I want no more interactions with Lotus Bludgeon.
“And he is not of the Breed,” the soldier next to Lotus comments.
“I do not enjoy chasing her. Those splits in time are getting more difficult to slip through,” I continue, assessing my equations. “And that tenebrous creature continues to aid them and taunt me!”
I have upset myself greatly at the thought of the black squalid beast.
“How did he get in here?” another soldier asks.
To acknowledge them is to feed the plague. I will grant no audience to their vermin.
“If I use the World’s Dark Twin tree branch to evade the Nightlung vermicide…”
I use the World Dark Twin tree branch sparingly, only when I come across an exuberant amount of those hellish, noctivagant Short-Haired Windilas that ride my coat tail like the obsessive pestilence they are. The sacred tree can be found three seas away, in a small quiet country called Morphollow, and is protected by generationally refined and ritualized murderers. But with my eldritch affliction of moving through time, I may appear right past their walls.
The tree contains elements, minerals, and compounds that are comparable to veins and organs of a living being. Thousands of years ago, a rare crop of black trees grew from the cinders of a war that killed both armies. Months later, a village cultivated nearby, casting out the Ashvine Family of scandal to the outskirts—forced to live in solitude among a cornfield, and the black cinder trees. The Ashvine Family had six children, four boys and two girls. The youngest sisters were not allowed to tend to the crop as they were girls, so they found purpose in caring for the strange crop of black trees. Watering them daily. Singing to their crisp, oily leaves, and praying at the base of their roots.
The village eventually hunted down the Ashvine family, slaughtering them in their sleep on a moonless evening. The Ashvine sisters hid in one of the trees as the surrounding trees were burned to the ground. They were devastated and took their own lives in front of the only tree that survived. They prayed that their sacrifice would manifest ruin and plague on the village for generations until their disgruntled spirits were satisfied.
Following their death, the roots absorbed their decay and blood—a cellular event occurred. Perhaps it was the iron from their blood that reacted with the irradiated soil, hardening the trunk in a vascular mass. Either way, the tree is said to have grown veins and disfigured organs. The bark breathes and pulses in the Nightlung, syphoning very bad people to that village. Serial killers. Rapists. Aristocrats.
It picked each villager off one by one until there was no one left.
And I have stolen a branch.
A beautiful, exquisite, glorious branch.
It summons me to the slender rift Sapphire S Valdawell leaves when she tumbles through time. It acts as a compass, a guide, a lantern in the abysmally dark Nightlung. I have prayed to it just as the Ashvine sisters have, caring and tending for it as if it is a delicate extension of myself. It has brought me joyous feelings that the branch rewards me for such devotion. The black cinder branch sends phantom sounds through the Nightlung when those Short-Haired Windilas are near, mimicking their natural predators, and other beings they fear, such as RottWeilens. I’ve seen it infect their weaker counterparts, runts of the litter.
“And I still have yet to discover all of its peculiar aptitudes!” I announce.
“Weburntrespassers,” the soldier, Lotus, warns me.
“He speaks to himself. His condition of insanity might be contagious.”
I have every intent to let their existence rot within the hollow corners of my disinterest. But Lotus touches me. Hetouchesme. His smarmy, cimicidic hand latches onto my inner elbow. That rancid breath humidifies the air I breathe, so I stop inhaling to prevent it from contaminating my lungs.
The world reacts much faster than I can. It spits on the interaction, spreads a miasmic disease that leaks from my pores, through the thin fabric of my shirt, into this flesh. The sickness is highly corrosive, drying up his veins, and carving its way into his lungs. Blood sprays from his sudden coughing fit to my face.
I waste a perfectly good handkerchief to dab at the mess.
“I now appreciate the memory of watching you asphyxiate on your own vomit seventeen years from now,” I whisper to Lotus.
The others drop to their knees from the predictable effects of my presence, defiling this timeline with my execrablewrongness.
“Now if you will excuse me, I must tend to a troublesome girl, a Valdawell—a mordacious, notorious bloodline. I saw her face many times in the vicious time loop I was trapped in as a child. And now, I am failing to obtain an audience with her.”
Even mentioning the time loop gives me pause. When I traveled out of my mother’s womb a week before she was due, I moved to an isolated beginning with a congregation that lingered in the swamps of Vexamen. They called themselves caretakers of the “unbound.” They tolerated the sickness I brought with me. The fevers. The seizures. The hours where time would stutter around my crib. They did not fear it. They documented it. Measured it. Studied me like proof of prophecy.
They listened when I spoke of the Valdawell family and agreed they were necessary to stabilizing my ability. But at the age of five, I was caught in that time loop. A side effect of attempting to return to the same moment of my mother’s pregnancy too many times. It stuttered through my like a seizure. It lasted ages. I stopped reacting like a child because reactions slowed the cycle. I learned to stay still. To observe. To wait.
I watched the same people die dozens of ways. Disease. Drowning. Murder. And the loop was drawn to the Valdawell family. Variations of their time stamps on the world. They were a perfected product of what I am. Their blood was my only hope to end these cycles and rid myself of internal plagues. To never be trapped in that loop again.
I shake off the fog of memories.
I draw my equations on their foreheads with the iridescent vial of mother’s blood I’ve accumulated from my last crusade. And the Nightlung takes my hand, granting my momentary asylum in its haunting darkness as I wait for Sapphire S Valdawell to travel again.
And she will…
