She had been encouraged to stay around the Chamber, but Malis’ had been tight-lipped when Alight had asked why, unwilling yet to explain it all to her. (Giver had nodded severely, he was at least mindful enough to find the agitation in the Chamber Queen’s voice.)

But Alight was always rather pliant as a child (often yielding, even now, as a woman), and perhaps that was Malis’ intent, if not her hope – she had to be soft enough, willing and wide-eyed enough, to be safe. She had to listen and heed the stories she had been told, sleepy-eyed and yawning, of the thing that bumped in the night

The thing that wielded fear like a blade; that would know her – (just by her hair!) – if it saw her. And if it saw her, he would turn her to bones and jelly.

The thing that hunted indigo, hungrily and greedily, like a poacher hunts for ivory. (That thing whose bruises she bears, even if she cannot see or feel them. They are purple and angry; blood like her blood, pooling under the skin. The skin so like his own.)

She has always loved it here, so her orders were not resented. She enjoys her meanders with Giver – first the soft moss of the Forest, exploring the green murk and queer, bare patches on the trees (‘Bears,’ Giver would say, gravely, and they would push on); then the Meadow, sinking into the silt of the river’s bottom and dragging her chin through the rush of cold water. At night she watched Giver gather stars and galactic energy around his body. She could count constellations in the bright aura hovering over his skin.

But this is home. This is home in the way a hundred paws and hooves have pounded family trees into the earth like destiny. It is home in the way it took her mother in, and her too, though still suspended in that prenatal haze. In the strange heart that pounds below – and it is hers, too, she thinks. So she passes easily through the knowing softwoods, humming and dropping her nose to smell the sharp piney scent until she catches something perilous and odd. 

It is danger and horsehair combined, she follows it because she has been warned against a monster, but a monster she has always believed she would know just by feeling it near. As if it would disrupt time and space itself, send warning like the wriggle of worms to the pit of her stomach. She does churn nervously, when she reaches the black cat, examining, warily, it’s toothy yawn. “Hello.” She swallows, breathing evenly.

But behind the sheen of black fur and the lean slink of felinity, she is sure she can see him.