The Wound

The earth held you tight. You called it shelter. Blood thickened to honey and you called it peace. Season after season, you didn't survive winter – you mimicked it. Froze yourself shut. Above you, frost lifted years ago. Still you clench against a season that has passed. The first warmth finds a hairline crack in your armour. It floods you like blood to a limb you had forgotten. With the pain, the question: What if the cold was all that kept you whole?

The Path

Panic. You try to seal the crack shut. Your body clenches against the thaw. You've been seed so long that softening feels like dying. Better buried than unrecognisable in the light. One morning, the pressure peaks. The shell gives. Light finds flesh that never knew sun. You cannot see. Cannot bear it. You try to force the husk back together. But the root is already drinking and the shoot already driving upwards, powered by hunger older than your fear. The colour in your petals: grief that learnt to bloom. The stem holding you upright: the pressure itself, transfigured. What you guarded in the dark has dissolved into soil. What blooms now carries winter in its veins. Below lies the husk where it split – that small shrine of refusal, empty now, and entirely yours.

The Shadow

But to bloom, the shell must yield. Some shells never crack. Some crack too soon. The Stone Seed feels the warmth and sneers. Softening is defeat. His sister had trusted the first false spring. She opened pink and soft, and the frost returned and burned her black. She died facing east, one leaf still reaching. He builds his vigil from her death. Each spring the sap rises – treason in his veins – and he crushes it. Not yet, he tells himself. The frost could return. He is never wrong. The frost could always return. They find him every spring: still a seed, perfect and hard, rotting inside the monument of his rightness. The soil around him had bloomed without him. The Pale Shoot will not wait for the soil. The moment she feels sun, she tears out of the earth. Anything but another hour of dark. Anything but becoming him. She rises before her roots set – pale, trembling, drunk on light. For one morning she is a miracle. She smells of raw honey and wet soil. Sun finds her. A child stops to look. The second morning brings ice. Her stem has no bark. Her roots have no depth. She reaches for reserves she never stored. By dawn she is glass – frozen mid-reach, one petal falling before she knows.

The Cut