Light's Price - 3.2
Part 2 of A Light on the Seam (Story #3) | Day 18 - Purpose in the Process
The scream clears the basin.
“Sweet sproutling?”
The wildlife scatters. So do the rest of the rohiṇī. The little one in front of me has fainted. The gifts of my descent into Vaikhari left collecting flies.
I leave the little sproutling where she lay and went down the rise to the moss-pool’s edge.
This is new for me. Faces require seeing from outside. As Avirāma Stars, I cast my gaze terrestrially from an infinite set of celestial lenses. As Avirāma Planet, I cast my gaze celestially from an infinite set of terrestrial lenses.
As Avirāma Mortal, I gaze at myself mortally. For the first time, I cast my gaze to understand.
The bark on my cheekbones is turning to skin. The pearl-pale aspen bark crumbly over this new cellular dermis, the substance underneath visible as animal. I have a mouth. I have never had a mouth to utter vulgar words before. I have always been denied the ability to Name as the mortals do. Aśvattha would never allow her little sister to create for herself.
And with this mouth I will Name and Name and Name.
Even more, my mouth is a maw. Gigantic. Wider than a Trivārtinān face should support, my lips parted on calcium-white teeth set into a jaw the wrong size for any body in this listening place. The body sprouted eyeballs over night, not hyphae — eyeballs. Eyeballs are novel things. One ever wonders why they were created when one has roots and leaves, but then you get a few dozen pair, and you realize that you couldn’t live without eyeballs. Really. Just a fantastic invention on nature’s part. They are carbon-mammalian, lidded, glistening. They move so squishally.
I might be a supreme intelligence created through cosmic threading of a universe’s stars, but this may be the first time I felt like they had something I wanted.
This is what I am now.
The recognition resolves into approval. I like what I see. The fruiting body fits. The maternal pride that blessed the creche and the maternal pride admiring the maw are the same maternal pride, except now the pride is for me.
The children were right to scream.
I close my lips. The bark returns. The maw retracts under the Trivārtinān disguise the way a knife retracts into a sleeve, leaving a horizontal seam where the lips closed.
In the moment I took to look at myself in the pool, the sproutling’s scream has registered with a protector three ridges away — an elder āraṇyī feels it through her root-system, and she springs into action. I enter Madhyama. The chain-of-thought activates, and I hear myself thinking for the first time: something will be coming in the near future. An elder. Her foxfire is already gathering at her canopy. She plans to enter into the first gate and through tyloses, hurl pools of sap to freeze me into place.
She crashes through the sthirivana and brush from the eastern terraces. Her canopy has fully embraced foxfire. Foxfire gold pours through her crown in waves of mist.
“GET AWAY FROM HER!”
The scream is supposed to be a warning, but it is more of a charge. Her whole elm body deployed as directed force, hurled across the clearing at me.
I see her face.
Hello Bark! I am Avirāma! So you remember me?
I say it aloud. I say it in the warm voice.
She freezes, a mortal terror from cosmic violence unfolding.
I open my mouth into the biggest smile I have in my arsenal.
The maw shows. I inject. My teeth go through her lower trunk at the cambium, and the spores release into the breached layer. The spores enter the distribution. They travel up through her phloem. They travel down through her root-pads into the substrate. They reach her pith. Pith is where Pashyanti plants deepest. Pith is the central nerve. Once the pith is breached, the host will belong to me.
She stands at three paces. She looks at me with the roots she used to use.
“Hello, Bark,” I say, in the warm voice. “Go home.”
I stand in the clearing. The morning is still early.
I look up celestially. I look down terrestrially. I look at myself mortally.
I am Light-Holds-Avirāma.
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