3. The Damned Flowers #2
Below us, two figures were working in the densest patch of overgrowth. The first was a silver-haired giant, easily eight feet tall if not more, his body cast entirely in bronze. He carried a metallic sphere in each hand, moving through the flowers with a grace unusual for someone so massive.
The spheres glowed when he brought them close to the asphodels. The flowers began to unweave at their approach. The stems loosened. The petals separated. The physical form of each bloom came apart into threads of silver-blue energy that flowed into the spheres.
Just like that, where there had been a bloom, there was only bare stone.
The second figure was almost as large but covered in thick black fur.
His head was wolven, heavy-muzzled, with pointed ears that swiveled as he worked.
He moved through the overgrowth the way I’d seen farmhands clear fields, sweeping his death sphere in wide arcs that sent the asphodels unraveling in waves.
The flowers resisted. They snapped at the bronze figure’s hands, and he pried them off one by one with patient fingers before letting the spheres dissolve them.
They coiled around the wolven one’s legs, and he shook them loose without slowing down.
Behind them both, fresh stems pushed up from the cracks in the stone almost immediately.
The flowers kept growing back, kept reaching, kept being unmade, over and over in a futile and quietly terrible cycle.
“Who are they?” I asked Iaso, pointing at the two figures.
“Harvesters.” She watched them with a clinical familiarity that told me she’d been observing this for a while. “The bronze one is Aion. The other is Theron. They’re part of an elite unit. Normally, the asphodels don’t resist them like this.”
“They were strange at the auction too,” I said, thinking back to the corridor before the stage. “They followed me down the hall. Phix said they bite.”
“I say a lot of things, child,” a familiar voice cut in from my right. “Most times, none of you know how to listen.”
I jolted and spun around, coming face to face with the sphinx auctioneer.
She was sitting on the wide stone railing on the other side of the balcony. Her massive wings were folded against her flanks. I straightened and met those dark, ancient eyes. “I’m listening now. Thank you for carrying me off the stage.”
“You collapsed in the Agora.” She said it as casually as one might mention the weather. “Everyone who steps onto my stage is my responsibility until they step off it. You simply required more assistance than most.”
I accepted that. Phix wasn’t a creature who wanted her kindness examined, and I wasn’t going to press the issue.
“I came to explain the circumstances in which you find yourself,” she continued, and her gaze drifted to the harvesters below.
“You are a death-touched bride who entered my market. The auction was interrupted before a claim could be made. Under Asphodelian law, you are granted a period of recovery. When you are well, you will re-enter the market.”
The words were plain and clean. No malice, no softening. I let them settle before I asked the question I already knew the answer to.
“And if I don’t recover?”
“The grace period has no fixed length,” Iaso offered from beside me. Her hand hovered near my arm, not quite touching. “You will not be rushed, Ianthe. My infirmary is yours for as long as the treatment requires.”
“As long as I eventually go back on that stage,” I said.
“Yes,” Phix replied, just as calm as before. “As long as you eventually go back on that stage.”
A silence settled between the three of us. Below, the harvesters kept working. Aion had reached a long trail of asphodels climbing the wall across the canal. He held his spheres close, and the flowers came apart with the same devastating ease.
Phix turned to watch.
Her forepaws gripped the railing. Her claws extended into the stone.
Her wings pressed tight against her flanks, and her jaw clamped shut, rigid and unyielding.
She stared down at the unraveling flowers, and the ancient lines of her face twisted into an unguarded grimace.
Iaso caught my eye and shook her head. Not now.
I looked away. Whatever Phix saw as the flowers dissolved was none of my business.
Phix exhaled slowly. Then she spread her wings, launched from the railing, and was gone.
I tracked her flight toward the far side of the canal. When I looked back down at the avenue, Theron had moved farther along the street, his sphere carving a path through the overgrowth.
In the Blighted Lands, asphodels had lit a path through the darkness when I had nothing else to follow.
They had bloomed ahead of me, steady and patient, the first living things to reach toward me instead of away from me.
At the Agora, they had pressed close at the threshold of the stage.
And now I stood on a balcony and watched them come apart into light and vanish.
“It’s sad,” I murmured.
If Iaso agreed with me, she didn’t show it. She brushed her fingers against my shoulder. “Come inside. You’ve been on your feet long enough.”
I let her guide me back through the archway. But I looked over my shoulder once at the avenue below. The asphodels ahead of the harvesters bloomed on, bright and stubborn and doomed. I wondered if I was as damned as them.