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It was cold.
The trees were towering, each one bending and leaning with the excessive snow piled atop it. The forest floor was bare of anything but the occasional print left behind by a hungry animal.
The air burned Abaddon's nose.
His back was pressed against the trunk of one of the tall trees, one with large enough branches that, when they dipped with the added weight of winter, created an alcove near the ground. It did nothing to stop the snow from covering the forest floor, but it did stop the wind from hitting his face, and that was enough.
It was his fault he was out here anyways.
Several years ago, when he was just barely tall enough to see over the pavilion table, Abaddon had snuck out of the main house to play in the snow.
He'd ran around and built snowmen pieces that he didn't have the strength to pick up and stack. He'd laid in a hole he'd made himself and stared at the starless sky, and when they came and dragged him away, he didn't put up a fight.
That night had ended with him, wet and shivering, holding his right hand directly over the flames inside the fire place. Despite the burning and sizzling coming from the appendage, he still felt cold.
"Hey, Bud," said the voice of a dead man, "what're you doing out here in the cold?" Nathan crouched beside him, his right hand landing on Abaddon's shoulder instinctively. It phased straight through with a flash of light. "You'll get sick if you stay out here too long." He sounded worried.
The boy kept his gaze to the branches above him. His eyes were unfocused, but he was entirely present in everything his caretaker said. Was caretaker even correct anymore? Miss Katherine had a greater hand in caring for him now than Nathan did. "Do you think snow angels come to life when you're not looking?" He asked, just to get the thoughts out of his head.
Nathan gave him a curious look. "I mean, maybe. We can't really confirm that theory, huh?"
Abaddon hummed, then stood up. The snow buried him up to his calves, but he still trudged through it. Nathan followed behind him, able to move faster and yet still keeping pace with him. He did that sometimes. It was confusing.
They pushed ahead of him, walking too fast for him to keep up. It was a sunny, clear day, yet his feet could not move fast enough to match the speed of which they moved.
He eventually met them at the river, where they shoved a basket of clothes into his hands and looked at him as though he was meant to know what to do. He grabbed a scarf and dipped into the lake, only to be slapped across the face.
No, he'd done bad. He'd need to be better in the future.
His cheek was bruised by the time he returned.
"Where have you been?" Miss Katherine scolded, guiding him by his shaking shoulders to the fire in the parlor. She sat him down roughly and draped him in heaps of blankets, some fluffier than others. "You can't just disappear like that, Abaddon! Not in this weather!"
"I would have come back…" he whispers, but she doesn't hear him as she storms out of the room.
Esther sits quietly on the couch, hands folded neatly in front of her. Nathan lingers in a corner, looking sheepish. Ben is somewhere, he's sure, just not here. Annabelle probably needed him for something.
Why did he care if Ben was here or not?
He didn't notice when Esther moved to sit next to him, but soon she's right there, staring into the fire. "Isn't it beautiful?" She asks, and he isn't sure. Fire isn't beautiful. Not like snow is.
His hand tingles beneath its wrapping, and he chooses not to answer.
When Katherine comes back, she's carrying a tray of hot chocolate. He takes a sip, and his mouth is surrounded by whipped cream. He can't taste it.
Breakfast was always eggs. Eggs from the coop that was just outside the pavilion. Eggs from the forty-two hens that had never before seen a rooster.
They weren't seasoned, just scrambled and thrown on a plate. Sometimes, if you'd been good, you'd get a slice of bread on top. If you'd been extra good, it'd be buttered.
Abaddon was never good, and neither were the other children.
Abaddon was the only child in a group of twenty-four people.
There used to be more.
Nathan liked this one movies called Con Air. He watched it every week, and forced Miss Katherine to put the disc in each time. Sometimes, he'd ask Abaddon, but that was only if he was desperate enough.
Abaddon didn't understand "technology". He didn't understand how Nathan could sit in front of a box for hours and re-watch the same film a hundred times.
He didn't understand how Nathan could watch his so-called "favorite movie" and choose to kill himself.
Abaddon left the parlor, the blankets dragging behind him.
He was given a bed. It was small, much smaller than the adult's, but it was a bed nonetheless. It was made of his old crib's wood.
All of the other children had already been given beds. He was the last—the youngest, the smallest.
He was moved into a room with the other children, rather than sleeping in the nursery by himself. It felt strange, being in a room filled with people while he slept, but he tried not to mind it.
Over the next month, the other children began to disappear.
The first was Anna, with her dark hair that was found everywhere and her head. She had been sent off on a "mission"—to recruit more people to the community. Usually, that was left to the adults of the oldest girls. She was neither, yet she still left.
She never came back, and her bed was burned soon after her departure.
The second was Myla and her light eyes, who had started coughing one day and never stopped. Some of the other children followed suit, but most of the infected were isolated and kept from those still healthy.
The adults argued a lot during those days.
The third—and perhaps the cause of all the others—was Harriet.
