The Index
Chapter 5: In Which Seed Meets His Shadow
Seed's Story, Chapter 6: In Which Community Aid Is Called For
Seed could feel his body changing, the knots of his muscles become the grain or green wood. He didn’t care. All he could think as he listened to his own voice writing his faults into the clear night air, pounding him with all the things he had always worried were true, was
Please…Payton, Twin Gods, Anyone… Help me. He opened his eyes into the darkness.
A poppy fell very slowly from the heaven, light as a feather. The wind caught it and cradled it in its arm. Even in the dark night, it was blindingly red – the sweet red of a rising sun, or clouds at sunset. It was the red of a tongue, or lips ready to kiss. The petals were soft and thin, lit by a light from within so each thing vein glowed. Seed didn’t know how to interpret it – poppies had always been flowers of hope to him, hope and first love, new life, sweet kisses. But poppies, as he always said, were funeral flowers – the death of hope, the end of life – for funerals and ghosts. Poppies were the flowers of dreams, the younger brother of death. As it fell, teetering this way and that, he couldn’t decide what it meant that it was.
As it reached the ground, it exploded into a bomb of poppy stalks, into a circle of red light that banished all the shadows and made the forest lit by day once more. Standing there were two great deer, one delicate and red, one masculine and gold, but somehow also exactly one deer larger than either.
“You have called,” said The Red. “We have answered,” said The Gold.
“What is this?” “what?” “what?” The trees chorused in surprise.
