Blood and Roses🔥

Chapter 7: Language of Thorns

The journal's remaining pages were not blank after all.

Liora discovered this by accident. She had carried the leather-bound book downstairs, intending to read it cover to cover while the morning sun was still strong enough to illuminate the cabin's dim interior. But the journal resisted her. The pages she had already read, the entries from June through September of 1978, lay flat and obedient beneath her fingers. Everything after that final entry, the one where Margot had written God forgive me for what I am taking with me, appeared empty at first glance. Blank. Unmarked. A book half-finished, abandoned by a woman who had fled in the middle of her own story.

Liora almost closed it. Almost set it aside and moved on to the letters bundled in twine, which seemed more promising. But something made her pause. A faint impression on the page, visible only when the light struck it at an angle. Indentations. The ghost of handwriting pressed into the paper by a pen that had run dry, or by a woman who had wanted to write without leaving evidence.

She carried the journal to the window and tilted it toward the pale morning light. The impressions sharpened. Words emerged from the blankness like bones rising from soil. Margot had written more. She had simply written it in secret, pressing so lightly that the ink itself had failed, leaving behind only the shape of her thoughts.

Liora fetched a pencil from her bag and did what she had seen done in old detective films. She shaded the page gently with the side of the lead, letting the graphite catch on the raised impressions. The words surfaced slowly, reluctantly, as if they did not wish to be read.

October 2nd, 1978

I did not leave. I told myself I would. I packed the trunk. I bundled the letters. I held my daughter in my arms and walked to the car and put the key in the ignition. But my hands would not turn. Something held me. Something that felt like roots growing through my bones, anchoring me to this ground. He was not letting me go.

I had already bled on the roses. I had done it weeks before, in a moment of foolishness I have not written down until now. A thorn, a drop of blood, a silence in the forest. I told myself it meant nothing. I was lying. I have been lying to myself since the day I arrived at Ashwood Hollow.

He has been speaking to me ever since.

Liora's hand trembled, smudging the graphite. She steadied herself and kept shading.

October 5th, 1978

He told me his name tonight. I will not write it here. Names have power, and I am afraid of what I might summon if I commit his to paper. But I heard it, spoken in a voice that was not a voice, in a language that was not language. It felt like the first word ever spoken in the history of the world. It felt like the last word I would ever hear.

He says I am the seventh Thornwood woman to bleed on his grave. The others came before, across the centuries, but none of them stayed long enough to listen. They ran. They all ran. He says I am the first who did not run. He says that makes me the one he has been waiting for.

I asked him what he wanted. Freedom, he said. Or death. He is no longer certain which is which.

I asked him why he was buried. He did not answer. The roses wilted. I did not sleep.

The impressions grew fainter toward the bottom of the page. Liora shaded harder, her pencil strokes becoming frantic.

October 10th, 1978

I am afraid. Not of him. Of myself. Of the way my heart quickens when the roses bloom. Of the way I have started to dream of the garden as it must have been three hundred years ago, before the executions, before the curse. Of the way I have started to dream of him.

He is not what the records say. He is not a monster. He is a man who was buried alive for something he did not choose to be. The pact the townspeople accused him of making was not a choice. It was a sentence. He was born different. Born with something in his blood that the Puritans could not understand and would not tolerate. They called it witchcraft. He called it inheritance.

I am beginning to wonder if the Thornwood blood carries something similar. Something that skips generations. Something that is waking up in me.

The entry ended mid-sentence, trailing off into a smear of graphite that might have been a word or might have been nothing at all.

Liora turned the page and shaded again.

October 14th, 1978

I have made a decision. I will not run. I will stay and learn what he has to teach me. The roses are not a warning. They are a bridge. Every bloom is a word in a language I am only beginning to understand. He has been alone for three hundred years. He has been buried in silence and darkness, unable to speak, unable to die, unable to do anything but wait for someone with Thornwood blood to hear him.

I hear him. God help me, I hear him.

And I am not sure I want him to stop speaking.

The next several pages were too faint to recover. The impressions were there, but they had been pressed so lightly that even the graphite could not tease them out. Liora skipped ahead, shading page after page, until she found one final entry near the back of the journal.

October 30th, 1978

Tomorrow is the anniversary of his execution. He says the veil between his prison and the world is thinnest on that night. He says he can almost touch me then. Almost reach through the soil and the thorns and the centuries. I should be terrified. Instead, I am counting the hours.

He told me something else tonight. Something I cannot write down, even here, even in secret. But I will say this. The curse is not what I thought it was. He is not trapped beneath the earth because the townspeople buried him. He is trapped because something else put him there. Something older than Thornwood. Something older than the Puritans. Something that used the executions as a cover for its own purpose.

The roses are not his. They belong to the thing that imprisoned him. They bloom when he stirs because they are the bars of his cage, and they are warning the world that he is trying to break free.

He is not the danger.

The roses are the danger.

And they have been blooming for three hundred years, waiting for the right Thornwood woman to feed them.

The journal slipped from Liora's fingers and hit the floor with a dull thump.

She sat motionless in the cold cabin, the pencil still clutched in her hand, her mind reeling. The roses were not his. The roses were a cage. The roses were a warning system. The roses were feeding on something, and they had been waiting for her.

Waiting for a Thornwood woman to bleed.

She thought of the thorn slicing her thumb. The three drops of blood falling onto the frozen soil. The forest going silent. The pulse waking beneath the earth.

She had not freed Malrik. She had announced herself. To the roses. To the forest. To whatever ancient thing had buried him and was now, after three centuries, turning its attention toward the newest Thornwood woman to walk this ground.

Outside, the wind shifted.

Liora heard it. A new sound beneath the familiar moan of the pines. A rustling. Soft at first, then louder. The sound of petals unfolding. The sound of thorns scraping against bark. The sound of something growing, rapidly, relentlessly, in the frozen November soil.

She ran to the window.

The meadow was red.

Dozens of roses had bloomed overnight. Not scattered. Not random. They formed a pattern. A circle. Concentric rings spreading outward from the collapsed garden wall, layer upon layer of crimson blossoms, each one facing inward. Each one facing the grave.

And at the center of the circle, where the unmarked grave lay hidden beneath the frost, the ground was moving.

Not cracking. Not collapsing. Moving. Rising and falling in a slow, rhythmic pattern, like a chest drawing breath.

Malrik was waking.

And the roses were calling to her, their petals turned toward the cabin, their scent flooding through the cracked window frame. Copper and salt. Thunder and earth. A smell that was not a smell but a summons.

Liora pressed her palm against the cold glass. Her thumb, the one that had bled, began to throb again.

Not with pain.

With recognition.

Somewhere deep beneath the soil, something felt her touch. The pulse quickened. The roses leaned closer. And Liora Thornwood, seventh daughter of a cursed bloodline, understood with terrible clarity that her grandmother had been right about one thing.

The roses were the danger.

But Margot had been wrong about everything else. She had thought running would save her. She had thought distance would break the bond. She had thought she could protect her daughter, and her daughter's daughter, by never speaking of Ashwood Hollow again.

Yet here Liora stood. Bleeding. Listening. Belonging to a place she had never seen before two weeks ago.

The roses did not need to chase their prey.

They only needed to wait.