Red's CD Project Story 2: Part 27 - Seeds

Note: This is either great or terrible, and I can't even make up mind yet on it. Most likely, I just wrote a check I cannot cash. Oh well, writing, much like life, is all about taking chances. I'll enjoy seeing the reaction to this.

Disc 2
Track 6: In This River – Black Label Society

“Withdraw a step away, just to find myself. The door is closed again, the only one left”

A seed, green and tear-shaped, rested in a callused and dirty hand. The hand tipped, the seed slid, fell, nuzzling below in a dry bed of soil. The hand scooped up the sandy earth and buried the seed. Dust particles carried by a wind and a blazing orange sun stung her eyes, her green pupils pulsed to life. As if staring into a reflection, she saw herself. Short, square-shouldered and round faced. And young. Oh so, young. The dust kicked up more, drawing her hands up to block it away.

Another seed dropped from the hand, she looked up to meet his eyes. One green, one blue centered on a thin face with short gray whiskers spotting it.

“Matris, my dear, I am still here. Still planting the seeds, as you told me. I am still here.”

“Matris?” She ran her hands along her face. “My name. My first name! The one given to me on the Dawn of New Reap in a time, in a place lost to her. I am home!”

“Matris, my dear, I am still here,” The man began again. “Still planting the seeds, as you told me. I am still here.”

Turning wildly, she was standing in an endless landscape of brown dust. Only in the distance could she see the outlines of a dark mountain range, and squinting with hope, she made out a small copse of green below the mountain’s shadow. Life, where there had been none!

“Matris, my dear, I am still here,” The man’s voice was warm, but distant and cracked from disuse. “Still planting the seeds, as you told me. I am still here.”

“Isad. Can that be you?” He recoiled from being addressed, she did the same at the youthfulness of her voice. “My love. After all this time, it cannot be?”

“I am still here, Matris,” there was no moisture in his eyes to wipe away, but he made the action anyway. “I must get back to planting. As you told me, every seed counts. Who knows what will grow from the next one?”

He walked away five steps, reached into a pouch under his worn coat, and withdrew another seed repeating the planting steps she had shown him when they were both children madly smitten with eachother and knowing their love could not be. He was as frail and stretched as the waste around them.

“Isad come away from here with me. We’ll take the old door like I did before. No seeds will grow here. Not mine, not yours, not any. This world has passed away.”

Straightening after planting another seed, Isad walked another five steps, withdrew a seed and this one she could clearly see was black. The air left her lungs, the water poured from her veins. The power of the plant that grows stiffened and ran cold at her core.

“There are no more doorways here Matris,” Isad watched her never looking down at the shriveled black seed. “The Doors of the Worlds are closing.”

Her tongue was heavy and slow as Isad bent over and pushed the seed deep into the soil. Of all them, she knew that would be the one to grow.

“Isad, not that seed. Do not plant that seed?”

He covered it and straightened. There was no smile on his face, probably had not been one in an eternity of fruitless labor.

“Why Matris?” he asked, his voice as cold and as barren as the world “You told me to plant the seeds, no matter what. It cannot be helped if some of the seeds turn bad. The seeds must be planted.”

Springing from the ground came a fountain of blood and from that came a thousand mouths that sank into Isad’s flesh. She ran, not looking back, but hearing his voice one last clear time.

“The seeds must be planted.”

* * *


Across the cell, the skeleton with a thin layer of skin, a faintly beating heart and greasy white hair that dangled from the sides of his head and chin in tangled knots down to his chest, slumped against the base of the stonewall. Stretched out before his feet with toenails that curled out more than an inch was a brown rat with its insides squeezed out both ends. Two smells clung to the air – one a pungent mixture of sweat and decay, the other lingering underneath smelled almost of bread cooking in a warm oven. She knew what had killed that rat.

“What has become of you my son?” She touched her own lips as she spoke.

The man lifted his chin from his chest, drool lowered from his lips that were chapped and blistered. Brown blotches spotted his pale skin and dark bags circled his eyes that were nothing but two milky orbs with tiny black dots in the center.

“Paw and claw.” His mumbled words were directed toward the wall behind her. She was sitting on a thin canvas cot that had a flat, moth-eaten pillow at its head

“Is it gone then?” She edged forward on her elbows. “Daipraine the Wise, has the breath been released back to the dark.”

At the mention of his name, a ring of green surrounded the black dots in his eyes and the many lines of his face sharpened in anger.

“I have passed that seed on,” he meant to shout, but the words still were little more than a whisper.

“To who?” His face was covered with a dark grin that sent goosebumps up her arms. “What have you done, my son?”

“Paw and claw, I’m slipping away,” His words lasted only a moment, but by the last consonant the green had faded from his pupils replaced first by blue then gone altogether, leaving the tiny black dots.

“Daipraine?”

“Mother,” his eyelids wavered and closed, “sing to me mother.”

She pulled her knees to her chest trying to remember how to make a tune with her vocal chords. She started with a deep, monotonous chant of a tune well known in her son’s world. At least, it was known when she was last there.

“While the Wizard sleeps, never will the ladies weep, never will flame burn land”


* * *

The images broke into splinters like a vase thrown harshly against a wall. Before her was a painting of the man, spiked and dying. From above a light shown down spotlighting his bare chest, but not hiding the blood dripping down from his hands and feet.

“Now come, Daugther of the Green, come to the world I saved.” The voice echoed around the cave behind her and reverberated through her mind. “Come, the Doors of the Worlds open for you once more.”

