The Seeds of Monstrous and Beautiful Things

The Seeds of Monstrous and Beautiful Things

by J.A. Prentice

One evening Iphigenia found a creature at the bottom of the Garden, lying in one of the flowerbeds that pressed up against the base of the high Wall. She knew it was a Witch because it looked just like the pictures in the Book: starsuit ragged and patchy, a helm with black insectoid eyes, a Knife of the Unholy clenched in a gloved hand.

Iphigenia had almost passed right by her. The clusters of stems grew so tight, so tall, that it was difficult to see her for their bobbing and weaving. Iphigenia pushed gently through them, warding off their glass-edged petals, and looked down at the witch lying among their roots.

At first Iphigenia thought she was dead. She lay so still, with blood pooling from her side. Red blood, like Iphigenia’s, not like shimmering blues and silvers like the Gardeners. Once Brother Vanerion cut one of his left hands with a shear and Iphigenia was so taken with the beauty of his blood that she took ages to bandage it. It seemed a shame to keep so much beauty on the inside.

That morning Iphigenia had seen the Gardeners release an eye-swarm out over the wastes and she’d noticed more guards patrolling the Wall. They must have been looking for the witch.

The witch breathed and Iphigenia jumped back. It was a slow, rasping breath. A broken breath. Iphigenia saw the tubes feeding into the insect mask and wondered if the witch needed them to breathe.

She looked at the shears in her hands. Imagined herself snipping the tubes, the air leaking out…

Another rasp. Shallow and shaking. A sick breath.

Iphigenia should have called the others. Should have turned and run back to Brother Vanerion. He would wrap her in his four arms and hold her tight against the softness of his robe and tell her it was all right like he did when she was a child. Then the Gardeners would come and speak a blessing over her and take the witch away for burning.

She should have done that. Should still do that.

But she stood and watched, listening to those slow, alien breaths.

Iphigenia’s first memory was of a sapling looming over her. She remembered reaching out a hand towards it, stubby toddler’s fingers grasping for white-veined petals. The sapling had twisted, spitting acid at her, and all her little world had turned to hot pain.

She still had the scars on her fingers, little discoloured splotches. She looked down at them now as she stood over the witch, and wondered if she was still that child, still reaching for danger with no thought to the pain it might bring.

The witch’s arm twitched. Iphigenia raised her shears.

The witch sat up. Groaned. The sound was strange, electronic, through the grill of her helmet.

“I’m not afraid of you, you know,” Iphigenia said, though she knew how she must look: a trembling girl barely thirteen in her homespun robes holding gardening shears like a sword.

The witch laughed. It was a bird’s caw, cruel and hard. “Little one,” it said, “I believe you.”

Iphigenia smiled and her shears shook a little less. “You are a Witch,” she said. “An unholy blasphemer. An enemy of the All-Knower, a weed in the Garden.”

“A weed.” The witch tugged at a flower and the flower nipped at her finger. “And what’s a weed, little gardener?”

“I’m not a Gardener,” Iphigenia said. She’d be one someday, she knew, when she was older. Vanerion had promised. “Don’t witches know anything?”

“We know everything and nothing,” the witch said. “We know the coldness between stars and the brightness of a nova. We know ten ways to slit a throat and twelve to make it whole again. We are the lorekeepers and the loremakers, the truthtellers and the lieweavers.” It looked at Iphigenia. “But most of all, we know how to ask questions. Let that be your first lesson.”

“I could kill you.” Iphigenia raised her trembling hand. “I could.”

“So could I.”

The witch whistled. Her knife soared from her gloved hand, circling Iphigenia. Its blade hissed to life, a crimson cutting edge of crackling light. Iphigenia stepped back and the knife followed.

“But what good would that do me?” The knife flew back to the witch’s hand. “I’d still be here. Still bleeding. That’s why I won’t kill you.” The witch cocked her head. “Why won’t you kill me?”

Iphigenia said nothing.

“That’s the second question you haven’t answered.”

“And what was the first?”

“What’s a weed?”

“A weed is…” Iphigenia spluttered, threw back her arms. “A weed is a weed.”

“Come on.” Beneath the mask, Iphigenia knew the witch was smiling. “Humour me. What’s a weed?”

