by SJ Fleming
“There’s...there’s a thing I’m...really struggling with. I was in the Undergrowth, and I... I found this...relic.” She paused, waiting for the response.
Go on, she heard.
“It’s, uh... the Woundmender calls them an Iron One. They’re...made of metal and...and ceram-I mean, polymer. I woke them up after three hundred years,”
You waited that long? He said. Willow snorted, and shook her head, correcting herself.
“She had been waiting there three hundred years…and... I feel like I should help her. That’s only fair, right? Help someone if you got them into their current situation.”
Sound’s like you’ve been talking to them quite a bit.
Willow nodded and sighed. “Yeah, I have. It’s...she’s nice. Really nice. Always wants to help, doesn’t really...doesn’t really know much about how things work, but she’s always willing to learn.”
Go on, tell me about her. I want to hear what you think.
“She’s...just...really nice, and she’s pretty. Like, she’s silver and white, and really detailed. She looks...really human. Her face moves like a person’s. I can see when she’s happy, or sad.”
Like a person’s?
“Yeah...I... she’s close enough. If it wasn’t for the...metal, I wouldn’t be able to tell.”
What’s the difference? She sounds like a full person to me, if a bit of a weird one.
Willow didn’t respond. She was caught off-guard, a part of her was a bit offended (though she didn’t know why), a part of her was trying to understand what Kael meant, and a part that dominated over both of them understood he was completely right. She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. Suzy wasn’t like a person. She was a person. She was a person, and that meant she more than deserved to come up from the Undergrowth. It meant she more than deserved the right to live, to be happy, to exist somewhere other than the corpse of a world she once knew.
Kael dissipated, slowly. It wasn’t that he was offended by her silence, or that there was some tension between them. Their conversation was simply done, and it was now up to her to make the choices. If she needed help, she’d contact him again. But this was in her hands now. Only she could move forward.
But...who to ask? Who could she talk to? She trusted Kael. In matters like this, he could be relied upon. But everyone else? Willow wasn’t sure.
Her heart sank. Nothing about this seemed easy. It was like she couldn’t actually make a difference. She felt like a fly caught in a sundew. Every move would make the situation worse. There didn’t seem to be any middle ground that saved both of them.
If nothing else, however, Willow could try. She’d need to be careful, choose who she’d talk to about this, and try to keep everything under wraps if she could. Woundmender was the one person she knew for sure she couldn’t trust to speak about this. At least, that was her first thought. Then she thought that maybe, just maybe, she could convince him. But...that didn’t seem like the best first step.
She found herself sitting on the bank of the stream, mindlessly chucking debris into it. Profound emptiness consumed her. Her chest felt vacant, her heart hollow, her body cold.
“What’s wrong, Willow?” A sweet, smooth voice caught her attention. She looked to her side, and saw the Treesinger, Juniper. She was an older woman, with deep laugh lines and a bent back. She sat down beside Willow and stuck her feet in the water. “You seem a little upset.”
“I…” Willow paused, her words getting caught in her throat. She tried to force them out. They stuck like burrs, spiked, barbed, refusing to move. Juniper put her hand on Willow’s shoulder. Willow took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She felt herself get a little lighter. A confirmation that no one else was around, or at least, no one else was listening, was enough to calm her down just enough to talk.
“Do you ever feel stuck between what’s right, and what the community wants?”
“All the time, dear. What’s got you in that position?”
Willow explained the situation, keeping her voice low and pausing to gauge Juniper’s reaction far too often. She was told to keep going with a quick nod and nothing else. Juniper listened to Willow through all the backpedalling, corrections, clarifications, and meandering that Willow did. Willow was trying to make the situation sound as favourable for her as she could. Willow could tell that Juniper saw through it. She was gathering a more accurate version, based on Willow’s reactions to her own story. Juniper was good at reading people like that.
