Everywhere (1/3)

In some odder, more obscure reaches of the world there rest forces of nature which exist, normally, only in our daydreams. Some are beautiful and fantastic. Other, more sinister forces exist as well, however, almost beyond reach.

They require an impossibly perfect combination of darknesses that only occurs once or twice in the lifetime of a world. They warp and change the domain, balancing out the good forces. They poison, and destroy, and corrupt, and return the world from happiness; a reminder of the necessary balance of things.

Once upon a long forgotten time, such a force as the latter invaded a castle full of flowers. Both the castle, and those within it, grew to be home to great darknesses, which sprouted from the ground and spilled out through the castle's halls, and into the hearts of its occupants.

*

An organ hummed a perfect cadence from the inside of the grand stone castle, which rested in a crevice at the top of a tree-covered hill. Veins of assorted colour ran up the grey bricks and tied themselves into neat loops around all of the turrets and towers. An orange ball of sinking light descended slowly through a sky full of whirring birds.

They could see the symmetry as they flew over it: two grand green gardens on either side, the light grey front path perfectly enclosed between mirrored bursts of hedge, the adjacent greenhouses at the back and, as its frame, a square all around the grounds, made up of multicoloured streaks. Even the tiny dark dots that represented groups of people resting on the grass or going too and fro could be quite easily believed to be arranged deliberately, into shapes that matched.

A perfect metaphor of life's symmetry seemed to be continued down below. All around, the sounds of laughing voices and chatter, dog barks and bell jingles rang, never rising or falling, just remaining as they were – happy-sounding and reserved; peaceful.

Dark shadows danced along the shaded bottom of the castle walls. Some sparrows stirred as a man ran gasping out into the open, pushing through the many people still roaming the gardens at this time, towards the very edge of the grounds.

He then stopped suddenly. His eyebrows rose for a moment, then sank back down. A blade had ripped right through his stomach, and he fell forwards to the dirty ground of the garden, pushing the spear back out of the wound slightly in doing so. The soldier that had been chasing him slowed his pace and walked the rest of the way to the body now lying on the ground. He placed an indifferent boot on the man's back and tore his weapon back out from its residence. The shell of the man twitched, and as his leg turned up slightly the soldier saw, for one second, a purple lilac pressed flat to the underside of his shoe. He gazed upon it for a moment, then snapped his vision back upwards right away, and turned around to the other guards who were now approaching to help discard of the body. All around them, people continued, smiling and never once dropping their gazes towards the corpse and its growing pool of blood.

*

The lone Princess of the castle looked over the countryside from the western watchtower, her own watchtower, with eyelids dropped. She purposefully inhaled a breath of the remarkably clean, fresh air. The orchard stood beautiful and proud, with identical apple trees poised in perfect rows, staring up, as if they were awaiting her command.

To an external eye, the castle may have seemed to be from somewhere outside times of darkness.

In fact, darkness had barbarically trudged through the gates many years before, and by now had made its home quite comfortably.

*

To gain a true understanding of the strangeness of this castle, and the residents therein, we must simply look into the minds of these people. While one might expect, as it is with a person of almost any sort, to find personal strengths and weaknesses, passions, some war of colliding opinions and vibrational secrets churning away inside, decorating the head with the joys and sorrows of phenomena such as youth, age, love and loss, one would discover no such thing. If it were in fact possible to stare directly in, all that someone would see would be – for the most part – a great blankness. Each consciousness was a dark, tranquil pool of silent water. The people of this kingdom had been trained to stop even the most involuntary emotions from reaching awareness. They observed, accepted, and continued to live. They smiled. They smiled so much, every single day. Only one other sole drifting feeling evaporated upwards from the still pool, steady and constant, but very quietly – a rattling, endless terror. It was so ingrained into their psyche that they were not aware of it any more; it was simply they way that they were.

As well as this fear, one would hear the same odd passage, repeated again and again in different voices, thoughtlessly; a stanza from a children's song:

If whisper wicked words you do,
Death's dark hand will follow you.
So think good thoughts, stop not to stare
At the flowers that grow everywhere.

Such a kingdom could not have been born, if not for as bizarre and terrible a history as the one this particular castle possessed.

*

Many years before the Princess stood at twilight gazing out from her tower, the castle had been ruled by a good King, and his beautiful Queen, who was an expert gardener. She was extremely skilled at retrieving blossoms from the most despondent seeds, making anything grow in an awful habitat, and generating new, hitherto unseen plants with a multitude of wondrous and often eccentric qualities. The whole kingdom sprawled with her work, and from above it was just as perfect and colourful as the castle, with flowers running up and down every street, and along the rooftops and fences too.