Iphigenia remembered finding a weed when she was young: a bright green stalk that did not twitch, soft yellow petals that did not hunger for meat. She had meant to dig it out, to burn it, but she could not bring herself to do it. Instead, she watered it and kept it hidden down in her little corner of the Garden. Each day she watched it grow and all she could think was how beautiful it was.

Brother Vanerion found it, in the end, and he dug it out and burned it. Then he had her whipped until she begged for forgiveness for failing in her duty to the Garden, to the All-Knower who commanded that weeds must die. Vanerion held her as she wept and dried her tears even as the blood dripped down her back and she loved him for it.

Vanerion had never beaten her like that again. He had never had to. Others missed prayers or strayed into forbidden places, but never her. Once had been enough.

“A weed is an invader,” Iphigenia said, feeling old scars ache. “Something growing where it shouldn’t.”

“Heh.” A deep rasp. The witch clutched at her side and her gloved fingers came back bloody. “Almost right. Shall I tell you? A weed is a just a plant growing somewhere you don’t want it to. Let’s call it your second lesson—”

A horn-cry sounded across the Garden. Iphigenia looked back at the Obelisk, its high and twisting white walls, crawling with purpleleaf. Brother Vanerion descended the curling stair, his upper arms folded in prayer, his lower arms beckoning them to come in. The sun was setting red and it was time for Last Prayer.

The other novices were marching in, heads bowed as they began their chant of the Holiest of Holy Songs. Brother Vanerion saw her standing still and walked out between the stalks of the flowers writhing in the evening sun, calling across the tops of the leaves.

“Iphigenia,” he cried. “The flowers will keep ‘til morning, child. Come and pray! Come and eat!”

“Well, well,” the witch rasped. “What will you do now, little Iphigenia?”

Iphigenia looked at her, then at Brother Vanerion. Now was the time: to run to him, to tell him the witch held her fast with spellcraft, to bid him come quick and set the witch alight.

She breathed deep. Turned her head.

“Coming, Brother!” she called.

She went to him and left the witch behind, that horrid, cawing laugh swallowed by the rustlings and howlings of the Garden.

“What kept you?” Vanerion asked.

Iphigenia looked up into eyes that she had always known, since she was a child. He had taught her right from wrong, flower from weed. His hands had guided her when she took her first steps into the Garden, and had let go only when he trusted her to know the way.

If she could trust anyone or anything in this world, she could trust him. If she told him about the Witch, if she told him the truth, then he would deal with it.

The Witch would burn. And Iphigenia’s doubts, her sins, would burn with her, yes, climbing up into the sky and blown away, leaving her clean and pure.

“A weed,” Iphigenia said.

“Oh, my good and faithful child,” he said, and kissed her on the brow with ice-cold lips.

But she wasn’t. She was rotten. Like a fruit which seemed ripe but inside was dripping, oozing blackness.

She did not deserve his love.

She could not meet his eyes, black and unblinking, as he led her back to the Obelisk, singing their holy mass.

Brother Avilleon led the service after the song. Of the Gardeners, he was eldest, wrinkled and withered and yet beautiful still, graceful still. His voice trembled as he told again the story they all knew, the story of their world. How all the universe had been desolation and wilderness. How no plants had grown on the surface of this world save for vile weeds, and how the Moon hung like a dead thing in the sky, its surface grey and rotten.

Iphigenia was only half-listening as he continued, preaching of how the All-Knower in his great wisdom had sent forth seeds from the great Garden of Homeworld, and sent forth Gardeners to keep them and watch them grow.

She thought of the Witch, crawling her way from the toxic sands beyond the Wall. Perhaps her suit and helm protected her from the poisons. She must have come from beyond, as surely the Gardeners would have noticed a Hopper dropping above them, magics or no. Clearly they had noticed something—otherwise they would not have sent out the eye-swarm or increased the patrols—but the Gardeners couldn’t have known the Witch was inside the Garden or the horns would all be sounding.

Brother Avilleon was wrapping up his sermon, telling them how the Gardeners had taken the children of this desolate and empty world, orphaned and alone, into their care.

“The work is nearly done,” Brother Avilleon said. “The plants here grow tall and strong, by your handiwork, by the All-Knower’s blessing. Soon, soon, they shall be free of the Walls. Soon, the dust will live again. The time is at hand when all the world shall be a Garden!”

