She runs in her dreams because she thinks they are real.
She runs because the horde has already taken Rouge and will surely take them next. She runs because the sound fills her ears, an angry, unnatural symphony of oncoming death. The smell is there, too, clogging and putrid in her nostrils. She gags and tries to ignore the sounds. All the while, though, she runs.
Noir is alongside her, a black wisp of a colt who she knows will tire far sooner than she will. Already he is stumbling over the ash-covered rocks that seem almost murderous in their placement and intent. She can almost smell the fear rising from the boy (though she cannot differentiate the source; it can just as easily be her terror). The horde of charred bodies grows ever closer as they make their ascent up the mountain. Noir slows her down tremendously. The thought of leaving him behind passes through her brain like an arrow, painful and swift. Painful, because imagining the monsters clamping down on him and ripping him apart (like they surely had Rouge) is enough nightmare fodder for a lifetime. Swift, because it’s not a true thought. Jaide will fling herself into the masses long before they have a chance to snatch a single hair from the boy’s head.
They come still, regardless of her thoughts. Noir’s breaths are more like small gasps now. He looks at her with pleading eyes. “I can’t run anymore. I can’t…do this.” The mountain trail carved by the survivors stretches on, ‘safety’ still far above them. Jaide thinks they can do it, can reach the summit, if they keep going.
“You have to. It’s easy though, no sweat,” she says, trying a smile that comes off more like a grimace. She’s ever the optimist, and even with monsters breathing down their necks, she tries to keep his spirits up. If Noir thinks she’s all right, maybe he will be too. The rocks shrink the further up they trek. It makes it far more difficult to avoid each and every stone. A milky buckskin head appears at the trailhead, watching them with a neutral expression. Alpha, she thinks, he will help us now, surely. The horde is so close now. Noir notices, too, and redoubles his efforts. His feet slide on the pebbles, though. With a sickening realization, Jaide sees that he is sliding backwards, his four legs spreading as he does so. The no-longer-horses hiss in excitement, closing the distance between them. One springs forward, it’s jaws open and sliming. Green spittle flies into the air, coating Noir’s leg as it latches on…
“NOOOOO -”
~
“OOOOO!”
She wakes, her legs flailing and leaving tracks in the ash. Sweat covers her, despite her relatively sheltered spot under an overhanging boulder. Her heart beats to the cadence of the run she’s just undertaken. But has she? The air is still all around her, ashy and grey, but still nonetheless. The sights and sounds of the undead are absent. Nobody scuttles for safety; no one screams with the certainty of their own death. Has it all been a dream, then?
Jaide rises then, and it’s still so easy at this point that she takes it for granted (it won’t be later, when she hasn’t the muscles to do so, when both her body and mind are starving). Despite a month on the mountain, she’s done okay. They all have. Her blue roan coat shines with health as she ducks out from the carved space and emerges into the post-apocalyptic light. Grey eyes survey the now-familiar stretch of mountain she cannot bring herself to call home – not yet. The others make it better, though. They bring her closer to the word, to the feeling of belonging. The nightmare-panic fades to almost nothing. She thinks of Noir and smiles. He’s out there, thank goddess, and seeing his face will erase the rest of her worry.
She leaves her little alcove behind and makes her way to the meadow. Their morning rituals will be in full swing: Alpha calling everyone to chores, his mares gossiping around him, Rouge rolling her eyes in the background. Rouge is alive, Jaide remembers with another smile, not even caring that it meant her attitude will be fully preserved and on display as well. She comes around the corner, shining with happiness and a new determination for survival (I will be better, she thinks, we have our lives and that is enough). She expects that they will all be standing at the meeting spot, gathered around the old paint male.
She doesn’t expect that the horses will look more like lumps.
At first she thinks they are new boulders, spread across the heavily-grazed meadow. But that doesn’t make sense - boulders don’t just appear overnight. Jaide moves closer to the nearest one, her curiosity replaced by growing realization and horror. It’s Vert, the amber champagne girl who could’ve been an Amazon. She was brave and ambitious and selfless, all things a Sister should be. Now, though, she will never get the chance. Her once brilliant green eyes are faded and glassy. Her expression is the worst aspect of all, however: a hopeful expression lines her mouth and creases her eyes – like she’d seen past the end of Beqanna to a new start, a good start.
There’s no sign of trauma on her or any of the others. She knows, because she examines all of them closely. She doesn’t cry. Not at first, anyway. Not until she finds the palomino girl Jaune. The tears come then and grow increasingly in number when she finds Gris. The grizzled grey lies awkwardly against a stunted tree, like she’d tried to climb it as the last dregs of life drained from her. Her mouth droops open, her wrinkled muzzle touching one of her lifted legs. Jaide imagines she was yelling at some unknown adversary, a stubborn lady to the end. She stumbles as she leaves Gris’s side; her grief nearly prevents her from finding more reasons for it – of course there is more.
She can make out Alpha’s tawny form in the distance through her tears, but she doesn’t go to him. They’d had enough trouble getting along in life for her to know what to say at his death. She is numb, but not enough to forget Noir. He isn’t among the lumps, isn’t scattered like so many fallen leaves in the field. She walks and looks and screams his name until she is hoarse. Her voice is the only sound on the mountain (and perhaps, in the world) and it feels almost like sacrilege. Who is she to disturb their rest? That’s all they are doing, she reassures herself. They’re just sleeping, just slumbering away until a better day.
