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All his life he relied on his prodigious mental acuity, his minuscule and vast gardens of neurons he tended industriously, and with no small amount of pride. His brain had always been there for him — his safety net — no passing detail escaped the web of it, and even now, his senses widened to capture everything and file it away: the lightness of his limbs, the chill jaggedness of the magic-charged air, the pressure in his heart which was at first gentle and then fist-tight as Butler and Holly’s faces turned pale, and then emerald with the light emanating from his left eye.
Ah, he thought. So this is what it feels like.
Like someone was ungloving his hands. Like he was being hefted out of his heels. Like someone had jabbed a needle into the back of his skull and was blowing out the contents, like he was spilling upward. His uprooted gardens were withering. In the moments that he realized were going to be his last, he used the remainder of his meager strength to keep his hard-won knowledge and hard-defended memories — and instead found himself succumbing somewhat helplessly to tired cliché as he scrabbled and fought and managed only to witness his life flashing before his eyes, scene by scene. The shadow of his father’s back, the empty Fowl Manor, the Fairy Bible in the creases of his hand, the crispness of a new suit, his mother holding him tightly, the rumble of Butler’s voice, a communicator blip, the blue of magic, snow, the bite of, saltwater, lashing against, sparkling, running, falling, reading, moon, light hazel runes spit grass citrus so many too many so many things and
then,
abruptly,
nothing.
:::
He woke up — though applying this verb to what happened to him felt tenuous at best, given the lack of body with which to wake into, or with. All that seemed available to him was some form of disembodied awareness, which felt like a kind of cruel joke. So much of his life allocated to his favorite hobby, thinking, and now, suddenly, there was nothing else to do.
Then again, could this really qualify as thought? Thinking necessitated a brain and its cooperative (if occasionally flawed) regions. Reptilian: the region perhaps to thank for how he thrashed himself out of the encompassing murk and buried himself back into the earth, gasping even without lungs, as stubborn as a dwarf. Limbic: the emotional region that recognized his thrashing as hopeful, and desperate. And finally, his historically favored region, the rational, which would be the one telling him All of this is nonsense and not real, Artemis, if he still had it.
Stop thinking with your mind, Artemis. Think with your heart.
Physically impossible advice from a physically impossible voice whose very physically impossible echoing through his consciousness he didn’t have the capacity to understand. Something beyond his ken: magic. Or maybe, since magic was generally as predictable as quantum physics given you knew all the rules, something beyond even that.
He’d never been the kind to shy from complexity, but it was exhausting thinking of all this. He felt himself drooping. He would give a lot of things right now for something to be…understandable. Basic.
When I get a body again, he thought, I’m not taking it for granted. He could sense that his mind, even as a disembodied entity of some kind, was getting him, as Dr. J. Argon so aptly put it, “stressed out.” Exercise was good for stress. He would do that. Really. The mundanity of lifting the same weight up and putting it down over and over seemed very appealing right now. And he’d do the whole heart listening thing too.
But for now — none of that, and no safety net either. Just a ragged, twisted strip of earth that his thoughts (or whatever they were) paced, glacial. Each day melted his resolve a little further. He mused on recent events and realized, uneasily, that they were getting harder and harder to recall. His memories sloughed off and sank, colorless and tasteless, into the center of the earth; but the worst part was that by the time they left him, he no longer recognized them enough to mourn them.
He was fading. He was too tired to even feel any emotion about it. Was this what the Berserkers felt, in their centuries between worlds? Nothing but relentless, consuming loss. At least they had that spell to seal their spirits in place, a reason to re-exist. And they had each other. He had...
He only had...
Who was he again?
:::
“Arty,” called a voice, and in the ringing silence even this whisper was jarring; his consciousness flared in response, burst like a swimmer seeking oxygen.
I’m Arty, he remembered. Artemis Fowl II. Juvenile genius. Ex-criminal mastermind. And that — is —
“Holly,” he gasped. He whirled, somehow. Holly was there, at the perimeter of the spiral — No, he corrected, the rune. Bruin Fadda’s rune, as strong as wine, steeped into the earth and grown more potent in time, a fine an anchor as any for a lost soul. Magic, not so predictable after all.
He was sure he had just seen Holly, on her knees, staring blankly at the (he grimaced) corpses littering the Berserker’s Gate — but now she was standing, and her expression was sunken, and she held a white flower, and she was dressed head to toe in black.
