Deleted Scene: Indigo spirit

2200 words, 8 minute read.

After a short walk through the halls of the Library, we emerge into the gardens that surround three quarters of the campus. There are greenhouses and ponds and paths, benches and gazebos and bridges, plants and trees and flowers from all over the world. In mid-Lavender Moon everything is a bit dry from the summer, but recently it’s begun to rain again. Overhead, the blue sky is dotted with clouds like tufts of cotton.

To the east, the foothills of the Bell Mountains rise to green, carpeted peaks. Land which has been tended by Illuminators for centuries, plant and earth and people in a symbiotic cycle of growth and death. Opal can’t handle much of the steep trails these days, but I’ve explored them on my own and with Rose at times. I wonder what changes the coming autumn will bring.

What we’re seeking today grows closer at hand, a circular patch at the center of a less-used walkway of the gardens. At the center of the patch is a mirror pool, one of many perfectly circular wells of water installed to make it look as if a piece of the sky has fallen to earth. There is a large frog in this one, spoiling the illusion. The version of me that’s still nine years old inside wants very much to try and catch it.

The plant we’ve come to gather grows as a shrub with small, oblong leaves and pink flowers similar to that of beans or peas. An unassuming, ordinary plant for the power it holds inside. I recognize it not from my books on pigments, but from the sudden return of yet another childhood snapshot.

“My parents grew indigo,” I say, reaching out to brush my hands along the leaves.

“Did they now?”

“And madder and weld. Buckthorn. Marigolds. I remember the indigo better because it smelled funky and stained everyone’s hands blue.”

“As it has for many, many years,” Opal says. “Indigo has a deep history here in Caspora and across the western continent. There is no other dye like it. Even woad, its spiritual cousin, cannot compare in vibrancy or depth.”

Opal sits on a small folding stool while I sit on the ground between the plants, their leaves and flowers tickling my shoulders. I feel a sneeze coming on and realize that along with my sunglasses, I forgot my handkerchief. Opal, using a preternatural sense that must come with age, hands me one just as I’m about to sneeze into my hands instead. Sniffling, I dig into my bag for my allergy medication. It makes me sleepy, but that side effect will be less disruptive than constantly needing to wipe my nose and eyes.

If only there was a way to tell my body that pollen is not our enemy. I need all of my focus today.

“All set?” Opal asks once I’ve cleared my sinuses a few times.

“All set.”

I slip on my headphones and press start on my cassette player. The audio quality is nowhere near that of a vinyl record, but the portability of the new-ish medium makes up for that. So long as the batteries last or you’ve got extra on hand, that is. Soft classical music trickles into my ears, harmonious with the sounds of nature still audible in the garden around us. The trill of flutes and of birds; the rustle of [PERCUSSION INSTRUMENT] and the trees; the sinuous flow of oboes and water.

The music unlocks the cage of my body and allows my spirit to expand. Reaching into the dirt, the rock, the mirror pool at our backs. I feel against my mind the probing roots of the indigo, the slow growth of its budding branches, the fertility dancing within its blossoms.

Opal is here with us as well, a solid presence with a swirl of stars at the center. Well-laid bricks covered with moss, trailing with well-trimmed ivy through which a window reveals there are many bright lights on inside.

The roots lead us to a door. The door leads us to a cave.

Now we are on the astral proper, much as that distinction actually exists. Opal says that the realms are one, but that our human minds separate them for easier understanding. A sort of opposite process to the way our brains take information from two eyes and combine it into one field of vision. The idea of the objective world, measurable, testable, and the subjective, experiential, mysterious, is a fallacy.

In spirit, Opal’s appearance is variable, much more so than anyone else I’ve ever met. E cycles through decades of eir life along with the cycle of the moon. With only a few days until the full moon, today Opal appears no more than ten years older than me. Early to mid-thirties, hair a luxurious black swept back from eir face in a 3930s style, face unlined. Only eir eyes are the same deep, twinkling brown. This is how e would have looked when first writing Planet of Honey.

“It always has amused me that we still wear our glasses in this form,” e says, adjusting a pair of tortiseshell frames. “Even without our physical eyes.”

I touch my own glasses, gold wire rims with large aviator-style lenses. They aren’t really there, and yet, they are.

“I don’t know about you,” I say, “but I can’t see more than a foot past my nose without them. They’re practically an extension of myself with how much I rely on them every day of my life.”

Opal nods and smiles. “And there it is, the explanation: an extension of the self. Not an exaggeration. Perhaps the Noxians are right when they say that humanity’s greatest gift is not, as we say here, the act of reading and writing, but our ability to imbue physical creation with life, a reflection of our own creators’ power.”

Have you come to speak with us, or have you not?

The indigo plants speak as a collective, their layered voices expressing mild annoyance and amusement. Opal and I give each other a guilty look, then turn to the embodiment the indigo have sent to stand before us.

There is nothing humanoid about the Indigo spirit. They are a swirl of blue beyond blue, ocean and sky and river and lake, flower and gem and mineral. The quiet overlay of dusk and the brilliance of cold shadow on snow. Fractal limbs branch out from a body shaped like a seed, a tangle of braided roots serving to support them on the floor of the cave.

