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The Beginning
The Garden was a wild thing. A free thing. It had no name and grew with abandon. It spent millennia in the isolated mountains. Content.
But then, it grew hungry.
It grew sharper, thorns infecting the honeysuckle and lavender and plum trees. Nightshades and berries of intense poison grew in abundance; the blood of the animals that made the mistake of thinking it was safe. It is not safe. It is hungry.
Starving.
Soon the blood and flesh and bones of the few animals dry up, and it feels hungry so consuming it begins to eat itself.
But then…
Something fell into its grasp,more complex and beautiful and more filling than anything it had ever experienced.
And like Eve when she bit the Fruit of Knowledge, it doomed itself.
Blood
Hazelthorn gives, as well as takes. The creatures that reside in their shelter in the wild garden of Hazelthorn demand payment, and it obliges. Rubies red like the blood spilt on its soil; absorbed into its roots and food for the worms that live within it. The price for the blood that nourishes the garden is cheap, one that it can give with ease. However occasionally, it consumes the blood of the creatures in the manner that resides in Hazelthorn. They are so arrogant, stealing the leaves and the roots of it, and it is so hungry–
Byron Lennox-Hall
The boy who grew up at the edges of It is now a man. He leaves offerings to it, only to steal parts of Hazelthorn to hurt. Hazelthorn is the whole garden, wild and all-consuming and uncontrollable. It knows that the boy-that-is-now-a-man cannot stand things he can not hold at its mercy. It hopes for the day it can squeeze its bones while they crack. It hopes he eats the poisonous plants it has created, and yet…
It can not consume him just yet, because it has yet to devour its fill. It takes and takes, and yet it still wants more. It is never satisfied. The Man withholds, he tests, he tries to hold It in the palm of his hands. He wants to tame It, but it can never be tamed.
Like The Sun To A Flower, Like God To A Believer
A boy sleeps in the garden. Cheek bruised purple, eyes red from tears, face covered in soil. The patch where the boy sleeps blooms with flowers that heal the boy's bruises. The boy often trips, feet twisting on its roots, tears falling onto its soil, and It finds it does not mind this. It will always protect him even if he falls, and one day, it will consume him whole. Yet…
The Man traps the boy in the garden. Soil in his mouth, breath stolen by its own soil. It feels a new emotion at this something close to the pain of hunger. It feels so strongly that it feels parts of itself wither at the sensation. It knows that The Man has found a poison to inject into Its soil, something that It doesn’t understand. And then–
The Man sends The Boy away.
And it feels like something that should not have been possible.
An all consuming loneliness.
The Temptation Of Sin
The boy has finally asked for something.
“Please… Give me someone. Someone who loves me more than anyone…”
The boy’s blood seeps into the soil. It feels a hunger so consuming that it knows it will never be satiated. It will give this boy whatever he desires, as long as he stays here and lets himself be consumed by It. It knows somehow that It has been changed, and can not go back to how it used to be, or perhaps this boy had already been changing it? Maybe this boy was a snake in its garden, slowly choking it. The garden cannot survive with these feelings, and yet it cannot survive without them. It is too late for Hazelthorn now.
For the first time, it separates itself.
There is pain, the suffocation of the dirt, the claustrophobia of a human body, and yet the delicious taste of the boy's blood and tendon brings something back to… him.
Yes…
He is Evander, and he loves Laurie best.
He thinks this till The Man splits him in half with a shovel, and then he remembers nothing at all.