“Hello Malis, are you still in there?”
She would’ve turned away from him if she remembered how, but her wasted body only lay there, her spirit wholly crushed.“No,” she whispered back instead, her voice ragged from so much silence, “Malis is gone.”
--
But the pressure of him doesn’t fade from her head. He remains, not unlike a headache, carving out a space for himself beside her thoughts, a space where there should be none. She thinks she can feel him settle there, he might even be smiling at her in that strange way he does. But he digs in deep like a parasite, burying something else, something ruinous, a seed of darkness in the deepest part of her consciousness, of magic that isn’t hers but loves her anyway. She knows this, she can feel it, but the numbness of solitude, of being trapped in a stone tomb with only her demons to keep her company leaves her feeling as though she is observing this through someone else’s thoughts. She is detached, and this is easier; she is detached, because she cannot live with the truths she has been carved from.
Malis. His voice sounds again, and he is crooning, he is pleased.
She is wary.
“Malis.” He says once more, and this time his voice is in her ears, not her head, and she has only a second to brace herself before the stone slab over her body is pulled back to let in the light. The light. She drowns in it, gasping and writhing and burning in its bright. It feels wretched where it touches the blue, where it warms her skin and finds the dark that pools in the bottoms of those aching emerald eyes. A hand reaches in to stroke her shoulder and at first she leans away, burying her face in the familiarity of the cold stone slab she had been pinned against for so long in the dark. But the hand is gentle against her skin, his flesh cool to the touch and that is also familiar, so she softens a little for her captor. “Malis,” he says one last time, his hand moving to take the halter between his fingers and pull her up out of the tomb, “come with me now.”
She rises without question, finding her balance on legs that should be as weak as willow branches, but something makes her strong. It is his magic, she realizes with the furrowing of her dark brow, the magic he had buried in her head. She was nothing without him. The thought doesn’t feel like hers, but it fills her head like an echo until it is all she knows, until she is not only obedient and complacent at his side, but willing too. He saved her, pulled her from the dark loneliness she deserved, to give her another chance. He is good, he is kind, and this is the only life she could have had anyway.
He leads her down another hallway with his hand against her neck and she follows quietly at his side, calm until the hallway opened up into a vast coliseum, until the battlefield to-be reached out to call to its precious blue mare. She felt its presence in her belly like a heat, a hunger, a darkness she resented for the way she craved it. It was a darkness she had known intimately, a darkness she had conquered, a darkness that would never let her go. There must have been a part of her that had not died in the stone tomb though, a piece of the blue mare that still held on to who she was before, because when the darkness reached to take her she balked. “I can’t.” She starts, she tries, wanting to turn away. But Grumblesnakes merely releases his hold of the halter and turns to go, knowing inately what will come next. She knows, and it ruins her. She can feel them thrashing and shifting somewhere beneath her feet, great colossus beasts of magic waiting impatiently to be unmade.
She moves stiff legged into the center of the arena, silent as she absorbs the scene around her. The coliseum is immense. There is a ring of tall stone bleachers around the entire perimeter, but she notes that Grumblesnakes is the only one in them. Where she stands at the center is all dirt and clay, smooth, bare of any root or rock. It seems large enough to fit an entire kingdom inside and she wonders why anyone would need this much room. Her banded eyes lift to the sky to find that this stone structure is without a ceiling, but birds and clouds seem to follow a curve overhead that makes her suspect the existence of a barrier. There is a sound to her left and she turns quickly to watch the spot in the wall where stone grids against stone to open like a gaping mouth of black.
