The Vampire & Her Witch Chapter 1998: The Rot Within (Part One)

Ashlynn woke to the sound of water dripping on leaves. Like a quiet forest after a long rain, the air was filled with the sound of dozens of droplets falling on leaves that were just wide enough to catch them.

When she opened her eyes, she was greeted by the sight of a towering olive tree, easily thirty feet tall with a trunk wider than her outstretched arms.

There was nothing else. No forest, no sky, no horizon. Just the tree, and a pale grey mist that pressed in close on every side, along with the soft ground beneath her bare feet.

The ground was wrong. It gave beneath her weight like a sodden mattress, and when Ashlynn shifted her feet, the earth let out a moist -squelch- that she had heard once before, in a bed in Lothian City. Mud welled up between her toes. Warm mud instead of the chill of a forest floor after the rain.

-twap-

A drop landed on the back of her hand. Ashlynn lifted it toward the grey light and watched in horror as the droplet rolled slowly between her knuckles, leaving a thin red line behind it.

-twap- -twap- -twap-

The dripping came from high up in the tree where the branches of the tree’s crown had twisted and wrapped around the body of a woman who Ashlynn had loved and cherished since the day she was born.

The sides of her seafoam skirts had been dyed red with the blood that spilled from Jocelynn’s wrists, and a strangely contented smile lingered on her lips as she gazed down at Ashlynn with drowsy, drooping eyes.

Thin branches, no thicker than a sailmaker’s needle, threaded in and out of her arms. In through the skin above her wrist, out through the soft flesh inside her elbow, in again at her shoulder, as though she’d been stitched into the tree itself.

As Ashlynn watched, one of the branches moved. It slid forward a finger’s width through Jocelynn’s arm, slow and patient, the way a root creeps through soil, and a fresh bead of blood swelled where it emerged.

Jocelynn didn’t flinch. She didn’t even look down.

"It’s all right, Ash," Jocelynn said weakly. "It’s better like this. I deserve to die..."

"No, you don’t!" Ashlynn shouted, rushing toward her sister. "You deserve a chance to live. To stay with me and..."

"Don’t worry," a cold, almost emotionless copy of Ashlynn’s voice said as a bark-skinned doppelganger appeared to block her path. "I won’t let your sister die," the Olive Seed said with a confident expression on a wooden replica of Ashlynn’s face.

It was her face. The curve of her cheek, the line of her jaw, even the small crease that formed between her brows when she worried, all of it carved in pale, close-grained olive wood. But where her emerald eyes should have been, there were only two dark hollows that went back much, much further than any head could hold.

When Ashlynn stopped, the doppelganger stopped. When she drew a breath, its wooden chest rose a heartbeat later with the creak of a green branch bending. It wore her face, and mimicked her movements precisely.

"You see how she bleeds?" the Olive Seed asked, pointing up at the blood flowing from the wounds on Jocelynn’s wrists. "Look," it said, pointing at the slick, red surface of the tree’s bark where the blood flowed down from the branches to the trunk and finally to the olive tree’s gnarled roots.

"Her blood nourishes the tree," the Olive Seed explained. "And the tree nourishes her," it said, pointing at several smaller branches that had pierced Jocelynn’s tender flesh. "One endless cycle. Alive and in agony for as long as you are the Mother of Trees."

"Let her go," Ashlynn commanded, pouring everything she was into the words. It was the same commanding tone that made ancient trees bow their boughs and seedlings stretch toward her hands. "I am the Mother of Trees, and you will obey my desires!"

Overhead, the crown of the olive tree rustled. The branches shifted. Then, with a wet, grinding sound, they tightened, and the breath left Jocelynn’s body in a small, soft huff, like a sleeper rolling over in bed.

"I am listening," the Olive Seed said, tilting its wooden head at exactly the angle Ashlynn tilted hers when she was puzzled. "I have always listened. You told me what you desired on all those long nights while I nestled against your heart. You fed me again and again, nourishing me with your wishes for retribution. You just never used those words because you didn’t dare to speak them aloud."

"I never wanted this," Ashlynn protested.

"You can’t lie to your own heart," the Olive Seed responded. "It’s useless to pretend that you didn’t yearn for this."

"Of course," the Olive Seed added, holding out a long-handled woodsman’s ax. "If you want to put an end to her suffering, you can. That power has always been yours, and you knew it when you wrote your last letter to her. Cut her down. Set her free if you can’t bear to see her like this."

"If I cut her down, she’ll die," Ashlynn said, refusing to touch the ax. "Whether I cut the branches away or take her head, the outcome wouldn’t be any different."

"True," the Olive Tree said, smiling at Ashlynn as she came to accept the truth. "It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? She’ll suffer until you’re satisfied, and then you, and only you, can decide when it ends. Until then, I’ll keep her just like this..."

In the tree, Jocelynn didn’t look like she was suffering. No matter how much she bled, or how tightly the branches held her, she looked like she was... content.

No. Content was the wrong word for it. She looked resigned. Like she had accepted this as the only outcome she could arrive at. She wasn’t struggling; she wasn’t fighting. She just passively accepted the torment.

"I have a better idea," Ashlynn said, reaching out to take the ax from the Olive Seed.

For a moment, the weapon felt heavy in her hands. It had a weight that went far beyond simple wood and iron, encompassing everything that the ax was meant to represent. Her hatred for Jocelynn and her merciful love as well. All of it, packed into the one implement that could end it all. Even her nameless darksteel falchion couldn’t have compared to the weight of the ax she held now.

Then the ax spun in her hands as she swung, using all of the strength she’d gained from her pact with Nyrielle to cleave through the neck of the wooden Ashlynn in front of her and send the doppelganger’s head tumbling to the ground.

The blade bit through the wooden neck with the dull -THOCK- of an ax striking green timber, and the head landed in the warm mud with a soft, wet sound. It rolled once before coming to rest face up, its empty hollows staring at the grey sky.

Beside her, the body didn’t fall.

It stood exactly where it had been standing, one wooden hand still extended where it had offered her the ax, while dark sap welled up from the stump of its neck and ran down its bark-skinned chest in slow, glossy ribbons.

It smelled like blood.

"I refuse to be limited by the choices you offer," Ashlynn said, dropping the ax at her feet before crossing the last few steps between her and the bloody olive tree.

"Fight your way free of this, Jocey," Ashlynn said, reaching out to touch the tree trunk through the slick, red blood. "Fight for it, and I’ll always fight for you," she promised.

Behind her, she heard the sound of creaking wood.

When Ashlynn looked back, the severed head had turned in the mud to face her, though nothing had touched it. Its lips were moving. Wood ground against wood as the jaw worked, and the voice that came out of it was still her own voice, perfectly calm, as if nothing at all had happened to it.

"It doesn’t matter if you fight for her," the severed head of the Olive Seed mocked Ashlynn from the ground. "You can fight anything. Your determination rivals the Mother of Forests. You push past limits that wiser people would ignore. You refuse to yield. You refused to die, even when you’d been buried in your grave."

"But Jocelynn isn’t you," the Olive Seed taunted her. "She doesn’t have your resolve. She’s rotten from the inside," the seed said, moments before an anguished cry pulled Ashlynn’s attention back to her sister...