wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me; pollock

[Malis]

"we pull apart the darkness while we can"

She looks down at the rot and decay below them. The stretch of ugly discolored bone peeking through tatters of flesh that, in places, had seemed to slip from the body to rest on the gray and brown ring of dead grass around it. There was nothing beautiful about death, nothing that softened the tightening she felt in the pit of her stomach. But the longer she watched, her eyes drawn to this decay with the same pull of a swirling, billowing fire, the further her thoughts slipped to herself. She could regenerate, but to what extent. Would this be a fate she ever knew, a bloated body full of stink and rot and parasite, a disturbance that strangers sneered at in passing. A spectacle even in death.

Her face darkened as a frown twisted across the delicate curve of her tense mouth. She was remembering that first day she had realized something had changed. That day with Erebor. Malis had confessed the turmoil of fury and disgust she felt for the flash of indigo on her skin, for the way she wore the color like an impossible, all-consuming scar. It was like being trapped in a memory she only wanted to forget, a memory that seemed far too impossible to ever be true and yet it was. It was as true as the blue on her skin and the impatient way her flesh knit itself back together. They had tried to burn the color from her that day, to melt the indigo from her skin in the same way Hestia’s skin had melted from her bones. It should have worked, and on anyone else it would have. It would have even worked on Malis had they tried it before the impossible memory. But something, everything, had changed then and when the seared pink flesh had faded instantly and new indigo hairs had filled the hole to erase its existence forever, Malis had been lost to the impossibilities.

She had been running, hiding, ever since.

The sound of his voice draws her out of the misery of her musings and she turns her stricken face to him. She feels his dark eyes on her, can feel the way the rove her shape as if he is both damning her and trying to understand. He will see stone and steel and the jagged edges of broken things, he will see the glint of cruel obsidian and the flash of blue and purple like a fresh bruise bleeding across her skin. He will never know the bright emerald-eyed girl with plain brown skin and harmless secrets hidden in a delicately wild face. That girl had died a long time ago.

“When she was alive?” She questions with a glint like flickering green flame in the pits of her eyes. “Or did you find her pretty when her skin swelled and maggots swam in the jelly of her eyes.” Her tail flicks uneasily against her hocks as she watches him, the tension in her mouth tracing fingers all the way up her cheek to settle in the mask of black around her eyes. He eases closer and her eyes narrow a little when she answers his next question. “I don’t love the smell.” It is a simple answer, elusive but simple, and then, “Did she bother you?”

Is that why she is dead, she wonders silently, did you do this to her.

MALIS

makai x oksana

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