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The forest is dark. The flashlight in her hand illuminates the small branches intertwining in front of them, needing to be pushed through. December keeps a close eye on the small human by her side, wary of the possibility of them getting it in their head to make a dash in some random direction and get themselves lost. She’s grateful for the fact that not too far behind them, Asriel is no doubt doing the same for her own little sister.
Something on the ground catches Kris’ attention. They stop in their tracks and kneel down, peering at something Dess can’t see.
“What’ve you got there?” she asks, squatting down beside them and pointing her light in the direction of their gaze. Wordlessly, Kris points at a collection of bugs scurrying around, and Dess nods knowingly; she should have guessed.
She squints at them and tries to recall whether there are any bugs they should be especially worried about out here. They don’t immediately look like they might be dangerous, but she’s not sure. She relays the question to Kris, who shakes their head.
“Might bite, but it’ll be fine,” they say quietly. That’s enough for her; experience has taught her that Kris knows well enough for themselves when dealing with these things. They sit together in silence watching them crawl around, until eventually the sound of twigs breaking and leaves crunching comes up behind them.
Dess’ head snaps up to see Noelle and Asriel both give her a grin. She smiles back.
“Hey, Elly, we finally caught up to them!” Asriel says as he walks to stand next to Dess. Noelle bounces over to Kris, though she wrinkles her nose as she realises what they’re looking at. She keeps her distance from the bugs, choosing instead to peer over Kris’ shoulder.
“Took you guys long enough,” Dess ribs playfully, and Asriel shrugs.
“Not my fault,” he says with a shrug, voice light. “Noelle had to psych herself up every time a tree looked weird in the dark.” Their voices are hushed but still cut through the quiet enough that Noelle’s eyes turn to them in a small glare. He raises his hands in an apology and laughs.
They stand in place for a moment, as Dess starts thinking about when they should break Kris’ concentration and keep moving forward. They can’t do much exploring if they’re just staring at bugs the whole night, after all. Before she can decide, though, she hears something from the forest.
A laugh.
Dess shudders involuntarily, snaps her head in the direction of the sound. Asriel looks at her quizzically. Did he not hear that? How could he not hear that?
A quick glance at Noelle and Kris seems to show that they didn’t either. They’re both where she last saw them, though now Kris is looking up at Noelle instead of down at the ground. If Noelle had heard that noise she’d be crying right now, and there would be no mistaking that shrill screech.
Something laughs again. It’s grating in her ears, high pitched and distorted, as though it’s breaking through the bounds of the world. It pushes against her ears like nails against a chalkboard.
Still no reaction from anyone else.
The sound is still echoing in her ears. She puts a hand to her head and Asriel leans into her, resting his paw on her arm.
“Are you okay?” he asks, voice whispering so the kids don’t hear.
She shakes her head. “Do you not hear that?” she asks. She’s alarmed by the sound of her own voice, shaky and quiet, and it seems like Asriel is too. He shakes his head.
“Hear what?” He waits, but she doesn’t respond. “Dess, maybe we should go home. This was a dumb idea in the first place,” he says. He starts moving towards their siblings, but in that moment Dess sees something.
Glowing eyes in the trees. They’re unnatural shades of pink and yellow she doesn’t believe she’s ever seen. She can’t believe that the universe would ever result in something being born with those colours in it.
She knows, without a doubt, that this is where that noise came from. She’s frozen with fear.
And then the eyes turn to look at the kids. To look at Noelle.
Her heart stops in her chest.
The eyes don’t move. A pit begins to grow in her stomach. These eyes are bad news, and they want her sister for something.
She stops Asriel in his tracks. “Stay here.”
She starts heading towards the eyes, which tear their gaze off of Noelle to look at her instead. She can see a wide, terrible grin attached to them. They turn in the direction of the heart of the forest, and she realises they’re attached to the body of a cat.
The cat begins to move. Before it can leave her sight, she gives chase.
Her hooves dig against the ground as she manoeuvres around roots and bushes. Distantly, she can hear Asriel and Noelle yelling. Their voices are drowned out by the sound of her breath starting to labour.
The cat leads her through the forest, moving unnaturally fast. Her vision tunnels as she watches it, making sure not to let it leave her sights. She’s being led far enough into the forest that the lights from the town have been left behind entirely, but she still has no trouble. She hopes Kris and Asriel didn’t follow her; they would have a much harder time.
She finally reaches a break in the trees, startled to a stop when she crashes through into a clearing. There’s a structure sitting ominously in the very middle of the grass, overgrown and clearly abandoned.
Around it, the trees form a perfect circle. The clearing is brightly light despite Dess seeing no sign of lamps or any light source; the moon shines brightly above her head, but she doesn’t believe that it could cause this much illumination.
