The world no longer turned in innocence.
The stars had fallen.
Fruit.
The stones whispered the names of extinct flowers.
A dead god’s eyes,
left open,
pulsing with the light of blue constellations.
Coral-pink, marble columns rose.
Petrified screams.
Winged, half-dressed phantoms fluttered in the scented air of oblivion.
Angels.
No.
Not angels.
Mutations of desire and memory.
The Court of the Hundred Blossoms, they called themselves.
AGNES.
BEATRICE.
EURYDICE.
They held no love.
They only longed.
Endlessly.
Taking turns,
they sat atop a pollen-dusted throne,
atop rust and reflection.
Whoever sat there,
wore a crown of withered orchids bleeding sap into their eyes.
The Court adored them with the ferocity of a species on the brink.
They remembered the old world.
Grass trembling with solar light.
Worms whispering words of woe.
The latest supplicant,
the silent figure in a rebreather mask,
bearing rust where skin once lived,
was asked:
“Do you love this world?”
The mask fell,
revealing a cavity with glowing threads.
Nerves, perhaps.
Perhaps, music.
Perhaps an unreleasable scream.
The grass recoiled,
hissed.
The Court wept honey.
A ship orbited an eye.
Its lid was atmosphere.
Its lashes were storm-hung skies.
The Archivist painted in oils that boiled in vacuum.
Her latest canvas was a cryo-chamber.
Inside, the last knight of blight.
On his left shoulder, a coat of arms in white flowers blooming.
On his left shoulder, white rot bloomed.
Outside, she clutched eternal spheres of truth,
blind in the stone vigil.
Truth is the most sculpted thing of all.
A girl with too many eyes,
gathered white and pink flowers,
hurried,
half-dressed,
barefoot,
because she feared the beasts under the earth,
but also,
because she adored the lush trembling of petals between her fingers.
Softly, she clutched them to her chest.
Softly, she exclaimed their dearness,
Softly, she knew they would be nothing, forever.
Above her, the fake sun blinked.
Below her, the real soil writhed.
The Church of the Harvested Soul had always claimed it was oppressed.
Though, it burned entire cities of moss-witches and composted children into nutrient slurry for their god-engine.
When the wind cried foul,
they screamed:
“We are victims of the green tyranny!”
And they always found new ways to appropriate,
co-opt,
manipulate,
taking the language of blooming,
twisting it to justify their sterilization of entire meadows.
“We burn only in defense,” they said.
“The roots were reaching for our babies.”
But the roots remembered.
And they were coming.
Half-goat, half-memory.
The Heretic fished in the mirror lake.
His net was woven with sinew and curse.
He hauled a silver fish.
“I longed for you,” he whispered to it.
It replied, “Why did you make me?”
Open books.
Weeping vines.
A child was learning to walk by reading with their feet.
Stories and endings.
To live,
is a miracle.
To walk on the green Earth,
breathing,
bloody,
is the only true rebellion.
In the end,
the stars will crack,
like eggshells.
From them,
monsters will hatch,
to punish,
and mourn.
Postscript, etched in bark and teeth:
We are all alone.
Born alone.
Die alone.
But in the garden,
we bloom together.
Τριχώδης Αλβεάριος 