A Week of Blossoms (Part 2)

The sound of footfalls drew Beren’s eyes up from his wobbling legs. Grace and Rufus walked quickly over, and Grace looked furious: her eyebrows were drawn close together, lips pressed tight, and her hands were balled to tight fists. She peeled away from Rufus as she got closer, and he allowed it—being spared her ire was enough of a blessing that he accepted it with no questions.

“Are you all idiots?” she cried, making Beren recoil. “Don’t you know how special this place is to my father? And the rest of the town for that matter! Do you know how much money goes to maintaining this place? I bet you don’t, since you’re all poor anyway! Ugh!”

“Grace, we—” Syl began.

“No! Get off the flowers right now! You’ve trampled all over them, and your words won’t fix them. Go! Before—”

“Grace!” Toma snapped. Her mouth slammed shut instantly, stemming the flood of words. He pointed out into the field she and Rufus had just walked across to reach them. “If you’re so mad at us… why’d you take such a curved path?”

“What?” Grace asked, turning. “I came straight… here…”

Where she and Rufus had walked, there was a faint path: a corridor of parted flowers. And, as Toma claimed, they curved around the center of the meadow. And more than just a slight grade attributable to momentum or error; it was a proper, broad arc.

“I don’t know,” Grace snapped back. “But, just, get off the flowers, now!”

Rufus at last sauntered up to them, having relished the peace enough, stomping clumsily through the thick flowers surrounding him. “What’s going on?” He stumbled as he reached them, tripping on a particularly thick cluster of blossoms that Grace had nimbly avoided. Many of them tore free from the ground when he stumbled to regain his footing.

“Get off the flowers!” Grace thundered, voice and hands shaking with rage. Beren complied quickly and with all the composure he could muster. Rufus, Syl, and Toma made it with minimal damage to the rest of the meadow. Grace herself nimbly hopped between miniscule patches of clear ground until making it clear of them.

They all turned back to the torn up and trodden down flowers.

“Now, we’re all gonna work to make this place beautiful, as it was. Got it?” Grace asked.

Out of the corner of his eye, among the trees Beren caught a flash of movement. He jumped, searching for the source, but found nothing.

“Guys? Hello?” Her eyes jumped back and forth between them.

Again, in the trees. Beren got a better look at it this time: brown and black, large. A bear? Or a mountain lion? Beren thought. Or maybe—

A large buck broke free from the trees, bounding across the brush ringing the meadow and into the flowers. It trotted across, making for the other treeline, but… something was off about the way it moved.

As it passed over Grace and Rufus’s curved path, Beren realized: it too was tracing a curved path, just as they had. But it only curled around the place the ethereal flower had been before Toma dispelled it—the center point—

“What…?” Beren asked under his breath.

“Ugh, you guys are the worst!” Grace finally whirled around, searching for what stole their interest.

And there, in the center of the field, just where it was before, was the very same flower—the very same as from Toma’s shared imagination—unwavering in the faint breeze. It thrummed with energy, pushing their bodies away but raking in their minds.

“Toma,” Syl said slowly, “turn it off.”

“I did.”

“Toma!” Beren hissed.

“I did!” Toma waved his hands, smacked his head a couple times, but the flower was still there.

Beren had no idea why it made him feel the way it did. It was a flower, beautiful in objectivity, perhaps even more so than the rest in the field. But… it was as though something meant to be confined to a dream began to encroach on the real world. An idea was inserted into their collective imagination, and now, it had spilled forth into reality.

“I’m going to touch it.” Toma stepped off the raised path and into the waist-height flowers.

Syl grabbed his shirt. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“It’s a flower. Worst that’ll happen is I get a rash or something.” Toma smiled warmly at her.

She rolled her eyes, but returned a smile back, and then lowered herself into the flowers, too.

Beren scrambled down after them. I’d rather go with Toma and Syl than stay with the other two, he thought.

Behind him, he heard Rufus clamber down, followed by a frustrated groan from Grace, and then her also jumping down.

The flower’s pressure against them was more intense the closer they drew to it, and it was magnified now that it had bloomed in the real world. It cast fiercer light than in their imagination, and pushed the flowers around it down.

And now that it was present in reality and they’d approached it, Beren saw it in complete clarity for the first time. Its stem was a dampened green, prickly leaves the same sickly shade jutting off it at regular intervals. At the blossom, the green brightened, before giving way to silvery petals, ringed with bloody red.

The five of them surrounded it in a semi-circle, standing shoulder to shoulder a couple feet away.

“What is it?” Grace asked, leaning in to inspect it closer. Her rage from before had dissipated, replaced by passionate curiosity.

Beren looked to her, and then to his brother. “Are you gonna…” He trailed off, but remained staring at Toma.

Toma nodded. His eyes were fixed on it. He took a deep breath. “Yeah.”

All of them stared at him now.

He reached out his hand.

His fingertip brushed a petal.

The world fell to a heavy silence.

Nothing.