She felt her hand turn the knob.


* * *

Tarek Grandar had stood before the door such as she had for nearly week. His thick fingers grasping the knob as his mind sped through thousands of worlds, hundreds of lives. He was seeing time at its very strangest in worlds that existed in thin stacks atop one another. Some minds could not handle such a jolt, but he was an extraordinary man.

It was he that had called it the Door to Nowhere when he stepped into the cave long ago with Lunar and Kekur strapped across his back. The swords were already taking a firm hold of the man that stood three times her height by then. He stooped over to avoid hitting the roof of the cave. Even the boy, Oan, who not short, would have had to stand on the tips of his toes to reach the lower hanging rocks. Tarek Grandar had been a rare man. She had studied him closely as he stood before the door all those days. Then on the seventh day, he turned the knob full, the door opened and he went through without a word. She did not know where he was sent or for what reason. All he left were the two swords resting against the wall. Those could not leave.

The witch was different than Grandar. She did not breeze through random worlds when her hand had touched the knob days ago. She had traveled before, and when her time came to move again, the door always provided haunting images of her former homes.

The last image had been her invitation from the guardian of her destination. Every world had a guardian, or at least once had a guardian. Even they were not immune from being consumed from the gathering dark. Isad had said the Doors to the Worlds were closing, if so, then the guardians must have allowed them or they had not been there to stop it.

The door opened easily, a grey-brown mist seethed out from around the cracks. The inbetween always came first, and, for that moment, she always worried that she would be stuck in it even though she was certain of her invitation to another world. There was no smell in the inbetween, just the all emcompassing mist and the dreadful feeling of being lost. She stared into it a second with the door all the way ajar. Even an old witch could not defeat even older emotions like fear.

“One more trip for me,” she said, but the words were gobbled up into the gray mist. “This will be the last, and mayhap, the worst.”

Stepping forward, the mist dampened her face first then a cold shiver settled and stayed in her bones as behind her the door blew shut. Walking forward, she left her hands to her side knowing that there was little reason to reach out. The first time she had travled so, she had ran through the mist in terror, her arms spread out before her, stumbling, but never really falling. There was no up or down, front or back, once inside only a sense of movement and the expectation of a destination remained. Some had been wrong about that destination and were lost forever in the mist.

Above her, a square appeared as if cut out of the mist by a sword. She recognized it as her doorway, and moved toward it as if climbing a stairway. The image of the otherside of the doorway was distorted and shimmered like it was covered with a layer of clear water. She could make nothing out for sure other than what appeared to be a thick wood beam. When was right below the opening, she stopped and a smell carried through that she faintly recognized.

“Dried hay,” she laughed. In another world, she had grown fond of the smell of hay stored in stables and barns.

She strode through. The dampness left her skin when she rose through the floor of the barn on the other side. Taking a few steps out, she realized she had entered into the upper loft of a huge barn. The door behind her fell shut with a hollow thud.

Closing her eyes, she breathed deep the rich smell of wood and hay. It was a welcoming place to enter the world, a perfect manger for her to take stock and gather her wits. Before she could complete the thought, she heard a click and something cold and solid nuzzled against the back of her head. She was not alone.

“Who are you?” The man’s voice was desparate. “Who are you and how did you come out of the floor?”

“I am simply a weary traveler,” she said in the most soothing voice she could manage. “Is there place here for me to stay a night or two before I am on my way.”

“There are no simple travelers in days like these,” the man said. “I’ll blow your fucking head off if you don’t tell me how you just got here!”

Slowly turning to face him, she found he was aiming a small iron object at her head. She had seen the damage the thing could do through the glass in the doorway. Some magic forced out a small ball of fire that exploded when it hit its spot. She was eager to study it and see if she had the spark to make the weapon work.

“My name is Madi,” she made a new name for herself. He stepped back caught then in the charm of her green eyes. “Please, we have not met properly. What is your name?”

He lowered the weapon and shook his head. His strange clothing of dark pants, a white shirt with a strip of red cloth around his neck that was too small to work as a scarf and a black jacket were all torn and dirty.

“My name is Henry Glock,” he stammered. There was something dark hanging on the edge of his eyes. “This is my family’s barn.”

* * *

Back inside the cave, the door was closed again. The room filled with the cold of winter and a baby bear sniifed from the entrance trying to decide if it was a suitable place to hibernate through the season.

All was the same, except for the green diamond of glass on the door. That was not the same, at all. It was now black.


* * *

“AHHHHHHHHH!”

Nestor jumped to his feet as the boy screamed from across the fire. He thought for a moment that the terrible giant that the boy called a gargola had returned to finish devouring them. Adjusting his eyes to the dark sky and dwindling fire, he saw that there was nothing around, but the two of them.

“What’s the matter boy? A bad dream get to ya?” Nestor’s back cracked as he eased back down to his bedroll. He was getting too old to be sleeping on the ground.

The boy was standing in nothing but his britches next to the fire. It had stopped snowing before they made camp, but it was still bitter cold for his blood. Yet the boy, with his brownish skin and long dark hair, still barely wore any sort of clothes. He was rubbing the spot on his chest where the damn witch had burned him.

“In a way I did,” Oan said. “The wounds have healed except I can feel something hard, like a broke off arrowhead still there under the surface of my skin. The witch must have gone through the door. She’s left us.”

“Good riddance, my boy.”

Nestor was truly glad to be rid of her. One less thing in the way, he thought, and started rubbing at his own chest. It was going to get harder to hide the changing of his skin.