I left the castle with what supplies I could carry. I brought flints, flasks filled with wine, a coat, boiled leather strips, hard meat, tack bread. I ate the bread, no symptoms. I drank wine, and let it wash my stomach. Nothing wrong with me in four hours. It's good for now, I told myself.
Before I left, I looked through the castle study, but there weren't any books I could read. The language wasn't English: it was soft, serpentine, cursive, and careful. I packed a few. Maybe I'll learn to read. Somehow.
I took some gold. I thought I could've bartered. Someone out there had to find this valuable.
It took me two days before the castle receded from view. A forest came from the opposite end of the horizon, sunsetside. I don't know if the sun sets in the west or the east here.
The tops of the woods rolled. Red bubbled at its base. Crowning leaves crooned to heaven, ebbing and flowing like a moonshaken tide. Black branches melted into shafts of brown, straight, thick as my thighs, thin as they were. No wonder the whole forest swayed at the mere thought of a gale.
Veins fat with blood sat at the wilds' edge, between purple grass and the spackled shadows of buckling boles. It wasn't blood, not really.
Vines everywhere. Little stems like spider legs tucked in the shadows of flat arrowhead leaves. Kudzu. This one was red and plush. I let the leaves run between my thumb and finger, and it pulled back, careful, nervously careful. It felt like a lover's fingers, weak at the brush of human skin.
Maybe not like a lover's fingers, not like any of mine.
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I thought about Denise. Why did I call her Denise? I didn't know anyone by that name, why did her name come into my mind?
The red Kudzu smelled like leather. It might not have been the season yet, but none of the flowers have bloomed. Maybe there aren't any pollinators left. No bugs of any kind. No whirring, whizzing, humming, buzzing. Just red at the edge of the forest.
Beneath some was a poor man's skull. Fat at the base, more left to unravel. I'd need a shovel. No shovel.
No flesh on the bone. Hair remained. Old, not ancient. No scars, drill holes. Redhead. Enough of a tuft for a lock. No skin, but hair, dug deep like grass from a rock. I wrapped it in sinew and took a whiff. It smelled like red kudzu.
I put it in my pocket.
I heard squelching sounds; I whipped around. Nothing in the air. I looked down at my feet. It was growing!
A root thick as my thumb slithered up the heel of my boots. I jumped back. The leaves unfurled again.
I couldn't go into this forest, not right now. I stuck to the edge, but I never saw the roots' end. Did it follow me? I don't know.
I danced around them and poked the skull. A gash from the cranium to the cheekbone. Front teeth broken. This person didn't die from the kudzu. They died from someone else.
This was a world with murder. It felt good to know; they were human, and they weren't that different from me. I brandished my walking stick around the roots, hoping to find the glint of a blade, but not a sliver of iron peeked from the nest. In the corner of my eyes, the veins twitched.
I gave up looking for a sword, and went further sunsetside.
Description Summary:
The Red Kudzu has roots the size of legs, branching out to stems as thick as thumbs. Three leaves per stem, flat like arrowheads, gentle and wayward in the weakest wind. A touch, any touch, leads to their leaves retracting into a small, tubular shape. The leaves branch out from the base to the stem. Tiny specks of white, barely visible to the naked eye, can be seen.
At night it crawls even faster. Any contact and you smell like leather. You've been marked. It doesn't pierce or puncture, but it wraps, and the trees of the forest are wilting to the vines choking them at their roots.