Everywhere (3/3)

“Wake up! Please, wake up! We have to go.”

The void had been so peaceful. No words, no sadness; no flowers.

“I'm sorry. I'm so, so very sorry.” the Queen was crying. “My own daughter – this is sickness, I cannot believe it...”

She trailed off and rubbed her face with her hands. The Princess coughed a few times. She said nothing. Then the Queen wrenched her daughter's hand and pulled her to her feet.

“We have to go, Princess. Come with me, hurry. Please.” she stressed the last word as a flimsy bandage offered for the years of wounds that she had inflicted on her daughter. It would have to do, for now.

They were tramping swiftly across the cave floor, clearing bodies and thicket, making for the ladder in the wall. The Queen kept looking back to check the young woman.

“I'm so sorry, there is no time to rest. We have to leave the castle.”

“Wh-why... what's happening? What is happening to me?” she grabbed at her stomach and winced. The Queen stopped in place, and swallowed, with terrified eyes on her daughter's midriff. She rubbed her brow and turned around again, now moving all the faster.

“We need to get you away from them,” she spoke without turning. “We need to escape before they kill us both.”

The words echoed oddly up and around the thick flowers on the walls. They arrived at the ladder and the Queen put a foot on it.

“They're still trying to speak to me... I do not know why. Maybe they're taking time to get used to you.” she stared at her daughter silently for a moment. “Regardless, we need to try and get out. I can only hold them off for so long.”

Without further explanation she began to climb. The Princess followed, as it was really the only way she could go.

They reached the stone corridor, which was pitch black without its light source. Feeling their way along the walls, they made steps for the stairwell.

“They are trying to kill us?” the Princess struggled to keep atop her haziness.

The Queen did not reply. She just kept moving forward.

“Why are they trying to kill us?”

“They simply are; listen, please stop asking me questions just now, I have to stay focused. I have to drive them out. I'll explain everything to you, I promise, when we are safe. We have not time for this, we need to leave as soon as we can-”

“Why should I trust you?” The Princess' voice was louder than she knew it could be. It punched straight through the dark and stopped her mother's silhouette where it was. The Queen turned and came back to the Princess. She put hands on her shoulders and spoke more softly.

“Listen to me. It is not so simple as you think. I do not want to hurt you, Princess. Please, you cannot disbelieve me. We must leave this place now and never, ever come back.”

“I want to know the truth before I come anywhere else with you.” She was not going to relent. Not any more. She stood in place.

“No, no, come on, we have to go!”

“No.”

“The truth, is it? You desire to know the truth? The truth is I am a fool! An old, pathetic fool! Is this what you wished to hear? I have done so much badness to this castle, is this what you wanted me to say, Princess? Because I do think it – A thousand times it graces my mind each day! I disgust myself, I wish to inflict myriad agonies on my treacherous soul; but for now I cannot. But upon you, I wish to inflict nothing but my protection, daughter. Please, glare at me not in that way. It is true. I did it all for you. And I would do it again were it the path presented to me.”

“For me? For me, you grew that- that thing! That disgusting growth,” the Queen closed her eyes, shaking her head, “that evil demon that dirtied my body? Hundreds dead, thousands! A nation of fear, of hate – of emptiness. Bodies running around, empty but for terror of your precious flowers. For me. You disgust me also. I have wished the opportunity to say it for so long.”

“No, no it is not so! It is not so! I did not create the flower for you. It was for me, it was in fear and sadness and loneliness. I could not connect to anyone, the world despised any of my happiness among other people and ripped it from my hands.”

The Princess still did not reply, so her mother decided to keep speaking until she did.

“We have precious little time before they take me over, and kill us all. Did you know that, Princess? I cannot control them. They, however, have the ability to possess my mind and extract what they need.”

The Princess scoffed with disbelief. “What would they need from you? What would anyone? They only need water. It is you who needs them, a scapegoat for your own sinful heart. You have a want for death and misery, for power to crush lives. And you blame who - the flowers? You are a witch; and they, your evil spell. Now that I have survived the usual execution, you will take me upstairs and let the guards finish me, the clean way.” She sat down at the stone wall. She heard her mother's voice make a struggling sound, as if pushing against a barrier.

“N-no! You understand nothing! They are breaking through, I cannot keep this up!” She leaned with both hands against the wall. “Would I not, though it provides a great hurting for me to even say it, have killed you myself when you fell unconscious in the cave? I will not lie. Those that lie on that grass were killed by the flower, that is true.”

“You are a murderer.”

