DESPOINA
It is cold—so cold—and Despoina can feel her puppy teeth chatter as she feels the wind sweep down. There is still the thrashing of trees behind her and cackle of witches as they swoop through the air. Still the sound of monsters and pumpkins and things she cannot name as the rest of those alongside her lumber along in alien shapes. She still doesn’t know how she has managed to make it this far, doesn’t understand why that witch had picked her up and carried her the rest of the way, but she accepts it as best she can.
Accepts all of this as best she can.
There is a loud clap before things begin to glow gently before her. Lighting up the path with a gentle wash of light. It is calming, she thinks, and nearly beautiful if she wasn’t so soaked with her own fear. If she wasn’t so certain of her own demise. She never should have left this night. Never should have followed her own curiosity. She had never been the adventurous sort before—what was she doing now?
But she thinks of her children, and of Torryn, and she resolves to make it through.
She can’t give up. Not now.
So with gritted teeth she slinks forward, pushing up against the wall of the mountainside as she makes her way up the path. She never thought she would miss her hellhound form—never thought that those things that make her a monster would be viewed as a comfort—but she does now. As her delicate pads begin to ache and her stomach curls with hunger, her thin coat doing little to shield her from the cold, she misses the body of the predator. That thing that could hunt and hunt and hunt and never need to slow.
This is the worst of it, she thinks, as she continues to climb, her eyes narrowing to see in the dark with only the help of the flowers that dot the path upward. But as with all things, it is not.
Not even remotely.
Because just as she slinks onward, tail between her legs, she begins to imagine the snow is moving in unnatural ways. Forming together into a shape that is not that of fallen snow. Her heart stops in her chest as she recognizes one that rears back its head and yawns with icicle teeth. The tigers that begin to prowl before her that look so much like her late mother it takes everything in her to recognize they are not.
All good sense flees from her.
She is nearly to the top of the mountain now and she only has to keep sneaking through the bushes to go undetected, but fear does not care about logic. Because she is a puppy once more and she is watching her mother’s tigress form launch toward her. She is watching her teeth snap in the air above her and knowing that she wants nothing more than to kill her—wants nothing more than to end her own daughter’s life.
So Despoina runs.
She yelps and begins to pound forward as fast as this small body will carry her, the tail sweeping behind her as she forgets about hiding. It is enough to set an alarm for the snowbound tigers and they come crashing after her with all of the silence of a winter storm. Despoina feels their icy breath as they gain ground on her but it is almost as though their speed is throttled. As though they know the true terror is in the chase and not in the catching. Because although they could easily grab the puppy, they don’t.
They just chase and chase.
Chase until her small heart could burst with the fear and the agony of seeing her mother’s face.
With that one racing though that she would never see her family again.
She cries out and crashes and, at one point, begins to fall down and down and down. She falls tail over head, her limbs tangling together, and her yelps bleeding together until she comes to a stop, deposited on the edge of the red sand. For a moment, she just lies there, tears leaking out of her eyes—waiting for the snap of teeth to close around her throat—but it doesn’t come. Nothing comes except the unending silence before her and the sound of her broken sobs as they rack through her body.
When she is certain she has nothing left to cry—when she is certain that the creatures are gone and she will not die by their jaws—she finally unfolds her bruised and aching legs and lifts. She steps forward gingerly, whimpering, as she moves forward into the fog to find the end of what she has started.
I guess the sound of your voice in the aching will just have to do