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Alinua hadn’t even seen anyone through her tears until she’d ran into the woman at full speed, too desperate to get away and keep her family safe, and she’d been so tired, and the woman had offered a place to stay—so now she’s here. The woman is handing her a cup of tea and saying something about how children shouldn’t be out in the woods alone, but Alinua can hardly focus on any of that.
Something feels wrong with her magic, in a way it’s never felt wrong before. She hopes she’s not about to lose control, that she wouldn’t have killed her family if she’d figured everything out even a few hours later, that she’s not about to die—maybe, something about this woman is wrong, maybe something about the cave entrance the woman’s little tent is pitched outside—but Alinua knows what she is now. She knows what the most likely explanation is. Taking one last, long sip of the tea, Alinua stands up.
“Thank you,” she says, “but I have to leave.”
The woman stands up too, although she has to stoop due to the height of the tent. “Please. I couldn’t allow a child to go out alone at this time of night.”
“My parents will be wondering where I am,” Alinua says nervously. It’s not a lie, and she does her best to ignore the discomfort twisting in her stomach at the thought.
“You don’t sound too sure of that, poor thing,” the woman says, and Alinua takes a step backwards without really understanding why. “And even if they are, they’ll be able to find a campsite much easier than one small child wandering the woods alone.”
Slowly, reluctantly, Alinua sits back down. It’s clear the woman doesn’t want her to leave, and she suddenly finds herself fearing what the woman will do if Alinua does something she considers undesirable. Alinua can probably hold her magic in until the woman falls asleep and provides Alinua with an opportunity to get away.
Probably.
Time scrapes by agonizingly slowly as the woman talks and talks about things Alinua can’t bring herself to care about. The sun slips beneath the horizon and the moons rise, and Alinua fights off sleep while the woman seems unaffected by the passing of time. Alinua knows she can’t let herself fall asleep here—whether for the woman’s sake, or perhaps for her own, she can’t tell.
Finally, finally, the woman lies down. Something about it still seems wrong, but Alinua knows better than to waste what may be her only chance to get away before she loses her grip on her magic. She wriggles out from under the blanket the woman had laid over her and creeps out of the tent, keeping her steps as light as possible.
She’s already run away once today, after all. Doing it again should be easy enough.
‘Should’ turns out to carry more weight than Alinua had expected, though, because she’s barely taken five steps past the entrance to the tent when the woman’s hand closes painfully tightly around her wrist.
“This isn’t right,” Alinua wants to cry out, but instead she grits her teeth, digs her heels into the dirt, and reaches for her magic. It bursts out readily, pressurized by the hours she’d spent pushing it down, and vines spring up from the ground to anchor her in place.
The woman twists Alinua’s arm backwards, and tears spring to Alinua’s eyes. Different plants burst from the ground, vines covered in thorns ripping through Alinua’s meager defenses, and suddenly the woman is crouched in front of Alinua, her fingertips pressing against Alinua’s cheekbone with a faux gentleness.
“I know what you are,” she whispers firmly.
“Then you’ll know why I need to get away!”
“I know what you are, the woman repeats, “and I do not wish to kill you. I deserve some respect for that, at least.”
Alinua’s body accepts her defeat, surrendering to its exhaustion, and she falls into the woman’s arms. The glow of magic around them fades, and the woman wipes a tear from Alinua’s cheek as she carries her away from the tent and into the cave.
~~~
Alinua has never known what to call the woman whose presence has defined the second half of her childhood. She’s never had even the slightest temptation to refer to the woman as her mother—she ran away from her mother, and her mother had never treated her like a mere curiosity—but “the woman” had quickly felt too vague for such a constant presence.
Alinua had settled on referring to her caretaker and captor as “The Collector” after she’d realized just how often The Collector had shown up with something—or, often, as Alinua has begun to suspect, someone—new to experiment on (and after it had really sunk in that The Collector sees her much more as a thing to be studied than a person). “The Collector” has never really felt right, either—Alinua has a lot of things to say about The Collector’s particular parody of parenting, but she can’t say The Collector has never taught her anything—but Alinua has never come up with anything better.
It’s not that she hasn’t had plenty of time to think of something, either. Alinua has been stuck here with The Collector for so long that sometimes she forgets what her life was like before. Some nights, she can’t do anything but desperately cling onto what she remembers of her family and remind herself that how The Collector treats her isn’t normal.
