[private] Journey we more into the Nightmare - Malis

[Malis]

"we pull apart the darkness while we can"

But she had fallen. She had found a lonely grave in cold dirt beside the body of someone who had been ordinary. Malis had been ordinary once. A long, long time ago when her family was still whole and she was brown instead of blue. She had been perfectly ordinary. But that had faded in the years to come, an illusion shattered by impossible truths that hurt to remember, impossible truths she could not bear to think about. She had forgotten what ordinary felt like, but she felt it then with the bones broken in her neck, with eyes like pockets of mangled jelly sitting in a ruined blue face. She felt it when he stood over her to carve constellations of red into the smooth blue. She felt it when she closed those ruined eyes and remembered the weight of him on her back, the hungry pressure of his mouth against her neck. She felt it until she could feel only the pain of being ruined, of blades buried between bones and torn up through quivering flesh.

She felt it until the dark came to claim her, until she had felt nothing at all.

While she slept, succumbed to the unnatural night behind her eyes, Pollock left and her body healed. Bone had knit itself back together, the jagged edges folding like steepled fingers – and without bone to pry the lips of each wound apart, the skin had melted smooth and even and as perfect as it had been before. Her eyes solidified, regaining their shape once the crushed mess of her face had been restored. When she woke she looked no different, no different but for the blood matted and dark against her skin, but for the dirt of a would-be grave buried against the dirty indigo.

She rose and though her body looked perfect, each bone and joint and ruined muscle wept at her, like they were trapped in the memory of what had happened. She hurt like that for weeks and weeks, and then hurt more and differently when her stomach swelled despite the way she couldn’t, wouldn’t eat and the bones were sharp points beneath her skin.

--

She is a stain of bright indigo against the dark of the shadows that pool beneath the immensity of the mountains. This is her favorite place to be because it is quiet, because only her ghosts can find her here – because here, she does not have to pretend to be the Queen that Killdare thinks she can be. The one he sees when he looks at her. It is an impossible thing to ask of her, to give her a throne and a kingdom, to give her those she needs to protect when she can hardly protect herself. But here, here she is just Malis, and it is okay to be a ruined, broken thing.

She doesn’t notice him, not at first, not in time. Not until that scent is wrapped around her like an embrace and she is remembering his weight against her back, his mouth damp on her neck, his hooves buried in her face. When she turns to face him she is feral in her outrage, like liquid spilling across the stone and dirt as she crosses the forest to join him. His voice, his face, it is all as she remembers it and remembering makes her sick, it twists her mouth into an ugly snarl that betrays the fear that bubbles just beneath the surface, just beneath the blue. “You don’t belong here.” She warns, her ears pinned back into the tangles of an impossibly dark mane.

Fear or shock or fury, or perhaps some mixture of all three, boil in her veins and she cannot help the way she burns fever-bright. He lifts his chin to show her something, lifts his cheek to show her the knots of pink flesh where she had buried those horns as far as she could reach (not far enough), and though she should be pleased with this handiwork, she does not smile. She is too busy remembering, too busy being ruined.

Lovely, he says when he looks at her with hungry eyes that live on the ghosts who haunt her dreams, and she wonders if he means as she is now, smooth and blue and perpetually new, or if he is remembering how she had looked with her face caved it. But when she watches him now it is with a face carved from stone, and those emerald eyes narrow only when that wicked smile spreads across her dark mouth. “I think you’re losing your edge, Pollock,” she says at last, stepping closer with languid ease, close enough to press the point of a single horn to his exposed jaw and draw it all the way up to the corner of his mouth, “ didn’t you try to kill me?”

She pauses and pulls away, lazy when she makes a show of trying remember something. But then her eyes fall back on his, burning pin-pricks of green from behind the knots of her dark forelock, “because I don’t feel dead.”

MALIS

makai x oksana

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