Ilka was gone.
The thought came in waves of understanding, ebbing and flowing, testing the limits of her still fragile sanity. It threatened to undo her, she who had vowed to take better care of her family if only she could escape that plastic prison and return to the place where a heart beat beneath her heels. She had repeated it like a prayer, clinging to it hard as waves of pain and illogical fear tried to shake her loose. Somehow, impossibly, and without courage or bravery, she was home again. But that promise was little more than a dropped porcelain doll, shattered and scattered, because Ilka was gone.
When her sister had fixed those luminous eyes on her, a brown so pale they looked like crushed gold, Malis hadn’t the heart to argue with her. She understood not belonging, the feeling of being trapped some place and being willing to do anything to change it. She understood better, more intimately, than Ilka could have ever imagined. So instead of arguing with her sister, she had offered to travel with her. They followed the river from the Chamber, not straying as it narrowed into a quieter stream. When it opened back up again into a wide pond, Malis had recognized the sprawling stretch of land and tree as the Meadow.
They had agreed to part ways in the Meadow.
It was a promise Malis was loathe to keep, but how could she break it now when the other one still lay in sharp, haunting shambles at her feet.
For a long moment, stretched so tight, so thin Malis was sure something would break, they stood together. Nose buried against shoulder, no words with enough meaning for either to try to speak. But then the moment passed, as all moments do, and the sisters broke apart with equally false smiles drawn like armor across their identically delicate faces. It was only after Ilka had turned and gone, little more than a smudge of black and white disappearing into the far line of forest that Malis remembered to say goodbye.
“I love you, Ilka.” Her heart crumbled in her chest.
There was a nose pressed suddenly against her neck and she turned to find Pyxis looking back at her. Somehow her heart managed to soar in her chest even as her stomach fell through her belly. Pyxis was going with Ilka. The two had always been inseparable, so it made sense, it felt right, even though it meant a little more of Malis’ world was eroding away. There was only silence between them, full of thick and static, but it didn’t matter. Malis knew that Pyxis understood. She knew she would take care of their sweet Ilka. Their expressions mirrored one another until they parted and each began the trek to their respective kingdoms.
She turned from Ilka, from Pyxis, from her own bright reflection glittering back at her from the pond at her feet, and managed not to flinch at the blade that shoved itself between her ribs when those green eyes settled on something hauntingly familiar. She tried to take a breath, she swore her lungs even shuddered with the effort, but the stallion walking past her had sucked all the air from the world. Seconds stretched into eons and she was entirely willing to let him pass without saying anything, without dredging up impossible memories that felt more like a lingering nightmare.
“Wait.” She says, she breathes – it’s impossibly difficult to speak when all the air has gone from the world – just a whisper of uncertainty that he would never hear.
But then, even more impossibly, she is scurrying after him, awkward and indigo and completely wrong. She knows in an instant she cannot let him fade back into the crowd, knows regret will haunt her like an entirely new nightmare. And when her mouth presses against his shoulder, her flat teeth insistent, she realizes she has nothing to say. Any question would be a confession, a ruinous secret revealed. So she moves to face him, to bare any ghosts hiding in the shadows of his expression. There’s something there, she thinks, something she saw in her own reflection. The indifference she wears like a mask, a shield, it fissures the longer she looks and her secrets seep like black blood through the cracks.
MALIS
makai x oksana