“If you can talk to them, can you ask them what they want?”
My attention narrowed on a single word: if.
If I could talk to them. If I was telling the truth. My eyes bored into the stallion for a long moment. It was a cold, indignant, measuring stare. He moved to stand in front of me, and I rolled my eyes at this dramatic gesture. Like I was a babe in need of protecting. Furfur didn’t notice-- his eyes were pressed to the flowers and his hackles had begun to rise..
I frowned at this but didn’t think much of it. How foolish I was! I turned to the sunflowers and lowered my head respectfully. “Excuse me flowers. My name is Aspara. Um, what exactly is it you want?”
A silence fell upon us. It was the kind that makes you feel cold, somehow. Like it isn’t just a silence but an emptiness, and beneath its oppressive weight all the heat of life is smothered. Then the flowers twitched in the silent breeze and-- how do I describe it?-- the soil beneath us suddenly felt... funny. Tense. “we want magic,” they whispered, and this time when they began to laugh there was a sharp edge to the sound. Some vile wanting that came from deep, deep within the earth.
Did the stallion hear them this time? I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t particularly want to translate the message. I had magic. A bounty of it. But it was mine.
“I think we should go.” My voice was hushed, but level and even. An eerie sort of calm had seized me. (Later I would wonder at that calm and how easy it came to me. I felt like a counterbalance to the world around me-- I was wild when the world was placid, and placid when the world was wild.) I raised my voice to say “Well, it was a pleasure to meet you. Thank you very much, flowers.”
A few things happened very quickly as soon as I took a step backward.
First, the earth trembled. Furfur seemed to double in size even as he hunched low low low, a bone-rumbling growl bursting from behind snarled teeth.
Second, the sunflowers were no longer sunflowers. They wilted and died and then their brown, brittle limbs transformed. Knifelike thorns erupted from their sides, and between them strange brown eyes took shape. Their roots grew huge and gnarled and ugly, bursting through the skin of the earth like veins. A frantic sound caught in my throat, a sound I’d never made before.
Third, there were vines-- no, roots-- which shot up from the ground beneath us and snaked around my hind legs. Furfur instantly latched his teeth to one and I was slicing at the other with the sharp curl of my horn. I was not paying much attention to the stallion next to me, but from my periphery I saw more roots rising and a slim blade slashing.
- - -
@Sarkan <3
