Are you a monster?
You are certainly not the monster you once were.
This new land is full of fantastical beasts, mythological in their strangeness. You were among them once, a strange and wretched thing. Your vicious mother’s daughter, though you were never as monstrous or depraved. But you are nothing now except a feathered thing, dripping blood where the skin tears when you move.
You long for the comfort of the afterlife, where the skin tore but never bled. Where you were not a fragile thing. This place – wherever it is, because it certainly is not Beqanna – is cold and the wind sinks daggers into your skin so that it cracks and bleeds and you stand there staining the snow around you a deep crimson. It is a nuisance, certainly, but it feels good to bleed.
You are idle in the shadows, studying the passersby. They are largely oblivious, or perhaps willfully ignorant, to your presence and that is just fine with you. You do not want to be here, you do not want to engage, the frigid temperature scalds your lungs and puts an ache in your ancient heart.
How strange it is to be so unremarkable. You do not study them in wonder but rather in irritation. Because you had been among them once – gods – and now you are nothing but a peculiar thing with feathers where your coat should be. A joke of a thing! Feathered without wings, a flightless bird and great, wide eyes.
Your irritation mounts, compounded by the knowledge that you will not be able to make your way back to where you came from. The place you belong. So, you call out to the next thing that passes, beckoning, “you,” you bark, hoarse and stilted, “come here.”
and the nightmares that accompany it
