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i.
You are cruel.
You learn that word from your father; it’s the closest thing you have to a beloved childhood nickname, and you can only suppose that you earned it the hard way.
He wasn’t always this way with you: there must have been some long-past time where you were close. A time when your house was still a home, still full. You think that you can still remember it, but it’s distant, like a dream. Like it’s covered in a mist, a haze of memory that makes you believe that perhaps it’s too good for you to know.
Apparently, you made your mama die. You don’t know how or why—all you know is that she’s not around anymore, and that it has to be because of you.
You only have yourself to talk to, so you’re left to fill in the blanks on your lonesome. To find rationality in your father’s sea of reluctance, to find land in the reasons for his withdrawal. And that’s the best guess that you have: the memory of that featureless face, the warm, glowing voice of your mother.
Or, you suppose, the lack of it.
You figure that the only crime that you could’ve committed is making your mama die. Your daddy blames you for it, you’d overheard him say so once. Or were you simply dreaming it, trying to find quartz amongst stones?
But you live for that man. So you believe him, no questions asked.
ii.
When you’re eight and only just learning what it means to have dreams, you take all the comfort you can get.
The other kids aren’t all that fond of you so, like any other lonely child, you seek it first and foremost in him. The man that is supposed to be your father, your first friend. But that friend is as imaginary as a figment of your own making, something you conjured to pull a mask over the man that dwells in the house alongside you.
Most days, he leaves you to play in your room, choosing to simply ignore that you exist at all. Sometimes you pretend you’re a ghost that walks the halls, having to stay out of sight of the occupant so you don’t get exorcised.
This game—it makes you feel good. To find innocent fun in the cage of your home. At least, this way, the way your daddy looks at you makes sense. It’s like he’s in on the game, without you even needing to ask him.
On particularly relentless days, when you give in and call for him anyway, until he can’t ignore you, until he comes upstairs, he asks you if you know how cruel you are. Asks if you’re being cruel on purpose. Asks if you’re doing this to make sure that he can’t forget about her.
You’d like to think that it’s a decision that you made, to become this way. But the reality is something you’re not quite old enough to understand.
Today, you’ve been playing with the other kids but they’d tagged you and run away to hide. Skins scraped away, caked in dirt, your eyes filled with tears, you walked into the house, up to the table, where he still sits.
You don’t understand a lot of things these days—like why your daddy’s been sitting at the table for hours. Or what he’s been drinking, or what he’s holding. It’s all foreign to you. Even the way his head looks heavy on his neck is still new, and yet it feels like he’s been this way forever.
His breaths come like sighs.
“Daddy?” You say, feeling the shake in your own jaw, your knees throbbing heartfully.
This is the most pain you’ve ever been in.
“What, Imogen?” he says, barely even sparing a glance to look at you.
You’re in the most pain you’ve ever been in and yet you wipe your eyes, planting your feet into the ground, trying so desperately to keep the tears from welling again.
“Daddy, it’s not fair.”
He turns on you now. His glass mostly empty, one hand clenched around a chain. He sits back, shoulders slumping against the back of his chair. The free hand reaches up to scratch a line on the ridge of his brow as they furrow. He doesn’t ask you what’s not fair. You don’t know what part you really mean, anyway.
“Do you really gotta look at me like that, Imogen?” he says to you.
“Like what?” you ask. You don’t know the answer.
“You look just like your mother when you look at me like that.”
And it slots into place, snapping in like a dovetail joint.
He must see her in your eyes. See her in the lilac of your hair or the shade of your skin or the shape of your smile. Like an inescapable phantom—another facet in your game—a persistent ache he can’t seem to shake.
You thought you were playing, but you are a ghost. You understand that now. You’re both the ghost of yourself and your mother. You don’t understand how it makes you cruel. Regardless, you accept the truth: that if that’s what he so desperately needs you to be, cruel is what you’ll become.
Because when he tells you you’re cruel, he looks right at you. And it’s better that he sees you for that, if only it means that he doesn’t see through you.
So cruel you are, in the only ways you can conceive at so gentle an age.
It’s not much, not at first. There isn’t much that little hands can do to scar this world: but it starts in things more your size. But once you begin to really look, the world of your backyard becomes a raft of ample opportunity.
Bugs, insects—lifeless things. Things that look about as pitiful as you, perhaps. The kinds of things that will always be smaller than you are, no matter how small you feel.
To spiders, especially, you’re a particularly cruel mistress. They’re just all long, crooked legs spinning fine silky webs, making their homes in the darkest corners of that tiny shed out back, the only place you can really call your own. The audacity that they have to try and take what utopia you have, without asking your permission at all.
Your guise takes the shape of calling them nightmares. Much too many legs, much too long and much too crooked and much too them. Of course, you don’t really think that. Not truly. They’re much too small to be scary, but you suppose you have to hate something. You convince yourself that their existence alone upsets you, and for that they can’t stick around any longer.
There’s a graveyard on these walls: a warning, you tell yourself. A warning and a reminder to those who come next. A reminder to yourself of the tears you shed for them – your weakness.
You show no mercy. And their limbs, splayed out across the peeling lilac paint on those rickety panelled walls, live for years afterwards in your dreams. This is how it all truly begins.
So on you harbour with this secret, sheltered belief that you are destined for cruelty.
And you reap what you sow.
iii.
You live in Gelvaan, a small town in a flattened piece of land in the midst of the Taloned Highlands. It’s surrounded by fields of tall grass, so tall that year by year, you measure your own height against the strands, gaining on it more and more every summer.
And you prowl those grasses, when you can find the raised husks of anthills, only to grind the heels of your boots to collapse their tunnels, watching as panic flooded a colony.
There are a few moments, though fleeting, where their anguish feels like a torrent flood, sweeping your feet from beneath you and carrying you to a graveyard of sunken ships you were surely responsible for.
Such a pathetic little predator, you are.
The years go by this way. And then, when you’re almost twice the height of the longest grass, the thoughts come creeping in, a perfect cruelty served hot and fresh and delivered right to your feet.
iv.
It’s overwhelming. Of course it is.
The first time it happens, you’re only trying to make your way through town, trying to find your father after he left you at a stall in the market.
