D: L&L - Part 41 | Tin Man: For Whom the Heart Bleeds

I bound down from the mountain, the black walls of Kiamo Ko stark against the morning sky. The path is littered with rock and debris, years of neglect. Its bricks, once yellow, golden in the sunlight, are crusted with dirt and mottled green with moss. Dew glistens on the tips of rotting thistles jutting obstinately out of crevices. The way is clear, but the path leads only to darkness. Everything here is dead. Long dead.

Too long has it been since I went this way. Memories linger on the fringes, and I close my eyes, pushing them away. But her face is there, her smiles, her hands, her tears.

They told you no one truly dies in Oz a comforting lie for a broken boy broken boy broken

They know. The trees. The Haunted Forest.

Oh, yes, they remember. Every single drop. The very soil their roots claw through, a spongy, black ichor, is glutted with it – the spilled lifeblood of forgotten legions, hurled against the cyclopean walls of Kiamo Ko. And broken. The countless dead. Their vitae, a ghastly sacrament, seeped deep, feeding a sentience that should not be.

Their eyeless gaze looms down over me, and I grip my ax tighter.

The trees, they remember. I see them now, in the bruised light of a reluctant dawn, their hulking silhouettes swaying in a parody of triumph, a grotesque ballet against the bruised sky. I edge closer, drawn by a morbid compulsion, towards their leering boughs. Their bark, like desiccated flesh, peels back in a silent, knowing rictus. Their branches, twisted and arthritic, extend like the grasping limbs of the unburied. Below, hidden in the clinging moss and the sweet rot of ages, their roots writhe, a slow, unsettling tremor in the earth. And they whisper. Not with the rustle of leaves, no. These are stolen voices, choked murmurs from throats long since silenced.

I can hear those whispers. I take a first step, and I can hear them now.

This is the path… the one you trod… to find her. But still I did not stop. Because this is what I wanted. Her. Only her. Only my Nimma. Because I could not stop.

A sibilant chorus, slithering through the chill air. 

To find your precious Nimma… your blighted rose… your doomed love. 

A pause, a collective intake of breath that isn't breath. But then… The whisper deepens, thickens with a primal dread, and I feel it seep into my joints.

Oh, we know. We remember. We saw. We know what you became. What you did.

My boots halt at the precipice, the very fringe of this arboreal abyss. Before me, the trees shiver, a convulsive tremor in the nascent, sickly pink glow of the approaching day. Leaves, like the upturned palms of the dying, flash their pale undersides, a desperate offering to a storm that gathers beyond sight, a palpable weight in the air. 

A groan, low and resonant, vibrates through the ground, through the soles of my feet. Is it the wind, tearing its mournful song through their skeletal limbs? Or is it the agony in my own constricted throat, a sound I no longer recognize as mine? Ignoring it, or perhaps succumbing to it, I take a hesitant step, then another, towards the waiting dimness, the profound depths, the silence that holds its breath… and watches.

The brick path beneath me is rotted and flaking, swallowed by vines that coil like veins. I step beneath the canopy. The air changes. The silence has weight. My footfalls echo against the tin of my legs. 

Step. Step. Knock. Knock. Tick. Tock.

The forest repeats them all. 

Step. Step. Knock. Knock. Tick. Tock. Knock knock on the door her door their door the battered broken door with your ax

This was the road I took to find her. My Nimma. But she wasn’t here now.

Where is Nimma? Where was she? What did you do?

The trees are reaching arms and gnarled grey bark faces. Their limbs claw the air, bark faces yawning open. Hollow mouths, knotted eyes. When I pass, they lean in. Maybe it’s my tired eyes, my rising mind, but they seem to yawn and snarl, to eye and scorn me. They can’t know, but they do.

What did you do? Your Nimma. Your heart his heart her heart beats beats beat stop

Rain begins to fall. Fat, cold drops. One splashes off my shoulder, smearing my reflection in a puddle at my feet. I see my face—my hollow eyes, my gleaming skull. Like the dead. My eyes mere sockets, glowing like candles, like burning flames, burning desire and lust and need…

Her lust her need her lover her betrayal was yours. What did you do? We know. We remember.

