"we pull apart the darkness while we can"

There is nothing surprising about nightmares crawling out of the shadow, not for Malis, not for the mare who nightmares loved best of all. So when his voice finds her in the silence, she does not startle. Instead she turns to face him, cautious, curious, but no longer violent in the way she had been when they met. He is arrogant and unsettling, but there is nothing that makes her feel as though his presence puts her in any immediate danger. Besides, if he is here with her, then he is not with her King, their children, or their people. That in itself is enough to settle the prickling unease that blossoms beneath her skin when he comes to stand so close.

But it does nothing to soothe the way she roars internally at the stench of death on his skin, at the rotted out places filled with wriggling maggots and tatters of skin peeled back like gaping mouths. The carnage reminds her of the girl Pollock left in the forest, of a body torn open and wasted, the stink of sour meat and old blood. He had taken her over this body, put life in her belly and then meant to end it, to end them both. Infection makes her remember all this, makes her remember Pollock’s weight against her back, how it felt with his horns buried in the soft bone of her face, how it felt when her spine split beneath his hooves. He reminds her, and she cannot help but loathe him for it.

’You remind me of someone.’ He says, and she cannot help but see the irony in that. It seems he is not the only one stirring dark memories, dredging up pasts better left forgotten. She smiles, but it is not the same one she reserves for Killdare, it is one that curves as wickedly as the horns atop her face. “Did you not like her either, Infection?” The smile softens a little, bemused, and she moves to close the distance between them despite the way his stench turns her stomach. Ever so carefully she pushes the tip of the uppermost horn against his skin, careful to avoid the places filled with rot and filth, and draws a line from his throat to his chest before backing off again. It isn’t a threatening gesture by any means, not the warning she had meant for him earlier when she offered to bury those horns in the soft meat of his throat, but it is a promise, a reminder that (even immortal) he would do well to heed.

“You’re falling apart just standing here.” She says in regards to the rasp of his words, her eyes narrow and incredulous, though somehow she believes him. “How useful could you possibly be?” But she isn’t doubting him, and this much should be clear by the way her eyes glint in the dark of the approaching shadows, she’s daring him to show her. She shifts again, turning languidly to face him, close enough to touch though he would find her earlier promise fulfilled if he tried. And then she settles, disgusted with the way she already grows used to his rotting smell, and with a curiosity that few are ever privileged to see, her guard drops a little. “You die as I watch, even now your flesh falls away, and yet you stand here as proud and arrogant as ever,” she pauses to cock her head at him, her voice thick with the shadows that drench them, “what kind of creature are you?”

MALIS

makai x oksana