Explain It Like I'm Tree

Cursed

A nightmare. It had to be a nightmare. This couldn't be happening to him again.

Arthur's right hand was no longer his own. It was covered in bark from the tree. Half a second later, so was his arm. It spread faster than the demon in the cave had, as fast as the heartbeat pumping blood through his body. Tiny tendrils on the underside of the bark shot through his clothing and skin, twining with his nerves. He couldn't pull away.

In the time it took to register the pain from the thorn in his hand, barkskin engulfed his chest, spreading out in all directions. By the time he drew in breath to scream, it wrapped around his lips and surged into his mouth, choking him off.

Going to die!

A pause. Something hesitated at his desperate thought. It didn't want to kill him. The bark stopped growing down his throat. The barkskin in his mouth broke apart. The hold on his nerves relented for a moment. He curled over, vomiting. Chunks of wood came up with the bile in his stomach.

Please. Please. Please. He couldn't bring any other words to mind, there was only terror. Please. Not again. Please.

Anger was the answer. Bitter, futile rage finally given form. His body doubled over of its own accord, knuckling forward like some deranged gorilla. Anywhere he looked down, his body was covered in wood. His arms were twice as long, like great branches curled at the ends that swung the rest of him forward. He was going somewhere. He was going to end it. Finally, he had the power to end... something.

But this was not like last time. Before, Arthur had been shoved aside as the demon in the cave shrugged his arm on like his body was a coat to be worn. It had had no interest in listening to him.

Whatever had taken his body over this time, its attention was partly on him. It was forcing him to move, but it was also constantly checking its power, keeping itself from growing into his vitals.

He struggled with his thoughts. They had scattered like a bag of greased marbles hurled across a room. He had to communicate! Desperate, he seized on his first related thought.

Like Yettle?

His body slowed. His gnarled fingers gripped the top of a tall fence, preparing to hurl him over the top at a moment's notice. Yet, once again, it paused. The presence probed him. It was rough, but not careless. It had its own questions. It wanted to know why Arthur could hear it before making physical contact. It wanted to know why sap already ran through his veins. Yettle? It wondered how Arthur came by such friendship with a reclusive elder tree that he had been entrusted with her name.

But these were smaller questions, quickly swept aside by a hate-filled scream that traveled in from his nerves and burst out of his mouth. This one's trunk was already hollow with rot from roots to tip. It had been dying slowly for decade, and none who could take action ever heard it. That damned poisonous curse was spawning again. It had to be stopped. No more, no more! Even if blood had to be shed, this time the curse would be uprooted.

He vaulted over the fence and landed on the other side. There was that swing, that piece of idiocy the family hung at the edge of a cliff and never took down even after a child of theirs died there. On the other side of it, his hand still on the picket fence that lead to the graves, stood the last living child of the family, frozen in place.

There. A bulging, ebony serpent coiled around the boy's chest, its head lolling on his shoulder. It was as thick as a man's arm and had tiny, needle-like legs all along its body, like a millipede. The legs dug into the child, anchoring the body in place. The curse had already taken root.