After all was said and done, Juniper reached into her pack, and pulled out a small ceramic pot. Inside was a loosely-woven cloth bag, open on one end. She pulled a few leaves from the bag, chewing on them slowly.
“Well,” she said between chews. “You mentioned that you spoke to the Woundmender. What’s he think?”
“That she’s dangerous and that I should avoid her.”
“Does your experience with Susi,” she stumbled over the name without realizing it, and Willow didn’t bother correcting her, “seem to indicate that he is right?”
“No.”
“Then don’t listen to the Woundmender. Personal experience speaks much louder than the opinions of others who have little in the way of context but a lot in the way of answers.”
Willow felt the weight in her chest lift, the strange empty-yet-heavy feeling fading away in favour of relief. She turned to face Juniper, and let out a gentle sigh. Her mind cleared a little, and her thoughts turned to Suzy getting up from the Undergrowth.
“Do…” Willow’s throat closed up again, the feeling of spikes and barbs returning with a vengeance. “Do you think I should try and get Suzy up here?”
“No, I don’t,” Juniper said with a brutal bluntness. The words struck Willow like a maul, smashing the air out of her. Juniper looked at Willow, closely studying her. Willow tried to cover her face. She put her hands across her eyes, hiding the tears forming in their corners. Juniper saw right through it, and put her hand on Willow’s shoulder.
“I mean…” Juniper sighed. “I’ll talk to the others about it. I’ve always been a lot more open than...some people here. I don’t know if I’d be against or for it until I met her, right? I’ll see what the other Treesingers think. If this comes to a Commune, then it’ll be better to have all the Treesingers behind you than just me. Don’t take any drastic actions.”
“You could have just said that first,” Willow let out a half-chuckle. “You gave me a…” she trailed off.
“Come over to tea later, alright?” Juniper smiled and stood up. “I need to go and look after some of the plants. That poor Springleaf I’m growing has decided to go on and get sick on me. Might need someone to go get me some more seeds from Purewater,” she said.
Willow assumed that it was a suggestion for her to make the trek out to Purewater and deal with those people. She stopped herself from refusing outright before she had even been formally asked, though. Didn’t want to make her dislike of them too apparent, given they were the closest Stamen around.
Of course, it’s not like that dislike was unfounded. She had nearly been killed last time she went, and she still swore that the worker dropped his axe on purpose.
But hey, on the upside, Juniper seemed a bit supportive. Maybe this wouldn’t be such a lost cause. She wasn’t exactly a chessmaster (she hadn’t even played chess) when it came to this whole “gathering support and politicking” thing, but Juniper was.
The entire thing had made her...nervous, anxious, scared to the point of breaking out into sweat. Her entire body felt dirty. Either it was just the activity of the day having distracted her from the fact she had been crawling around the Undergrowth for a few days, or it was some deeper, psychological thing.
Probably the first.
Definitely the first.
She waded into the river, and dunked her head under. It was cold, almost icy. Her muscles seized as she forced herself underwater, and there she stayed for a few seconds, wiping away the days of work she had let pile
up. When she couldn’t take the cold anymore, she rushed out of the river.
Shivers wracked her body as she made her way to her Hollow. At least she was clean. Practically tripping inside, she made sure the door was secured tightly. There were still a few places where light peeked through, holes in the door or places where resin had been used to fill the gaps.
She changed quickly, squeezing as much water out of her skirt as she could before finding her spare. The spare was a lot more intricate than the other, with little patterns and designs embroidered in, beads woven in and tassels hanging around the bottom. It fit around her waist nicely, sitting comfortably. The other, the one she wore for work, was quite a bit rougher, but also quite a bit more durable.
And, because she was cold, she put on her cloak too. It wasn’t some grand, thick quilt like she had seen some other Gaians with. It was simple, passed from her mother to her, thin and a bit too small for her. But it was good enough. She wrapped herself up as best she could and left her Hollow.