Those voices, they chastise you like a public beating, the cracking of a whip as your body is brought before a crowd. They surround you like some oppressive gas, smothering your lungs and curling around the sponge of your brain and squeezing until you—
They don’t go away.
You can’t get them away.
They never go away.
Even in your dreams, you can still hear them. Though they're mere echoes of the world, awake. You can still hear them. Sometimes, they show up at the edge of a storm.
It’s not all that long before you hear them talking about you, those voices. They say horrible, nasty things. Things that are cruel, even to you.
About how you've always acted strange, that you remind them of Liliana in all the wrong ways (you pretend not to know that that’s your mother’s name) and that you're ill-mannered. And dirty and rude and a freak. That you should never have been born in the first place, if they knew you were gonna come out this way.
(Are they right?)
They tell you to get out of their heads and you don’t know what they mean. When you tell them that, they don’t believe you. You start to believe that you're only ever capable of telling lies, even if you're convinced it's the truth.
You had started to befriend the Tildamere kids a few years back. You were pretty close in age to the oldest daughter and you’d been getting along just fine until the voices crept in. She turned into one of them, one of the worst ones, too. And when her brother joined in on the torment, it was all that you needed to stay far away from their yard, further into your home.
They tell you things about yourself that you didn’t know, so you can only suppose that they’re true.
Because your voices are other people’s thoughts. Aren’t they? That’s the only explanation. And it should be a relief, maybe, to learn that other people are just as cruel as you, only these people keep it in their heads.
You hear your father’s thoughts the most. He’s the only one that you can hear when you’re at home. He thinks about you a lot, but you learn to tune him out, because he only confirms what you know already. That you’re not welcome here, not when you’re like her, whatever that means.
Well, the truth is that you know what it means. Your mother, of course. Because you’re too much like her, much too you.
But you spend so long trying to convince yourself otherwise that it feels too easy to feign your ignorance.
v.
You’re an outsider in your own town, your own home, your own dining table.
The isolation of being alone in the presence of so many becomes a habit, just like trying your best not to listen to the biting monologues of the townsfolk, just like tying the laces of your boots.
It gets easier with time. With practice.
At eighteen, your father finally tells you you have to come join him in working for Master Faramore. It’s only a few months after the voices begin.
You’re sent down to the stables every morning, noon and night to care for the horses. You don’t mind it all that much, to be honest: there aren’t anyone’s thoughts to impede on all the way out here. And the horses aren’t half bad either.
It doesn’t take all that long before you bond with one of the younger mares—her name’s Flora and she’s the only person (if you can call a horse a person) that’s ever been happy to see you.
Maybe it’s because you always come with the promise of sugar cubes and small treats and attention. She’s a horse. She doesn’t know they’re bribes.
It’s a few months into your routine when someone else is exiled to the stables.
He introduces himself as Samuel: he’s tall with long blond hair and eyes like a watery sky and he’s gentle with the horses. He smiles at you: it makes you wonder if he’s heard what they say about you, or if he’s an outsider to them, too.
His thoughts aren’t as intrusive as all of the others, you find. Or maybe it’s because it’s only his thoughts that you need to block out, here. Either way, it feels less abrasive.
Still there, always there, but without malice. Somehow. It doesn’t feel like it can last. So you stay away, even when he’s kind. If you don’t, it will hurt more when he sees the truth later.
One day, you’re running errands in town like you usually do, head down, trying desperately to push all everyone’s thoughts out of your head. You’re surprised when you’re accosted by someone: the very same Tildamere girl, the one around your age, the one from when you were kids.
It’s a little more than surprising when she, heart in hand, apologises to you. She says that her brother’s sorry too, that they all are. Because they were just kids that didn’t know better than to bully anyone smaller than them. She asks if you want to reconcile.
You agree, but you avoid them regardless.
You’ve grown accustomed to being alone. It’s much easier this way: no one’s heads to get stuck in, no blame to take.
vi.
Your life, as with most things, falls into routine, eventually.
You go about the chores in the house or some task in the stables or some extra work for Master Faramore. On rare occasions, when he needs an extra pair of hands, you’ll go and work with your daddy.
In the end, you have no choice but to adapt. To stick to paths away from the main roads. Remaining out of sight if you can.
(It keeps them from thinking about you if they never see you at all.)
vii.
One night, you have a dream.
It starts in Eden.
Silence.
For once, pure and true silence. Devoid of the oppressive voices that usually swarm you like a moth to a blaze. The kind of silence you’ve been yearning for.
All that’s there is the quiet noise of nature, without fear of something breaking through. The sound of the wind brushing through the grass. A soft, distant whistle that streams through the blades before lifting to tenderly brush your hair from your face as you stand in the field outside of your home.
Flowers are intermittently littered in the abundant green—all subdued blues and wild reds and flaming yellows. The sun reflects off of the surface of their petals, casting idyllic shades of glittering rainbows amongst the sea of waving viridian.
You bask in this small piece of tranquillity you’ve been mercied—you let the sun dry a few tears across your cheeks, let the crisp air permeate your lungs, let yourself be invigorated by the life you draw up from the ground.
And then you blink, and there is red.
Red, as far as the eye can see. A sheet of crimson, rolling like clouds, slipping over itself like a wave crashing into the body of the sea. And it’s surrounding you from all sides, flooding the horizon like a ghastly, bleeding barricade.
Has surrounded you already.
How long have you been boxed in?
Has it always been this way?
Lightning snaps and breaks through a crack in the great cumulonimbus, lashing out like a whip, scourging the wall of cloud into motion. It circles, spiralling like water through a drain, growing ever smaller. With no way out, no break in the current, it’s like it’s containing something, you surmise.
But the only thing here is you.
With your feet weighed with the sandbag of your little cruelties, you have no choice but to stand watch. A sentinel as your demise—the storm—curls ever closer.
It swallows the field, foot by foot.
Petals are blown from flowers. The sun is extinguished.
You are utterly powerless but to watch.
“Run, Imogen!”
That voice—that voice is a familiar sound to you. An accent not unlike your own, curling around your name in a way that you can only associate with learning it. Learning to walk too, if that’s even possible. Like a gentle cooing, an encouragement. Warm and glowing and…
This is your mother. Isn’t it? Your mother, forming words you could swear you’ve never heard her say.
