She waits for the dark to come with the setting sun before emerging from the shadows.  It is easier to wait until the whole world is a shadow, rather than the small pockets that exist during the day.  It is easier for her to blend in – to be the monster that she is – when the stark light is not glittering off of her scales.  It is easier to wake when most are asleep, to avoid the stares and scares of young and old alike when she passes by.  In the dark, she is her new self.   In the dark, she is free.  

Some creatures are not meant for the light.

Zosma moves through the edge of the forest like the refugee she has become, with a nimble and hurried grace.  The fir branches still shake as her leathery wings scrape them, dislodging needles to rain down and slide off of her sleek, reptilian body.  She has taken this trail to the river every night.  It is as familiar to her as the stars once were, when she lived and loved among them.  Here, she makes sure she can’t see them anymore.  The crowded evergreens shelter and shield her from the constellations above.  They reach across the inky sky like hands (Her hands) grasping at nothing, but grasping all the same.  Waiting, reaching, but never closing on anything more than dust.

Eventually, the shadows relinquish her to the winding river banks.  She makes a conscious effort to focus on the glassy surface of moving water in the near distance (to not look directly up at the sky, nor to look at her reflection directly below).  In this way, Zosma stills herself into nothingness.  She can almost believe she is still the pale mare that fell in love with the honey-eyed woman on an island far away.  She can almost forget that she is a monster that worshipped and adored a demon, only to be remade in her image and cast aside.  

She pulls the shadows around her when she thinks too long like this.

They are weak things still, tendrils of fading smoke that try but fail to conceal her.  She is always surprised to see them, though.  Each time the black mare is yanked from her reverie, she startles to see that she has stretched some of the darkness from the forest to wrap around her.  Tonight, as she loses herself in violent memories of broken angels and rabid children, they are denser than they have ever been.  Zosma marvels at the way they spin around her limbs and wings quicker when she notices them, almost as if they are excited she has.  A smile starts on her face for the first time in too long.  But then there is a crack sounding from the woods just beside her.  Too close for her to disappear again without being seen. 
   
 

Zosma

Crack.

A sound like a bone breaking.  A reminder of the exquisite pain of her femur snapping cleanly in two.  Crack, a rib.  Crack, a humerus.  On and on until she was a pile of waste, of broken bones and severed tendons.  On and on until she could not breath, until she was turned inside out, all her organs splayed and shining in the gaseous light of a passing star.  Crackcrackcrackcrackcrack.  She remembers how it felt to be so helpless that she couldn’t even ask for her own death, couldn’t even beg.  Not that it mattered.  Kangaroo always put her back together again, stitch by stich, she felt every time.  

Crack.

That sound again in the here and now.  It is different but so very much the same.  Z would (should) have startled, but fear has been forcefully drained out of her.  It has been replaced by an instinctual and cold curiosity – the desperate disbelief in one’s own mortality, for she has already died so many times and come back.  The demon had taught her not to fight or to flee.  She had taught her to be an opportunist, a waiter and a watcher.  So that is exactly what this demon does.  She shrinks deeper into darkness of her own making, spinning the tendrils faster and tighter around her sleek form.  She does not show herself – not at first – and lets the silence grow in the warm summer air.

Reveal yourself, the other says.  They are the first words she’s heard from another since her time away from Earth.   It is funny, in an ironic, not-really-all-that-funny way.  Because since the last time she has spoken to someone from Beqanna, she truly has revealed herself, revealed the monster lying dormant under her skin.  Zosma flexes her membranous wings experimentally, thoughtfully.  She can hear the other approaching (a woman, by the pitch of her voice).  The dulled sound of her steps on the soft riverbank means that she doesn’t have long to wait or to watch.  A decision will have to be made.

With a greater, more expansive sweep of her wings, she clears the air completely of her shadows.  She reveals herself all right, and with rather a flourish.  Twin horns spiral outward from her skull as three more fall in descending size down the flat plane of her face.  Her whip-like, spade-ending tail flicks like a feline behind her, agitated or excited or both.  She glows like hell, a deep red that emanates off of her scaled skin and illuminates the reeds that sway gently around her.  Zosma grins at the pretty girl she finally sees, and it is like the fanged smile of a ravenous and sure predator in their element.  “You asked for it.”  The dark mare takes a step forward.  "Don't you wish you hadn't?"


   
 

Zosma

Indifference is not the reaction she had been going for.

Unabashed fear?  Yes.  Trembling lips and quaking legs?   Certainly.  Anguished cries into the dark, hot air?  Oh, most definitely.  But this woman regards her with a calmness that speaks to her familiarity with monsters.  Perhaps, Zosma thinks, there are worse creatures out here than she, things more terrible that go bump in the night.  It is hard to believe.  

But even as she is scrutinizing the other for points of weakness, she is moving closer.  The splash of the shallow water sounds distant to her ears.  She’s too busy studying the painted lady face as she approaches, as the space between them dissolves into almost nothing.  At first, Zosma thought that this is what she wanted.  Up in space, it hadn’t mattered that she was ripped apart and resewn thousands of time, the skin crudely drawn back together.  It hadn’t mattered what she looked like, that her eyeballs melted from their sockets or that Kangaroos’ kisses left puncture marks on every inch of her they roamed.  Even when she was remade into the being she now was, she hadn’t cared.  She only worried how she would be received.  Now that Kagerus openly accepts her appearance, she longs for a touch of fear.

Kangeroo tried to brutally muscle an ego into her charge, and maybe that’s what surfaces now.
  
I’ll ask more of you, she says immediately, so close Z can see each individual eyelash curling towards her brow.  And you’ll wish there was more.  Normally, this kind of talk by a pretty girl would have her stomach pleasantly fluttering.  But a heavy weariness sucks at her.  She remembers, all too clearly, the last adventure she has just finished (or at least, the prologue to her current adventure).  She still sees the faces of her island family when she closes her eyes and dwells in that distant place.  So she does not reply.  Her opal eyes are luminous, though.  It is clear she will go with her anyway, even as exhausted as she is – ever the glutton for the eccentric.

“I was not,” her deep voice intones.  And now it is her turn to be studied.  She finds herself warming under the roving gaze of the stranger.  Extraordinary.  “Zosma,” she corrects, clearing her throat and mind both.  Because if this examination continues, she’s not sure she will be able to hold herself back.  She is not over her goddess – not by half – but this one could prove a pleasurable first step away and ahead.  “And you?  What might I call the woman who wants to ask so much of me already?”  She grins then, and fangs poke out of her black mouth.  “What makes you think I won’t devour you on the spot?”   



   
 

Zosma