The day passed slowly, even slower than normal in the summer. It was full of Willow trying to distract herself from the thoughts tumbling about in her head, trying to get a handle on her own emotions, followed by completely failing to do so. Blank stares off into space as her brain betrayed her, stumbling about with an otherwise basic task. She could feel the eyes of everyone on her. Watching her. Judging her failures. Trying to…no, they weren’t doing that.
Her mind was overblowing everything. It had to be. Everything was being made out to be a mountain, when nothing was that serious yet. No one was judging her, no one stared. She just…needed to calm down. That was all. She repeated the mantra of ‘calm down, Willow’ every time those thoughts emerged.
It didn’t help.
Tea with Juniper that evening was awkward and mostly silent. The two of them ate and drank, trying to avoid the awkwardness that their previous conversation had allowed in. Small talk here and there, as they tried to maneuver their way through the evening.
“Did you hear about what happened in the Canopy?” Juniper asked.
“No, what?”
“Something fell from the sky, smashed right into Flowermeadow. No one was hurt, thank the spirits, but everyone’s trying to figure out what it was. Spiritsinger there’s calling it a curse from the ancestors, but they call everything there a curse from the ancestors.”
“That’s…that’s weird. Any idea of what it was?”
“Big, white, and looks like it’s mostly metal. Why?”
“I’ll ask Su…I mean, I was just curious,” she bit her tongue hard, an unconscious act of self-mortification. “I was thinking that maybe they could make some use of it.”
Juniper nodded, apparently playing along with Willow’s misstep. “I doubt it. Yggdrasil herself could start growing metal and they’d still start calling its use unnatural. You know how the Flowermeadowers are.”
“I do,” Willow said, never having visited Flowermeadow. Only heard rumours here and there, the odd telling of a story that exaggerated the negative and made them all out to be fundamentalists and luddites. Of course, she didn’t want to go the twenty kilometers needed there and back just to check if a rumour was true. She had more than enough responsibility here.
She seemed to hold herself responsible for a lot of things these days. Between the feelings of duty to the Stamen, responsibility for getting Suzy in the current situation, and the need to get her out of it, she felt like she was being pulled in too many directions at once. Like each of her limbs had been bound and pulled, stretching her out until she couldn’t take it anymore.
After tea, Willow went to sleep. It was an uneasy rest. Every noise seemed to wake her up, every position was uncomfortable. When morning came, she was more tired than when she had lay down.
Willow stumbled out of her Hollow, realized she had forgotten her pack, went back inside, and stumbled back out again. The rest of the Stamen was just waking up, so she was able to slip out without anyone raising a concern about it.
She went past the vine, went well away from the Stamen, down the path the branches. They got narrower and narrower, until they were just barely wide enough for her to feel comfortable. She looked down at the pits of the Undergrowth. Hundreds of feet, at least, if she slipped. Six inches of wiggle room on each side. If there wasn’t any damp moss climbing the side of the branch. Precarious seemed too weak a word.
And yet she went forwards, until she got to a sharp rise that flattened out a little. She climbed up, and found herself in somewhat unfamiliar territory. Not because she had never been there, but because it had changed.
Someone had gone around, rearranging things and changing something that was once immutable to Willow’s mind. Whoever had done it was meticulous, careful, cleaning up everything they could. Willow had a sinking suspicion as to who had done it.
But…that was ridiculous, right? Suzy couldn’t have climbed the rope herself. She wasn’t…light enough. That much metal had to be heavy, even if she was a lot smaller than Willow. Surely, she hadn’t climbed all the way up.
Willow sat down, trying to figure out who else could have come by. If not Suzy, then who? No one else from the Stamen came by here, at least as far as she knew. And the next closest one was in the complete opposite direction.
A shuffling sound came from nearby. Willow instinctively reached from her pack, for the springleaf. She relaxed a little bit after realizing she wasn’t in the Undergrowth. Predators weren’t exactly commonplace here. But she was still on guard.
“Hello?”
