Fantasy

The Uiii Bloom

By Nekonekoniii

In this world, delight is not a feeling alone — it is a substance. When a person, animal, or even a field of flowers experiences true, unforced joy, a warm green-gold vapor seeps out of them, and that vapor is called uiii. It gathers in low places, pools in hollows, and can be skimmed, bottled, and drunk. A mouthful of uiii makes a person lighter, braver, quicker to laugh, and it is the most valued thing in every market from the shore villages to the high terraces. You are a gleaner — one of the trained few who can feel a bloom coming before it rises, who knows how to stand still and not scare it away. You have been working the same circuit for nine years, and you have never once been wrong about where the uiii would surface. This morning, at the meadow's edge, you felt something you have never felt before: a bloom so vast it has no edges, rising not from the flower field where it should, but from the abandoned tileworks up the hill — a place where nothing has lived or laughed in thirty years. Something up there is happy. Deeply, impossibly happy. And whatever it is, it is still growing. Who you are: You are a gleaner of nine years' standing, known across the valleys for your unerring sense of where uiii will rise, with your own circuit, your own jar, and a reputation you have earned. People greet you by name at every market, and half of them owe you a favor.

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