“All the world shall be a Garden,” the novices intoned as one.

Iphigenia closed her eyes, imagining a world of greens and purples and deep reds, alive and hungry and singing. That was the All-Knower’s dream, the Gardener’s dream. Her dream.

So why, a voice asked her, did you not tell them about the Witch?

Iphigenia stirred in the deep hours of the night, when the cries of the sandfliers echoed across the vastness of the Garden. She went to the window, treading softly past the pods. Delilah snored, snorted, snored again. Iphigenia paused, conscious of the in-and-out of her breath, of the whistling wind. Delilah shifted and snored deeply. Iphigenia kept walking, quiet as a settling feather. None of the other novices woke as she passed them by.

She stood before the window. Outside, the Garden pulsed its night colours, luminescent purples and blues and reds, hemmed in by the far-reaching whiteness of the Wall. The sandfliers circled on elephantine wings stretched taut between fragile bones, silhouetted against the green Moon.

Iphigenia looked back at the other novices, sleeping in their pods, then slung her pack across her shoulder and slipped out through the window into the Garden, scrambling down the purpleleaf and walking towards the flowerbed by the Wall.

By moonlight, the witch looked even stranger, her helm even blacker, a beetle’s glinting carapace. The winds were blowing cold and the bloodvines were hungry. Hissing they crept across the soil. A groundcreeper squealed, then fell silent. On the Wall, Iphigenia saw the shadows of watchbeasts prowling. They did not look down, did not imagine the danger had already passed inside the Garden.

Iphigenia leant down over the witch, hidden among the sunken dark earth beneath the twisting stalks of the flowers. Behind the helm, eyes flickered open, half-seen through translucent black.

“So…” The witch’s voice was quiet, strained. “You came back. Alone.”

“I’m still not scared, Deceiver,” Iphigenia snapped.

“You call me deceiver,” the witch said, “and I am. But only one of us has lied today.”

“Why did you come here?” Iphigenia asked. “To corrupt us? To kill the Garden?” She paled. “To kill the Gardeners?”

The witch laughed. Then winced. “I’m not here to kill anyone. I crashed.”

“Crashed?” Iphigenia looked around. No sign of a Hopper. Not even a Crawler.

“My ship,” the witch said. “It’s out in the sands. Beyond the Garden’s wall. One of your damned orbital Basilisks caught me as I was passing.”

Iphigenia knew about the Basilisks, of course, though she had never been lucky enough to see one. They were an automatic defense seeded in the orbits of the Gardener’s worlds. Their great eyes could sap any vessel of the enemy of its power and tear it from the sky. The witch, no doubt, would not have appreciated the beauty of the creature as she fell.

“A ship.” Iphigenia turned the strange word over on her tongue. “What’s a ship?”

“Like a hopper,” the witch replied. “Only built instead of grown.”

Iphigenia snorted. “Built? That’s impossible. You can’t build Hoppers.”

“You can’t.” Again, Iphigenia knew she was smiling. “But I’m a witch. I have magic, don’t I?”

Iphigenia recalled stories—of Witches killing stars, poisoning worlds, corrupting minds. “I suppose so. But only a pale reflection of the All-Knower. A shadow in a mirror. A—”

“Yeah.” A rasp. “I can quote scriptures too.”

“Blasphemer,” Iphigenia snapped. “They would burn your tongue.”

“And in the Before, there lived a whole and perfect Light, untainted, in a Garden pure and weedless.” The witch coughed. “Yeah. No burning. No more than before, at least.”

The witch had done it. Quoted scripture perfectly. They weren’t supposed to be able to do that. Maybe the Gardeners had been wrong. But no, that couldn’t be it. The witch was turning her mind, like they’d warned her Witches could.

She should go to Vanerion right now. But Vanerion would ask why she had dawdled, why she had not immediately known—as all good children of the All-Knower should—what was to be done with a Witch.

Unless. Unless.

“I’m going to save your soul,” Iphigenia said.

Yes. She would cause the witch to repent and then to betray her kin and their knowledge to the All-Knower and so allow the Garden to spread. For even His enemies would become His tools, as it was written. Even someone as unworthy as a witch might serve the All-Knower.

Even someone as unworthy as herself.

The witch was laughing. That same coughing, broken, rasping, cawing laugh. How Iphigenia hated it. Surely that sound alone was proof of this creature’s wickedness.

