Shadows

She had done her best not to think of Arawn, but whenever she allowed her mind to drift, the sound of his voice seemed to drift through her ears, or she’d feel the phantom of his lips on hers. It was maddening and irritating.
They had only just met. He was handsome, of course, but that didn’t excuse the almost obsessive way her mind turned to think of him. If her waking mind was bad, her sleeping mind was much worse.
The night after he left, it had just been the warmth of his lips against hers and vague feelings of sweet pleasure rushing through her. She’d woken up embarrassed and a bit confused about it.
The next night, she dreamed of his bare skin against hers and woke up feeling overheated.
This morning she woke from a dream of them dancing in the air. The wind carried them up above the trees at a height that would usually send her heart lurching in terror, but she’d felt calm in the dream. She would almost say she felt delighted as they danced above the trees. Stars twinkled above them and the entire forest of Berth seemed to go quiet as they watched.
He’d pressed his lips to hers for much longer than he had in the garden, not pulling back until she was sure her lungs were burning before vanishing into the wind.
When she woke up that morning, she was warm from the dream and the odd tenderness of it. She didn’t know if gods could enter dreams, but if they could, she hoped he would find something else to do with his time other than driving her crazy or romancing her in her sleep.
If it was just the work of her imagination, she just hoped it would fade like the little crush she’d had on a stable boy in her youth. He’d grown up to be a crass young man who was more interested in chasing skirts than doing work.
For a moment, she wondered if he had been killed or converted. He was young enough that there was a chance he had survived the Herald’s siege on the house.
The dreams and her general agitation were beginning to make her antsy.
“Are you alright, Sirona?” Druid asked across the dinner table. “You seem… troubled.”
Sirona shook her head, “I’m just… feeling antsy. Maybe, I’ve just been inside too long.”
Druid nodded, “Perhaps. I will go into the village tomorrow. Maybe you should spend your time outside?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“If you wish to talk about it, I will listen.”
She nodded and finished dinner. She felt a bit silly being so on edge, but by the time she had found the words to express what it was that was bothering her, it was morning and Druid was gone.
There was a note on the table that said he was called out early. It amazed her that he could write so neatly without sight.
A bit disappointed, she grabbed a basket and went outside hoping to work out some of this restless energy in the garden. The air was sweet as it blew over the garden, carrying the scent of baked bread from the town.
She set her basket beside and grabbed a few tools before crossing the garden to kneel near the nearest planting bed and start to pull weeds. The monotony of the work was soothing in a way and her mind drifted back to Conna.
Was Mary still alive? What about her daughter and the rest of the staff?
As she was weeding, her gaze drifted down the path towards the back gate where the vegetation didn’t look as vibrant as the rest of the garden.
She frowned at it. They weren’t weeds, but the leaves of a potato plant. She thought of a gardener that worked on the Gunning Estate and would always talk to the roses. The man said that even plants liked to have a conversation and deserved proper addressing. Aria had always said it was just an old farmer’s way of saying that they prayed over the plants, but Sirona had never seen roses grow better under his care.
When he’d been too old to continue, she would go out to talk to the roses sometimes in his place.
“What’s wrong, little potatoes? Feeling down?” She grazed her hand over the leaf. “How about a pick-me-up?”
A spark of light jumped from her fingers, and she gasped as the leaves lifted. The stem stood up straight and the leaves started to almost grow a vibrant green. The plants around it began to stand up straight and take on the same extra vibrant green glow.
The earth seemed to darken and grow softer, rippling as the light drifted over the surface. Her heart leaped as it began to spread across the growing bed. The rocks that lined the bed shifted as the roots began to thicken and push outwards.
“Oh, no,” she gasped, shaking her head.
This couldn’t be normal. She had to be imagining things. Plants didn’t grow like this. Weeds shot out of the dirt, blossoming with jagged leaves and soft bristles. A wind blew carrying the seeds across the garden where they took root and continued to grow.
Brambling weeds curled and unfurled beneath the cover of the potato’s leaves, covering the ground in a thick green tangle. She panicked. The potatoes and the rest of the plants would suffocate if she could get this under control.
She tried to cut through the weeds, but they continued to grow faster than she could uproot or snip them.
“You can’t,” she pleaded as a twirling vine tangled her shears and refused to release it. “Let it go!”
The vine continued curling and squashes began to bud along the vine.
How had the squash plants gotten over here? She turned and gasped in horror as the other planting beds were growing just as unruly.
“Stop, please. I said a pick me up not a full-on party!”
More light jumped from her hands, bouncing between the leaves until vines began to crawl across the ground and overrun the gates, binding it in place and covering every piece of wire.
The potatoes pushed up out of the ground and sprouted more spuds with thick roots and stems. The carrots seemed to double in size, peeking out of the ground between the weeds sprouting around them. The squashes dropped from the vines and began to sprout more vines that rushed around and dug into the dirt. The ground beneath her shifted as plants began to push up from the soil.
“Stop. Stop. Stop!”
A vine stopped mid crawl towards her. For a moment, she thought she could maybe fix the garden before Druid returned if she could get another pair of shears, but the vine near her feet began to droop. Then, it turned brown and began to smell before decaying into plain earth. The rest of the plants followed suit making her gag at the scent of rotting vegetables for a few moments before they reverted to dirt. The darkness of the decay began to spread quickly towards the outer edges of the garden.
“No, that’s not what I meant! Stop!”
A jolt of red light leaped from out of her hands and she reached for the plants and cut s bath of near-instant death towards the back gate and into the forest path. The grass along the path, wilted, crumpled, and dissolved into fresh earth. The tree creaked and the leaves began to fall from the branches. The tree behind shivered as well.
She heard something laugh, like a high-pitched laugh. The hair on the back of her neck stood up and her blood rand cold. She didn’t know what that sound was, but she didn’t like it. It was unnatural. Something shifted in the shadows of the trees. The nearest tree was devoid of all its leaves and began to creak and shift.
Her heart started racing as she watched it and tried to keep calm.
Something chittered and a wispy figure drifted between the trees as it got harder to breathe around her panic. What was that?
What was happening? How was she doing this? What was she doing?
How was she supposed to make it stop?
“Please…” she whispered as she felt a gaze looking at her from within the forest.
She wants it to stop and screams at it, but then all the produce starts dying very quickly. Her panic makes the decay spread further out towards the forest.
She feels a surge of power and thinks she sees moving shadows like ghosts in the trees as she’s freaking out. She tries to calm herself down and the shadows vanish when she feels a presence behind her.
She whirled around hoping that it wasn’t Druid.
Instead, it was Arawn who staring at her with a heated gaze.
She hoped he didn’t notice the growing catastrophe behind her.