Beren’s eyes flicked back and forth from his brother to the flower. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing, yet…” Toma muttered. “I’m not sure—” The words caught in his throat.

“What?” Beren asked.

He was silent.

“Toma? Hello?” Beren asked again, cocking his head.

“Look!” Syl cried. “Where’d it go?”

The flower was gone.

Toma reached out his hands. “Touch my hand!” he shouted. None of them moved. “Do it! Now!”

Syl reached for him first. Then Grace, scowling all the while, and Rufus. And finally, Beren, too, reached out his hand.

His scar exploded with pain, and he keeled over.

A blast of energy washed over Beren, nearly casting him to the ground as the flower appeared again. Images of the flowers all around the ethereal one were pushed flat to the ground by the immense force, though he could see and feel the originals just as they were before he’d touched Toma’s hand.

“You have each proven yourself capable,” boomed a voice from all around them. It bore no significant qualities of any kind, beyond the sole fact that it was completely indescribable. “Throughout the world,” it continued, “there exist eight flowers in everlasting bloom. You must rescue them.”

Each of them could hardly stand against the force bearing down on them, much less respond.

The voice continued: “Do you accept this task?”

Beren looked to his friends.

“Is this our next objective?” Toma asked.

The voice didn’t answer.

Toma looked at each of them, his eyes slowing to rest as they met with Beren’s. “I… I accept!”

“Me too!” Syl called. Straining against the hurricane of force, she straightened up a bit taller, balling up a fist in indignation.

“What’s going on?” Rufus called.

“Say, ‘I accept!’” replied Toma, brow furrowed.

Rufus nodded slowly, brow furrowing in confusion. “I… accept?”

“Toma!” Grace called, looking at him with tears in her eyes. She was shying away from the flower now, and from the torrent that washed over them all, pushing away their bodies and dragging in their souls—just as before, but tenfold now compared to then.

He simply nodded, and a smile touched his lips.

With a deep breath, she nodded too. “I accept!”

All eyes turned to Beren now. His own eyes wide, he met each pair. They all held the same idea in them: expectation.

“Beren!” Toma said. “It’s not real!”

“I-It feels real!” Beren called back. “I wanna go home, Toma!”

Toma shook his head, smiling. “Everything will go back to normal if you say you accept!” He held out his hand. “Trust me!”

In spite of his instincts, he did trust him. He took Toma’s hand. “I… I accept!”

Just as the words left his lips, the air around them began to swirl, their clothes whipping in the spiraling wind. Petals and chunks of dirt were dragged into the maelstrom, pelting them relentlessly. Beren raised an arm to shield himself out of instinct, and turned his head away.

“Rescue the Blossoms to return here,” boomed the voice, clear even over the roaring gale. “That is your quest.”

Return here? Beren thought. His mind couldn’t properly process the thought beyond that with the wind ripping past him, though. He turned his head to shield it from the onslaught.

A glint caught his eye, in his vision’s periphery.

On the ridge, just beyond the boundary, Beren saw a car. A stopped car. And a figure in front of it.

His mother. Her mouth was open, speaking. Yelling. And though the sound didn’t reach him through the gale, he could see the words she spoke, somehow hearing them anyway. “Beren!” she called. “Toma! Don’t go!”

What?

Before he could consider her meaning, the flower erupted into a wave of glowing red force that sent each of them toppling over as it passed. It continued on, he saw, into the dense trees a few feet—

Trees? he thought, bewildered. The treeline was at least fifty or so feet away, but…

“The flowers!” Grace cried. “What happened to the flowers?”

Each of them stood up in turn.

“What was that…?” Rufus said, rubbing his backside.

“I’m not sure,” Syl muttered. She looked around, her eyes coming to a rest on Toma, keeled over in pain, clutching his head. “Toma!”

She, and then Beren and Grace, ran over to his side. “Toma, what’s up?” she asked. “You okay?”

“Where the hell are we?” Rufus wondered aloud.

That was the first time someone vocalized Beren’s thought thus far, and it seemed the first anyone else had noticed it, judging by their reactions. Syl and Grace each jumped up—Syl into a defensive, boxer-like posture; Grace straight as a pencil.

Beren nodded, looking around. “I noticed that too. Toma?”

Silence fell over them all for a time, waiting for any explanation. Everyone, even Rufus, was too apprehensive to stray far.

Finally, Toma spoke, opening his eyes. “Anwin.”

“Uh, what?” Grace asked, condescension dripping from her tongue. “I-I mean, what did you say, Toma?”

He stood shakily, helped to his feet by Syl. “I… I had a… vision. This place,” he said, gesturing to the environment with one hand and yet holding his head with the other. “This obviously isn’t the flower meadow anymore. This isn’t even our town. Or our country.”

“What are you talking about?” Grace said, not so careful to mask her feelings to him this time.

He nodded. “I think—if my vision was right…” He trailed off for a moment. “I think… we aren’t even on Earth anymore.”