“Of course you will.” The witch looked down at the dark stain. “I’ll try not to die of blood loss first.”

Iphigenia grinned, for surely the All-Knower was providing her with the very instruments she needed. “I shall heal your wounds.”

Iphigenia knelt beside the witch. Her suit had tried to reseal itself over the wound, oozing something like foul black sap from one of its tubes. Iphigenia peeled the new seal back. Beneath, the witch’s skin looked normal. Almost human, despite its paleness.

“Hold still.” Iphigenia pulled a bandage from her pack. Gingerly, she applied it. Her fingers brushed against the witch’s skin and instinct made her want to recoil. But it was just skin. There was no pain, no corruption, no unbearable cold.

Not yet, a voice whispered in Iphigenia’s mind. But maybe that’s how it starts. Be careful.

She remembered again the scars on her fingers. Remembered the pain.

The bandage hissed as it touched the witch’s skin, then wound tight about the wound, pulsing as it lapped up blood and cleansed infection. The witch winced.

“I don’t like it,” she hissed. “One of the Enemy’s creatures against my skin.”

“The All-Knower’s creatures are designed with purpose,” Iphigenia said, “and this one’s purpose is not to harm.” She tried hard to look righteous rather than smug, but it was a difficult distinction to maintain. “Do you not have such creatures where you are from?”

The witch did not answer.

“The All-Knower looked upon life as it was and saw it unfit for purpose,” Iphigenia said. “He saw that it was made not to serve, not to exist in perfect harmony, but rather was only a wilderness and a desolation. And so, He made creatures which healed and creatures which nourished and creatures which—”

“If you’re going to keep going,” the witch interrupted, “I’d rather you ripped the bandage off and let me bleed to death.”

Iphigenia was not wounded by this latest assault of the enemy’s tongue. Surely such a response could only have been prompted by the witch realizing that Iphigenia’s words were true and holy. There could have been no other reason to silence her.

“I will leave the bandage be,” Iphigenia said. “When I return, we will see if you have healed. And if you have healed, then we shall consider the implications.”

“What implications?” the witch demanded.

“That you have been saved by one of your Enemy’s creatures,” Iphigenia said. “And you now owe your life to Him.”

The witch chuckled, which was better at least than her laugh. “There’s an old story we witches keep. A story about…” She paused, letting out a pained breath. “About a witch who was put on trial because people didn’t like what he taught. They charged him with corrupting the youth. And he denied it because…” Another grimacing pause. “Because to corrupt someone is to risk corruption yourself. It’s permeable, see? Can’t teach without being taught. Can’t lead without being led.” She looked at Iphigenia, who could just barely see the shapes of eyes beneath her helm. “Shall we corrupt each other, then, little one?”

Iphigenia felt—she was not sure what. Something that scared her.

“My faith is stronger than yours,” she replied, “and so I will win.”

“Of course you will,” the witch said, “I look forward to worshipping your megalomaniacal false god with you soon.”

“Mock now,” Iphigenia said, “but you will see the truth.”

“And you? What will you see?”

Iphigenia turned away. Let the bandage work. She would return to her pod, to her rest. When she saw the witch again, her tune would have changed. Then the real work could begin.

She would save the witch. She would present her up to Vanerion, to the All-Knower Himself, and they would tell her she had done well, that she was good, that she was faithful.

And Iphigenia would know for certain they were telling the truth.

And so, Iphigenia came again the next night to the witch and instructed her in truth. There were more watchbeasts that night, just as there had been more eye-swarms that morning and more vigilance amongst the Gardeners, but Iphigenia knew the Garden well and they did not spot her. The witch prodded her and tested her, but Iphigenia’s faith was deep-rooted and would not be shaken.

Iphigenia explained how the All-Knower had made the Garden wall, how it grew year after year as the microbes it seeded purified the dust around it, until one day it would envelop the whole world.

The witch asked how the dust had come to be dust, why it was so poisonous it needed to be purified.

“That is the way of the universe,” Iphigenia said, “that all places were dead until the All-Knower sent forth his seeds.”

The witch said that she’d seen other worlds, the life they bore. It was lies, of course, and Iphigenia told her so.

But the witch reached into a pocket of her suit and produced a small, rounded disc that reeked of Witch-work: a cold, dead thing.

