BLIND | DreamSMP

XXIV - A Thousand Lifetimes

Phil made her hot tea with honey in the mornings and gave her licorice in the evenings, hoping that the sickness might resolve itself with just the simple remedies, but it grew worse and worse, and by the time snow covered the ground once again, Hickory was bedridden. 

Phil kept her company day and night, refusing to leave the room except to fetch her things and occasionally bring them both a meal. He talked to her when she had the energy to gesture back, sat perfectly motionless when she was able to rest, and held her silently when she needed him, cradling her frail body in his arms.

Phil's dreams were full of fear and worry, but he was sure she would make it through the winter. Hickory would see spring. She had to.

It was a cold and dreary day. Hickory was quiet. No coughing. It gave Phil hope that maybe she was getting better.

She rolled over to face him, so close that her eyelashes brushed his cheeks, and kissed him softly, drawing away with a melancholy smile. 

She raised her elegant fingers and, with trembling hands, signed a final message to Phil: "I love you".

Then Hickory lay still.

At first he couldn't move, shocked; and then he was sobbing, shaking her and pleading with her to wake up as her body became unnaturally rigid and bark began to cover her once-soft skin, and as he begged the piece of wood shaped like a woman to come back, he at last understood that Hickory was not flesh and bone like him, but wood and leaf, like the hickory tree he had found her under so long ago.

Phil did not move from the bed. 

He held Hickory and cried, and when he slept he wept too, so that his eyelids were sealed shut with tears. He did not move when his throat grew dry or when his stomach panged with emptiness, or even when the tears stopped because there was no more water left in his body. 

He did not move for weeks, waiting for death to take him, until finally he closed his eyes and they didn't open again.

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Phil remembered feeling like he was dreaming, though his mind and body were completely awake. A palpable darkness made up the entirety of his surroundings, but it had a flexible, illusion-like quality, as if it might shift or fall apart at any moment. 

He found that he was no longer hungry or thirsty, and he wondered if that meant he was dead.

By his side a woman appeared, sliding gracefully into view like a pool of water. She wore a kind of silky fabric the same color as the abyss around them that accentuated her many curves. Her face was round and pale as snow, framed by black locks that encircled her ears and cascaded down her back. She was tall, much taller than Phil, nearly double his height, which should have made her cold, distant gaze all the more terrifying; but Phil was too numb to feel much of anything. He met her regal glare with a wan smile.

Then something changed in her expression, a small flash of interest in the man before her who did not cower in her presence. 

She spoke, but not with her mouth, keeping her pomegranate-colored lips in a prim line as words coalesced from thin air like a giant inhale and were exhaled into a sentence that vibrated with prestige and power.

She questioned who he was, and Phil answered with as much truth as he could, because he didn't quite know anymore. 

She asked how he had come to be here, and he told her about Hickory and how he was now an utterly broken man.