She just repeats those words, begging for you to escape in the same way you begged for your father’s love.
And still, the soles of your feet have grown roots into the ground.
You are powerless.
You think of being a child in that purple-painted shed out back. You know how those crushed spiders felt. Living, and then suddenly not.
The moment the storm overtakes you, you wake up.
When you lift yourself from the mattress, there are a few too-long moments where you think you can’t. You panic and heave for air, but your chest is constricted, like the clouds have filled your lungs, choking you. Suffocating you.
There is a cardinal stain on the inside of your eyelids. Perhaps it’s always been there, but it’s never been as haunting as this before.
Your body is slick with sweat, your hair glued to the nape of your neck, your pulse thunders in your ears. When you look down at your hands, you ground yourself to the small slits, glowing a harsh purple that cuts across your skin.
Even your body is cruel to you: fighting to have this power evicted and harming itself in the process.
viii.
Over the course of a few months, the deep purple marks on the pads of your fingers turn into lightning. Scars you’ve been run through with a current. With each dream, and each red storm, they creep further down your fingers. It’s like they’re crawling over your skin; sometime soon, they’ll reach your palms.
The day they do, you hide them behind leather gloves. Easy enough to disguise as protection from calluses that have already long developed, right? Not that anyone’s paying you enough attention to ask, anyway.
It becomes a new facet of your routine, and you only really take them off to sleep, when only your own eyes can berate them. If the rest of the town found out about the malady creeping its way down your hands, it’d only add fuel to their fire. The desire for you to leave would take over. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
The strange thing about being on your own for so long is that you begin to forget what it’s like to forge bonds with others.
You have Flora, in the stables, and the biweekly wage from Master Faramore. Beyond them, you can’t think of anyone you’d ever need.
Or, so you thought.
Your twenties creep up on you like a trap promptly sprung. All of a sudden, you’re counting your twenty-sixth year and you hold your blankets tightly around yourself to mimic the feeling of touch.
There’s too many cold nights that you spend tracing patterns against your skin with your off-hand. Your arms are tucked close as you cradle your own frame, squeezing your eyes so desperately closed that maybe you’ll forget you’re laying alone.
(You never do.)
It’s strange, because you don’t remember when you got so lonely.
Maybe you’re all the more cruel for craving company in the first place. For yearning to be held, just for the sake of it. Subjecting another person to your company is punishment enough, you can feel it.
But it’s meant to be this way: you’re saving another for your own detriment. Surely that makes you a better person, right? It’s not like you want to hurt other people. You never wanted to hurt anyone to begin with.
Your days turn into a slog. One after the other after the other in a cycle of rotting mind and fatigue.
You wake up, and work and eat if you have the energy, sleep and then do it all over again.
(You don’t need to look in the mirror to see the deep purple bags forming under your eyes. Besides, you stopped looking in the mirror a while ago. No reason to start again.)
With each day just like the last, you can hardly feel the months passing by, only noting the shifting seasons like a distant memory.
You’re not sure how much longer you can take it: how long it’ll be before you just can’t stand another day.
And then, one day, through the static of thought and lethargy, you hear it. You hear her and hope seeps into your chest like a sweet, warm balm over your aching mind.
ix.
You’re brushing out Flora’s mane, your fingers combing through the final tangles when someone’s thoughts press into yours.
You don’t recognise them.
They don't sound like any of the voices you’ve heard before. In fact, at the moment it’s not much of a voice at all.
A blend of sounds and song, all seeping over one another like the layers of a chorus. Like soft rain and spring, somehow. Like lakes and the crackling of a fire and the singing of birds. A gentle breeze and dreams and being so very alive.
And then a voice comes in, in something of a hum and it’s… like music. Real music. A loving respite, a place of warmth and comfort.
Though, as you move to step away from the stall, the sound withdraws.
They—whoever that wonderful mind belongs to—comes back. Not on the same day, of course. On occasional nights, just when the weather is taking a hotter shift, it hovers around for longer. Still distant, like a civilisation barely marring the line of the horizon, but there. Unmistakably, there. Alive.
At some point, you lose control of yourself.
You stay bereft of a migraine, but as you finish filling the final bucket, you can hear the symphony. It stays distant, at first. And then louder.
Your feet move without you telling them to, at first. And once realise what you’re doing, where you’re heading, something tempts you forward: you wade your way into the nearby treeline, avoiding stay sticks and twigs, holding onto the bark of hearty trees.
The first time you get a glance of her, you’re almost certain she’s nothing but a shadow, lurking in the darkness.
In your head, the musical sound of her voice fades in through, like a constant ambience, just a note above the real sound of the trees rustling around her. And then, the words creep in, no longer just a melody.
“These would go lovely in something sweet! Perhaps it could be worth the risk— oh, no, no, no. I just got here. It would be too much of a waste to throw it away now. Pâté? What do you think?”
A second voice cuts in.
You jolt.
There’s two of them?
And they’re talking in their minds? At least, you’re pretty damn sure they’re not speaking aloud.
“Oh euuuuhhhh, now listen ‘ere, I think we bed down, y’know lay low for a couple days, get ridda those nasty blisters and we can try our luck on the way outta town, aye?”
“Pâté, you really are full of the most wonderful ideas,” the first voice says, aloud now.
Feminine in expression and a fluctuating, almost sing-song range of tone and pitch strung through the words. It’s strange, hearing someone sound like they’re in the midst of a performance. It almost reminds you of the puppet shows you used to watch when you were a child.
Was she really talking telepathically? The thought of another person like you sends a bolt of frightening hope through your chest.
No response comes, mental or otherwise, and the voice begins to hum a gentle tune as she wanes from the beaten path, rustling the leaves of bushes as she goes.
A low hum becomes the gentle words of a song, her thoughts apparently trying to recall a tune. The song cuts off, sharp, new words cutting in. Words that apologise to some critter she has to move.
“Go on, now. There you are,” she says. The words come through the trees almost muffled, but somehow still feel like they’re intrinsically coloured with the sound of affection. Like your own voice when you’re talking to Flora.
You don’t think you’ve ever heard it from another person, definitely not from this close.
How close are you?
There’s a flash of a cloak in the low light, a different shade to the assertive, growing night, and you gather that the woman can’t be too far away from you. You catch a lighter flash—skin, perhaps—in movement before you press your back into the rough bark of a thicker tree.
