Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They aren't really lilies.

Firstly, they're something altogether more like lily of the valley, Maiglöcken, muguets. They're only lilies in Common, don't share many characteristics really. Lilies are larger, forming something closer to a star shape. What he sees everywhere he turns now are thin stalks with more, smaller flowers, petals curling in to form a shape almost like when the wind catches a skirt just right on the washing line.

Secondly, they're stained with petals of a blue that speaks to something magical, something ancient and powerful.

He knows the stories about their significance; he grew up here, once upon a time when the corruption had been far enough not to worry children about and there had still been people here to raise him. Tended to the earth with small hands. Made tea for mourners who called him an old soul, a comment he feels more and more in his chest.

He knows the stories, and the risks, and that his family are coming back, so he turns away from the flowers and walks back into the empty house. Has what's left of the stew he made too much of a few days ago and tries to mend Colton's favourite mug from where he’d smashed it when dad and Calliope left. He's still trying to fix it when the sun goes down. Every time he thinks he's fixed it, it leaks from somewhere else.

A long time ago, the Mother had been forced away from them. She had been forced away, but she lived on in a voice upon the wind, the dawn chorus, growth and life and what was left behind after the Matron came. So now it was their duty, to tend to the birth and the life and the decay.

People still come by the Grove, regardless of the woods, regardless of the ugly fences. He buries the fourth generation of Ressex in their plot, and appreciates the sprout of tulips, even if they don't seem as vibrant, this season. Prunes trees and makes sure the birds have somewhere to nest now they have nowhere else to go.

Harvests brown wrinkled fruit from the tree above the Samel family, more than he can eat at once, maybe more than he can eat at all. He collects them in a pan, and pulls out the sheet of paper his mum had transcribed the recipe onto. The handwriting is painstaking but scribbly in the way it always was, which stirs something in his gut. Fries them with chopped -chopped onion and a few spoonfuls of the little pot of spice mix from the top left cupboard and adds water to make the soft fruit into almost-jam.

He sits outside on the low stone wall around the chapel, and eats it on slices of bread as the sun comes up. It gets included in his morning prayers now, another offering to the Mother. He sits on his wall with his breakfast, staff lent up beside him. Looks out over the land of which he's been left keeper.

That ritual lasts quite a while. Seasons pass, as he sits, tail and feet dangling in the snow and the sun and the leaf litter. He misses one day, and then he's ill for a week and by that time the spiced fruit has run out so it's not quite the same. He thinks the Mother thinks so too, if the loss of enjoyment of it is anything to go by.

In any case, it's not like there's many mourners he misses by being inside at sunrise in a dying woods.

Drying herbs has been his job for as long as he can remember. His mum told him it was because, when he was very little, he’d been the one who could sit still and do a monotonous task like that. He’d said it wasn’t monotonous, because it was useful. His mum had smiled and gone back to ensuring Colton knew the proper ways to record the dead.

The proper way to record the dead doesn’t just involve graves, because they can be destroyed, eroded by nature. All things die. So the Blooming Grove has a book, faded, thinned pages recording what the people buried here did, who they were. And stronger still, it has a memory - years of tending to the graves also ensures someone remembers these people.

He cuts the herbs at the stems with the same knife his mum gave him when he’d first done this, leaves the roots to regrow. Bundles them up with string and hangs them up to dry in the chapel.

They aren’t getting used up as fast, now he’s only making meals for one person, so he sends mourners away with arms full of rosemary and bay. Hopes that that can be another little thing he does for the Mother. That maybe she will speak to him, soon.

He'd given up on fixing Colton's mug quite a while ago when he drops his dad's onto the stone floor of the kitchen. He isn't doing anything particularly hazardous with it, just using it to measure out the flour for a batch of bread rolls, when he knocks it off of the worktop. It's all perfectly normal. Everyone drops things.

He could've sworn, though, that his dad's was yellow. His memory has been playing tricks on him lately. Pale cream ceramic shards lie on the floor. He picks them up to try and fix them, separates out the larger pieces and sweeps up the flour and tiny shards intermingled.

He has to measure the flour into one of the blue cups mainly saved for visitors, which doesn't give him quite the right amount and makes the bread rolls heavy and oddly pale.

The grounds are maybe too much, for one person alone, but Caduceus is the one who stayed for a reason. He wakes with the sun and maintains the Grove. He doesn’t do much else. He didn’t even beforehand. Sometimes he makes fancier teas.

He encourages the things that grow on the graves, and makes sure the names can still be read. Doesn’t look at the lilies. Buries bodies, comforts families. Prays to the Mother, feels the wind across his face in recognition. Ignores the way blue flowers creep into the edges of his vision. Washes sheets and dusts and keeps interesting bugs and mends all the clothes they hadn’t had time to, for when his family comes home. Because they will. Soon. He will not be alone here for long.

The first time lilies make their way into his dreams is one of the stretches of time where he is angry. Bitter. He doesn't feel like himself, when he is angry, and he is aware that he never seems it outwardly, which really worsens the whole thing. So he goes to bed bitter that everyone has left, that the Mother does not speak to him, with nothing to take it out on but himself, because nobody is here . He goes to bed, and stares at the ceiling until his eyes blur.

He must fall asleep somewhere in the night, but he isn't aware of the sensation. He awakes feeling odd, floaty, the sunrise painting his room a somewhat non-committal orange. The ache of his ribcage has gone away with sleep, which is nice, and he rises from his bed less reluctantly than he’d thought he would, given how late he was awake.

