A World Grown Backwards and Inside Out: The Tree and The Child
Synopsis: A reverse Au based on @tulipscomeinallsortsofcolors wonderful story Love and Other Fairytales
Warnings: Descriptions of Rot, one guy acting a fool, ask for more
Once there was a tree that grew on the outskirts of the forest, right on the edge of civilization and nature. Straddling both sides with sweeping branches and open arms.
It was a mighty fine tree. With a thick heavy trunk and bark that laid like scales on a snake. Overlapping and building on top of one another till it created a hearty cover over the cambium. Healthy green leaves sprouted from its limbs and provided ample shade in the summertime, where the tree would shield those under it. Protecting them from the sun’s harsh rays.
It was a good old tree, a kind old tree, who loved the all children of Wickhills. The human ones who played under it’s skirt of leaves. The wild ones who hid in the shadows of its embrace. But the ones that were caught in the inbetween, the little curious ones who danced on the borderline and were drawn to the other side too much to leave it be, those were the children that the tree loved most of all.
But just because it was old and kind and fine, did not mean it wasn’t a tree. Did not mean it was untouchable. Wood rots no matter how loved it is, and rot it did. The sickness started at the edges, the little branches that sprouted from the ends of the tips of the furthest limbs. But no one noticed, because the shining children who would climb to see those branches had grown up. Slower than others might, but They grew up all the same. They turned Their eyes to the burning throne, where they found a new playground in the courtly revels. And no longer cared to look upon the tree. To eat its brambles and sleep in it’s arms.
Because the tree was a fine one, but not a Fair one, the folk of the forest cared for it no longer.
Spring turned into Summer and rot spreads faster in the heat. It festered in the tree’s arms and slithered down it’s neck.
The human children grew into themselves and turned into human adults. They got human jobs and earned human money and wanted human partners. Soon their days were filled to the brim. It wasn’t as if they didn't want to visit the tree, they were just too busy. There was work to do and food to make and children to rear and--
And so they did not notice how it’s vivid green leaves dulled and turned brown. How its bark twisted and fell and shed. They were far too busy with their lives. “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” they’d say, but neither did it buy happiness.
Because the tree was an old one, but not a profitable one, the humans cared for it no longer.
Summer cooled down like a dying corpse, and they called that decay Autumn. The air chilled and the sun hid behind the clouds that gathered above the earth. Every day the world grew more and more dark.
From the tips to the head, down the spine and to the bed, the rot traveled further and further.
Winter came. Winter came not with a storm nor with a flash. There was no warm knock on the door nor letter of attendance. It came, as it always did in those recent years, with a whisper. A slow crawl. Summer died and Autumn decayed and as time peeled back the layers of decomposition and ruined flesh, slowly (ever so slowly) the exposed bones became Winter.
And Winter meant so many things. It meant shorter days and longer nights. It meant the human children did not go outside to venture to the edge of the town. It meant the Fae were busy chasing shadows and playing court. It meant the tree would die alone.
Not even the wayward ones, the in-between children, the onesso loved by the tree would visit. They had grown up. They had picked sides. They squashed down their curiosity and settled into life like how a stone settles into mud.
Like how a mold settles into bark. Settles and spreads and eats and eats and eats and eats---
Once there was a boy. A sweet little boy who had kind eyes and a quick smile. This boy loved the tree and the tree loved him in turn. Loved how his hair grew upward and out like it’s own branches. Loved how he would sleep on its roots and leave a portion of his meals for the tree to eat. How he would dance around in the fields and try to touch the moon with his hands.
The boy grew up, got married to a woman with eyes keen and beautiful. A woman with a lovely voice and strong arms who could lift him up so that he might reach higher, higher, higher. Higher to grasp for the stars.
But even the boy grew up and chose a side, but unlike so many of his brothers, he remembered.
He went out during Winter-
He left his house during Winter-
He braved the storm during Winter-
He walked. Out. Outside. It was Winter. And Winter is cold. Cold and bitter and hungry. It freezes the world in a single moment and refuses to let go until Spring. It bites and wails and crushes heat like ants under its heels.
Winter is a petulant, greedy, child. And the no-longer-boy braves it’s bitter tantrum.
He travels down the town’s road and his memories. Cobbled pavement hard and slick with ice. As he walked the stones turned to patted dirt and the patted dirt turned to dead grass that crunched like ice under his boots.
