her
Blind and whistling just around the corner
And there's a wind that is whispering something
Strong as hell but not hickory rooted
Do not go gentle into that good night, it was once said, and there was nothing gentle about this.
Three more disappear, as if they never existed. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe this is all a dream, and somewhere Hickory lays feverish and dying, raving words spewing from her lips. She can hope.
(The pain feels so real, though.)
For a moment she sees the lamb, or thinks she does, and again the air splinters with the seal. The last one.
There are so few of them left, but the few who remain – this nameless brethren – stand against them, the wicked dying brothers, they stand with seals in their veins and a glint of defiance in their eyes.
There are so few of them.
The world flickers again, and for a moment she gets a real glimpse of the world she came from. She isn’t sure if she misses it. She never felt much, in that world, instead drifting through life with a legacy wearing heavy on her bones, a destiny gone unfilled.
Here she is broken, she is bloodied and will more than likely die, but she feels things – feels rage and fury and fear and a sort of hysterical joy, even, the righteous glee of doing something, acting rather than standing idly by.
Famine remains still, watching them. His gaze is more than predatory, it is apocalyptic, and the unease sits heavy in her gut. The smile that curls across his wretched lips is the vilest thing she’s ever seen.
Run, he says, and she obeys before he even finishes the word.
Someone – something – else is coming, somehow worse than the rest, their brother, their king, their god.
Their end game.
She runs and the others run with her. Conquest runs, too, and War, and all the gibbering beasts they brought with them. She hears the hellish chorus of them – their heavy chuffing breaths, and below that, a kind of laughter.
There are things at her heels, things that might have once been the earth’s creatures but were since sickened and mutated by the world.
She wonders if she would become like them, if she’d lived here long enough. If her skin would have twisted into metal, if her body would have twisted, enlarged until she was only a semblance of her earthly self.
She wonders what it would feel like, to transform.
Something nips at her heel, a creature that might have once been a jungle cat – a panther, perhaps – but is now twisted. It has too many eyes, and wears armor that appears to have cut into its skin. There are sores on its body, too, and one of its several eyes dangles out on a stalk, gruesome.
She tries to dig in, to run faster, but her lungs are already burning with exertion and pain, her fractured ribs worsening, so when the cat thing bites again she stumbles, almost falls to her knees.
War and Conquest catch up, surround her, as do the creatures. She braces herself, forces her eyes open.
(do not go gentle into that good night)
She will face them.
(rage, rage against the dying of the light)
She will not win, but she will face them.
But the attack doesn’t come. They stalk around her, almost playfully, and she realizes she is being kept, a prize to offer to something so much grander. But she can’t be given, not yet, not when there is a seal that still sings her name.
She scans the ground frantically, but there is nothing but dust, churning up by their eager hooves.
They’re murmuring something, a conversation she can’t quite here – an argument, perhaps – and she takes this moment of distraction. She inhales, deeply, like it’s the last time she might ever take in air.
She barrels through the circled creatures, one last stand, and hones every part of her blood to listen for the seal, for it to holler her home. There is something, so faint it might be imagined, so she runs in that direction, and already the creatures are after her, but there --
A piece of the seal glints in the dust.
She doesn’t take this one into her mouth – there’s no time – merely places a hoof over it, but it melts into her all the same and she feels a moment of strength, its power flooding her veins.
The world flickers. She sees lush jungles, frozen tundras, the meadow sprawling open. She sees two horses engaged in idle chatter, and the normalcy of it feels like a bullet.
They don’t know, she thinks, they don’t know how thin the world really is.
Conquest and War do not come. Nor do the creatures. Instead, he comes – Death, a creature of smoke and blazing greens and blues. He is calm – calmer than Famine, even.
Death has all the time in the world, after all.
You should know this – Hickory is not supposed to die.
None of them are supposed to, of course. But Hickory comes with a legacy stricken inside of her, she is a woman made of a finite bloodline – she is the only one, the offspring of only ones. She carries in her a strange line, a unique one. Each individual in the line has one child, only one.
And she is the last.
And the last now meets Death, and she is childless, and somewhere perhaps her mother and father and all those before her are weeping as the last of their line stands in the dust, bleeding and broken.
Death knows this – of course he knows, because Death is who met her mother and father all those years ago – and a soft smile touches his face. It is not malicious, not like Conquest and War.
Rather, it is the feeling of something inevitable – an unstoppable force.
(The darkness is like a song.)
The world flickers and Beqanna’s sun shrines through. She knows she should say goodbye. But there is so little to say goodbye to. There is no family,
(the last, the last)
no friends.
Instead of goodbye, she thinks I’m sorry.
Sorry to her bloodline for not fulfilling her destiny.
Sorry to Beqanna for not stopping this – because though she has the seal, they are all still here, and the world still flickers.
“Hickory,” he says. He knows her name. Of course he knows her name.
Death knows all their names, in the end.
She tells him what she told all the rest.
“You can’t,” she says.
It feels like a lie. Because he can. Of all of them, he can.
She moves to run. Because she cannot go gentle into that good night. Because, god bless her, she is still frightened as she (quite literally) faces death.
(rage, rage)
She doesn’t get far.
Death moves quick as a snake when he must, and his muzzle touches her withers. Just barely, but it is enough.
She is gone before her body hits the ground.
The darkness that takes over is not like a song, but rather, like nothing at all.
hickory
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