Fairy Tale
Disclaimer: This is an original work of fiction. Theft of it would be seriously uncool.
Untitled Fairy Tale
In the borderlands to forever, where the forests grew old and wild, stout trunks thick with branches, there was a small village. Five families founded the village, generations ago, and were well-established there.
The first of the five families were blacksmiths. And they had iron in their blood, so that their eyes glinted black metallic in lowlight of fireplaces, and their muscles were corded thick into their arms and shoulders and necks, and their lungs were like bellows to coax their work-fires to a heat that would rival starflame.
The second of the five families were weavers, and were born nimble fingered and blind, their fingerpads sensitive to the touch of thread. They had the curious habit of never cutting thread - of continuing on until there was no more to use - because of the belief that to cut a thread was to sever a life.
The third of the five families were woodsmen, and they went into the forests that bordered forever with their axes every day, bringing back lengths of wood for the building of new homes. They were the singers, who filled the empty spaces with their loud vibrant voices, flooding out loneliness as they swung their axes up and over and through the thick trees. And they knew the secret of birdsong, but held it close to their skins, jealously.
The fourth of the five families were cattle-men, raising animals to slaughter. They had a peculiar mix of brutality and gentleness to them, their hands just as soft in stroking the beasts’ heads as they were gutting them. The smell of viscera clung slick and wet to them, heady blood tang and the smoke of burning animal hearts offered up as sacrifices to a distant god.
The fifth of the five families were farmers, and grew the crops in boundaries of fields, hands rough with tilling the earth. This was the family that knew the seasons, ate the dirt to know the life it contained; ground the bones of the animals to mix with the soil, watched carefully the slow movement of plant growth.
And a girl was born to the fifth family who grew to a woman without having had a moontime, who was dark where her brothers were fair, and who some said was a witch. She might have been killed for this crime, but instead was cast out.
She lived in the forest that bordered forever, keeping counsel with only herself. Her nights were full of stars and her days full of her garden, which fed her and housed her and kept her safe from harm. The woman loved her garden, was devoted to its care - touched each new leaf and flower with quiet reverence and tangled her feet in its roots.
The woman slipped herself deeper into the heart of her garden. She pushed her hands and body to the base of roots. She took the roots of her garden into her mouth and tasted them, flicked her tongue along their woody lengths, ran her fingers to where the roots of one plant tangled with the roots of another. The earth seemed to shudder. She pushed deeper into the soft loam, dug herself a space full of air and the damp smell of mud, curved her spine to fit into the curve of the earth. Dirt settled around her, sighing, full of love.
Oh, she thought, wordless but for wonder. It seemed as if her entire body had come alive. Each part of her was touched, held. Gentle pressure, settling against her, steady, steady - and she cried out, Oh.
In the morning she drank dew from the cup of flowers, their petals curled upward to catch condensation. She stroked the plants of her garden and hummed a low wordless tune.
A new flower began to grow. She noticed it at once, a small pale green bud, hopeful, pressing up out of the earth. She laid a finger against it in welcome, and watched it as it rose, slowly, slender stalk swaying under the weight of its furled tip.
This was a flower like none the woman had ever seen before. But it was sickly, and she grew afraid that it would not survive. So she brought her hand to her mouth and ripped her flesh open with her teeth, and scattered blood like rain into the earth that held the flower’s roots. She did this daily and, gradually, the flower grew stronger.
It grew for what seemed to be ages, its pale green leaves darkening, its furled petals changing shade from pale blue to dark blue to purple to blushing red. When all the colour had leeched out of the flower, had turned gleaming ivory and white, it slowly began to open.
She kissed the edges of the petals and found that they were velvet against her lips, and smelled of copper, like blood.
And at the heart of the opened flower was a small child, the size of which could fit within her palm, who looked at her with the blank love particular to things new to this world. When she took the child out of its flower-home, it keened, but rested against her skin, as if it liked the touch of her.
The woman and the child lived in the garden for many years, both changeless and undying, and the garden grew around them.
*
The village meanwhile sickened. None could explain that death that swept throughout it, lighting fires in the veins of its children, its grandmothers and grandfathers. Careworn and heartsore, with graves dug deep, the five families searched for answers.
Inevitably their thoughts fell upon the witch they had cast out generations ago, who the woodsmen still said they heard singing some mornings, whose garden was a tangle of wild woody growth.
The first family said, “She is to blame.”
The second family said, “How will we kill her?”
The third family said, “We will go and fetch her.”
The fourth family said, “We will sharpen our knives.”
The fifth family said, “We are sorry,” and bowed their heads in shame and guilt for having been the ones to have borne the witch into the world.
*
The woodsmen chopped the woman’s garden down with steady strokes. She cried out in horror to see her love destroyed.
They bound the woman with lengths of rope. She had no resistance in her. She made only high keening noises of grief. They didn’t see the child that watched behind the wreckage of plant limbs and leaves; the child that followed as they dragged the woman from her garden home.
They brought her to the village, to the centre of the village, to where all that were left of its people waited.
The blacksmiths had built a fire, blazing like the heart of the sun, and the butchers had readied their knives. The woodsmen held the women still as her heart was cut out and thrown onto the flames. As it sizzled and smoked, the youngest of the weavers cut a single thread.
The woman was all-over red with blood. Her body was still and her eyes wide unseeing.
The farmers took her bones and ground them and mixed them with the earth.
Sickness faded from the village, though a new trouble rose to take its place: a refusal on the part of the earth to grow. Crops failed. Grass withered. The animals thinned and became hollow-eyed. Starvation stalked the village.
The child watched.
*
Eventually the child walked to the edge of forever, which was dark with impossibility. Waves of it stroked up against the edges of the forest, perpetual swaying movement. The child looked out into forever, and reached into the sky of it and pulled down blue, and reached into the depths of it and pulled up gold, and draped these two colours about its body.
The child was unafraid. A new story was just beginning.