The start of all promises.

A field of endless waves of flowers- pink, orange, red of death, blue. Specks of hell knows what fluttered in and out of vision. Phoenix could barely feel himself. Over all these delirious stings of flushed out calls. A deep voice, broken, cracking at the edges, distorted the scene in a disorienting flurry. He tried, tried to ground himself, in vain! Had he any feet anymore? So he listened.

“Endless times I’ve tried to reach you, and I do, but you might as well be deaf and blind! Don’t you know, understand, what you’re forsaking-”

He soared awake with a hitch in his throat. 

“Dreaming and not keeping it to themselves, I see.”

“Is that anything new?”

He paid little attention to the black-naped monarch and the deer that stood feet away from him. They stood gazing at him, steady animals with flickering gazes. When he’d first started having these fits of, well, dreams, they’d been worried for him, scared. And how that ominous stillness (hordes of animals around him, ears perked up, monkeys with river water cradled in leaves. Waiting) had adapted into ease of normal. In some of the more playful and tauntful animals, mocking. 

He’d heard them talking often of what he’d often seen glimpses of in his dreams. Of “spirits”. 

“Do you know anything about spirits?” he’d asked Fea, the majestic stag, on his death-soil-and-grass. It was a long, long time ago, when he’d scarcely been about four. Fea was the only one who’d ever held promise to him. Great antlers, fur that had warmed him many nights and days. Now he lay with his legs tucked under, curled. A leaf, withering. 

They didn’t communicate in words. None of the animals did. It was thought. It was a fire. It was warmth, a link, a thunder bolt. Their mouths didn’t open. The Earth did. 

“Phoenix,” he’d staggered a few last words. “Just let yourself die a bit more, won’t you, son?”

The moons waned. The throb sprawled dead and cold in death. So much for promise. 

The dawn was misty. The tree that he’d been leaning against stood wide and brooding over him. Brooding, quite literally. It’s trunk, wide enough to carve himself a family out of (of elephants at that) hummed. Hummed like a fading note of a trumpet. This happened occasionally, and more frequently as of late. Never, never had he ever found a reason for it. The times he’s tried to make it answer with an axe? Only an increase in the intensity of the hum. Like an acceleration in a vehicle, a whoosh as a blade passed by. The bark grew right back. Now if he tried, he pretty much only did it to see the rapid golden threads solidify into golden-brown (though he told himself otherwise).

His eyes followed the daunting, unmarred (except for by age) trunk up onto the crown of the tree, silent and smudgy in the light of dawn. A cast of falcons was perched on the reaches high above. No matter how he tried (climbing up, trying to get other creatures to talk to them) he could never seem to reach them. He’d concluded they either didn’t, couldn’t talk, or held secrets that could run him amok. 

They seemed to belong within the grasps of this tree as much as waves belonged on top of the ocean. Yet they were as silent and distant as the depths of it. Answer m-

Distant yelps rung afright and tinny through the woods. Shivering. Before he knew it, he was tearing through the ensnaring roots, dangling, slashing branches with his soul perked up. It was the kind of rush that promised an end with loss at end. His feet slowed as he looked out into a space crammed with herbs and orange trees. The blooming, spilling-open flowers were a foil to the closed up, grimly sacred (to Phoenix, at least) scene enclosed within. He saw a person, scarcely any older than him, kneeled over a fawn, seemingly nursing it. It was the fawn he’d struck down before he went to rest. The yelps had died down. Phoenix felt a surge within him like a christened rage. How could they dare touch his food, something he’d earned for himself? His legs turned into arrows, fingers into weighted knives. Before they knew it, Phoenix had them pinned to the soil. Another death-soil-and-grass? His fingers grabbed their throat. In the rage and rabidity of it all, his nails had cut open the side of their neck. It was enough to make him think of them as another vision. The wound was giving out blood. And flowers. Foxgloves. 

“What,” Phoenix retracted. He met their gaze, hair slicked back, sweat cloaking them, and something he couldn’t explain. This look in their eyes that told him this was a person who’d spent life dying. Let yourself die a bit more, son. 

A pang as the memory of a vision swept through his spine. He was flowers. He’d become them, and he watched as the sky bled out, roots tangle, a wildfire. 

