u/Evolutionary_u-turn

More specifically, the return of smoking in shows.

There was a period where nobody was doing it at all, or at most they were moaning about not being allowed to add party of the plot, and almost nobody was shown lighting one up

Now though, it's become much more noticeable again, seems everyone's sparking one up at almost every opportunity.

Has there been a change in some regulations? Has a ban been lifted or has the tobacco lobby been applying pressure?

There's a few in-world references and names but overall, I'm quite ok so far with what's on the page so far.

The restoration was progressing, though slowly was perhaps too generous a word. The abbey had been left to its own devices for long enough that the land had formed opinions about it, and those opinions were largely expressed in bramble.

The first week had been humbling. You could tell by the way the ground dipped that what had once been a path was now all but lost to the onslaught of nature. There was a hint of something bigger, something majestic lurking, but it was beneath a tangled, choking mat of bindweed and blackthorn that fought back with something close to personality.

A full day's labour from Stratford and two willing hands produced perhaps a yard of progress. Perhaps. The scratches outnumbered the inches.

It was in the Vulture one evening, over a supper that had cooled while he talked, that Stratford mentioned the situation to a group passing through. Travellers, by the look of them. Walking north with the unhurried purpose of people who know their destination but aren't in a hurry to reach it. One of them paused, tilting her head.

"There's a horticultural school," she said, "couple of days north of here. Good people. Serious about their plants." She said plants the way some people say convictions.

He sent word the following morning, not expecting much.

The students arrived ten days later, seven of them, carrying implements that looked less like garden tools and more like considered arguments. The tallest introduced himself with a handshake and a particular brightness in his eye. "We understand there may be some rare flora on the estate," he said pleasantly. "We've come to study it."

Outside in the yard sat a cart loaded with canvas, rope, and what appeared to be an entire field kitchen. These were not people who did things by halves.

Within a fortnight, the clearance had taken on an altogether different character. Where there had been inches, there were now yards. Where there had been cursing, there was something approaching method. Stratford watched one morning from the gatehouse steps, tea in hand, as the students moved through the undergrowth with the focused calm of people who understood that plants, like most things worth dealing with, respond better to knowledge than force.

He allowed himself, quietly, to feel hopeful.

It was on the third day of clearance that the first real discovery emerged.

One of the younger students, a slight girl with paint-stained fingers who had said very little but noticed everything, called out from the eastern wall, where the bindweed had grown so thick it had formed something almost architectural. The others gathered, and Stratford came to look, not entirely sure what he was peering at until she pointed.

Tucked against the old stonework, half-strangled but stubbornly alive, was a stand of something none of them had expected. The tall one crouched, pulled his notebook from his coat, and was quiet for a long moment.

"Marjoram," he said finally. "Wild. Old stock, by the look of it. This hasn't been planted in any living memory." He glanced up at Stratford. "Do you know what this means to a bee?"

Stratford did not, but he was willing to learn.

They found more as the weeks progressed. A sprawling mound of borage had colonised the old kitchen garden corner, its star-shaped flowers an almost impossible blue against the grey stone, humming already with early bumblebees despite the season's uncertainty.

The tall student crouched over it for a moment, then looked up at Stratford with an expression that had shifted from botanical interest to something more complicated. "Does Katarina know this is here?"

She did, as it turned out. She had known for some time. The borage oil she pressed each summer, honey-tinged, extraordinarily fine, produced in quantities too small to sell and too good to waste, had a reputation in the valley that far outran any explanation she had offered for it. The dried flowers she scattered through her summer salad were the same. People came back for it without quite knowing why, the way you return to a particular view or a piece of music, certain only that it does something the rest of the world doesn't.

Nobody had thought to ask where it came from.

Close to the corner of borage, threaded through the collapsed remains of a cold frame, stood something thornier and less immediately lovely. A stand of buckthorn, its small dark berries still clinging from the autumn before, patient and unprepossessing in the way of plants that know their own value without needing to advertise it.

Stratford stopped.

He knew buckthorn. Not from any book though, but from his grandfather's shed. From the smell of it in autumn. From the particular quality of the mead it produced when you knew what you were doing with it. Gesho, he had called it. A bittering agent, resinous and complex, the kind of thing that separated mead worth drinking from mead worth forgetting. The abbey would have grown it deliberately once, tended it carefully, valued it for exactly this purpose.

Which meant someone, at some point, had known what they were doing here. Not just with the buckthorn. With all of it.

He stood looking at it for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.

It was the tall student's turn to go quiet again when he saw it.

"Brimstone moths," said a different voice entirely. The one they called Pell, on account of the hat, which was today a wide-brimmed felt affair in a colour that defied easy categorisation. He had a hat for every occasion and several for occasions that hadn't arisen yet. "The caterpillars feed on buckthorn almost exclusively." He said it without drama, the way you state a fact you've known so long it has become part of you. "If this has been here undisturbed for as long as I think it has, there may be generations of them in the surrounding soil."

He crouched, peering at the base of the stand with the focused attention he gave to things that interested him, which was most things.