She’s gathering something, it seems like. Maybe some sort of herb or plant.
You wait in silence before you lean out of the cover, hoping to catch another glimpse of her.
Instead, you find the figure staring, rather intently, in your direction.
A chill runs through you. A jolt of fear—the evidence of being seen so suddenly. The same feeling you get running into someone in town. A strike of fear that renders you stiff, completely unable to move.
But could someone with so much kindness in their voice be so cruel as them? You hope not.
That thought is the only thing that lets you lean further out from the tree, your eyes slowly focusing in the dark.
Long, stringy black hair and sharp lines and arms as thin as the branches above her. Even from this far away, not but a few metres, you can feel her looming over you, tall and spindly. Clothes tattered and stained, hanging off of her frame limply, as though she simply hung them over herself as opposed to wearing them.
The sharp, pointed (almost elven, but not quite) features are covered by a stretch of thin, greying skin. Like her entire body has been ridden with frostbite, like she’d been left to wade in icy waters until her whole form turned that shade of sickly blue-grey.
She’s almost spider-like, too long and too tall. Creeping and looming in a place that isn’t hers. She looks like one of those bodies you left in that shed, suddenly animated and made human.
Is this your retribution? The world is finally catching up to you for all of the things you’ve done?
You hope that death is kinder than man. Afford you so kind a voice before your departure.
As she meets your eyes (does she even have eyes? From this distance, you can seldom tell. The place where her eyes should be bares into you like a deep, sinking void), the figure seems to retreat into herself, extremities curling closer to her body, as if trying to become one with the trees around her.
Worse than death, is she some sort of hag? They were supposed to live out in the woods and stuff, aren’t they? You’ve never heard of any living anywhere near Gelvaan but it’s not totally implausible, nonetheless.
Maybe the townsfolk were already under her spell.
The smile grows wider still, and you’re certain that each breath you take brings you closer and closer to the fast-approaching last.
Hopefully, at least your father will come looking for your remains. Or were you too cruel to even be afforded a burial?
“Oh, hello!” the spider-like woman says in that lilting voice. “It seems you’ve found me with my berries! They’re very nice! Not that they’re mine mine because if they’re yours I promise I don’t want any trouble. I’ll be moving right along, don’t worry!”
Berries?
What in the world is she talking about?
“Oh, uh. They’re not mine.”
In the low light, she is nothing but teeth and white skin.
She’s out here picking berries?
You step out from around the tree against your better judgement, taking your hat from your head to use as a temporary basket. In the darkness, your eyes strain to see the small, dark berries perched on a low-lying bush.
“We could… share?”
It’s a habit the way your eyes search for another figure in the dark, someone looming just out of sight, waiting for you. Your eyes catch and fall from branches and foliage, landing on nothing but shadows.
“That’s—okay. I don’t need any, I’m alright.” You can catch the uncertainty in your own voice. You can’t help it.
There’s a spark of unease, one that courses from your mind to constrict your chest. It’d be nothing strange but—it’s not your own.
She’s scared of you.
Why is she scared of you?
“I just thought one of the horses got loose or somethin’ from the noise,” you add, hoping to soothe that anxiety. “If ya need some help, I got the free hands to do it?”
The scars on your hands thrum beneath the leather of your gloves as you clench your fists, the brim of your hat contorting slightly in the grip. You wonder if she’s seen them, and that’s why—
There’s a bead of silence strung between you, collecting like rain on a cobweb.
The feeling of distress wilts ever so slightly, like a plant left in the shade.
“Aren’t you scared of me?” she asks. In the dark, the form hunches over herself, as if she has to duck under the lip of a cave before emerging. Dark tangles of hair make her form intangible, almost impossible to see where she begins and the night stops. The pits of her sockets must have eyes, you notice blindly. There’s a reflection in them, ever so slight, of the little of Catha’s light that can reach this far into the forest.
You want to say yes. You’re thinking yes. Yes, because this whole thing feels like some joke. If this has been some sort of quip, some gag sent after you just to torment you, to tease you with the prospect of being seen. You can’t help but fear that the gods are all the more cruel for dangling this in front of you.
Or, or, for a fleeting moment. This is the world, kneeling down, offering a hand, urging you to take it. To pick you up, bring you back to your feet, to—
But what have you done to deserve this?
She’s closer now. Without the obscurity of distance, her white skin is pale, but glowing. A halo of dim light—you begin to make out the shape of lips, a nose. All framed with deep hair and round eyes and you can’t help but think…
“You’re beautiful.”
You take the hand presented to you.
Part of you doesn’t believe your own words. But they stand, hearkened to the space between you, solid. They leave your lips like a weight being lifted from your skull. And that grating feeling of dread exhales with them.
“Are you sure?”
The figure steps ever closer.
Now directly in front of you, she’s taller than you originally thought. With her whole form towering over you, even from what details you can make out, you can’t help but feel like there’s something wrong with the way she is. But you can’t put your finger on it. You blame the darkness.
“Certain,” you say, ready to embrace a punishment if that’s how this is to end.
Another beat of silence.
The trees whisper around you, their branches interlocked like a web of connections. Shielding. Keeping you in, everything else out.
A weeping feeling crawls into your chest, something brimmed with both mourning and hope, like a child being reunited with a lost toy. Like hearing the voice of your mother in a dream. A melting feeling, like the seeds of flowers beginning to germinate in the spring.
“What’s your name?” the voice asks.
“I’m Imogen,” you say. Your family name hovers over your tongue like a trap waiting to be sprung. Your hands clench to fists before you let the tension in the joints release, holding your hat with one so you can extend the other out. “Yourself?”
“I’m Laudna,” she says, then, singing, “Pleasure!”
Her fingers are long and thin, as if simply bone covered with skin, and cold. You can feel it through your gloves. It’s times like these when you truly remember how sensitive your fingers are to the heat—or lack thereof—of others.
You can’t remember the last time someone touched your hand. Or any part of you, really. That wasn’t a wayward shoulder or a stern grip.
This woman’s—Laudna’s hands are firm, but gentle. A little ginger. She waits a moment too long before letting go, a voice singing through thoughts as easy as grass growing roots.
