Chapter 10
Prism
Neon greens and pinks spread across the cobalt sky above Nisse.
It happened the nights following Vore and I claiming each other.
We were together in his cave, and I was lying naked and sated atop his fur pelts.
Flashes of color illuminated just outside, and I wrapped myself in the blanket and ran to see.
Silently, my wither followed after me. Always my silent shadow.
My guardian.
My night sky.
As I watched in awe as the colors danced across the sky, I sighed to my wither. “This is the most magical and beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
When I looked up, he was staring down at me, ignoring the lights entirely, though they washed over him. His inky skin and shadows a canvas for their light to refract off of. “Yes,” he said deeply. “You are.”
That was before I, or anyone, had any inkling of an idea that I possessed any magical abilities at all.
And yet, it didn’t matter, because Vore looked at me like I was the most magical thing in all the realms. Vore looked at me like I gazed up at the dancing lights. In complete, dazzling delight and awe.
Vore’s love for me could never be matched.
My love for Vore could never be stopped or silenced—not even by death. I’d walk past the gates to paradise in favor of a doorway to hell if it meant the chance for one more day with him.
To see him look at me like that again.
To feel the touch of his skin, the gentleness of his claws, the fervor of his devotion.
When he first took me, I believed a monster had stolen me from the wedding to my true love, and I’d die a gruesome death at his fangs.
Instead… my monster had a name. He had a home and a family of people and beings I’d come to love.
My wither stole me on my wedding day from a far worse fate.
If I had stayed and married Birch Viper…
if Vore had never come for me, if he’d never won his battle with Wraith, the big red wither, for me, then I’d be somewhere miserable at this very moment.
Cleaning horse stalls as my reprieve and escape from Birch and his brothers.
I thought that was the best life I could obtain.
Freeing my sister from the burden of caring for me and finding some measure of companionship in a man who hardly looked at me at all, much less gazed at me like I was his everything.
When he took me, he took the possibility of a mundane, dreary existence with him. I was already dying in Willowspire, I just didn’t know it at the time. Then, in the claws of my wither, I was given new life. A real home and a love greater than the twirling lights in the heavens.
I wanted it forever.
I wanted a lifetime with Vore.
But I had to be a fool, didn’t I? I had to worry about Rumor. I had to beg and plead with Vore, my protector, to go see her one last time and say goodbye. I should have known better. The signs were all there for our entire lives, that Rumor was… that Rumor was toeing the line of something dark.
The way hunting came naturally to her. My sister wouldn’t flinch when killing an animal or butchering chickens.
The snap of bones made me cringe, but to her it was just another day.
Not that hunting was evil, Matri was a huntress as well, I knew many skilled hunters in Willowspire.
I wasn’t so naive as to think death was inescapable when it came to survival…
I just didn’t want to take part in seeing to it if I could help it.
Although my sister not only didn’t feel the same, she seemed to derive joy from the chase, the hunt, the kill.
Even to the point of taunting me, waving slack geese in my face from her most recent hunt as I cried and ran for Mother as a child.
There was a fierceness to Rumor that indeed kept us alive after our mothers were taken… yet I fear that in my absence, and without me to care for, that ferocity morphed into something else entirely. Something cruel, something vicious, something dark.
I didn’t know if I could save my sister from that pit of depravity.
I didn’t know if I even cared to after what she’d done.
Rumor saw me happy, truly happy, for the first time in our miserable lives, and she couldn’t take it, could she?
She had to rip it away from me. My very sister took away the love of my lifetimes, my whole heart, my everything.
The one being that loved me for me. The one being who saw me for what I was and who I was and loved it entirely.
Rumor killed Vore as I hugged her.
It may as well have been a knife in my back.
I would have preferred a knife in my back, actually. Anything other than losing him. Vore hadn’t deserved to die. He’d done nothing wrong. In fact, Vore had treated me with more kindness and respect than Birch had, or any mortal man for that matter.
And all that torment within me aside, what was my sister doing conspiring with the Blackthorne Boys?
The Blackthornes? The lords who abandoned our town and now, apparently, were daimons wreaking havoc in the streets?
What had happened to her? Something horrible took root when Vore whisked me away…
and I wished to every goddess above and below that I could go back in time and never return to Willowspire.
I wished I would have stayed in Nisse. If I’d listened to Vore, none of this would have happened.
If I’d listened to Vore and fully accepted him as my guide, my protector, then he’d still be alive.
We’d be in my garden in Nisse, my fearkitten bouncing between us, Vore holding my basket as I filled it with crops.
But instead—because of my stupid naivety and my sister’s sinister ways, Vore was dead, and I was traipsing into the mist and beyond mysterious dark doorways to find him.
What if I didn’t find him?
What if this were all a trap?
If I were being baited into some horrible fate, I guessed I’d chosen to be a fallope in a snare than to sit oblivious past some pink door of ignorance.
I half wondered which door Rumor would choose if she were in my place.
My older sister had always been my guidepost. Before I did anything, I thought of Rumor.
I made the stew meat medium rare to her preference.
I was inside before twilight so she didn’t worry.
The woods were off limits or she’d lecture me for my carelessness towards my safety.
When Vore took me, I wondered what Rumor would have done to evade his claws. I imagined she’d be crafty, quick, and cunning. Rumor would have escaped the first night, I had no doubt of that.
Maybe I’d relied on her too much. Listened and followed her instructions too closely. Worked too diligently to not add to her plate.
As a child, my mothers worried about hiding and managing Rumor’s witchcraft abilities.
I didn’t blame them for that, I worried for her also.
One wrong move and a child with magic could irreparably harm someone and summon Asunder’s mist in one swoop.
The stress that likely put our parents under was immense.
But in turn, I worked to stay polite, good, and as low-need as possible. I didn’t want to add to everyone’s plate. When my mothers were taken, I suppose that pattern just continued. Don’t rock the boat, stay quiet, stay small.
The only time in my life I’d felt free to explore my own desires and speak up for myself and what I wanted was with Vore… and how ironic that finally speaking up for my want to see my sister and say goodbye, one last time, was what ultimately destroyed everything and killed the love of my life.
Now… I’d have to go against the way I’d always been.
For Vore, I’d force myself to be strong, to be brave, to choose the scariest option for a chance at saving him.
Something within me knew I’d have to be loud, sure, and determined if I were going to come close to accomplishing this daunting task of searching for his soul in the great beyond.
If I failed, I could lose myself forever to pain and torment. Though, I had no life without him.
He would have done the same for me… He already did, really. Vore saved me from my own particular sort of death. And now I’d do the same for him.
—
Heat followed by ice whipped me from every direction. Bright lights flashed only to be punctuated by the blackest void of darkness. Memories shuffled through my mind, pronounced in their random assortment with seemingly no rhyme or reason.
The memory of looking up at the colorful night sky with Vore.
A memory of sitting on my front porch with Mother and Matri shucking corn in the waning summer light.
A memory of Rumor braiding my hair, tucking in runes, as if I wouldn’t know, as if the runes in my hair made me feel safer when an actuality they only made me more afraid each time a stick would prick my scalp.
I was reminded that I wasn’t safe and that my sister was so worried about me.
She’d resort to backhanded magic to keep me safe, maybe just to massage her own guilt at her inadequacies.
I guess I’d never be sure, but all the memories flashed through my mind as the sound of a door slamming shut behind me and the clink of a lock clicking into place echoed around me.