“What is that?” Iphigenia asked.

“A sextant. It maps the paths between stars and knows the planets that circle them. Within here, a hundred thousand worlds are remembered.”

“How can it remember anything?” Iphigenia asked. “It’s not alive. It’s just… stone.”

The witch clicked the disc, and it unfurled, a geometry of wheels and gears, until it was a sphere about the size of her head. “Take it.”

Iphigenia hesitated. It was a Witch-thing, a cursed thing, a dead thing.

But she found herself taking it all the same. There was a warmth to it, a soft hum, almost like life.

A mockery, her faith insisted.

Beautiful, her heart whispered.

“Show me, then,” Iphigenia said.

The sextant cast images into the air: Worlds of ice and crystal, of endless jungle and deepest sea—all of them full of life.

“Phantasms,” Iphigenia said. “Witches are liars. These places aren’t real. And if they are—” Then the Gardeners are liars. “Then they’re wastes. Poison places that only look fair.”

“You’ve caught me, then,” the witch said. “I’m a liar.”

But that next day, as Iphigenia went about her duties, as she watered and culled and fed the plants of the Garden, she thought about those worlds.

Weeds, she told herself. Weeds and dreams and blasphemies.

Yet the sextant still sat in her pocket, and she did not throw it away.

On the third night, Iphigenia told the witch about Homeworld. Homeworld was a dream, a story. The first Garden, from where all the roots came, where the All-Knower shaped his creations, where he made the Gardeners and sent them to do his bidding in the dark between stars.

“Have you ever been to Homeworld?” the witch interrupted.

Iphigenia scoffed. “Of course not.”

“I have. And I saw your precious All-Knower too. In the depths of his temple.”

Iphigenia stared.

All her life, she had longed to see Homeworld. And now this heretic, this enemy of truth and goodness, was saying she’d been there, walking in paradise. It was a lie. It had to be a lie.

“You’d like it,” the witch said. “Plants as far as the eye can see. Creeping everywhere. Always hungry.”

“I…” Iphigenia brushed at a strand of her hair. “I like plants.”

“More than God?” The witch chuckled. “Now there’s idolatry for you. He sits at the heart of the temple. Entwined in pulsing roots. He’s cut out his eyes and replaced them with branching vines. When he breathes the whole room breathes with him. The vines are full of blinking black eyes and grasping tendrils. You think he’s this vast thing, this ancient and unspeakable god… but at the center of it, the center of him, he’s just him. This thin old creature, withered away to almost bones, kept alive only by the things he’s bred.” She looked into Iphigenia’s eyes with those deep, black lenses. “That’s the All-Knower. That’s your god. Call that your third lesson.”

Iphigenia stood and pulled back. Her heart beat fast in her chest. It wasn’t true, couldn’t be true. “You’re a Witch. You lie.”

“You think your Gardeners love you?” The witch’s laughed stabbed at Iphigenia’s chest. Tears welled in Iphigenia’s eyes, hot and stinging, and the laughing just kept echoing. “What do you think they’re Gardening, little flower? They’re keeping you in your neat little rows. Pruning you. Picking you. How old were you when they took you?”

“They didn’t take me!” Iphigenia shouted, eyes blurred with tears, her heart hammering with anger, with hate. “They saved me!”

“You don’t even remember, do you?” The witch shook her head. “You’ve spent all your life here, in this beautiful prison. Learning their language, instead of your own. Living in their world without even a memory of yours. Never even dreaming anything they didn’t put into your head first.”

“I’m going back,” Iphigenia snapped. “I’m getting Brother Vanerion. I don’t know why I didn’t from the start.”

“Because you’re curious. Because you see beauty in strange and ugly things. Because there’s a darkness inside you and you know no prayer can ever drive it out.” She paused. “Because you’re a witch.”

“I’m not!” Iphigenia threw her pack to the ground. A bloodvine hissed and pounced upon it, slinking away disappointed when it did not draw blood. “I serve the Gardeners. I serve the Garden. I serve the All-Knower’s creations—”

The witch pointed a thin, gloved finger. “You’re not serving. You do this because you love the plants, not their god. Because you love the strangeness of the Gardeners, not their wisdom. There’s no room for their Book in your heart, Iphigenia. It’s too full of monsters.”