“Imogen,” she thinks. “How pretty a name!”
The darkness seems to shift around Laudna, sinking into the sharp lines of her face.
You want to say a thousand things to her—about the balm of her voice and the shape of her smile and the way her thoughts seem to float like feathers on water and—
It happens without you thinking about it really. Out of habit more than anything. It’s not the first time you’ve been out in the stables afterdark, all on your lonesome. And besides, you’d become so used to it that it hardly even occurs to you, outside of a meandering hand motion.
Soft purple light begins to emanate from a translucent orb that strikes within itself: a self contained roiling storm, silent rotating in its trapped sphere. Nowhere to go, nowhere to run from but the palm of your hand.
Laudna.
In the night, she’d been a terrifying thing. Empty sockets and ragged clothes and omens. A curse on too-long legs. A reanimated thing of your past, brought back to show you the same kind of mercy.
But here, in this light? Those thoughts of beauty trickle back in like water through holes in a beaver’s dam. Slow and steady, eroding the barrier until it comes over you all at once, like the river breaking through.
Her eyes.
She has them, first of all, and they’re wide. And dark and maybe a little unsettling. A mole under her right. Glistening, drawn to the apparated light like a working dog to cattle, darting around, as if trying to find its source.
And then they’re on you.
Dark and full and alive.
You feel like you’re underwater, overtaken by the current, helpless but to watch as you catch yourself staring. That silence spreads again. You can feel your chest, completely bereft of air, suddenly feeling all too trapped. Something like drowning. You can’t move. You can’t bring yourself to move.
Why would you move?
Your eyes linger on the shape of her skin—trapped over her neck, pulled almost taut over her face, interrupted by the jagged shape of bone. Can’t help but take note of the hunch that she carries herself with, feel yourself pull away from her. There’s something about her that’s wrong. Too long and too dark and too beautiful.
“Are you sure you aren’t scared of me?” Laudna asks.
This time, you can see the way her head shifts, carrying towards you, almost serpentine, before recoiling. Those eyes seem to study you, just as you had done for her.
“Maybe a little,” you say this time. Bolder now in the shape of your own light. A light smile taking to your lips—the feeling is unfamiliar—the shape of what might be a laugh forming in your lungs. “But if you were gonna kill me, you would’a done it by now, right?”
Laudna stands, her free hand coming to her chest.
“Kill you?” she asks, apparently having either ignored or misunderstood the jest. “Why ever would I kill you, Imogen? If anything, I thought you were going to kill me!”
“Why—would I kill you?”
“Well, you wouldn’t be the first to try.”
Something about those words sink into your heart, carving themselves into the cavity of your chest, like a name etched into the lavender paint of an old shed behind your house.
“I’m not gonna try and kill you,” you say. “I like you.”
You watch her unfurl slightly, shoulders pulling back to where you think shoulders should reasonably be, before she reaches out a hand for the second time, deep purple lips pulling into a smile.
It’s an idle thought, but you wonder the last time you’d said something so nice to someone. That the words that came from your lips were the honey they seemed to be, bereft a bitter note.
“Call it a truce, then?” she offers.
“Not much of a truce if we’re not even fightin’,” you say, your smile now unbidden.
And you take her hand.
x
That’s just the first time you meet her—Laudna, that is.
In fact, the more time that passes, the more you think that these accidental run-ins may not be as accidental as you originally thought. From the music of Laudna’s mind drawing closer and closer to the stables with each passing night, to the brush of her thoughts when you’re taking your lunch late, it’s like something, somewhere, is pushing you together.
It’s not that long before you run into her again, earlier, this time. You find her thoughts wandering in from the treeline in the early afternoon. You’re surprised to hear your name in them.
So, like every other time you meet, you seek her out. Mindfully following the breadcrumbs of thought onto the path beginning to be beaten by your own boots.
Today, you’ve brought her a gift—it ain’t much, but bread stolen from the pantry, split between the two of them is better than no bread at all. You wonder when was the last time she had bread.
Laudna often mentions being run out of places. Never in depth, only ever fleeting, like skittish detail she can’t bring herself to commit to.
You hope you can favour her with some concern, at the very least. Part of you wants to offer her a bed in your home, but you’re not sure how kindly daddy would take to having another stranger in the house.
There’s a buzz of thought as Laudna catches sight of you—and you fall into the routine that you’ve taken to. Talking about the day, how she slept, how you slept. You haven’t told her about your nightmares yet. Or that you can hear her thoughts. It’s… too soon. Too soon to drive her away.
A lull presses itself into the conversation, Laudna seeming to stew something, mull it over. Her thoughts have become a background noise, anyway: they’re not as harsh as everyone elses’.
“Actually, Imogen,” she says, lowering what remains of the bread to her lap, letting it rest in the folds of her skirt. “I have someone for you to meet.”
You swallow hard. You can’t sense anyone else out here. Are they hiding? Are they dead?
“Someone for me to meet?” you say, mouth suddenly dry.
“Yes.” Laudna stares at you intently. “Now, Pâté, play nice, alright? Because Imogen—”
“Oh ‘ello, I’m Pâté de Rolo. Pleasure to meet you,” Laudna—Pâté says.
You watch as black sinew drips from Laudna’s fingers, wrapping around the limbs of what appears to be a… rat? Maybe? It should be a rat, with a furry body, a limp, bald tail and tiny little arms. Only, where the head should be—well, maybe it’s inside but—instead of the head, sits a raven skull, attached at the neck with a deep red thread, as if stitched and kept in a bow.
The sight repulses you. And at the same time you literally cannot take your eyes off of the damn thing.
The jaw even moves comedically out of rhythm to the words.
You’ve seen Laudna’s magic before—felt the kinship of someone else who felt like their very existence was the contrary of nature because of their ability to manipulate the world around them, not that she told you that, of course. Seen the black, inky strands that stretch from her fingers.
She mended your clothes for you once—you’d tore a strip into your favourite dress (you’d only worn it to dress pretty for her anyway, had been so darn upset when it’d been ruined). When the black ichor dripped from her fingers, you’d thought it was going to stain. But when her hands pulled away, the fabric breathed with new life, you couldn’t help but see beauty in it.
Now, as she brings life into the limbs of Pâté de Rolo III, that same feeling wells in your chest, like dry grass setting alight in the blaze of the sun.
