Fruit of Vitality

An old man in a state of near death eats a plump green pear, slumped at the base of an enormous pear tree. The moment he swallows his last bite, vitality returns to him. His thin grey hair becomes thick, shaggy and scarlet red once more, complimenting his fiery green eyes nicely. Colour returns to his skin until he looks like a living person again, and furthermore it tightens up until the wrinkles are erased entirely.

He straightens out to stretch when he is finished, looking not a day over 20, and does a little dance before he climbs up into the tree to join his granddaughter, who doesn’t look a day over 6 and who’s hair and eyes match his perfectly. She is eating a small, dense, orange coloured pear.

“Shall I tell you a story?” he asks her.

“The tree the tree!” she replies.

And so he tells her a story.

Once there was a fine young man, beloved by all who knew him. Gentle yet strong, and kind as can be, the young man earned the admiration of every person he came across. But one day, he grew weary of his travels. Night after night, alone on the road. It took it’s tole on him, so he took a wife. Which is to say he bumped into a very intoxicated young lady who beat him to within an inch of his life over a bottle of whisky SHE broke, and then dragged him to her home to nurse him back to health only to find herself being proposed to a week later when she woke. She said yes of course.

Ten months later, a perfect little girl was born. Olive skin, shining green eyes, and fiery red hair. The young man was complete. Or he felt that way in any case. The family lived happily together for six long glorious years of prosperity, before calamity struck.

A storm the likes of which mankind had never seem was raging through the nearby village, it would reach their farm within hours. They prepared as best they could, expecting an ordinary cyclone. It wasn’t ordinary though, ‘twas a storm of demons.

Foul lifeforms of all shapes and sizes poured out of the cyclone and destroyed everything for miles and miles in every direction. By the time the cyclone passed, there was an army of dark hellish creatures swarming the farm. The young man locked his wife and daughter in a small storage room at the back of the underground shelter, and he held the line. Slaying demon after demon his fury became insurmountable. He was a machine, mowing down the assailants that threatened his family.

Three days went by, and the hordes finally thinned out.

Three more days, and they stopped altogether.

Once his blood had cooled a bit, and he had caught his breath, the young man looked behind him to see the door to the storage room was literally torn to shreds. He burst into the room, to find his little girl crying over her mother’s body, with a jagged piece of wood still clutched in her hand, no doubt used to finish off the little winged imp that lay dead on one of the shelves.

Ten years came and went. The girl grew up into a fine young woman, and the young man didn’t seem to age a day.

New village. The young man took to smithing, and become quite talented. His steel was called the best in the land by many. His daughter helped him happily, and together they made a tidy profit and lived a good life. So good they nearly forgot their grief altogether.

Until Calamity struck again, this time in the form of a direct assault.

A cloaked old man knocked on the young man’s door, when he answered, a bolt of lightning just missed his face. And just like that he was launched into combat. He grabbed a sword from the umbrella stand and leapt into the mystery assailant, who expertly dodged with a roll to the right. For hours their battle waged on, mage versus swordsman, each evading the other’s attacks with precision as they danced together. The magic wielder seemed surprised that his target’s sword was deflecting his lightning.

Finally, when half the village had been reduced to rubble and both men seemed exhausted beyond measure, the young man struck a blow. His sword pierced the heart of the old man, who simply smiled.

“You have committed a blasphemy sir! To wound a god is a great sin! I demand recompense.” The fair red haired young lady that called the young man father was attempting to sneak up behind the now self proclaimed god to slit his throat, and he knew it. He turned around at the last possible moment, and blasted her with black lightning.

“She will age 1 year for every day, until she dies. Remember this day, foolish mortal.” the self proclaimed god said.

“Why?” was the only word the young man could bring himself to say.

“Because I’ve been watching you and you looked like fun! Who do you think sent the storm that killed your wife? And I must say, I was right. This is the most fun I’ve had in centuries!” With that, he cackled maniacally and vanished.

It would be two months before a solution would find the young man. The girl had become old, appearing and feeling as though she were nearly 80 despite her actual age of 16. She asked if they could rest, and the young man built a fire.

“You look good for 34,” she said weakly, and chuckled, “Look dad I know it’s hard but, you're all I care about in this world, so I find it comforting to know that you will outlive me.