It had been after the untimely demise of the Queen's and the kingdom's beloved King that this had evolved from a hobby into an obsession. Her husband was well known as a ruler for his benevolence and fairness with his subjects. Of everyone, his then young Queen was the most aware of the kindness that he exhibited. He was also strong, right from his youth, their first meeting being when he kicked down her door as a spritely Prince, and rescued her malnourished form from the abusive people who kept her chained up next to her 'bed' (which was really a pile of dead grass), whom she was made to dub 'parents'. He arrived at their door upon reports to the castle regarding various screams exuding from the shed, and the dwellers' known acts of torture upon subjects of the kingdom, including their own daughter.

The Queen, who was then the Princess was not so strong as her new partner; not yet. Young, and scared of very much in the world, she did however manage a slow growth only with the supporting hand of her husband. He never forced her into anything, but instead genially reassured her, just the right amount, until she was ready for her next step. She took the first step after much deliberation and worry – marriage. Accepting another's acceptance. Coming to the castle, living among them all as one, and making her first speech, was the next step. Through quivering lips she found herself addressing thousands of people (the castle's reach extended much further back in those times) and realised that some things were more possible than she thought. No matter how scared she was, she could still speak and they would listen. As the years passed she came to speak freely and was revered and adored by those who listened for her distinctive bluntness, and beautiful flawlessness. The King was still always there, really, making sure she got to where she deserved to go, should she ever fall back into fear. It was suspected with little doubt that he needed her equally, a truth shown privately on one night she always remembered, as they retired from one of the many troublesome days of punishment and retribution – of execution, which the King so detested although it was a necessity in very rare cases to rid the world of a deep black danger – that come with ruling a kingdom. He sank into the chair next to hers, in front of a spitting fire, and said, simply, 'thank you'.

“For being the one thing always right, in a world that is so often wrong.” He replied simply when she asked for what, and closed his eyes.

Soon enough, their daughter was born, and the Queen, now empty of the baby, was full of excitement for the first time in her life. She was fully grown into the person she wanted to be – the cherished woman, the rigid Queen, the great mother – and now she and her husband could help this little person grow into their own vision of perfection. No torture or captivity. Just light. A fresh start, to a family of true greatness. From murky beginnings, her own life was due to spring into great silver brightness.

When the King was poisoned, entirely unexpectedly, by an ambitious lord who strove to steal the throne (who was subsequently caught and hanged, without any trepidation) the Queen felt that the walls around about her had collapsed, and the floorboards burned away to ash beneath her shoes. She fell into the void with a baby in her arms; one noticed the change primarily in her eyes as they frosted over into indifference. She had scraped so hard for her chance at a good life, tried so hard, and failed. It was gone from her now. She lost her power, and melted back into a mostly impassive state, and she simply slumped on her throne staring off to nowhere and giving out the minimum amount of orders to keep life continuing in the castle.

The kingdom fell into chaos, despite the legion of loyal guards who tried their best to contain the troubles, but whose efforts generally collapsed without the hand of a real leader to guide them. The castle succumbed to disrepair soon too, and many left its residence amid looting and violence. The guards and other staff stayed, out of loyalty to their much respected King, as well as in there love for the woman who the Queen had once been, in case she should one day rise again to lead them.

At that time, the only sort of comfort the Queen received, however, was in her greenhouse, as flowers grew silent in a perfection that could simply not be replicated by human beings, who were warped and selfish creatures. A year or so passed, and her derision for people continued to fester. She had been left to guide a castle full of subjects whose twisted ways she could understand not, bar one little perfect girl, who was her daughter. But she could not be a fit example for the Princess, she was a shell and always had been. She did not know how to be a mother, or a Queen, or anything at all. All she knew was how to make flowers sprout from pots. That was her power.

On what was to become a significant day, some time in late summer, the Queen was sitting at the workbench of her central greenhouse, faced by a certain troublesome bloom. It was by far the strangest looking flower in the greenhouse. It was bulbous and had five thick reddish brown petals around the centre, dotted white. Its centre was bizarre and foreign too, a pit filled with a circular bed of a hundred spikes, pointing straight out at the observer.

She had devoted months of her life to procuring it, from a realm so far away that she had not even known it to exist until she heard of the plant. She desired it initially as a perfect centrepiece for her already capacious collection of rare and exotic blooms, which took up half of the main greenhouse. The rarest of them all would sit right in the centre. This flower, however, proved itself to be so much more than ornamental in the end.