She shivers at the wrongness of this place. She inches towards the structure, blood rushing in her ears. She doesn’t know why she’s so scared. With a sharp intake of breath, she remembers the cat she had chased here. It’s nowhere to be found. How did she forget?
Her hooves dragging against the ground make the only noise she can hear.
Iron doors stare at her as she moves closer. It’s clearly abandoned, tall grass and vines snaking over the metal in intricate natural patterns. She raises a hand to touch the door before hearing crashing footsteps behind her. She jumps and turns around.
It’s just Kris. They stare at her, unblinking.
“Where’s Asriel?” she asks. They shrug.
She shudders, shrugging off the feeling brought on by the structure. Dess Marches forward to take Kris’ hand.
“Can you stick with one of us, kid? Don’t go running off by yourself.”
“You did,” they say, and she can’t argue with that.
They sit there together, and soon enough Asriel and Noelle have caught up. The two of them look at her with twin looks of anger.
Asriel’s gaze promises that they’ll talk about this later. Dess rolls her eyes at him.
“Okay,” he says, putting on an almost-happy voice. “How do we get out from here?”
Dess cringes, pointing back at the way they came. “I guess we just retrace our steps?”
Noelle tugs on her sleeve, and Dess looks down. “Why don’t we just go that way?” she says in a small voice, pointing behind the iron mass to the other side of the clearing.
Dess’ eyebrows raise. There in plain view, where it definitely wasn’t before, is a perfect path laid out in gravel. The tree line is broken. She can see back into town from here, right into the towering church.
This is strange. She doesn’t like it.
She shrugs and moves forward anyway, swapping Kris’ hand with Asriel for Noelle’s. She keeps her eyes trained forward as she goes. She catches a glimpse of coloured eyes in the corner of her eye anyway.
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
“Father Alvin tells me he saw you children coming from the shelter yesterday,” Dess’ mother says over dinner, accusingly in tone.
Dess furrows her brow. That thing in the clearing was a shelter?
“I didn’t see Father Alvin at all,” she says, annoyed despite having no real reason to be.
Her mother stares at her, expression unchanged.
“We didn’t know what it was, we ended up there by accident,” she whines, picking at her food. Noelle nods quickly to her left.
“Yeah, we were in the forest and Dess started running and we ended up there!”
Dess resists the urge to bang her head against the table.
“Not helping, Elly.”
She doesn’t even know why her mom seems not to want them there, but it’s obvious that they did something wrong.
“Whatever,” she grumbles. ”I’ve never even seen it before. It appeared out of nowhere.”
Her mother’s face is still stormy. “Don’t be ridiculous, December. Stay away from there.”
She rolls her eyes and shrugs. Her mom takes that as agreement, and the discussion is ended.
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
Dess can’t sleep.
She can hear Noelle awake next door. An ear-destroying jingle is coming from her room, no doubt from one of her games keeping her up.
With a sigh, Dess stands from her bed and makes her way out to the hallway. Her too-long pyjamas cover her hands as she reaches for the doorknob. She knocks on Noelle’s door and waits a second before heading in.
Sure enough, Noelle is sat at her computer, coloured lights flashing against her face. The glow of the screen is the only light in the room, washing everything in blue, then pink, then yellow, then green. Dess shudders at the familiar shades of pink and yellow; they match the colours that have been following her everywhere exactly.
“Elly?” she asks, “Why aren’t you asleep?”
Noelle grunts. Dess sighs and moves to hover over her shoulder. Dess doesn’t mind video games herself – Angel knows she’s played her fair share of Dragon Blazers with Asriel – but so many of the games Noelle plays are just off-putting.
She watches as Noelle clicks on the screen, cats racing past her. Try as she might, Dess can’t figure out what the objective to this game is. Noelle must be doing something right, as she can see numbers growing in the corner, but for the life of her she can’t tell what.
Her heart stops as she sees something familiar. Grinning eyes stare up at her, disappearing as quickly as they appeared. Dess grips the back of Noelle’s chair.
“What was that?” she asks, voice tight.
“What was what?” Noelle asks back.
The cheshire cat grin appears again, and Dess startles. “That.”
Noelle lights up. “That’s the super ultra rare cat that only shows up when you’re doing really well! It can lower your points or give you more than any other cat,” she says quickly.
“Why does it look like that?”
Noelle shrugs. “It’s just like all the other cats, I don’t know.”
Dess swallows around the lump in her throat. It looks familiar, but it’s probably a coincidence. It was nothing.
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
Dess strums at her guitar absent mindedly. It’s dark outside. Everyone else is asleep.
Her thoughts are racing in every direction.