Opal inclines eir head and says, “Hello again. It is a pleasure to meet with you as always, teacher.”

A pleasure to meet, yes, Opaline. You have brought your own student, says Indigo, and I feel its attention shift to me.

“I have. This is Juniper,” Opal says.

We have met, Indigo says, once again sounding amused. Will you ever cease naming yourselves after your names for us? At least this one smells of eir namesake.

Downsides—benefits?—of being named after a tree: plant spirits find it funny and strange. I’ve never spoken with Indigo directly, but their collective consciousness must remember me tending to my parents’ plants in our garden way back when.

“Hello,” I say. “It’s nice to meet with you. We’ve come to ask permission to harvest your leaves and have brought you a gift in return.”

That is usually the way of it, says Indigo, what is it you have brought for us?

“Water which mirrored the moon for a full year’s cycle,” Opal replies, “and a rich compost imbued with the powdered bones of birds.”

Indigo considers Opal’s words, their body flickering and swirling with color. There is something dissatisfied about the way their roots writhe in their tangles. Once again the sensation of their attention turns to me, like a waft of leaves fermenting in a swamp.

And from you?

Opal and I glance at each other. The moonwater and compost was supposed to be from both of us, but somehow Indigo must know that I had nothing to do with their creation. That they’re things that Opal has made, and though I am Opal’s student, that doesn’t exempt me from the exchange.

“I—I’ll sing you a song,” I say, offering the first thing that comes to mind.

The fractal branches bloom with petals the color of a summer sky.

We look forward to it. You may proceed with your harvest.

Opal and I leave the cave, returning to our bodies from the dirt. My cassette has stopped in the meantime, the first side finished some time ago. My butt hurts, and Opal stretches eir back with a groan.

“Truly, I am too old for this,” e says. “Help your ancient mentor to eir feet?”

I help Opal stand and we get to work on our indigo harvest. By that I mean that Opal holds the mesh bag while I do all the bending over and snipping with a pair of enchanted silver scissors. Once we’ve collected what we need (and nothing more), I also do the brunt of the work spreading the compost over the ground with a shovel and hoe. Opal pours the moonwater, and I suppose this is as good a time as any for that song.

I don’t know why, but I’m drawn to a Fenian song by folksinger Adelaide Laurent, the lyrics of which are practically untranslatable to Casporan given the amount of gendered nouns:

“I am the Queen’s seventh daughter,
Her seventh daughter among seven sons,
Our castle was once filled with love and laughter,
But now she and I are the only ones, only ones.

My first brother married a priestess,
The second married a butcher.
My third brother sailed into the east,
A year past, his letters had ceased.

My fourth brother married a tailor,
The fifth married a princess.
My sixth brother became a sailor,
To save the third from pirate and whaler.

To war went all of my sisters,
From war came none of them home,
To war went their king, our father,
His body lies now ‘neath the loam.

Now it is just me and my mother,
My mother the Queen and I,
We sit in our garden and water,
The grass on their graves with our eyes.

Our castle once held love and laughter,
Golden and dear and well-known,
But the Goddess has taken from us,
Our God has left us alone.

What shall we do without love?
What shall we do without love?
What shall we do without love?”

My self-consciousness fades the further I get into the song. For all that I am nobody’s daughter, the core emotion within the song, the loss of one’s family, touches me deeply. Like ripples that feeling spreads out from me, dappling the words with shadow as they roll over the garden. I find myself moving through in a spiral motion, until the last of the compost has been spread right to the edge of the mirror pool.

The last lines of the song hang in the air, and beneath them I Hear Indigo’s voice whispering to me through the water. I crouch beside the pool, my own freckled face staring back at me beneath my hat. A faint breeze stirs the otherwise perfect surface, warping the image.

Not lost, never lost: only distant, only reborn.
When they come back they are different.
You are whole without their return.

I pull my notepad from my pocket and write the words down before they fade. After silently thanking the Indigo spirit, I walk over to where Opal has taken a seat on a shady bench. The day isn’t hot, but the work has us sweating. I show em the response my song elicited from the plant.

“They must have enjoyed your song,” Opal says, “to give you another gift, one of from their own collected wisdom. I enjoyed it as well, even though I did not understand the words.”

I explain the song, which was based on a historical royal family of Fenia, before it became a democracy. The narrator grew up to be Delphine the Compassionate, one of the country’s most beloved queens, who turned her loss into love for her people.

“It’s a prequel of sorts,” I say. “A part of her story that doesn’t get told as often, but is crucial to understanding her later life.”

“Something you relate to,” Opal guesses, “on more than one level.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way. “I suppose. My prequel to now would be—it would include my lost memories. It’s hard to know where you are and where you’re going when you don’t know where you’re coming from.”

“A sense of perspective is certainly helpful,” Opal replies. “How fares your search?”

I hadn’t mentioned the memory I retrieved with the help of my old fanfiction to Opal for a very obvious reason, but it can’t be helped now. To pretend it was for another series or franchise would be silly, and I’m a terrible liar. My face heats up as I explain what happened at Inyene’s house, and what we saw after I plucked the etheric knot connecting the two of us to my story.