Sorynn's Sculpture

It was far too easy.

A lure was all it took. A noise brought them to her with the curiousness she expected of them. She left them a body to panic over. Keep them distracted a while.

That woman was another matter. That woman was going to be a statement. Put the fear up that red beast.

One minute she was there, and the next, she wasn’t. The roots came up from beneath the furs on the floor of the tent in which Sorynn and her family were held. A snap had them wrapped tightly underneath the wench’s skirt, and then they began to drag. She hit the floor face first, shrieked and tried to grab hold of the fur throws on the floor, but only wound up dragging them with her.

The roots ignored the screams that came from the other women, and those that came from Sorynn’s lips were entirely unimportant. No doubt the guards had come running, but who was going to believe that Sorynn, treacherous, knife-pulling Sorynn, had been dragged off by trees? Roots, even?

Into the copse. The catapults still stood abandoned, the men presently plunging themselves into the fray at the castle. The roots dragged Sorynn across the ground, taking the lesser seen route. They’d follow, if they heard her, so she had to move quickly.

Jenova looked much like any other tree branch in the world at that precise moment. She stretched between two young ash trees, and promptly stuffed the woman’s mouth with vines once she had her in her grasp properly.

Stop screaming, bitchlet. You’re going to be of some use. You’re going to give that beast a message from me.

Quickly, now, quickly. The face above Sorynn was bizarre and formed from bark, the pale blue eyes looking back from the apparent backs of butterflies. The mouth was non-existent, the voice penetrating Sorynn's mind in the same way as the wooden vines would puncture her skin.

I wonder...

Yes, she wondered.

The roots around the woman’s ankles yanked apart, others holding her upright and beginning the slow pressure against her ribs that would eventually pop the skin and seep within.

Did he seed you?

Thorns raked the flesh of Sorynn’s cervix open, one root probing around within her womb, careless of whether it shredded anything in the process. Nothing. No offspring. Nothing here to take from him but a female.

And take she would. The uterus wrapped root pushed its way upwards into her guts, the others pushing through her intercostal muscles to hug her lungs tightly. She had hold of her, and she could taste her. She could taste his presence at the fringe of her being.

The roots bent the two sides of Sorynn’s body outwards, cracking her ribcage like opening an oyster. Blue flowers began to spring between the spaces, and latched their teeth down against exposed flesh to begin sucking the life out of her.
It didn’t last long. Soon, the roots in Sorynn’s mouth had no need of being there to muffle her, so they simply tore their way out of her cheeks and throat. She continued sucking the blood out of her until there was none left, until her flesh looked brown and pale, and her skin had turned ashen.

Shouting. She would have to be faster. She drew the body in close to the tree, and began to envelop it in wood. Bark swallowed, and swallowed, until there was no sign of Jenova, or of Sorynn. Just an ordinary copse, with a fur throw randomly littered at the feet of two woken ash trees. What did these creatures know. Mother would avenge these rearranged brother-corpses.

It would have been easier that way.

But there was still a point to prove.

Drysllthen’s tent. The earth in front of it began to shift. Sorynn’s mangled corpse came up of it in a cradle of solid vines, the opened cavity of her chest flooded with black moss and her orifices flowering blue life.

She was left there like some morbid sculpture. The roots solidified and stopped moving, grasping her tightly and ensuring they held every cavity open for the recently appointed King to witness. Body spaces lacking in blood, flooded instead with sucking roots, biting flowers and creeping, insipid moss. Her jaw hung open in a torn, soundless scream - but she was eyeless. They had either been popped out or devoured, the tendrils of black from within winding out of her sockets and hiking up her forehead. One single, golden flower blossomed from her mouth, the petals wide and pointed, the central stems and tooth-like attachments a deep, indigo blue.

I am here.

Drysllthen limped away from one final meeting with his commanders, the hour past late already when he wandered toward his newly appointed quarters. Sleep, maybe an hour or two, if he was lucky. Thus when a servant bowed deeply in his way, he scowled, prepared to stalk around him with his staff.

"Y-your Majesty.."

"What?" Will you piss off, you bastard, and let me get ten minutes of sleep?

"Your tent.."

"What about it?"

"There-there's something you n-n-need to s-s-see."

"It'll wait until the morning." With that growl, he marched around the servant, his staff smacking hard against the stone floor.

"P-p-princess Sorynn..."

The King turned with a dark glare, this particular servant in very great danger of having his head knocked off his shoulders by Drysllthen's quarterstaff.

"What about her? Is she waiting for me in my tent?"

It was only as the serving man shook his head that Drysllthen realized his pale cast wasn't due to himself, and the trembling wasn't a fear of royalty. That look upon the man's face was pure terror, and he finally read what he was trying to say. But why should he care if something had happened to the treacherous wench? Perhaps she'd turned the knife on herself and saved them the trouble. It seemed her sudden appearance with a blade had dissolved away his sympathy for her at the moment.

He gave no answer and simply turned to stalk back out the main doors of the castle, fury and agony in each step. Caoilfhionn would doubtless scold him for over-extending his injured leg. He would sleep, one day. He snatched up the reins of the first horse he saw in the yard, leaving the rider to stare wide-eyed after the King, and he rode at a ground-eating pace out to his tent, contemplating the ways to skin a servant.

All thought of such things ceased at the sight that greeted him, his other servants cowering outside his tent, trying not to look at the thing on the ground. Annoyed by their cowardice, he swung down and crouched over what had once been Sorynn, glove hands prodding at the vines experimentally. Gruesome, to be certain, but there was a strange beauty to it, flesh mingled with plant.

More curious was the lack of blood, and he glanced around, to see if it had pooled anywhere, frowning at the complete lack of it. Obviously, it had happened during the battle. "Tell Raegnold's women that I wish to speak with them soon, and the guards that held them," he commanded the waiting servants.

Roselyn's dream tugged at the back of his mind, his head tilting as he studied the flower emerging from Sorynn's mouth. Just as with the dream, instinct called for Caoilfhionn. She knew more of the natural world than anyone he knew, and of the body too. "Put it in my tent, and find ice to keep the body fresh. I will send Caoilfhionn to examine it as soon as she has slept." And with that, he was off, head pounding too much for him to worry over one body so mangled. It was just one more death in a day of them.