She tries to focus on her guitar. It can usually calm her down, but this time she keeps getting too distracted to play properly. She’s resorted to churning out simple chords to keep her hands occupied.
Something has felt strange inside of her since that day in the forest. Her mother called that structure a shelter; shelter from what?
She was led there by something, she’s convinced. She was brought there for a reason. She wants to go back. That want is growing with every second she stays away. She knows soon it’s going to become unbearable.
Her fingers pause their idle strumming on her guitar. She needs to do something.
She puts her guitar down in the corner of her room, replacing it in her hands with her baseball bat. She doesn’t bother with anything else.
She opens a window and swings her leg out.
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
Dess carries her bat. Her hair is tied in a ponytail, clipped to keep her bangs out of her face in case she has to run for whatever reason. She stares down the doors once again.
The atmosphere of the clearing is different this time. Despite coming down the path from the town, it feels more secluded. It’s as though something is happy that she came alone.
She eyes the chains around the doors. She tries to hit them with her bat and they crumble.
She’s a little surprised it could be that easy, before pulls at the doors and they still don’t budge. She considers that they might be rusted shut, for a moment, before she catches sight of a keypad hidden under a panel of metal and sighs. It was easy because the chains were purely decorative.
She tries to pull at the metal to further show the keypad. The panel is warm against her hand, and she recoils as something clicks.
Without any input from her, the door creaks open. She swallows nervously. Maybe this isn’t a good idea.
She starts to back away, but that feeling that she has to do this returns. She will regret it if she doesn’t enter. This is how it has to be.
She squares her shoulders and marches through.
As soon as she crosses through the doors she’s hit by the freezing cold. It smells damp and unused. It’s pitch black.
She feels stronger, as though something has changed in her. She watches as her body transforms, clothes becoming more elaborate and fur darkening.
The bat clutched in her hand has become a black katana, similar in shape if not colour to those hanging on the wall of her house. It feels heavy in the wrong places. Her bat provides a sense of security that this doesn’t.
Dess takes a step further in, and startles as the doors slam shut behind her with a loud, cackling noise. She twists sharply to look at the direction she came from as she’s plunged into darkness. She waits for her eyes to adjust to the lack of light as they usually do, but nothing happens.
It’s fine. She’s not scared of the dark. She’s never had to deal with full darkness like this, due to her adaptive vision, but she knows that she’s not scared of the dark. She can’t be.
Dess stands still for an extra minute in case something changes, before turning carefully to face away from the locked doors again. She strains her ears for any sign of life but all she gets is silence.
Carefully, she picks up a hoof and knocks it against the ground.
She hears a loud clack.
She starts marching forward, measuring the taps of her feet. She walks for minutes with no change at all before she trips on something, making her heart fall down to her stomach. She catches herself with her hands, cringing as she feels a sharp pain running through her wrist.
Dess pulls herself to her knees. She runs her hand against the ground and feels the shape of the small rock she must have tripped on; the ground is less even than she had previously thought. Cracks run through the ground, almost like a paved sidewalk. She grimaces when she touches what feels like cobwebs and pulls herself back to her feet.
Her eyes dart around despite the darkness, and she hopes that she’s continuing in the right direction instead of having accidentally turned herself around. She begins to walk again, clenching her fist in an attempt to stretch her aching wrist.
She keeps her eyes out for any change around her, which is why when she notices a flicker of light she makes towards it immediately. It’s faint, but it’s a change from the darkness blanketing the rest of the world.
She stops a few steps away from it. It’s a painted eye, purple dripping from the pupil. She raises a hand to touch it hesitantly. It’s only when nothing changes that she realises that part of her was expecting it to. Her shoulders drop. She keeps her hand raised, dragging it across the surface; it’s not a full wall, stopping around the height of her hip. She tries to walk along it in the hope that she’ll find some sort of door, but it ends as abruptly as it began.
She picks a direction and continues.
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
She kicks her hoof into a rock and after some exploration – dragging her hand across the ground – she decides the rock formation around it looks like the shape of a wave. That brings her a little comfort; she liked the ocean, the last time she was there.
She keeps walking. She hums a short, repetitive tune to herself. She’s not sure where she’s heard it before. A shrill laugh sounds from around her every few bars, punctuating her pauses.
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
Dess’ whole body hurts.
It feels like she’s been walking for days, with nothing to show for it. Whatever she came her for – was led here for – she can’t find it. The further she’s walked the more the environment seems to break down.
The terrain remains the same; too-dark walkways and crumbling foundations of what once might have been trying to become structures, covered in dust and cobwebs. Nothing set anything apart from anything else. She could have been going in loops for all she knew.
And everywhere when she least expected it, that laugh.