The first occurrence of oddness came a few days after she had received it. She was happily tending to a row of dahlias which had erupted overnight in a new unique way, when her attention was drawn by something in the corner of her eye. She looked around and saw that her foreign flower was turned upwards, instead of slumped in its usual drooping stance. Furthermore, it had dramatically changed in colour, originally the dirty red shade with white dots, to a shimmering purple dotted yellow. She put down her watering can and walked over to it, surprised. Almost as soon as she registered it, it shifted in place in front of her eyes and its petals pulsed into a faded mauve. She was now greatly perplexed. It turned a much brighter yellow and faced her directly. She stared on, reeling. In the moment she was puzzled, and after some time of watching change and rest, she stopped watching reluctantly so that she could attend to the rest of her greenhouses. As the days passed and she watched it move and flash through a spectrum of colours, she began to come naturally to the truth - the flower's appearance altered in response to how she, the Queen, was feeling. When she became nervous, it was always green, and when she felt excitement it turned crystal blue. It seemed so vibrantly excitable when it changed, it must love the flavour of emotion.

There was a second reason why it was a remarkable growth. The oddity required not to be fed, watered, or otherwise tended to; yet it lived on and on. It took the Queen some time to notice this, of course, but once she did, she experimented; she tried moving it into darkness, denying it water, even eventually burying it in sand for weeks, just to test its limits, but through all this it survived just fine.

It had been in her possession several years now, by this crucial day in late summer, and she had never, for all her green fingers' prowess, been able to extract the flower's secret for use in anything else she grew. It had become her life ambition, her first thought when she entered the glass sanctuary every day. She wanted it to show her how she could make her own beautiful blooms similarly immortal, so that she could build and keep collections of the most remarkable flowers, the perfect creations, but no matter what she made it consume, or how she felt around it, or what she otherwise did to it, she could not force it to yield its secrets.

By this day, the Queen felt like she should simply give up. The flower just sat there, dull grey and facing the counter it was kept on. Bleakness made it black, and it was raining outside which always led the Queen to gloom. As she leaned over it, inspecting it, she felt like its dark colour was transmitting back to herself, and in turn, it noticed her hopelessness and grew darker, back and forward, until it was jet black.

It was pointless, all this. The flower was taunting her. She would never know, she was as powerless as she always had been, over everyone and everything. She had been foolish to think this plant would be any exception. She began to cry while searching across its head desperately, and eventually sat back with her face in her hands and pondered the ultimate futility of gardening. It was her only warmth, her only order, and even it was unwilling to save her. She wondered whether she might do better to retire from it entirely. She thought about life, and whether it was a truly worthwhile endeavour if all it contained was anguish and failure. As she sniffed, and lowered her hands, so she could begin to tidy things away, however, she encountered a sight that stopped her hopeless wondering where it was.

The flower was animated. It was switching colours every second, dancing around and bending into all different shapes. It had never done this before, it was usually just a flash of colour and a quick jerk in the appropriate direction. The Queen just stared blankly at it; she was not causing this. The only emotions inside of her were bemusement coupled with residual misery. Eventually it rested and stopped, to her disappointment. She wondered what could have made it behave in such a way as she wiped her eyes. Among the confusion there was a tiny spark, however, that at least there had been some sort of development – finally there was progress. It was not hopeless. She would uncover the secret.

She looked down at her hands, which were now both covered in a smear of make-up and mud. She reached up to the shelf above the bench for a cloth to wipe them, but then paused. She looked down at the damp black smudges on her palms again. Black droplets dripped a little off the side. Tiny pieces of her misery. Those that had entered the plant. Then came the revelation.

Of course! She thought. Of course! What else would the flower which consumes human emotion desire more than the fruit of such a potent one – sadness. Her head was bubbling as she felt a great gate unlock; but she then saw the fading light and was made bitterly aware of the time. She had to get back for the great feast that was had at the end of every week. It was the only real tradition she had kept up in her own separate reign; it was the one her King had felt most enthusiastically about. He believed in the idea that a family should sit down for a great meal together from time to time, to give thanks and share joy. She would deal with the flower tomorrow. She had waited so long, she could wait just a small time longer.

The Queen knew not what changes were to unfold as she slept, down in the greenhouse. She knew especially not, sadly, what these awful changes would come to mean for her and her castle.

The flower had exploded outwards overnight. It had expanded vastly, still its same self in form, yet larger. Its pointless roots were now lying over the shards of a broken pot, around which displaced soil had been scattered. The head was bulbous and strange to look at already, never mind at the size it was now – it was maybe double the width of a breakfast platter. After a gust of excitement and slight panic - which turned the big flower orange - the Queen rushed to drag out the biggest pot she could find. It would house it. It did not need the soil for sustenance, but without being planted she found that it just fell over with its own weight.

The flower did not stop yet; still it continued to grow. It outgrew all of her pots put together, and she was forced to devise a quick plan. She applied all her faculties to the problem, and suddenly remembered something that could be of use. There was a cavern below the castle, dug out of the rising hill the castle sat on, behind the dungeons. It was originally intended to be a larger main dungeon, designed to imprison the increasing torrent of wrongdoers filling the kingdom. Crime had been rising and measures, much to the Queen and King's dismay, were necessarily taken. It had never been completed, however, due to its less than optimal support for any kind of construction (displayed when the entire ceiling collapsed) and it was closed off, supposedly for good, by a stone wall. Around this time the King died, and any notion of suppressing crimes fell away just like the paint on the walls and the valuable ornaments lying around the castle.

