Page 61 of The Blight of Hollowmire

She smiles slightly, which should be unnerving, but there is no fear in her expression, only certainty.

“Well,” I force a brittle smile. “Shit.”

Ursula does not return the smile.

“The visions grew stronger the closer I got to Hollowmire. Eventually, I realized every path led toward Sephia’s bloomday feast. I needed to have a chance to speak with you without being turned away.”

The memory of the feast rises instantly behind my eyes: music, candlelight, the smell of wine and roasted meat, Sephia laughing somewhere nearby before Ursula found me just shy of sneaking out. Blight Mother—the scene replays again and again in my mind. I drag a hand slowly over my face. The exhaustion of the last several days settles heavily through my bones all at once.

“You called me the Blight Mother,” I say quietly, my hope turning desperate in the face of her explanation. “Is that what the gods said—what they told you? Do you believe that is what I am? What I’m becoming? Is there any way to stop it from happening?”

She doesn’t answer immediately, but rises from the table to fetch something from a high shelf—an apple. At first glance it appears ordinary enough—slightly too perfect with its glossy red skin absent of blemishes, but otherwise normal.

When she slices it open, the inside glistens with moisture, and yet no scent rises from it. She slices a piece off and hands it to me, bidding me to eat it. The moment my tongue touches it, I recoil—there is no sweetness or tartness where I expected, it is as if all sensations of taste and the satisfaction from eating such a beautiful piece of fruit have fled.

“The food still looks like it should,” Ursula says softly. “Better, even. Everything looks perfect, but it does not nourish. Nothing breaks down, nothing withers. It all simply… remains. I believe the land is blocked, somehow—life cannot complete its natural cycle.”

Renard’s eyes widen, blue and piercing. He tenses and leans forward slightly. “How long has it been this way?”

“We’ve had a difficult spring and summer with meager harvests, so merchants have been bringing food through Morsell from Valehar for months now. Grain, fruit, glossy vegetables that smell off before they get unloaded from the carts. Everything arrives wrong in the same way.” She nudges the ruined apple with the knife tip. “It fills the stomach for a little while, but nothing satisfies. The people of Morsell have begun to starve.”

Renard exhales, shaking his head.

“They’ve been trading the tainted crops,” he says, disgusted. “Selling them to others instead of trying to dispose of them… even though they know the food is inedible.”

I stare at the shining red fruit while fragments of memory drift uneasily through my thoughts. Suddenly, the weak harvests in Hollowmire seem more than just a coincidence, as does the cold arriving too early, and the way the forests grow quieter each season.

Ursula sets the knife aside and folds her hands loosely together.

“Decay is part of life,” she says, eyeing me meaningfully.

The words land strangely inside me. For years, I’ve listened to people describe my magic as corruption, disease—even punishment. It’s always something to be ashamed of, or hidden away, not like Sephia’s fertility or Bronwyn’s merrymaking. Gods, even my own family poured leywort tea down my throat with expressions pinched tight from revulsion and fear.

“I suspect you already know how vital it is, given your connection to the earth. New roots grow from soil that feeds on rot,” she continues. “Gods, the earth itself feeds on death. Forests survive because fungi and worms and scavengers break down what came before so new life can grow in its place.” Her eyes settle steadily on mine. “Without decay, life eventually starves beneath its own abundance. Without decay, there would be no life.”

Suddenly, I’m reminded of the rather useless diary buried with Hollowmire’s archives and now sitting in my pack back at the inn. Humanity pushing the world toward imbalance, and the Blight Mother becoming the hand that tips the scales back toward equilibrium. At the time it sounded like myth, but now I’m no longer certain.

Renard rubs thoughtfully at his beard. “You think someone interrupted that balance deliberately.”

“I think something prevented—is preventing—the world from completing its natural cycle.”

“And you think I have something to do with it,” I say, my voice a touch more shrill than I’d like it to be.

The look Ursula gives me is just short of pitying, and I bristle, standing abruptly.

“I think you are connected to it intimately,” she answers.

My antlers give a dull throb, my head aching with a persistence I’d otherwise believe was the result of a sore head from too much wine. Sighing, I cross toward the window that overlooks the village below.

Morsell glows softly below, sleepy and quaint. Candlelight flickers through warped glass windows while smoke curls upward from clustered chimneys. People move along the narrow streets below carrying firewood and baskets and ordinary concerns that have nothing to do with prophecy or ancient balance or antlers erupting from their skulls. They simply go home to their families, to their loved ones, secure that they will not be ascending to some sort of destructive goddess-hood because the world simply needs fixing. For one breathless moment, I am nearly suffocated by envy.

Behind me, Ursula speaks more gently than before.

“You are not the sickness, Vireth.”

I close my eyes briefly, feeling the pressure of tears behind my eyes. Gods, I don’t want to cry in front Ursula, and certainly not in front of Renard again. I think I’ve cried more in the last week than I have in the whole of my upbringing.

“You are what comes after,” she finishes.