A tree groans nearby, its bark splitting to reveal something red beneath. For a sickening instant, the patterns in the wood coalesce—a grotesque parody of a familiar smile, my smile, stitched onto alien flesh. I remember the man at Nimma’s door. Flesh stitched with tin. My mouth. My hand. My smile. He was me. Her screams filled the valley. 

The trees laugh without laughing. Their leaves rattle with glee. 

Tin freak. We remember. We remember what you did. What you chopped.

I raise my ax and begin to run.

Flowers bloom beneath my feet—red, wet, pulsing, rising, growing along the path that used to be golden. A river of red. A current of blood. The roots soak it up until the leaves drip with it. My ax sings through the bark of one tree, then another. Faces twist in the wood. Eyes open where knots used to be. The trees close in. Their limbs creak with hunger. A tree moves. Not sways. Moves. Its trunk peels open like flesh.

Where is Nimma? Your Nimma my Nimma my dear dear dearest your love your heart beats for her.

She went to live with friends on Mount Munch, my Nimmie Amee. I hadn’t heard from her since I’d returned to the High tower.

I’d left my men at the bottom of a hill once we spotted her cottage. Smoke lifting from the chimney, warm food smells that made a stomach rumble as I clomped up the path. They were dining when I knocked on her door, quickly polishing my chest, my face, wiping my lips with the back of my tin hand. I was a shining beacon of light on her doorstep. Though I felt I could not love her, I knew my duty and would take her and make her my Empress. A dress of tin with metal mesh and flowers, to match her tiny flower hands, her shining eyes

The door opened.

“I would…” I stared at the man in front of me, the stitched up human with a metal arm and

and

and

A metal head.

He stared at me curiously, a smile hitching one corner of his mouth. My mouth. I looked harder, that was my leg, that was my hand, my mouth my smile my hide.

“Who… who… are you?”

Who are you? Who was he? She? Them? Before you did. Before you…what did you do?

Between the arching limbs of trees drops of rain begin to fall. One splatters off my shoulder, wetting my face, and I see the rivelet of crimson streaking down my chest. I plunge deeper into the woods, into the dense shifting hush. Ivy covers this part of the forest floor, the golden bricks all but gone. I shuffle through it, but the vines snake over my metal feet almost instantly; I kick and thrash, my metal legs crashing into each other.

She peeked around his leg, my Nimmie Amee, my Nimma Rose, my one-time love, my all. Her eyes grew round, her mouth a small pink O.

She blinked. “Nick?”

She found another, my Nimma. Another. Beat beat beat her heart beats for another another another

But he was me. My face my head my hand my heart. He was me and not. She had stitched him, helped Ku-Klip fashion him of flesh and bone when I did not return. This he was me.

She found another, your ax, your love, your heart, your blood, it beat for her for love for this

Oh, how she screamed. How she scrambled and moaned as I chopped, because I could not stop I chopped him, she scrabbled like a mouse around his body, flitting through the house for cloth for his blood. She held his neck together, a needle and thread between her teeth, cursing me as the silver point flashed in the dim cabin.

“You tin freak,” she hissed.

Tin freak tin freak tin freak what did you do?

“You metal monster, first you leave me, then you slay the only man I ever loved.” Crying, wiping blood and tears from her tiny flower face, she glared up at me. Her child’s feet kicked as I lifted her by her hair, her mouth blood-smeared.

Because I cannot stop I chop I chop I chop the heart that lies that forgets that betrays

Blood rains from a sky of bronze, burnt and falling fire. Amber leaves swirl in a cyclone, I realize I can’t see, can’t move. The vines have completely suffocated my feet, and bright flowers are blooming as I watch – a red splattering of buds slithering up my legs. I try kicking myself free as the entire forest begins to moan, to howl. Is it the wind? The rain? Who is screaming? I scramble to my feet and tree limbs close around my metal body. With a jerk I try to be free. When I open my eyes I watch my ax disappear, dissolve into the split white bark of the tree with a sigh.

A strangled gasp tears from my throat as my chest plates begin to buckle, rivets screaming.