She had the guards tunnel down and the flower was finally moved to the cavern. The ground was tough but not yet impermeable, and they planted the freakish thing as deep down as they could manage. It finally stopped growing not long after this. All of her free time was now devoured down in the cave; she abandoned even her greenhouses and spent hours every day with the flower, while everything else she had grown wilted and died without even her slightest consideration. She took samples and examined every inch of it, meticulously, laboriously, over and over again. She tested concoctions of her own tears, hair and even blood, trying to uncover the crucial pattern.

This is the extent to which the story, as anyone in the kingdom knew it, was able to be related. It had been gathered over time from mismatching hearsay from the guards and broken pieces of conversations. The rest of the Queen's story was long lost, and as the darkness began to spread its fingers around each corner of the castle, even the afore related truth of how it all began was blurred and beaten away, wrenched from the clutches of memory.

The real birth of the new world, the first incident long forgotten now, took place just outside of the Queen's sleeping quarters. A tailor walked briskly down the corridor past the varnished brown door. Some servants stood next to it, hooking a hanging-basket of azaleas to the wall. He thought to himself about the Queen's gardening. He had respected and cared for the King dearly and was as sad as anyone when he died, and now that he was gone the tailor felt that the heir, his wife, had began to break the limit as to how long she could leave them all stagnant like this. The castle was in such an awful state, he hadn't really wanted to stay around when the others did but felt an obligation to his wife, who was a maid and was very much in favour of staying. But it had only gotten worse as the months passed, their Queen had been too busy tending to her weeding and watering; she hadn't even attempted to rear her own daughter – that had been the job of the various servants she threw at her! Trade had fallen to a nearly-gone trickle and the castle was in a dire state financially. The Queen was to blame. She was incompetent and weak, an unfit ruler. Without the King she was lost. Pathetic.

Almost at the end of the corridor now, the tailor heard a door fly open and a scream of “Halt!”

He turned around. The Queen was standing by her opened door, with tears and anger on her face, measuring him up across the tiled floor. Her lip trembled. She did not take her stare off of him, stepped forward, and then stopped in place again. Then she shouted “Guards! Guards! I need a guard!” From around various corners they tramped to her side. Then her mouth closed firmly. She cleared her throat, and muttered to the men around her.

The tailor was forced to his knees, wailing. He begged her to stop, and asked why she was doing it. A light came into her eyes, and he thought himself saved. Then she muttered again and started walking away in the other direction. He sighed and waited for himself to be let go.

The guards firm hands remained on the tailors shoulders and arms. He was dragged forward, and had to hold his face up from the ground. He was pulled down some stairs, and then some more, struggling and shouting all the way.

The next day, a young servant boy was handed the robes of the tailor's assistant, who had been promoted early in the morning, and told to put them on. The way it was barked at him caused him to question the situation very little.

From then on, things finally began to change in the sleeping kingdom. Houses all through the kingdom were ransacked for items stolen from the castle, and found in remarkable time - within days in fact – and returned to the possession of the Queen, along with the life of each person who had set hands upon them. Traitors to the castle, those who had run away from its residence to the far edges of the colourful kingdom, were brought back to where they belonged, and many of them were killed.

Amongst all this, it was only for fear that most subjects failed to notice the luscious colours that were springing up around their feet. The flowers, with their shades of blue, pink and yellow that were once bright and dotted everywhere, returned. Even more, they surpassed themselves in thickness and abundance.

In the end of this revolution only a few hundred remained from the couple of thousand that had been left in the kingdom. They were ordered to ascend the hill and come to live in the castle. Once everyone was there, they were given the directive to plant and hang incomprehensible amounts of flowers, in specific patterns and arrangements, around their new home, which included a thick impermeable bed outside in the ground, set in a solid square all the way around the castle, giving the impression of a colourful moat. Nobody left the castle after this time, and those who ever mentioned such an idea often vanished soon after.

Children were left alive, being too young to do anything truly wrong, yet, but their fear was even more ferocious and uncertain than the adults. They made sure to be good, always watching behind them for the guards, and were told many stories of those who were had been bad, and their gruesome fates. It was a way of keeping them safe. There was even a song, that they began to recite a song amongst themselves:

"If whisper wicked words you do,
Death's dark hand will follow you.
So think good thoughts and do not stare
At the flowers that grow everywhere."

And so it was, for the next few decades. People lived in fear and learned to be quiet and think well, and the castle, closed off and self-contained now at the peak of its hill, gained a ruler once more. It continued just like this, until the starry night that the Princess was now looking out upon, which was to become itself a night of great change.