Around It Spins
The Oaker
All villages needed a place for entertainment.
His village was no different. They did find plenty of entertainment in needling the outsiders when they appeared at the forest boundary, but anything got boring after done enough. And so, without fail, when saplings grew old enough to understand needling, the art of making strangers uncomfortable would flourish, and then fall to the wayside after enough time had passed. It was something every generation went through.
But something else had managed to keep its charm through the centuries.
The Oaker.
The Oaker was an establishment. It was an establishment that deserved that enunciation, for the first dryads had erected it at the same time as the Sanctum, and that was older than the village itself. How long it had been standing no one knew. There was a timeless grace to it, a sheen to its bark that refused to bow down to time, one that kept it glittering in the sunlight from the first generation of dryads down to his own.
The Theatre of the Dryads.
Everything was made of wood. The stage, the chairs, the body, even the foundation of the building. Of course it was. It was made for dryads, by dryads, and with dryads the only species to grace its stage.
And what grace they had.
Dryads would train the entire year for their plays. The plays themselves were based upon the stories told down from generation to generation, or from the few books they still had from their ancestors. Each play could take up to four hours. And there would be dancing, singing, props carved from bark, and even smoke effects, if the playwrights were feeling daring.
He didn’t even know the Imagos could take him here.
----------------------------------------
Imagos (Lepius)
He found himself sitting in the back row of the Oaker.
It was the very same seat that he always chose whenever he came to watch a play. He had to sit in the back, because the villagers were fierce about getting the seats up front, and he would often arrive late. And so the only seats available would be the ones at the back. Usually, he would’ve come with his friends too, Nurma and Detin and Thoyce, and they made a routine sight at the back.
It was different, this time.
He sat alone. All the many rows leading up to the stage were vacant, and it was strange, for there were sunstones and other props lined up on the stage. There was a play about to start. And the strange part about it was that it was never empty before a play, even the day before, as early risers would always come in to book the best seats at the front. Huh, strange.
“Hey.”
So he was not alone. He turned around, and saw Andura.
Andura.
Between her greeting and the minutes after, all he could do was hang his jaw open and listen to his heart prove that it could shout louder than he could. Thud, Thud, Thud. His hand tried to rise up to her cheek, to see if she would dissolve away, but it couldn’t move even an inch.
“Close that jaw, idiot.”
He did. Only after his heart shouted some more and he remembered how to move his hands did he find the words to say.
“Are you… real?”
Andura snorted, “You know the answer. Sprouts, no. I’m just a figment of your sub-consciousness. But a good one, no?”
He looked her up and down, then slumped back in his seat. His hand rose, not to her cheek, but to cover up his eyes as he tried to blink away the tears gathering there. She was dead. Remember it, curse it – she was dead, and he had failed her, failed himself as a brother.
“Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. That’s up for you to decide. But personally… you didn’t.”
He smacked his tears away, “You don’t know that. In fact, you can’t even – you’re me, aren’t you? What are you talking about?”
“Sure I am. But-”
“Are you the Voice? Because if you are, I’m getting my way out of this. Back to Rosemary, to reality.”
It face flickered between a frown and a snarl, “No. I am not that thing. That Voice is a dirty foreigner in your head… I am a part of you. You know that.”
And as much as he tried to deny it, Andura, no – this… imitation beside him, was him. Or at least a small part of him. The mana of healing radiated out of it as a glow, a light that warmed him up through the distance between them, something no one could bring out other than him. He felt himself easing into the chair.
“Why am I here, anyways?”
“Tch. Forgetting, like the buffoon you are-”
“Stop. Stop. Just stop, don’t act like Andura, don’t talk like Andura… you’re not her.”
The fake bowed its head, “Sorry. But I can’t really control it. Do you think you can control your subconscious?”
He sighed.
“Alright. Just answer my question. Why am I here?”
“Because your mana wanted to show you something, and you weren’t strong enough to focus it back. And now you’re here.”
“What does it want to show me?”
And as if on cue, the play started.
----------------------------------------
“Dryads and dryadesses, allow me to introduce myself. My name is…. Lepius Rosemary!”
He stood up, “What… what is going on-”
And then an invisible hand shoved him back in his seat, next to the fake, who was stifling its giggles.
“No interruptions! Lepius Rosemary is onstage, and he shall be the one to hold the audience captive!”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“What audience? What audience are you-”
The hand returned to cover up his mouth. He tried to force through his next words, but it was like speaking into water, and the only thing he could hear were bubbles floating to the surface.