She was the one Abaddon remembered the most. She had hair as bright as the sun, yet skin as dark as the earth. She was not kind—it would be unbecoming of her to be so—yet she had a sort of care to her features, one that was wiped away the night they'd taken her to the back. After that, she would hiss and snap at the others, until they eventually did, too.
The more reactive ones were gone by the end of the week, and those left over were gone within the month.
All but Abaddon.
His room is what Esther calls "cushy". He has a soft bed covered in even more blankets than were already on his shoulders and a loveseat pushed right beside it, where Nathan used to sit and read to him.
He supposed he could ask Miss Katherine if she wanted to move it to the parlor. It had no use anymore.
Against the left-most wall of his room was a shelf. On it, he had stored every object Nathan had given him: stuffed animals of varying figures; books he couldn't read; art supplies with shades he couldn't believe existed; cases with movie discs he would never watch.
The door to his private bathroom was to the right. He wasn't sure why he needed his own bathroom—most of the other rooms in the hotel didn't even have their own, with how old everything is—and Nathan hadn't given him a real answer when he'd asked.
Something about privacy and how he was "pretty sure you won't drown yourself in the tub."
Abaddon didn't question him.
Now, he was glad for it.
The warm water felt like a hug as he sunk in, his cold, pale skin growing a shade darker. He felt heavy, but comfortable; like the water wasn't suffocating him but instead keeping him grounded.
They pushed him beneath, then pulled him back up.
Down, up, down, up, down, up.
His lungs burned whenever they tried to suck in enough air to breathe.
His hand—the one not injured mere weeks ago—was taped up so he couldn't scratch at their arms.
The other didn't have nails, and therefore had no need to be covered.
The cold water bit at his face each time he was dunked, and his eyes stung with the constant change in wetness. They were screaming something at him, but he couldn't hear it.
His chest hurt. The cross that had been seared into him felt like it was still hot enough to burn, despite being a few days old. His bandages were probably wet and soggy now. He'd have to get them changed.
They lifted him above the water for long enough to hear their words:
"You, girl, have betrayed us! The final, the greatest, and yet you dare to fight our word? To speak your mind—like it is your own to address?"
The man—because that is what they all were, weren't they? Men, dressed in clothes meant to look old so they could take further pride in hurting him.—lifts him up further, his feet left dangling over the water's surface.
"Everything that is you is ours!" He announced, and the men behind him echoed it. "Everything that is here belongs to us!" Echoed, like they were in a cave. "You have nothing of your own, so stop acting like it."
He was dropped into the water a final time.
"Leave us, Demon!"
"Abaddon, buddy, look at me," Nathan was beside him. His knees were phasing through the tub's edge, his hands gripping it as if it was something he could actually touch. The water had run cold, the bubbles almost completely gone. Abaddon was shivering. "Are you okay?"
What a stupid question. Barely ten years old, and yet already ruined—they had said as much to him back then. A so-called demon. He couldn't answer Nathan. Despite being so painstakingly awake, he felt like he was still dreaming. He tried to meet the ghost's eyes, but couldn't seem to do much more than stare through him.
The water was so, so cold.
The men were after him. One of them was dead on the ground, blood leaking from a crack in his head. The others were chasing Abaddon.
Through the forest surrounding the large log house he ran, twigs and leaves and snow and ice sticking, clinging to his hair.
It felt like freedom.
It felt like fear.
Footsteps followed behind him, but he was smaller. Able to duck beneath the trembling, bent branches. Able to hide behind bushes and beneath snow piles.
They lost him quickly.
He hid in a cave, one far enough away from the cabins that there was little way the men would come after him. They wouldn't risk chasing something illegal into some place public, after all.
His cave had no snow on the ground, though it was far from warm. The small opening did little to reduce the strong winds from outside.
He ripped the skirt off his dress and folded it to sit on, like Anna had told him all those years ago. He didn't try to light a fire, like Myla had warned him of.
He didn't call for help, just as Harriet said he shouldn't.
Winter was nearing an end. The first few days, he stayed in his cave and shivered uselessly. When the hunger became too much, he snuck out to hunt.
He found a rabbit and killed it. The raw meat was better than nothing.
By the second week, he had a schedule: stay in for three days, then go hunting. Ration the meat for the next three days, then go out again.
The rabbits learned their lesson, though. They stopped hopping by his cave, started running faster than he could catch them.
He grew hungry.
He was still cold.
By the end of the first month—when the snow had started melting and the wind had slowed—the rabbits came back.
So did the men.
Every few days, one of them would scout the area.
Abaddon would watch them, pleading to no one in particular that they wouldn't find him.
They didn't.
He stopped going out, too scared of being caught. His stomach twisted and turned and screamed at him to eat, but he had hardly anything to give it.
By the end of the second month, he was living off the few rats that scurried past him in the dark.
The men stopped coming when the heat came. Either they had given up, or they were waiting for him to reveal himself.
It was the former.
