Sunflower - Volume 2: The howling-men - Chapter 1

Seek beauty.

It does not matter what you are; human, sunflower, beast, animal, monster or anything in between those states of being.

It does not matter where you have been and upon which plots of soil your feet have tread.

It does not matter what you have done and what strong feelings, both good and terrible, you have created in the hearts of yourself and others during the journey. The memories of the thing you might once have been are now, in this moment in which we find ourselves, irrelevant. The actions of your past self, whether five years ago, a month ago, a minute ago, are entirely unimportant for the choices you make now, in this second to come.

So, seek beauty.

Whether you are a terrible beast, hungering for the blood and the flesh of a thousand screaming faces. Whether you are a poet, with hands abuzz above a paper like a bee hovering over spring-flowers. Whether you are a man, noble and strong with a sword in hand to fight a conquering evil.

- Seek beauty.

In beauty lies the greatest gifts of this world.

Like myself, for example.

I am a sunflower.

I am a most beautiful entity, worthy of the adoration and the reverence of the hearts of everything that sees me.

- Ah.

Most curious.

I exist.

What a world.

Can someone just… stop existing and then exist again once more?

Apparently.

I look around myself at the landscape in which I sit.

It is familiar. It is…

- Beautiful.

Fires dot the landscape, marring the once verdant grasses and consuming them in a wildly driven hunger. The orchard of bountiful trees is laid to waste, the wood of their strong, healthy boughs is broken and smashed by the forces of many spells and dangers. Broken fields of sunflowers lay out in all directions, being consumed by the blaze.

Shadows and silhouettes move through the smoke, inside of which creatures howl.

The sky, which I recall being blue, is aglow with a glowing orange smog, which obscures the love of the most radiant sun, for which I desperately long.

- After not having existed for a time. I would very much like to see the sun again.

Other things have changed too.

I look around myself at the community that has formed here. A community of houses, strong and beautifully built. A community of bodies, strong and beautifully built. Men, women, children, all have found their way to this place of sanctuary.

It seems that dream was short-lived.

However, I find the sight of this place most beautiful.

Marred and destroyed as it is, covered in fire and corpses and gore, there is a beauty here, present that none are left to witness save for myself and for the person who has returned me to existence, out of a dire need for a way to cope with her anguish.

Things move around in the distance. Shapes. They howl.

- Hello, Burch.

I look down at my best friend, who has birthed me a second time; an indecisive mother. Corpses surround her, bodies of humans and elves to which she claws and screams, as if her feral yells would stop them from drifting away.

Oh, Burch. How I have missed you.

You are still such a silly thing. I am glad.

But those bodies are empty. There is nothing left inside of them except red and meat.

My dearest friend lifts her shaking head and hands and I see that she, like the world, has changed.

Her bones have set. Her skin has taken its shape. Her hair has become well groomed and clean and healthy with a strong, oily shine. Her eyes, mesmerizing, are filled with tears stronger than I have ever seen her carry before and as they drop, falling to the smoldering corpses, I catch the sight of the beauty of the moment.

She has reached maturity.

- My best friend, Burch, the horrible, strange, gremlin creature that she was, has become most beautiful.

At least in my eyes.

My roots spread out deeply through the soil, feeling and touching their way through the ground, so that I may better assess the situation. The mycelium speaks to me and tells me that the world here is good. The soil is good. It is well tended to and loved as is every entity that had tread it with their bare feet.

“I tried,” she says, looking at me. “I really tried,” she explains, lowering her head, her fingers digging into the fabric of a strange creature that she hovers over. It looks like a human, but it is more slender and has sharp ears. Many arrows stick out of its body.

Ah. An elf.

“I really…”

Shadows move around us.

There there, Burch.

We all have to try in life and sometimes, our trying is simply destined to failure. It isn’t personal and it isn’t a personal failing either. It is simply the nature of the beast.

Not all who try are able to succeed.

- What fun would that be, if it were the case?

Something rushes from the darkness, howling.

