-Two-
OLEANDER UNDERGROUND

Oleander had spent the better part of the fifteen years since him and his brother’s escape from the Kingdom in his mother’s bedroom. He was there now, flipping through the pages of a picture book whose cover dwarfed his little hands. He sat on the edge of her bed while she combed his hair from where she lay, propped up with pillows. His silky straight locks did not need the combing. Even with the issue of dwindling staff, the well-kept prince had plenty of servants who would insist upon grooming him before the bedridden queen had to. At twelve years of age, he was also quite capable of taking care of it himself. But it was something for the two of them to do as mother and son, something she was able enough for, something they both enjoyed.

“Oh Oleander, blessed with such lovely hair.” She said. She said it often. It must have made an impact, when she told him the first time when all this had happened for the first time. “I wish I could steal it for myself!” She buried her fingers in the dark strands and tickled his neck, one of her playful attacks.

He squealed and flung his book to the floor, laughing and grab at her wrists. “No Mama! Its mine!”
In a rare burst of energy, she scooped him into her embrace, squeezing him against her chest. Their long hairs mingled without distinction. “It’s not fair, you have to share some of all that cuteness with your poor withered mother.”

He smiled at her playfulness, but he did not entirely understand the jest. Her own hair was the exact same as his. His four brothers had all gotten the oak brown scruff of their father. Only he, her special second son, had inherited her hair like flowing ink. Every servant he’d ever known had commented on their resemblance. It was a point of pride for him. He was not yet old enough to notice how rapidly the midnight shine of her locks had given way to lusterless streaks of gray, nor fully understand their significance.

He squirmed until he felt her arms relax around him. A great sigh escaped her and she sank deeper into the mattress, overexerted. The pair of them contented to lay there in a moment of stillness. He nuzzled into her neck, inhaling the warm clove and yarrow scent ever-clinging to her skin.

No detail of his mother ever faded or blurred, even as the room around her lost its sharpness. The indecisive curtains appeared a different shade of red every time he looked at them and the medicine bottles on the side table existed only when he gave them concentration. The splayed pages of his book on the floor should have shown drawings of the fantastic and fearsome beasts of the Evergrowth, like the cover advertised, but instead every single page bore only hazy butterflies of iridescent blue. The more he questioned the room the more it came apart at the seams like a worn artefact, but his mother remained always crisp. The sensation of her preserved perfectly in mimetic amber.

“You have paint on your hands again.” The queen said, and the memory adjusted itself as stains of dried paint appeared on Oleanders fingertips. “What have you been making for me this time?”

Oleander pulled his arms into his tunic to hide the evidence he’d forgotten to wash off. “It’s a surprise!” It was always a surprise, and the surprise was always a painting, or sometimes a paper cut-out when he was feeling artistically explorative. Still, every time he presented his mother with a new gift she would throw her hands up and gasp and praise him like she was discovering his talents for the first time.

Small and pressed against his mother’s breast, nested in the luxury of fine sheets and pillows and the haze of clove scent, Oleander could not be harmed by anything that lay beyond the queen’s chamber. No turmoil, not the steady disintegration of the kingdom beyond the walls of the fortress nor of the royal family within it, could reach him here. In this crystalized memory of his mother’s room a door was notably absent.

There he would have remained forever, if unmoved. Unfortunately, even the poison of a God wanes in potency. When he next looked to his mother’s face, her crisp features were replaced by a flat visage of stoney blue gray. The shock of the sight sent him reeling out of her arms and tumbling onto the floor. The queen did not react, for she was already fading. The dark stone spread out from her face, dissolving the shapes of her. The room followed, until the gray confronted him as rows of stalactites like a jagged-toothed grin. The warm air turned cool and damp. When the dream had fully vanished, the fright of child Oleander gave way to the somber realization of adult Oleander. He was awake again.

Control of his limbs would not come for a few minutes, so only his eyes moved to survey his surroundings. Same as always, he was in a bed. Not his mother’s, a different mattress with a wooden frame and canopy carved with ornate designs of inhuman origin. The bed sat outside any building, out in the wild on a narrow outcropping of stone off the inner side of a ravine. The ravine cut deep and narrow into the earth and the bed hid deep within it, so that looking up Oleander saw the thin slit of its mouth as only a distant crack of dim gray. Between the surface and him menaced a thousand clusters of stalactites hanging from the overhangs of the craggy uneven ravine sides. The forest floor above admitted little light and even less trickled this far into the ravine. It might not have been bright enough to see at all if it were not for the swarms of butterflies that rested on the stalactites nearby. Their flashy wings glowed with cerulean light, painting the stone with a somber hue. He could not see below the bed, but he knew that over the edge of the ledge on which it sat the ravine descended deeper still into darkness. None of this was any different from the previous times he’d awoken.