“Goodness me, what a saucy audience we have here tonight! We have our work cut out for us, it seems. But no further ado! I shall not dilly nor dally another second, for here comes our wondrous actors, who will be playing…”
He raged against the mana-construct holding him in his chair.
“The Wheels! Give it up, dryads and dryadesses!”
What?
For a second, he thought the announcer was joking. With a name like that, stitched together as if to mock them, it was an easy thought to come to. But he wasn’t joking. As the announcer had promised, out rolled wheels. Wheels.
And there was one of every kind.
There were wheels no bigger than his hands, and wheels long across as he was tall. They were made of every kind of wood. Birch, maple, redwood, oak, eucalyptus – all the species you could name and more. And they rolled all across the stage. Some rolled straight through to the other side of the stage and vanished, some did a long loop around in a circuit before they left, and some just spun in circles.
He found himself leaning forward, in spite of himself.
“Hoho! Interested, are you? I knew you’d be fascinated… here.”
And then he found himself in the front row.
The announcer was right in front of him now, and when he looked closer he saw it was no stranger, but… himself, Lepius. What? What was he doing in that ridiculous getup, all puffed up like some bluejay?
“I tend to disagree, Audience Member Number 1. This is a dazzling costume.”
“Wha- I’m the only audience member, and… and hang on, you’re not me! I’m me! What-”
The hand shoved him back into silence. It locked up his body, but he could still turn his head, so he whipped it around to find that fake Andura. Had it been moved to the front, too? He looked left, right… no, it was gone. He even yanked his head all the way around so he could see to the back, but she wasn’t there either.
“Looking for that part of your subconscious? Why, she’s right here!”
He turned to the stage. All the wheels had rolled off, except one.
“Hah! Act Two! Dryads and dryadesses… here is… Andura! Give it up, people!”
There was only one wheel on stage now, and it had a gold rim over a white coat…. Andura had autumn leaves for hair, and was a birch dryad. That was her? He leaned in closer, and indeed, an inscription written around the rim said: Andura.
What was this? What was going on?
Andura’s wheel never left the stage, only going round and round in its circuit. But the longer he watched, the more it wobbled on its path. First it was only a tilt of its axis, ever so slight, but the more times it went around its circuit, the less slight it became. Its circuit went from a circle to an oval. And soon it was spinning around all over the stage in no particular shape, to the corners then back to the front, and then he realized the wheel was breaking up.
Before he knew it, he was on the stage. The hand didn’t try to push him back.
The wheel fell flat on its side.
He rushed to it, tracing his hands on the rim… the gold, the very gold of Andura’s hair. All those autumn leaves.
“Andura?”
The wheel spoke, “Who else, idiot?”
He forgot that this didn’t make sense at all, that the invaders had already burnt down the Oaker and this was just all some strange hallucination in his Imagos. Of course he forgot. This went beyond memory, beyond instinct… this was something that people could carve up in a thousand years and still find written on his bones.
This was his baby sister.
Andura.
“Oh! A stage invasion! But was this all planned… my honoured audience members?”
He grabbed the wheel and held it close to him, to his body. He was crying again. The wheel was so light in his arms he could lift it with a finger, despite it being as tall as he was. Why was he crying over a wheel? It didn’t make sense. But he supposed loving someone didn’t make sense either, so he cried nonetheless.
“Andura… hey… what’s going on…”
“I’m dying…”
The wheel was breaking apart in his heads. First the rim dissolved away, the gold flaking off to reveal the birch underneath, and then that too began to crumble from within. The axle snapped off. A few spokes slipped from their spots on the hub and clattered on the floor, next to his knees, and he couldn’t bear to look down.
“Please… please stay with me this time… please…”
And then she said those words, the same ones he would never forget. It was the old grove all over again.
“Stop, L-Lep.”
“N-no, not this… not this, please…”
“Just stop, Lep,” she said, and it was barely above a rattle and a whisper now, “shut up and listen to me.”
“Stop… stop… don’t-”
“Y-you… you stay alive, you hear me? Because… because I’m scared, Lep.”
He couldn’t say anything. All he could do was cry, for he was back on the grass in front of his old grove, wasn’t he? Dying, again. Watching his world die.
