I am the last of a line, my only company the mosses that line the walls and the books I am tasked to guard. The books lie still, their pages full of songs and poems transcribed as they were spoken by long-extinct creatures, new life forms, even stones that spoke once and never again. The mosses rest between their wooden slats, insulating me from the caprices of the outside world. For many years, they too were silent, but now they whisper to me.
It began on the new moon. Though the tone grows more frantic, the words remain indecipherable, like voices speaking in the next room, where only certain syllables come through. I press my ear to the damp green mats, but the earth below the mossery is alive with fire after the most recent burn. The pops and cracks of superheated sending stones drown out the whispers. It frightens me. The earth beneath my feet is sliced through with veins of sending stone, and that someday it would have to burn, leaving empty tunnels behind. I never imagined it would be so soon.
When the world quiets enough to hear the moss, I don’t know what the words mean. The mosses have never spoken to me before, and as I learned from the hen of the woods, words mean different things to all the different shapes that life takes. Still, they must be recorded.
The pages of the old, damaged books smell half of mildew, half of sweet tobacco age. Histories of a world eaten alive by magic.I open the book of flora with all the care I would give to a hatching hummingbird. With an old bottle of iron gall ink and a quill nibbled by moths, I scratch the message into a blank page:
Soft the rain and mist
To bring a lover’s kiss
Choke the neck
That fruits the spore
And thread the forest floor
Dread creeps down my spine like frost. Something is coming. I want to huddle in the middle of my house, as far from the mosses as possible, but I have a duty to protect the books. If they hold no answers, there is but one place to look.
I do not go outside often, for the trees are ancient, their words so slow and deep that they are felt in the bones more than heard. Trunks slant against each other like a child’s house of twigs, tied together with hungry vines and shingled with massive lichen. Leaf litter and other decaying things are soft under my feet, the scent of rot mingling with the metallic stench of burning magic that rises from below. Blue plumes of smoke and fluttering flecks of magic make me cough and gasp for air. They numb my lips and tongue. I press on through the discomfort, reminding myself of my duty. Nobody else will treasure the words of this wilderness that snatches my breath away every chance it gets.
The ugly squash of death beneath my feet turns to spongy softness. Moss fields stretch out ahead in a thousand mottled shades of green, a rolling sea beneath a sky tinged yellow with sun and spores. I lie down in the bed of moss, warm from the sending stone fires. Here, their song is louder than the crackle of breaking rock.
Bright the sunbeams shine
To run the anchor line
Seize the bark
Climb up the stone
And creep into the bone
Tepid rain patters against my closed eyelids. The droplets trail down my face, a tangled web of filaments tying me to the ground. Thread the forest floor. Something shifts beneath me, the barest movement of rhizoid tentacles. The moss is awake. I sway when I stand, dizzy with danger. I must keep the books safe, as my mother did before me, her mother before her.
I shamble back to the mossery, my stomach a glass bottle on the edge of tipping over. The slow rumble of the trees stops. The lichen only hum. Somewhere, a blue jay makes his rusty-hinge call and falls silent. Safety flees my home on silent wings, leaving only slats and colorful mosses that form deadly coral snake stripes on the walls. A hiss joins the whispers, like a thread being drawn through the eye of a needle. The mosses pull free of their substrates, rocking the structure to and fro. I grab as many books as I can carry and run as the mossery lists, shedding boards and nails, falling in on itself.
The gentle rain becomes a downpour, making lakes out of lichen pads and pouring waterfalls into the undergrowth. I dodge the flows, trying to protect the books. Over my shoulder, a wave of green consumes the mossery, the displaced air thick with the smell of earth. Trees moan, deadwood crashes to the ground, and saplings are crushed beneath the flow. I splash through streams, heart too big for my ribcage.
Soaked to the bone, my nose and mouth fill with pollen and algae washed down from the canopy. I stumble once, twice, fall into earth churned to mud. My tomes, precious record of a world of songs, sink into the muck. I’m elbow deep in an instant, slogging through slime, but the delicate goatskin parchment is ruined by the time I rescue the books. I have no children to learn the words of the crow or the orb weaver. I haven’t seen a single human in fifteen years at least. With the books destroyed, my work was for nothing. The songs were my children. My lungs burn for nothing.
I push to my knees, not knowing why. The roaming mosses crush me flat. Rhizoids skitter over my skin, their wet weight pushing me into the mud. The last molecule of oxygen leaves my lungs, and for a while, I’m suspended in time, body struggling for air that isn’t there. Tendrils enter my eardrums with two bright, searing pops, and the song of the moss rushes in.
Dark the shadows fall
To crush and cover all
Rot the flesh
And still the mind
To leave the pain behind
Relief. My head clears as precious oxygen surges into my lungs and words fill my veins. Every stone, every tree, every mushroom, telling the story of rain, of river, of flood. Lightheaded, I stagger to my feet again and look for an escape. I scramble into an oak so ancient and massive my arms can’t fit around the trunk. The wave of moss ripples past, and water comes behind it. Choking steam rises from cracks in the earth, so thick that it blurs everything except tree bark and glowing cerulean motes of magic once encapsulated by sending stones.
The world is muffled by my punctured eardrums, blood running down the sides of my face, but when the roar of water fades, silence settles in my bones, heavier than all the water in the world. If I’m free of the duty that has bound me to this place, I don’t feel it. Instead, I am tied more deeply to it, the last of a dying breed the trees will forget as soon as my flesh no longer feeds them.