A pang swept through his spine, a vision, where he turned into flowers and flowers into him. He’d healed withering flowers and diseased flowers and flowers crying. Now he placed his hand against their neck. The flowers fell to the ground, the wound closed up. 

“You,” Phoenix said, struck. “You aren’t human.”

“It’s true, I’m sick,” they said mournfully, sitting up, as Phoenix crouched beside them.

“Dying?” he quickly braced their arm, at which they could feel a tinge of refreshing warmth. Life.

“Dead,” they said. “Something’s falling out of me all the time.”

The fawn at their side had fallen dead. Its straining head released with a thud. As did the flower-bleeder’s body. Their shoulders drooped, eyes shut, head like a downstream current. Their back hit the ground.

Phoenix held their wrists, and dragged them along. He was thinking of taking them to his cabin. Their body was heavy, so, so weighted. Eventually the effort picked at his legs and the space between his eyes, so he leaned against a tree. He shut his eyes. The waves came in like a tsunami, a comet hitting ground, every time he’d killed with a screaming psyche. The city was the last thing he’d ever thought would flash before his eyes. He was shooting through lit-up blocks of buildings stretching into the clouds, lurid lights out of stores. He felt a wild sense of panic course through him, turning him into a forest fire. Run. The volcanic voice from his dreams. He shuddered apart from the vision, but the inferno didn’t die. He dropped their wrists and scrambled away. Anywhere. 

***

The red tinged the dark first. It was evening now, the forest cradling golden. Sere woke up, dazed. A distant sound, an engulfing hum sounded. They could feel the blood in their veins quicken, heart throbbing crazily. They rose up, trying to gather all the pieces they’d lost. Willing themself clear and awake, they started moving towards the sound. Occasionally, they could make out a voice of another animal- a wolf, birds, and roars? - but the hum overpowered all. Walking the path that seemed to hone them like a sword, they ended up before a shadowy tree emitting gloom. There was no doubt about it- it was the source of the hum. They circled it, getting closer, when their vision landed on the horde of creatures in the clearing. There were wolves, lions, deer, rodents, birds. Falcons. So many of them. Despite the surprise and the potential danger it would cause to a person, they didn’t feel the least bit afraid. The surprise settled down as the animals did. All heads down, eyes closed, welcome. They were paying them reverence. Even the birds bowed, regal. 

They would have never thought. The night before, they’d been at a party of their mother’s friend. They hadn’t known a soul there. They did make friends with the other kids, and tried their best mixing with them. Blue lights, wicker chairs, occasional potato pops and talking of how far they could shoot at golf. It started with a knit between their eyebrows. Then sweating hands. A feeling like the earth under was shifting in the other direction than the rest. Like it’d fragment under them any second. They rose up, took their leave like they’d been taught. Then their soul fell into a pit, caught on fire. Lost its shackles. And they ran. Through the daunting buildings, floating, glaring people, lurid lights stinging them. Tearing through roads, bridges, boundaries. Tearing down boundaries. They ran for a long time before reaching the woods. A feeling like home seeped into their very bones. The stiffness melted, the ice put in the forge, forcing it to not melt. Death, reimagined. Finally. Years and years of stifling an aching so huge it felt like a dead soul. And finally it’s led them to this broken edge of belonging. But, it’d also led them to this place, between all these creatures, bowing. Bowing to them! Their vision glazed over all of them, stately and lifting. They knew deep in their gut that opening their mouth would do no good. So they thought to reach out with the mind. They had just grasped the thoughts, when their vision landed on Phoenix. Behind a group of foxes, Phoenix, with a mind embroiled in pure anger and rage, though he didn’t move and said nothing. Then their mind took in what held beside him. Brighter orange than the foxes near them, like sharp, striking lava. A flower. Wide-spanning silk for petals, with a centre of gold. It sprung out ropes, a siren call, pulled them towards it with rapturing gravity. Their feet lifted off the ground, slowly, aiming towards the flower. A haze seemed to glide into the scene. What is this? This pull that yielded rebirth? They reached it, and felt an irresistible aura emit from it, almost like the sun’s burn and fumes. Their breaths quickened, threatening to leave their body, oh, dear Lord, answer, what am I tell me I’m okay-

“Calm down,” Phoenix’s voice rung out. In their head. Even Phoenix's lips parted as surprise took him. He recollected Fea’s words: you need a connection to be able to reach someone’s mind. Like roots that reach somewhere deeper than the soil. 

