The Tale of the Necrobotanist

There are long, winding trails through the dark forest. Undergrowth cut back, trees removed, dangers abated. This is not one of those trails.

The locals pointed it out — take the western path, the one behind the apothecary. You'll pass a tree cleaved in twain, a still pond, a fox den. Jaime finds it only because it's marked. Scuffs in the grass, a sign nailed to a tree, "Do not enter."

The trees barely part here, the barest hint of an old path thick with new growth. The closeness of the brambles doesn't deter Jaime. They’re an adventurer, after all. Wading through the dense thicket, their sword hews branches and twisted limbs with ease, leather bracers deflecting the skeletal trees clawing for fabric and hair.

Moving further into deepening darkness, Jaime reflects on the circumstances that brought them first to the village and then to this trail.

A series of disturbing tales barely overheard at the neighbouring tavern. Snippets caught over the drinking of wizards, the snapping of fighters, the laughter of bards and the brooding of rogues. Sitting alone in the busy tavern, nursing an ale as amber-brown as their eyes, Jaime had listened and observed, well accustomed to picking up jobs by piecing together others' stories. One can’t wait around for a local to ask for help or approach a guild to see what’s posted — not when they’re considered ‘a little bit odd’.

So, they listened. According to talk, a handful of ill-fated companions had failed to return from a once-sleepy village. Despite an interest in gossiping, none of the other adventurers seemed keen to go looking for the missing.

But Jaime was plenty keen. Keen to be away from the crowded taverns, the choked roads, the busy paths. Keen to be away from the quest givers and the innkeepers, tavern loiterers, and inquisitive locals. It was too loud, too busy, and expectations were looming over everything. Expectations on how to dress. How to act. What to say. “You must curtsey, darling. You must sit with your ankles crossed, like so.” You must never wear anything too comfortable, OR too revealing. You must look at a man one way, and not another. Not like an equal, never that. You must keep your hands soft. Your fingers slender for needlework. Your chin tilted down. Take up only approved hobbies. Growing flowers. Painting pictures. Reading books.

Jaime only like books about knights. Only liked growing flowers with thorns.

When you’re a loner, you must be willing to do what others will not. So, Jaime set upon the road to the village with no companions to wrangle and no opinions but their own to juggle.

They arrived in the village to the sight and smell of picked-over bodies in the streets. Homes were crudely barricaded, boards scavenged from the carts that would have taken goods to market, stalls that would have stood in the village square, and fences that would have kept the wolves at bay. Eerily quiet, it smelled like burnt and rotting flesh. A strange smell beneath that, a loamy, earthy smell. One of freshly-turned dirt in the garden. Damp, crushed grass and morning petrichor.

Several villagers were congregated within an old stone temple, grown over with vines and moss, stones cracked with nature's attempt at reclamation. There, the tavern whispers were confirmed. Each night, the town was overrun with shambling skeletons held together by vines. Skeletons that moved with ease, as though their musculature was still intact. Regrown. The villagers had a tale to tell — a terrible power lived in the woods. A warlock. A powerful necrobotanist.

A what?

A necrobotanist.

Intrigued, if incredulous, Jaime accepted the directions. Take the western path, the one behind the apothecary, you'll pass a tree cleaved in twain, a still pond, a fox den.

Plunging through the undergrowth, they come upon the tree first. Struck by lightning, by the looks of the charcoal striations.

The pond next. The ground dips below the path and softly cups a pool of still rainwater like a hand raised to a mouth, ready to drink.

The fox den is dug from the rotting corpse of a fallen tree. Jaime waits quietly, but there are no sounds from within. Further down the trail, it becomes apparent what happened to the fox. As broken as the tree, its parts now a home for wriggling maggots.

Having run out of instructions and unsure of where to go next, Jaime listens to the woods. The air below the canopy is still and heavy, weighed down by condensation. Beneath the stillness, there are bird sounds, faint and far. Beyond that, the sound of rustling leaves, snapping twigs, softly churning undergrowth — worms and centipedes crawling through the dirt and the dry fallen leaves, spiders spinning their webs.

A loud snap. A shift. A breaking open of the earth. Jaime clutches the hilt of their blade and moves toward the sound. Noises have never frightened them. Things that made others nervous — darkness, loneliness, differences — are all familiar.