That wasn’t true. That couldn’t be true. It wasn’t true.

“I believe in the Gardeners. In the Garden. We’re bringing life to a dead world.”

“Dead.” A long, rattling breath. “And who do you think killed it?”

“Nobody,” Iphigenia said. “It was always this way. All the Universe was this way, ‘til the Gardeners came, ‘til the All-Knower sent forth his seeds into the emptiness filled only with weeds and wasteland, and He—”

“How can there be emptiness and weeds? And how can weeds be weeds if they’re all there is?”

“I— You’re just playing games with words. Trying to trip me up.”

“It wasn’t empty. Ask the sextant.”

Iphigenia held the sextant humming in her hand, knowing she could believe nothing it showed her, and opened it anyway.

She saw her system from above, planets circling the star. Closer—this world, its moon—not green, but death-white, pickled and pimpled with old scars. Iphigenia looked up and saw the same marks, traced over now with life.

And below the moon: continents of greenness, of grey, of lights twinkling like stars, smears of white cloud, oceans bluer than any sky she’d ever seen. Closer still—skimming over sharp cliffs, over burning slopes, over forests so still they barely moved at all, content to linger.

“This isn’t real,” Iphigenia said. “Just something your device is dreaming.”

“It’s no dream,” the witch said. “It’s memory.”

Now the sextant was throwing up towers, great spires of glass, arcing white bridges. There were streets, full of people, with two arms like hers. Humans.

Iphigenia had never seen an adult human before. She hadn’t even thought about it, not until that moment. Now she looked at those faces, laughing, talking and thought—That’s what I’ll become, when I get old.

“It’s lies!” Iphigenia spat. “Just lies!”

She hurled the witch-thing to the ground. It thunked dully against the root of a flower, then began to curl back into itself, metal folding in.

An image flickered, right before the device stopped. A place like this flower bank, only larger, larger than she could even imagine, rising and falling with the hills.

But the plants growing there were not flowers—not like the ones she knew. They were smaller, stiller. With green stalks and yellow petals.

“How—” Iphigenia grabbed the disc up, tapped it hard, trying to make it open again. “Where did it get that image? Did you pull it from my head?”

“What image?”

She crumbled to her knees, holding them tight to her chest. There were tears in her eyes, hot and swimming.

“Hey.” The witch’s voice was soft, beneath the helm’s growl. Almost gentle. A new form of mockery, no doubt. “What’s wrong?”

“It was my weed.” The words rasped in Iphigenia’s throat, scraping on their way out. “The one I found. How did you—”

The witch took the sextant and coaxed it open again, then handed it back. The image of the field hung in the air.

“Those are tew-lepz. They’re flowers.”

Flowers. Iphigenia remembered the witch’s words. A weed was just a plant growing somewhere you don’t want it to.

But Brother Vanerion had said it was a weed. He’d said it would destroy the Garden, would destroy all of them.

But she’d found the weed. Tried to hide it. Just like she was hiding the witch now.

“I’m wicked,” she whispered softly. “We’re all wicked. That can be the only reason—That’s the only way it makes sense.”

The witch grabbed her. For a moment, Iphigenia thought she was going to kill her.

But the witch just held her wrapped in her two arms, tight as she could. And after a while, Iphigenia stopped struggling.

She hadn’t noticed it until then—that the witch had two arms, just like her.

“Listen to me,” the witch said firmly. “There is nothing wrong with you. Nothing.”

“I lied. And I—I hid you, even though I knew—”

“You hid me because you’re kind,” the witch said, “and because you’re curious. Because you’re good, you understand? You’re good.”

Iphigenia collapsed to her knees and wept for her ancestors’ world. And she wept for her own world, now broken and crashing down in pieces all around.

Iphigenia woke early that morning to the sound of horns and already she knew everything had gone wrong. She raced down to the gathering place, to the smooth columns encircling the Obelisk’s pulsing green heart, with the witch’s sextant still hidden beneath her robes.

“What happened?” Iphigenia asked Delilah as she squeezed beside her. They were packed in, all the novices chattering and fidgeting and sweating.

They were terrified. She was terrified.

She’d never realized she was terrified before.

Delilah’s eyes glinted. “They’ve caught a Witch.”

