The Rosetta gathered to their Queen, their trunks bowed in despair, awaiting a wellspring of emotion that had long since dried away in the endless summer.
Only Verdance wept, her tears falling to the leaf-littered ground. The seed she had placed on the empty throne. This kernel of dormant life was all that remained of their creator, their once-immortal matriarch. From great Davnir’s death, the Queen had nurtured their survival. From the war-torn spirits of the dead, she seeded a civilization—one that would live in perpetual peace.
She spared not a glance for the shuffling Rosetta, as languid now as they had been when she sought to rouse them against the Rotwood. She could not look at them for fear that she would rend the mourning atmosphere with the anger that now sprouted peppery shoots inside her belly, heating her throat and embittering her tongue with words she would most certainly regret.
With a groan of protesting Oakwood, Elder Ozrim moved to her side. From his stiff mouth, his voice oozed as sluggishly as sap.
“Of this our Queen spoke to me when I was but a sapling. We come from the seed. We return to the seed.”
“How?” rasped Verdance, choking back her turmoil to allow the words free passage. “Candlehold is forever. She…” Her hand trembled as she pointed at the seed. “She made it so.”
“And she will again. Within that grain awaits time immemorial. Should we wish it, we need only plant it within the soil of Candlehold. We do this and the forest shall continue, the summer shall live on and on and…”
His voice faded away, as if losing the will to even consider the notion of continuance. Verdance heard the weariness in that faltering moment, the aching weight of a thousand years and a thousand more, bearing down upon the surrounding Rosetta.
She looked at the wilted flowers surrounding the throne, at the yellowed canopy above. Already autumn was making its presence known, the air cooler, the sunlight weaker. Even the Sigil of Earth, the evergreen emblem of Davnir’s essence, showed touches of yellow upon its outermost leaves.
“If we plant it in the soil of Candlehold?”
“It is the Seed of Tomorrow,” answered Ozrim. “It holds the promise of yesterday, should we want tomorrow to be as it has always been.”
“And if we don’t?”
This unwelcome voice froze Verdance’s own words upon her lips. She turned slowly, struggling to maintain her dignity. To see Florian standing there before the throne, his rot seeping into the ground, speeding the withering of the grass, turning dandelions to orbs of fluffy seeds in the blink of an eye, was too much for her to abide.
“You did this!” she growled, her voice splintering with rageful sorrow.
He ignored her, fixing upon Ozrim instead. “What else might we do, Elder?”
Verdance glared at Ozrim, daring him not to speak, but the creaking wisdom came, nonetheless.
“To plant the seed beyond Candlehold’s roots is to embrace a tomorrow we cannot know.”
“Then there is nothing else to consider. There is but one possible deed,” urged Verdance. “We plant the seed within Candlehold. It is what the Queen would have wanted.”
The Harbinger stepped forward, resting his boot on the throne’s lowermost root. The great tree groaned and red leaves cascaded from its canopy, softly falling among them like blood-stained snowflakes.
“You do not speak for our departed Queen, Verdance.”
Verdance looked to the elders, trying to kindle some fervor in their placid stares. They met her gaze, and in their somber eyes she saw something that troubled her to the pith. Weariness, so old, so ingrained, that she could remember them no other way.
She looked beyond the elders to the creatures of Candlehold who had gathered so quietly, drawn by instinct to this moment of profound loss. Great and small, she saw them, eyes fixed upon the Seed of Tomorrow. In their dull orbs she saw no luster, no longing for life. In silence, they stood. Placid, awaiting an indefinite future with passionless expectation.
For the first time in her long existence, Verdance felt the dreary weight of their passivity upon her shoulders, bearing her down. She strained against it with every fiber of her being like a sprout trying to break free of the hard-packed earth.
She turned to Florian, resolute. “I am the Queen’s chosen rose, and I speak for the preservation of Candlehold.” She closed the gap between them so they were but a twig’s length apart. She harbored no fear of the rot, for summer still ran through her veins. “I speak for life everlasting.”
With a groan of tormented timber, Ozrim shook his heavy head. “Many have forgotten Davnir's knowledge,” he murmured.
“With time we shall remember,” urged Verdance. “By planting the seed, we shall cherish Davnir’s sacrifice forever more.”
Ozrim gazed at her with unseeing eyes. He was looking upon the days to come.
“Our Queen is gone. Change, at last, is upon us.”
A faint smile twisted Florian’s lips, and in that moment Verdance felt the truth of it. The Harbinger, in tainting Candlehold, was now eating at the resolve of its people. If the Rosetta were to regain their vigor, Florian had to be stopped, no matter the cost.
The roses upon her dress turned crimson and thorns sprouted across her bare shoulders and arms.
“You are the only change in Candlehold,” she spat. “Who else but you could have brought death upon our Queen?”
The Harbinger’s pallid face twisted with anguish. “I have been reviled since the day I broke ground. Though your accusation does not surprise me, it cuts me to the heart.”
“Your heart is as rotten as your damned wood!” Verdance opened her hands and arcanity poured forth.