He is aware of the fact he is dreaming when his bedroom door isn’t a door. He steps towards where it should be, because there is something roiling in its place. Hungry. Fluid, stopping and skipping like time. He goes to take a step back from this thing, but there’s something behind him that trips him; a flower sprouting from between his floorboard. He falls back, but instead of hitting the floor he goes through what isn’t his door.

He is running. The walls around him are flesh and spasming muscle, narrow although he knows they are cavernous, twisting in the wrong direction at every corner although he does not know what the right direction is. He doesn’t know if he is running for something or from something, just that his legs are burning. His lungs are screaming, as the air that fills his lungs is not choked by familiar corpse-scent but by cloying lily. The pathway crashes down on him in a flood of water, deeper than any he has ever been in, and then he isn’t running anymore. He is drowning in an endless expanse, weightless, unable to determine up or down in the darkness and the sting of opening his eyes.

Maybe he should’ve let Colton teach him how to swim properly, rather than the way the rest of them all swam; able but not strong, not fast. He’s swimming in a direction he isn’t even sure is to the surface, clumsily, childlike. Choking on salt water that settles floral in his lungs. For a moment, his skin is green and bleeding from salt-stung wounds, his heart is bleeding from confused anger and betrayal.

Then he is laid on his back in a garden, not his own, the lapping of an unfamiliar body of water close and something that isn’t grass beneath him.

Shaking arms - why does he feel older, adrenaline shaken? - push him to a semblance of upright, and he can see the lake, cutting into the jungle that surrounds wherever here is. The water is clear, urgent. The sand is deep red, and coats his hands as they touch the carpet of vegetation.

The carpet of lilies. Stretching into the jungle and almost to the shoreline of the lake is thick with the things. And above them dance figures.

They move stiffly, like the puppets he’d seen one of the few times he’d been into town, rotating only at the joints. Some of them look dented, missing parts that green glass fills in; cracks across the waist, holes in the head, missing hand, fragments glued together with glass. It blends with the flesh and glows, hums with promise of change.

Round and around they go, some kind of spinning dance like his mum and dad had done a few times, slow and late at night.

And there goes his mum, locked in the dance with Corran. He tries to reach for her, but where his hands had been left on the ground, flowers have grown over them, roots unnaturally strong. Colton and Clarabelle spin across the crowd of dancers, curling around one another as if trying to shield each other from the world around them. Calliope, held upright and almost being dragged by their dad. And he cannot reach them, and he cannot shout to them as he keeps choking on saltwater. The heat of a fire burns along the beach, panicked voices whose owners he cannot see.

He lays back down as the lilies grow over him, claiming him for the ground.

He wakes with his blanket pulled tight over him, aching as he was yesterday, but pushes both aside and walks out into the Grove for ingredients. It’s easy to find lilies, they’re growing everywhere he turns, but he takes a long trip around to the nameless graves of those who served the Mother but whose names were not remembered. It’s a simple matter to dry them out with a quick spell, as the kettle boils on the stove, to crush them small and open his tea infuser, the little metal mesh basket.

He puts the dried lilies into the basket, makes a blend from all the plants growing on graves they didn't have a name to mark on. It's pretentious, and more than a little petty, but he allows himself this indulgence. He hasn't had many of them lately. He feels threadbare, stretched thin and left unmended, even as he patches clothes and increasingly takes them in.

So he puts all the forgotten things in his tea, and he sits and drinks it as a forgotten thing himself; liquorice and mint and apple blossom and the heavy perfume of poison.

It makes him throw up, later, because of course it does. It’s poison. But the world becomes…different. Timeless. That’s worth the cost.

Chapter Text

A long time ago, the Mother had been forced away from them. She had been forced away, but she lived on in a voice upon the wind, the dawn chorus, growth and life and what was left behind after the Matron came. So now it was their duty, to tend to the birth and the life and the decay. And Caduceus cannot understand this.

"But mum, what about if we need to talk to her? Not just listen, or ask, but talk?"
"We can't. That is the heaviest of our duties. We must do without, must continue."
"But..."
"To attempt that is to force yourself into the Divine Gate."

Silence. His mum looks at him, and sighs without any anger.

"Do you remember the story of the lilies?"

It’s getting harder to keep track of time. Of how long he’s been alone. Of how long he’s been awake sometimes, when he’s been drinking the lily tea. Knowing what the season is as instinctual, maybe more instinctual, than breathing. It’s keeping track of the ones that have gone by that’s the issue.

The mugs in the kitchen are depleting, he notices as he goes to find some for a family of mourners. His dad’s is in pieces on the windowsill alongside Clarabelle’s, Colton’s has disappeared, his own is riddled with chips from shaky hands, and he keeps finding the mugs they keep as spares scattered around the Grove. He found one on a grave, one time.

His dreams, before this, used to be rare, and always seemed to be an expression of the Wildmother’s love.

Now - because he doesn’t know if the lilies or the isolation did this - his dreams are twisting, awful things. He drowns quite often, as the other man and as himself, and the figures dance enough that they’re starting to freak him out. He dreams a lot of things, different shifting things, but there are themes. The drowning man in the ocean has something cursed and awful in his chest. Fire tears through home, which is only sometimes the Grove. He is chewed up and spit out and lonely in a hundred ways, surrounded by red eyes and flesh, green stone threads through him and most other dreams.

It always comes back to those eyes, and that twisting of death that he’d seen in the first dream the lilies had caused. To bodies melting up out of the flesh of an unbreathing thing, somewhere the Matron cannot reach, or maybe fears.

