All Things Devour

Chapter One

Kolfina

There is a woman in my home, and I do not know her name .

She wanders my halls with feet that do not touch the floors and a voice that is more songful wail than anything akin to words.

When she stands before the mirrors, she wears my face as if it were her own, and she weeps for something I cannot remember.

There is a tear in her chest that festers and aches. A wound that cannot be healed.

I wish that she would stop crying and let me rest.

I know this woman is me. She moves as I move, cries when I cry.

I know the pale yellow of her hair and what it feels like to run my fingers through it.

I know the plump curves of her body and the freckles across her nose.

I even remember the striped dress she wears—blue as a robin’s egg—and the phantom grip of someone tugging the laces too tight.

I know that she is me, and yet I do not recognize her.

I could not tell you her name or her age.

I could not tell you the things she likes or dislikes.

I do not even know how she died, only that it sometimes seizes up my throat like a vice until I am left clawing and tearing myself open, gasping and pleading for another breath.

This house was once hers—mine. I wander the endless halls and climb its many stairs with the familiarity of a lover, trailing my fingers across the dark floral patterns on the walls in the hopes that they will feed me answers to the questions I do not know how to voice.

They do not respond, they never do. They only writhe and scream in my wake, calling for me in voices I dread to hear.

Whatever answers this house might have held once, it holds no longer.

Where once it could have been a home full of life, now it is an empty carcass ravaged by the beast of time.

There are no portraits on the walls, nor clothing in its many rooms. Spiders have made their homes between the cracks in the banisters, and the rugs and tapestries are moth-eaten and coated in dust.

Late at night, I try to dig my toes into the dirt and grime, desperate to leave some epigraph to show that I am here—that I am real. But when the morning comes, there is nothing there but the mites and dust.

Is this what death is then? A wide, gaping emptiness that cannot be filled? An endless punishment that threatens to drive you to madness before long? I do not recall being a religious woman, but surely there must be more to the end than empty halls and cobwebs.

Perhaps the wallpaper can tell me, though I fear the peonies and daisies will drive me mad long before they would give me peace.

I do not know how long I’ve roamed my manor on the cliff. Time doesn’t quite matter when one is dead, I’ve noticed. I suppose it has been years—perhaps centuries, or eons. Perhaps I never lived in the first place and am but a memory of something that could have been.

What I do know is that it has been ages since my halls have heard the gentle hum of conversation echoing through them, since feet have tromped up my stairs and the candles have trickled their light across the walls.

At first, I am convinced that this is it, that I have finally gone mad and the screaming wails of my cliffside home have changed the direction of their tauntings.

Isn’t that how it happens? Ghosts grow bitter and sour like mold, haunting the living world in anger and despair?

Driven mad by the voices in their heads, the whispers and yells in the distance that tease something living but never draw close enough to bear truth?

Except that when I find my way to the entrance hall, my curiosity at war with pitiful acceptance, it isn’t ghosts hidden in the wallpaper or headless voices pounding around in my head.

It is people. Real people. Flooding through the front doors like flocks of birds in the wintertime.

They do not see me as I weave between them, too busy pulling boxes and crates behind them, carrying in heavy furniture and rolling out old rugs and chairs, filling my home with sounds and smells and life.

“Can’t believe someone actually bought the old place,” one says—a man with a mustache as thick as a rat and muscles that bulge when he sets down the crate he carries. “Must be crazy, yeah? To buy a place like this?”

The younger man with him wipes sweat from his brow, face red from exertion. How long had they been working while I was lost in my labyrinthine halls? I wonder. “Well, maybe she doesn’t know the stories, been empty so long. And I heard the lady’s not from around here, so she probably doesn’t know.”

Another man steps up to them, his fine tailcoat pressed and his greyed hair tucked neatly behind his ears.

The air shimmers around him as he stares through a pair of small spectacles and down his nose at the two men.

“If you please,” he says, gesturing a gloved hand toward the door, “there is quite a bit more work to be done.”

They continue back outside as bid, and I move on, curling through the entrance hall like a breeze.