Oh, Artemis thought. He looked up to where he thought might be the direction of Fowl Manor, and, more specifically, the Fowl family cemetery — but beyond the spiral, he saw nothing. Even here, at the rune’s edge, Holly’s form wavered. He might have thought her a distorted memory if it weren’t for the fact he was sure he had never seen her expression like this: her face dark, her mismatched eyes red. It was a while before she spoke again; when she did, her eyes were glassy.
“I gave Foaly your message,” she said. “He jammed me under an electron microscope. Turns out those things aren’t actually meant to examine a whole skull. Didn’t think of that, did you?”
She sniffed. Her voice was sardonic, but she was smiling, faintly.
“You know, when Foaly told me what you actually meant I started to sweat, just out of stress. He stuffed me into a fridge while he fiddled with the microscope, so I wouldn’t lose anything. Didn’t think of that, did you? The great Artemis Fowl II, thwarted by a little bit of anxiety.”
Her voice, though soft, had a curious stabilizing effect. Artemis inhaled as he felt himself centering, strengthening. As he felt…himself.
Yes. He remembered.
“Foaly doesn’t like to eat near his precious keyboard,” Artemis told her, just in case she could hear him. “Which means he likes to keep an eating area which is separate but nearby. And he always brags about the raw lunches Caballine makes for him, and when I browsed his project files I didn’t see anything to indicate the existence of some kind of a self-chilling lunchbox, so I figured there would be some kind of refrigerator.
“Additionally,” Artemis continued, “you’re the great Holly Short. Sweating for something this? After going up against not only my tyrannical child self, but multiple Opal Kobois? Unlikely.”
Holly was quiet.
“I don’t think the sweat was actually a problem,” she confessed. “I just felt very conscious of it after that. Still. I had to lay on wheatgrass and fruit salad for almost an hour.” She snorted. “Foaly didn’t want to waste Caballine’s cooking. He didn’t even adjust the microscope that much. The fit was pretty tight. Or maybe that was his revenge for my crushing the grapes.”
Her voice was too low for someone who believed they were speaking to someone who could hear them. That was fine. Just seeing her warmed him, just seeing her made him remember. If he had a brain, the neurons would be lighting up again. Yes, he knew all this.
With every word she dropped another seed, and he caught and held them, greedily: Foaly, Caballine, microscopes, fridges. Everything he knew had been uprooted, but he could grow it again, starting from here: Holly’s soft narration of the funeral, which she and the others secretly attended, at a distance from its human attendees. His silent parents and the Twins. Mulch’s shedding of a few dwarf tears, a secretion Artemis suspected was even more precious than Mulch’s others and therefore closely guarded. Butler’s heavy absence. So much pain, because of him. Artemis swallowed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. A useless statement from him, for more reasons than the obvious.
“Everyone is so sad,” she continued softly. She fiddled with the white flower, which he remembered now was called a rose. Traditional. “I couldn’t really...well, I’m glad I didn’t have to attend it from a monitor underground, but it turns out I can only bear something like this for so long anyway.” She made a sigh that juddered in her throat; she swiped sharply at her hazel eye. “Everyone always says a body looks like they’re just asleep, but I couldn’t see it. I just couldn’t sense anything like you up there at all. But...but I can...sort of...”
Holly swallowed. Artemis straightened.
“I sort of feel like...you’re here.”
“I am here,” Artemis said, before he realized it. He paused, and then tried again, louder: “Holly, I’m here.”
He had no vocal chords to vibrate the air — but — maybe the rune could convert his sentiment into something else, some a soft wind to brush her fringe from her face. To his surprise, a wind did blow. Holly shivered a bit before her uniform adjusted to the temperature.
If she found this breeze more than coincidental, she didn’t show it. As Artemis observed her, another memory sprouted inside him, a strong thing with its roots twisted around a left rib: a plane, a desperation, a moment he wanted to file for safekeeping even as he recognized how many moments like it he had already squandered. Holly, beautiful and fierce when she piloted herself and him along the edge of life and death. But she was even more beautiful doing something Artemis was even less capable of then physical activity: speaking honestly, clearly, wholly, from her heart.