They break through the brush into a clearing. The canopy is intact above, but the trees seem to have bowed around this patch of earth, enfolding it in a circle and hiding it from the path. Protecting it. A quick scan of the clearing paints a small rise of earth upon which a cairn of stacked, white stones marks what can only be a grave. A dense hedge of thorny brambles circles the rise, and across the path, a fallen tree is splayed, its rotting contents open to the sky, a patch of strangely mottled growths freckling its craggy surface.

The clearing is washed in the colour of a rosy sunset. Pink that breaks through clouds and canopy to dapple the cool, dark shade. The shade deepens to impenetrable darkness at the other end of the clearing. Something snaps behind them. Jaime turns and finds the forest they've just traversed as dark and foreboding as the woods on the other side of the cairn, night having reclaimed it while they hesitated on the edge of dread.

They step backward two paces into the pink light of the clearing and stop. Sticks snap. Leaves and brush rustle. Just a moment ago, the forest was still enough they could hear the spiders in their webs, but out of nowhere, a cacophony of sound erupts. Creaking, groaning, breaking and slithering. Jaime takes another backward step, sword raised, and their foot crunches something, a firm texture that gives way beneath the pressure. Their booted foot sinks into the rotted tree, and as it does, it crushes several of the strangely mottled mushrooms, releasing a gaseous odour that makes them cough. Reflexively, they open their mouth and suck in more of the fetid air, breathing in the sour-smelling swamp. Lungs revolting, they cough harder until doubled over. The twig snapping pauses for a moment, then begins again, closer. When Jaime pulls their arm back from across their mouth, there are splotches of red on the brown sleeve. Jaime staggers further into the clearing, unsure of where to go, where might be safe to fall to their knees while struggling for air. Their failing vision lands on the rise of dirt and the stone cairn upon it — just as it moves.

*

Swollen, heavy eyelids part. Above, a dark, starry sky is blotted in irregular shapes by the shifting tree canopy. At first, it seems like the sky is moving, like a child's spinning top. But the sky isn't the one moving.

With this realization, Jaime becomes aware of sensations. The ground moving beneath their back, soft and moss-covered, dampening their clothes. The occasional twig grabbing and scratching at their arms, whipping across the exposed skin at the nape of their neck. Something is wrapped under Jaime’s arms, some kind of rope dragging them across the clearing. Jaime bucks and squirms, but they're weak. Already spent. It feels like a blacksmith is trying to hammer out a dent in their chest piece. Their lungs fill in short huffs and expel in time with the rapidly increasing thrum of their heartbeat.

Struggling weakly at the end of the tether, Jaime is unceremoniously dropped. The rope, which is not a rope, starts to unravel — vines. Long, leafy tendrils that untwist themselves as they recede. Jaime thrashes against them, finally breaking free enough to push into a sitting position and scrabble a few feet across the mossy, damp earth before taking full stock of their surroundings.

It's fully dark in the clearing now. The cairn and the small hill are directly in front of where they've been deposited, dragged around the perimeter of the bramble hedge. A sliver of moonlight gleams against the rounded shapes of the mound, casting it in a pale blue glow. Jaime squints into the dim light, suddenly able to make out darker shapes in the white. Eye sockets. The upside-down leaf of a hollow nose. The cairn isn't rocks, it's skulls. That's when they notice a glint of moonlight off burnished silver armour. Letting out a strangled cough, Jaime takes in the bodies of the missing adventurers caught against the side of the thorny hedge. Dead, empty eyes look out of rotting faces, thorny red vines snake out of noses and mouths.

"Why did you come here?"

Jaime whirls toward the voice, but there's no one there. Just the small rise of earth and the grisly cairn.

"To… help the villagers."

"To help the villagers," scoffs the voice, mocking.

There's a long pause, then laughter seems to fill the clearing from every direction. Jaime’s head swivels, just within the tree line, dark shapes move, skeletal figures creak and shake as laughter rises from rotted bellies.

Jaime presses on, cutting through the sound. "The villagers sent me here in search of a powerful necrobotanist—"

"A necrobotanist!" The voice ratchets up, the laughs emboldened.