“Ol’ Laudna here made me when she was out wanderin’,” Pâté explains, his animated hands dancing around to illustrate his words. “Got rather lonely, y’see? So here I am, stopped the old bird from goin’ crazy, I did.”
“You did?” you say, at first looking at the display. The silly dancing rat, Laudna’s posture as she almost seems to hide behind him, a facade taking over her frame. Your gaze fixes on her, catching on her eyes and being regretfully unable to fall away as you continue. “Well, Pâté, I’m mighty glad you could take care of her for me.”
xi
After that, you don’t know what it is but it’s almost as if something shifts, like Exandria itself had changed somehow. Your daily chores come easier, your chest lighter, your feet quicker. You feel like you’re a new person, somehow. Like, this whole time, that damn red storm has been fucking up your head, been keeping you from seeing what you love in the world around you.
The grass feels greener, softer underfoot. The sun refreshing on your skin, never quite bringing you to the point of burning as it so often does in the Highlands’ treacherous high summer. A new wave of freckles flourish across your cheeks, your arms. You only know because Laudna told you. Because Laudna told you they were pretty.
You looked in the mirror for the first time in years just so that you could see what she thought was so good about them.
(You don’t recognise yourself. It’s been a while since you’ve seen yourself smile.)
It’s stupid. Every bone you have commands you to think so. For so cruel, bitter a creature to be made soft by the kind words of a single woman, it’s so curious. To be made into clay warmed in the sun, malleable in the hands of a woman not so unlike yourself. Her hands.
Not that Laudna is cruel.
In fact, rather the opposite.
You find that she is quite possibly all of the things that you are not—that’s why you fit so well together, you think. Because you’re complimentary by default. Sun and moon. Night and day. Some other grand, nature-based contrast that you’re too busy thinking about her to truly commit to.
Where you can’t help but hate the people and the place you come from, Laudna yearns for it. The idea of having a home, a place to return to, familiar faces.
She tells you about it, one day.
You’ve been out in the woods together. Walking through the foliage as though grazing through a field of wildflowers. She’s been teaching you about all the things she knew to be edible, all that she knew to be not. Of course, she knows that you don’t need to know, that you have other places to get your food—your chest aches at that—but it’s reassuring anyway. Just in case you, in her words, get peckish and are in desire of a little snack.
You’re leaning out into the river to look at one of the plants she’s trying to reach, something good for curing upset stomachs, she thinks it’s some variation of peppermint, given the fresh, mint-like scent. But the moment you reach out to pluck it from the reeds, you… miscalculate the end of the bank and tumble ass over tea kettle into a shed load of water.
There’s a moment of stunned silence. Nothing but the sound of the running water, the ripples flooding out from your torso, your sharp intake of breath before—
Laudna starts laughing.
Truly, really laughing. The sort of laughs that turn heads, demanding perturbed looks and wild confusion. A full-bodied, beautiful thing that, admittedly devolves quite quickly into a series of wheezing breaths and—
You’re about to stand up, to begrudgingly drag your muddied, water-logged boots out of the river when Laudna simply seems to throw herself down in the water with you. All of a sudden, she’d pushed herself in, wading in after you. Places herself in the silt next to you, smiling as if lost in some sort of memory.
The tips of her long hair are touching the surface as she lets her head slide back, letting you catch a glimpse of a mole on the underside of her chin that you want to—touch? Kiss?
Then, she’s telling you about how this reminds her of being a girl. Fussing about in wild water, clothes wet with no curfew.
You can’t help but be fascinated by the shape of her hand, the way it seamlessly glides over the surface.
Her stories meander into growing up in Whitestone. You’ve only briefly heard of the place, and in your mind, it’s still some foggy, cold landscape, a skyline devoid of any defining features. She tells you about her mother and her father, as vague as her memory is, about growing up as a young girl, a farmer. About not having many friends growing up, being the strange kid in town. Growing up on the outskirts, making dolls out of sticks and lost things and…
You see so much of yourself in her story that you can’t help but tell her about how you grew up, in return.
Something about how your daddy ain’t that nice, about how the other kids would laugh and make fun of you ‘cause of your powers, about your powers, about making your mama leave.
Her eyes, this rich, deep colour, illuminated by the soft stream of light, fill with water. But when she blinks, her tears are tinted grey, polluted. She swipes them away and you pretend not to see and—
“I’m so proud of you, Imogen,” Laudna says.
In the water, she moves closer to you. Offers you a hand. Without hesitating, you take it. Your fingers are gentle on hers—a feeling wells in you, wanting to keep these hands safe from harm. You wonder if this is the first time you’ve wanted to keep anything except yourself safe.
“Proud of me?” you say, barely even noticing the way your scarred thumb runs over her pale skin. “Whaddya mean?”
“They were so cruel to you.”
Those tears appear again. This time, she can’t catch them before they smudge her cheeks.You want to reach out, to brush them out into ripples before they have the time to reach her chin but instead, you find your muscles locked. Stuck in place, as if snapped into a stasis, an hourglass stuck on its side.
They’ve never been cruel to you. That’s not—right. It’s not. Anyone would react this way to you, you’re sure of it. Why else would they be this way?
Her hand slips from yours and then her palm is at your cheek, cupping your jaw.
“Funny you should say.”
You don’t mean to say it out loud, not really. But when she’s looking at you like that, eyes so full, trained on you, you’re just not sure what else to do with yourself.
“And as for your powers, I mean, you’re ever so capable. I can’t see why anyone would ever think otherwise, and you’re so kind! To be accepting of me, of all people, too? Imogen you might be the first person that hasn’t tried to kill me on sight in a decade.”
Kind. She thinks, you - you, of all people - are kind.
Kind and capable.
You remember those spiders on the walls, too long limbs and dark bodies and—
Laudna isn’t all that different. Too long, too dark—and you realise, she’s to them what a spider was to you.
Something small. Something to exercise power over when you have nothing at all to spare. Something to crush with your off hand, if only to feel the rush of safety you get in its absence.
You can’t help but lean your face into her palm, your eyes prematurely closing.
The water around you had been cold, startlingly so, and it grounds you to the sense of warmth that radiates from the centre of where her bare skin touches yours.