From within that mouth came a slender bay mare with a halter identical to her own, a familiar bay mare, and Malis felt her heart seize in her chest. This girl was Malis, but she was the Malis from before. The girl who grew up in the jungle with her family, who raced beneath the canopy of green with wild cats; this girl was unbroken, unruined. Malis felt a roar of agony tear through her chest, rending flesh from bone until she didn’t even know what held her together. The bay girl was wild, defiant, and her green eyes flashed like buried gems as she raced forward to come face to face with her bitter blue future. “I hate you.” She cried, and with none of the venom that would come from the years to follow. “Look what you’ve let us become, look what you did to us. It’s no wonder father left you, how could he stay.” The accusation feels like steel buried in her bones, like tattered flesh that tore and bled. The darkness swelled in her, a bitterness that this girl, this Malis from the past can even still exist and be so whole when all she felt now was years of coming undone. With her eyes burning bright she tries to pull away from the bay girl, to leave, but something turns her flesh to stone and she finds she can go nowhere. “Please.” She says once, the word a ragged prayer on deaf ears, but she knows what is to come even as the girl rears back to strike.
You should kill her malis. His voice comes in her head, and even though she had known it would she feels cold inside. “I can’t.” She tries. But she feels something come unhinged inside her, his nimble fingers hovering impatiently in her thoughts. You must.
Time slows, winding around her like a lazy river, and a single second stretches into a million as the bay girl rears up and flashes the white of her underbelly. Before Malis has a chance to react though, a hoof strikes the bone of her cheek and it shatters. For a moment she is blinded by pain, furious at the illogical strength of the brown girl who had returned to her yelling, hurling insult and accusations that hurt as much as any stone. “God, you’re such a coward. Even this life is too good for you, death is too good for you.” There is an echo trapped inside the blue mare, an echo of soft and kind, an echo of sanity. But it is lost in an instant when she rallies and thrusts herself forward, burying the full length of each horn in the soft squish of the bay girls fleshy chest. “YOU ARE NOTHING.” She screams, and the echo dies inside her. Malis withdraws, freeing her horns with a wet sound, and when the body of her childhood hits the ground it bursts into black shadow and is gone. This was never meant to be a great battle, this foe not selected for the prowess of power. This was meant to undo, to sever the blue mare entirely from who she had managed to become.
And so she is undone.
Her sides still heave, more with fury than exertion, when his voices comes one last time.
My malis.
And she is.
The ground rumbles at the opposite end of the coliseum and Malis twists to face it. For a second there is nothing but sand and dirt, nothing but empty stone seating. Still, her skin prickles suspiciously as the rumbling increased and it feels like it might vibrate loose the marrow from her bones. She is wary when she slinks forward, wary but unafraid until the stone stadium explodes in shower of dust and rock sediment. From the yawning darkness hurtles an enormous colossus, a dragon, though she does not realize this until the dust settles. He is entirely black, smooth as the obsidian of her horns, but for the faint glimmering outline of each scale. Along his spine are a row of jagged, uneven spikes and they meet a crown of them against the top of his heavy skull. His wings are so ragged from years of battle that she doubts he can still fly well, but in a coliseum this size it won’t matter at all. He staggers forward and his tail whips around so that she can see that it also has a row of smaller spikes, much more like thorns, and a heavy cluster of bone and spurs like a club at the tip. The beast throws back his head and roars, smoke and orange heat fluttering from the plates shifting at his throat.
