I shoved Devin’s life away from me, deep underground, dismantling it as I worked, ripping, tearing. The process was slow and purposeful as I fed him to the earth, my mind focused. Aboveground, I burned. The pain my body was experiencing, I ignored. I was on fire, but I couldn’t care. I pulled other salamanders to me, breaking them, bleeding the adults and the tadpoles into the earth. Pulling each body to pieces, each bone and muscle and tendon. Undoing each cell. The life force, alien, strange, fed the land. The flames in the dark slid below me, scratching at me as they went, screaming deep into the dark beneath. Feeding them deeper.
My awareness spread out, to the trees and grasses and shrubs all around. I claimed them, feeding the creatures of fire into them, awakening them, giving them life. What was left of the blue-blooded things, I pushed all deep.Deep. Into the magma I had called to the surface by accident. The salamanders screamed, reached back. They fought. All of them in a single concerted assault. But the magma and the earth wanted the heat that was salamander.Salamanders. All of them. All that rich, strong, potent blue blood and alien life. I fed them to the earth. I fed them to avenge Occam. To avenge his death. I fed and fed. And I learned how feeding truly worked. It was a gift of myself, as much as a sacrifice of blood.
When the salamanders were gone, I reached back to Soulwood and found the walled-off prison that hid and protected Brother Ephraim. I fashioned a blue spear out of the remaining life force of the salamanders and I thrust it into the cell that hid and protected and imprisoned Ephraim. Pointed and sharp, edged and spiked, like a two-edged sword, it slid through the cell wall. The Bible verse came back at me as I pulled back and rammed the pointed edge again into the protective wall.For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
That was what I needed. Something that would divide Ephraim’s soul and spirit and joints and marrow. I hadn’t prayed to God very often, not since I’d killed the first man on Soulwood. Not really. Not with need. But now... Now I was avenger and death come calling, and I refashioned the spear into a sword of light and heat. I shouted to the heavens, “Death to Ephraim for the evils of his heart! I claim him for the earth! Death! Death! Until nothing is left for heaven or hell!”
Ephraim gathered the scarlet and black energies into himself. The snakelike power whipped and whirled and began to form a point, a weapon.
The blade of vengeance sliced back and forth through the walls of Brother Ephraim’s prison. I stabbed and cut and ripped into the cavern. Into his snake-energies. Ephraim tried to resist, tried to pull power from the earth, from the church and the tree that shared my genetics. But the sword of vengeance was faster and hotter. Heated by the earth and by the magma that was mine to call. And I sliced into the foul old man’s soul, cutting, cutting, dissolving each sliver of life into separate components—individual thoughts, needs, hopes, memories—and fed them to the heart of the world. This time I didn’t stop too soon. This time I gave myself as I tore and cut and ripped and fed, fed,fedBrother Ephraim to the land until there was nothing left.
Then I tore apart the cavern he had made for his life force.Dismantled the walls, the emptiness, the death he had surrounded himself with. And I cut through the tendrils he had once again sent down into the church land. To the vampire tree. I sliced and destroyed the vine-like coils and shoots of himself that he had sent into the tree. Not hurting the tree itself, but destroying the roots and vines where Ephraim’s life had touched it, had shaped it. He had taken over the tree, turning it into a death tree. He had done this and I hadn’t noted it, hadn’t understood.
When nothing was left of Ephraim or his prison or his control of the vampire tree, I turned my attention back to the land where my burned body lay.
Entwining my energies with the roots and trees nearby, I fed them. Pulled their energies in, replacing the death of the land around me with life. Soulwood stretched out and joined in the battle against the fire, sending groundwater up toward the surface, engulfing the roots, protecting them. The warmth and love and joy of my land entwined with my own soul. Together we communicated goodness and health and strength to the trees all around me, bringing the burned land and all that still contained a spark of life to fecund, flourishing, abundant health.
Life, green and full of all good things, burst forth.
Feeding it, I claimed the land.
