Chapter Seven

Out of the Forest

Out of the Forest

Time is infinite, Iris once told me. It goes on forever forward and back. But more than that, it can be divided without end. Take the briefest of moments, an instant so fleeting you barely notice its passing, and it can be split a thousand times and more into shimmering fragments of the universal pulse. And each of those, and each of those, on and on forever without ever arriving at nothing. And so it seemed now: that moment after Iris fell. A second and a lifetime all at once, shattering, splintering like my thoughts.

Moments from long ago, from when I slept. Faces, vague and indistinct, as if seen through a veil. Words reverberating in my skull. Needs and desires and sensations that have no parallel in thought, no basis for understanding. Disturbing and unnatural and yet, and yet.

My awakening. A slow becoming then a quickening rush to the surface of that under which I had slept. The scent of the clade and of the Queen.

My Aggie making faces. Her hands. The games we played, our fingers intertwined. The hands of another and the way they moved. And it meant something, everything. Where are you now my Aggie? Whose hands are these? What is happening to me?

And Iris, whose mind shone like a beacon that lit the world around me, that bathed everything in light and sense, ritual and meaning. But for those strange little phials that made no sense at all, that she had hidden, that I had carried out for her. And the phial that had almost slipped from my hand as Iris fell, a drop of nectar beading from the not-quite-closed stopper. And as the drop fell, all these moments came together again, coalesced into the here and now. I closed the stopper tight and gripped the phial in my fist. I left the others where they lay in the satchel, and I fled.

But without Iris by my side it was not so easy to run as before. Fear crowded my mind and dragged at my limbs. I stumbled over roots and crashed through clawing branches. The nectar which had brought my senses into such clear focus now heightened my panic above all else. Yet still I heard the faint whistling just in time, instinctively twisting mid-stride. The bolt grazed my ear as it flew past and stuck fast into the trunk of a tree with a shuddering, sickening crack.