There was silence. She stood up, squinting as she moved to the source of the shuffling. Behind a web of vines and mosses, there was a person.
Willow couldn’t make out many details of who…but white and silver were the main things she saw. Her heart sunk hard plummeted, and she pushed away the vines, hoping it wasn’t who she thought it was.
Her throat was open. That was the best way Willow could describe it. The plate that had been the front of her neck was on the ground, exposing cords and ropes of all colours and sizes. Suzy was sitting there, working away on some weird green and silver plate.
Willow felt the colour drain from her face. The nervousness and panic that had come when she first met Suzy rushed right back, and all the confusion as to what she was entered her mind again. She was seeing Suzy’s insides, and Suzy didn’t seem in the slightest way fazed! It made her step back. The only thing that stopped her from running was the narrow path behind her. She would rather watch this…whatever the hell it was than fall to the Undergrowth trying to get away.
Suzy turned to Willow, and waved, mouthing out something that Willow was too confused to understand. A few moments later, she inserted the plate back into her throat, and spoke.
“Oh, hello Willow!” her voice had changed completely. Far from the grating, metallic edge of before, her voice was direct, controlled. High-pitched yet pleasant to listen to. The offset between sound and the movements of her lips was gone. It was almost as if she had become a completely different person. “I am terribly sorry to disturb you. I was performing routine maintenance. I had not had a chance to do so prior.”
“I…what…” Willow stammered. “What were you…”
“Is everything alright?”
“Your neck! It’s…it’s open!” Willow gestured to the plate on the ground. “Are you ok? Did you do that to yourself?! What was that?!”
“Oh! Oh dear, I am…I am terribly sorry! I had not realized it could be unusual in this era for modularity to be commonplace. You see, I am capable of removing certain parts of my chassis in order to access parts of my internals that may need repair. I was simply repairing my voice modulator’s connections. They had been damaged over the time I was in sleep mode.” Everything she said was stated as if it was something Willow should have expected.
Willow didn’t understand what most of it meant. Suzy picked up the silver plate, stretched her neck upwards, and put it back in place. She smiled, beckoning Willow
over.
“Come, sit down!”
“Why are you here?” Willow asked.
“What? Oh! Yes, it was terribly dark and dank in the previous location. I decided I would move upwards after you, for fear of my electronics malfunctioning further. I am sorry I did not inform you in person. I was unaware of how to contact you, after all. I had left a note, though!”
Willow sighed, and sat down on the ground. “So, you left…a note. How’d you get up here?”
“I climbed! The rope that you had left was most helpful!”
“I see,” Willow nodded, putting her back against the wall. She didn’t like this, not one bit. The situation she had been put in was…more than awkward. Suzy may not have intended to force her hand, but forced it had been. There would need to be some sort of plan, in case someone less forgiving than Willow stumbled across Suzy. A plan in case she needed something from the Undergrowth, a plan to get her into the Stamen far quicker than originally intended.
“Did…I do something wrong?” Suzy asked, sounding far less sure of herself than normal.
“No, no,” Willow lied through her teeth. “Nothing wrong. I just wasn’t expecting it. Uh, I mean, you’re…welcome to come between here and the Undergrowth. I’m just not sure how wise it would be for you to…uh…go to the Stamen or anything like that.”
“I see! Yes, you mentioned talking to some people about that. How has that gone?”
Willow swallowed hard, trying to force down the imaginary lump in her throat.
“Well, uh, you see…” she mumbled, trying to find a nicer way to word it than ‘some people think you’re an abomination and should not exist.’ Willow realized, quite quickly, that there was no way to get into specific detail.
“Well, some are for, some are against. It’s a while off, I think.”
“I see,” Suzy said, frowning. “I suppose resources are an issue. I understand that my needs are...unconventional, and perhaps that you may not have the proper equipment to maintain someone of my...my type. That is, I think, simply a fact that cannot be avoided. This world is certainly very different from the one I came from.”