Isolde Sleeps

-◇- The prim florist slept. The night of the fire, the healers came hastily to dress her wounds and give a prognosis. She'd sustained a surprising forty-percent third degree burn coverage, canvassing the length of her legs, the right side of her torso, and both hands. Flesh peeled away from her muscles in ribbons and blisters formed in swaths where there had once been clear, ivory flesh. Her boots had burned to her feet and ankles, and none of the flesh on them were salvagable. Her fever was unrelenting, requiring cool water and ice in the intervals between bandage changes. If the sight wasn't terrible enough, the smell was. The healers had left Solomon with a sobering reality: most people with injuries as extensive as hers died of infection or fever. Her survival was unlikely.
That night when they left, Henry did as he was told. The macabre plantling (now grown to over five feet) made an excellent guard. Nobody came, and nobody went. Isolde's fever dreams plagued her, and despite the pain-relief provided by herbalists, she groaned and sighed as she slept. Tears traced her cheeks, though her mourning was otherwise silent and motionless. What she dreamt, only she knew.
At sunrise the following morning, Solomon , Henry and Shade would have woken (if they slept at all) to the same gloomy scene in her bedroom with one relief-- she was still breathing. Although, that in itself might have been a curse. When the healers came to change the bandages, they were accompanied by several of the farmers and neighbors. Among them, even a few citizens from within the city. And all of them had flowers. As stunning as it was, that wasn't all. The garden was already showing signs of life again. New ferns had unfurled overnight, coiling upward toward the sky and then falling open in healthy and full verdant plots. Vines crept along the ground between charred remains of old grass, where new green shoots of grass had begun to poke their heads out. Large flowers bloomed in a colorful array, dotting the foliage with sunny colors. Chrystanthemums of yellow, violet, red and orange burst through the landscaping. Fleshy, fragrant peonies popped up from the black embers of her favorite bushes. The apple and pear trees were flowering as if it were spring, despite their badly burned trunks. Anemones, larkspur, lavender, cosmos, poppies, bachelor's button, and countless other blooms grew as if it were spring and the prior night had never happened. It was shocking to the townspeople as they came bearing flowers to replace the ones the florist had lost, but rumor circulated that it was their kindness that spurred on the flourishing garden in her time of need. By evening, twenty-four hours after the devastation, half the empire had been and delivered cut flowers to the garden gate, which was redolent with color and life on both sides, thanks to their kindness. The florist, they said, shouldn't wake to an empty garden.
As the sun set that evening, small white puffs floated peacefully from the trees, highlighted by beams of golden sunlight as it set between the tall pines in the forest. With closer inspection, these small white puffs appeared to be composed of tiny white feathers. They had tiny, translucent wings that were thinner than tissue which glimmered in opalescent colors when the light hit them just right. They weren't faeries, but small bugs, it would seem. Lore spoke of them as angel-bugs and they were often described as the pets of faeries. While not unheard of, they were rare. By dusk, they'd floated down amongst the new flora and fauna to coat it in a soft white cape.
The second night, Isolde made no sound. Her fever hadn't yet broken, and she breathed, but the stillness was maddenning. She bled almost endlessly in those first twenty-four hours, but the following morning would find her wounds beginning to heal. Still more townspeople showed up with bouquets, though speculation was more likely the culprit after the first day's events.
By the second morning, the garden growing outside had begun to scale the wall that shared her bedroom and the outer bounds of the house. Vines scaled the wall and into the window, reaching toward Isolde's bed. They would grow until they circled her in a halo of green and with that, the garden slowly halted its growth. It had reached her, and now its journey was complete. She laid quietly in a bed of leaves, wounds healing at an unprecedented speed. The nelipot slumered heavily and did not stir. The fever broke, and the tension in her brows finally disappeared.
In less than 48 hours, the city of Immortalis was teeming with word of the florist and her garden. Isolde, it seemed, would live.-◇-