Arbor was dying. The yellow of his petals had begun to fade, turning from a blaze that mirrored the sun to a burnished ochre. His seeds had grown full, dark and brown like pox marks on his face. He could not leave his plot. He would not leave his plot. His roots ran deep into the earth—he made sure of this. Arbor would cling to the solid earth, cling to the little vibrancy he had left. He would stand firm, blocking any way to simply stand up and walk away from his fate. To try, to leave, would be to give in. Something he would never let himself do. He abhorred the very notion. To become one of those wandering dryads whose plant had returned to the soil as the other flowers that once grew next to him. 

Just as his siblings, his patch, had. They had been ripped from the soil just as they had begun to sprout and grow. He barely remembered that time. Yet through the blur he still remembered what happened after they passed. Those dryads, barely born, lost to wander. He saw the color drain from them as they died, and began to wander. All taken by passing birds or drowned in torrential waters. All he had was half flashes at best, little smatterings of memories to hold of them, but he held them all the same. Knowing nothing about them, he still held them all in his heart as they had gone. He was not even there to see them in their grief, all of them passing on the moment they were gone. Perhaps he should be grateful they did not wander for long, but then again he was certain he would as he had lived for so long. They were newborn, barely capable of holding on once they died. 

He was not. He was the last sunflower of the patch and he had grown tall and splendid. The last survivor of the patch. So he had to sit there, writhing against time, never letting go of the earth. There was so much more to do, so much more to see. He was not ready for the grey filter of death to coat his vision and the beauty of the world to be stripped away from him. So he would rage against it. He would strain to turn his face up to the light that had always helped him to grow. He would stand firm, witnessing his own demise as time ate away at him. As it sapped the color from his petals and splotched his stem with dark markings. Leaving him with nothing but his dead plant and his own lost soul. 

For what was a dryad without its plant. A dryad was its plant, in a manner of speaking. Much as a human’s body houses its soul, a dryad’s plant houses its being. One without the other is incomplete, a mar on the world. Now Arbor’s body weakened as time marched on. So little time remained. He had lived to see almost one hundred and twenty-five days. Yet it all seemed so small. He had not even fully developed until a couple months in. So much time, over half his life, left in a state where he could not fully appreciate the world, seeing it only as a child could. That brief window, when he was fully himself, was so small. Still it seemed to stretch on, for in that time he could take the world and see it truly, know it intimately. Those were the times he remembered. That time, so short, was soon to be gone. As death approached it seemed to shrink smaller and smaller. Until what seemed like a life that would go on forever was eclipsed by true eternity. He knew once his seeds started falling from his face he would be gone. As he approached his end the voices of other dryads coursed through his mind. Consolations that have been told so many times that they had become tired. All things he had heard before, now replaying in his mind as the end crept close.

 “You should feel lucky to have lived a full life.” The oak would intone in its deep bass voice. “Many are not so fortunate.”

“Are you not excited to see the patch your seeds will grow,” the willow would whisper. “I would hope you would be proud of the small flowers that will bloom from your death.” 

“Cheer up,” the daylily would say, grinning brightly as they always did. “We’re flowers, we exist to be beautiful for a second. We’re not meant to live through ages, it’s just our nature.” 

The oak was ancient—for it, everything was ephemeral in its crawling vision of time. The willow was soft, it did not see past the wind that flowed through its leafy tresses. The daylily was a mere child, it experienced life in only the briefest of flashes. Arbor was a proud sunflower, the mirror of the sun. Whose stalk grew tall as it reached up to caress the sky. Though his life was shorter than many, he lived not in the dappled shade or the choked underbrush, but under the bright blue sky.  It was warm, inviting, and seemed to be made only for him. The sun seemed to shine only for his petals to follow. So he was proud, standing so tall and gazing up. Arbor could see the world. See it not as an oak who lived for so long it had become boring. See it not as a willow would, through a veil of swaying leaves that left them only seeing flashes. See it not as a daylily, who barely had an idea of what the world was, their lives were so short. He saw it for all the beauty it held, soaked it in for as long as a flower could. Bathed in its vibrant color and bright sun. 