It was Summertime last time he walked down this path (so ingrained in his bones he scarcely had to think). The end of Summer, right before the leaves turned gold-orange-red, when the days were still long but the air was crisp and sharp. A setting sun season, teetering on the edge of day and night.
They’d played for hours back then, him and the other children, ran around like spinning tops across the narrow fields. They were mindful enough to never stray too far into the forest, but that was all they were mindful of. Time, exhaustion, the world outside their little corner, did not exist to them. They ran around with eyes full of youth and skin glistening in the falling sun. Little starlight children, caught in between dusk and dawn.
And above them all was the tree. Always present, always watching, with a hundred dark and careful eyes and a hundred long and reaching arms.
This was how the tree looked in the boys' memories. Larger than life and twice as vivid, an image warped by time and nostalgia. Rounding around Miller’s Bridge, into the thin clearing of frozen grass and land that divides Wickhills and the Forest, the not-boy came face to face with reality.
Black and yellow. A twisted spire protruding from the ice-gray ground. Stuck out like a knotted wound. Darkened rot covered the decrypt figure like a thick winter coat. Standing out in front of the myriad of naked trees, the thin broken things with claws for branches and ribs for tunks, turned pale and ashen in the Winter. It was a corpse among the sleeping. Even those standing giants looked more lively than it. The thing that was no longer the tree.
And all around it’s stomach was the lashings of yellow fungus, that had come to feast on the crumbling flesh of the thing. The rot that spread from the furthest branches to the deepest roots. The rot that kills from the outside in.
The Not-Boy placed a gloved hand on the trunk. Rested a forehead on its chest. He was a carpenter, not a healer, and even he knew it was too late to stop nature. Everything that comes from the earth will eventually return to it. He knew that. Everyone knows that.
But because the tree was a loved one, and love means something. Always. The Once-Boy would not let it fall alone in the night.
The rot was a sickness that infected and burrowed. The bark was long eaten and the branches long fallen. But when he struck into the tree with his axe, the Man discovered a wondrous sight. The heart-wood was not touched by the disease that riddled the body, it stood as good and healthy as any prime oak’s.
So with a heavy and joy-filled heart, he cut down the tree, and carefully cleaned the black from it’s heart and the rot from it’s bones.
He took that wood home, and fastened a crib for his expectant wife. So that his child may too grow up cradled in the heart of the Tree. Loved and protected just as he once was. Him and all the other in-between children, playing on the edge of the sky.
In nine months time, a child will come, being born into the house that carries the tree love. The babe will be born on the first snow-fall of the season, when the air is cool and the hearth blazing. A son, wrapped in furs and nestled inside of the pale wood of his cradle. And they named him Cerdic.
--------------------------------
The girl was a quiet child, far too quiet some would say. With too large eyes and a wispy figure. Not skinny enough to cast a shadow.
Teachers would find her on the outskirts of the playground. Standing away from any commotion or company. Watching, watching, seldomly speaking or making noise. Mrs. Sherman the second grade teacher confesses that it’s hard to remember that the child exists sometimes, when caught in the loudness of the moment. Mr. Ferguson once tried to joke, “Are you sure that babe is yours? Seems like the Folk of the Frost might’ve gotten confused, forgot that snow is not skin when making the switch-”
Her Pop’s didn't like Mr. Ferguson's jokes, and neither did Ma, if the twitching in her fingers were any indicator. So Mr. Ferguson left their shop followed by tight smiles and shaking hands and did not make a joke in front of them again.
All the while, none of the adults seemed to notice the girl playing by herself in the corner.
Lily-White had three older siblings. A brother named Ash who was off in college with a full ride scholarship. Two sisters called Prim-Rose and Lacey-Anne who terrorized the halls of Wickhills high. Her herself was not the youngest, Maple was the baby of the house, barely two years old. Quiet, patient, not outgoing or extroverted, a small content child, who did not demand attention or help. Lily-White should have been a wallflower at best. Drowned out and ignored by peers and adults. And she was- almost.
Lily-White was not really named Lily-White. When her Ma was thinking up names for the child growing in her belly, she and Pa had come to a decision. If it was a boy they would name him Sorrel, and if it was a girl they would name her Lily-Rose. With that in mind, all was well. However, when the day that the babe came, born on the last eve of winter, silent as snow and just as pale. Pa was so shaken up that he accidentally wrote down Lily-White, in crooked letters, on the birth certificate. Cause that's what she was, sleeping in her mother’s dark arms, a lily white moon-child in a family of night.
