off of the towering mound of ice and rust and thorns in front of him and sticks it into his mouth, melting on his warm tongue.
Before the last snow of the season he is attacked by a cougar who had been stalking him in the trees for days. He knew he was being watched but continued his daily routine as if nothing had changed. Caduceus was more than ready to fight when he could feel it stalking up behind him as he tilled the soil in preparation of spring. The battle was over quickly, swiftly, leaving him with a few claw marks across his arms and the giant body of a lifeless cat.
He ponders over what to do with it.
On the equinox of the season it is only appropriate that he walks between the planes for enlightenment, for guidance. He asks the trees to send a message for him and drags the cougar’s corpse into the open, using a knife to split open the belly and let the insides pour out onto the ground. Inside his home he grabs a jar and pulls out a handful of semi-dried mushrooms, colorful and spotted, and returns outside, preparing a spot to lie down about twenty feet from the body, pocketing the mushrooms while doing so. It isn’t long after he finishes his preparations that a halo of vultures appears overhead, descending like angels.
“Welcome,” Caduceus says, with arms outstretched. “I bring lunch. In return, can you watch over me for a while? It would be much appreciated.”
They grunt with a low woofing sound, bobbing their heads asynchronously at him, hunger bubbling at the smell of blood.
“You’re wonderful,” he says to all of them, smiling, gesturing at them and then at the carcass before stepping aside.
He sits down on the ground, resting an arm on a bent knee, and pulls out the mushrooms out of his pocket, throwing them all into his mouth and chewing slowly, watching the vultures step past him, their gait chicken-like, rushing to tear into the still warm organs of the giant cat. It takes a while to set in, to feel his vision swirl, to feel time slow down, for sounds of ripping flesh and demonic hissing from the vultures to sound like a cacophony of strings and flutes. Specks of life, spirits on the other planes blink into his peripheral, and he lies down on his back, arms folded on his stomach as the drugs take full effect, and like a rush of blood to the head it seems to hit him all at once.
In the late spring another death comes to him, a body, wrapped in a shroud, and he works all day preparing the gravesite, digging into the wet, moist soil. He can’t help but stoop down and smell the earth, feeling the tangle of roots weaving around his fingers. He chats with an older woman, elvish, her hair woven into a tight braid around her head—a face Caduceus remembers as she had brought another family member here within his lifetime. While the rest of her family avoids him, staying near their horses and talking in low voices, she stays by his side.
“Caduceus Clay, I’m glad to see you are doing well,” she said when she first arrived. “You were just a small boy when we first met and you’ve grown so very tall.”
And that was true. He remembers meeting her over sixty years ago, when she towered over him and ruffled his short hair, when he was impressionable and young. And now he towers over her, lithe like a willow but still imposing in stature. She sits on a chair he drags out from inside his home so that she is comfortable, knitting black yarn with long silver needles rapidly, from centuries of muscle memory.
“Is your mother around?”
“No, unfortunately,” his voice is as slow as his work, languid, delayed. “But Mother is with me, I hear Her words often.”
“How pleasant, blessed you are to hear Her calling.” The knitting needles click and clack on. “What about your sister, the one who I spoke to at length last time I was here?”
“She left a couple dozen seasons ago. She was the last one to leave.”
“So you’re alone?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say alone, but visitors are few, especially as the curse creeps closer.”
“So I’ve noticed, boy.”
“My family has tried lots of things, and we’ve delayed it. But it is not stopping.”
“A shame. Have you heard from any of them at all?”
“No, not anyone.”
“And you’re not bothered by the silence?”
“Mother tells me I must stay here for now, and She knows best.”
“As She does.”
She tells him it is nice to talk openly with someone so young who shares her faith—many younger members of her family have distanced themselves from the Mother, found guidance from other gods, and she’s glad that Caduceus has remained steadfast in his piety. He echoes the same sentiment, but really, he’d welcome any conversation at this point, and he stumbles over his words, almost rambling at times, without filter, but she just smiles at him and nods.
She’s curious as to the last time he’s been into town, when he’s made the long journey to Shadycreek Run, and he honestly can’t remember. She describes it as vile, filthy, but he has no context for any place other than the woods, the shambled town, and his home. And, he adds, visits to Shadycreek were short, to the point, his brother grasping his hand and leading him through the crowds when Caduceus got distracted by fights breaking out in the streets or was interested in the moss growing on the crumbling walls. They were there, disguised, got the things they needed, and then left, but he always enjoyed seeing all sorts of people walking through the streets, fascinated by the whole spectrum of race and age and genders and variations that people can be.
Caduceus buries the body in the loose soil and he gives the entire family time to reflect together over the fresh grave while he sits inside, grinding up flowers in a giant mortar and pestle, pouring them into a small jar so the elvish woman can take some with her with she leaves. “I’ve never had a better cup of tea,” she tells him, “than the one I shared with your mother when you were a child, when I was burying my own child.”
He invites them to stay the night, but they decline. He warns them the forest can be dangerous, but they are on a timeline to get back home. So he prays for their safety and asks the woods if they would be so kind to let them through unharmed. There’s no response, there never is, and he hopes he’s done enough. The crickets chirp, cicadas buzz, and frogs bellow in a noisy symphony he watches the cart roll away.
“And consider eating more, my son,” said the woman before she left, him stooping down to meet her tiny, beady eyes buried deep behind clumps of wrinkles. “You’re awfully skinny.”
He retires to his home where ivy climbs up the stonework, moss spreads across the door, and in the broken frame of the window high above his head—where panels of stained glass glittered once—vines wrap around the iron frame, their flowers closing for the night.
It is a small, dilapidated, decaying temple, but it is still his cathedral.
His last name is fitting—as all beings are made out of clay, molded and sculpted and then smashed into a messy brown lump with an angry fist. Then molded, carved again from an amorphous body, and then broken down again. The creator of all things is a frustrated artist who can’t seem to get anything to work, the lines they shape are never perfect and they’ll work so hard, for decades, and maybe a few of their creations they make are worthy to sit on the shelf for a while. But the clay eventually dries, cracking, flaking, and one day it either crumbles under its own weight or with anger, the work flung off the shelf by its maker and shattering into millions of pieces. The dust, the shards, are grinded, wetted, combined in a primordial cauldron, stirred, and then handfuls of wet clay are again taken out, set on the wheel, and spun. No matter what the creator does, it will never be enough, they’ll never be satisfied, and will recycle, recycle, and try again, never to get it right.
Caduceus is still young, glistening wet and hardly hardened, his bones still spry and they rarely ache, but he knows as he ages his joints will begin to lock up, he won’t be able to move his fingers like he used to, his staff will become a cane, and his face will wrinkle in the shape of his smile lines. He will harden, baked in the sun, and then shatter, and he welcomes the day that he’ll yet again become color on a palette, ready to be painted upon a new canvas, even though he enjoys the work of art he is currently.
He is tending to the graves. He is a constant, good gardener.
That will never change, even when he finally leaves this place, after many, many moons.