“But I didn’t get to say the rest… why I want you to stay alive…”
He knew. He knew the next words by heart, by the atoms displaced in his ears when the sound had passed them by. And the knowledge got him speaking through the tears.
“I know. You were scared… scared… scared to die…”
“I was. I was scared to die… but more than that, I was scared to be alone. I want you with me. But you have to stay alive, okay? Because Rosemary will be sad if she is alone…”
The hub had fallen off, the last spoke lying next to his feet. All he was holding now was the outside, the rim no longer a finger thick.
“No… don’t go… I’ll go with you, I’ll take you away so-”
“Shut up. You… you stay alive. You’re such a wonderful, amazing person. And I want the world to know it, not just Andura.”
“I only want you, I-”
“Quiet. I’m dying, and you’re interrupting me? Be quiet. Listen. I… I have to go. But you don’t. So you stay alive, you hear me? And get some new friends, find a lady to love. Heal. Make the world as bright as you. And I’ll wait for you… I promise, okay?”
“No-”
“Stop. I’m about to die. Promise me that.”
“Okay. Okay, I promise.”
The rim dissolved away, and so did the rest of it, broken on the ground. There were daggers in his every organ. He cried, tried to grasp for what wasn’t there, and then sprawled back on the stage. His breath was like fire in his lungs. Why did everything hurt so much?
“Because the road is not smooth, Lepius.”
The announcer sat down in front of him.
“Just… just let me leave… please… why are you here?”
“Hmm. One last act, and the play will finish.”
“I don’t give a sprout about the-”
Then a wheel rolled out. It was brown, made of oak, and had a green rim. The inscription: Lepius.
“W-what?”
“The final act. The last wheel. And of course it is yours, for this is your play, no?”
“B-but-”
“It’s always been your play. Your road to spin on. Around it spins.”
The wheel tottered to a stop in front of him, unbalanced and tilted on one side. The axle was missing. Half the spokes were snapped, the remainders dangling from the middle, and what a sorry sight it made.
“This… this is my wheel? It can’t spin. I can’t do this.”
He tried to fall back onto the stage, but a hand propped him up. The announcer pushed him towards the wheel, and forced his hands on the rim.
“Try spinning it.”
“No, I don’t want to. I want to go to sleep. I don’t want to do anything anymore.”
“Just do something. Do anything. You will do this, then that, then a hundred others. Do it all, one turn at a time… let the wheels spin. And one day you might not need to push it to get it moving.”
He blinked away the tears, “My wheel is broken.”
“So what if you have a broken wheel? Do you think the roads you take care about a snapped axle, or bearings bent out of shape? No, they don’t. They only care about where they start and end, and this road has started long ago. And where it ends?”
“Where… where do I stop?”
He pushed the wheel off on its road, and watched it spin in a circle around them.
“It’s the only road that ends when you stop spinning. Where else would it end? You could stop, and the road ends here… but how little you’ve travelled. You’ve not even touched the horizon yet.”
“What if… what if I don’t want to touch the horizon? What if I’m too tired for it…”
“But maybe you don’t want to touch the horizon, and that’s fine. The road takes you where you want it to go. And it’s not a smooth path. Of course it isn’t, no road is. A spoke might break, or the road might turn muddy, and you’ll spin and spin and go nowhere. But you’ll keep going, spinning through the mud and the snow and the pebbles. And the road could end there, too. But it doesn’t matter how it ends, because what matters is that the road could take you up a mountain, or down a valley, or to some new friends, and how beautiful would either of them be, hmm? So while you’re spinning through it all, do enjoy the view.”
He watched the wheel, his wheel, spin through to the other side of the stage. The act was over. The curtains closed, he heard applause, and then the announcer stood up.
“Ah, the play is over. A shame, for I, Lepius Rosemary, will have to say goodbye to the audience. But I suppose this is where I stop spinning.”
The play ended.
----------------------------------------
Lepius
He opened his eyes.
Rosemary was above him, shaking his shoulders. When his eyes opened, she rattled out a sigh and slumped into him, holding him tight. He held her tight, too.
“What happened? We… we were talking, and-”
He raised his eyes to meet Rosemary’s.
“Before anything… I need to say something. I need you to do something for me.”
“Of course. Anything, my dear sapling.”
“I-I… want to keep doing things. And I want you to help me get out of bed, just like this morning, and let me do one thing after another, until I can do it on my own. Can you do that?”
She brought her down forehead to his.
“Always, my sapling.”