But he rises each time. It’s less and less common that he rises with the sun, or that he rises in his bed, but he wakes up each time, and keeps on with his duties.

Something hurts in his abdomen that’s worse than just a muscle. His stomach growls at him, even though he’s mostly too nauseous to eat the amount he should. His bones ache hollow as they push towards his skin, and weigh him down like a stone when he is stood.

It can’t get much worse. It can. Oh Mother, it can get so much worse.

Somewhere on the descent into whatever kind of madness this is, he gets his mind back. The winter is a harsh one on the people who come to the Grove, so when spring makes the journey here safer he spends enough time carrying out burials and his duties that he doesn't have time to go hunting for the lilies he hasn't already eaten. That week, he manages to sleep and eat, and the world comes back into colour as spring definitively breaks the last of winter's chains, blending the blue into the background as he looks out the window.

The morning at the end of that week, he finishes his bread and not-really-jam that he'd made yet another batch of, and realises he wants to cut his hair.

It's been a while since he last did; the case for the scissors is dusty, and he takes a moment to brush it off with a thumb. The feeling is familiar; this'd been his job, since Corrin’s joints had started to ache a little too much to do it for everyone. He'd never done anything besides trim his own, but he'd shaved swirling patterns into the underside of Calliope's hair, shaved one side of Clarabelle's close-cropped before she set out, to keep it neat for the journey.

That was one of the last things he'd ever done, for his family. The day before her and Colton left.

He doesn't remember how long it's been. He never was good with time, and it's slipping through his fingers like shorn strands of hair.

Those strands of hair are paler than he remembers, scattered across the kitchen floor, even though the world has come back into colour. He hasn’t really been looking in mirrors recently, so the change, if it is real and not just pink taking longer to return, is jarring. He didn’t think it had been that long since he last dyed it.

He cuts his hair, a little shorter than he usually would, because he can feel the wrongness of some of the ends of his hair where it's been left tangled for too long one too many times. A bit like a woven straw hat, unwound row by row by absent-minded hands. His head feels a little lighter, a little less heavy to hold up. It isn't that much hair gone. He stains it with lichen, the way he’s done so many times before, almost clean except for the way his hands are stained. It still doesn't feel right, though, and he thinks about his family, and their laughter about feeling the breeze on their skin, without so much hair during the summer. Thinks about swirling patterns and the feel of close-shaven hair under his fingers, about the Mother's words on the wind.

The sides of his head aren't shaved as well as he'd been able to for the others, but it feels familiar under his worn fingertips, and a little spark of hope he didn’t know had died reignites as though the Mother has breathed on the embers.

It doesn't last.

He’s tried to heal himself of this before; little spells in a desperate attempt to keep himself to some kind of condition to keep going. It works, usually, in the sense that he hasn’t died yet. It doesn’t ever stop the burn of the lilies through his system. This time, though, he goes through the cupboards for the kit Colton went out to buy before he left.

He’d been begrudgingly nice like that, Colton. At least to him and his siblings. Everyone else he’d been unfailingly polite to.

Colton had bought a few things for if things went badly whilst he was by himself. A tinderbox, some daggers. Most importantly, diamonds and diamond dust.

He doesn’t want to know how Colton got it. He certainly didn’t have enough to pay for it.

The diamond dust is in a little leather pouch, ready to be tipped into his hands, and he does so, taps it to his forehead and drags up his arm, tracing the route of his veins.

“Please Wildmother. I’m sorry to ask for myself, but uh..the poison frightens me. I know it is your will that I consume them, I just ask for healing, so this does not leave the Grove without a keeper.”

The spell wakes him up a little, closes some scratches along his knees from weeding earlier. But the Mother’s flurry of cold wind to his shoulder only tells him that she is sorry, but cannot fix this.

He goes to the fences to check them, sometimes. Not that he can do anything about them, he doesn’t know anything about metal. His dad made the fences. He hadn’t been allowed that close to the thorns.

Today, the thorns are almost to the third fence. They’ve been getting closer each time he goes out there.

The shackles around her arms - they aren’t his arms, even if this is the body he’s experiencing the world from right now - are too tight. Too tight even for a criminal, which she is and isn’t. She’s trying not to cry, and it comes out as anger, snarling like something limping but determined to see sunrise.

He wakes up in a nest of his covers and pillows.

A monster with half of her face threw her in here. He had looked like a man on marble steps and a viper waiting for the venom to take hold. He waits for the venom to render her unmoving, to stop her fighting, as the other half of her face turns away.

He doesn’t really leave the nest he’s made. It’s comfy here. He leaves to make tea and relieve himself. Dreams most of the day away.

The shackles around her ankles jerk them too forcefully from side to side as the cart shakes. The force would probably dislocate Caduceus’s joints, worn and never especially strong in the first place. His ankles had always been wrong, swelling with no reason, bruised by a touch.

There is fight coiled in her bones, in her fists, in her whole body. She does not fight the shackles, any more, as they agitate torn skin, but she will not fall.

Time passes.

There are no graves to be made for his family, because they are coming back, but he sits sometimes, in the places his family used to love, to feel them. Which is halfway to what a grave is.

Calliope, for all she had loved to train, to fight in the dusty patch she’d claimed, had always meant the most to him when they’d sat together by the spring. His early memories of her are all here, him sat on her lap or curled up with her as she wove bracelets and watched the water.

He sits there without her, today, but he can imagine her presence. She’d comb his hair with her fingers, would listen to him ramble about something or another. Today she’s here to listen to him ramble again.

