Kudzu Flower

A girl is lost and alone in the Wood. She has no name, no family, no village. Not anymore. They are dead to her, and she to them. To the world, she is but detritus sunk to the forest's floor, awaiting inexorable demise at the jaws of some thing bigger than her. But she runs; because that is all there is left for her to do. Away. Towards. She does not know which it is, but the movement seizes her like levin, coursing painfully through her limbs and squeezing mercilessly around her gasps for breath.She runs and runs for as long as she can, but the Wood is ever dark, ever deep. She runs until the trees are so tall, the vines so dense, that the canopy is beyond sight. Sun does not reach the cool, black moss that grows here. It is softer against her feet than the underbrush from which she has come, but she knows that it is poison, and so she does not stop. Her lungs ache and her heart thuds stone-like in her chest.When she stops, it is so dark. So quiet. Never in her life has the girl been so alone; so apart from the world. The crickets do not chirp here. The cicadas do not sing. There are no birds. Here there is only blackness. The damp, dank smell of mold and tepid peat more ancient than the monstrous monoliths of stone-like wood that grow from it. Here, in this void of voids, this stench is her only company, and though it curls her nose from its acridity, she finds comfort in it all the same. It does not know her. It does not demand to be known: it simply is. And so the girl lies down across this bed of lichen and old bones and when at last the world is still and silent she cries. She cries and cries and cries until there is no more left to give, until her heart gives way and her claws grasp for something, anything, to hold onto.The earth is soft beneath her; like old flesh, rotted through, it breaks beneath force of hand, and so she sinks deeper, deeper, until moss and loam have swallowed her. Peace, she knows, has come at last; it is a bed for her and only her, and as She pulls the blanket of deepest, darkest forest over her crumpled form, the girl closes her eyes to sleep and, mercifully, it comes. Then she, too, is part of the Deep Wood.That is when She speaks to her. It is quiet at first; barely a whisper, a shade of a thing so pale and abstract it may well be nothing at all. But it persists, and the girl knows: in that damp, dark stillness, She is with her. She is alone, but so is She.They do not speak in the words of her people or the tongues of men; they have no need for them. They speak in streaks of luminescence through the darkness. They speak in the sighs and groans of old, dead, loose earth that sways with the currents of wind that pull at the treetops so far, far above them. They speak in the slither of snakes and showers of spores and in the rattle of wet, forgotten bones; in the chitter of a fox that stalks among them, gnawing at flesh long decayed. They speak in the absence of sun and moon. They speak in the passage of time.A vine grows from the black moss and old, dead earth; wiry, sable, resilient. Curious. Hungry. It probes at long dead bones, consumes the great, stony trees studded throughout the abyss. It takes their shape. A stygian weave creeps across the deep dark, hungry to feel, hungry to know. Hungry to be. Outward it spreads, desperate for purchase, ilm after ilm, fulm after fulm, malm after malm.When the vine is first tread upon by the people of the Wood, it remembers their shape. It remembers, too, the shape of their hate. The shape of their malice. They are wary of it, this black vine that swallows the trees. An ill omen. A curse. It grows with such zeal, such purpose; it grows faster than blade and fire can hope to match. And so they allow it; because they must. There is no other way. The Wood has Her will, and it is to grow. Who are they to deny it? So they flee. They abandon their homes, and leave her only their empty huts.But that is not enough. Always, the vine remembers the shape of their hate. It will know the taste of it, too. It is so very, very hungry.From the stygian vine, a flower blooms; with petals like tall, lovely ears and a blossom like dark, beautiful hair. A vixen chitters. A woman laughs. The shape of her hate.The shape of a girl no longer.