(Rose)
A slightly colder morning than usual. I guess summer is over.
Time to try what legends dreamt about for ages. I'm washing my feet in something straight out of kings wildest dreams. I wonder how many more legends of old could become true today?
It also looks ironic to me that no great hero or epic tale brought this place to be found. It's just me, the lowest form of heroism or knighthood, and not even a man, that found this holy place. And I use it merely for myself.
It amuses me how much I killed the magic of the tales that surrounded this place. No hero, just me. No epic romantic quest, I just were looking for a shortcut on my road. No noble cause, I'll just try to use it to heal myself.
I would have made my father the story teller cry...
Or burst in laughter perhaps. I think he would have... We were the same he and I. The irony of my amazing discovery makes me smile.
I'm naked again. I'm alone. I dive into the water and keep my eyes open.
I don't feel anything unusual as I swim down. The flowers turn toward me as if to keep an eye on what I do.
I grab my old jacket and try to bring it back, but it's stuck. Roots have spread over it I notice. It's getting eaten I guess? I unwillingly ripped some of the roots trying to get the jacket. I leave them the jacket. It's theirs now, and I don't mind.
As I swim back and reach the surface, I feel like the water is becoming heavier.
It's difficult to exit and I struggle to climb back onto the ground.
I manage to do it still, and drip all over the grass, out of breath. I lie there and close my eyes now.
I wait a moment for my heartbeat to return to normal, lying on the grass on my tummy to rest there.
I only hear my heartbeat and my breathing. I feel the droplets of water flowing from my hair into the grass.
When I slowly open my left eye, I can distinguish light and blurry colours again. This is incredible.
Even if I cannot regrow my entire arm, recovering even partly an eye is amazing already.
And I will try. I will try everything I can think off.
The blur slightly becomes more clear as I dry and go around. It gets better.
The roots of yellow flower I have ripped accidentally are floating on the surface of the water. I pick them up, wondering what I should do with it. I leave them close to the water and the tipping edge of the rock where some are growing, far below.
~
I tried something very dangerous. My left arm. I'm missing it up above my elbow, and a stump has healed, covering the bone and flesh.
Trying to regrow that... It's reckless. My eye was a closed wound too I think. My arm hasn't changed, but it might if I opened the wound again and exposed the bone.
I might also bleed to death or get awful infections...
I try. I flamed my knife, as best I could. Lying on the edge of the pool, I can plunge my arm and stay safely on ground.
I'm trembling as I try to get myself to mutilate my healthy stump. Of course I'm doubting that a greater good could come from a sacrifice when it's put that way. But I want to try it. I need to know.
I go blindly, stabbing myself and ripping my wound open as I kick and scream.
I plunged my bleeding arm in the water, my eyes shut with tears, crying in pain and heavily moaning.
I see blood spreading into the water.
Of course...
Then the blood is sucked up by the depth, and the pain gradually vanishes. It feels really weird to have pain vanish so quickly. As if my body suddenly realised there had been a mistake and stopped over reacting. There was no mistake but mine eventually.
When the pain is gone, I look carefully, trying not to move.
What I see now with both eye surprises me. My left eye is still a little blurry and colours are dull, but my depth perception improved nonetheless.
In the water, I see translucent tentacles, or soft aquatic branches, growing out from my wound, and growing. Blood flows within them, back and forth.
I'm not moving, only observing now the grotesque and miraculous show, of my arm regrowing slowly. (or incredibly fast truly)
~
These soft tentacles holding blood grow slowly into complexity and specific shapes. They transform into kind of small trees with thinner branches always further where blood flows.
At the same time, other things are growing out of my arm. Flesh white like fish or chicken meat, translucent really at first. It's bubbling slightly as it spread and consolidates the blood tentacles into their vessels.
I see the blood vessels take shape into a full network that looks like the inner structure of an arm. And soon, the same tree structure stretches into an invisible hand and fingers. The vessels are thin there, but in greater number too, thus I clearly recognise the shape of the fingers.
Flesh slowly thickens and grows all around those. Bones however I do not see grow. It's much slower. It's hidden through the bubbling flesh.
I lie there, agape, witnessing a miracle.
~
I wake up during the evening, having fallen asleep there where I lied, my left arm plunged all day inside the water.
I dreamt of something weird but I can't quite recall what. Something about flowers.
My left arm is numb. I slowly pull it out from the water. It looks alabaster white, but it did regenerate entirely...
That much of my body, grown in less than a day. I even have new nails on the fingers, though they are softer than normal yet.
My arm is slightly souple and springy, like a stick. The new bones may not be made of real bone yet. But still! Looking at that new arm is astonishing. And I can move the fingers slightly.
When I try to lower a finger, another one twitches slightly instead. It's not much, but it's a start.
I'm amazed anyway. The weight that used to pull my left shoulder down is back.
Soon enough, I'll be good as new thanks to them.
I take my meagre dinner and set myself for the night sooner than expected.
I have bad dreams again. Colours, flowers. I feel anxious and threatened. Something turns black like ink and I fear for my life.
I wake up suddenly feeling pain in my lower abdomen. Something is entering me and I begin to fight it off in panic.
They're roots, crawling from around the rock and water. I escape, crawl back and fight them off. I'm pulling the roots rather roughly out from the depth of me they reached. I throw them back to the water.
I'm under shock. But my left hand did not betray me as I did all that.
That thing doesn't attempt to strike back, it's gone.
It might have only tried to feed on the bodily fluid I secrete naturally, but I don't want to be invaded for that. I hope it was just that or mere curiosity.
I catch my breath back in the middle of the night. I realise how little I still know or understand about this place.
For today, I got what I wanted and I will leave.
I feel another pain in my chest and feel a bulge under my fingers as I scratch it. I fear for a second that the thing went one way or another this far inside of me, but then I recall what used to grow there in the middle of my ribcage.
I hold it carefully now. It, she, may be growing back too.
~
I'm walking ahead as the sun rises. I've slightly cut open my skin in the bulge between my breasts. Some clustered flower buds were pushing each other, growing underneath. The skin there didn't bleed, and what was meant to grow can now sprout.
It's shyly pushing forward, starting anew.
I can see her again.
I teared up. My left hand can brush them. If only one thing needed to grow again from my body...
I would have chosen you Blume...
~
My tears made the buds react slightly.
I also noticed later that day that my urine helped plants to grow in a matter of seconds...
Have I drank too much of that water?
I understand that my body is quite saturated with the water from that place. Given last night's occurrence, I don't want to go back there for now just to double check its effect on other plants.
I can guess what it can do on other organisms now, speeding their growth as well. Another time.
Even my saliva if I spit it currently, provokes a sudden spurt of growth in the wild grass it touches.
I must carry a lot of that place's odd power with me for now. I did drink that water for days beside swimming in it.
My right eye still sees those translucent ghosts everywhere. Most are only minding their journey, but some get curious at me now. Though all of them vanish when a hand tries to touch them.
I'm leaving this place for now but we'll surely find plans and uses for it in the future.
First, I'll wait for that bad flower to come back fully.
I've missed her...
~