His challenge does something to Malis, triggers something buried so deep inside that she hadn’t felt it until now. It was magic, and it throbbed and writhed and ached to be used. It was instinctual when she released it, reflexive when it mingled with the dark to take her, to bend and stretch her bones until she was just as he, a dragon, a mirror in emerald green. She roared her reply, throwing a far sleeker head than his back so that when the flame and smoke erupted from her chest it hit the sky barrier and was forced back down. If the black beast was surprised at the horse turned dragon, he hid it well. Instead they each took to prowling with an almost feline fluidity, pacing their respective sides of the coliseum while they picked out weaknesses. Where he was built like a hammer, hard and heavy, she was built like a sword. She is lean and fluid, and instead of spikes along her spine she has plates that shift, plates with edges like razors and they lift and flex as she stalks forward. Her chest is armored, as are her legs up to her elbows, and the scales gleam with reinforced gold. The dragon-beasts turn and leap together in the same moment, and Malis uses her smaller size to duck beneath him, opening her wings to pivot her body quickly so that she can tackle him before his lumbering body has a chance to prepare itself. She hits him hard and it feels so much like wrestling a mountain, but the seething fury in her veins burns and burns until all she can think about is the desire for the wet warm of his blood seeping through her teeth in his neck. She roars again and he responds, and they writhe together and grapple, tearing holes in the scales like they are little more than tissue paper squares. She bleeds, and so does he, but she can heal quickly where he cannot. Malis thrusts off the ground and wraps her reptilian body around him, using her weight to throw him off balance, to pull him back off his feet. It works, but she isn’t ready for the knot of bone and spike at the end of his tail when he flings it around and buries it in the bones of her ribcage. She screams and she is enraged, more furious than she is hurt because even now the skin starts to heal around the embedded spikes. Her thick, knife-sharp claws bury themselves in the rigid flesh beneath his scales and he throws back his head to bellow his fury. But she is ready for the instant he does, and she lunges forward to close her teeth around the unprotected underside of his throat. With fire leaking molten from her mouth, she closes her jaw and shakes her head, rewarded almost instantly with the hot iron of his blood against her tongue. His bellow ends in a wet mangled groan, and only when he grows limp beneath her and they topple sideways does she release her hold and unfurl those sleek wings to coast out of the way.
She lands quietly and turns to watch with impassive eyes the moment his body hits the dirt and shatters into a thousand pieces of shadow and dust. There is still blood in her mouth when yet another door opens in the stone of the coliseum and she turns like a cat, both bored by and curious of the prey that slips through. But whatever she had been expecting, it was not this and the emerald dragon roars her anguish. The figure at her feet is a heavily feathered bay stallion who smells of soot and ash and home. She roars again and the sound is deafening. In an instant she is wholly at war with herself. The echo of the Malis from before, the Malis who had found love and a family, she knows what it means to have this stallion here in the coliseum and the pain she feels is wholly unbearable. She fights and she rages and digs for the surface, but she is trapped. It is the darkness that fills the green dragon, the magic, the halter that consumes her. But she cannot help but feel curious at why he could be so important, so she stretches that refined head down to nose at the beast, intrigued until magma leaps from his skin and swallows every curve of her beautiful reptilian face. Furious and feverish with a lust for blood she could barely hold back, she opened her wings and flicked them hard to create a gust of wind that forced him head over heels across the coliseum floor. She should have just killed him outright, but something still held her back. When he rose again he should have had broken bones, but he moved with as much impossible grace as she did. Snarling she stalked towards him, and he met her with a dragon made of molten magma. She couldn’t harm it, it wasn’t solid, so she volleyed chunks of broken stones at him with her thick green tail. Again he was knocked aside, and again he rose without issue.
The magic inside of her flared hot like a brand, fueled by the fury and darkness she kept trapped inside. She closes the distance between them in an instant, pinning him with a foot even as he rained magma down on her. It burned away the scales where it landed, burned holes through those beautiful wings, but she had always loved this kind of pain, and she would heal. She roars at him again, her face inches from his, and still she cannot take his life. But a voice appears in her thoughts, Grumbles voice, and the blue bitch is blessedly silent. Kill him Malis, he’ll never love you like this. He will just want to change you. Do you want to be changed? The darkness in her is pure fury, pure resistance, and finally, finally, the emerald dragon reaches down and with teeth like knives, plucks the chamber kings head from his shoulders. But the moment those impassive eyes swallow the scene of the decapitated stallion, something inside her breaks. She forgets how to be cold, numb, forgets the blood lust that burns like a fever in her veins. There is light in the dark again, pure and wild and hotter than the sun, and she burns inside, burns until the dragon screams and becomes horse again. Until the horse screams, until her voice is gone and those green eyes are as hollow and empty as stone.
MALIS
makai x oksana