Chapter 33 #3
The cave walls in the dreamer's sanctum have eroded, forming shelves of identically-sized alcoves, like cells in a honeycomb. Many of these are etched with crude drawings, symbols marked in overlapping layers, newer scribblings covering older ones until it's hard to make sense of either.
Some cells are littered with scattered bones.
Shay chokes on a dry cough. “Anything anyone wants to tell me?”
Marjan frowns. “Did I not mention that sometimes the thing the night hags take is the dreamer's life?”
“You most certainly did not.”
“That won't happen,” Yara quickly interjects. “It only happens to, like, evil people.”
“That's a theory,” Marjan corrects.
“No,” Yara argues. “Mmi has researched the ghoul clans extensively. If you read her journals, you'd know it's a reasonable assumption based on known facts.”
“That's exactly what a theory is,” Marjan insists.
Shay strongly thinks someone should have mentioned this before they left from the bone-eaters’ cottage, but there's no point debating it now, when they're already here. When that sound has gotten, not louder, exactly … but stronger?
It's almost like a vibration, so, yes, she thinks stronger is the right word. It's relaxing. Shay can tell Yara and Marjan feel it, too. They've stopped arguing and started swaying their bodies back and forth, back and forth, to the calming rhythm.
Without much by way of further conversation, they set up camp. Each girl chooses a cell to sleep in and rolls out their cushions and blankets for the night. When Shay closes her eyes, her mother's face is not there. Her mind is blessedly blank.
It's a relief she doesn't enjoy for long, because the next thing she's aware of is heaviness, a bearing down in the middle of her chest. She struggles to breathe, to roll over and change position. She can't move.
Her eyes flick open and go wide, beholding the creature perched on her body.
Night hag.
Shay tries to swallow her panic, but it goes only halfway down her throat before coming back up kicking and screaming.
Though the hag is crouched over her, Shay can tell she's tall.
Long, straight dark hair falls over her shoulders like a veil.
Her skin is alabaster white. Her eyes sockets are gouged, empty black pits from which some dark substance leaks, spilling down her pale cheeks in jagged smears.
Her mouth hinges open as though eternally frozen in a muted scream.
From shoulder to elbow, her arms appear normal, but from the elbow down, the skin melds into thick black scales that end at her sharp-taloned fingertips. Her chest is covered by glossy black feathers that tip silver in the strange glow Shay realizes is coming from the cave drawings.
Clicking sounds, like nails scrabbling over stone. The whispery rustle of feathers. Shay lifts her eyes, searching the far reaches of the cell. More creatures crowd around her. She tries to count them, but the effort makes her dizzy.
The hag slowly extends a taloned finger and presses its pointed hook to Shay's temple.
She scratches lightly. Shay would not be able to stay still if she had any choice.
Every muscle in her body screams at her to thrash, resist, flee.
The hag makes a moaning sound, and though whatever she's saying is unintelligible, Shay understands her request.
Her tongue loosens. Despite the burning desire to scream for help, she instead rasps out, “Yes, you can come in.”
The sides of the hag's mouth twitch into a grotesque mimicry of a smile. The talon digs into Shay's temple, drilling deep into her skull. Pain eats through every thought until there's only the whoosh of flapping wings. Then she's airborne.
She looks down from the night sky upon the realm of Mekchaouen from the perspective of a crow, but it's not like when she joined minds with the irises.
This view is impossible.
It appears as though she's flying at such a height that the entire realm unfolds below her, every region visible at once.
From the wind-furrowed sands of the Mourian Desert to the moon-crusted waves of the Cerabbi Sea.
With each flap of the giant crow wings stretched out to either side of her, her vision is spliced by unbidden images.
Images that feel like memories. Memories belonging to someone else. Dreams!
Dreams of falling, of being chased, of bloodied teeth that clatter against the porcelain sides of washroom basins. Of dying, dying, dying again. Over and over. A hundred different ways.
No, not dreams.
These are nightmares.
The hags wheel across moonlit clouds, sifting through dream after dream, jumping from nightmare to nightmare, in search of a clue to the hjabat's whereabouts. They drag Shay along through a disjointed parade of humanity's most ardent wishes and basest desires.
A surprising number of dreams feature jewelry of some sort, and a fair portion of these involve engagement rings, specifically. Finally, Shay glimpses the bracelet. Where the other crystals are set into a metal or wooden base, the bracelet is a thick band made of blue crystal in its entirety.
The hag dips low in the sky. The streets of Nezjar spring up around them. They glide past the darkened square, the abandoned market, through slumbering neighborhoods. With each successive wing flap, the image of the hjabat grows clearer.
The night hag's clawed feet touch down upon the dry earth of a bramble-filled clearing beyond the medina. Shay recognizes the rocky hillside. The familiar cave opening wrought into its side.
She doesn't walk necessarily, but her consciousness glides toward the lights flickering at the end of that long tunnel.
Those streaming ripples of red, blue, silver, and green.
She floats past the ledge where she sat with Khawla and Shadi on Jou Boulka.
Down past the glowing pillars and deeper into the twisting innards of the cavern.
Through tunnels where tracks have been laid and strange equipment has been left behind.
Tools of the like used for quarrying and mining.
In a hidden cubicle, not unlike the cell where Shay's sleeping body now lies, she comes upon two sleeping figures.
The hjabat glowing from the wrist of one is so brilliant, its aura casts a flare that obscures the face—and other identifying features—of both sleepers.
All Shay gets a clear look at is their boots.
Boots caked in a fine sheen of silvery dust.
Caw. Caw. Caw. The crows’ calls fill her ears, each cry growing louder and brasher, overlapping.
Amplifying. She winces her eyes closed, and when she opens them, she's back in the dream caves.
The night hag pants, her feathered breast fluttering.
She still perches on Shay's chest, her talon embedded in Shay's temple.
The hag jerks her clawed hand back. Pain sizzles in a white-hot burst. Shay's vision sears and blurs before slowly shifting back into focus. Something pale and wormlike hangs limply off the night hag's talon.
Shay instinctively recognizes it as a piece of herself that has been plucked from her mind like an apple off a tree.
She knows not what piece, won't know until one day when she'll be straightening her thoughts like books on a shelf and come across an untouched hollow in the dust where something is missing.
Shay's heart lurches beneath her sternum, already missing the ineffable. The hag lowers the clinging morsel toward her wide-stretched mouth. No, Shay wants to whisper. Wants to shout. It's mine. But whatever it is the hag has chosen to take, she swallows it down whole with a wet gurgle.