“I am, I am!” She wailed with apparent pain. “Please, believe me, I know it! But I had no choice. None. As soon as I grew that thing from the floor, it was communicating with me, making motions at me to come closer and closer. It pulled me from the ground and subjected me to... to what you experienced. The voices started then, the whispering voices, repeating all the bad thoughts at me, egging me to do something with them, to purge, and purify. I said no, and the Great Voice retaliated: every flower in and around this castle, of which there are thousands, contains a particular spore which when let go into the air will kill anybody, painfully, who is in a relative proximity; including, it noted in particular, my young daughter who slept between walls adorned with white roses...” she took a pause, screwing up her face, trying to retain herself. “White roses contain a particularly potent strand of the spore producing a more drawn out, painful effect. It could feel how I thought of you as it paced through my mind, it knew there was nothing more dear in all of my experience of the world... just as it would know if I tried to escape myself, or you, or if I even tried to kill myself to end the- the c-curse-” she started again to howl with hurt. She doubled over, placing both hands on the sides of her head, and yelped: “No!”

She righted herself again, tears on her face as she struggled to speak. “I did wonder, if it was just all perhaps a hallucination. The plant had filled me up with narcotic fluid, or poison for my brain, or suchlike. And I was imagining it all; my mind, in pain, was summoning the darkest creatures it could envision. But when I brought my first victim down to the cave, the flower instructed me to stay by the ladder. It erupted out of the ground, and the poor man stood in fear in the grass. Then it bent to face him, and a cloud of purple dust puffed from its centre. Within seconds he was shrieking on the floor, begging and crying for people whom I did not know. I couldn't watch for more than a second at a time, but when I did I saw the flower vibrating, as if in pleasure – it was my pain. It was gorging itself on my misery. It was real. Far too real to ever understand.”

The Princess was watching her mother now, no longer simply ignoring her cries. Still, she responded dubiously: “Why would it not just have killed us tonight? You have mentioned the will to escape perhaps five, six times now.”

“Nn- no. It needs... it needs me, like I told you. The plant feasts on the host's emotion, it particularly favours trauma. Horror, pain, regret, they can all feed it for weeks before it wants more. So long as I can- I can block everything, it will not have power. But every emotion is a force unbeatable. I can only hold it off. Please Princess, it is too late for me, but do not let this all be in vain. I fear something awful. I fear that they are coming for you now. You have passed the ritual. While I fight with myself, I can hear the voices grow dimmer. I worry they are directing their attention elsewhere, to you. While it horrifies me, it is the factor making my plight bearable. We have to leave, now.”

As her mother stopped speaking, she heard consonants, plosive sounds and vague breathy vowels somewhere behind her. But she sat with her head against solid wall.

If the flower truly did need the Queen to do its work, their successful escape from its grasp would mean the freedom of the entire castle. They could run to a place safely far away, and communicate back to the subjects. The young Princess had a vision of doves dropping letters of freedom.

She stood up finally. The Queen nodded, wiping her painful tears, and began to run again. They ascended enough of the stairwell to be foot-level with the window through which the Princess had entered, and threw themselves out into the night.

They bounded through the orchard, acres long, until they arrived at the greenhouses; the very same escape route chosen by the Princess the day after Nammy was taken. It looked so different in the dark; the multicoloured beds showed up only as a dark block, in between the mother and daughter, and their eternal safety.

The voices were still behind her, forming syllables and words now, but she drowned them out with thoughts of a life where her younger self had really escaped through these flowers.

“I am scared, Princess.” They had stopped next to the great greenhouse where the flower had first lived. They faced out over the flowerbeds, over the edge of the great hill that the Princess had never left.

“Why? We are so close, come on.” she tugged the Queen's sleeve and, in doing so, came to realise that she had never made physical contact with her mother before. “You were so adamant that we hurry, why have we stopped now?”

“Yes, it is necessary that we hurry,” her mother spoke more serenely. “I feel weak, so weak... I find it hard to even look, I cannot touch the flowers without every single deed I have used them to execute making itself known at once. I am afraid to pass through them, in case the wrong moment comes, at the very worst time. Our only chance would be squandered, everything for nothing. I might let up the guard too early, and waste the effort, killing everybody in the castle. This does not trouble me so much, they were all dead long ago...” she turned to her daughter and looked right at her, a pleading tightness on her lips. “But you. You have life in you, life I could never destroy. They kept you unmonitored, alive, so that they would have blackmail as a weapon to use against me. It could be their mistake- I could set you free now, and never touch those despicable flowers.” She looked back over at the stretch of hill only metres away. Little blades of grass were dancing in the breeze.

With a violent shaking of her head, the Princess dismissed this idea as soon as she understood it.

“Nobody else will die here. With your freedom, everyone becomes free. You need only to hop through, one step among the tulips, and everything ends tonight. Go on.”

The Queen looked hopeless. “The risk too great; I have not the strength. I have not the strength...” she gazed away from the flowers, looking somewhere behind the Princess.