Abaddon crawled out of his cave—crawled, because he couldn't stand—and made his way deep into the forest like an animal. He left drag marks on the ground, and he scared away any animal that may have become his food. He found a spot with soft ground and began to dig.
His fingernails chipped and his hands—both good and infected—bled. His lungs told him to stop, his head spun around too quick to focus on anything but digging. When he woke up from his state, he was at the bottom of a deep hole. He couldn't bury himself, but that was okay. He was almost dead, anyways.
He didn't move for a long time. His legs couldn't hold what little weight he had, and his arms were tired from digging.
He could see the sky, but only just barely. It was beautiful.
Weeks or hours passed before something changed. A shadow fell over him, and for an achingly long minute he thought it was one of the men, come to take him back while he was still breathing.
He was wrong, just as so many of his other unlucky predictions had been. "Hey, Bud," he must have looked like a boy to this new man, with his ripped skirt and ankle-length undergarments. His shoes were torn up, he realized. "You need some help there?" A hand was outstretched to him, and Abaddon somehow gained the strength to take it.
The man led him to his large home called a hotel and gave him food and water and a pile of blankets. He introduced himself as Nathan, and said that he was glad he'd found him.
When asked his name, Abaddon didn't answer truthfully. What was the point, if this man already thought him a boy?
It was a new start at life. A new chance to forget everything that had happened to him.
For the first time in years, Abaddon was warm.
Miss Katherine came in carrying seven folded towels. Why seven, Abaddon didn't know. He wasn't listening when she explained. If she explained.
He was lifted from the tub and wrapped up, and oh, Miss Katherine had thrown these in the dryer. They felt warm, like the bath once had. Like Nathan had, before that night.
His hair was messed and puffed, then combed through to lay flat against his nape. A large shirt was fitted over his head, and soft pants were pulled up his legs. He was carried to his bed, then wrapped in his blankets.
Nathan sat in his loveseat, and Miss Katherine grabbed a book off the highest portion of his shelf. She sat down beside Nathan's seat and held it up, letting her brother read off of the pages.
Slowly, the familiar story of twelve princesses lulled Abaddon away from his mind, and he turned to look at the pictures on each page.
"…every morning their shoes were found to be quite worn through as if they had been danced in all night. Nobody could find out how it happened, or where the princesses had been."
He was warm, and safe.
The king sat on his throne, an angry but desperate look on his face. It was familiar, in a sense.
"…if any person could discover the secret and find out where it was that the princesses danced in the night, he would have the one he liked best to take as his wife, and would be king after his death. But whoever tried and did not succeed, after three days and nights, they would be put to death.
"A king's son soon came. He was well entertained, and in the evening was taken to the chamber next to the one where the princesses lay in their twelve beds. There he was to sit and watch where they went to dance…"
His eyes drooped, but he stayed awake.
It was so easy to imagine that Nathan was still alive when he was reading this story.
He rested his head against the loveseat's backrest, pretending it was the ghost's shoulder.
"…it happened that an old soldier, who had been wounded in battle and could fight no longer, passed through the country where this king reigned, and as he was traveling through a wood, he met an old woman, who asked him where he was going.
"'I hardly know where I am going, or what I had better do,' said the soldier; 'but I think I would like to find out where it is that the princesses dance, and then in time I might be a king.'
"'Well,' said the old woman, 'that is not a very hard task: only take care not to drink any of the wine which one of the princesses will bring to you…'"
Something wet slid down his cheeks and dripped on the cushion beneath Nathan's intangible body.
The soldier met with the king, as was expected, and went off to watch the princesses.
He was greedy, this soldier, just as all the other men had been. Did these girls deserve someone better?
… Abaddon wasn't sure.
"…and the soldier, who was still invisible, danced with them too. When any of the princesses had a cup of wine set by her, he drank it all up, so that when she put the cup to her mouth it was empty. At this, too, the youngest sister was terribly frightened, but the eldest always silenced her…"
The princesses danced across the pages, beautifully drawn gowns flowing behind them and swaying between the princes.
This page was his favorite.
It felt so free.
"…he told the king all that had happened, and showed him the three branches and the golden cup which he had brought with him.
"The king called for the princesses, and asked them whether what the soldier said was true…"
The soldier would pick the oldest daughter, he knew. She was the one who thought very little of anything, the one who did not believe her youngest sister's worries. The one with little brain, with such a small, closed mind.
The other princesses were at a loss because of her, too. They could not dance anymore, could not meet their princes or giggle beneath trees of silver and diamond, because their eldest sister had not believed the youngest.
"I wish…" Abaddon started once the book was closed. Nathan and Miss Katherine looked to him expectantly.
His eyes were falling. He was tired. Harriet, all those years ago… had she doomed them, like the eldest princess in the story? Or was she just so young and oblivious to not know what to do? He used to think her so old and mature, yet now, he wasn't so sure.
"I wish…"
His eyes shut before he could finish.