Where the voices end, darkness begins.
In one moment, the vultures (or at least she thinks it’s the carrion-eaters) are asking for a number. She obliges - “six,” her voice urgent but also graveled with disuse - and they give her only the blackness of space in return.
It’s not totally dark, of course. Stars twinkle all around her (glinting more like, she thinks, like the dead eyes of the damned). Galaxies swirl and shine, looking so close that she could touch them if she wanted. The old her, that blue girl who used to exist in a too-bright world compared to this one would have made the effort. The Jungle’s daughter would have laughed in delight at the sensation of floating, would have marveled at the universe and all the impossible sights. Because it is impossible - should be impossible. She shouldn’t be up here among the constellations - hovering over a vast, star-dense plane - but she is. Why should little-old-her be privy to such a spectacle? Who was she to gain such privilege in such an unfair world?
Now, she doesn’t even flex a muscle. She’s so desperately tired (and starved and thirsty and bone and heart-weary) that it doesn’t even occur to her. If it had, if she’d been the Jaide she aspired always to be, she would have met with resistance, anyway. A low snort she attempts proves as much. Nothing comes out. No tickle at the back of her throat, no sound is emitted into the still, dark air. Before this entire ordeal (the dream, the fires, Noir) she might have panicked. But now, she is the calm of a stone beneath a pounding, churning river.
Someone’s got me, she thinks. Then immediately after, I don’t want to die.
Maybe she should want to, after everything she’s gone through. Maybe she should want to feel the cold press of Death’s fingers against her forehead, a gentle touch before driving with numbing finality into her skull. Only ash and the charred remains of the life she once knew remain back in Beqanna, after all. She’ll never share the company of the macaws again. She’ll never see the bobbing pink faces of the river dolphins, never become a Sister like she’s dreamed of. Noir will not be there to greet her; the colt will never again snuggle for warmth and companionship against her side at night. Where will she go, the lone survivor of the world? Who will she turn to when it all becomes too much?
Maybe the vultures will have me, she consoles herself with the thought but she cannot reconcile it with the strange image it conjures. A mad flock, but not alone, she thinks, and chortles in her mind. But it’s not entirely her own thought. Something is in there, too, sharing space with her brain. A void that pulls at all the warmth she has remaining within her (it’s not much). She tries to shake it out, but then…
There are others alongside her, floating in space.
They are just as ragged and threadbare as she, wisps of the stout and sturdy beings they might have been before this all began. She doesn’t recognize them from Before Beqanna Burned; she doesn’t know them from any random meadow bum. But immediately, somehow, she learns everything about them. Images clamor to be seen in her mind, a whirlwind of pictures and voices and memories all foreign. They are similar to her own, but at the same time, wholly different. Jaide sees the fires ravage their homeland from four different sets of eyes. She sees a flash of red as a fox disappears into the undergrowth; watches as the famous falls dry up to nothing at all. The survivors (others she doesn’t know, not like Survivor Mountain's band and Alpha and Rouge) gather on different mountains. They look for food and water, like Jaide and her own group had, with varying degrees of success. They form search parties and gathering groups, alliances and even enemies. She sees the rise of the undead, how they start to gather and hunt in the wastelands below the mountains. It chills her once again. The growth of Judea’s devout group shows in Heartworm’s memories. Jaide counts as a habit (unable to stop herself, though she pauses after the sixth horse for a long spell) as nine survivors come to stand behind the overzealous woman. She wants the skeleton mare given over to the horde, her bones and magic a sacrifice she’s ready and willing to make (it won’t work, Jaide giggles, the stupid cow – nothing will satiate their all-consuming hunger).
Other stories emerge out of the void that has become her mind. Rhonan follows Kav and Gero blindly, rising in the middle of the night at the promise of food. It’s rash and foolhardy, you’ll run out of food soon enough, she thinks. The images move on quickly from there. She watches with little horror as Nadya becomes a monster. The horde welcomes her into the fold as a satellite member, and she pays her dues in the form of flesh. She tears apart a mother, tears apart a Carter. She can hear the soft whistle of the air escaping his trachea, can smell the blood as it pools around his broken head, but she doesn’t care much. Tyrna descends into the darkness, the madness like she had (has). Her herd-mates take the eternal slumber, and here, Jaide wants to sympathize a little. She reads each line of the wolf-girl’s ribs, understands the need for each scab that the grey mare picks at until it becomes fresh once more. She knows how flesh can be such a comfort between teeth that haven’t been used in days, weeks. Tyrna’s struggles make sense to her in a way that the memories of the others don’t.
Still, though, she feels nothing for any of them.
Her heart, once open to all, now feels constricted and leashed by some force she doesn’t understand. She feels like she’s given control of her very soul to someone else, though she doesn’t remember signing it over. There’s a sweetness she tries to ignore in the release, a feeling like freedom she vehemently denies. The presence wants her to so badly, though. It would be all too easy, a match to dry kindling – her soul for an eternal, final rest.
Laughter rattles from her aching chest, bubbling from a well that should have run dry long ago. Words soon follow, slipping and silky on a tongue wetted by her own blood and disease. “Home,” she/it croons into the starlit sky. Home for a price, of course. It’s there, far below her: a splatter of green and blue paint on an overlarge canvas, insignificant in the entire scheme of the universe. She/it talks about a choice, of sending two of their number with the darkness that now nestles into her ventricles. Jaide can feel the poison pumping with each beat of her heart, sickening her mind even further. It’s not a choice she wants to make (she’d sooner send herself). They’ve all suffered enough already – why is he/she/it doing this? Heartworm, Rhonan, Nadya, Tyrna, Jaide. One, two three, four, five -
Six? This demon is six, she decides. He/she/it is there amongst them, the silent sixth. It poisons all of them, pollutes their veins and throats in equal fashion. What will happen to the two it takes? Where will they go that is worse than their scorched lands? The monikers of the other four arrange themselves in her mind as she weighs their suffering. She tries to keep her mouth shut, tries to clamp her black lips down so that the names can’t escape. Unwittingly, they spill out. The demon makes her release them into the blank air. Nonono, she thinks as her tongue forms their names: “Nadya and Tyrna.” I’m sorry, she thinks to them, but cannot say out loud. A deafening silence fills her ears and lungs then. She thinks of Nadya’s eyes as a monster – how easily it could have been Noir she’d eaten (how close the monsters had been to him, anyway). She thinks of Tyrna’s wolf – how if any of them could survive anything else, it would surely be the girl and her canine other half. She has the strength and grit for it, more than the blue girl, anyway. Jaide sobs for all of them, internally, quietly, not even able to mourn out loud.
Jaide
girl of fire and ice