Chapter 10: Ashes or Earth

Chapter 10: Ashes or Earth

The world had shrunk to the size of his palm.

Inside it lay the leaf, a vibrant, impossible green. Alex stared at it, his mind a hollow chamber where thoughts echoed and died. The sharp, chemical smell of The Blight rising from the shattered syringe on the floor was the scent of his failure. The quiet, even breathing of his wife beside him was the sound of her surrender. And the leaf, resting on his lifeline, was his own damnation.

“Now you see,” Anya whispered, her voice not triumphant, but filled with a gentle, heartbreaking relief. She reached out, her fingers tracing the air around his hand, not quite daring to touch the leaf. “The fight is over, Alex. You can rest now.”

Rest. The word was a siren’s call. He felt it then, for the first time. The thing she had called a song. It wasn’t a sound he heard with his ears, but a feeling that resonated deep in his bones, in the marrow. A slow, cool, green hum that spread through his veins from the point of infection in his chest. The frantic, buzzing panic that had been his constant companion for weeks began to quiet, soothed by this deep, cellular thrumming. The raw, jagged edges of his grief for Luke began to feel smooth, distant, as if viewed through a thick pane of ancient glass.

It was peace. A terrible, seductive peace.

He looked at Anya, truly looked at her. The wild, fanatical light was gone from her eyes. In its place was a vast, placid lake of calm. She was already gone, he realized. She was just a beautiful shell, her consciousness already sinking into the collective, vegetative soul of The Wood. And she was holding the door open for him.

“We can be a family again,” she murmured, her gaze drifting past him, out the open kitchen door to the moonlit yard. To the tree.

Slowly, as if in a trance, Alex began to walk. Anya fell into step beside him, a silent acolyte guiding him to the altar. He walked past the living room, a museum of their dead life. A framed photo on the mantelpiece caught his eye: the three of them at the beach, squinting in the sun, Luke a gap-toothed whirlwind of joy between them. The memory brought only a faint, dull ache, where once it would have been a gutting stab of pain. The green silence inside him was already working, sanding down the sharp points of his humanity.

He stopped at the threshold of the back door, the place where his home ended and that other world began. The cool night air washed over him, carrying the scent of damp earth and chlorophyll. The Luke-tree stood in the center of the yard, its leaves a dark, rustling canopy under the moonlight. It was no longer a sapling. It was strong, its trunk thick, its branches reaching. It was growing with unnatural speed, fed by grief and rain and… them.

Alex looked at the tree, the monstrous, living tombstone of his son, and felt a profound sense of homecoming. The roots of that tree felt connected to the roots now sprouting in his own chest. To be a part of that. To give up the struggle, the pain, the endless, grinding weight of being human. To just… be. Silent, growing, reaching for the sun. United with his son, with his wife. An entire family grove, whispering together in the wind for eternity.

He closed his eyes, ready to let the green tide pull him under.

And then, a sound.

It wasn't the whispering of the leaves or the humming in his blood. It was a memory of a sound, so vivid and so pure it shattered the unnatural peace.

Laughter.

Not the placid, silent contentment of the tree, but Luke’s real laugh. It was a high-pitched, breathless shriek of pure, unadulterated joy. The memory ambushed him, complete and overwhelming. Summer. The sprinkler hissing back and forth across the sun-scorched grass. Luke, five years old, a skinny, soaked creature, running through the spray, his face a mask of ecstatic delight as the cold water hit him. He’d tripped on the hose and tumbled onto the wet lawn, and when he sat up, covered in grass clippings, he had let out that laugh—a helpless, hiccupping explosion of pure, chaotic, human happiness.

The memory was a lit match thrown into the placid, green stillness of Alex’s soul.

Rage, white-hot and utterly human, roared to life inside him. It burned away the seductive peace, incinerated the unnatural calm. The humming in his blood was no longer a lullaby; it was the drone of an invading parasite. The peace wasn't peace; it was erasure. The Wood wasn’t offering to reunite him with his son. It was offering to let him become the same monster that had consumed his son, to forget the sound of his real laugh and replace it with the mindless rustle of leaves.

His eyes snapped open. They were no longer dull and accepting. They blazed with a new, terrible fire.

He would not be a tree.

He would not trade that one, perfect, sun-drenched memory of his son’s laughter for an eternity of silent, green contentment. Pain was real. Grief was the price of love. This rage, this burning, agonizing refusal to surrender—this was his humanity. And he would hold onto it with broken, bleeding fingers until the very end.

“Alex?” Anya’s voice was laced with confusion. The calm in her eyes flickered, disturbed by the sudden, violent shift in him. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“His laugh,” Alex rasped, the words feeling like shards of glass in his throat. He looked at her, at the placid stranger wearing his wife’s face. “I remember his laugh.”

She didn’t understand. He knew she couldn’t. She had already forgotten it.

His hand, of its own accord, slipped into the pocket of his jeans. His fingers brushed against something hard and familiar. A plastic Zippo lighter, a relic from a smoking habit he’d quit years ago but had never managed to throw away.

He pulled it out. It was cheap, red, and mundane. An artifact of the human world of bad habits and small fires.

He stood on the threshold, caught between two worlds. Behind him was the house, a tomb of memories he would now fight to the death to protect. Before him was the yard, a verdant, alien future he would now burn to the ground. He was infected. The enemy was inside him. But if he was going to be consumed, he wouldn't be silent soil for its roots. He would be a wildfire. He would be a conflagration.

He flicked his thumb. The flint sparked, and a small, defiant flame bloomed in the darkness, dancing in his eyes.

It wasn’t a cure. It was a choice. A different kind of cleansing.

Ashes or Earth.

He looked from the small, brave flame in his hand to the monstrous, whispering tree in his yard, and he made his choice.