a little wild cherry tree

Torrent had taken a lot to get to this point. It had taken seasons for her to get to the point of feeling comfortable again in her home. She'd been tormented by random chunks of memories, anxiety, paranoia, and could barely sleep at night for the night terrors. But slowly time and proximity had desensitized her to the trauma she'd gone through when the volcano had erupted. Mostly now she was just plagued by the nightmares, though there were times yet that she would relapse into the hot fury that fear dragged from her.

But she hadn't yet returned to where it had all changed.

Today was that day.

She'd carefully packed travois with sealed jars of water, stacked to balance it so it wouldn't pull too far to either side and pull on the hide straps that would attach it to her back. In front of the jars she began to stack seedling plants with their bare roots wrapped in scraps of pelts that had been wetted to keep the seedlings from drying out. She'd been quietly gathering these seeds from surrounding lands and had planted them in front of her den to grow into these little plantlets. She and Asriel had dug them up that morning, and now the seedlings sat on the travois in front of the jars of water in neat little rows like child soldiers standing at attention. She dropped a willow branch cage over the cargo and fastened it to keep it in place so the contents would remain where the were if they were jostled.

Silently Asriel lifted the hide half-harness for her to slide beneath it so that her head popped out of the hole in the front of it, leaving one side of the hide, the side attached to the travois poles, drapped along her back like a heavy blanket, or a simple saddle, and a thinner strip of the hide across her chest for her to pull against. The big cat was tense as he moved around her, checking the straps and the cargo for far longer than was strictly necessary, and Torrent knew he was as reluctant as she was. "Asriel," she said finally, just the one word, quietly. If they kept putting it off the day would be nearly gone, and it would be too easy to simply put it off until the next day, and put it off again, and again. No, they had to go now or she'd never be able to go at all.

The snow leopard gave a faint growl in his throat of protest but nodded, and sighed. He visibly steeled himself, and then moved out in front of her to guide and guard her as they made their way through the pack lands eastward. The lands between her home and her destination seemed determined to make dragging the travois as difficult as possible, but Asriel led her to skirt around the forest and then again around the quicksand pits. She couldn't help but recall her panicked flight through these lands in the other direction, only avoiding the dangerous quicksand because Asriel had followed his friend's last command to keep her safe, and guided her headlong sprint through the lands.

When she came to the edge of what had once been a thriving forest, she stopped, trembling, and forced herself to look upon what remained after the volcano had had its way with it. Despite seasons of the volcano slowly settling, and rains falling, not all the ash that had lain thickly over this land had washed away and it clung to her paws and Asriel's like boots. New growth peeked through the ash, and she found herself drawn to it, staring hungrily at the small green in this world of ash and cooled lava flows. Asriel waited patiently, though his pelt twitched and his claws had slid out in agitation. Finally she moved again, following the quiet leopard through a landscape of desolation the volcano had wrought.

And then they were there.

This lava flow marked where she'd nearly died as a child. This was where Enrico had saved her, and in doing so lost his own life - and bound her and Asriel inexorably together in the trauma and grief of his death. His body wasn't there, of course. He had been buried beneath liquid rock, and his grave was the thick rocky crust that now coated and added strange new contours to this land.

She couldn't say how long she sat there with Asriel, both of them lost in their thoughts, but the sun was rising when she finally shrugged out of the half-harness and flipped open the willow cage. Determinedly she and Asriel both set themselves to digging holes in and near the lava flow, one for each of the seedlings she'd raised. They'd been seeds from the red budded trees that had once grown here, and would now grow here again. The last seedling was different. It was a cutting she'd taken from a lilac, and it was further along in its growth than the red seedlings. This she carefully planted as close to where she thought Enrico's body lay as she and Asriel could determine it.

Without pause she returned again to the travois to grasp the strap of one of the water jars and carry it to the first of the seedlings. Uncapping it, she tilted it to allow a generous amount to fall and wet the ashy earth around the seedling and gather in the shallow depression she'd left around it. She moved on to the next.

By the time she'd finished watering all the tree seedlings and then the lilac, she had only a quarter of a jar of water left, and her mouth and nose were dried out from the harshness of the old ash she'd stirred up as she'd dug the holes. Asriel didn't seem any better, and they shared the water between the two of them and still felt thirsty. Despite that, they didn't leave right away, but sat before the lilac they'd planted for Enrico's memory. She couldn't say that she suddenly felt at peace, or any such sentimental nonsense as that, but it did feel like something was... less unfinished now. The forest would regrow, and within it, to mark the place she'd changed so much, would grow a lilac tree. She'd return here with Asriel to continue watering the seedlings until they could make due on her own, and someday this place would be shady with red-budded branches and blanketed in soft grasses once again. Asriel had told her that volcanic soils were rich and fertile, and would nourish the plants. Someday, this place would forget the trauma and be stronger for it. And maybe, she thought as she replaced jars and slipped back into the harness to return home, maybe she would be able to do the same.

WC: 1151