Sawtooth Spire i’m looking down the barrel of a string-bean

@Mahler? whenever you have time <3

take one step past the cloudberry bushes, mother had turned to say to her children (but most pointedly at her audacious girlchild) punctuated by a biblical-adjacent threat: and i’ll have you trapped in the den with a wasp nest and roll a rock on front of it. she then departed to find food or whatever.

she’d either really meant it and had a corrupt sense of justice or hadn’t meant it at all and had a corrupt sense of humor. either way, corrupt. up to the hilt. 

phaedra huffed a bored sigh. she didn’t even know what cloudberries looked like. her eyes stravaged along the treeline, looking for shrubbery that grew the clouds and their apparent fruits. failing that, she then gazed up at the sky and squinted suspiciously at the buttermilk clouds. if the clouds had berries, why didn’t they come down with the rain? is that why things flew up there, to eat the sky fruits? most things adults said to her didn’t make a lot of sense, but telling her not to go past something without explaining what that something was really vexed her and it would take a while to pick at that burr on her mind. 

she scoured the ground and spied the white caps of mushrooms, turning to see them all encircling her in a fairy ring. these sort of looked like clouds, she supposed, but they weren’t really … on bushes ... and where was the fruit? phaedra glanced round for thade, but saw no sight of him, and gleaned from his absence that he must have turned in for the afternoon. 

an even more dramatic sigh passed her lips and she slumped into the grass. surrounded by toadstools, half-lidded gaze landed on a frog as it stared at her from its roost on a nearby rock. they had a staring match for a few moments, until, to her disgust and horror, its throat intumesced and a croak followed.

she screamed.