Alinua’s family let her play outside, for one thing. For another, they never made cryptic comments about how much harder it is to study a soul that’s still inside a body. It’s not that Alinua particularly minds the odd remarks, and she rarely feels the same urge to run and play outside that she did as a kid, but the feeling of wrongness from Alinua’s first meeting with The Collector has never gone away. For a while, Alinua had thought she might get used to it, even if it lingered, but it’s never really faded into the background the way she’d hoped it would.
There’s a small crack in the wall of the indented segment of cave where Alinua sleeps (and, frankly, spends the majority of her time when The Collector’s attention is off of her), and she likes to grow flowers in it. She never keeps them around long—the dark of a cave is no place for a plant meant to grow in open meadows—but the colors of the petals make her happy, and with each flower she grows, she gets to watch the crack split just the tiniest bit wider.
~~~
The Collector is planning something, and all Alinua knows is that The Collector wants Alinua to accompany her.
Alinua can guess a few other things. For example, whatever The Collector is planning is probably not a good thing, seeing as taking apart people’s souls is a hobby that Alinua is fairly certain would be considered sinister by most people.
The Collector is planning something, and The Collector wants to bring Alinua along, out into the outside world, and every last fiber of Alinua’s body is singing that this is her chance. It’s as if her veins were the roots of a tree, stretching and tunneling through the ground to find the water of freedom.
She keeps her head low when the day finally comes, unwilling to betray anything to The Collector. Alinua can barely contain herself when the sunlight hits her eyes and she feels its warmth on her arms for the first time in years. A smile blooms across her face, and she hides it by ducking her head and letting her curls fall over her squinting eyes and her beaming face. She can hear birds whistling to each other and the leaves of trees rustling in the wind and if she didn’t know better she’d say she could feel worms wriggling in the dirt beneath her feet.
She’d forgotten how beautiful the world is. The Collector’s collection didn’t include any of this.
There are buildings in the distance. Alinua had forgotten how big buildings could be.
When The Collector seems sufficiently occupied with her chimeras, Alinua slips into the forest and runs toward the city. She doesn’t want to go in quite yet—no, she needs to revel in feeling alive for a good long while first, and in order to feel properly alive she needs to be surrounded by plants—but there’s an abundance of new things to discover in the city, and there’s no better place to hide from The Collector. She’s just figured out how to climb a tree and is midway up a particularly magnificent one that promises a beautiful view of the city and its landscape when she hears it.
It’s a sound unlike anything she’s heard before, and it scares her.
Somewhere deep inside, Alinua knows who’s responsible for it, and she finds herself afraid of The Collector in a way she’d forgotten how to be. The Collector, and her odd lessons and experiments and neglectfulness, had simply been a constant in Alinua’s life for so long that it wasn’t scary anymore. Sure, Alinua knew what The Collector was doing, and Alinua didn’t like what The Collector was doing to her or The Collector’s other collectables, but Alinua knew what was happening, and as long as she forced her mind elsewhere and waited it out, she’d get to go back to her corner and grow her tiny plants. It was predictable, and thus merely unpleasant, and no longer scary.
Alinua needs to get back to The Collector and pray to all the Primordials and the moons above that The Collector didn’t notice she was gone. She has to get back to the known, and she can’t afford to risk angering someone who can cause a sound like that.
Once Alinua leaves the forest, it doesn’t take long for her to find the chimera tracks, and she starts running along the roughly-made, makeshift path in search of their master, but before she finds The Collector, she stumbles across a figure lying supine on the ground, bleeding.
She can’t risk it, she can’t risk it, she can’t—
Alinua finds herself kneeling next to the dying person, and pulls a thread of magic over her fingers. She hasn’t been trained in healing. The Collector has shaped her magic into something that changes creatures, and while Alinua has experimented with plants on her own, growing a plant has much lower stakes than healing a person—and the skills involved are only vaguely transferable.
The magic bursts out of her, unused to this new purpose and unwilling to be constrained no matter how hard she tries to grasp it. It’s been so long since she’s felt like this, like a leaf blown off a tree during a particularly violent storm. Every time her magic has gone off like this, The Collector has been there, using some instrument to guide the power with one hand and taking notes with the other. A hazy idea forms in Alinua’s mind that she might be about to die. At least it won’t be while doing something The Collector wants.