“I don’t think time means anything anymore. And the Mother won’t…well, she isn’t speaking to me how she normally does. It might be her speaking when I eat the lilies. I’ve started drinking the lilies, in my tea. And they don’t grow on any of the graves, they’re just here, like they’ve always been here but worse. And…”

He’s crying. There are tears, and she is not here to mop them up on the hem of her shirt, to brush them away with a thumb.

“And I think that’s where I die, Cal. If I don’t die right here, if I leave, I go there and something happens that the dream won’t show me. The place won’t die but there is so much death there, in my dreams. And I have to leave eventually, if these are visions, because there are people I have to help but I’m scared.”

And because she is not there to show him some importance to the fear, or help him burn it from his heart, he carries on afraid.

He woke up in the dirt, one time. He'd forgotten that. Falling asleep by the banks of the river, in the dirt like the lilies. Cold. He'd been cold.

There had been things at the edges of his vision. Something warping his periphery and changing it back when he turns to look at them.

That had gone away when he slept, but now there is someone sing-songing in the Grove. Try as he might, he cannot find the source of the voice, and eventually he just sits and listens to the voice as it tells some story that the voice’s owner only ever half-heard. Something about a tinkerer who fell on a glass island to their own hubris. He’s not sure if it’s just him, or if the story cannot decide who the character was.

He could leave this place. Could shrug off the lack of a sign from the Wildmother as the effect of the corruption. He could go out into the world and maybe save his family and maybe save this place. He could spare himself this monotony of keeping home and slowly poisoning himself to try and reach her signs.

But he can’t. As much as he tries to kid himself, it’s not really duty that ties him here. It does tie him, but not so strongly as unwillingness. He does not want any part in this world besides his role here, because he may not be able to stomach returning to this place that has drained him.

Or is that just duty under another guise? He cannot think. He wants to run, but knows he would not make it past the gates.

At some point, Caduceus is making himself lunch. It's porridge. He shouldn't really be eating breakfast for lunch, but nobody is there to stop him. His hands are shaking, though, and as he goes to add some pears from where they're in syrup to last the winter, he pours some of that syrup in too.

So the porridge is less porridge and more over-sweet swollen oats. That's fine. If it isn't porridge, he's definitely allowed to eat it for lunch.

So at this point, Caduceus is sat with his bowl of not-porridge and a cup of lily tea. It's a nice-ish afternoon. He's going to wrap up warm later, and check on the further-away graves.

He drinks his tea, and suddenly remembers that the lilies are a poison.

Maybe his liver will just turn to mush inside his body. He can feel it, sometimes, can feel something halfway-dying inside of him. It applies to a lot of his body at the moment, so he's ignoring it.

He remembers, unbidden, burying the body of a half-elf who'd drunk himself to death and hadn't been found for a few days. He'd been jaundiced, clear even amongst the bruised look of the front of his body; he'd died laying flat on the floor, blood pooling with obedience to gravity. It painted him in the colours of a fight, but the man's knuckles had been unblemished. He didn't see the man's viscera, didn't need to see the fatty layer that would've spelled the man's death, to know what it looked like.

He thinks of his own liver, probably growing charred from necrosis; it's a wonderful thing that can only take so much poison. Still, he can't help but feel the phantom of that man's liver in his own abdomen, the fat choking it with its soft grain. It's far too much like the porridge in front of him, and even though he knows they are not the same, the oats turn from cloying to the swollen-soft rigidity of fat. He pushes the bowl away, clattering the spoon on the table.
He barely makes it to the sick bowl before he's emptying his already-empty stomach, oats and bile dribbling into the ceramic.

The lilies aren't food, but that night he nibbles at them like they will fill his stomach in some way, rather than filling his liver with death.

Chapter Text

A long time ago, the Mother had been forced away from them. She had been forced away, but she lived on in a voice upon the wind, the dawn chorus, growth and life and what was left behind after the Matron came. So now it was their duty, to tend to the birth and the life and the decay. Caduceus couldn't understand this, at the time.

"But mum, what about if we need to talk to her? Not just listen, or ask, but talk?"
"We can't. That is the heaviest of our duties. We must do without, must continue."
"But..."
"To attempt that is to force yourself into the Divine Gate."

Silence. His mum looks at him, and sighs without any anger.

"Do you remember the story of the lilies?"

Caduceus does remember the story. He's always been good at that, remembering stories, especially fables. But he's comfy, snuggled into the crook of his mum's arm. She smells of herbs, of the stew she'd been teaching Colton to make earlier, and she's warm against the vague chill of winter that the fire can't quite keep out. Maybe some part of him had known, even then, that he would have to treasure comfort. That he would eventually be alone. His mum smiles fondly at his shake of the head.

"They grew in the Grove back before we were the Grove, were the first things the mother saw fit to encourage here. She had a connection to them."

It’s slipping through his hands like silt, like sand like hair like daisy petals like like likelikelike.

A million comparisons he can make, but he’s not quite sure what’s slipping.

It definitely used to be time, but now he thinks it might be something more. Maybe it’s him.

He’s with the drowning man, on the deck of what he assumes to be a ship in a storm. There’s movement, too fast to track, around them, blood and water sloshing across the deck. He isn’t moving, probably because of the gaping hole where Caduceus knew there once was something wrong.

Something starts growing out of his own rib cage, forces its way up his windpipe and out of his mouth. It’s a plant. Unfamiliar, not a lily. He’d be relieved if he wasn’t too busy choking.

The plant keeps growing, unaffected by his gasping or the storm raging around them. Curls down to fill the wound of the man below him. The man chokes on the salt and the rain as it fills his mouth, but breathes.

