This is a serial the first part is HERE

Chapter 13: A Rosy Welcome

What Dr. Bones couldn’t understand is where the bramble familiars were coming from. They’d jump out from vents, from doors, from windows. He’d have quite the crowd following behind him if it wasn’t for the things getting pulped by the great mawroot chasing behind him. Dr. Bones would have honestly admitted at this point that the thing was more a help than a hindrance.

If a bramble familiar was getting too close, Dr. Bones would just swat the thing back into the maw. Thus he continued through the twisting insides of the lab, however as he continued, something deeply unnerving happened.

He was no longer being chased.

Whatever lurked within the heart of the lab had figured out he was heading right towards it. Thus, our doctor relaxed a bit, but he did take the time to look at a piece of a bramble familiar he had cut off. A tiny piece.

It was like a worm, wriggling inside the crystal bottle Dr. Bones had stuffed it in.

–Sorrow, loneliness… this almost eclipses the plant nature. There’s a contradiction to that depressed air though. The sheer vitality and will to propagate itself present in this is horrific. Anything other than itself will blossom a flower and die, so it will remain alone…–

As he murmured, the magic shielding on his body grew brighter in response to the air growing thicker with deadly curse laden pollen. In short order it was so thick he had to use magical sight to see through it. Not long after that it was so thick he could physically feel it through the shielding on his feet.

He came before a sealed door. The reactor room. The heart of the lab. Having a ready power source is invaluable to a facility like the lab once was. The room was still, but the aura of sadness was heavy. There was however no weeping.

It was as quiet as a grave.

The door of the room was opened without a sound. Dr. Bones wanted to look away at what he saw, but his abilities as a doctor had numbed him to the sight of all ills, to all that is broken.

So he looked.

Clinically. Coldly.

Spread about the room was all the remains of what had once lived in the lab. Scattered and propped up like a child’s dolls. In mockery of life. Yet for all the positions of delight and life they had been arranged in, each remnant had a chain of brambles, as if the owner feared even the true dead would leave. Petals to the centre of a flower. The core of this flower was a massive red crystal, once covered in tubes and mechanisms, all for drawing in and storing power, then sending it away.

These were broken. By rights the crystal should have been lying on the ground, because all the old supports, all the workings of the willed were broken and gone. It grew there.

She grew there.

A woman’s upper body, beautiful but sorrowful in countenance, pink skin like the flesh of a plant, like the brambles. She was fused with the crystal, and brambles grew from them both, spread through the routes the pipes had once taken. Trapped. Her hair was a green flower, a rose and her eyes, they were red and green, and within them was such torment of solitude. Sprouting from her forehead was a horn that was a thorn. A curving blade to disrupt her image of peaceful tears.

“Welcome home” she said to the doctor.