Page 51 of Up from the Earth

“You have lived Cerridwen Adaire Locke. You have given birth, and you have now known death.” A circle formed around me as all the voices spoke as one, the warmth of existence permeating this strange essence of mine. “But there is more. There is yet another step to be taken, and a kingdom to preserve.”

The endless changed. That flickering of light, these shapeless and certain beings around me, altered as one. It was everywhere and nowhere, suffusing my spirit and existing outside of it to pull it forward, to pull it out.

I was in the depths of the well, and I had changed. But this was not the final phase of my existence. I knew now that I had to go back. I would go back.

Because I had and would again. I was the cycle, the circle. And circles have no end.

I was a daughter of spring, and spring was a time of rebirth.

Twenty-Three

Gather Up Your Seeds & Plant Your Future. Reap What You Sow & Tread Ever Onward.

Ipushedmyhandthrough the darkness around me, now solid and warm. It crumbled, breaking away and slipping past me as I clawed through the soft earth. Dirt. I pushed my way up through dirt, finding the light like a seedling sprouting. Sunlight warmed the air where I broke through, new life calling to me.

The pain of pressure and toiling work settled in my muscles, but I persisted until at last it gave way and my head breached the surface. I sucked in my first breath, the air crisp and cool and clean. I hauled myself from my grave, my body reformed and whole, and I dragged myself across the surface until each bit of me was free from the ground’s embrace.

Sunlight stung my eyes, the searing rays bathing me until I gradually grew used to the glow. The aches in my legs and chest slowly receded with each moment, nerves and extremities and veins coming back online. I breathed. My heart pumped. I heard the sounds of the forest around me. And I could feel the constant earth beneath me.

I was alive once more.

Pushing up off the ground, I scanned the scene around me. I wasn’t on the battlefield or near the tear in the planes. I wasn’t in the World of Below at all. I was home. This was the forest where I’d first run as a child, the woods that had led me off the path—and to my wolf.

Shaking the dirt from myself as best I could, I stepped forward, the heart of the forest calling to me. Something crunched beneath my foot. As I looked down, I found a skull. It wasn’t human. It belonged to a fox.

Reaching down, I freed it from the thick layer of moss that grew over it. My skin burned where I touched him, and at once, my mind filled with the vision of its demise. Cruelty and pain. A spirit no longer at rest. Forcing my eyes back open, I saw them—the hundreds of bones and corpses that decayed beneath the undergrowth.

Not all animals. Humans and plants, too, had found their end at the hands of my own murderer. Paine had desecrated these beings, pulling them from their intended cycle. From souls to lives, he’d claimed their deaths and afterlives as his own, garnering him power while the balance became ever more corrupted.

Holding the skull, I looked out over the field of loss before me. “You do not deserve this. This was not to be your end.”

I could not revert time without a horrible cost to myself, one I could not pay if I wanted to oppose Paine in the World of Below. But cycles were not straight lines; they were circles.

Holding out my hand, I called up that power, turning my fingers so that the bodies and skeletons hidden beneath the green would progress further. The newer souls speed through their decay, flesh melting from bone to feed the earth and bone bleaching white from the spring sun. Flowers pushed up through their ribs, and the rest that had been here longer.

And time continued rushing across them. The woven strands of reed and stem covered my fallen ones as muscle and sinew. Chlorophyll and sunlight fed their spirits, winding together the flora and the fauna as their blood. The forest shook, understanding the depth of the working in this sacred place.

“I need you.Please.” I turned my hand still forward, giving that bit of myself that knew the truth. “Rise up with me to strike him down.”

Clouds darkened overhead, my arm trembled, aching to fall. And they were made whole, the stains of malice no longer coloring their remains. The archway in the wood was up ahead, and I looked around to see the family risen alongside me on this day of perfect balance.

“We need to find him. Father Paine remains in the World of Below. He has taken you from your cycle. I cannot return you. But you may accompany me, and remain in the Forest of my castle.”

A figure stepped from the line, a small boy who had once been a member of the priest’s flock. He looked from the greenery-forged deer to the slight fox who now leaped from my hand to greet him.

“He will not go quietly. He only likes quietly.”

The voice was small, a projection of a spirit that had been sliced free of its proper home. I approached him, dropping down to my knees and looking up into the boy’s face of leaf and vine.

“The priest took you from your life. He took…” I peered into the boy’s essence, the scars of torment inflicted still there. “...so much from you. I cannot change the past. But we can reshape the future. He hasharmedyou. And what has once come before must come again.”

Nodding, the boy seemed to understand. He turned toward the path that led into the trees, and I took up my place behind him. The stag, horns made of brambles and branches, stepped up beside me. I laid a hand on his back, and he did not flinch.

“You are in need of a mount.”

My eyes stung for the memory, but I nodded. “I am. But…wait until we are below.”

Feeling the earth beneath my feet, a familiar white gown draped over my body, I leaned my head back and let the sun radiate onto my face. The wind rustled my hair, slipping around all of us with a silent spell of fortitude.

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