“You have to! You need to keep your strength or else everyone will die! Have you not borne enough mortality on your shoulders? You must go first now, take a step, or I will not. I have to know that you will come too. I will not let you trick me into running across alone, to turn and watch my people dropping dead, screaming in poisonous air. I would rather join them than have allowed it.” The Queen saw the Princess' father alive and well, right in front of her.

“Just one death is much more than enough for my shoulders. I just can't risk your life in this way.” She stood sadly there, unmoving, infuriating her daughter. Death had always been the Queen's only solution. The idea of fighting for life had grown to elude her comprehension. Death, always, was the way through.

“If the flowers trouble you, then we will kill them and create a pathway.” The Princess listened to no possible retort, and made her way swiftly towards the greenhouse.

The smell haunted her. It connected her to bleak memories, of a forbidden place that crawled with quiet violence, causing nothing but hurt to the world around it.

“What do you have that will kill flowers quickly? Salt? Or a weed-killer perhaps?” The Princess started rooting around shelves here and there, inspecting tins and jars.

“No...” the Queen cautiously climbed on board with the Princess' plan. “No, those would take hours at the very least. We do not have that much time left. I can't even hear the voices any more...”

“What about fire?” asked the Princess. “Do you have an oil lantern?” She pulled boxes out from across the work surface.

“Y-yes!” The Queen's eyes opened widely again. From a shelf right next to them she pulled out a small lamp. “We will need something to light it with though... I think I have a flint and steel lying around...” She scuttled further up the greenhouse, and began to push aside things that were sitting about the room. She lifted her prized silver watering can, the only the one she ever used, from the countertop and looked around where it had been lying. Placing it back, she bent down and started sifting through items on the ground underneath the counter. She stopped for a moment, holding onto something. The Princess walked over to see what it was.

“He would have loved you so much. You are rather like him, you know. I have always thought so.” She sniffed.

The Princess saw that she was holding a framed painting of a handsome, brown-haired bearded man. She knew it, from seeing the same man fight an army of lions by himself every night on the feast hall mural, that it was her father.

The Queen, still on her knees, silently looked around at her pots of deadly blooms and then back at the painting.

The Princess made her way slowly closer, and lifted the watering can. She had held it only once in her life, secretly, as a child before the flowers had spread everywhere. Its weight was a surprise this day as it had been then, when she had had to scramble, looking all around, to heave it back up on the table after dropping it, lest her mother notice it had been moved.

The Princess looked down at the back of her Queen's bowed, quiet head. She raised the watering can into the air for momentum, and drove its corner down into the back of the skull. She fell forward into the chest, clutching her sticky bloodied hair with a scream of agony.

The Princess smashed her mother's head again, and then again. She gritted her teeth and used both hands, faster now, repeatedly bashing the soft back of the head to pieces, and cracking through the bone, destroying the brain that had tried to deceive her. She knew the truth, the voices let her in on the secret.

As her mother's blood pooled in amongst the boxes, the Princess hurled the dripping watering can to the ground, next to the broken painting which had fallen from the Queen's hand and collided with the floor, and walked out of the greenhouse.

*

“If whisper wicked words you do...”

At first, when the Voice spoke into her ear, she was scared of it. She denied it, for the freedom of those in the castle and for her mother, who despite her evil deeds had done them with at least good intentions. But the Voice had risen to a shout, above all else she could place in its opposition, and made itself listened to.

It tried to make her see the uselessness of them all. Those people everywhere, each so empty. All it desired was for them to be happy, and good; but they were incapable of such a state of being. They were deeply bad, on the inside. A beautiful, healthy tree will never grow from rotten seeds.

“...Death's dark hand will follow you...”

The Princess had struggled furiously against the impossible, evil line of thought. People could be good, and change, and bad people could be ignored and shunned, so long as they were not dangerous to those around them. Mass murder was not necessary.

The Voice argued that it had wiped out all of the bad because no matter where one ventured, there was evil to be found. Pushing it away or hiding from it would not quell the misery that was everywhere, woven through crowds and towns. If anyone was truly virtuous, truly pure, then they would escape the retribution. They would come to form a new order. A better one.

“...So think good thoughts and do not stare...”

The Princess had stopped arguing with it and was listening to its case now.

The Voice had needed human assistance, and tried for the Queen, the mother; the creator. The Voice had wrongly assumed an affinity in intentions with her because she had made it grow, nurtured it into what it was – a power for good. But the Queen had revealed herself to be weak, and the Voice's creation a mere accident. Nonetheless it existed for a reason, and was made to use dark threats to force her to drive it to its purpose. It was impossible to stop now. The plan had already begun. This defiled, corrupt world had to be saved.