“I miss you, Arty,” she told him. “Topside isn’t the same without you on it causing trouble.” Her eyes were filling again. “We’re doing our best, but there must have been a reason you weren’t clear about this part of your plan, and I can only guess that it’s because it might not work. So...I know that I should...prepare for the worst. Foaly won’t even tell me what he thinks the chances are. But he…I don’t know…he keeps making all these adjustments.”
“Foaly said that?” Artemis said. Something stabbed him then, a small but sharply thrashing little worm of fear.
No, he told himself sharply. Foaly can do this.
But — if he can’t? The only foolproof parts of Artemis’s plans were the bits he was able to execute on his own; everything else was assumption, and trust. Grains of uncertainty that could ruin everything.
If he can’t...then am I going to be here forever? Slowly fading away all by myself?
“Well…” Holly sucked in a hard breath. She knelt, and set the rose in the center of the spiral. “That’s it, I guess. I just wanted to say hello.”
His tongue loosened with horror. “Holly —“
“And thank you.”
“Holly, wait, Holly —“
“And...and goodbye.”
“Not yet,” Artemis gasped, and before he realized it he was saying, “wait, Holly, it’s dark here, it’s hard for me to remember, I don’t have my mind, there’s no one else here, Holly, please just — for a little longer so I can think —“
But she was already turning. Wind blustered at her hair, uselessly. He raced after her, but the moment he crossed past the rune he —
:::
...what was he...?
:::
“Arty,” called a voice, and the voice was a glimmering ripple in dark, deep water — a sign of which way was up. He realized he was submerged — he realized — he was — and with a flare, a gasp, a burning, he burst through, and out. Like a swimmer seeking oxygen.
He was in the spiral again.
I’m Arty, he remembered. That’s me. I’m...Artemis.
He waited for the rest to come, and when it didn’t, he decided it didn’t matter, because the one who spoke was —
...was...
“Holly,” he gasped, “Holly, Holly, Holly, Holly Short, Holly who I abducted, Holly who hated me, Holly who saved my life, Holly my best friend,” yes, there she was, not in black any longer, and with her hair longer than his last memory, which he could find but couldn’t place. He glanced down and saw a brown, desiccated husk that had once been a white rose. How much time had passed? Since...since last time?
“Hi, Arty,” Holly said, smiling in his direction. She had another rose, a fresh one, and this she arranged on the earth, right on top of the last. “Just thought I’d visit again, give you an update. Things are changing fast up here.”
She told him: the sightings, the newly-made farm and garden patchwork of the Fowl Estate, his family, the handful of fine lace in the chrysalis that Foaly was calling nerve endings.
“It’s all good progress,” Holly concluded. “Not as fast as if it were you at the helm, probably. But I think you’d be happy anyway. I still don’t really get how all this might work, really. It just seems so beyond...science...even magic.”
She paused. She nibbled her lip.
“Actually,” she admitted, “Foaly says that even if you somehow come back, you might not even remember anything. Something about how memories are defined by a container — em, no, a vessel — and without one they just eventually…dissipate. I don’t really get it but I guess that’s how it goes with the mesmer — you bury memories behind other things, or you sort of weave something new from someone’s existing experiences. But even if you get a new body…I mean, where are you even at now? How can we…put you back into it?”
Artemis was silent. How can they put him into it was not as pressing an issue to him as How can I last until then? Even in — he grimaced, a little — death, he steadied himself in facts. All this blacking out and the stressful certainty he was losing things he couldn’t even remember was not boding well for a future where he could be flawlessly resurrected. At worst, he would wake up unrecognizable. Or a criminal mastermind, again.
In any case, he was dissipating. Fading away into the ether by some principle common to both science and magic. Memories wanted the reactivation of neurons, or, apparently, just, “a vessel.”
But at that he felt a distant spark. In normal circumstances such a spark would illuminate some grand and extremely on-brand Fowl idea in five to ten seconds flat. But right now —
“I guess I’ll worry about that when we get to it,” Holly sighed, and before the idea could reach him, before he could even attempt a protest, she had taken a breath, and started away, and he —
:::
…he —?
:::
...I have to stay.
