The snake’s laughter ricochets in their head between throbs of pain even after the door slams shut behind them. The magical binding does not release them mercifully. It vanishes a few stumbling steps beyond the threshold and drops them unceremoniously into the dark nacre of the Between.
The Between catches them poorly—no ground, then all of it at once. They hit hard, the impact shuddering through bark-bone and what remains of flesh, breath tearing loose in a sound that barely qualifies as one. For a moment they do not move. The dark nacre stretches around them, endless and close all at once, swallowing the last clean lines of thought.
The tether. Verdant claws for it, finds it, follows.
Movement here is wrong. Distance behaves like a suggestion rather than a fact. Still, they drag themself forward, one-handed, leaving behind a faint trail where soot and something finer—something that had once been more solid—sloughs away in drifting motes. Dross. The remnants of something burnt too hot, too quickly, now settling into the fabric of the Between like ash that refuses to vanish.
The grove answers slowly.
Verdant breaks through at last—spilling from the dark into green, into root and soil and breath—and for a moment the world feels almost right. The scent of living things. The quiet hum of their own domain. The promise, always present, that here they are whole.
The difference arrives sharp as a blade.
They feel it immediately—the misalignment. The way the ground does not quite meet them where it should, the way the air settles wrong in their lungs, the way the tether that should snap them cleanly back into themselves drags instead, stretched thin and uneven. The foreign absence in their chest aches where something had tried to root and failed to stay, leaving behind a wound that is not empty but… rearranged.
There is no dignity left to salvage in it. One hand pulls, knees drag, their body follows in stubborn increments toward where they know—know—heartwood waits. The anchor. The core. The place that should resolve all this dissonance into something stable again.
It feels further away than it should.
Every motion leaves behind more of that fine, dark residue—smoke-dust drifting from sleeve, from skin. It catches briefly in the low light of the grove before settling into the soil, indistinguishable from the rest.
Verdant pauses, breath shallow, head bowed.
As Verdant drags themself forward, the familiar geometry of root and soil begins to loosen—softening, shifting, bending inward toward the absence they carry. Moss lifts where it should lie flat. Low branches bow without wind. The ground itself rises in subtle, patient inclines, as though something beneath is reaching up to close the distance Verdant cannot cross fast enough.
Their trail of drifting debris does not settle cleanly here. It hangs, briefly, caught in the grove’s breath—noticed.
The heartwood should be there—fixed, certain—but instead the space around it gathers, condenses, forming an impression rather than a place. Roots knit together in suggestion of limbs. Bark curls in the loose outline of a hand. Light filters wrong, pooling where there should be shadow, shaping something that is not quite form and not quite thought.
Verdant’s hand lifts—unsteady, blood-slick, trembling with the strain of holding anything at all—and for a moment they hesitate.
The distance has always resolved before.
The contact is immediate and total.
A question, terrible in its precision:
Are you still the same Verdant who shared their sap with a dying princess?
The grove fades at the edge of their awareness. Recognition floods through the point of touch, searching. It finds every place they bent, every place they did not return as they left. Water through cracked stone, and the cracks do not close under it.
They almost say yes—but that Verdant had not been divided.
Since we’ve parted, you’ve become someone else. I have become myself.
Verdant’s fingers tighten, just once. There is a silence only disturbed by the pinprick beat of their heartbeat. The grove does not soften or lift its weight, relentless.
It finds something viscous. Ichor—and it dredges the tempestuous—
Recollection does not return to them cleanly. It seeps between a breath that wouldn’t come, an almond-sharp tilt of a teacup, vivisection imagined—fertilizer—the intimacy of a bone cracking, fire curls with heat heat heat that takes—they sag where the burned socket of their shoulder grinds into the dirt—the wet, fibrous pull as something living is torn from their own face, threads resisting, body refusing, and still it comes away, leaving behind—escape, failure, for nothing—the violent ricochet of volition stripped down to their heart—the laughter rings and rings and rings—
When we join, we won’t be ourselves anymore.
The same recognition presses through them once more, certain, and where it meets their ichor-laced dissonance, the grove moves it.
The surface yields in a slow, inevitable parting as roots unwind and soil loosens its hold. Verdant’s body follows the motion without resistance this time, drawn under not as something cast out, but as something that cannot be held where the light expects coherence.
The green fades. Sound dulls to a gentle, distant thrum.
Below, the structure loosens. The insistence of form, of alignment, of sameness thins into something broader, darker, less defined. Space opens where there had been none. Room for contradiction to exist without tearing itself apart trying to resolve.
The last echo of laughter still rings, thin and distant now, stretched past meaning.
And in that vast, rootless dark, where nothing demands they be whole—Verdant finally stills.
Time does not pass cleanly in the grove.
It gathers, thickening—layering itself in slow, patient sediment rather than moving forward.
The upper reaches of it—once merely shadowed—have deepened into something older, something that watches without needing eyes. The air hangs heavy with damp loam and slow growth, with the quiet, patient hunger of roots that do not hurry because they do not need to.
The glimmerblooms are the first to move.
They gather in a slow, circling drift, their faint bioluminescence pooling like diluted starlight against the dark. One by one, then in clusters, they settle around a small shape half-nested in the soil—a parcel, carefully bound, edges softened by the damp but still intact.
Verdant’s work, from before. Before the fracture. Before the crossing.
The magic laced through it hums softly—purposeful, patient. A thread cast outward, waiting only for the moment it is allowed to follow its path.
The blooms press closer, chittering amongst themselves.
“Mage! Talk to tall glimmerbloom!”
Something to be sent away.
One steps forward—taller, or perhaps only braver—lifting itself from the cluster as the others hush in anticipation. It edges toward the bundle, hesitates only once, then gathers it up with careful, trembling leaf-limbs.
A final, collective chitter—
—and it turns, carrying the parcel to throw toward the glowing abyss beyond the grove.
See two paired asks here (link) and here (link) that lead into the thread