He wakes up collapsed in the dirt, a curious beetle watching him.

Drinking the lilies is no more pleasant, becomes no less effective the more he does it. Maybe it’s because he makes the tea with just the lilies, no more of the other things to soften the blow. Maybe it’s because he’s wasting away faster than his tolerance can build. He should stop. He doesn't want this. It feels more like the flowers feed on him than he feeds on them.

He won’t stop, though. Because he isn’t alone, when the poison is coursing through him, and he isn’t living through all the time that passes. And sometimes, just sometimes, it makes the wind through his hair feel like her hand.

The mourner he's talking to doesn't understand him.

"I'm sorry? You are a Clay, correct?"
"Caduceus. Are you here to bury, or to visit?"
"...Visit. My brother, they told me he was buried here."

He's half-genasi, the man. Half earth genasi. Dressed fairly finely, as far as he can tell, but he's distressed. Travelling through the Savalirwood will do that to a person. He assumes, given he hasn't left in seasons.

"Sorry, I didn't ask for your name."

The man starts to look impatient.

"We've done this already. My family name is Yiel."
"Yiel. He's up on the hill. Let me show you."
"I want to take my brother home."
"Of course. We understand that cultures hold different views on burial."

The path up to the hill is short; they were already halfway there. The man is agitated, when they reach one of the graves.

"So, is this a shovel thing or can you do it through magic?”
“Do what through magic?”
“My brother! I’m here to take my brother’s body home!”
"You can't take him. He's here."
"For the love of the gods! What the fuck do you mean?"

He's the first mourner in a while, definitely, but that doesn't explain why he can't understand him.

“He’s the Mother’s, I have to…”

The man shoves him in the chest. Hard. It sets him staggering back.

“You said I could have him.”

Caduceus doesn’t…he has a duty to respect burial rites, and a duty to keep the body for…something. The two things swirl in his stomach. Maybe it's just nausea. The man shoves him again, harder, and he has to brace himself against the gravestone. People grieve, it’s hardly the first time he’s been hurt by a mourner. He tries to express that, but what comes out doesn’t make sense to him or the man.

That makes the man lose his anger, weariness creeping back across his face like ivy up a tree.

“Just…if you can’t do it, give me a shovel.”

The Corruption is through the outer wall, now. Maybe it has been for a while. Maybe it’s just that his dreams have started to blend into the waking world. It’s not like he wants to touch the thorns to check.

He keeps prodding at the bruises the man left, reopening the scrapes until they are puckered, weeping gashes. It hurts, he bleeds. The gashes do a strange thing, where they begin to scar, panicked, at the edges even as he does not, cannot, let them heal. Is it compulsion or punishment? He’s not sure, because he’s not sure if the end goal is atonement or pain. Maybe they’re the same thing.

It’s not uncommon that ravens come to visit the Grove; they aren’t native, but this is a place where the Matron’s touch is present, if light. They don’t stick around long, or come with any kind of pattern.

There are quite a few of them, this time, and he doesn’t have much food to share, so he bakes bread for them especially, puts in the seeds Clarabelle used to feed them and some of the dried fruit that currently constitutes his meals. He lets it overcook without burning so he can crumble it up and leave it out for them on the faded wooden table outside.

The unkindness seems to appreciate it, as a whole. They look at him with a little sorrow, but they’re ravens, so that’s to be expected.

It’s a few days before they leave. They spend their time on the graves, blessing them for the Matron. Land in the boughs of the uncorrupted trees. He wonders how long it’s been, since the woods were safe for them to land in. He can’t say he minds the company, especially given they don’t care when his words don’t make sense. The bruises from the man's shove still haven't gone away.

When they do leave, though, one is left behind. A little mangy. He wakes one afternoon to find it alone, not touching the bread, and spends the rest of the day trying to find what’s wrong with it. He heals it, and it does not fly away. He checks it for any curse the woods may have marked it with,

All living things Know, even the plants, as is the Wildmother’s love. Ravens even more so, being the Matron’s chosen. But this particular one, the one that stays behind after the rest of the unkindness have moved on, looks at him with an uncanny knowledge. Only eats as he does. Pecks at his hands as he tries to harvest the lilies. He doesn’t have the energy to argue with it.

The morning it leaves, to join the rest, Caduceus comes to leave seeds on the table and finds something shiny where the food has been.

Laying on the age-faded wood is an earring, tarnished and a little muddy, but intact enough that he knows it to be one of Calliope’s.

It wasn’t one that had had a pair. Clarabelle, back when she was young, but just as wild as she’d always been, had been wandering through a market with him, looking for something or another. She’d seen the thing, amongst the clutter of some person’s stall, and dragged him over to see it. It’d been warped and missing parts, but she’d insisted Calliope would love it, and he’d given in to her insistence without much complaint.

It’s an odd-looking thing, metal rings linked together to form three dangling strands, mismatched stones dangling from it where Clarabelle had filled in the missing parts. And by all rights Calliope should had no interest in it; she didn’t really wear jewelery-jewelery, and this certainly wasn’t practical.

But she’d taken it from Clarabelle’s hand with reverence, and worn it without fail until the day it went missing. They’d all searched, with both of his sisters distraught, but nobody could find it.

And here it is. On the table. With the raven staring at it.

“Was this you?” He manages around the sudden tightening of his throat.
“Did you bring this back to me? Why?”

The raven doesn’t answer. It just looks at him with those too-knowing eyes.