The other workers quiver as I pass, a few muttering prayers under their breath as they cross themselves.

I do not know what stories they’ve heard that have them so frightened, that have them setting down their treasures and rushing back into the warmth of the fading sunlight, but I know enough not to blame them.

Would I be allowed to flee behind them and never return, I would. But my feet are roots sunk into the wooden floorboards, and my heart is an anchor weighing me to this place. No matter how many times I try to leave, I am always drawn back in with the tide.

Death, it seems, is just another cage to be trapped in, and whatever key might have freed me once, now surely rots at the bottom of the sea.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?”

A woman’s voice drifts from the back library, and I follow it in a daze, a desperate sort of yearning pulling in my chest for some kind of sign that might tell me it’s real, tell me that I am not losing myself further and further into lonesome delusions.

There is something so drastically different between the two strangers in my library and the men skittering through the rest of my home.

Perhaps it is the fine clothes they wear—the man in royal purples and blacks, his suit pressed with a faint design that shimmers gold in the candlelight; the woman in a hungry, crimson gown, jewels draped from throat and ears and wrists like drops of fresh blood.

Or perhaps it is their beauty, otherworldly and divine—the man as tall as a mountain and tanned like only those born under the sun were; the woman with a gracefully straight nose and skin that shone like polished bronze; neither holding the obvious grit and wrinkles of hard work that the men outside do.

I could stare at them for hours, I think, and not find a single flaw amongst them.

“It’s a bit small for my tastes, but it is…

quaint, I suppose,” the man says, fluttering a hand about him like he is swatting flies.

He drags his finger across the top of the old oak desk behind him, his agreeable smile falling into a grimace at the trail of dust he’s wiped away.

“Though why you chose this one at all, when father had a lovely Venetian manor ready for you, I will never understand.”

“I quite like it,” his sister replies easily.

“The manor father has is so new. It has no history, no life to it. And it sits in the middle of a city, besides.” Her painted lips purse and she shakes her head, a few strands of dark hair falling from her voluminous bun to frame her face.

“No, I prefer my isolation, I think. It shall give me the leave to paint as I wish, without the needless interruption of company.”

Long, polished fingernails trail the spines of books as the woman circles the room, and as she draws closer to me, I find myself fascinated by the depth in her eyes—the amber flakes that glitter in the light, the browns so dark they appear almost black, the sparks of red that shine when she passes a candelabra.

She looks like a goddess might, if I believed in such a thing. Transcendental. Dangerous. Lovely.

Her brother acquiesces. “If it pleases you. Though I beg you at least let me hire someone to clean the place for you. You’ll catch your death from all this dust, and it will give you more time to paint.”

“I am perfectly capable of cleaning, Jonas,” the woman says, shooting him a look I cannot understand. She waves a hand towards the door and shakes her head. “And careful, brother dear, lest Allard hear you. You might offend him if he knew you were questioning his skills.”

“Allard is here to run your household and serve you, Azizi. He is growing too old to keep a place this large clean on his own with no staff. I insist you let me at least—”

He cuts himself off, and their gazes shoot towards the door—towards me—and for a moment, I swear I can feel my heart beat in my chest again. Can they see me? Do they know that I am here?

I open my mouth to speak, to ask them, but something shifts behind me before I get the chance, shifts through me, and when I blink away the chill, there is a man standing a few paces in front of me where there wasn’t before.

“Pardon the interruption, my lord and lady,” he says, pushing a large rectangular box into the room to lean against one of the walls. “Was told this belonged in here.”

Ms. Azizi gives him a pleasant smile with no teeth and inclines her head politely. “Thank you, that’s perfect. Please make sure the others are careful with my painting boxes. I’d not want to see any of them damaged.”

It is a clear dismissal, but the man does not leave. He’s an older man, with wrinkles pressed into his skin like folded paper and bright blue eyes that once might have been jolly if not for the years of work that has hunched his back and crinkled his fingers.

Mr. Jonas frowns at the man. “Yes? Is there something else?”