"The name's older than the moth, properly speaking," he said, to nobody in particular, in the way of someone who has simply started thinking aloud and sees no reason to stop. "There was a king, Dominik-of-the-west. He marched his armies east across the mountains toward K'blkah, in the Caucasus foothills. His men found moths there whose larvae produced a spark when hatching. Natural enough on its own, but those moths had a habit of settling near the gas vents in the rock, and the spark would catch the dried undergrowth, and the undergrowth would catch the gas as it vented." He paused, still looking at the buckthorn. "On a busy night it looked like a pyrotechnic circus. The sulphur in the gas gave everything a particular smell. The wing edges on the adult are that same sharp yellow." He glanced up. "Brimstone. Smell, colour, fire. The name came with the soldiers and it stuck."

He straightened, adjusted the hat, and looked at Stratford.

"Remarkable thing to find here," he said pleasantly. "Quite remarkable."

His last words before sleep were "But my name's not Stephen", and he fell asleep before he heard the surgeon reply, "no, that's me"

XVI. The Becoming of Raven

The walls breathed. Not as metaphor. The walls contracted and expanded in a slow, fleshy rhythm: warm, slightly damp, with the specific temperature of something from the inside. Whether womb or mouth remained ambiguous and mattered less than the fact of the breathing.

Only Raven.

She stood at the tub's edge, steam lifting off the blood-threaded water like smoke from something still smouldering. Her body caught the firelight and kept it. Water ran from her knees to the tile. Her lips were slightly parted.

Her expression held several things at once. Resignation, perhaps, or its more sophisticated cousin, acceptance. But underneath both of those: something that looked very much like arrogance, and was probably the most accurate of the three.

Her sisters had all been taken differently.

Freesia: bled clean.

Pip: dissolved into rapture.

Morta and Echo: deeper, somewhere.

Lark: looping.

Willow: repurposed.

Ash: expelled through a wound in the fabric.

The old ones were not done.

They didn't want her soul. They wanted her form. Not to destroy it but to use it. Stretch it. Stitch it into something cartographic.

From the walls came a sound that wasn't sound. A chanting felt in teeth and in the pelvis and behind the eyes, words that had never been designed for air:

SHE WHO WILL BE THE HILL

THE VALLEY

THE MOTHERLAND

THE FINAL SKIN.

It began at her feet. The tile softened. Her heels sank into it with a slow, wet suction and she heard herself make a sound — low, involuntary, occupying the ambiguous territory where sensation lives before the brain decides whether to call it pleasure or pain. Her legs spread, Not wider, not longer, but outward, flesh finding new geometry, taking up more of the world.

The process was not quiet. Her hip split sideways with a sound like a door being forced open, bone spreading in wide, architectural fans. Her ribs cracked outward and began to calcify into something structural: ridge lines, archways, the suggestion of formations that would be named by people who hadn't been born yet.

Her spine multiplied. Vertebra by vertebra, then in clusters, then in sudden cascades. Her scream shaped the air around it, and the walls of the spa leaned in to listen.

Where Raven had stood, there was terrain. Hills of flesh and sinew, veined in black and pulsing. Her breasts swelled into twin domes crowned with obsidian protrusions that wept dark, steaming oil. Her thighs became cliff faces. The valley of her throat deepened and echoed with something that had been moaning inside her for centuries, apparently, waiting for the acoustics to be right. Her hair threaded into the ground and kept going, seeking stone, finding it, holding.

Raven did not die.

She expanded.

When her face finally entered the earth, it left an impression, a smirk, open mouth, eyes shut, the expression of a woman in the midst of something enormous and private.

The clouds that gathered above her had her cheekbones.

The wind moved through what had been her throat.

Maps would be drawn. Pilgrims would come to the canyon-mouth, the mountain-spine. Lovers would trace the hillside and never know they were memorising an ancient woman's anatomy.

She wasn't history.

She was geography.

She is the place.

And the spa?

Still there. Still waiting. Just beneath the left breast of the mountain that was once called Raven.

The door is always open.

You can check in.

But you can never leave.

— ✦ —

XVII. Dawn

The receptionist hummed as she worked through the terminal's closing sequence. Routine, efficient, not especially hurried. Her nails were red and sharp. Her name tag read Dawn. Her smile had not wavered once across the full shift, not even when the sounds coming through the air vents had got interesting.

It had been a long shift. The spa was fed, though. That made it good.

Behind her, the spa had tended to itself. The walls had re-knitted. The floor had wiped. Over the tub room, heat still rose like exhalation from something sleeping off a large meal.

She didn't look back. Nobody who worked here did.

Click. Click. Click. Power, terminal, security lock. Pointless, technically. But ritual mattered. It always had.

She retrieved her handbag from under the desk. Leather, ancient, scuffed into a softness like old skin, held shut by two gold clasps in the shape of weeping eyes. She shrugged on her coat, which caught the light like skin. Not hers. Never had been. But it fit so well.

Down the front hall, her heels clicked in time with the spa's heartbeat. Fainter now, digesting, somewhere between satisfied and dream. She passed the framed photographs: couples, facials, hen parties, everyone towelled and grinning. None of them staged. All of the faces real, once.

She unlocked the front doors and stepped outside. The wind didn't blow. The stars were wrong, but beautiful. She didn't look up.

The doors hissed shut. The lights went off. One thing remained:

AQUA NIRVANA SPA & WELLNESS

Flickering in the particular pink of something biological trying to pass for neon. Buzzing. Letters twitching.

You deserve this.

And beneath that, barely visible without commitment:

…a thread of black ichor, trailing from the door across the car park, toward the hills. Toward what had been Raven.

No alarm. No patrol. Just the neon and the dark and the hills breathing slowly above the treeline.

"Next booking confirmed."