Every cell in your body tells you not to believe her, but you can’t help it.
Cruel, but kind. Kind.
Maybe the two can co-exist.
xii
Meeting Laudna becomes less of a habit and more of a routine.
On the rare days you have when you don’t have to turn in at the ranch, you’re in the woods with Laudna. Out with her on her daily chores, little adventures with Pâté. Collecting things from the natural spaces surrounding Gelvaan in places that you hadn’t even considered looking in before now.
Today, she’s set out with a mission, a small quest, if you would.
You’ve gathered some long dead sticks, some of the dried grass and wound it into a starter. You’ve not much practice making fires, but Laudna is more than able to pick up the slack that you leave.
With the scissors she keeps on her belt, she shows you how to dissect some of the fungi you’d found in the crevice of a tree—a common one around these parts, adapted to the dry heat by winding itself into the body of trees like a tap. In a sustainable way, of course, you always have to leave enough for it to survive.
She shows you how to cut into small enough chunks, to add it to a concoction of local flora and some spices—a whole anthem of dried herbs—from her belt and—
Well, it’s evening by the time it all comes together but it smells positively ravishing.
You’ve never really been one for food, avoided it, really. It was always just another part of being alive that you’d come to accept as a passing necessity, not much of a pleasure. But when you’re seated next to Laudna and she’s pouring you matching portions, part of you yearns for days you didn’t know you were missing. Family dinners, love derived from honing the perfect recipe, kinship that comes from two chests warmed from the same meal.
It’s strange, you think, how much better food tastes when it’s taken with someone else. Someone who wants you there. Someone who smiles at you. Someone who you feel, for what might be the first time, genuinely cares for you.
xiii
Your days with Laudna slowly wind into evenings, and then nights.
As it turns out, you spend more nights with her than you do at home. You’ve never felt so at ease around another person and it’s a strange comfort from being known that you thought you’d never come to truly know.
Today, you’re sitting around a fire that Laudna managed to get together about an hour or so back, and you’re stoking it with a particularly long stick, revelling in the feeling of the heat licking at your legs. Such a harsh contrast to the sting of night.
And Laudna, beside you, hums, her voice mingling with the crackling of the fire, as if she’s in symphony with it.
She dances Pâté about the air, his tiny arms feigning a waltz with a phantom partner.
“What?” she asks, fingers recoiling at the sudden intrusion. “What is it?”
You can’t help but smile at her.
“Nothin’. Just watchin’ you and your little fella, that’s all.”
“You’re not bored are you? I do hope I’m not boring you—”
Laudna’s thoughts are suddenly a torrent, ideas of flashing games or conversations and Pâté. You have to blink them out.
“I’m just fine. I appreciate the thought though.”
The thoughts slow as Laudna breathes a sigh and shifts herself somewhat closer to you. Her legs are curled beneath the fraying hem of her muddied skirt, hands still wrapped around Pâté.
“Good, good.” She sighs.
You glance back to the fire, tuning in to the sound of the trees around you. The whisper of their leaves and the chant of the fire mingling in such a way that you can’t help but lean your head back, eyes finding the sky, allowing the image of flickering light to flash against the dark night. You don’t manage to stifle your yawn.
It’s been a while since you’ve been out this late.
Even longer since you’ve really taken notice of the stars above you.
When you were young, way young, your daddy used to tell you that there were pictures in the sky called constellations. They weren’t obvious, but when you knew where to look for them, a whole story could unfold around you.
Tonight, you can see Ruidus and the way it fits so perfectly into the crescent of Catha.
You’re about to say something, to share the sight with Laudna, but you’re cut off when she starts to speak first.
“Imogen?” she says.
She sounds off, as if she’s a little off-kilter. Maybe watching something, or someone around the outskirts of your camp. Seeing and hearing something that you can’t. Anxious. That much you can get without hearing her thoughts.
When you look up at her, Pâté is being held in her hands, her actual hands, his little arms being manipulated in the ends of her fingers.
“Yeah?”
“You told me about all of your capabilities. Your mind shit, as you put it, and, well, I’ve been wondering something, if you wouldn’t mind.” She glances up at you, only briefly. Then, her eyes seem to look past you, slightly glazed.
Your hands find fists that are only tight for a moment, before they smooth out on the loose fabric of your working slacks. It’s Laudna. It’s not like she’s gonna ask you anything for the sake of laughing at you. She’d never do something like that. Never.
Then, her attention snaps back to you.
“Do you ever hear voices inside peoples’ heads? Do you ever hear more than one in one head? In mine?”
Her eyes are a little too-wide. She’s an illuminated creature of the night. A figment of the ghoul you thought she was, left lingering in the light with qualities too often shaded in dark. She just stares, waiting.
“In your head?” you say. “Like what do you mean?”
“Other voices. Like multiple inside one head?”
This feels like some kind of trap.
“I mean I can sometimes hear Pâté in your head if that’s what you’re askin’?”
“You don’t hear her?”
Laudna blinks.
“Who?”
“Delilah.”
Some part of you almost thinks that it’s another persona of hers. Another friend she’d made for herself on the road, like Pâté.
But she says the name like it’s a poison. Like the very shape of the word on her tongue sits like bile burning her tongue. Like it tastes like cruelty served straight to the mouth.
It doesn’t take long before you know who Delilah is.
You know about Whitestone and the Briarwoods and the Sun Tree and what they did to her.
There are cruelties boiling in your chest for the Briarwoods. Curated and polished for them, for the damn wench livin’ in Laudna’s head.
You tell her that she didn’t deserve to become a martyr.
(You’re looking at her limbs, too long, too stretched, too her. The warnings that those spiders had been, the warning—you have to remind yourself—that she had been.)
And she looks at you with her smile and she reminds you that she’s alright. That all of that is from a time since passed. That now, she’s here and she has you.
She has you, Imogen.
She’s smiling at you, even now. After recounting the story of how she was brutalised, hung, made into a symbol for someone who’s name she can barely recall, she can smile at you. Because you make her happy. Because, in her words, you’re the best thing that’s happened to her in years.
Your chest feels warm, your heart thrumming beneath your ribcage in a way you don’t quite understand yet. But, perhaps, for now, you wonder if you’d still think yourself cruel if you’d met Laudna sooner.
xiv
It’s only a matter of time before it all comes crashing down on you.