“You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

The raven dips its head, before brushing up against his hand. It takes flight as he watches, and a feather slowly floats to his feet.

Sinking to the floor becomes too familiar. It used to just be when he stood too fast. Now it is most times he stands. The blood rushes through his ears, vision blurs, and he becomes practised at lowering himself to the ground with limbs that will not stop shaking.

A body that isn’t his is walking through unfamiliar, barren lands, at almost a run, the kind of pace that comes from a need to keep the momentum going lest you collapse to the ground in exhaustion. She is exhausted. She’s been going for days. Alone, except for her wife.She’s at her shoulder, keeping pace. She’s back where the blood came from. She vanishes each time she tries to look back for her. Her hands run through her hair, place sodden flowers in it.

This woman’s wife is dead, back there. There’s a storm above, a desperate hand of a god reaching for her through the divine gate. She keeps walking, blood caught under her fingernails.

Lightning strikes the ground ahead, and there’s a figure waiting. An empty thing, covered in red eyes, who smiles at her like the moon had once; guileless and uncaring of what he’d done. Of what she’d done.

Thunder booms.

He’s halfway out the kitchen window, fallen asleep watching the horizon for the oncoming storm. It’s not oncoming anymore. His hair is dripping wet.

Thunder booms.

Rain is hammering against the canvas of a circus tent. The empty thing, covered in metal rings and embellishments, smiles up at her as she leaves, but it’s sad. Like he doesn’t trust she will see him again before his borrowed time runs out.

He wakes up as the storm passes. Pulls his water-heavy head back in the window and ignores the way it drips onto the kitchen tiles.

He's curled up in his bed. He isn't asleep, isn't about to fall asleep and certainly isn't waking up. He had been trying to sleep, unsure how long it'd been since he last had but knowing it was too long, and it wouldn't let him. Sleep has crawled out of his reach. He doesn't usually mind things that crawl, but between waking up in a grave and sheer exhaustion it's starting to grate on his usually steady nerves.

The sheets are tacky, and he looks down in the half-light of the single ray of sunshine slipping between the curtains to see dark stains in his covers, on the bedsheet. He looks for the source and finds wounds everywhere; sluggishly bleeding more than he can afford to lose, all stuffed with the heads of lilies. They're stained and drowned, paper-thin petals failing to actually staunch any kind of blood flow.

Then again, that probably wasn't why he'd decided to introduce poison straight into his bloodstream.

He sits, for a long moment. Feels his head get lighter. Wonders if the creeping darkness of the Savalirwood is blocking the Mother's influence, because this is a strange insidious thing to make him live through to be worthy of her. Wonders where his family are, if they're hurt worse, if they're gone. Absently, mutedly, wants to die.

Then he stumbles to the mirror, and starts to pick out the flowers.

Chapter Text

A long time ago, the Mother had been forced away from them. She had been forced away, but she lived on in a voice upon the wind, the dawn chorus, growth and life and what was left behind after the Matron came. So now it was their duty, to tend to the birth and the life and the decay. Caduceus couldn't understand this, at the time.

"But mum, what about if we need to talk to her? Not just listen, or ask, but talk?"
"We can't. That is the heaviest of our duties. We must do without, must continue."
"But..."
"To attempt that is to force yourself into the Divine Gate."

Silence. His mum looks at him, and sighs without any anger.

"Do you remember the story of the lilies?"

Caduceus does remember the story. He's always been good at that, remembering stories, especially fables. But he's comfy, snuggled into the crook of his mum's arm. She smells of herbs, of the stew she'd been teaching Colton to make earlier, and she's warm against the vague chill of winter that the fire can't quite keep out. Maybe some part of him had known, even then, that he would have to treasure comfort. That he would eventually be alone. His mum smiles at him. Is it less fond than he'd previously remembered? Is that unknown emotion in her eyes dread? Did she know too, that he would be the one left behind?

"They grew in the Grove back before we were the Grove, were the first things the mother saw fit to encourage here. She had a connection to them.

We have been content with our simple guidance for centuries of peace; all consider it bad luck to damage a graveyard. But one war that raged on this continent many years ago did not care for that, and they surrounded these walls as we kept the people they were seeking within them. We were outmatched, though, and one of the family decided he needed to speak to the Mother more directly. He asked this of her, and promised he would not care for the consequences.

So the Mother flooded the lilies with power, and he ate them. And he dreamt, awake and asleep for the days of siege, eventually finding a channel to speak with the Mother. He brought the siegers to their knees single-handed, but the flowers took their toll on his body, and the dreams he had were too much for his mind. There are consequences for crossing the divine gate."

"What happened to him?"

Hesitation.

"He fell asleep in the stream."

He thinks he understands now.

He burns the bloodied bedsheets. It wasn't as though he was sleeping on them anyway.

Waking up hasn't been pleasant in a long time, even with the promise of meditation in the morning. Today, he's jerked into awareness by something just below his rib.

It feels like someone has stabbed him. He goes to check, and there's no blood, but unfurling to check spikes more pain through him.

He screams, because he can and because he's never felt a pain like this, and curls back in on himself and cries because he's not stupid, he knows he's dying. It feels like failure and even that cannot mute the agony in his abdomen, where before failure had been an all-consuming pain. He’s not supposed to fear death, or revile it, but he’s taking a moment of weakness to scream.

He stays like that until the pain dims enough to move, then yanks himself upright by his staff and heads out.

In what is becoming unusual, he has a goal, a grave in mind. Some sort of clarity, with the pain, and the inevitability he's taking as certainty, given its absence anywhere else in his life.