Arbor loved this world. He loved the daylit sky, shining blue and dappled gray. No, Arbor was not ready to die. Arbor was not ready for his gaze to be shackled to the dark earth and restricted to simple blacks and whites. The blue sky, the vibrant yellow, the bright greens, Arbor did not want to give them up. He was too beautiful, the world was too beautiful, to be lost so soon. He was not ready to wander the world, lost without his flower. To be trapped without color, be sapped of his own, was the worst torture. So he stood against it. He would stand against time, against death, against the loss of this world. Yet, his leaves had started to curl and lose their luster. His face was heavy, so, so, heavy filled with the seeds that had grown large on his face. He was not ready. He would drive his roots deeper still, pushing against the earth that fed him. Further down, further down. He would let his vision grow blurry as the seeds grew fat and ready to fall, but he would suck his breath in and keep them firm to his face. He would keep his stalk straight, and his back unbowed. He would not die, he would not die, he would not …

A little more than two months later. 

Arbor had wandered for what felt like ages. This was true eternity, he realized, and it would be longer than anything he had been through. His once verdant skin had wilted and his once blooming face was gone. The petals that once framed his face falling to the earth and leaving his visage bare. A wandering dryad. A soul lost without a body to give it purpose. The sun, which he once mirrored and followed in awe, was nothing more than a searing ball of white in the sky. Painful to look at as he mourned. Unable to find rest, as wandering was no rest. The dryads who he passed by in his aimless travels tried to comfort him. They tried to sympathize with his pain, just as he knew they would. They would tell him how it would be better once he moved on and found his peace. They did not know what it meant to wander. They only knew what every dryad knew. The little glimpses they saw throughout their lifetime. The barest idea that after their plant died all they had to do was move on. They did not know. All they were these platitudes and condolences they did not even know the full meaning of. Their attempts were all a blur. Their words mixing into unintelligible slurry. The words did not matter, for the beauty of the world was ripped away from him. 

How could one find peace in that? What was this besides his torture? What he had spent so long fighting against? He spent so long growing, all for nothing. He was never ready to die, ready to wander, but now where was he? His face bare without the seeds that once choked his vision. He had now been lost for almost as long as he could feel, could understand, the world he inhabited. He could not fathom that he would fade away, that his wandering would end. He could not bring himself to leave this earth, one that he loved for so long. So he wandered, shackled to it in his own form of purgatory. Lost to his aimless travels, directionless without the promise of growth and life that once surrounded his world. Now he wailed against the world. His death, so much louder than his life, surrounded him now promising nothing but agony. So he roamed the earth, his roots lost now. Still pining for them all the same, wishing he could find purchase in the ground beneath him. Still fighting a futile war against his death, even as it had come and gone. Most flowers had faded away at this point, wandering for only a few weeks before they faded away. Yet not Arbor, not yet. He wandered still. Not even noticing how little he traveled. Where could he go that would give him peace? Was there any place like that? 

As he drifted about, raving in his sorrow. Arbor had circled back to his first plot. He had never walked that far from his home to begin, but to him there was no place to call home. So as he walked back to his old patch, he thought he was so far from where he started. He barely knew where he was most of the time. As he stepped, something inside him knew he was stepping on familiar, almost hallowed, ground. He walked, closer, ever closer, to his old home. The crunching of the soft leaves overtaking him as he quieted. Soft leaves he knew, old things that once marked his home. Were there more now? He couldn’t quite tell. Yet this sound, so alien yet so familiar, grounded him. He finally saw where he was, realization striking him with terrifying force. It coursed through his brain, shocking him out of his own lamentations. He was back where it all began, where he once grew from a tiny sprout into a bloom that tasted the sun. Now where new sprouts had shot from the soft soil, clustered together and crisscrossing. 

He stared at the patch of sunflowers, some already in full bloom while others hid away, too shy to face the sun yet. All of them grasping at the edges of development, of adulthood. They looked so much like him, it was strange. Something deep inside Arbor noticed that first, that these flowers looked like he did. He felt an unknown kinship with them. Something deeper than simply being the same sort of flower, something more that he could not fully place. He looked at them, their royal colored blooms reflecting the yellow of the sun.  He could not see that color, but he knew what it would look like. He knew his kind. His memory still held all the color he used to be able to see. This view of the flowers, all black and white, still stunned him into immobility. 

