Page 55 of Up from the Earth

I sobbed, screaming for nothing as there was none to save me. The end tunneled all the closer, my thoughts jumbled and flickering.

Cerberus…

And then I was there in my mind, seeing the forest where I’d carried him through months that progressed as seconds. I’d carried him. I’d given birth to him in the soft grass and circle where I felt most at home. My son.

That pain had been…it had nearly claimed me. But it had made me as well. It belonged to me, and the priest would not use it.

“What are you doing, witch? You think some fucking nonsense about your doomed child will—”

I opened my eyes, searing light bathing Father Paine. “You want my suffering? My agony and death? Take it. Take this.”

Focusing on the enormity of sensation that gripped my body when I delivered Cerberus, I somehow pushed up onto my feet. I didn’t force the knife-sharp digits from my mind but through them sent it all to the priest.

“Feel what I have been through.” My drowning, my creation of the steel. “Take what I have used to shape myself and hold it inside your festering soul.”

Cries dripped from the priest’s mouth, blood and teeth falling to the ground as his split mouth stretched further. And the pain was mine again, but shared,giftedto one who so needed the reminder of its purpose. The pillar beneath us rumbled, and I conjured my vines, sending them into the priest’s mouth and eyes and head.

“Now, friends,” I called down to the children of the earth and below, “pull this mortal back down.”

Tendrils of green flew through the air, some climbing the sides of the pillar, until they wrapped around Father’s Paines manifested form, circling him in a web that trapped him in place. I sank my tendrils in deeper, sucking away the life he’d stolen, returning the spirits he’d kidnapped from the cycle.

“You do not belong here, Paine. You are not welcome. Go back to your Pit.”

Flesh melted from the bones he’d stolen from their graves, sloughing off him in chunks. Sinew and blood evaporated, turning to nothing but dust as the life this monster had taken from others was retrieved, sent back where it belonged. His robes burst into flames, gone in a whoosh of smoke that left nothing but a charred skeleton.

Releasing my hold, the remains clattered to the ground. Immediately, the earth here began to creep around his ribcage and skull. He would join the void, his matter made fuel for the realm. My pillar lowered to the ground as the choking clouds above dispersed. Lightning dissolved from the sky, the cracks in the crust’s surface sealing over with thick moss.

“Cerridwen!” Turning over my shoulder, my King rushed across the field toward me, crashing against my chest as they fell to their knees and held on to me—so tight.

I curled myself over their form, tears bleeding from my face in verdant trails of green and red that dripped into their hair. My body shook, my heart beating too hard against the swell of everything that had happened.

“I’m here. I’m here.” I held onto my Beast King, clinging to them just as much as they did to me. “I’m never leaving you. Never again.”

Tipping my head so that I might rest my cheek on their head, I spied the skeleton of the priest, nearly eaten whole by nature. Flowers—yellow and pink—bloomed through the empty gaps in his ribcage. Ferns coiled around the matte white bones as moss blurred the edges of where he ended and the earth began.

Life through death.

And I held onto my King, nevereverletting go.

Epilogue

All Hail The Queen Of The Cauldron.

Astilllakelaybefore me, its surface like speckled glass, with purples and pinks melting over it from the reflected sky. Looking up into the limitless atmosphere, the sun and moon hung together, granting this space its equilibrium. The air was soft, a gentle whisper of life across my skin, and this place encompassed me with no visible end.

From the hair-thin split between the light’s sky and night’s, stepped my King. They approached, streams of endless black strands speckled with stars trailing behind them. They smiled, their void black eyes and ethereal features neither human nor God, neither masculine nor feminine, but all, none.

“Cerridwen.”

The word was a balm, drifting over the lingering aches with perfect preciousness and care. I stepped up to them, and I was small. Their mountainous form dwarfed me, but I was still too tiny to be myself as I usually knew myself.

I looked down, finding a child’s hands, a young maiden only just entering the woods full of questions.

“I am not this girl.”

The King shook their head. “No. You are not.”

At once, I was in my rounded shape, life carried within me. “I am not this mother.”

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