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It is a dry, dusty winter. The grass in the faerie fort is green. Mushrooms surface daily, thrusting clusters of spongy caps to the crisp sunlight. Pockets of colour against such a sickly, bright background; equally as saturated.
Cleo hates the way the trees encroach on the clearing like strangers, obscuring cold daylight with their reaching, clawing hands. A living cage. She hates that she doesn’t know — the Lady of Shadows never told her, never told anyone — if the circle is designed to keep people out. Or themselves in.
Lizzie had laughed at the notion, a melodious chime that grated on Cleo’s eardrums. She’d then summoned her mercenaries to a meeting — emergency, she called it — and the question remained perpetually unanswered. Hanging in the space above their heads like the midwinter clouds; like the labels heralding their place and fate in the grand Universe. Pawns to be sacrificed. She doesn’t know who is playing.
Cleo hates how alive the place feels. The gate swings without a creak, beams wreathed with flowering vines. It latches behind her without a touch. Lizzie is sitting at the edge of the pond, bare feet languidly ruffling its surface. Ren is hunched next to her. Cleo knows he feels the same, feels the ghost of an itch of an axe in his neck that heralded Red Winter to arrive. His face is pallid as he nods, bows, swears allegiance.
It is winter now. The snowflakes fall like ash, yet none penetrate the fort’s leafy canopy. Cleo scuffs her feet in grass heavy with dew. She’d rather it were frozen than this unnatural spring. Storm flies cluster above the pond like thunderclouds themselves.
Lizzie’s cloak shimmers in the dappled daylight, iridescence playing off its surface like the inside of a clamshell. Columbine and baby’s-breath would bloom in the craters of her footprints only to shrivel hours later. She may be crackling with staticky magic that plucks at the hairs on Cleo’s spine, but it’s a touch compared with full faerie potential.
She has wings that are more slips of moonlight. Fluttering like a desert mirage. Barely there. She is sickly life and lustre and too-bright, too-cold optimism. Not yet impassive to the world around her; still, she has long passed the borders of humanity: more fae than whatever before, and never again human.
Ren died a long time ago. The pits of Tatooren claimed two limbs and his lungs, all substituted by sleek, cold cybernetics. Bodies are replaceable. He then died a second time — under the bloodstained blade of an axe held by his Hand, runes hewn into the worn diamond surface. Intended to curse all those daring to cross the Red Winter.
Curses required a sacrifice. Ren was all too willing to offer himself as the lamb.
Neck bared and hairs standing to attention in the crisp morning breeze, dressed in a simple white blouse which Martyn could burn afterwards.
For you, my liege.
Ren hadn’t closed his eyes. He was dead as the axe severed his spinal cord.
Black Heart altar, they called it. The only blood spilled was the hue of crimson poppies. Ren’s head gazed sightlessly from at Martyn’s feet, eyes glassy, mouth stretched into a final pained grimace. Blood dribbled from the stump of his neck and stained the collar of his blouse like a ruby necklace. Still kneeling.
Ren’s headless corpse crumpled into smoke — snatched instantly by the breeze, carried up and out of Dogwarts’ walls. The head went the same. Martyn clutched the dripping axe to his chest, ignoring how blooms of blood darkened his cloak.
My lord?
For a moment, the Hand was alone.
Ren died that day. In his place awoke a… not-quite-Ren. Pale as a corpse, teeth a little too sharp, and with a thin line of blood girdling his neck where an axe had once rested.
He is now no longer Red or any sort of King. Scrappy and determined with a fierce kind of blizzard — no, not a blizzard any more; instead a flood to drown the snowdrops — nestled deep within his eyes.
Ren couldn’t be further from life, held together by the conditions of a curse and frayed ends of magic. He hates the spring as much as Cleo does.
BigB is the only human in their little alliance. She and Ren, undead; Lizzie, too alive and bursting with fae magic; and him. Swayed by Lizzie’s words like a fly into the web; strands too tight and glistening to ever let him go.
Ever.
He is childish, bright, settling into the eternal spring that blankets the fort like there never was anything else. He wears a cloverleaf in his buttonhole; the same viridian as the tag inches above his head. Stunned into wonder. When the wisteria blooms and carpets their castle walls in lilac, it will be his time. He is sure.
But for now — he is content to wait in the endless spring, hooked by the swell of the words spilling from a faerie’s lips.