I felt it when roots grew into and from my body and plunged deep. I felt it when they rose again and burst through the crust of dead grass and sprouted new trees. Felt it when the trees sprouted leaves out of season. Felt them grow tall and strong. Grass and vines and flowering plants followed. The land came alive. It pulled me into it. It enfolded me. And the pain of burning I hadn’t even noticed vanished. I leafed out. I grew.
Yes,I whispered to the land, to the trees.Grow. Live.
•••
Much, much later, after the full moon had waxed and waned, I felt the vibrations of footsteps, footsteps I had once known. And... ahhh. Soul. Soul, in human form, walked across thenew leaves and grasses growing atop the crisped and charred land to me. I felt her kneel beside me. Felt her touch on my side. But I couldn’t come back to her. I was part of the earth now. I was part of this land. Here there was no fear or grief. No worry or pain. Here I would stay. I felt Soul move away.
•••
Sun fell upon me. Rain watered me. Moon rose and fell, waxed and waned and waxed again. Birds perched on me. My forest grew. My trees grew. Grasses and shrubs and deer and rabbits. Foxes. A family of bear. I was alive. I was the land and it was me. Soulwood was part of us and roots thrust deep. The land was alive with me.
•••
Moons later, when the days had grown longer and the earth had warmed with spring, I again felt Soul return, this time not alone. There were others with her, tromping on the earth, between the saplings and mature trees that were my land. There were humans and were-creatures and a witch and they gathered about me. And... there was a creature like me.
Some part of my understanding woke. I understood what Soul had done. She had brought with her the sentient creatures that my former self knew. There were two in animal form, one which belonged to me, which I had claimed.Rick LaFleur. That was what this one was called. Black were-leopard. He had died. But he had died on land I claimed. And I had... I had given the land a great portion of the salamanders’ life force, but I had kept something back. With it, with the help of Soulwood, he had been healed.
Rick draped himself across my body. Purring. His claws extruded and pressed into the wood that I had become. He milked the wood, claws in and out, pricking me as a woodpecker might, though there were no insects within me.
Occam pressed beside him. Occam had died as well, and I had shared the land with him. I had claimed him as I had claimed the trees. He was mine. He laid his cat across my roots and he shifted into his other form. His human form.He was different, disfigured, scarred from the salamanders’ fire. I had not been able to save him from all the damage.
T. Laine, moon witch. Soul herself. Tandy, empath, whose thoughts were clear to me. He missed me. He wanted my old self back. JoJo, who was human and silent and perhaps... appalled at my new form.
And Mud, sister of my mother’s body. She was like me. She was part of the land.
Mud placed her hand upon my form and said, “Nell, come back. I’m callin’ you’un back.” She pressed her fingernails into the wood that had once been my shoulder and said, “Come back. Come backnow.” She shoved Rick out of the way and pressed herself onto the wooden shape that was all that was left of the human I had never been.
Mud’s strength. Her life. Hergreennessreached out to me. Her life force was strong and dancing, the way buttercups danced in a summer wind. The way tree limbs beat against the sky in a spring storm. And she watered my wood.
“You’un need to come back,” she wailed. “You’un need to teach me. And you’un got to deal with the vampire tree. It’s growing to your’n land. It’s lookin’ for you’un, putting up sprouts everywhere, between the church’s gate and the cliff to Soulwood. If’n you don’t come back, Sam’s gonna set something he calls C-4 on the tree and explode it. Or poison the land to stop it. But I don’t want it to die. It’s special, or it can be, if’n you’un’ll finish what you started.” Softer, she said, “I need you, Nellie. I’m scared. And I’m alone. And I’m afeared they’s gonna give me away, no matter what I do.” Wetness fell upon my bark and my bare wood. She watered me. She watered my wood.
Tears.Mud was crying. For me. For herself.
Daddy had been sick. Daddy had been failing and growing close to death. Daddy might be dead... If he was gone, then no one stood between the churchmen and Mud. They would force her... force her to marry one of them.
I tore my arm, with its roots, out of the earth and reached around. Clasped Mud’s body to me. With my other hand, I reached up and tore my jaw free of the roots that bound meto the earth. “Cut me free,” I said, the words grinding as sand on stone. “Cut me free of the land. Take me to Soulwood.”