The new dryads did not seem to notice him. They were looking up at the sun, just as he used to. Not all had even bloomed, yet he couldn’t do anything but stare. He was enthralled by them. Watching them as his brain raced to figure out what about them made him simply want to stay there. Finally he put the pieces together, collapsing into the ground as he realized. All these flowers, each budding blossom, had grown from the seeds that had fallen from his face. All he could do was sit down on the soft earth, watching them and before he knew it, tears had started to fall down his face. Not the tears that have plagued him through his wanderings, the thick tears that streamed down his face in choked sobs. These were small tears that were not filled with grief and rage, but calm. Tears that were sad in a way that did not hurt. He sat there for hours, watching his kin. Watching the dryads who grew with their flowers. All born from the seeds that once clogged his vision. The seeds that fell from him when he died. They were here now. He did not know. But how he wished he did. How he wished he saw them earlier. All he could do was sit there, as singular tears rolled down his chin and fell onto the soft earth. As night fell and the sunflowers finished their path that mirrored the path of the sun in the sky, they turned their gaze downward. 

Finally the dryads saw him, waiting there, seated at their feet. They saw the dryad that looked like them if all color was drained from them. Arbor could not help but look down, shame greying his cheeks. They were so beautiful, those that fell from his face. Those new dryads with the soft colors of their youth. He did not know what they thought of him, so he looked down. His anger leaving him as he averted his eyes from them. The oldest dryad, the earliest bloomer, looked him up and down. Her eyes sparkling with recognition. Her leaflike arm reached down to let Arbor see her. 

With soft eyes she simply said, “you’re finally here.” 

Her smile cracked through the face full of seeds and Arbor spoke his first coherent word since he fell to wander. A word that was not meant for us to hear, but that held his sadness, his regret, and his pride. The word that he spoke is too difficult to be captured as it could never be said in that way again. It captured the fear he once felt in his dying days, fear that seemed to fade away as he spoke it. It encapsulated the rage he felt as he wandered, but that didn’t seem to matter now. Most importantly, it expressed his pride, the feeling that now filled his soul as he saw his progeny. Through the whole night they spoke, the dryads living, and the dryad dead. No retelling could ever capture the ways his voice broke and nothing seemed to matter but the dryad he was speaking to. Nothing could capture the way the dryad responded in her kind way, letting Arbor know he was never far from her thoughts. They continued to talk in a way no words would do justice. By daybreak, Arbor had finally faded away. Arbor would no longer wander anymore, not in grief, not in rage, not in any other way. He was no longer rooted in this world, in any sense of the word. Arbor had faded away the way all flowers should, content with what he left behind. The new life only possible by his own passing. All new dryads to live and die and fade away in this beautiful world.

Authors note: Heliotropism is the directional growth of a plant in response to the sun. The most famous plants that undergo this phenomenon are sunflowers, which change the way they face throughout the day. I love sunflowers, and I love fantasy and nature spirits. So when I learned of the theme wither and bloom I had a few ideas. Yet this was the one that stuck with me. I have never feared death, so I like stories where death is not something evil but more kind or apathetic at best. So I liked writing this a lot. I love this theme and the natural themes so I went all in on that side of it. So I decided to explore this theme with something as ephemeral as a flower. Its spirit struggling to hold on to life before succumbing to it. Its spirit being consumed by its own mortality before accepting it for what it is. This is definitely more idea than story right now, but I think I would like someone else’s input to refine it into a submission worthy of this journal. This is long enough so I’ll end it here, but I could go on about my idea and how I think it connects to the theme. I really should let it speak for itself though. 

Edited by Cai Pasco

Artist Statement: Heliotropism is the directional growth of a plant in response to the sun. The most famous plants that undergo this phenomenon are sunflowers, which change the way they face throughout the day. I love sunflowers, and I love fantasy and nature spirits. So when I learned of the theme wither and bloom I had a few ideas. Yet this was the one that stuck with me. I have never feared death, so I like stories where death is not something evil but more kind or apathetic at best. So I liked writing this a lot. I love this theme and the natural themes so I went all in on that side of it. So I decided to explore this theme with something as ephemeral as a flower. Its spirit struggling to hold on to life before succumbing to it. Its spirit being consumed by its own mortality before accepting it for what it is. This is definitely more idea than story right now, but I think I would like someone else’s input to refine it into a submission worthy of this journal. This is long enough so I’ll end it here, but I could go on about my idea and how I think it connects to the theme. I really should let it speak for itself though.