The dead half-elf's grave is clean, like every grave here; he doesn't neglect his duty regardless of what has taken hold of his mind like mistletoe, leaching him of anything worthwhile.

The half-elf's grave is clean, and not particularly old, so the writing is clear. Elvish characters, by his aunt's hand, where she was the one to speak it.

They'd all known Sylvan, because it was their language, and Common, so they could talk to most of the mourners. But each of them had taken another language, to understand the people who did not know either. Because they were supposed to look after this place as a family, as one collective, not whatever he's doing now.

He can't speak this form of Elvish, this formal, swirling thing that isn't the one he reads, but he was told what the words meant when they buried this man. We remember his faith , is what this cold slab of stone reads, above the body of a man who died alone and hopeless. What fucking faith? He only had faith in a bottle.

It's a cruel thought, an ugly one that he hates but cannot take back, one born from far too much understanding. After all, in Elvish, his aunt had told him one time, faith and liver were only one letter apart. One letter, one that was only perceivable if you knew the language well. To have faith is to surrender your liver, so say him and this dead man. It's almost funny. It is funny, in the kind of way that makes him want to lie down in the mud, to let himself be choked on sand, on blood. He might be doing those things. He can taste the blood in his mouth.

Caduceus wakes up in a freshly dug grave, an offering bouquet of lilies in his folded hands and a bitter taste in his mouth. He doesn’t fill it in. He’ll need it soon, and there’s nobody else here to bury him.

Sinking to the floor with shaking limbs, the skill he uses more than his voice, now, must look so strange from the outside. Maybe it looks like some kind of religious fervour, seizing in the throes of a vision. It might be, if the lilies are the Mother’s way of showing him what will come to pass, not just vivid dreams from a hallucinogen.

Then again, it probably just looks stupid.

He wakes up in the dirt. Falling asleep by the banks of the stream, in the dirt like the lilies. Cold. He'd been cold. He is cold. The mud is warm, and he swirls it beneath his shaking, skeletal hands. The mud is in his hair, mats his fur.

He picks himself up, halfway, before he realises his staff is nowhere to be seen, and comes to the realisation that the lilies, that he, has stripped him of the strength to hold himself upright. A fawn, staggering on disjointed legs, still with blood in its coat, has more strength than him. Fawns have something left to care for them. They die otherwise. Caduceus knows this intimately, he's seen enough abandoned things fade and die.

Instead, he crawls out of the mud and into the water, sinks down down down until the mud is out of his hair and he barely has air left in his lungs. He doesn't let himself drown; lily-eaters have made that mistake before; but he thinks about it.

Remembering is hard, sometimes. He still sort of expects his family to be shouting to each other from different rooms and different graves, to be sat down, smiling, for a family meal. The house is lonely, with their rooms preserved and their mugs chipped and broken by his clumsy hands, his clumsy attempts to stave off loneliness.

They’ll be back, though. And he is dying. He can tell by the yellowing of his skin, the blood in his vomit.

So he dusts their rooms, opens windows to chase away the stale air. Tidies his bedroom; folds clothes neatly, organises his trinkets on his bedside table, makes his bed as though he has been sleeping in it. Places a note on top of the pillow.

I’m sorry , the note says. I tried. I hope the Grove has survived in my absence. It wasn’t my choice to leave it untended.

He drinks his tea by the banks of the river. It's sunrise, or maybe sunset. The sky is alight in shades of red even he can identify in this haze. He needs to know if it's morning or night, whether he needs to take the washing in- the last of his wash to get rid of the mustiness of Clarabelle’s wardrobe. Red sky at night, shepherd's delight. Red sky in the morning, shepard's warning. Skirts on the washing line. Flowers on the stem.

He finishes his tea, feels the nausea rise, feels things start to creep into the sides of his vision. He's so tired. The things he sees don't make sense. Whispers on the wind don't reach his ears. He misses his family.

Maybe that's why he finishes the tea and starts to eat the lilies around him.

The world starts to blur faster, throws details into sickening clarity. The flow of the water, bird calls, the rustle of leaves drop out abruptly. He is alone, feet off the edge of a cliff. An overgrown child who misses his mother. The petals are bitter on his tongue, and he vomits pathetically, barely avoiding going face-first into it. He keeps eating them. Peels the flowers off the stem, counts every season he has been alone as though he himself knows.

He feels himself slam into something not-quite solid. The impact is enough to shatter bone, and maybe it does. It's agony, and the thing he has been slammed into dents under his crumpled form. That's odd. It's never done that before.

He hasn't done this before? Has he?

He can get through it, this time.

He gives up eating the petals and starts shoving whole plants into his mouth, heedless of the dirt. All its parts are poisonous.

He can make it through this time. His body slams deeper into the dent in the wall. He lays there, crumpled, does not get up but impacts again and again anyway.

This is going to kill him. He can't find it within himself to care.

His crumpled form, somewhere, lays motionless against the wall, and he cannot shovel the flowers anymore here as he slumps to the side, slams his head against the rock. The blood that leaks out, he notes with singular focus, is threaded with blue.

From where his body has fallen, he watches as the red of the horizon spins itself into red eyes. Delight or warning. Shadowed figures stumble in through the gate, staggering. One melts away, into the eyes.

The figures stagger towards him. The six things, shapeless in the way that a scribbled out drawing of a person is, move towards him. They do not look at the sky, but he can tell that they know deep down that it is there. Fleeing those eyes, or chasing. Delight or warning. They reach for him, on the ground and at their side, like he is supposed to be with them. He doesn't have the strength to make it to the hands outstretched to him in either place.

