The roots, thicker and more twisted than any serpent, squirmed and curled from the tree, divided the Garden of New Souls into nearly equal parts. Two flowers nestled at the Y where two of the three diverged—one down, to the land of the Half-Dead, and one the wiser still follow to a land of goat’s milk and almost finished walls—and though this in itself was not unusual, crowded as the Garden was with flowers, each of the thousands perfectly different, the tree took notice. And unfortunately for the fresh-blossoming flowers, so did the moth.
It had been been meandering, an all-too-comfortable smirk spread across its minuscule face, when it spied a target. In the few sunbeams who managed to pierce the canopy like elf-shot arrows, flowers glinted and fluttered, glittered like falling butterfly wings, and one grew so close to the root it looked connected. A long stem shot up, bent under unseen breezes but somehow still supporting symmetrical spatters of leaves and a tiny flower, puffed silver and lavender.
The gypsy moth grinned and zoomed in to inspect the fragile thing with every-angle eyes, but when it was only a few inches away, a puff of warm air burst up, sending it tumbling. The air carried with it a new scent, a heady smell more invigorating than wine, more exhilarating than new love, a gift that ghosted over the moth’s wings and surrounded it in a cloud.
Even through faceted, red-tinted eyes, the moth could see the sproutling plant curled around its former target. A nest of oval leaves shimmered—green through one lens, blue through another—below scattered clusters of bright flowerbuds just beginning to open. One shone, at the base of the taller plant, yellow with flecks of red, like the sun had planted it herself.
A careful observer could have heard the moth’s tinny laughter as he swooped, lazily, closer and closer, but even the three gray women were distracted arguing over the fates of newly-made gods. And so the bug flew on, rubbing prickly feet together and landing where the pale roots emerged from the ground to soak up the sunlight and open more yellow flowers. Like seeds, the dark eggs were thrust deep into the rootstalk, too small to be noticed for many lifetimes.
Only the tree would be unsurprised, uncounted years later, long after the flowers had bloomed fully and floated off to other planes, returning time after time to compost and rejoin the world, when those eggs hatched. Slick with evil, the crawling caterpillars slunk down veins and up capillaries, taking sharp turns to fingers and brain, licking and tasting and demolishing what they could.