He was not alone here. A figure sat next to him, its chair and side table as out of place in the underground world as Oleander’s bed. The figure appeared cloaked at first glance, wrapped in a long richly patterned shawl perhaps. But it wasn’t any article of clothing, Oleander had only made that mistake the first few times he’d woken up to its watchful presence. What enshrouding its body were actually its wings. Giant moth wings covered in millions of tiny scales forming patterns of deep purple, indigo, rose, cream and gold. Oleander’s caretaker was one of the bug-people of Gol. It stared with huge compound eyes at their now stirring ward and held up a five fingered hand. It did not speak. It never had before and Oleander did not think it was capable, having only a coiled proboscis instead of a mouth. Oleander had always found the bizarre fusion of arthropod and human in the creatures of Gol disturbing, ever since he’d first seen illustrations of the strange beings in the kingdom and only more so now that one greeted him every time he woke.

On the side table lay the tools for Oleander’s bodily care. A bowl of soapy water and several washcloths, a razor, scissors, vials of unknown medicine, a long flexible tube made of strange translucent material. He did not let his mind linger on their uses, nor the thought of the insect creature applying them to his unconscious body.

As his twitches gradually turned to shifting limbs, the moth thrust out its palms to still him. Oleander ignored it. As soon as full sensation returned to his body, he sat up. A new bulk in his middle made the motion awkward. The atrophied muscles of his arm trembled as he touched the taut striated flesh of his belly. He groaned. If he was going to wake at all, he preferred it be early term. Judging from the size of his pregnancy, he was at most a moon or two from delivery.

The moth danced anxiously at the edge of the bed as he continued to rouse. Clearly it wanted him to lie still, but it dared not try to physically restrain him. Its thin hard limbs like blackened branches probably did not contain much strength. Even so, it almost certainly could have overpowered Oleander, whose body had been weak even before years of inactive slumber. It did not touch him because it was only a lowly servant and he was a most precious prize. Even a slight bruise would not be tolerated by its master. Oleander had learned this by now, and so he ignored the frantic gesticulations of the moth and slipped his legs over the side of the mattress.

The soles of his feet met the cool stone of the ravine and the sensation helped to further clear the venom haze from the back of his skull. A searing migraine took its place, one of the effects of all the dormant systems of his body waking to assault him with painful protestations. He stood too suddenly and was immediately overwhelmed with the need to vomit. He could barely control the collapse to his hands and knees, crawl to the ledge, and hurl the contents of his stomach into the chasm below. This really panicked the moth, who anxiously turned its unblinking eyes and mouthless face back and forth between Oleander and the depths of the ravine.

“Calm down. I’m sure he’s on his way.” Oleander croaked. Somehow, every time he woke, Thanatos did not take long to appear.

Sure enough, the chasm below soon echoed with the sound like a thousand crackling dead leaves that heralded the husk god’s arrival. The butterflies excited, flapping their wings in a dazzling flurry of blue flashes. Oleander watched the dark ravine wondering what body Thanatos would wear this time. From the depths the head of an enormous centipede emerged, followed by the long sharp-legged body snaking through the air towards their ledge. It was colored a dull translucent amber. Like all the bodies Thanatos borrowed, it was hollow, a discarded molt. The dried shell crackled as it moved, its ragged body riddled with splits and missing pieces. The bug that had produced this molt had been monstrously large. Oleander’s curled up body could have easily fit inside just the head that arched over the ledge and set its hollow shell lenses upon him. Besides its animation, the dim blue glow behind those eyes was the only sign that the molt was inhabited by the spirit of a fallen god.

“You should not get out of bed so quickly, Oleander. Especially not so close to delivery.” Thanatos’s voice was as much without body as the rest of him. It did not seem to be an actual sound at all. It did not issue from any particular point in space, it did not have vibration, it always carried clearly into the heads of its recipients, above any and all earthly noise. “I worry you’re developing a resistance. I’ll increase the dose. Let’s get you back to dreaming.” On cue, a few dozen butterflies dropped from their stalactite perches and descended towards Oleander. As they fluttered their wings shed tiny scales, producing a small cloud of glittering blue dust: Thanatos’s poison.

“Wait. I’ve only just woken. Give me a moment.” The displeasure of the waking world contrasted starkly with the comfort of sleep, but it was still the truer world. Oleander would return to sleep after he’d received his usual updates. “How long have I been asleep? How many births have passed now?”

“Not this time. I have urgent matters to attend to. Get back into bed, please.”

The butterflies surrounded him now. He covered his mouth and nose with his hand, but he knew it would not keep out their dust. Thanatos was already sinking away.

“Wait! Any news of my brothers?”

“No” came Thanatos’s answer, but the hesitant pause that preceded it hinted otherwise.