This was important. This was an important thought, and once it occurred to him he lunged, and clutched it, used it to tether him here, far away from the beckoning light behind him. No wonder ghosts of yore tended toward moaning, repetitive single-mindedness; it was hard to manage anything else. If he had a body, it would be shaking worse than it did after two and a half minutes of Butler’s personalized workouts. It was becoming increasingly challenging to hold on to more than one notion at once, much less the many millions he once had the privilege of enjoying.
I have to stay, he thought, until Holly comes back, which she definitely would, this the second thought he held with complete certainty, this idea that she would return to him, and it was only when she finally did that he remembered the reason for his conviction: the way she said “Hello, Arty,” was exactly the same way she had said “Hello, Nopal.” Eternities ago, when she led him to the clone for the first time, and he understood why a chair had suddenly appeared and stayed in the security feeds of Nopal’s room.
“She’s alive,” she’d told him, stubbornly, “I know it,” and her heart was as soft as she was strong, so of course she would visit the imaginary wisp of him, as surely as she visited Nopal’s perpetually dozing body. He always did wonder what it was Holly spoke about during those long one-sided visits, and maybe it was just like this: idle reports, memories, musings. Topics that their tumultuous lifestyle had never been calm enough to let them linger on, like how she wanted to decorate her new apartment (finally salvaged from the collapse of Haven), or some new toy Foaly asked her to guinea pig, or what she wanted to make for dinner with whatever she picked from Fowl Farms that day. Sometimes she sang, and sometimes she said nothing, and sometimes she tried to say something, and couldn’t manage it, and instead spent the time silently staring out over the estate without really seeing at it. Sometimes (Artemis frowned to realize he had never asked her about this before) she even spoke of her mother, who was named after a color and who Holly even today missed terribly.
The white roses piled.
“She would have loved being able to visit the surface so much,” Holly said, smiling as she sat down and drew her knees to her chest. “Not that I’m, em, officially endorsing so many fairies sneaking up topside nowadays. But it’s nice to be able to get out a little more.”
“You’re getting out more than just a little,” Artemis said. She was developing freckles across her shoulders and the bridge of her nose, which even indicated not only some reasonable sun exposure, but sun exposure outside of a LEP uniform.
That’s what he liked about her, he remembered. Her moral compass was steadfast, but more attuned to her heart than to any arbitrary protocol. She was good, at the “listening to your heart” thing.
“And the freckles suit you too,” he added.
“I mean, it’s not great that there are more and more fairies up here,” Holly said, sitting and drawing her knees to her chest. “From an LEP perspective, anyway. But...we just have bigger problems. And nothing beats fruits ripened in the actual sun. Fowl Farms has some good strawberries.” She laid one out, beside today’s white rose: a fruit that looked almost as large as a heart, and was a stunning red. Hesitantly, Artemis reached for it, and found to his surprise that he could touch it. Doing so caused a sweetness to bloom in his consciousness. He closed his eyes, suddenly achy. Holly’s visits were the only thing sustaining him through his death, and in return for all her time and care she received nothing but silence. He couldn’t do a thing.
...couldn’t you?
“It’s probably because of all the old magic around here,” Holly mused, “that all the plants take easy,” and at that he felt that distant, nostalgic spark again. In normal circumstances such a spark would illuminate some grand and extremely on-brand Fowl idea in five to ten seconds flat. But in these circumstances...
...it took an embarrassingly long minute and a half, to attempt what he should have done at the beginning, or at the very least after he had shouted at Holly earlier and been rewarded with a coincidental wind. He closed his eyes, and redirected his energy into the magic-rich earth, and as Holly combed through the grass he tried it, tried to manipulate magic as he had attempted long ago, right beneath her fingers. He thought of her, her warm voice speaking of her mother, he focused on a visual, and willed it —
The effort was — not insignificant. An instant later he shuddered, and stumbled, and fought for air, even as he scoffed at himself. All he was right now (presumably) was an (unraveling) essence of Artemis Fowl II as preserved by magic — if he was going to use magic to do something, of course it was going to take some him out of him.
The drained weakness, at least, indicated that something had happened, but still he waited, holding his breath as Holly’s fingers stroked the ground absently. Just as it seemed it was all for naught, her hand paused. She blinked, and looked down. Something was poking her. Her brows furrowed.
