Excerpt: Arboretum

For Rosetta, it turned out, the passage had been simple, if strange. One second she was giving birth. The next she was a rosebush.
Dogstar gently probed about the circumstances, and as it happens, her last memory was not telling Ironfold to run but simply staring at her second born with love. That last instance of happiness. Dogstar, of course, was unaware of this discrepancy; as would all but Ironfold himself, who kept defiantly mum about the end of his mother, along with everything else. Anyhow, the transition was instantaneous, and Dogstar listened intently as Rosetta described the sensations of suddenly being transmuted.
'It was like waking up. I had fallen asleep, all a sudden, as sometimes happens, on the kitchen floor, and I woke up.
'You know how sometimes you wake up and everything is a haze? Well it was like that. Only I couldn't see at all. No sight, just sensation. I could barely move, but I could feel like nothing you could imagine.'
She was, of course, wrong on this point. Dogstar let it lie.
'Looking back, I don't remember feeling unpleasant at all. I just remember feeling grounded. Rooted seems too obvious a word, but it's true. My feet, not that that's the right word, were firmly on the ground. Planted in fact. Of course.'
Rosetta shook her head as she caught herself. Dogstar looked on patiently, and she continued.
'So I woke up, and I couldn't see, but I was connected downwards, and outwards as well. Time was confused, but I felt so lost in the breeze that it didn't matter. It wasn't even like a breeze, it was a gale pushing and pulsing through me. So much raw energy tickling and floating through me. It was....exhilarating.'
Rosetta was visibly aroused by the memory, her legs tensing and her eyes briefly glazed over. Her daughter, still sitting nearby, had been bought out of her reverie just enough to be disgusted by this thought, and even more so by her urge to make an exceedingly innappropraite pun about morning wood. She felt Dogstar's soothing hand on hers, and forgot the innuendo and the disgust in an instant.
'But I was trapped there, and then I felt a burst from you. Suddenly interrupting the magic. In an instant I felt what was so wrong. I don't know how long I'd been there, in love with that feeling, but your touch. The brush of your breath. It awakened the part of me that was still me. Discomfort was all I felt. Suddenly the unreality, the fragments of sensations, they fell apart and were suddenly horrific.' She was tensing up as she spoke, and Dogstar reached over to calm her along with her child.
'But you stopped that. You realised so quickly. And you wrapped me up, and you came up from the roots, and you pulled me up, and bought me together. I felt my branches unite, bundle up and take shape, and the next thing I know I'm coming to on a table in the pub. And it's been a long time since I've done that, I can tell you.'
'Longer than you imagine, I imagine.' Silverstar spoke for the first time since collapsing onto her chair.
And she was right.