"The... skulls... and the vines... the creatures..." Jaime coughs and sputters, defensive.

"Necrobotanist. Ridiculous."

"Then what are you?" Jaime asks.

"I was a druid." The skull at the top of the cairn swivels slowly until its empty eye sockets come to regard the adventurer below. "I once made my home in these woods. I traded with the village. I called myself one of them for a time."

"And ... now?"

"Now I'm dead." If a voice could contain a shrug or a look of derision, this one would. "Obviously."

Jaime's planned retort dissolves into furious coughing. They struggle to their hands and knees.

"Soon, you'll join me," the voice adds softly.

Standing, swaying, Jaime wipes their mouth on the back of a dirty sleeve, beginning to unbuckle heavy armour. The iron drops to the mossy earth with a clang, and they suck in a satisfying breath laced with rot and decay. Stepping away from the cairn, they search for a trail in the muck.

"Stay!" the voice surges forward, echoing around the edge of the clearing. "Stay for a while longer.” And more softly, “At least until the end."

"I would rather die in the den with the fox." The adventurer spits red.

"Please?" the voice asks.

Jaime turns back, regarding the cairn with eyes like dark honey. "Why?"

"You were the first one… who didn't say they'd come to kill me."

The adventurer shrugs, wiping their mouth again, ignoring the red on their sleeve. "Doesn’t mean I won't, or can’t."

"Is there no alternative?"

"I don't know," Jaime shrugs. "Talk?"

"Fine,” the hollow voice says. “Let's talk."

Jaime glances toward the woods, avoiding the sight of the bramble hedge with its grisly fortification. There's no home for them beyond the darkness. No one they'd like to see before they go. No voice they'd like to hear before they die. No warm bed they'd like to lay in before they rot.

Shrugging, they climb the rise of dirt towards the cairn. The stones at the base can be distinguished this close, a small foundation beneath the stack of three bleached skulls. There's no inscription, no adornments. Next to it, Jaime finds a spot to settle where it’s relatively dry, the moss soft and comfortable.

"So why all this?" they cough, motioning around the clearing.

"Why not?" the voice asks flippantly.

"Do you need lifeblood to sustain your magics? Do you crave destruction to sate your vengeance?"

"Vengeance?" the voice barks, then softens. "No, not vengeance."

"Then why?"

"I said I used to live among the villagers," the voice continues as Jaime softens into the ground, body slackening as they recline. "I was... different. Strange to them. I was an outsider."

Brown eyes reflect the dark sky, memories there, in the shape of the clouds that pass before the stars. A child who sits alone. Who belongs nowhere. Not in their home with their family, not in the clothes they are forced to wear, not even in their own body.

"Is that why you left?" Jaime whispers.

"I came to live in the forest for a time."

"But?"

"They pursued me. The villagers. Constantly tormenting me. The children would throw rocks through my windows, the adults would knock over my cart and murder my chickens. They would dig up my plants and trample my garden."

"That's awful,” Jaime murmurs, thinking of the child in the memories, knocked to the ground, dirt ground into their palms until they bled.

"People are awful,” says the voice, thoughtful, as though regarding them.

"So when you died, you became the ... necrobotanist? To exact vengeance?"

"No. When I died, the villagers dug up my grave and separated my bones. Trapping me here."

"And then the vengeance?"

"NOT YET!" The voice shakes the clearing, stones skittering away from the base of the cairn.

"Go on then," Jaime prompts weakly.

"I communed with the forest for many years,” continues the necrobotanist. “Beyond my influence, the village grew and dwindled and grew again. Through my friend the fox, I watched from afar. Through my friend the hawk, I looked on. But the villagers trained the hawk. Killed the fox. I was completely, utterly alone."

"How long?" Jaime asks.

"Ten years? Or a hundred."

"Then why all this, why now?" They indicate the skeletal figures surrounding the clearing, the bones and the bodies and the rot.

The voice does not respond. In the silence, Jaime looks up at the small window of the night sky visible through the canopy, now beginning to lighten due east, still glinting with stars. Pin-pricks in the curtain of the dark. They press their fingers into the loamy, soft earth. Their heart is beating slower now, and their shallow, small breaths are slower too. There's a glimmer at the edge of their vision, and Jaime turns their head slightly. A tall, shimmering figure stands beside them. Light blue, the colour of the skull in the moonlight. The slender figure is clad in cropped trousers and a tunic lashed at the waist, long braided hair swept over their shoulder to reveal the high bones of their face, sharp like cut glass.