“Grow,” she murmured, and the little twig that nudged her trembled, and writhed, and lifted. Blue sparks outlined the unfurling of jagged leaves, and hooked thorns, and a tiny, tiny bud. Holly rearranged herself, knelt, and cradled it gently in her palms, feeding it more blue sparks, until the bud yawned open. Its petals stretched and unfurled under her attention, shyly. They were a mysterious color, vivid. Coral.
Holly smiled. “A rose.” She stroked the petals gently with her thumb, coaxed them just a little further into fullness, and then pressed her freckled nose in the center of them, and inhaled gently. Under such careful ministration the rose’s color deepened, as if blushing.
“If that’s you, Arty,” Holly said, “thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Artemis murmured. He was glad he wasn’t corporeal; if he was, he was sure that he would be flushing, and that Holly would be teasing him about it, even though it most certainly wasn't at all that he was embarrassed in any measure. If anything, he was just exhausted. And ashamed it took him so long. And hopeful.
Because it wasn’t just a rose. And to him, by its other name, it smelled even sweeter.
Vessel.
Holly spoken to him once about...something. As Holly pressed her face into the rose for another smell, Artemis reached. Making contact with the rose caused a sweetness to bloom in his consciousness, and he remembered: Holly’s voice, speaking of her mother. As soon as he removed his hand, it left him — but when he touched it again, there —
Her head tipped to the sunlight, peaceful. Her body relaxed, leaning back on her strong arms, propping herself up, relaxing in the warmth. Her fingers coiled in the grass, which in the wind emitted a susurrus like a purr. Her expression was peaceful as she told him her mother’s name.
“Since Fowl Farms is open now, I’ll need to go and tell Butler and Juliet to make sure no one plucks this,” Holly said, standing and dusting herself off, and for the first time that he could remember in his non-existence, Artemis didn’t dread the sight of her retreat.
“Please,” he said. “Do.”
:::
It had been a major leap for his personal character to go from accumulating wealth for personal reasons, to distributing it into funds and investments that weren’t likely to yield returns of a monetary nature. It was difficult to turn his back on Aurum Est Potestas, but possible, because ultimately, gold was not his most precious commodity.
On the other hand, to purposefully release his memory, even if it was for safekeeping...well. A rose, even armed with thorns, wasn’t exactly the same as a Swiss bank.
Then again, I have broken into a Swiss bank before, Artemis mused. And not yet a rose. So.
So, his moaning and haunting of the spiral rune was over, and replaced with something more familiar to him: meditation. Not for assembling plans, this time, but for assembling himself. He breathed steadily, felt his inhales and exhales in the sway of the clover and gorse, and in the center of the rune he gathered and grasped his slippery thoughts, carefully, like catching fish in paper netting. One they stilled in his palm, he rolled them tight, and tighter, until he could plant them into the earth, where they could take easy, where they rose on their own even without Holly’s assistance, much to her delight. Every time she returned there were more and more of them, growing to her height, undulating after her.
He wasted no effort on the flutter of physics, or computing, or chemistry, or whatever else remained of the assortment of knowledge he still was conscious of — if he had learned it before, he could learn it again. The truly precious and irreplaceable was —
Butler — serving pancakes the morning after Father left. Artemis hadn’t even known Butler could cook, or do anything besides be Artemis’s second shadow, albeit a larger version with significantly more mass. Butler nodded, beckoning him forward, and slid a plate before him laden with caster sugar and finished with a squeeze of lemon.
“Do you like these?” he asked. It was the first thing Butler had asked him that didn’t seem immediately relevant to his physical safety. Cautiously, Artemis maneuvered a knife to make a small bite, and ate it. The pancake itself was pleasantly chewy, and the sweetness and acid of its decoration were enlivening.
“Yes,” he decided, “it’s my favorite breakfast food,” and Butler smiled at him warmly.
“Help yourself, then.”
Artemis blinked, rapidly, and made himself relive all the rest, a frenetic film. Butler, hefting him over his shoulder. Shoving himself between Artemis and booming flashes of light. Butler, bleeding all over Artemis’s arms — aging a decade at once — watching as the Berserker’s Gate began to flash —
The roses yielded by these were stocky in nature, strong, with thorns so thin and sharp they covered the stems like a fur of razor-sharp needles. Despite their breadth and heft they rose tall over the others: the roses with frilled edges that swathed his mother’s hugs and delighted laughter when he called her Mum; the broad-leafed roses heavy with his father’s whispered advice and high, excited hopes and plans for the future; the double roses that bobbed with the Twins’ wrestling on him; even the elaborate twining roses that carried his memory of trading joke images with Foaly, which occurred solely via surreptitious injections into each other’s extensive servers (“That is NOT the proper usage of this meme,” Foaly wrote, aghast, exactly as Artemis intended).