Ren was a traitor.
At least, Cleo thinks, he had the decency to avoid harming his allies.
The air is thick and unbreathable with dust, smoke; Cleo clutches at her chest in order to gasp an inhale. The stench of sulphur wrinkles her nostrils.
There’s a crater. A gaping maw, jagged and rock-edged and filled with the pit of the abyss. She peers down, bracing herself against the ruins of the staircase.
Ren never lied. Through his judgement or not, he sank to his knees in the grass at the foot of the Lady of Shadows and begged for forgiveness. That he was possessed. That he was bloodthirsty and death-ridden. The Boogey puppeting his body had let him speak.
And Lizzie had tilted her chin to the fruit-burdened branches above.
Be merciless, she said, sharp as winter dawn. The death of an enemy is more valuable than a death amongst our own.
Ren had nodded. Rose to his feet, a clear head above Lizzie though possessing none of her authority.
There was a certain commanding presence she’d developed over the past few days. No longer the waif, the innocent; her wings are knife blades and her hair is bundled atop her head.
When the explosion rocked the land, a boom that juddered the ground beneath her feet, she’d merely looked to the dappled sky and clasped her hands.
Well done, my blade.
And Ren is grinning now. Passing Skizzleman the sooty shards of his armour that had succumbed to the blast, and the blackened diamond tools that hadn’t. Bubbling, did you see me, my dudes?
It was a trap to be proud of. Even its victim concurred.
He and Ren had climbed the rags of the staircase and were discussing mirthfully. After all, there was nothing to be afraid of. A kill would lull the Boogey for a week or so.
Cleo’s muscles are relaxed. She’s cackling at something Ren exclaims, muffled from the floor above, though keeping a constant hand on the brickwork. She has no intent to break her legs any time soon.
Someone clears their throat behind her; a shiver hikes up Cleo’s spine. She’d forgotten there was anybody else in the ruins of the tower.
“Cleo.”
When BigB speaks, Cleo is struck by the deliberation and calmness of his words. There is no space — no time — for error.
“Oh!” She turns and offers a smile. “Gave me a fright, you did. Didn’t think anyone else would stay in this death-trap of a place.”
She chuckles at her own joke. BigB does not.
Cleo huffs. “If it’s not funny , you could’ve ju—”
“I’m sorry,” he says. Cleo can’t see his eyes.
“You didn’t need to apologise , B. I’m only say—”
The edge of a sword bites into her shoulder blade.
Cleo’s heart jams in her throat; she scrabbles, shoves BigB aside, get out out escape now —
A cobbled step snags her foot and she smashes into the dirt.
Get up get up go go go —
Her knees are smarting and her bones throb. She staggers forward, scraping her palms on the rough path.
BigB is behind her, sword raised. An angel of Death. Harbinger of disaster. His face is remorseful; his hands are trembling.
“I’m sorry!” he shouts, and brings —
the sword —
down.
Cleo is already gone, sprinting for the gap in the tower walls. Breath tears at her throat.
“BigB!” she yells back. “You don’t have to do this!”
He pauses his advance. Cleo, too, halts. BigB tilts his head to one side, the side where his sword scores a line in the loose dirt.
“But Cleo,” he says all of a sudden, sing-song, voice soft and lilting.
Cleo steps backwards. Loose gravel scatters under her feet; she slips and meets the hard cobble path dug into the side of the hill.
BigB glides forward, phantasmal, close enough for Cleo to make out the radioactive green-red of his irises.
Cleo’s mouth is parted. “No,” she stammers, shaking her head minutely. “This is under your control! I know you’re still in there! Don’t —”
The sword is at her throat, grazing the skin. As gentle as a kiss.
“But that’s the thing,” he purrs.
“Wha— What do you —?”
And he straightens up. Light dances on the blade’s edge.
“Don’t you see, Cleo?” he grins, swinging the sword loosely in one hand.
Cleo is no longer there. Scrabbling backwards on feet and elbows, tripping over herself in her haste to escape.
“No!” she yelps with a fierce, final glare at him. “I do not see! Not at all!”
And she twists, flings herself from the path and into the shallows of the river, barely flinching as icy water seeps into her clothes, the marrows of her bones. The currents drag her down.