“What have you heard? What are the urgent matters? Tell me, Thanatos.” The venom’s haze was returning quickly and Thanatos continued his descent. Oleander shouted after him, “You said I would not be your prisoner!” That stopped him. The butterflies cleared and Thanatos rose back to the bed.

“Glorio, join the others.” He said. The moth caretaker did not hesitate to scurry away along the narrow ledge that ran the length of the ravine.

“My brothers. Have they been seen? Is that what’s so urgent?” Oleander asked. He’d learned to read his keeper well over the course of his years in the ravine.

“No.”

“Is that the truth?”

“There are rumors, nothing more. Nothing my Acolytes have seen with their own eyes.”

“That’s something! You promised you would tell me. I don’t want to be kept in the dark.”

Thanatos had no lungs to draw breath with, but he communicated a pointed sigh exactly as well as a human. “What use do you have for information? It will only trouble you.”

“Who was seen? Aster? Cedar? Fern? All of them? Are they alright?”

“We don’t know. It's only rumors. Rest assured we will investigate them.”

“And if you find them, you’ll tell me? You’ll wake me, right?”

“Oleander, you’re going to upset yourself.”

“I need to know they are alright!”

Thanatos’s voice projected forcefully into his head. “You came to me, Oleander. You are no prisoner, you asked for this. Maybe your guilt has gotten the better of you over the years, but it does you no good to pester me with questions you forfeited the answers to when you abandoned them!”

It was not the first time they’d had this bout, but it was the first time Thanatos had chosen to employ that particular word, abandon. The truth of it cut Oleander deep. The temptation of sleep’s oblivion grew suddenly stronger.

“You bear a cruel fate, little prince,” followed Thanatos’s voice, soft like a whisper now, “The choice you made, to leave them, I don’t blame you for it. I will provide you safety and comfort, but the price of sleep is ignorance. You cannot live in both worlds.”

Oleander now struggled onto his feet. Thanatos bent his long body down and around the frail human, giving him something to lean on and support his wobbly legs. “And if I chose to wake, if I chose this world, would you let me?”

Thanatos could bridge the gap between species, between divinity and mortality, and convey any precise emotion in human terms when he wanted to. When he did not want to, he became the expressionlessness of a bug’s dead husk.

“Of course.” He said, “But Oleander, where would you go? This is a place of death, it’s not fit for anyone to live here… not consciously. And you would not survive a day above ground in the wild, you can hardly walk.” Step by step he guided Oleander back to bed. “I would protect you if I could leave this place, but you know fate has not been kind to me either.”

Oleander crawled back into the sheets, still slightly warm from when he lay in them mere minutes ago. Thanatos usually gave him at least a few hours to talk, exercise his legs, gather his waking thoughts. The urgency with which he nudged his ward back to sleep hinted that perhaps his urgent matters were more than just empty rumors. Thanatos’s acolytes were always chasing rumors… What made this time so urgent? Oleander considered this but knew that the knowledge did not provide any new options for him. Maybe he had not been a prisoner when he’d first come to the ravine. Maybe Thanatos really would let him go if he insisted. But by choosing comfort and dependency, he’d made himself a prisoner all on his own. The longer he dwelt in the waking world, the deeper fear and guilt and helplessness engulfed him. It was why, time after time, he chose to sleep.

“I hate to see you suffer.” Thanatos said, his voice like a lullaby. “I want as much as you to see your brothers safe. Leave the task to me. There will come a time when things are different. A time of reunion, a time without death. With your help, I am bringing about a new world. Until then, dream, little prince.”

Oleander settled comfortably into the dent in the mattress his years of slumber had formed. A swarm of butterflies circled over him, dusting him with their potent poison. Under the sheets out of sight, his hand crept to the edge of the mattress. His fingertips searched the stitching there. It was only an impulse to know if it was still there, the just-in-case measure he’d hidden years ago. Of course it likely wouldn’t be. Thanatos might have found it while he slept or replaced the mattress. Maybe he misremembered the spot where he’d put it. His fingertips found only firm stitching and his eyelids were growing irresistibly heavy.

Thanatos now receded, his borrowed body fading away until all that remained visible in the dark bowels of the ravine was the blue glow behind the molt’s eyes. Then those disappeared too and Oleander was sure sleep was inevitable. How long would it be until he next awoke?

Then, as the butterflies lifted and his eyelids settled fully closed, his fingers found the tiny tear in the fabric on the seam of the mattress. Inside lay something small, hard, and smooth. The only card he had to play was still there.

If he waited any longer, sleep would overtake him and another few months would slip by in dream. Maybe even longer. He would pay for comfort in time, as he had with half his life so far. Maybe it was a nagging premonition that compelled him, or maybe he was always going to break with dream and it had only taken him years to build up the courage. With heavy poison-weighted fingers he withdrew a small vial from the mattress, uncorked it, and dumped its contents into his mouth. Oleander chose, finally, to wake.