Vines burst from the dirt to wrap around Florian’s legs. Slender shoots erupted from ropey stems, creeping across his body, clutching and confining.
With one hand still free, Florian drew his Rotwood Reaper and sliced his tethers away.
Gritting her teeth, Verdance redoubled her efforts. The entrapping flora grew faster.
Florian sliced and slashed with increasing ferocity, his bladework a blur of destruction. Severed vines curled as they fell, rupturing into dank dust as they struck the ground.
“In the name of the Queen, you shall be bound!” cried Verdance, citing a law that had not been enforced in a millennia. “For the safety of Candlehold, you shall be—”
Her judgment was cut short by a blurred blade. The point caressed her face, gentle as the kiss of a butterfly. Astonished, Verdance ceased her assault. Vines stilled and slumped as she raised a hand to her cheek. It came away reddened with blood.
Florian stared at her, wide-eyed, as shocked as she. “I didn’t mean to,” he whispered. “The vines. I was only…” Words failed him. He stumbled backwards, turned, and fled the glade.
Verdance watched him go. Where she might have felt triumph, she felt only shame. Her fellow Rosetta swayed like willows in the wind, their cloying glances shifting sluggishly from Rose to Seed to the path of rot left behind in Florian’s retreat. On the latter they lingered, fear trembling in the eyes of some, resignation in others.
Ozrim rested a ponderous hand upon Verdance’s shoulder, his stiff fingers splayed to avoid her thorns. “We should consider this carefully.”
“There is nothing to consider,” she bit back.
He sighed, his timber creaking as if settling in the cooling evening after a hot day. “No, Verdance. There is everything.”
He turned and shuffled away. The Candleholders followed his example, shambling back to their own glades and groves to ponder their mortality.
“There is nothing to consider,” she repeated to herself, the words as thin and brittle as leaf litter.
Verdance touched the wound on her cheek. Infection had taken hold, bruising her flesh, making her skin feverishly hot to the touch. Yet a simple incantation soon wiped it away, sealing the wound so thoroughly that it was as if it had never occurred. As she healed, her mind wandered through the paths and glades of her vast memory.
Candlelight Clearing, where the Rosetta of old had once gathered to garden, share poetry, and sing. No one visited now. The buildings were empty, the gardens overgrown, the floating light-trees smothered with lichen and regret.
It had happened slowly, over centuries. Poems grew stale in repetition. Little changed, so there was little to write songs about. Work that once held meaning became monotonous, pointless. One by one, the Rosetta had retreated into themselves.
Verdance shook herself free of that maudlin memory and set to work rejuvenating the throne glade’s flowerbeds. The daffodils grew more slowly than usual, wary of the clammy air, their shade of yellow lighter, almost sickly.
They reminded Verdance of Rotwood, how it had started in a flower-clad gully. A rainbow of blooms turned to uniform brown as they withered away. She had tried to mend the place, but to no avail. That which flourished by evening would be fetid by morning. A wound in the land that would simply not heal.
The other Rosetta barely seemed to notice. Too reserved they had become. Too dormant in their disconnection.
Then came Florian, and one by one, the creatures of Candlehold answered his call. For now it was the animals, their instincts seduced by the rot’s false promises of rest and respite. She understood their loss. Every day, the forest grew quieter. For centuries it had lived. Now it seemed to wait.
It was only a matter of time before the Rosetta found their way to Rotwood. This notion, one that she had so recently found terrifying, settled softly upon her mindscape like the leaves now drifting down from the trees. Was this how the other Rosetta now saw it? As a promise of peace?
She moved to attend to the Queen's throne, when out of the corner of her eye she saw it. A plump, juicy orb, bright green, dangling from a branch like the forest’s many lanterns. Upon the Sigil of Earth it clung by a delicate stalk. Curious, she approached it. Her hand reached out, hesitated.
Take it, the breeze whispered in her ear. Davnir’s gift.
Entranced, Verdance reached out and plucked the orb from its perch.
Grape.
The word came to her in a memory that she had thought forgotten of a time when the Warden of Thorns had departed Candlehold, the only Rosetta to ever do so. A time of change, albeit brief, when the blossoms had succumbed to fruit.
Before her eyes, bud after bud exploded into blossom then curled inward to form a succulent grape. Soon, the sigil was weighed down by a plentiful crop. With wonder, Verdance gazed upon the cornucopia as she rolled the berry in her fingers, luxuriating in its smooth texture, its enticing plumpness.
Taste it, murmured the rustling leaves as they shifted in the wind. Davnir’s feast.
Verdance placed the grape in her mouth, bit down and let the juice flow across her tongue.
She experienced flavors she had no words for; flavors the immortal Rosetta had no use for. Hunger had been banished when the Queen had wrapped Davnir’s essence around the forest, sealing them off from the rest of Aria.
And yet, deep in her belly, a feeling stirred.
To Verdance the grape was neither crisp nor sweet, neither tangy nor tart, for these were not words with which she was familiar.
There was but one sensation she could grasp, one flavor that breathed life into her moribund imagination.
For want of another word, to Verdance, this fruit tasted like the future.
Illustrations by Nikolay Moskvin.