In the end, it’s only a matter of weeks. Is this really all it takes?
Is that really it?
Today is the day you’re going to take the risk.
For a while, you’ve been plotting a way to brave town together. Because together is easier, is better than alone. And retreating under matching hoods like old wives was, unfortunately, the only solution. It’s meant to be a disguise—not really. It’s just to… throw up the proverbial white flag. A declaration of peace, that you mean no harm.
You don’t make it too far into town before the thoughts start. As you clutch Laudna’s arm, her words are lost to the wave of thoughts. You’re seen. You forgot how hard it was to be seen.
It’s only a market strip—you’ve been here a thousand times. Multiple times a week even, but it's somehow worse today. All that noise, from every direction, no direction, really. Coming at you from all sides, surrounding you, pulling at the seams of your mind until you can hardly tell which thoughts are your own and which are theirs and…
The festival. There’s so many people in town because of the festival. You’d forgotten that was today. It’d been over a decade since you last even considered going to it. It’s only reasonable that you’d forgotten. Right?
“Laudna, I’m—I think we—I chose the wrong day for us to do this,” you say.
“What? What’s going on?” she places her other hand on the top of your arm. Her skin is cool, even though the loose fabric of your shirt.
“Town tradition or somethin’. Lotta people.”
“How are you doing?” she asks lowly. “We can turn around.”
Something like a twinge of disappointment finds you and you can’t help but let it in.
“No, no, I’m fine, I’ll be alright. We can keep goin’. Just, be my eyes for me, right?”
But it’s loud. You’d forgotten how loud it really is, being in the middle of all these people. Even if you didn’t intend on taking Laudna up on her offer, you can’t help it.
Your muscles instinctively tighten, trying desperately to reject the discomfort, the noise.
At some point, the voices blur together into a static. A buzzing that grows ever louder in your ears. You imagine that this is what it would sound like the moments someone’s struck by lightning.
Laudna is all but moving your feet for you.
Something breaks through. A thought—your name.
‘Ain’t that the Temult’s girl? Haven’t seen her out ‘n’ about in years.’
It’s innocuous.
There’s nothing innately harmful to the words but the sound of your name catches you with so much surprise that you can’t help but open your eyes. Search for the source, a face that you recognise at least.
It’s then that you realise that your hood—the yellow scarf you’d been using to hide your face—has fallen back.
And when you look to Laudna’s—hers too.
There’s a ripple in the static.
‘What is that thing?’
You try to let it all filter through, to pass like water between your fingers.
‘Is that a person or a corpse?’
But they’re talking about her. About Laudna.
‘With Relvin’s girl too. Dang nasty creatures gotta find friends somehow.’
They can talk about you. They can talk about you all they want until the damn cows come home. But Laudna? Laudna?
Laudna’s never done a thing out of line. And definitely not to these people. They’ve never seen her in their lives and they’re taking it out on her just because she looks a certain way?
You want to stop, to search for whoever’s talking about her, to do what, exactly, you’re not sure, but you can feel the force of your migraine passing down your body into a feeling like poignant anger.
You want to stop, but the moment you consider it, you catch Laudna’s eyes.
The last time you’d seen them, they were bright with excitement, with life. But now, they feel dimmer, withdrawn with concern. She’s searching your face, hoping that your face will somehow convert what words can’t.
Her eyes bear into yours, brows pulled together, lips pursed.
You can’t help but feel like you’re the reason for it.
She must see through the cracks in your expression because she mumbles something, something about home. Her lips move but you can’t make out the words. By the time you ask her to repeat them, she’s moving; arm still wrapped protectively over yours, pulling you through the crowd.
Through the crowd, through the market, through the town and out. Disappearing back out into the treeline until you finally make it back to the small shelter Laudna has been calling home for just over three weeks.
You’re reminded, letting the pressure behind your eyes seep away into warm tea and the sound of Laudna’s mind, that it’s only been a matter of weeks.
A matter of weeks and a glance of Laudna’s face in the market.
Is that really all it takes?
xv
They—the town—come with the fall of night.
You hear them before you see them. The sounds of what could be hundreds of feet—the soles of their boots rolling like thunder in the evening. It covers the sound of your crackling fire, the only source of heat in where you’d been laid, side-by-side with Laudna. So much so that you wake up, convinced that there should be rain.
The next thing you see is the light.
Bright, like a fresh day’s sun beaming over the horizon. But tainted with the flicker of shadows: over a dozen silhouettes crossing over them.
When the first shout comes, Laudna is up faster than you are.
All of the motion turns into a blur.
You catch fire, and the glint of blades and voices. Thoughts and voices and the sound of Laudna imploring you to stay behind her. That she’ll protect you.
At first, you think the way her form seems to shift must be a trick of the night, but feeling in your chest tells you otherwise. The night seems to liquify in her hands, dripping from her fingers to her clothes, running down her arms so thick that they seem to elongate.
The shadows wrap around her form like armour, her body contorting to fit to their shape. She’s too long, she’s too dark and…
“Stay back.” Her voice comes out guttural, projecting from deep in her chest.
A man whose face you barely recognise races forward, lurching towards her, towards your Laudna and the moment his blade slices her arm, your blood runs cold and a moment later, your world turns completely white.
xvi
You only find out what you did to that man after the fact, when you’re on the roads, far out from the sleepy town of Gelvaan.
Your eyes had flashed white and the scars on your arms set alight before lightning split out from your fingertips. Neither you nor Laudna know if he survived. Part of you feels cruel, not because you did it, but because you don’t care that you did. Cruel you didn’t say bye, either. Not that your daddy would even notice that you’d gone.
For what it’s worth, the road is more welcoming, more forgiving than Gelvaan could ever be.
After all, those marks on your arms—when you use your powers, according to Laudna it looks like they’re alive. The same colour as those lights you can make. You manage to convince yourself that those scars are good. They’re good because it means you can protect yourself and her.
When you’re out on the road, you sure need it.
You’re not sure where you’re going other than away from Gelvaan. No destination or goal or home. But you have each other.
Your final cruelty, to have taken her for your own.
Hers, to have let you. Welcomed you into her arms.
Maybe that’s home enough.