The eyes, impossibly, get closer, like an encroaching storm. He can't tell if they are running towards it or away from it because they are stopped here, with him. The eyes swallow the Savalirwood. The eyes swallow the graves. The eyes start to swallow the figures.

They grab at his hand anyway, and it hurts like stinging nettles under his skin and soothes some ragged part of his soul and still hurts and he doesn't mind the hurt.

He still falls, though. This time, he doesn't hit anything. He just falls straight through. And their hands do not prevent it, although they are some comfort as everything goes white.

Chapter Text

Contrary to what most believe about the ways of the three families, Caduceus Clay has never properly died before. At least...well. There was the ritual, but that barely lasted long enough to count, and the way that psuedo-death happened was very different. Point is, he doesn't really know what death feels like.

He’s not even sure he’s dead now.

“You aren’t.” Comes a voice from his side. Its owner seems to be whoever is gently pulling him upright and towards a circle of trees in the glaring…light? darkness? He can’t put words to whatever he’s surrounded by.

“There isn’t a word for it.” It’s the voice again, and Caduceus turns to see a winged half-elf, face obscured by an intricate beaked leather mask. His attention, though, is immediately drawn to his armour, leather and studded with feathers, familiar to him from bedtime stories and fables and legends. From stories about their duty to their home.

“Champion?” He stops as he says it, and the man stops with him, an arm’s length away.

“A Champion of the Matron, but not the one you mean.” It sounds kind, like it’s said with a smile, even though his mouth is obscured and the tone is still something otherworldly.

They’re moving again, and the man is at his side, supporting him as he stumbles over and over, limbs failing to cooperate.

“I’m dead, then?”
“Not quite. The Matron is willing to make an exception, for the Mother, and for those who look over her Champion. Besides, your life is entangled with too many others, will have too great of an impact to allow it to break where you have frayed it.”

Silence falls as they keep walking towards the trees. Most of his focus is on keeping upright and moving, but he notes the Champion smells of death but also of herbs, has beads of all materials on the ends of braids in his hair, carries daggers about him but no bow.

He’s too tired to focus on anything else about the Champion, so he instead tries to follow the golden cords that thread through this place, tangling into tight knots or merely touching one another.

As they reach the clearing, the Champion only gets close enough to shift his weight to one of the trees and nod his head to the Mother before walking back into the void.

“Champion?” He calls, and the man stops, turns back slightly. “My family, are they alive?”

That makes the man turn back fully, beads in his hair bouncing off each other. There’s something unreadable in the set of his shoulders, the drop of his wings. It’s alien, but he’d almost call it longing.

“They have not passed over to the Mother.”
“Thank you, Champion.”
“Vax’ildan. I hope you find your family, chosen of the Mother.”

The woman sat in the centre is beautiful, and shifting. Grows from the clearing itself. She gestures to another space in the clearing, right in front of her, expression unchanging even as he stumbles trying to reach it. He sits, eventually, back up against a tree softened by lichen.

“I’m sorry, my child. You have had to suffer so much in your faith.”

Caduceus has never been all that good at looking people in the eye; it’s always been too intense for him or the other person, and breaks quickly. This time, the Mother holds his gaze, matches it with her own.

“Faith is endurance.”
“That does not mean it didn’t hurt.”

And he can’t, as much as he wants to, deny that. Cannot deny the hurt that this has wrought on him. That has been wrought on him perhaps since the first of their family left.

“Why?” He manages, after a long silence. The Mother looks at him with grief in her eyes. With shame, but does not hide it. Does not look away from his eyes.

“I couldn’t reach you, and I..forgot myself. My place. In reaching for you, I was pulling you into the Divine Gate.”
“The lilies?”

She inclines her head, shaking blossoms loose.

“The touch of the divine is awful and aweful. It manifests in much the same way.”

He sits, for a moment, and watches her form shifting; strands of hyphae across her face turning to vines of wisteria that bloom and die in a moment.

“You can be angry, child. You have earned that right, and none would punish you for it.”
“I’m not angry. Not really. I think you’re lonely, up here, only just able to touch the lands. I think the Champion comes to visit you, sometimes, because you remind him of someone, and you don’t begrudge him that because you miss the companionship of mortals. I don’t blame you for what happened as a result of desperation.”
“You are something else, Caduceus Clay. Something maybe more special than our hands could have made you.”

There’s pride there, and almost-shed tears.

“Not really. I’m just good at reading people. Loneliness is…I’m sort of an expert on it now. It’s easy to recognise.”
“I am sorry that I will have to ask you to continue.”
“I don’t…I’ve carried on before.”
“But it’s not fair to you. You should not have to give as much as you have, as you will have to give if you carry on. The world owes you more than it has given you.”
“I can bear it.”

Caduceus, still looking at the Mother’s face, watches as it again contorts in sorrow in a moment. It looks a little like his mum’s.

“I can cure you of the lily’s poison, when you wake up. But it will take your memories of this place.”
“That’s fine.”

She puts a warm hand on his bony shoulder, and to his surprise, places a kiss on his forehead.

“My child. The world will have you to thank. The world will pay back what is owed.”

He wakes up in his prayer circle, with the feeling of the Mother’s kiss on his forehead and the memory of eyes and people. It’s time to move on. To carry on, with them and outside of here.

As Caduceus walks to gather his things for a journey, he aches, but he does not ache so badly. There is no poison in his veins, though it remains heavy on his mind.

As Caduceus walks to gather his things for a journey, there are no lilies in the Grove.