There was only so much room in the spiraled rune, but he filled almost every centimeter of it, until it was lush and fragrant, brimming with life, his life, and Artemis himself felt like barely a wisp of smoke in the wind. He had become a bare, drifting, lighter-than-air spider’s thread version of Artemis Fowl; if he was going to use magic to do something, of course it was going to take some him out of him. There was a joke in here somewhere, which Foaly might appreciate. Something about converting a ghost into a flower. Something about losing information in the compression, which was something Artemis realized he wasn’t actually in the mood to joke about.
There was just one last thing he needed to let go.
Maybe you don’t need to, came a quiet voice. It was familiar, in its own way — plaintive — a voice that had never learned to separate childhood fairytales from real ones, where people could end up slowly withering away on a dirt spiral. A voice he hadn’t heard for a while, and which he indulged now by acknowledging.
I thought you were gone. Didn’t I exorcise you? With therapy?
No. Not completely. A pout. You just never listen to me.
A pause.
Just keep these ones, the voice begged. They’re my favorite.
Artemis flickered with hesitation.
I know, he thought, firmly. That’s why I won’t risk losing them.
But still he hovered, waited, until she came back, one last time. Reliving his memories for extraction had been intensely private. But this part…this last part…
Softly. I don’t want to do it alone.
Even more softly. I know.
It…might be alright, this time, to have Holly beside him. It wasn’t like before, when someone accompanying him would have to carry the burden of the plan’s potential for failure. She would never know.
She would return, as he knew she would; she would come to the spiral rune’s center, the space he had reserved, where there were only a pile of dried white roses surrounded by his own. She would sit — “Hi, Arty” — she’d have more news, and more freckles, and maybe another update on some experiment from Foaly, something that sounded so substantially off-base that he wouldn’t be able to tell whether Holly genuinely misunderstood something or if Foaly, understanding Holly’s bleeding-heart vices as well as Artemis, was simply sending him another strange kind of meme. Maybe it would be a day when she’d bring a basket of fruit plucked from the so-called Fowl Farms beyond his perception; maybe she would eat them around her out-loud musings, and maybe he too would reach for them too, silently, with what remained of his strength, in parody. He would think, again, When I get a body again, I’m not taking it for granted.
Eventually, she would brush herself off — “Bye for now, Arty. Until next time” — and even if she couldn’t hear him he would answer, “Goodbye, Holly. Yes, next time.” For once it was as close to the truth as he could hope for, and she wouldn’t hear it.
Then — he would do it before she turned away. One last inhale, followed by one last long exhale. Her mismatched eyes would widen when the ground burst awake with the last thing left he cherished. New memories: the sunlit afternoons she kept him company with musing, or else comfortable silence. And, of course, the old: his worst mistakes, and his worst twists, his sharpest fragments, and how she fought and shot and shoved and healed and came back again and again, to snap him back into himself. Right before he made them, he would see these roses in whatever passed now for his mind’s eye — more vibrant than the others, and with a particular scent, and the tenacity to hold its petals even in a storm, even as they were soft enough to cushion him as he would begin to succumb, helplessly.
He would be ready this time, for what it would feel like.
Like he hadn’t slept in months. Like he finally, truly, actually, had no legs to stand on. Like someone had jabbed a needle into the gossamer balloon of a person he’d become, like he was deflating, melting, sinking with the roses rising up all around him, bobbing, peering, encompassing. In the moments that were going to be, again, his last, he closed his eyes, and let himself rest as his dreams began to color. The flitter of wings, the hum of a wild engine wrangled obediently into the firmament, the thrum of a lemur against his chest, the throbbing glow of magma, a breathless face flushed blue with magic, snow, the bite of, saltwater, lashing against, sparkling, running, falling, reading, moon, light hazel runes spit grass citrus her hand cradling a new rose close to her face with some measure of awe and…
then…
abruptly…
nothing.
:::
And maybe, when he woke up, she would still be there.