"You..." Jaime’s words hitch with their breath. "Were lonely?"

The figure nods. The canopy overhead shifts, blocking the moonbeams and casting the clearing into deeper darkness. The voice, when it speaks, comes from every direction. "The world spins, and I am frozen to this spot. I can't move my feet, and my arms reach only a small circle around me. I try to reach for the world, but there's nothing to grasp. Around me, it’s changing too quickly. The ground is eroding, and I can never find purchase. I pull grass out of the earth, dig into the dirt. When there's nothing else to hold, I dig into my own flesh. With the pain comes numbness. For a time, I feel nothing. I want nothing. I am nothing. And that is worse than wanting the world.”

Jaime watches the sky turn above them, their eyes fluttering closed as nausea rises with the spinning of their vision.

“The forest wants to help me,” the necrobotanist continues. “ It grows closer, slowly. It reaches out its branches, boughs, and vines until I have something to hold.”

Vines snake around Jaime’s arms, anchoring them to the earth and pulling them down against the loam.

“The world slows its spin. I am aware of time again. I am aware of my emptiness. My unimportance. The world has abandoned me. Moved on without me. Forgotten me. At first, I want nothing to do with it. I remember moments of happiness, and the longing betrays me. Soon, I am nothing but grief. The anguish of being just as alone now as I was when I was a living thing."

Taking slow breaths, Jaime is quiet for long enough to notice the rotation of the night sky. The circling of the stars is like a pod of sharks around a speck of blood. The vines tighten slowly, pulling at them slowly, so they hardly notice themselves becoming one with the brambles and the moss. "I have also been alone," they say. “For a very long time.”

A breeze moves through the canopy, and the trees bend away from the clearing, opening up the view of the sky to reveal the full breadth of the stars above, so many, they are vastly beyond count. Not a pod of sharks, but a whole, boundless ocean. A salty tear traverses the short band of flesh from Jaime’s eye toward their ear and collects along the highest bone of their cheek before soaking into the earth. The vines shiver with hesitation and, after a long moment, begin to retract.

"Here," the necrobotanist urges. "Look."

Jaime’s head turns, watching as a small green plant struggles from the dirt. It pushes through the closely woven grass and thick moss until they take pity. Rolling onto one side and shaking the vines free, they gently help the little plant emerge. Once it's grown a few fingers tall, the plant blossoms into a delicate purple flower.

"Eat," the voice says. "And I'll tell you how to save the village."

Jaime regards the flower for only a moment before doing as they’re bidden, plucking it and biting it from the stem. It grinds between their teeth, releasing a sweet, grassy taste that soothes their aching throat and flavours each deepening breath. They plant their hands in the moss and sit up, shifting to their knees and then to their feet. When no more vines are sent to ensnare them, no skeletons appear in the murky shadows, their eyebrows knit together in confusion.

"You're free to go," says the voice.

“The village?” Jaime asks, cradling their ribs with one arm while the other hand hovers by their empty scabbard.

“I do not need it,” the voice says before Jaime can turn away, “as long as you return — willingly.”

Jaime regards the cairn. Its stack of bleached skulls and nondescript stones now glowing faintly with the first red light of dawn. Trapped here, like its occupant, amid the circle of brambles and the bones of the many who had come to strike it down and failed. Not all problems can be vanquished with a sword, they think. Not all different things are the monsters they appear to be.

They consider a moment, and nod, before turning back to the still, dark woods of the empty forest.

Later, in the tavern, Jaime tells their story. And around them, a crowd gathers to listen. There are long, winding tales about bright, sun-dappled forests. Undergrowth cut back, trees removed, dangers abated.

This is not one of those tales.

***

Kaitlyn Petry is a creative and professional writer with over a decade of experience in marketing, advertising and business communications. She’s a mother, a lover of good food, reading and painting stuff, and a writer of science fiction, paranormal fantasy, and more. She is passionate about using storytelling for advocacy and supporting the work of marginalized creators.