Consumed in the Depths

If you wanna get good at magic, she said, you’ve gotta do something impossible.

Well, that’s how I got here, buried six feet under in the belly of a giant flower in the lightless bowels of the jungle.

I can feel juices slithering down my neck, prickling like a thousand tiny cactus spines.

It’s eating me.

I scream. Itchy! But no one hears. I’m too far down. My home in the treetops where my brothers play with the terrorwings might as well be on the moon, far past the swirling jewel-toned auroradome of the sky.

I scratch and scratch, my nails dragging across the raw gooey patches until I bleed. Then the juice bites.

I can twist in the putrid juices soaking through my pants and setting my butt on fire, but I don’t. Why should I? I tried to do the impossible, and to no one’s surprise but my own stupid ass, I failed.

I haven’t seen the sun in two days now. The moonsilver tattoos wrapping around my wrists are dead and dull, starving the scarab buried in the flesh on my back. It’s too weak to let me conjure even a candle flame, and somewhere in the hubbub of being eaten, I lost my only knife.

They say it’ll take a thousand years for the flower to eat me. I won’t live long enough to find out if that’s true.

So—itchy!

I close my eyes and try to focus like she taught me. I stop writhing for a moment, too tired to move, try to focus—but it’s there, not at the edges, but gnawing at my brain like the juices gnawing at my skin.

The blazing corelight at my heart slowly burns away the distractions. Its power warms the cold biometal that makes up my left side. I fade from this world. Instead of darkness pressing me, there is light. I lay curled in a cage of acid pink light. Blue and copper kapok trees emerge in my mind as towering columns of twisted blue and copper lines. Feather ferns glow pale white. And above me, a dragonfox: brilliant yellow-white, like the sun.

I settle. This is right. I will die soon, but I will be connected to the world as I do.

Embraced by light as I am, I do not hear the scratching, or the trills, or the squawks. I do not feel the flower tremble as tiny needle-like teeth rip and tear at its flesh.

But suddenly, heat and humidity slaps me like a hot wet towel and I fall into darkness for an eternity.

Crunch. The feather ferns don’t soften my fall. My arm snaps over a kapok root hidden in the darkness.

But then a small dragonfox, lit up from the glands within its throat, jumps on my chest and chirps.

Little dragonfox, I say, why are you here?

It closes its eyes and hums, and the jungle around me glows again, like when I was being eaten by the flower. The dragonfox scurries around my neck, then tugs at my shirt.

Little dragonfox, dryad guide or shifted giant, no one knows. But one thing I remember as I follow the little dragonfox through the jungle: I didn’t master magic today, but I certainly learned a little more that day of someone who has.