they all go into the dark; ALL

[sochi]

there are wolves in my head and their howling
there was a garden of evil in the palm of my hand

The disease has not left yet.

She feels it rattling in her bones. She rises with it each day, the disease that seeps beneath her skin, the blood that flecks the corner of her mouth, the weakness that causes her youthful limbs to tremble. She wonders if she will ever feel well again. She wonders if she is destined to live with this forever. If she is to spend her days shaking, coughing, her vision blurring and going spotty. It breeds a rage in her that she had not previously had. It takes the core of her and makes it sharper, harder. She becomes angry.

The hunger that had woken in her at the depth of the ocean does not abide. It simply morphs, changes her. She is not the star-eyed youth of her childhood anymore. She is not meek, mild—and she is done trying to apologize for what she is. She is done trying to pretend that she does not possess a predator’s hunger. She is done trying to pretend that she does not long for that thick copper to coat her lips, slip down her throat.

Perhaps it is why she does not startle when her vision is taken over, again.

She doesn’t fight it this time, although it causes her fury to bloom in her like a rose. Fury at Carnage for starting it all. Fury for her part in escalating it. Fury at this disease that rattles in her and now spreads.

Fury at this boy for causing it.

She rises to her feet and shifts, for the first time since she’s been back from Pangea, the tiger form feeling right and yet wholly wrong. The last time she’d been like this, she’d changed. She had become different. She had become herself, she thinks. She will not apologize for how she has adapted to changing circumstances. How she has grown. The world is harsh and she simply needs to be harsh to survive it.

Her head lifts and points toward Pangea, toward this boy who carries the root of her worst fears.

She cannot allow him to spread this further.

She cannot allow it to touch her mother, to touch Castile, to touch Daye.

To touch the seed of life that now rests in her belly, just a whisper of it.

Her lips pull back to reveal her canines and she digs her paws into the ground, shooting herself forward. She runs, despite the pain of aching muscles and rasping lungs. She runs through brush and over fallen trees. She runs even though the blood slips from her mouth to stain the cream of her fur. She runs even when her body protests and all she wants to do is find a place to rest her head, to forget all of this.

She runs until she breaches the godforsaken boundary of Pangea, her heart shuddering in her chest.

She runs until she sees him, his chest marked.

He looks innocent, she thinks, but she cannot allow herself to dwell on such things—not now. So she lets it bleed away and he becomes just a target. Nothing but the root of the root and the bud of the bud.

Once more, lips peel back and she roars, the sound deceptively powerful for how weak she feels.

She pays no mind to who else has heeded the call.

She simply launches at him, claws outstretched, swiping at whatever piece of him she can grasp.

(If allowed to live, he will bring ruin to us all.)

Ruin—

She is already there.

now I'm broken and bleeding, I’ll never find my way

S

OCHI

stranger in this land