She wakes up ravenous, when she sleeps at all, with the memory of bloodlust searing like fire in her veins. It is largely part of why she chooses not to sleep, to use the dark of night instead to wander and wonder and follow trails of what-ifs like the paths of shooting stars. But it is also because she knows a truth that so many others seem not to know, seem to ignore because oblivion is so much easier than the alternative.
To sleep is to be weak, to dream is far worse.
The first had been when she lived in the Chamber with much of her family, and even as this family had unraveled like the thread on a corner of a tapestry pulled too hard, it was still a family worth fighting for. But the not-dream, that impossible memory, it had stolen her family from her. She had known torture and defeat, had known an emptiness as deep and dark as any night sky filled with cold, gleaming stars. She had found a grief that rooted itself so deep in her chest, a feralness that knit itself intrinsically into the marrow of her bone and the fibers of her soul, that she would never be the same again. Still she might have, might have tried, might have lied to herself if not for the blue that followed her back from the depths of that nightmare. That aching indigo that stained every inch of her sullied skin where once she had been plain and brown and beautiful. There had been one, someone who understood, someone who had fallen into the same impossible dream. He had tried to burn the blue from her skin, but even as the fire singed the hair and her flesh had blistered and bubbled, there was still blue. Just blue.
It was then that she discovered the second gift, this one worse than the first and so much harder to ignore.
She was invulnerable, barely mortal.
In seconds her skin had healed, blue and gleaming, and indigo hair filled the gap like nothing had happened.
She had run then. There were too many questions she could not answer, too many things she ached to forget and yet none of her family was willing to pretend she had not changed. None except her father, whose heart was the same as hers and had asked only of truths she could part with and none of what she held buried like a blade in her chest.
Still, she ran.
But it happened again, that impossible moment when she woke to find herself in the realest dream, the strangest truth she had ever known. Except this time when the two who had tortured her the first time had been placed at an arms length and she had found herself with a blade in her fist, instinct came so easily. With just a reflexive flick of the muscles in her hand, she murdered the first. She hadn’t needed to either, not yet. The second however had been expected and Malis had been all too eager to perform, sinking her teeth guiltlessly into the soft of Lena’s fluttering pulse. It wasn’t until Malis was all alone in a dark place, isolated only to her thoughts and memories, that guilt finally came.
But there was a part of her, the part that was so much of her father, that suspected this guilt too was an instinct, a reflex.
It could not come from a genuine place, not when she knew she would do it all again.
She sank gleaming and blue into the dark and fog like a gem dropped between two edges of a narrow chasm. Like every night that had come before and since, she chose to chase away sleep hunting for familiar faces, impossible clues. Looking for the truths that would undo her if she ever found them.
Just ahead there was a flash of pale gold, the rustle of a wing and the swirl of fog as it was displaced around a large body. She tensed imperceptibly, her eyes flickering like green fire as they locked onto his pale silhouette. Still she said nothing, instead inching forward so that the fog spilled like shadow across her perfect skin and the row of curving obsidian horns glittered like knives in the cold, silver starlight. It was impossible for the predator in her not to take not of the single wing and its downed brother, or the dirt in the feathers that led her to believe it had been that way for a while. She might have even noticed the stiffness in his legs if it weren’t for the shadows she thought she saw dancing through his eyes when she glanced there. Shadows she had come to know so intimately. Her jaw clenched and muscle rippled like cord along her blue cheek. “Who are you?” Her voice was quiet and threaded with stiffness, her expression unfriendly but still a far cry from hostile. “Why are you awake.” She says again, just a little quieter this time, and there is only suspicion etched into the lines of her black-masked face.
MALIS
makai x oksana