myth for marshmallow

The moment ivy breached the hill and saw the city, wound in vines and the field torn in places by the splotches of crabgrass and smoke rising up from the factories in a haze tears filled his eyes. The soil at his feet was litered with oil and trash. Putrid smells rose up from the muck.

‘Even when the dark came, before, we knew how to heal the land - or that’s how the story went. Now we have forgotten everything about soil and wind. Water is faceless.’ He thought.

And here he had arrived: the one assigned to deliver the last nail in this city’s coffin. Like all villains his heart shattered. He was so far from the child he had been and even then it was unraveling. Rebecca was dead. He found her laid by her arch. The witch of thresholds, the one who whispered to roots, the only mother he really knew: dead.

How could there ever be beauty in the world again? It was consumed forever.

The red knight sat stoic beside Ivy in the carriage of the Christmas cactus. Behind them thousands of snow plants followed, all descended from the mountain.

Winter would descend and blood would freeze on the white and vengeance would be delivered by order of the red queen. Ivy saw no other way. He lit the first kudzu before he saw his dream.

The woman of the evening primrose stood before him in waking life. She had hands made of sundew and dirt caked her cheeks. She had crawled from the cut in the serpent’s belly through the swamp of sundew. But to Ivy she was just as beautiful as she had ever been. Like a river, like a mirror. He saw someone just as lost as he. Like a savior he saw a way out in her eyes.

“I remember you. How did you find me without vanilla?” If only he could take back the licking flames.

“This is my home. It turns out I was always going to return. I thought the moon would be my home. I thought the soil would be my home, but I wouldn’t die and the moon kept spitting me out. And despite my failure to help this city, I remember you too.”

A tear rose to her eye, for she was going to kill the serpent and the host that breached the hill with her grandmother’s sword, but she realized her sword would be killing a friend.

Where they met a marshmallow plant grew as their tears fell to the ground. Something was going to be healed though they didn’t know what. A tsunami roared behind them and flames tore the factories apart. People ran and the snow plants descended while the two remained frozen reaching to one another.