“I told you, Cleo,” the Boogey says through BigB’s voice. Too soft. Too calm. He twirls the sword on its point. “There’s no… possession here. This is all me.”
“ Trai—! ”
The sharp of the sword rips through Cleo’s lower trapezius and out of her chest. Her muscles spasm once, and then still.
She’s dead before she smacks into the surface. Blood mingles with water; the undertows coax it away from the body in streaming red ribbons. She floats, liminal, obscured only by her curtain of hair and the tissuey petals of her flower crown.
Her face; wrought into a wry smile.
Her hands; clasped at her chest as if clutching a spray of velvet-black roses.
Blood blossoms from the gash on her back, staining the stretch of water a permanent vermillion despite the currents’ attempts to flush it downstream.
Then smoke, ash; the body dissolves like salt, leaving only traces of pollen and the fading cloud of blood in the water.
BigB shivers on the river bank. The sun is bright and cold. He doesn’t know why there’s a sword in his hand; the river has drawn the last of Cleo’s blood from where her body hung like a spectre.
Cleo awakes panting, clutching the covers to the spot where a sword skewered through her chest. Black fog begins to cloud her mind.
He betrayed her.
How —
Cleo lets herself fall backwards; the mattress squelches beneath her sodden clothes. The pillow is not a traitor. The pillow can cradle her skull, cushion the buzzing Yellow Name which hovers a few inches above her head. She can’t see it, but it’s a constant. The duvet, the bedsheets — all soaked with freshwater. Slimy pondweed flops into one of her eyes and she picks it off. Flings it to the floorboards. She wants no reminder of the people she once called allies .
“Hey,” someone says, and it takes a startling moment for Cleo to register the soft particles bubbling around the outline of a person. Invisible. Straddling the chair a few feet from her bedside.
“Etho,” she seethes. “This is my fortress. ”
Etho laughs softly and stretches. The particles move with him. “I saw what happened,” he says. “Sucky day, eh?”
“If by that you mean bad , then yes.” She turns away, minutely. Folds her arms over her chest.
“For sure.” The chair legs scrape along the floor; Etho stands. His footsteps — invisible as his body may be — still tap out a regular, shuffling beat. “Where did you die?”
Cleo chokes out a laugh. “Blunt as ever, Etho. The river. You know, the one near Ren’s tower. I’m glad to see someone’s actually con—”
A pickaxe lifts itself from the workbench and vanishes into the Ether, followed by a rucksack and a sword, which disappear the moment Etho slips them into his inventory.
“Can I loot your corpse?” he asks.
“I doubt there’s much left after BigB was done with it.”
“Oh, okay. That’s a yes, then?”
Cleo can’t see his mask, or his face, but she imagines it crinkling into a loose smile.
“Why the Hels not,” she replies.
The door swings open, with it a gust of frigid winter air. “Awesome. See you around, Cleo! Try not to die!”
“I’ll do my best!” she yells back. The slamming door cuts off half her words, but she has no quarrel with Etho.
She eyes the iron chestplate dangling on its hook like a dried slab of meat. The scattered flints on the table. They’re not hers. Etho wouldn’t mind.
She walks on autopilot, legs carrying her past the faerie fort with far more haste than is necessary. A blast of humid air latches onto her skin in pockets of sweat. The gate is open. Branches reach for her clothes and scrape at her arms, come back, you are wanted here.
Cleo feels bile rise in her throat and quickens her pace. The further from this unnatural spring, the better.
As she walks, she has time to sift through her thoughts, pick out nuggets of gold from the silt and mud.
How she never belonged, and never made an effort to. Ren and she could have been a team. He instead leant into the life-magic, in the hopes that it would reknit the gash on his throat, reunite a cold soul with a broken body.
He saw hope. And Lizzie saw an opportunity. Cleo saw the lies she wove and the web he struggled into.
Lizzie is the verdant springtime, exuberant, less innocent than she proclaims. Every new bud or bulb or fern frond must have captured energy from the sun, broken down fur and ribs and blood to siphon off minerals. All beneath a fine grain of soil and brilliant, shining grass.
Ren is the thawing winter, hardened by lifetimes of ice and rock and salt. He has lost too much. Still, he softens inch-by-inch under the sun’s caring fingertips. Gradually learning not to detest the snowdrops.
And BigB: the almost-summer, fixed by the spring into whispered promises of later, later, and not yet unmalleable enough to disagree.