When Alinua regains control of herself, the only thought in her aching head is that she needs to run. Surely The Collector will have noticed the lightshow. Alinua staggers to her feet, and glances unsteadily at the unconscious figure still lying on the ground. She’s in no shape to carry him. She feels terrible as she shrinks into the shadows of the forest, ducking into the underbrush and leaving the poor guy to be vulnerable to whatever The Collector might do, but what else can she do?
Time inches on, and nothing happens. Alinua’s head begins to clear, and she cautiously peeks her head out to take a better look around.
There’s nothing there. No Collector, no chimeras, just a person lying on the ground.
That’s when Alinua realizes.
There’s nothing there.
There used to be a city there.
Maybe that’s why The Collector hasn’t come back. Maybe she’s busy with whatever plan she’s set into motion. Alinua creeps back out to the figure on the ground and lifts him with great effort. He’s heavier than he looks.
She grows a tree to hide in. Plants are easy, and it’s a relief when her magic tugs and resists in the same way it usually does, in the way she knows how to adjust for and work around.
It’s hard to slow her thoughts as she waits for the person to wake up. She’d wanted to escape from The Collector, she hadn’t wanted to keep on going the way she had been, she’d been so happy to finally have her chance—but it still hurts that The Collector hadn’t even bothered to look for her. Did Alinua really mean so little to her?
Alinua blinks back tears as she ventures out of the tree to find some herbs for tea, and tries to force herself to think practically. If she wants to be free of The Collector (and she does, she does, and she hates that she’s having to remind herself of that), then she needs to keep moving. She’s far too close to The Collector’s home to let herself get comfortable here. On the other hand, though… Alinua thinks back to how her magic had exploded out of her control when healing the person currently sleeping inside the tree she’d grown. She still doesn’t know exactly how chimeras are made, but she does know that life magic is involved and that she herself is a carrier of the chimeric plague. If she’s forcing herself to be realistic here, she has to admit that there’s a chance that she did something other than healing when she lost control.
She’ll stay long enough to be sure. She’ll make sure that both of them stay long enough to be absolutely certain that Alinua hasn’t turned anyone into a monster. Then, the world awaits.
~~~
Alinua hadn’t recognized him before—The Collector’s curriculum on the gods was largely made up of images of their souls, not their corporations—but with some of the color returning to his face, it sure looks like she’s found herself hiding out in a tree with Vash. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Vash—in fact, he seems like one of the nicer gods according to Alinua’s very limited knowledge—but having potentially mutated a god’s corporation is an idea Alinua really wishes she wasn’t having to entertain.
The second his eyes open, a strange mix of unease and relief flood Alinua’s system. She’s pretty sure gods’ eyes are supposed to glow, and whoever she’s handing the tea over to definitely does not have glowing eyes. Still, something seems off. It’s not the same kind of unease that haunted her early days with The Collector before she managed to numb herself too it; it’s calmer, less urgent, simply a feeling that something isn’t right.
When person explains who he is, who he was, Alinua knows she was right to be offput. A lot of The Collector’s oddities start to click into place, and the urgency to flee lessens somewhat. The Collector has always had a tendency to be consumed by whatever new specimen she’s studying, and from what Not-Vash is saying, it sounds like she’s just got the catch of a lifetime.
Alinua makes the calculated decision not to tell him about her relationship to The Collector. It’s complicated, for one, and she doesn’t want him running off before she knows he won’t turn into a chimera. She’ll tell him as soon as she can let him go in good conscience. After all, considering what The Collector just did, he has every reason to want nothing to do with anyone who has any ties to her at all, and Alinua has many, as messy as they are.
Alinua had forgotten how nice it was to talk to normal people. Well, maybe this guy doesn’t exactly qualify as normal (the whole new-soul-in-a-god’s-old-incarnation thing is pretty much an automatic disqualifier), but talking to him feels more normal than talking to The Collector ever did, or at least more pleasant.
She can’t believe she’s letting him talk her into leaving the tree, though. She knows it’s a bad idea. Still, his argument is strong, and Alinua wants to see the world too.
She sighs and relents.