At this, the young man started crying. He silently sobbed into his daughter’s sleeping bag while she stroked his head as though he were a child and she his grandmother. When he was all cried out, he sat up, and pulled two pears out of his bag. One green, and one orange. Daughter chose the orange pear, and father chose the green. They had always shared a favourite fruit, but always differed in preference when it came to the variety. These were the last of their perishable rations, refilled at the last town they passed through three days ago. Ripe as can be, the orange pear made gushing sounds as it was bitten into, as the excessive juice was slurped up and the soft flesh of the fruit was nibbled away bite by bite. But the young man didn’t eat his fruit. When she was finished eating, he sung her a lullaby, and she fell asleep almost immediately. Once certain his elderly daughter was sleeping soundly, the young man slipped away. He only walked about 20 feet or so, just far enough to be out of ear shot but close enough to keep an eye on her.

Looking upward to the sky, eyes full of tears, the young man begged the gods to help him save his little girl’s life. He raised his arm into the air, hand clasped around his pear, and squeezed it with all his might reducing it to skin and mush.

The gods answered. The cloaked old man who had cast the curse appeared before the young man, along with a very tall woman standing regal and proud and holding his ear as though he were a petulant child caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“Go on son,” she said in an authoritative voice, “Say it. Like we practised.”

The cloaked old man’s voice and body morphed to a less wrinkled and much smaller stature, his cloak shrank with him. His visage became that of a little boy no older than seven.

“I’m sorry.”

The regal woman pulled harder on his ear. Her iridescent eyes stared forward without blinking. No expression beyond the air of superiority that seemed to emanate from her very soul. Not a hair on her head made so much as a slight twitch, as though wilfully defying the wind. Her jet black hair and ice white skin glistened with equal but opposite radiance in the moonlight, each complimenting the other perfectly.

“OW OW MOM! COME ON! I’m sorry for playing games ok, I forget sometimes that you mortals our made in our image and share in our divine right. I was wrong to toy with your life, and I was wrong to consider you as lesser than I. How can I make this up to you mortal?”

The young man clenched his fists and said, “Save my daughter from your depraved magic.”

The goddess answered him with grave news, “She is afflicted by a god’s curse. It is not quite that simple. There is always a price, no matter how unjust that may be.”

“What is the price? I’ll pay anything!” the young man’s eyes were welling up with tears again, but this time with relief. He was ecstatic to know that there was a price, because a price meant a possibility, a price meant hope.

“Your vitality.” The child god retorted.

The young man blinked at him, an awkward silence pervaded the space until the goddess spoke up again.

“She will require your youth to regain her own.”

“What’s the catch?” the young man inquired.

The goddess smiled at him. A creepy little grin that made the young man’s soul quiver.

“She will require a great deal more vitality than you have to offer, repeated treatments in fact.”

The child god laughed and said, “This is where we get to how I make amends.” A massive tree sprouted up behind him, bearing two varieties of pear. The young man’s favourite, and his daughter’s. “Eat one of her favourites now, and she will receive all of your abundant vitality, you will be a useless, decrepit old man. Survive to the next full moon, and the cycle will begin. Every time you eat a green pear, your youth will be restored. She will then eat an orange pear, which will trigger her aura to leech off of yours, taking your vitality away again slowly over the course of three days. You will then remain decrepit until you do it over again at the following full moon.”

“Neither will die as long as neither misses the treatment. You will be as immortals. But miss one full moon, and both of you will die before the sun has fully risen,” cautioned the goddess.

Both deities disappeared just then, quickly as they had come. The young man carried his daughter to the tree, and partook of the orange pear as instructed. Then he watched dumbstruck as the girl’s youth returned to her, and then some. She was as a six year old girl once more. Suddenly the young man was not a young man, he was old. Very old.

The girl didn’t wake until the next full moon. When she did, she seemed to have no recollection of who she was or where she had come from. The now very old man ate a green pear, and transformed into a young man before her very eyes.

She fixed her awestruck gaze upon his face, dazzled by this magical metamorphosis, and she asked him one question.

“Who are we?”

He thought for a moment, and then he said, “you are my angel, my darling, my Anjali. And I am your grandfather.”

The centuries went by, and they never missed one ritual. They lived happily ever after in their pear tree, isolated from the world but together always.

And so ends the tale.

As the youthful old man concludes his story, he looks down at his slumbering 'granddaughter' and smiles thoughtfully.

"T'is a shame and a blessing that you’ll never grow up. This tree is our prison, but I'm happy here. I love you my daughter."