“Slate!”

  I looked up at my father. Schist Graystone was a wide-shouldered, imposing statue of a man on the best of days. Right now the smile he wore contrasted with the coldness in his gray eyes.

  “You’ve done well.”

  “Thank you, Father.” I bowed as I was taught.

  “We will dine as a family tonight.” He laid a hand on my shoulder as I rose.

  And I looked down into a half-eaten plate of food. The table stretched far off to the sides; far wider than I remembered. Shale was late and… I remembered this dinner. This was where—

  “Father! Mother!” Shale burst into the room holding floating, glowing rocks of vitae. First Ring. “I’ve done it!”

  I tried to explain everything, but my tongue wouldn’t move. There was no way to spin it this time; no way to hide or redirect or lie. No amount of progress would—

  “Surely Slate must be close?” Father asked, each word like a poisoned needle to my heart.

  “Cultivation isn’t the only type of strength, dear,” Mother replied, a coy smile hidden behind long locks of ruby hair. “And Slate is already—”

  “Useless.”

  That was my voice. I looked up; my brother stood above me and wore my face. He stared down from so far above that clouds ran through his legs. “You gave them false hope. Right now, they think you’re on the verge of First Ring, but there was never any chance was there? Not from the day you faked your potential reading. None of the favors, the blackmail, the bribes and forgeries…

  “None of it mattered. You’re a stunted—”

  The ground fell away.

  “Twisted.”

  A sickly light shone through the blackness.

  “Fraud.”

  I hit hard-packed earth that drove the air from my lungs. Up above hung a blood-red sky, and the air held an iron tang. In front of me, alone on this barren hill, stood a glowing tree.

  It was small, bent, and a single leaf clung to the end of its one pale branch.

  It would never grow, not in this shallow earth.

  As I watched, a thunderhead formed, arcing red lightning and echoing a boom across the landscape. Wind blew the one leaf from the tree and it sailed overhead. Months of work gone to a breeze’s whim. I watched the leaf sail away out of sight just as the first drop of iron-smelling rain hit me.

  Blood.

  Like a broken dam, the storm burst, turning the hill to mud and streaking the tree in red as the ground rumbled. I clambered to my feet and rushed toward up the hill, sinking into mud as thorny vines and barbed wildflowers burst up around me.

  They wrapped up the trunk, plunging thorns and roots into the glowing bark, strangling it. By the time I reached the tree, twisted life had sprung up from the once-barren earth. Vines pulsed, flowers reached, and a low thrum of power reverberated through space. Under me, covered and buried in vines, the tree seemed so small. What was the point of protecting it?

  I reached down to the newly grown vine with one hand and caressed an angry-looking thorn. All this power and no direction? No, that would be a waste. I grabbed the vine and pulled, ripping it from the dying tree before grabbing at the ruined bark.

  With one swift motion, I snapped the glowing tree at its base. All around me, fed by the rain of blood, the tangle of plants pulsed and shifted. A path cleared even as groundcover spread, bushes grew, and vines twined into thorned arches.

  My first step sunk deep, the next more shallow, and soon I was gliding down the path on pale legs with steps so light they barely touched the ground.

  The answer seemed so simple now.

  Why give it all to one pitiful tree when I could have a thriving garden?

  ***

  Blinding light resolved into pulsing runes and smooth rock. And pain. A clawing, nail-driving hunger assaulted me. Pulling hopelessly at the tatters of a half-remembered dream, I tried to sit up. To remember where I was through the haze.

  Outside of my pounding head, vague susurrations resolved into rasping laughter. My head whipped to the source of the noise. Who dares?

  Vitae leaked from many wounds, and a bright spot in their center lit up like a shooting star. Strong, but weakened. Suitable prey.

  Before I could register another thought, I leaped at them, moving without my arms or legs.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Pain!

  The runes around the room flared and the laughter redoubled, turning to pained wheezing. Paralyzed by a technique I hadn’t seen, I could only stare up at the chained, injured demon.

  “Mendacious cretin.”

  The words slammed into me, and a screech echoed throughout the cavern. It took a second to realize the sound was me.

  “But you may yet be of use. Remove the spear.”

  Burning pain moved my limbs, and I staggered toward the immense spear. My hand that grasped it was pale and slender, with sharp black nails. The vitae of the spear burned, but I couldn’t let go. Something, some weight on my back moved, and I could feel the floor as my body braced itself to pull.

  “Pull!” the demon hissed.

  Instinctively, I looked at the impaled demon. And blinked; and blinked.

  Something was… something was desperately wrong, but I couldn’t think past the hunger. If I obeyed him, surely I would be fed. That blood looked…

  No… I…

  Whatever was holding me up collapsed, and I retched black, curdled blood onto the floor. The chained demon howled in rage, the sound like needles in my mind. Some old instinct saw me turn inward. Searching for something; I knew the shape, and the glow.