The Gardeners came, Brother Vanerion at their head. They carried the witch between them. She was beaten and broken, lying limp in their arms. Iphigenia started and the witch caught her eye, gave the slightest shake of her masked head.

Vanerion held up the witch’s knife and the novices gasped, trembling, whispered.

“A Witch,” he said. “A Witch in our very Garden, in this holiest of holy places. Here, no doubt, to enthrall you, to work magics upon us all and poison the fruits we make, cripple our brave Crusaders who depend upon our crops to do their work.”

He fiddled with the knife. It would not move for him as it had for the witch. She laughed and one of the other Gardeners kicked her in the guts.

“Stupid invader,” she hissed, “it won’t work for you. Only works for us witches.”

She said the word with pride. It had been meant as an insult, but she made it a thing of her own. That, Iphigenia realized, was the nature of the witches. Their existence was an act of defiance, from their name, to that cawing laugh, to the hideous insect-eyes helm. If the Gardeners were the image of good, they would make themselves the image of evil.

The Gardeners kicked the witch again and kept kicking her.

“She will be burned,” Brother Vanerion said. “Burned as all enemies must burn. For her own good as well as ours.”

He tore the helm from her face and cast it to the ground. Insect eyes cracked as he stomped it underfoot.

Iphigenia braced herself for what might lie beneath, monstrous or beautiful. Instinct made her shut her eyes. She forced herself to open them again.

The witch’s face was beaten and broken, old scars and fresh, but she was young beneath that, scarcely older than Iphigenia. She had freckles, curly hair cut short, a slightly crooked nose, a spot on her left cheek. Ordinary things in an ordinary face. There was nothing strange about her, no lesions of the skin, no boils, none of the deformities that the Gardeners promised afflicted those who defied the All-Knower’s design.

Nothing but those curious, hungry eyes, and that knowing smile.

Still the witch laughed and kept laughing as they led her away, down deep into the Obelisk’s roots.

Vanerion tucked her Knife into his belt. A trophy. Iphigenia looked at his face, at the cold and inhuman eyes blinking.

Iphigenia came to her in the dark, to the cells in the roots of the Obelisk, and looked at her through the thorned bars. The witch seemed so small, so crumpled, leaning against the cell wall, but when she smiled, she seemed almost as fierce as she had beneath her helm.

“Little gardener,” she rasped, and her voice was so much smaller without the mask.

“Not anymore.” Iphigenia pulled a cutter from her pocket and put it against the bars.

The witch shook her head. “No.”

“But…” Iphigenia put a hand through the bars, didn’t care that the thorns tore at her arm. “They’ll burn you.”

“A witch must always be prepared to burn.” She looked Iphigenia in the eye. “I don’t matter. What matters is that the knowledge lives on, that the coven is not broken.”

“You can run. They’ll—I don’t know what they’ll do to me but you—you’ll—you can get away and—and—and—”

“I can’t run fast enough. Not with my wound. Your Garden will kill me before I get to the Wall. But one of us has to escape. I’ll die no matter what you do. And if you die too, it was all for nothing.”

“But I—” Iphigenia shook her head. “I’m not like you.”

“Oh, Iphigenia. Little sister. Our last hope.” The witch laughed. “You’re exactly like me.”

Iphigenia nodded, brushing aside her tears and her doubts. “What do you need me to do?”

The witch whispered to her all that she must do and all that she must know.

“You should make a helm as soon as you can,” the witch said. “The helm makes them afraid of you. Makes you more than human.”

“I don’t even know your name,” she said.

“My name doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

“Capella,” the witch said. “My name is Capella.”

Capella. Iphigenia saw her now for the first time: a woman no more than twenty, her skin purple with bruises, her teeth a little too big for her face, a smile sadder than any weeping.

“It’s good to meet you, Capella.”

Atop the Obelisk, with the Garden spread out beneath in a disc of writhing, hungry life, the Gardeners bound Capella atop a pile of dead wood, kindling waiting for the slightest spark. They expected her to weep, to repent, to beg, but she stood, strong and still and silent as Brother Vanerion lit his torch.

He held it out to Iphigenia and whispered in her ear.

“I know you saw her, child. I know she spoke to you.” Iphigenia’s blood was ice, but he kept speaking. “And I know you were not corrupted. Prove it now. Before us all.”

Iphigenia nodded and grasped the torch firmly. She stepped forward, one shaky foot after the other, until she was standing before the pyre. Her breath rattled.