(Sunflower) uses: [Sunkiss]

SOUL: 16/19

A pulse of magic leaves my body, striking the chest of the entity which has made a charge towards my friend. It barks, flailing as it falls to the ground, clutching its face.

Burch, despite the spell’s wide range and despite herself being unrooted, is unaffected by the magic. It seems that she has become resistant to the effects of natural magic.

The creature howls in agony, its eyes having been burnt by the spell.

I look at it.

It wears dark, heavy clothing. It wears thick, blackened leather pads and armor. It carries a sword. It is a man, a human. A young adult, barely past the cup of his adulthood. He rises to his feet, but Burch still seems to be lost in her strange, delirious grief.

Oh well.

I look at the human, at the howling-man and I, in the beauty of my natural existence, try again.

(Sunflower) uses: [Sunkiss]

SOUL: 13/19

He screams, stumbling forward and falling to the ground.

(Howling-man) has been blinded.

As he falls to the soil, landing amongst the many bodies as he continues to scream and to writhe, I decide to be done with it and have a drink. My first drink of many, many years.

[Bloodmeal]{Passive}

Thirst: Quenched

Minerals: Replenished

+32 EXP

EXP: 349/825

A taste of lingering, weak copper comes to the forefront of my senses, as my roots burrow into him as he lays on the ground, flopping like a worm.

He tries to get back up. However, my roots have entered into his eyes, wrapping around the thin bones of his skull, just between there and his ears, before coming back out again. I hold him down to the ground, face first and I pull.

I pull, until he, suffocated with damp soil, stops flailing.

It is good.

I missed this.

I look around. Many more of their kind fill the shadows and the fire. The creatures are many in number and there is but one Burch and one sunflower. It would seem that the era of the hobgoblin has come to an end; now is the era of the howling-man.

A dozen and then some rush out of the smoke, their bloodied weapons and violent screams held in the air.

Burch hisses and a glow leaves her hands.

(Burch) used: [Growth]

SOUL: 17/62

A magic leaves her fingers, pressing into the blood-nourished soil, pressing into my roots and I find myself becoming larger, larger.

Has a sunflower ever been this large before?

I can not say.

- But likely not.

I rise, higher up than the head of my friend and then higher than the howls of the howling-men.

How fun.

(Sunflower) used: [Heavy Pollen]

A great cloud of pollen escapes my towering form, raining down through the smoke like flakes of gentle snow, amongst the ash of a furious volcano.

 The howls go quiet.

Everyone, except Burch and myself, falls over, either asleep or into a state of some loose, hazy delirium.

My best friend rises to her feet and I watch as she heads over the howling men and, as they sleep, falls down onto them, violently ripping into their necks with her teeth and her bloodied fingers.

I don’t think that she has to do this.

- I just think that she wants to.

I gaze on in curious excitement as she rolls one over sideways and smashes down on his jaw with her boots over and over, making sure not to hit his upper head or his spine. She smashes his lower face, his ankles and his wrists into goo, before leaving him there to head on the next one.

After all, isn’t that what life is all about?

___________________________________________________________

I have shrunk down back to my normal size and Burch adjusts the straps of her rucksack. I wobble, falling back into a nostalgic position and then I look down at my very best friend.

An odd day has passed since the howling-men attacked and she shallowly buried the dead of her ilk. But not the howling-men, she threw them over the cliff and down into the ocean.

- Some were still alive, but were mangled and unable to swim, walk or struggle.

The ocean accepted our gift and the many creatures of it will feast well today.

She stands there, looking over her shoulder, looking towards what little remains of the village, of the place that she had built, of the place that was supposed to be home.

I suppose it wasn’t it after all.

“We’re gonna find it this time,” says Burch. “We have to find it this time.”

She lowers her head and without another word or a glance back towards the things and people that she loved, we walk towards the west, towards the mountain path that we had come down, so many years ago.

We walk towards the beautiful place, where all the suns of every day come to pass now rest, together with the spirits of the cherished who we have lost along the way.

- Paradise.