Chapter Text
You don't know where you're going.
It's a story, Roxy told you, once upon a time, long ago. You have to tell the right beginning to get to the right ending.
She'd smacked you on the head right after, told you sharply to remember, Di-Stri. Sheez. I can’t remember it for you.
So you climb this mountain trail, staggering doggedly on through trees and rocks on a road to nowhere because you don't know the path but you know where you need to be.
On your shoulder, the crow. In your arms, the corpse.
You carried him when he was small.
Now your shoulders ache and your feet stumble numbly and your laboring breath draws needles through each slashed and bleeding wound in your sides. The day is hot but he's long since grown cold in your arms. It doesn't matter.
You can carry him now. As far as it takes.
The crow huddles close by your ear, shocky and subdued. Iridescence trembles across black feathers.
"Hush-a-bye, Davey-boy, I'll get everything fixed. I’ll fix it.” It's more a mumble than a croon, the words out of time and out of place, spoken across years to the child he was, not the adolescent he’s become, but you circle back to them time and again. You spin him fragments of tale-songs and murmured rhymes, a confused patter of noise designed to soothe. The words tangle in your dizzy brain.
Above all you keep climbing.
---
You reach a divergence in the trail. Unfamiliar crossroads in unfamiliar territory and you hesitate, unsure. But, no, you know this one. You know how this should go. Your feet turn away from the easy, sloping path, towards jagged rocks and tangled brush. The right story needs the right path. Anything worth doing hurts.
Anything worth getting costs.
The crow on your shoulder mantles and refolds its wings, restless or anxious. The tips of primaries catch the low rays of the sun, black feathers flaming gold and orange along the edges, like fire licking in.
“’s’all right, s’all right,” you say in a voice grown raspy. It’s not, not really, not at all, but it will be. You’ll make it be.
It was your fuck up, so it’s your price to pay.
You’ve just got to find a dealer that will take your coin.
A demon to deal for a life.
---
The bandits jumped you both not half a mile from town, just a bunch of scruffy, two-bit mercenaries and thieves, not great odds but you’ve faced worse, and you’ve got each other for back up. It was their mistake to assume two people on the road alone would make easy pickings. Bad luck them, but worst luck you. In minutes only the fight was over, the remaining bandits abandoning their too-dangerous prey--and Dave was bleeding out on the road before you.
It was skill, not misstep that put him between that final, unseen archer’s quarrel and your back. Choice and sacrifice. Dave’s fast, like you trained him, talented and so damn reckless-brave, and you didn’t know pride could break you open from the inside like this, shatter your heart and leave you hollowed out and wrecked.
You knelt in the dirt and slaughter of the road, your palms pressed flat around the shaft in his heart, like you could put him back together with your own two hands, like you could catch the life pumping steadily out of him, escaping into the dirt with each faltering heartbeat.
"It’s all right,” you had told him then. “You did good. It's okay, li’l bro. I’ve got this. I’ll take it from here.”
Among the corpses, crows cawed and flapped, early arrivers to welcome the dead. Sharp beaks dived down to pluck at torn flesh.
You gathered your jacket in fingers painted red with your only brother’s blood, pulled the edges of fabric together like a net.
“It’s all right,” you promised him. “I’ll fix it.”
---
The trail ends but you keep climbing. You’re playing out a tale and this story has no room for doubts or wavering. You leave the path that’s petered out behind you and press on through clinging trees and over rough-edged rocks. Your hands slip, and slip again, your arms trembling with fatigue. You won’t drop him. You won’t leave him.
A stone turns under your foot, or perhaps your leg just betrays you. You stagger, one knee striking the ground in a burst of pain.
On your shoulder the crow flutters and rebalances. A sharp beak runs along your temple, loosening the stiff locks from your scalp and forehead, preening away dried clots of blood. The black of the bird’s feathers is entirely gone now, subsumed by the flame-bright golds and oranges that color it all the way through. Lit from within.
You make it to your feet again. You shift your burden (your charge, your ward, your precious baby bro), hefting the dead weight from your arms to your free shoulder. “s’all right, Davey,” you tell the corpse, tell the crow. “I got you.”
---
When you were very small you learned to take the pieces of yourself that didn’t fit and hide them away, put them somewhere safe where they couldn’t be touched. You never thought of it as magic because you never changed. In pieces or in synchrony your soul remained your own. You broke yourself and the world never broke you.
When you were older you found new weapons and different games and you learned how to hide without hiding at all. You wrapped yourself in riddles and honesty and found that hardly anybody ever solved the puzzles when the answers were placed in plain sight.
You no longer step outside yourself and you’ve stopped placing watchful eyes in the objects around you …but you still put a breath of yourself into every tale-song you spin.
And you still remember what it is to catch a soul in your hands, to tear it loose or bind it tight, tie it round with puppet strings.
You don’t have the power to stop a life from ending. A soul can’t continue without a body to sustain it.
So you watched while your brother bled and died on that road and then you caught his soul and you bound it into the crow.