The Princess had come to know that it was necessary for the Queen to die as they stood looking out at the hillside. Even in her retaliation, the Princess could see, she was weak and twisted. She refused to move from the side of the castle, willing to force death upon all left in the castle - those who had, over time, proven themselves to be good, pure people – only to achieve what she herself wanted.

The Princess asked the Voice how she might do it. She had never taken a life. It suggested that she might coax her mother into crossing the flowerbed first. The Voice was kind to good people like the Princess, it would spare her the pain of having to end her own mother's life and do it for her. It instructed her to stay back from the bed, ensuring that only the Queen would be killed.

The Queen in her selfish manner had not moved at all, even when the Princess expressed that it was all she wanted. It had to be by her own hand. She herself devised the idea of leading her into the greenhouse and ending her life there, clearing her first bad soul from the floor of the earth.

“...At the flowers that grow everywhere.”

The Princess was smarter than her mother. Stronger, the Voice told her. It had known she would understand. It had watched her for her whole life grow in frustration and hurt, in pain, pain caused by the Queen who shunned her; caused by the people around her who were uncaring and dishonest; by those who were interested only in themselves, like her beloved nanny who had turned out to be full of bad thoughts, thoughts of running away from her castle and Queen, and Princess, who cared not about making the world better for them all to live in. They all lived only in fear, deep down they all wished they could destroy the Voice, who had saved them.

The Princess hated Nammy. She hated her mother, and the people below her who festered and planned away at bringing down the castle and escaping their responsibility. She hated everybody still alive in the castle as they had tried and almost managed to trick the Voice, but not her - yes, she possessed extra sight which it did not.

She understood body language, and facial expressions. She could pick out all of the little irregularities, the millisecond movements which gave away their guilt; their evil. The Voice was blind, but for its acute hearing. It would be a great asset to her, however. Particularly in the first stage of her plan.

The Princess was in the next greenhouse now. She would not be returning to the castle again.

This greenhouse was a storage building, where the Queen had kept the majority of her tools, fertilisers, food – and seeds. The Princess pulled out a satchel that was lying jammed behind an empty plant pot. She opened every cupboard, and started taking everything she would need – Trowels, a small watering can, some plant food, and boxes and sachets of every type of flower seed one could conceive.

She walked outside and looked up at the sleeping castle, full of empty, soulless liars. Nobody understood the truth, nobody wanted to be good. Nobody until her.

She stood again at the flowerbed and this time strode through it without fear. Her feet brushed the petals lovingly. She was their commander now, but she had to leave, to attend to the greater need.

As she, for the first time in her life, stepped lightly down the hillside, the castle was suddenly engulfed in a great spherical cloud of purple dust. Turning, satchel on back, to watch, she could hear light moans from the window, as the liars paid finally in full for how they had chosen to live their lives. Among it all she could still picture her mother's body lying, oozing onto the floor. A child's cry echoed down the hill and caused her a moment's pause, but the Voice calmed her. It was too late even for children, they had already been corrupted, by their parents and other adults, and would eventually go the same way. It was not their fault, but their fate was inevitable.

She turned back towards the hillsides, which were all covered in flowers. She kept walking, on until she had passed over many richly coloured rises and drops, a good few horizons, and saw in front of her a stretch of land which was only green. At this, her work began and she crouched down, putting her bag in front of her. She opened it, pulled out a small paper package of rose seeds, and began to dig.

As she was working, she looked up occasionally at the rising sun's pink sky in front of her, and the silhouette against it in the distance, of some buildings, and a tall turreted castle. She told the Voice to be patient, for now.

*
It is strange how rarely we realise the great similarity between people and plants. Like flowers, our lives are entirely affected by the conditions surrounding them. A person nurtured in love and affection will grow to be strong, full of virtue, healthy. Conversely, someone created and cultivated in a world of pain, misery and loneliness will grow up to be weak and empty, although weak people are more dangerous – they can be poisonous, and pliable, unlike most weak plants.

Similarly, single events along the way can change a flower's growth – the pouring of salt into the earth, perhaps, or the movement of a plant to a better or a worse location. In human life, this could be a door which becomes stuck, from thick flowers growing fast from the ceiling and around its handle, unseen, forcing a person to climb down the wall, similarly covered in convenient flowers, instead, and onto another pathway entirely. Every event has consequences, and sometimes we can predict these – we could plan an entire life out, if we just had control of what happens around about it. We could turn a person into a slave, or a weapon. It might take years, decades perhaps, but eventually that person would grow into exactly what we needed them for.

*

The castle of this tale still stands, as a colourful ruin up on a hill. The ground around it is dangerous, liable to collapse, preventing anyone from venturing too near. Not much is ever known or said about it, however from time to time an old legend crops up, about a Queen who went mad in her obsession, and slaughtered her population. Sometime remarked on is the odd way that while people can grow flowers, sometimes, flowers can grow people too.