She doesn’t really believe it until she sees him. Noir. The black colt lies on the trail alongside the mountain spring. His torso and hindquarters are on the path, but his head is in the water, gently bobbing with the flow. It runs over his face, makes a dark halo of his hair as it flows over him. His brown eyes stare without direction towards the surface, wide and scared – accusing, even. As if it was her fault that he’d died without a friend in the world. She can’t stand the look. She can’t stand the way his eyes look like a fish’s when they’d been so full of life and curiosity before. She jumps into the freezing water immediately, tugging at his mane and pulling his face from the shallow stream and onto the bank. Jaide stands unmoving, her gaze fixated on the body for hours. She doesn’t know what to do. It isn’t supposed to happen like this; he had been meant to live. The words she’d spoken to him that first night echo in her mind, echo in the air around her when she repeats: “I’ll keep you safe. You are still Noir and always will be.” Something breaks inside of her when he doesn’t respond.
She doesn’t leave him for days. Sometimes she forgets to drink upstream from where his body had polluted the water. She remembers, after, but wonders if it even matters (wonders if she even matters). Loss pulls her guts into her throat; she would vomit if she was able to. The urge is there but she can’t. Her esophagus knots itself into a hard ball instead. It makes breathing difficult (she gasps sometimes when she forgets to breath) and eating impossible, so she doesn’t. The grass is coarse here, anyway. Surely the meadows are still growing. There is nobody else to compete with for resources, not now, but she is loath to return to the bodies at first. Besides, she has Noir to look out for.
Jaide grooms him and cares for him as if he were still alive that first week. She pulls the debris from his mane and tail, straightens each strand, and tucks his head into his chest at night. “We will be fine,” she tells him as she kisses his brow one evening, “soon we’ll find a new meadow to call our own.” The blue girl stops drinking (or forgets) a day later. Her mouth is already so parched, but she notices something else, too. “You ought to take better care of yourself, Noir. You’re starting to smell. We’re right by the water, for heaven’s sake.”
The vultures are drawn in by the smell. Six of them come at a time; she counts them every time, not understanding what they want. She’d grown up with the friendly macaws of the Jungle; she imagines these birds are simply looking for company. “One, two.” Their red heads are like a beacon as they land gracefully in the small mountain trees. “Three, four, five.” Three more land on the ground nearby but not close enough to reach Noir’s body. They look, though. “ Where are you, six?” Jaide’s grey eyes finally find the approaching sixth vulture. She can’t help but count. “Six!” She says triumphantly, the only victory she has these days.
Opposite the vultures, the smell eventually drives her away. She doesn’t tell Noir, of course. She doesn’t want to offend him, so before she goes, she tells him, “I’ll be right back. I’ve got to get some food.” Her stomach clenches at the thought of sweet, untouched grass. Her coat is now dull and without shine; her ribs protrude and make her look like a walking cage. She hadn’t minded until that moment – the thought of eating too much for her mind to digest – but now it is a need. She barely misses the sound of flapping wings behind her as she goes.
~
Jaide comes back to the stream feeling better than she has in a long time. Sure, the other bodies had smelled terrible, but the smell had been easy enough to overlook. The grass had been so delicious, so worth the trip that she had put her other losses out of her mind. She can’t even remember their names, now that she thinks about it. “Alone,” she says under her breath, closing in on the stream. “Alone with the flames and Noir.” Noir. She clings to his name as tightly as she can. His name is the mountain, her sanctuary – the only thing she has left. He’s there on the ground ahead of her and she smiles, looking almost ghoulish with her sunken face. But something’s not right. Some of him is there, just not as much of him as there had been before she left for the meadow.
“One,” she says as a crimson-headed vulture flies off, something red hanging from its beak. As she draws near, she sees that the boy – what is his name again? – is gone. His skin is peeled back, ripped from devastating talons and beaks, and his innards are splayed before her. She sees a spongy lung beneath a stark-white rib and looks at it with more fascination than horror. She wonders how it would taste, how it would feel pressed between her teeth. His fish-eye regards her with the same accusation as before, but it’s dimmer in its intensity. “Why am I here?” The corpse doesn’t reply, so she leaves it to the vultures. Six of them, she remembers, starting the count in her head: one, two, three, four, five, six!
The smell of death fades the further she moves across the mountain. It’s tough going with her wasted muscles. She laughs when the rocks trip her and she keeps her balance – another victory to celebrate. She does fall, once. A sharp stone opens a gash on both of her knees. They bleed terribly, and with little thought except her own hunger and thirst, she licks at the blood. The taste of metal (though she’s never experienced it before) fills her mouth, becoming increasingly delightful – a delicacy meant to be treasured. She makes herself bleed in other places, too. Her teeth are flat and dull, but with enough gnawing, she opens fresh wounds across her body. She wonders if she can get to her lungs, wonders if they’ll have the same consistency and softness as moss. “But how will I talk, then?” Oh, she thinks, hearing her voice inside her head. There’s no need for lungs, after all.
She stops talking all together but continues picking away at herself. After a few days on Her Side of the Mountain, the wounds become warm and angry-red. Like the vulture’s heads. One, two, three, four, five, six, she counts her sores, but the numbers exceed half a dozen, and she refuses to count higher. A voice whispers back one day. She thinks it’s one of the birds, because they circle above her now, waiting for her coming demise. It’s almost silent, but it’s there on the ashy breeze. Pick a number. Her thoughts are slow now, her words molasses on her tongue. She doesn’t have time to respond before it asks again, this time louder. ”Pick a number.” She lists them off in her head before reaching the end, her small victory: “Six!”
Jaide
girl of fire and ice