--
The second time you fall, you find you can’t get up again. You try, over and over, but the earth pulls you down, holds you panting to a hard plane of gravel and dirt.
It’s cold, or maybe it isn’t. You’re not sure anymore. The sinking sun sends fingers of red evening light threading through the trees, stroking edges of warm color onto the mountain face. Your own fingers, on the rock, leave red stripes. If you’re bleeding, you can’t feel it.
You have to get up.
You can’t.
Your brother’s body is beside you, cold, but you can still feel the way his soul burned you all through and you think you’re going to lay next to him die and then you’ll have failed him twice.
Something scratches on the rocks in front of you.
There’s a rustle and more scratching. A sharp tug at your hair, and you raise your head, finally. The crow scuttles back, hopping and fluttering on the stone in front of you, head cocked to watch you from one small, gleaming eye. The flame-orange of its feathers has gone halfway to white at the tips, like purest ash, the soul inside burning out the life of the bird by fractions. The crow bobs anxiously, forward and back, tilts its head the other direction to look at you with its other eye.
It opens its beak and makes a series of hoarse noises, soft and urging.
You blink blearily.
The crow makes a harsh noise. It darts forward, beak stabbing sharp and fierce into your hand. Get up, get up.
You drag in a breath. Right.
“’kay,” you say aloud, your voice as much a croak as the crow’s, “got you.”
You can’t stand, but with a concentrated effort you roll the body onto your back, distributing the weight across every aching muscle. You press blood-smeared palms into the earth and rock up to your elbows, to your knees. You firm your limbs beneath you.
You crawl.
You climb.
The crow rustles white and orange feathers and flutters ahead of you, watching you with worried eyes.
--
You’re no longer cold.
The bird flies ahead, returns, again and again, urging.
Your thoughts tangle and glitter in your head, strange broken shards of present and past blending kaleidoscopically together until you can’t determine which is which. Once upon a time there was a boy and girl who ran away because monsters could be people and people could be monsters and no one believed them when they said which was which. Nobody wanted them anyway.
Once upon a time the sister of your heart walked into the void to protect you, and then to protect other things, and the places of power within herself pulled her ever further out of step with the world. And though you saw her less and less and she walked those paths you loved her still and unchanged.
Once upon a time Roxy brought you your little brother and you held him in your arms and your world shifted on its axis.
Once upon a time she told you a story about demons and endings and beginnings.
You drag yourself across stones and earth and the evening light is dying and you have to find where you need to be before time runs out but you think you may already have reached the limit. You’re so close, you must be close, but there’s some element missing from the story you need to create and you can’t see what it is. The rock face above gives way under your seeking hands. You hardly notice the shower of broken stones that rains down upon you. You keep climbing because you can’t stop, can’t give up, can’t finish here.
The crow lights on the slope before you, dropping a short, broken off branch. A half-dozen berries nestle in the leaves. The bird caws, a soft, sand-sliding sound, and you blink blearily back, unable to speak. Its feathers are almost entirely white. Its eyes blaze with the soul behind them, the golden gleam almost incandescent, like a candle flaming brighter right before it goes out.
Your heart clenches hard. No. Not yet, not like this. You’ll climb forever if you have to.
But the crow’s life is flickering out, burned through, used up on the pyre of the soul within. And a soul can’t continue without a body to sustain it.
No. No time left, no place or power to bargain, and you did it wrong, you messed up somewhere, you didn’t try hard enough, and even though you know this must be the end there’s no part of you that can accept that you’ve failed.
It occurs to you that there’s still one more living body here, one vessel suited to carry a human soul.
But only one.
You carried him when he was small.
You reach out your hand, toward the bird.
The crow skips back an uncertain hop. Opens its beak; caws a single, reproachful noise. “Bro.”
Your voice is gone, but you find a curve for your lips. It’s all right, you think. It’s all right, li’l bro. I’ll fix it. You touch the feathers.
And that final, missing element slots into place. Power washes over you. The world aligns--and the landscape changes.
It's like passing through the surface of a soap bubble or a still, clear pool of water, only to find yourself on the other side and in the same place all over again. Except you haven't moved and it's not the same place. The air in your lungs feels strange, your skin feels electrified, as if a nearly intangible pressure has lifted. There's a woman in front of you and she's dark/light (green) and human/not-human (demon?) and when she stoops down before you her smile is sweet and ordinary and welcoming (...dangerous?).
Oh. You made it after all. Right place, right time. (Right story.)
The last traces of light are fading from the sky and your mind seems to be fading with it. You think you feel arms scoop you up, as easily as if you were a child, feel hands soothing across your injuries, the reassuring murmur of voices. ...More than one?
You can almost imagine that one of them is Roxy.
It’s not quite the end yet, Di-Stri, she tells you. But you’ve made a good start.
The crow nestles warm and alive over your heart, feathers pressed close. Just for a little while, you let yourself be carried.
Just for now.
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