The horses in her family had a habit of leaving, of drifting, pulling away from the things in their lives that kept them whole, kept them grounded. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t found the willpower to return to the Chamber, to her mother, to Erebor. Makai had left them, her own father, and it had never hurt Malis the way it had hurt her mother, but she had never fully understood why he left. Why he would want to leave anyone who loved him so much, so wholly, why he would want to deny a place in the universe that seemed to be carved out perfectly for him.
She understood now, though- and maybe it wasn’t for the same reasons, but she had come to the same conclusion.
Love was a terrible thing, there was no beauty in it, no purity. It was a ruinous thing that trapped and destroyed. It was all consuming, like a parasite buried in the marrow of your bones. There was no room for love in a world like this one, a world where, twice, she had been stolen from sleep, torn out of a dream and shoved into a nightmare. The first had made her plastic, broken her body and then her spirit, drawing thin cob-web fissures in the membrane of her soul. That was when the first shadows had slipped through, when the first darkness had dug itself a grave in her chest. The second had been only days ago, stolen away as a pawn in someone’s game. She had murdered twice, and both times she had wanted it. The ache in her throat for blood, the lust, that had not been her own. But the hunger for retribution, that predatorial urge to hurt those who had hurt her first, had been her own, born from the darkness churning in her chest. Even now she could feel it, quiet, patient, a sleeping beast.
The field unrolled before her, buried in the blue and black of a deep star-strewn night. Hardly anyone was out, and why would they be when the moon hung pregnant in the sky and shadow coiled like snakes through the grass and trees. But it felt easier this way, hidden with the few, out-running sleep for fear of what would happen when she let it claim her. Fear of who might come to collect her, fear of the things she would see played out across her eyelids. And with the shadow of night darkening that aching blue of her indigo skin, blending the band of black around those emerald-bright eyes and concealing the four curved horns that rose from forehead to nose, she didn’t feel so strange.
She didn’t feel like a piece of her own nightmare, slithering to life.
MALIS
makai x oksana