Brother Vanerion nodded. Her guts churned. The witch met her eye.

Iphigenia lit the pyre. Flames licked hungrily at Capella’s feet and the heat of them was on Iphigenia’s face. She breathed deep and got a mouthful of smoke. Coughing she turned away, but Capella shook her head.

Iphigenia stood and watched the fire grow. She did not weep, did not blink, did not show the slightest weakness, not even when Capella began at last to scream. She watched wood turn to smoke, watched flesh melt and robes crumbles, watched bone turn to ash.

When it was over, Brother Vanerion put a hand on her shoulder, tight and cold, and told her he was proud of her. She smiled.

Later, when he wasn’t watching, she vomited until her stomach was empty and heaving and her mouth tasted of death and ash.

She waited three weeks, until the Gardeners were no longer watching, until the novices were no longer prattling into the night about the Witch and how she had almost cursed them all, until everything was quiet and still and normal. Toiling in the Garden, singing her prayers, bowing to the Gardeners who had killed her world and used the bones as compost.

Slowly she gathered what she would need, hiding her supplies beneath her cot, keeping her pack at the ready. She took water and food for the journey. She cut a long strand of purpleleaf, long enough to make a rope, and bound to it a barbed spike from the spinetree.

On that last night she lay in bed, quiet and unmoving, listening for the slightest sound. She heard the soft patter of Gardeners’ footsteps upon the stair. She heard the creak of the beds as her fellow novices shifted in their sleep. She heard the whistle of the wind and the gentle swaying of the purpleleaf upon the Obelisk’s walls.

At last, when all was silent, and the last of the novices had fallen asleep, she slipped out of bed and slung her pack of gathered supplies across her back. She tiptoed to the window and stood upon the sill, casting one last look back.

She did not know what would become of the other novices. Now she doubted the Gardeners’ soft words. She had never seen a human Gardener. The older novices had simply gone away, and she’d never thought to question it. She wondered if they were dead. Or worse.

Iphigenia went out the window, down the purpleleaf thick on the Obelisk’s walls, past the rows of hungry flowers and slithering bloodvines, towards the Wall so vast and white, almost glowing in the moonlight. When she reached the base, she tossed her spiked vine up, and heard it lodge itself at the top of the Wall.

Inch after inch she climbed, clinging tight to her makeshift grappling hook, till at last she looked out over the Wall, across the expanse of the sands, stirring gently in the wind beneath the Sandfliers.

By sunrise she reached the ship, a glinting metal thing with solar sails like hummingbird’s wings and a cockpit like a vast eye. The hatch was cold to the touch. Inside, wires hung about a bloodstained seat. Iphigenia put her fingers on the blood and remembered Capella’s words.

“My ship is out there in the sands. The systems should have recovered from the Basilisk’s pulse by now. The computer banks hold the complete secrets of the Homeworld. They also contain the location of the coven. The Gardeners can’t get their hands on it. Go to the ship. The sextant will tell you how to fly it.”

Iphigenia booted up the systems, heard the groans of the ship waking from its rest.

Lights flickered and talismans glinted. Iphigenia set the coordinates for the witch’s secret place, deep in the dark of the night.

Then she saw him, coming across the sands, a pruning blade in each of his four hands. Brother Vanerion. He had come alone.

Of course he had. She was his failure. His sapling, gone to rot. He would not let another fix his mistake.

Iphigenia whistled.

And the knife that Vanerion had stolen, that he kept proudly about his waist, hissed to life. Vanerion’s eyes widened, becoming seas of black.

The knife cut five times. Vanerion fell to the sands and his pruning blades fell beside him. Iphigenia held out her hand and it came to her.

Vanerion reached out a dying hand and rasped through a slit throat. Iphigenia watched the blood spill. It shone so bright, glistening in its myriad colours, running in rivers over the sands. Vanerion twitched and collapsed. The blood still rushed out, a kaleidoscopic rainbow. Iphigenia reached down and dipped her fingers in it. She smeared a wide stain across her brow and smiled.

“It seemed a shame,” she whispered, “to keep so much beauty on the inside.” The witch climbed into the cockpit of her waiting ship and sailed up, until the Garden was just a spot of green amongst the dead sands and went forth into the promise of endless night.

END