To Sink
Lepius
“I thought you wanted to sleep.”
He collapsed next to Rosemary.
“Yeah, I wanted to. But there are some things more important than what I want, I guess.”
“Mmm. So we’ve all learned,” she wiped her eyes, “What’s on your mind then, my dear?”
He stared at her, “I… I just shouted at you. And called you an annoying woman.”
“You did. I certainly remember it.”
“And… you will still call-”
“Call you ‘my dear’? Or ‘my sapling’? You are Lepius, the little thing I once held in my arms. Your words are too quick to surrender, my dear, against every memory of you I hoard.”
Rosemary…
He played with the grass at his feet, “I don’t think I deserve you. I don’t think anyone deserves you.”
“Why is that?”
He breathed in, all the forest dancing in his lungs. Beyond the trees, there they were: the perfume from wildflowers, the touch of morning dew, the earthiness of soil. Faintest of them all was Rosemary. Despite being right next to him, he could only just make her out upon the wind, her scent of… of the Hospes, of his new home.
Why is that?
“Because you’re… Rosemary.”
“Because I’m Rosemary. Anything else?”
“Because you’re… wonderful and kind, and… and other words – every word in between them, that people have invented. I might just invent a new word. ‘Rosemary’. An adjective.”
“Oh?”
When he saw her begin to smile, he continued, “Yeah. A Rosemary person is someone… who needs to be protected, for that person is too kind for most. A Rosemary moment… hmmm… a moment, that, um-”
“You’ve just won something that needed winning… and you’re going to rub it in?”
Lepius chuckled with her, “That doesn’t sound bad. That sounds like something a Rosemary person would do.”
She laughed into the wind. Behind them, the Hospes vibrated, the branches overhead swaying as she filled the forest with her delight. His anchors lifted, just for a moment. They were there, always bubbling under the surface and ready to drag him down, but under her laughter he could resurface to breathe.
“I’m… sorry, I called you an annoying woman. You don’t deserve that. You were just trying to help me. And I’m sorry too, if that apology wasn’t good enough. I’ll work on my apologizing.”
She flopped back onto the grass, and Lepius followed suit. “I’m not sure. I was pretty persistent getting you out of bed. I think I was pretty annoying.”
“But you were trying to help me. And I was just… ungrateful, and I’m sorry. You deserve better than that.”
She sighed, then shifted so she was facing away from him, “Lepius… my sapling… sometimes I think you deserve better than me.”
“What? Are you joking?”
“I….”
He pulled her back around.
“I don’t deserve-”
“No, quiet. You deserve better than…” she stared at her hands, then at him, and her voice cracked, “better than a tender who let her grove burn.”
“You… you didn’t let it burn, Rosemary.”
And now there were tears in her eyes.
“I did. I wasn’t… I wasn’t strong enough… the whole reason I existed was to protect the grove, and now it’s all hitting me… you don’t have to see this, my sapling.”
She tried to get up to her feet.
But his hands were faster.
They moved with such energy it startled him – only this morning, after Karra had left, hadn’t he barely the will to do anything other than fall asleep? He was sure that the ravenous mouth in the darkness had drunken away all his energy.
Yet it turned out there was some left in this empty cup.
That darkness couldn’t drain it all. In the morning, he had thought it unconquerable, something too immense that would eviscerate him with only a single flick of a finger, but here, next to a Rosemary who was trying to hide her tears… something swelled up inside him. It was a reminder.
It was his mana.
Earlier, it had been sucked down. But he was not curled up in bed, nor hearing the same voices screaming about the emptiness of it all – he was here, and Rosemary was next to him, hiding her tears. This wasn’t some flighty thing that would pass. This was Rosemary, crying because of something he had done, even if he had promised the world he would never let it be so.
And his mana burst out, what little he had left. The darkness retreated.
What a reminder it gave him.
Heal. Healing. Healer.
He was born so. Now, he was on his feet, and that was not the only thing that rose.
His healing tore up into the air around them. Even without him focusing it, so much of it poured off his body that it all had nowhere to go other than the air around him, so he pulled her into a hug. And then his mana coated her all over. Her bark relaxed under its touch, and she stopped trying to pull away.
Instead, she fell into him with just a light tug.
“I don’t have to see you like this? I want to. Rose, listen to me… you are the most wonderful thing this life has seen me fit to meet. I literally just spent a minute talking about how lovely a Rosemary person is… and how silly a Rosemary moment are, because you are lovely and silly-”
“I’m not. I’m just a failed tender … I thought I cried it out last night, but I didn’t. I failed, I even failed as something as simple as leaving you alone, oh, Eldertrees-”
He hugged her tighter, deciding he didn’t have the words for what he could say. There was too much to articulate, and too few of them to choose from. And his tongue felt like lead in his mouth. So he simply held her close as she cried out whatever was left, rubbing her back and directing his mana to the spots on her neck and back that were swollen with tension.
