myth for comfrey

Sweetie woke suddenly to darkness again.

Lately she was deeply thinking about what it would mean to disappear. She was beginning to believe she was halfway there.

There are passageways in space, like there are in the soil. So, Sweetie spent an endless time roaming through those halls, gathering the bracts from where they fell from the moon. The snake told sweetie how to tend to the passageways by placing them against the walls after she fed the beast. The illness had a remedy.

The snake was agitated, turning over in knots, and making percussive, exhaling sounds in pained hisses. The serpent spoke in riddles, Sweetie could barely understand what she was meant to do, and whenever she did the wrong thing, the snake slapped its tail on the wall or bit her.

The snake's bites were not particularly unpleasant. She couldn't help but think the snake was acting out of love - was giving her some uncomfortable truth. She slept with that venom flowing through her. She dreamed in gold and red. She smelled vanilla and lemon. She spent her dreams walking with a man, and he seemed to see her.

Woman and snake lived together in the darkness of the sky.

But there came a time when in the snake's pain, it fell from a hole in the sky, and snake and girl fell with such force that the earth shook.

It was as if the very weight of gravity made her memories rush back into her. She had been sent on a mission to save her town. The oppression by the grass people, the terrible labor and the undead, as they walked without recourse through the town, as a terrible fear clung to all of them. She wanted to save them. The snake would help the old woman in the moon had said, but how?

“Eat the light who is not in the sky,” the serpent had said when they were resting one day.

She could not figure out the riddle.

“when you understand it will be time to go.” The snake expressed.

When she had left, the only person she knew who seemed to shine from within was Pearl. Pearl, who sat so serene at the fire eating charcoal. How strange she had not spoken to Pearl before she slipped between the net of vines to leave.

Sweetie looked around and saw they were in a field of tall plants with long leaves and thick fur. The sky was gray, so she could not tell if it was day or if it was night. It was then the shadow appeared, the yellow flower hovering beside its obsidian eyes.

“This is my snake. It's been broken from me.” The shadow said.

You know what fixes breaks? He ran his hand along the plants beside him. What is a snake without a shadow? There's a riddle.” He smiled. “Shadows can't eat. I tell you, I feel hungry enough. I could eat the sun.” He plucked a leaf and got to work. mending himself into the side of the snake whose body had made a crater in the earth.