DESPOINA
Everything hurts in this small, vulnerable body. Her muscles ache. Her bones protest. She can feel herself struggling under every step and wonders why she even bothers. Wonder why she doesn’t just lie down and let the monsters from the mountain run down and take her. It’d be what she deserves, after all. She deserves to let them rip her apart. Deserves to feel the pain and the anguish that she has unleashed over the years. Those that she has hurt in an effort to stop hurting herself. Those she has disappointed.
She stops moving for a second and hangs her puppy head, a low whine coming from clenched teeth. Her mother’s tigress form haunts her—the creature made of snow and ice and amethyst—and all she can think about is how Sochi had looked when it had been her. When she’d launched at her that very first day and then held back, whatever staying her hand having nothing to do with who Despoina had been.
Who she was.
Her throat burns as she forces herself to keep walking, her pads rubbed raw. Just one more step, she thinks. Just one more step and she’d be at the end of this and she could just go home. She could wake up and pretend that this had all been just a dream and there was nothing that could chase her anymore.
Except that is not what happens, not exactly. Instead, the silence that had cocooned her ever so briefly snaps and she begins to hear the grunts and growls of the undead before her. She swallows, hard, but forces herself to keep looking—to study their faces. To see exactly who she expected to see staring back:
Sochi.
Her mother is no tigress this time. She is herself as she was born—proud, stern, that blaze of iridescent blue so fierce as it cuts down her angled face, even when covered with dust and debris. The silver eyes are filmed, but harsh nonetheless and the air leaves Despoina’s lungs in a swift motion, leaving her trembling.
Sochi’s decaying mouth opens and a single word escapes: “Run.”
So Despoina does.
She yelps and rockets forward, ignoring the aching in her tiny body and the fear that drowns out the agony of seeing her mother’s dead face. She ignores the other creatures who rally around her mother and chase her, who nip at her heels. She ignores her mother’s war cry, the sound rattling her bones.
So this was to be her end, she thinks, blinded by tears as she sprints forward.
How poetic that it would be by her mother’s hand after all.
Despoina thinks that she hears her mother scream something at her but she just shakes her head, feeling a rush of wind by her side as a creature comes up and falls away. She ducks her head and angles away, certain that any second was to be her last. That any second her mother would finally catch up. Would shift and catch her between those massive jaws and the last thing she saw would be what she had seen first.
But it doesn’t come.
The air around her stills and the sounds become muffled, more distant. She stops finally, against every sense of better judgment, and she turns back—to see what has become of the army of the dead.
They do not rally around her dead mother.
They overwhelm her.
They do not rush by Sochi’s side to overtake her.
They turn on her.
She watches her mother shift, like she had imagined, but her teeth are not aimed at her. She fights the things that clamor around her toward her daughter. She takes them down, one by one. As ferocious as Despoina had always known her to be. As terrifying as she was in the nightmares that haunted her.
Despoina takes a tentative step forward toward the chaos, and Sochi’s head whips to the side, a snarl escaping her. “Don’t,” she hisses before her attention is snagged by something else launching itself at her. Her dulled teeth make short work of him. So Despoina listens, again. She takes a step back, tail between her legs, and watches as her mother defends her. As she cuts down the dead who seek to find her.
And when Sochi stands, sliced open with wounds unhealing, finally victorious over the piles of undead bodies, Despoina is not surprised when her mother does not look at her. Does not acknowledge how she has saved her. Sochi merely limps forward through the carnage—away, away, away.
And Despoina, her chest heaving and an emptiness spreading slowly through her, turns too.
Coming face to face with Jack.
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do