The laugh that was already off-putting and wrong had morphed like everything else when she entered the shelter. It was shrill and infinitely repeating, as if it was being produced by a program and not a real being. It hit her ears like daggers the first time she heard it down here. She had put her hand up to her ears to discover traces of dust falling from them.
Her mind feels like it’s playing tricks on her. Every once in a while, she thinks she sees something out of the corner of her eye; sometimes those glowing eyes, watching her, but sometimes other things. Strange figures, identifiable as figures only by her eyes catching onto the darkness seeming to move, seemed to fill the land. Her eyes couldn’t adjust to the light here but sometimes they came close enough that focusing on the figures would make a shape appear to take form, often familiar, as though this place was pulling from her own mind to create inhabitants. Before these figures were ever able to take shape, though, something always happened. Sometimes they appeared to melt, a process that looked painful and terrifying. Other times, it was as though the very world around them was trying to get rid of them, with what looked like television static or computer glitches overtaking their bodies until they disappeared. It was terrifying. This whole world feels like it’s hostile to anyone unlucky enough to find their way inside it; she’s scared that some day that might be her.
She keeps on pushing forward. Whether it’s out of a naïve hope that there might somehow be a way out of here or fear that if she stops for too long something might happen to her, she’s not sure. She’s going to have to stop eventually.
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
She keeps walking. Her thoughts are fuzzy.
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
She keeps walking. She feels like she’s been here before.
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
She keeps walking. She remembers a girl who would be scared of this place; she would hold her hand if she was here.
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
She keeps walking. How long has she been here?
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
It’s too much. She doesn’t feel any hunger. Her body hasn’t changed. She doesn’t feel like she’s aged, instead stuck in stasis at the point she was when she entered this place.
She sees things out of the corners of her eyes sometimes. Colours that disappear when she turns her head to look at them. Unbidden, a memory comes to mind of a teacher saying that solitary confinement is a form of torture, and if left alone in the dark for too long your mind will start playing tricks on you. If this is what she’s experiencing, she’s almost grateful for the company.
She’s forgotten her own name.
She can’t do this anymore. She’s can’t quite tell if she’s dead or alive; maybe this is all a dying dream. Maybe this is the afterlife, and the church’s teachings about living with the Angel were a hoax.
There’s only one way to be sure. She tightens her hand around her bat-turned-sword.
If she’s already dead, then nothing will happen. If she’s alive, then cutting short this mockery of an existence would be welcome.
She hovers the blade over her chest. Watches the washed-out fabric rise and fall. Her hand is a colour unfamiliar to her. The blade glints, catching non-existent light.
She readies herself and raises her arm. Putting all her strength into it, she brings the knife down, down, down.
The burst of pain she feels is completely unfamiliar after so long of next to no sensory input. Before she can register it, she feels the blade get stuck into the ground underneath her.
A bubbling darkness begins to encroach on her vision. It’s similar to what she saw when she first opened the doors to this place, so long ago. It was already pitch black around her, but somehow it feels like the darkness is beginning to press in on her.
And then –
The true pain starts.
It’s like her body is being ripped apart.
She feels a shock of painful ice as every atom that makes up her being is rearranging itself.
Looks down. Her arm is melting. The edges of her limbs are tinged with black. Something snaps. Her leg feels like it breaks.
Her bones feel as though they’re twisting and cracking and growing out of each other, crossing like the roots of a tree, and her eyes are burning and her brain feels like it’s boiling in her skull and her skin feels like it’s stretching in every direction, covering something with sharp edges that are begging and pleading to break through it as she screams and it’s the first time she’s heard her voice in longer than she can remember –
And then it fades into nothing.
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
Skin begins to stretch itself back over the opening, shutting the fountain off from the rest of the world. The body that houses it becomes sharp, pointy. The fountain roars in the heart of the being that stands from the ground.
It shambles along helplessly.
It’s crying. It doesn’t know why. The tears falling from its eyes freeze from the chilled air around it, shattering when they hit the ground and leaving a trail of glittering ice wherever it goes.
It doesn’t have much.
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
Inside the fountain, a girl finds herself even more lost than she was before. Where before the darkness had been eerie and all-consuming, now it feels malicious. It presses in on her from every angle. She shouldn’t have done that. What did she do? What caused this? Is she being punished?
She feels her body moving even when she’s at rest.
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
Outside the fountain, the body starts to take on aspects of the girl’s appearance. Pointed antlers grow out of its head, seemingly fused onto the void that is the rest of the form.
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
She feels phantom pains. She can’t stop crying. The tears fall and fall and never stop. If this world was real she would have created a river with her tears.
✦ ✧ ✦ ✧ ✦ ✧
Crystals fall from its eyes. It doesn’t know why. It doesn’t know how to stop. It doesn’t think it can.
It keeps walking.