Chapter Text
In the Wild Place, the spirit realms, all is spirit great and small. It is eat or be eaten, being alive in ferocious joy. The minute green spirits of root, shoot, twig and leaf can seem slow or even weak, compared to their brethren, and surely they are often consumed by others, but their creep never stops and their slow advance never tarries. They are many. They will be more still, reaching for light and ground, ever steady.
The story of Orima, as many great stories, starts simply: the Green reached forward, as it always did. On her first day, shapeless but awoken, she reached back.
Spirits of shoots and stems and leaves and twigs and branches and trunks and roots rustled, pleased. They felt themselves taken up by a larger form, but not absorbed this time. They made and then covered her body as cloth and skin, became ichor and bone, and then limbs, eyes, and ears. A work of weeks, and months, and years. They did it all in delight. Sister, sang the splitting bark, will you watch over us? A tender seed, too shy yet to burst, joined: Will you bite and tear and rip those who bite and tear and rip us, and did so to our forebears, and will do so to our descendants?
Orima let sap fill her veins and chlorophyll colour her cheeks. Her long limbs lignified as she tensed, becoming wooden. Every pore on every leaf drew breath. Her tones, hissing and crackling, harmonised with the low drones that surrounded her.
Child. Sibling mine, barely younger than I am, you ask me for strength.
I promise this: you all have given me all that is mine, and so what is mine is yours. You have taught me your ways, and so it is your ways I will use to torment those who would torment you. All your ways at once. I swear by thorn, venom, and poison; by flesh-rending flower and rock-breaking root. I will sting who would pluck you, I will trip who would cut you down, I will rip you from the belly of those who would devour you. I will be swift and unyielding. You are dear to me. Let those who would harm what I hold dear feel the wrath of the Green united. So I swear it, so it shall be.
The song swelled. Smells of resin, dark earth, new growth and dewy moss sealed the oath.
It is hardly fair to have your first words be the ones that bind you. It is unwise to swear for eternity when only a part of the world is known to you. Still, what was done was done. Orima knew no kind touch that wasn’t that of a sibling; she was only ever called to strangers biting, cutting, lashing, grazing, crushing and burning those Green spirits who gave her all she had, and so she had only anger and violence for all who were not Green. She never received anything else back.
She was also so much faster than her brethren that their songs soon became dissonant; shortly hers and theirs meant little to each other at all. She had only their first harmony to drive her.
Orima was young, wild, and warier every day. Plagued with nameless loneliness, she stalked a seemingly edgeless Green, which spread out further than ever now that many spirits chose to feed and roam where the Green was not united and could not call Orima to their aid. She still encountered Ungreen spirits, and still punished every one for entering her protected domain and feasting on it. Though she had no knowledge of it, she was a great spirit, and so her doings rarely faced consequence. Great spirits she met fared no better fates than lesser ones – a swift rebuke followed by a hasty retreat – and this could have led to retribution, were it not that these run-ins with great spirits were few and far between.
One day saw her called to find the Great Bear in a Green clearing, gorging himself on berries. Swift fury overtook Orima; she hatched the juicy seeds in his gut like so many eggs. The seedlings crawled their way up his throat. He roared, and they went flying from his maw, lacerating his insides, taking deep root as soon they landed. They sprouted bloodberries soon after.
You are not a spirit of hunger. You have no need of these berries, and had you a need I would still keep you from them. You are a glutton. Leave this place, and leave the children alone.
Vines threatened to wrap themselves around the Great Bear’s huge paws. He tilted his massive head at Orima: But I devour my own. Why should I leave these alone? I long only for rest and satiation. Spirits fuelling me will know only peace and satisfaction. It is the way of things.
BE. GONE.
The vines tightened, thorns sank past fur into his flesh, and irritant poisonous saps leeched their way into the wounds. The Great Bear bit himself free and licked his hurts for many days, but revenge would bring no satiation. If a solution had to be found, he would rather it not involve him. From that day on, he listened for Orima’s hisses on the wind, for the calls of the Green, and sniffed out the smell of new growth splitting in haste. When he caught it, he changed course.
He told of his encounter in the great halls that he frequented during the feasts held by other great spirits. Few listened at first, but the story took root, as stories do. It got added to, with echoes of other spirits’ encounters with Orima and lesser spirits’ complaints of shrinking territories and growing hunger. The united Green became a worry, more and more concerning, until those who keep balance in the Wild Place made their tallies and saw that the Green’s weight had become too great, while other spirits were diminished in hunger for fear of feeding themselves. Conflicts between spirits living too close together curdled and multiplied.
Something had to be done, it was decided. But the Wild Place is not suited to war; the chaos there cannot be made to mix with the discipline war requires. Trickery settles what is owed.
This is how the story goes: a hero is sent to beat the dragon terrorising the land. The dragon takes him for yet another fighter he can best in combat, but no, this one only wants to talk. Because the dragon is honourable, he does not roast the hero on the spot. Because the dragon underestimates him, the dragon is unguarded. That is its downfall. After a short and often meaningless talk, the hero feigns to leave scared, and as the dragon sleeps he either kills it or steals the treasure that will make it lose its power or its mind.
Orima is not a dragon.
But Naram is not a hero either.