Cleo is none of these things. She is the autumn, dying, half-dead, ripped of life and instead burdened by the storms of the coming winter.
She will drown the snowdrops. Ignite the forest. Tear emerald bough from every Voidforsaken tree, so the faerie fort can finally experience the depths of ragged winter.
She has new allies. Pearl and Scott, the Moon and the Galaxy, who offered her shelter under their wings. Neutral. A start, and castle walls, and people to guard her back as she slept. She would do the same for them.
The Moon pulls the tides, and the Galaxy pulls the Moon, and Cleo is caught up like a murmur of autumn leaves on a world cradled in both of their hands. They do not care for the seasons and cannot fall for the sway of a single, magic-wielding being. Cleo is safe.
Their walls are craggy and patched with wooden boards to prevent arrows flying through the chinks in the stonework. It may be a cottage, but a cottage nestled behind weathered barricades, to outlast even the most vengeful storm.
She is safe. It survived the fire and the wind and a trap too obvious to be missed. Protected from the Red Names, as being one step away from the likes of which herself. Scott and Pearl are both a rich, spruce-dark green. Secure.
She is safe. The main entrance is trapped, as is the front door, but she lets herself in through a hidden side passage, scooping away clods of dirt with a near-broken shovel.
She is safe .
An observer clicks at her feet.
She is —
(hearing a scream rip from her throat as the world explodes around her with Helsfire and burning light the earth crumpling with a roar like a sinkhole that pounds at her eardrums her neck snapping upon impact with the exposed rock, shards of iron and soil and sticky pulsing blood —)
Dust settles in the crater. Cleo’s mangled corpse vanishes with the breath of the wind.
There is no-one to greet her as she respawns. Her bed is still sodden from the death in the river, and for a while she doesn’t move, letting the chill ooze into her bones. It’s a toxic feeling, cold and ugly, but by all means preferable to the buzzing, acrid heat at the back of her mouth. A reminder of the explosion that knocked her down to Red. Reclaimed a life for the Universe.
She thought Etho might have paid a visit. Or Pearl and Scott — enemies now, she reminds herself. Neutral at best. Hels, even Joel to greet her with a fanged grin and murder in his eyes would be preferable. Besides, she is no better than him.
Cleo is utterly alone in a draughty castle with rooks screeching death from the parapets.
The sword tore her chest and the explosion then cracked it open. She feels for the gaping chasm under her collarbone, pushes onto spongy muscle. A thud — heartbeat, she then realises — ripples through her hand. She snatches her fingers away like from a flame. Tipped in ruby.
There is a hole that exposes her heart. Should someone reach into the chasm and squeeze hard enough, her final life would be choked from her throat.
Cleo is drained, and the difference is stark against the bright hues of her duvet and the discarded pondweed on the floorboards, caught in the mattress. She’s been snipped out of a black-and-white photo and pasted into this false, harsh reality of light and colour. Her edges are ragged. She feels the Universe shifting around her, as if being filtered, scrutinised through an array of lenses separate to the outside world.
Hers deals with black and red. The poppies braided through her tangled hair have survived. As have her throbbing, bloody heart and the whites of her eyes — now, though, permanently stained bloodshot.
She hasn’t slept in weeks. Difficult with the Boogey seeking your blood like a heat-guided missile, unsatisfied until the ground around you is spattered red and steaming.
Cleo struggles to her feet, knots the iron greaves around her shins. Raps at them with her knuckles. Her hands move automatically, a practised motion. Rustle through the chest. Pull out matching pauldrons, also worn rusted iron but at least offering some protection. She will take all she can get.
An axe. A stack of bread and a gilt apple. Never enough for the long term, but plenty to set her on the road. She is no longer welcome at her own castle, after all.
Before leaving, she snatches at the remaining flints on the table. The Shadowlands never wanted her anyway.
It is a dry, dusty winter. Bark crackles and tears under her fingertips. Cleo eyes the tree, the trunk that stretches into the heavens with leafy arms.
All too flammable, she’d said to Lizzie when the saplings were first planted.
She laughs to herself, a small chuckle that bubbles up her throat from her hollow, heaving chest. Scrapes the flints against each other, against the trunk. Watches a spark burrow into the wood with flaming claws, teeth. Light as a squirrel.
The world, Cleo decides, must burn.