How could he have reached them?

Phoenix snatched his face away from theirs. “It’s just a flower,” he bent down and crouched beside it. He knew it held something more promising than just a flower. Sere joined, crouching beside him, unconsciously shrining it, casting a light on it that ran deeper than the divine rays of the dipping sun. 

Then Phoenix reached for it. 

His hand touched he rubbery surface.

A vein of cold, and warm, gold ran through his hand, down his spine, down his legs, to his toes, doubling back, to his eyebrows, to his mind, to his soul.

A stag. Fea? Braced, fury radiating from him, antlers pointed sharp like the sting of a scorpion. Why did he look so wronged? His vision drifted to another mass, ruffled, shifting, a falcon. Huge enough to wrestle Fea. A confrontation. Indistinct, shadowy crowds surrounded them. Creatures. The flower rested in the middle of it all, brooding, preparing, yielding rebirth, alive.

“You’re a spirit,” Phoenix reached Sere. He’d thought himself one. The one. It explained the healing, the stitching whole, the reaching. It didn’t explain the distance, the angry dents in the sandalwood bark, the bruises on his knuckles. Why he could never make home in this nest of nature’s divinity. Die a bit more. 

“The falcon, he, he, he bred you. This flower,” Phoenix mourned. “It breeds the spirit. Flower-spirits. Spring-bringers. In the animals, the forest. The bark, leaves, soil, the rocks. The falcon killed the spirit before you.” And you killed so much of what they created. Phoenix wiped his hands on his thighs, I don’t know what I could’ve done, I don’t belong here, let me of-  “Fea couldn’t have accepted it, and he didn’t. The falcon had blessed you into the flower, and just as, just as you crept into the forest-”

“Harus,” Sere cut in, eyes wide, knowing, crouching. “The falcon, was attacked. By the one that bred you.” Fea. He’d never thought of it. He’d been a child, but he remembered the glow, warmth that still coated his bones. And his back. He remembered the golden drops on his back that were signs of his origin. As if Sere had seen him think of this (which, to be fair, they had, they could sense it) they lifted their shirt from their back. Golden spread, majestic. They were born from the same flower. 

They turned to look at the tree. “Plunged right into that tree.” 

“I’ve been having your dreams,” Phoenix said.

It all clicked in, for both of them. Sere was the spirit that guided the forest, led it by the hand 

to a sense of home. That was what the woods have always been for them. Phoenix’s head still screamed the fact that he wasn’t a spirit. Fea had taken, stolen nectar from the flower, and tried his hardest to turn Phoenix into the actual spirit instead of Harus’s begotten, the rotten.

They dared to move towards the tree. Phoenix stood back, still giddy about the fact that he was human, barely anything of the forest. He ached to get out. 

Sere approached the tree, dread rushing through his spine. But also home. Their hand found the bark, as their forehead came against it. They closed their eyes. Felt something ancient swing back and forth in their soul.

Phoenix stepped back as the hum turned into a rumbling, then a roar. He didn’t think it was in his imagination that Harus stepped out of the tree. Oh.

Looking at him, he immediately leapt violently at Phoenix. You’ve plagued the forest. YOU! You don’t have any right to be here. 

I don’t want to be here, Phoenix reached. 

He could see the broken shoulder of the bird. Where he’d been rammed into the tree.

He could also see pain like he’d never thought a beast could contain course through him. 

I only killed what harmed the forest, he said. 

Sere came and placed their hand on his side. Home.

***

They’d flown to the top of a lighthouse in the night. Harus's wings spread majestic. It was what Sere had always felt missing, along with their true home in the woods, it was. The city was nothing short of magic. To Phoenix, at least.

“Promise me-” they both started at the same time. 

They cracked up, and Phoenix felt something drop in him, something happy for the first time.

“We’ll meet at the greenhouse, we will.”

“Promise.”

“Promise.”

They could swear they held every promise the city and the woods, the Earth, home, had to offer.