Mortal or not, she still does not sleep. There is too much that waits for her in the shadows behind closed eyes. Instead, she spends her nights like a ghost across the landscape, fading in and out of a starless forest until her mind is full of nothing and it does not hurt to stop. It is the forest she has chosen tonight – a place she still cannot enter without remembering, and it such remembering that drives her ever forward, restless and impatient until sweat dampens the hollow of her neck and hips despite the chill of winter all around.
It is the scream that finally coaxes her from her place among the shadows, the shrillness of a voice warped and changed by fear. It does not matter that this scream is one she has not yet heard – that it is strange and unfamiliar and like a thing plucked from the depths of her nightmares – because she knows the voice that hides behind it, knows that it comes from lips like crushed gold and a mouth that calls her mother. She knows, too, that it has come once from her own lips in this same forest, beneath this same sky.
And, she knows why.
She spills like water over the snow, all power and grace, and there is no hesitation in any part of her quivering blue body when it weaves between skeleton trees and beneath the branches that reach out like fingers to hold her back. Small welts appear across her body, against the curve of her neck and the hollows of a wild face – and where once they would have faded, forgotten as soon as the skin stopped its thrumming, they rise now like mountainous ridges with her ribs as the valleys of blue beneath. She is mortal again, the way she had been as a child, but the years of invulnerability have taken their toll and where once she was brave, she is now little more than reckless.
It is not easy to forget what it is to be a God.
When she finds them in the open it is like waking to a nightmare, to a nightmare she has known again and again each night and through the dark. Alight is small, delicate and bright gold, and Malis knows her immediately. The other is so much larger, stronger, and even in silhouette she finds that she can see the arrogance that seeps from him. Their gold is the same, bright and soft like spun gold, except where Alight seems like warmth, he seems like death. She is quiet when she slips closer, languid and vicious, and though he has not turned to face her, though she cannot see those curling horns in silhouette, she is certain he knows she had come.
“Alight,” she says and her voice is as glass, sharp and unforgiving, flat as the expression that warps her face into wild blue fury, “come here, Alight.” But there is a pit in her belly, the abyss Alight had glimpsed at, and it fills with the suspicion that in mere moments, in a river of unraveling seconds, she had lost her daughter to the dark. It is like feeling small fingers loosen in her hand, watching them uncurl and let go to grasp the new hand that has been outstretched. The hand of a beast that is much more at home when buried in the soft, pliant flesh of a throat.
‘Who are you?’ Alight asks and Malis can feel something come undone in her chest, the roaring of great fissures opened wide enough to rend her in half. She is silent only a beat, though she shifts closer to Alight, pressing the blue of her mouth against that brilliant crushed gold. “ He is the beast from the forest.” Is all she says at first, winding close enough that she can feel the blue of her hair wilt in the heat of those fire-born wings. She knows Alight will remember those stories now, even if she hadn’t thought of them in years, that she will remember the warnings of the forest and of the man who hid within, remember why it was that Malis had kept her children tethered so close to the relative safety of the Chamber. Then, in a voice that is as heavy as the stones gathered within her chest, “He is your father, Alight.”
Her eyes turn on Pollock, bright and furious, bleeding green with the hatred that spills from her chest – and it doesn’t matter that this will only fuel his hunger, that it will only feed the beast in his belly, because it is all she has left for him anymore.
MALIS
makai x oksana