As with most orphans, she is too young to be alone like this. Her sides are thin and her bones are prominent, and it makes her lack that soft, innocent roundness of childhood. But in a world where plague has touched everything - the land and the trees and the many inhabitants, Winslow does not feel strange. Fever has been her constant companion, and she is used to that wet pressure that sits like a blanket over her lungs until she is gagging and coughing and spitting up globules of blood she wipes impatiently across knobby knees. It is all she’s ever known and all she’s ever seen, so when suddenly the plague lifts and the cure spreads like a balm over a wounded world, she is bewildered.
Frightened.
She follows the retreating dark as the light pushes it back, races along on legs that feel oddly strong and lungs that don’t suffocate her when she gasps for more air. She feels panicky, that bubble of fear sitting so cold in her belly, the stutter of her pulse when her heart thumps erratically in her chest. How can the world be changing like this, and so suddenly - and why!
It is strange how she clings to the sick, how desperately she hunts to rediscover the dark.
But it is all she’s ever known, and in a short life of belonging nowhere and being so unwanted, it is terrifying to lose this steadying sameness.
She does not notice the moment the frost-covered grass gives way to hard, red clay, does not notice that the landscape around her is suddenly so unfamiliar. She is too distracted by the swell of churning darkness in the sky ahead, the way it swirls black and ugly like a bruise on the day. She moves closer, as close as she can on willowy baby legs, until she is at the edge of the crater and peering down into its belly.
She shifts then, limbs shortening to something more sturdy, tail suddenly long and dense and fleshy as it lashes uneasily behind her. Her small, feline face lifts once to peer uncertainly at the landscape around her, ears unhappily flat against her robins-egg blue skull, and then she tips into the crater with a soft, wary grunt, bracing those blue paws as she slides through loose earth towards the bottom of the hole.
She feels dragged here by something dark and nameless, a fear of not knowing where she belongs in a world that is suddenly so beautiful when she is still so ragged. It isn’t the plague that had made her so gaunt - though certainly it hadn’t helped - and even though her fever is gone and her lungs don’t hurt, and the only blood on her pale blue fur is old and crusted, she is still wrong. Still a scab on a healed world, and it draws cracks along the surface of a heart that tries so hard not to break.
It is so much easier to hide brokenness in a broken world.
So the little lion cub curls up in the red clay near the belly of the crater, her little nose tucked against her toes and her tail wrapped so tight around her body. She doesn’t even move when the sky opens up to cry on her, and the rain soaks through her powdery blue fur until she shivers against the bite of cold air. She’ll just sleep for awhile, safe in the shadow of the plague-cloud, safe in the belly of the crater because it is the only place she belongs.
the devil in my arms said feed me to the wolves tonight