Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1993 10:25:32 EST From: The Dreamer Message-ID: <93060.102532ASG102@psuvm.psu.edu> Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn Subject: [Party] Kadrys: A bed of death in a house of life. Posted on behalf of Andrea Evans The wooden staircase spiralled downward, its graceful arc built around the tree-house's colossal main taproot. Kadrys' fingers trailed absently along the hand-smoothed banisters as he descended in silence. The stairs came to an end in a short corridor with storerooms to the left and right, and a larger door at the end of the passage. Though candles and a tinderbox had been left beside the door, he did not pause to pick them up. Kadrys closed the door behind him, shutting the light out as he moved into a large room hollowed out of the living earth. In the dark the faint tightness of pain that he had been too tired to hide completely, faded from his face. His eyes roamed the room with interest, following the elegant meanderings of thousands of treeroots of all thicknesses. Their intricate lacework upheld the ceiling, formed a bas-relief webwork meshing the earthen walls. The entire room was cradled in the house-tree's twisting fibres. Only a large patch in the very centre of the floor was beyond their reach: the fan of roots that spread out from the centre of the ceiling dwindled into their terminal filaments before they could reach that far. Kadrys stripped, hanging his new clothing on short hooked branches of rootfibre that projected from the walls. He padded out toward the bared area of soil, sank to his knees in an eerily graceful gesture. He spread his hands wide and rested their palms on the earth to either side of him. His long pale fingers sank into the soil with the same strength that allows grass roots to auger into the hardest stone. His head and shoulders bowed as he allowed the bone-deep weariness to wash over him, the weariness that had been mounting in him ever since his arrival in Generica, these many months ago. He inhaled, drawing the rich scent of the freshly broken earth deep inside him. There was something almost religious, something devotional, in his kneeling posture, the weary sag of his shoulders and eyelids, the smile of quiet pleasure on his lips. 'Ahhh, what bliss it will be to rest for once without fear...' Then, his bared shoulder muscles bunched, and his clawed hands moved, pushing aside the earth, moving into it as easily as a serpent. The fading power of his body was summoned and focussed into this one last effort, and he plunged like a diver, kicking and pushing for more depth, the soft loam yielding to his inhuman strength. At length, his movements ceased. The earth closed around him, moulding itself to the hard lines of his body, cradling him more completely than any mortal's bed. Its touch, at first cold on his bare skin, grew steadily warmer to his senses as the heat of his blood ebbed away, absorbed into the soil all around him. The beating of his heart slowed, gradually, gently. His consciousness faded, drawn deeper and deeper, sinking into the eternal darkness that lies under the earth. His heart gave a final beat, and was still. As always when his body lay in its deathly rest, the bonds of the curse that bound him to his flesh were loosened for a time, and his soul was freed. He was aroused out of the gentle oblivion of his grave, by a soft yet insistent pressure whose source he could not at first understand. Then, in the darkness he was given a vision: myriads of tiny questing fibres, fine as spider-silk, extending from the surrounding tree-roots, searching toward him through the loosened soil, reaching out to encompass his corpse in a net, a silken shroud. He moved away from his abandoned body, to touch the fibres, and felt the call, the invitation intensify. Curious, accepting, he yielded and felt himself being drawn upward, out of his body, out of the earth, into the dizzying labyrinth of living, growing wood that surrounded him on all sides. Out of death he rose into a tree's dreaming life. He felt the sun, not as an endless burning ache, not as a once-deadly foe, but as a golden fount of purest life, pouring out its lavish bounty onto a lacework of green and breathing leaves. He felt the wind whisper secrets in strong, reaching branches. He remembered the moving-lives that shaped the wood, guiding the branches into balconies and verandahs, patiently hollowing out rooms from spare sections of trunk. He felt the wood resonating with the laughter and song, rebounding beneath the dancing feet, of the revellers within. Stretching his strange new perceptions to the limit, he could even sense the mayfly-sparkling thoughts of the moving-lives that had chosen the tree as their new home. He felt their happiness, their appreciation, of each other and of the tree itself, and he felt the tree return their warmth in full measure. He knew that its wood would flex to cushion their steps, that it would hoard the heat in their rooms when snow clad the world outside, that it would beckon in every summer breeze. Its leaves would lull the nights with their drowsy rustling, and it would always welcome the Shadow and the Fog into the world sheltered beneath its branches. It had even welcomed an intruding body amid the vital web of its roots, shared its perceptions with that intruder's soul.