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She snivelled into his shirt, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for crying into you like this. You don’t have to worry, they’re not real tears. Just mana constructs.”
“They’re real to me. You’re real to me.”
“I don’t even know what’s real anymore. Sometimes I just wish that I would wake up, and we would be back in the village, all alive. Even though we would have to give up an amazing new friend.”
“Yeah. Karra is something, isn’t she?”
Rosemary hummed.
“But… Rose, please. Don’t think you failed. I’m still here, right? And… I know I can’t ever say something that will fix it all, but… I’ll just say I love you. So much.”
She blinked furiously in his arms, and mumbled, “Love you too.”
“Couldn’t hear you?”
She shoved him, but smiled, “I love you, you… you idiot.”
Rosemary’s cheeks were flushed with every colour. If Lepius hadn’t been probing her with his primary, he wouldn’t have ever guessed she was still holding back her tears. But she was. Because she was now more than her primary mana of home, and now he felt those others emotions dancing about her.
Mana that made him want to cry and stomp and pull his hair out. And… Eldertrees. He wanted to form a net with his own healing, drag it across her and pull away all of it, but he wasn’t sure if that was the right way.
Maybe she just wanted to be left alone for a while, just like him.
He disentangled himself from her, and looked back at the Hospes. Up on the third floor was his bed, and the remnants of his soul called out for it. Again. How lovely it would be, to just surround himself with his blankets and not have to do a thing, not have to focus his mana or put one foot after the next.
Rosemary is feeling a lot better… she’s smiling… I did my job… maybe I should-
He shouldn’t have thought that.
The darkness leaped out and grabbed his ankle.
And down he spiralled.
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The Imagos Realm
They called it the Imagos Realm.
A realm of pure imagination. It was a place where every thought and emotion that had passed your mind by came to declare itself. It was a realm of pure mana.
And it was all in your head. Every person had one.
It could be anything, too. Lepius’ was the hills near his village, the overlapping rise and fall that stopped as it touched the edge of the forest boundary. His mother’s, she had told him, was their grove. His father’s was the forest itself.
Rosemary had never told him what hers was.
And within every realm, the mana reigned. Manifestations of your thoughts, your emotions, all appeared real as they came, and they took the shape and form you yourself found most believable. Sometimes it took the form of people you knew in real life. Sometimes it became great towers that shot up to the sky.
Sometimes it was even a copy of yourself. They could even spill out into the real world.
After all, what you think you see is only the truth of it, and the thousands lies you place on top.
And so the Imagos Realm was a dangerous place.
But the minds of those who can think often are.
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Imagos (Lepius)
He found himself on a canoe.
It was a simple thing, a whittled trunk of a tree, tapering off on either end. He sat in the middle, but he didn’t have a single paddle, and even worse, he couldn’t even move his arms. Someone had strapped him in.
He looked around.
There were the hills of his village as the backdrop of his Imagos realm, as it always was. But there was a difference: they were submerged. Only the rounded peaks poked out above the water, and what an ocean it was – all grey, without a single wave to disturb the stillness. Above him, the sky was also grey. It was almost all the exact same colour, with only the light bobbing of his canoe on the surface to suggest he was afloat at all.
What was going on?
He started to panic and wriggle, and when he did, the canoe swayed from right to left. He stopped, his heart leaping at the thought of capsizing. No, he didn’t want to know what was underneath the water. Just thinking about it set his muscles to tension.
But he shouldn’t have thought it in the first place, for of course it came true.
This was the Imagos realm. All thoughts came true.
And the canoe began to sink.
He thrashed in his bindings, screaming out, only to realize someone had also tied a rag around his mouth, and so he thrashed even more. All around him, the greyness ignored the dryad on his little canoe. The islands formed by the hills began to descend too, and it was only then he realized that he was not sinking, but the sea was rising.
The water crept up to just around the rim.
He screamed through his gag, but he could do nothing.
…
And then the sun shone through.
His bindings evaporated. And his scream finally made it out into the air, and the sound travelled across the emptiness around him, leaving tiny ripples on the surface of the water. He could feel the sunshine on his skin, and only now he realized it was no sunshine at all. No simple light could be this warm.
It was his mana. Healing.
But the water was still rising. It broke the rim of the canoe and began to spill in, and as it did the canoe sunk faster, with more water pooling in at the bottom, then up and up until it rose to his chest. The grey water smelled like corpses.
He reached out a hand, out for that shining light.
