The Vampire & Her Witch Chapter 1999: The Rot Within (Part Two)

An anguished cry pulled Ashlynn’s attention back to her sister.

A branch had pierced Jocelynn’s chest.

It didn’t stab her like a sharpened stick. Instead, it pushed slowly, the way a root pushes through stone, finding the soft places and widening them. Jocelynn’s cry was thin and high and short, and then it stopped, and the silence afterward was worse.

Around the branch, her skin began to change. The color drained out of it, leaving it grey, then the mottled grey-brown of a log left too long on the forest floor. It split along fine lines like old bark. Something pale and frilled pushed out through the cracks. The soft, ruffled shelves of fungus that grew on dead trees in the wet season, blooming across her collarbone in a ring of pallid, rubbery flesh.

Then it crumbled.

Her chest fell away in damp, soft clumps, flesh and bone alike, as easily as rotten wood breaks apart beneath a boot. The pieces tumbled through the branches and landed in the mud at Ashlynn’s feet with a sound like wet clothing dropped by the door. Then the smell rolled down over her. The cloying sweetness of rot and sodden leaves, and something underneath it that Ashlynn had smelled only once before at the bottom of her own grave.

Inside the hollow where Jocelynn’s chest had been, her heart hung in a cradle of thin white roots.

It was small. Far too small. Shriveled and dark and wrinkled like an olive left too long to dry in the sun, it barely moved. Ashlynn watched it squeeze once. Then, after far too long, again. Each beat pushed out a single sluggish bead of blood, and the roots drank it before it could fall.

"Ash..." Jocelynn whispered. Her lips had turned grey, but they were still smiling. "Sorry... I told you..." Jocelynn said before her eyes started to drift closed. "I deserve..." she said, her voice trailing off before she could finish the sentence.

"Once the rot has taken hold, even you can’t make the wood strong again, Ashlynn," the Olive Seed declared. "You might live forever alongside your vampire lover, but the rest of the world still marches onward toward death. It’s part of life. Putting pressure on rotten wood only makes it crumble faster."

Behind Ashlynn, the headless body took a step. Then another. Its wooden feet made no sound in the mud as it came to stand at her shoulder, close enough that she felt a cool, damp breath against the back of her neck, though it no longer had a mouth to breathe with.

"You could still use the ax," the head offered from the mud. "It would be quick. Quicker than she deserves. Isn’t that right, Jocelynn?"

Up in the branches, Jocelynn’s grey lips moved.

"It would be quick," she echoed softly.

"You’re wrong," Ashlynn insisted, grasping hold of the dream the same way she’d learned how to shape dreams when she shared them with Nyrielle. "You’re wrong and you’re lying," she said as emerald light filled her eyes.

The dream fought her.

The mist thickened, pressing in until it beaded on her skin like sweat. The warm mud sucked at her feet, and pale roots slid up out of it to coil around her ankles, gentle and insistent, the way a sleeper’s arms wrap around a pillow. A wooden hand settled on her shoulder from behind.

Ashlynn tore free. The mist ripped like wet linen in her grip, and for one instant, the grey world around the olive tree went still.

In her hands, Ashlynn summoned two balls of brilliant emerald flames, pouring all of her remaining strength and power into the heat of her witchfire.

It hurt.

Here, in the dream, where the seed had once pried open her ribs and left her feeling nothing at all, the fire hurt. She could feel it drawing from the same well she had emptied into Ritchel only hours ago, scraping at the very bottom of it. The crescent wounds in her palms split open again, and blood ran down her wrists, hissing into steam before it could fall.

Fire wasn’t her strongest element, but it was far from her weakest, and the heat of her flames made the air around her dance and shimmer as she hurled the flames high into the branches of the Olive Tree where it held her sister captive.

-WHOOOOM!-

The emerald flames exploded with a roar like a hungry bear, engulfing the crown of the tree and Jocelynn along with it.

-CRACK!- -POP!- -HSSSSSSSS!-

Green wood shrieked as the sap inside it boiled. The branches writhed in the flames like the limbs of a living thing, and for a moment they clutched Jocelynn even tighter, as if the tree meant to hold onto her while it burned.

Then came the smell. Burning leaves, sharp and green, then hair, then something heavier and sweeter beneath it, like fat dripping from a roasting spit.

Jocelynn didn’t scream.

Through the roaring emerald flames, Ashlynn could see her sister’s face. The skin of her cheeks tightened and darkened and drew back from her teeth, and still her eyes found Ashlynn’s and held them.

"Thank you," Jocelynn said as the flames consumed her, turning her flesh black and brittle before it flaked away. "Thank you, Ash..." she said before the last of her flesh fell away, leaving behind nothing but charred bones hanging from burnt branches.

Ash drifted down from the crown like grey snow. It settled in Ashlynn’s hair and on her lashes, and on the upturned face of the severed head in the mud, which didn’t even blink.

"And how is that supposed to be any different from cutting her down?" The Olive Seed asked as Ashlynn knelt at the base of the Olive Tree.

"You burned her," the head added pleasantly from the mud. "I only held her. You burned her, Ashlynn. Remember that you made that choice"

"It’s different because you’re an olive tree," Ashlynn said, ignoring the seed as she poured pure, emerald power into the tree’s roots. "Because this isn’t enough to destroy you. Just enough to burn away the rot," she said, using the tree’s own words against it.

"The road ahead of Jocey is hard, and it’s going to be painful," Ashlynn acknowledged. "She’ll have to face the flames of her own trial. But as long as she persists, new shoots will grow," she said as several tender new branches with bright green leaves began to emerge from the charred and blackened bark.

"Eventually, given time, she can come back from this," Ashlynn said, smiling as she watched the tender shoots wrapping around Jocelynn’s bones, weaving together to reform her flesh.

It wasn’t gentle. The shoots threaded through the empty sockets of her sister’s skull and wound around her jaw, and fine white roots spread across the blackened bones like frost creeping over a windowpane, binding, pulling tight. Ribs creaked as they were drawn back together. Inside the new cage of green wood, something wet and red swelled into shape and began, haltingly, to beat.

Once.

Then again, sooner this time.

"That’s your real job," Ashlynn told the Olive Seed. "To give her the time she needs to find her way back. The time we both need to heal from the hurt. You seem to have forgotten that," Ashlynn scolded the seed as the dream began to fade.

"But I intend to remind you," Ashlynn promised, picking up the severed head of the wooden Ashlynn and looking directly into the dark hollows where its eyes should have been. "I might not be able to fight Jocey’s battles for her. She has to find a way to fight for herself. But however long that takes, I intend to give her the time, and you’re going to help," she said before letting go of the head and the dream along with it.

The head slipped from her fingers and landed among the ashes. As the grey mist rose to swallow the olive tree, the last thing Ashlynn saw was that wooden face, lying in the mud, its lips still moving around words she chose not to hear.