Freedom felt like an impossible thing. The kind of notion you have in a dream that feels so important, so perfect that you could build a life on it. The kind of notion that when you wake up and try to put it together, none of the pieces fit and it’s so painfully incoherent and irrelevant that it feels like you’ve lost everything even though there was nothing there to lose at all. That was freedom.
Freedom was an illusion.
Malis could remember her childhood easily, back when it had just been mom and dad and the wild green of deep jungle. It was after father had first been sick, after her parents had dragged themselves to the Chamber to bring the dead back to life and after that everything was, for a moment in time, just right. Either their burdens hadn’t existed yet, or she had simply been too young to notice them, to share the weight resonating in their eyes, but she had felt free.
She had known freedom.
Except-
As the years passed and their happy family grew and shattered under its own weight, it became painfully clear that freedom existed only to be taken, only to be denied. It was the world’s way of tangling its fingers in the membranes of your soul until all willpower had been sucked drier than the bleached bones washed up on the beach.
Freedom was an illusion.
The night stretched impossibly dark overhead and stars flickered in and out of view through the leaves trembling noiselessly at their moorings on the branches. When the mare appears suddenly from a portal of darkness, Malis barely flinches. It isn’t that she’s unafraid, in fact the sudden pressure in her stomach feels a lot like the absence of courage, but there was nothing surprising that her demons had at last come to find her, to collect her.
“Hello.” She says, and her voice is low and husky, and she wills the trembling of her heart in her chest not to bleed into the blue of her deliberately stoic face. For a moment her eyes drop and wander first to the black chesire smile, and then to the rest of the creature who seemed blacker than black, colorless – for what claim can a shadow have to any color. But then her eyes snap back upwards to drown in the glow of shapeless yellow. “I always knew you’d come for me eventually.”
Stoic still, but it’s the biggest lie she’s ever told, for she can feel the way her blood turns to ice in her veins and the marrow in her bones turns to dust with the way she forces the tremors to the deepest part of her broken, used up soul.
MALIS
makai x oksana