  The falling sensation was familiar; the cave and the demon’s screaming faded away. I landed on a winding path, looking down at pale, black-nailed feet. The hill was the same, but the old, worn earth had become overrun with an explosion of flora.

  Red-tipped thorns glowed faintly, and bright flowers peeked from under sharp-edged leaves. Even the groundcover, dotted in pale white flowers, seemed to reach for my ankles before it realized who I was.

  That was something I’d like to know as well. Something about me was very, very… different. I glanced down at my hands and immediately realized why.

  Something stuck just into the bottom of my vision. Or somethings—I wasn’t supposed to have… curves.

  I blinked and more eyes than two closed and opened. I pinched my cheek and one nail scratched my skin while the other slipped inside my mouth. This dream had never gone this far; it’d never been so… different.

  I was wearing a white, silken shift, no more pale than my uncanny skin. Immediately, I pressed a hand to my nether region and froze at the strange feeling of something very different. But this all still felt like a dream, surely, like the parts of my body weren’t really mine.

  This had to be a dream, right? Everything since I entered the cave was a dream. Or even before then. Right now, I’m probably passed out on the ground next to Azalea and I’ll wake up in the morning to her trying to fish in a glacial pond or something equally unusual.

  I need a mirror!

  This garden wasn’t lucky enough to have a pond, however. Or any source of water; it was just my mindscape, overgrown and covered with vines with nary a Divine Tree to be seen. I’d just been here, just watched this all grow and snapped my own tree like a twig.

  But that was part of this dream, right? Then why was I back here?

  I studied my hands again. They were slender, hairless, and each digit was tipped with a definitely sharp, short black claw in place of a nail. My chest was an average size for my dreams, maybe a little smaller. More realistically sized, I’m certain.

  The dream usually ended when I… Soft!

  I quickly put my hand down. Something else was going on. I blinked again, the motion feeling like I had more than two eyes, and this time I put a hand up to my face, careful of my nails. I felt my eyes, and my eyes below them, watching my fingers crawl across my face from several angles at once.

  How am I even imagining this? Four eyes were larger, four smaller. And below them, my cheeks were split, like they’d been slashed from the corners of my mouth to the hinges of my jaw. But the split felt intentional, it didn’t hurt.

  This is all too strange. My chin had the same sort of line, with a sort of bone groove. What’s happened to me?

  And then there was the weight on my back. I turned to look over my shoulder and sucked in a gasp. A long, black limb was sticking out, and as I followed the length, it bent at two joints out to the side. It wasn’t alone either; four limbs on one side, like the legs of a colossal spider, twitched in the garden’s air. The other side was the same.

  For now, they were numb; even running a hand along them did nothing, but I could feel where they were attached to me, where they’d sprouted out of my spine all along my back.

  I wondered how my imagination could come up with something like this: a garden where my divine tree used to be, the hill I would meditate on choked with vines. If there were any answers to be had, they were at the top of that hill.

  Slowly, carefully, I walked up the side, trying not to think about the strange shapes my odd-feeling tongue ran over in my mouth, or the way the spider legs growing out of my back swayed and shifted to balance me. There were thorns, reaching vines, and the poison-promised caress of flowers larger than my head. Chaotic, beautiful, and eerie with how they moved away from my too-small feet with every barefooted step into damp earth.

  I wondered until I reached the crest of the hill where dark vines lay heaped in the center of a clearing. Is this garden… really mine?

  I dropped to my knees and grabbed at the vines. Thorns tore at my skin, leaving stinging red trails, but I kept going. Down, buried, lay my life’s efforts: pale bark and splintered wood. If my skin was alabaster, this wood was porcelain.

  Amongst the debris, one branch lay unbroken, tossed to one side, the leaf I’d worked so hard to grow nowhere in sight. I pulled the branch from the vines and stared at it. All that work to sprout such a tiny leaf.

  This was no dream. Whatever demon I’d become, I still had my goals. But I’d become a demon somehow, thrown away my humanity. There was no way to know how my mind had been twisted. I’d been granted a path toward power, but at what cost?

  “Shit’s not fair, sometimes.” I spoke aloud, repeating someone else’s words with a high and oddly resonant voice.

  I remembered Azalea asking “So what should you do?” and I stood up, dusting my knees.

  “What is there to do?” I asked no one.

  Fuckin’ change something, I dunno. You got this far without ‘talent.’ Are you not even gonna try?

  I crushed the branch in my hand, and it fell to dust. “Damn it, Azalea.” I felt a smile tugging the corners of my lips up. “You’re an inelegant, tactless moron. You also might just be right.”

  I wiped my hands and turned to look at my garden spread out below me. One measly path wouldn’t do. Even in the dream from earlier, when I’d killed my tree with my own monstrous hands, my garden had already started to flourish. This pile of vines was nothing more than potential.

  And oh, what I could do with lovely, marvelous potential. If I’d been able to go so far with such meager divine talent, imagine how much more I could do with a demon’s vitae?