The water submerged him.
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Lepius
“Lepius. Lepius! Oh, Eldertrees, are you okay?”
He threw up, shaking in her arms. His breaths came short and desperate, as if they could clear away all the water he had swallowed in his imagination. Rosemary had her arms around him, and she helped him onto his feet and patted his back.
“Get it all out, my dear. Come on, let’s get you back in bed.”
He was vaguely aware of going up steps, of blankets being wrapped around him. He jerked as they tightened around him, and he grabbed Rosemary’s arms.
“No, no, leave them loose. The canoe, the canoe.”
“It’s okay. It’s okay.”
Maybe he was making no sense, but he babbled anyways, “I was drowning, drowning, Rose… I don’t wanna drown…”
Rosemary had the most wretched look on her face he had ever seen, “How do I keep you afloat? Tell me, Lepius. Just tell me, I’ll do anything.”
He tried to make it out, put the feeling of all that grey muck swallowing him up while his mana called out for him and he flailed and begged for it to save him. On and on he went about the hills, the grey sky, the canoe that had sunken with him, the chilling emptiness of everything under and above him, and there was so much to say so he kept speaking, speaking in some incomprehensible language Rosemary did not understand, but he kept doing it anyways and then she was crying-
And he threw up, again.
Rosemary wrapped her arms around him, “Come here. Hush… I understand. Let it all out…”
So he did.
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Rosemary
“Are you feeling better?”
He nodded. It had been an hour since he had last thrown up, after he had muttered all that gibberish in her ear that she could make only one thing of - he was scared. Something had terrified him. It was the wild look in his eyes, the very same Karra had when she was cowering under the Stalkerwolf.
“Lepius. Lepius, my dear.”
“Huh? Oh… I am feeling a bit better. Thank you, Rose.”
She pressed a hand to his forehead, “Do you want to talk about it?”
He didn’t speak for a while. For a moment, she shrunk back, reminding herself that he might not need any more needling, especially after her little fiasco yanking him out of bed. Even if had told her she was doing the right thing.
But still… she pushed it down. She tucked the little voice in her away, the one saying she was a failure.
At long last he spoke, “I’m sorry. It was unlucky, I was… mana dilated. But it was also… I think I know now. My mana was trying to tell me something.”
“Healing. In your Imagos?”
He clenched the blankets in his hands, “Yes. In my Imagos. I was… sinking. Every bit of energy I had I spent trying to remain afloat because… because at the end of it all… I want to live, Rosemary. I’m scared. I’m scared of drowning, dying, whatever you call it.”
Her heart pounded. It was just like her, in the clearing yesterday, watching herself dissolve away.
“I understand. I almost died in that clearing, too. I didn’t want to. I wanted to live, talk to you, watch you grow up.”
“Yeah. Maybe… this morning, I was just… I was just tired. I did not want to do anything, even if I knew I had to. Once or twice I even wanted to get out of bed, because I was… bored, yet I could not think of anything I wanted to do. I was tired. And there was nothing out there waiting for me, so I just wrapped myself in bed and waited for it all to end.”
Rosemary wiped away her tears, and steeled her voice, “You always have me to wake up to. Always.”
“I know. And so I thought of you, what I said to you. And I knew I had to get up, just this once, because I remembered you, every shining colour you arrived in. So I got up. And I saw you sitting there, trying not to cry, and I remembered another thing I had forgotten in bed.”
“Your healing?”
He nodded, “I forgot about it. Somehow. I’ve spent my life healing, and I killed that man… and I knew I had to, so I put it away, because if I thought about healing again, I would also think about the gold man. And I didn’t want to.”
Oh, Lepius… I am the mana of home itself. Every breath I take, everything I see… there they are, the ghosts I have loved and lost… I wish I could take it from you too…
“It’s okay.”
“No.” He glared up, “It’s not okay. I was selfish, stupid. I want you to be angry at me.”
“I can’t. Even if I tried.”
He sighed, “Well… tomorrow… I want to do better. I feel better, right now. Just a little bit. But tomorrow, I might feel horrible again, and beg to stay in bed again, and forget about all the wonderful things that spell out ‘Rosemary’.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but he cut her off.
“Let me finish. I want you to force me out of bed tomorrow, even if I fight and kick. I want you to drag me out no matter what I call you, because you told me nothing I could say could hurt you, and so I might say it all.”
“No. Nothing you can say can hurt me, my dear.”
“So, promise me? I want to do something tomorrow, not just throw up and cry. Maybe we can go to the stream together. Maybe we can do something else. Just promise me to get me awake, and get me doing something.”
She gave him a brave smile, “Yeah. I promise.”
They spent the rest of the day talking.