Peace is a lie we tell ourselves when the dark is too heavy and the world too tight. It is something we long for, something we promise ourselves that we can earn if we just wait, if we just hold out a little longer. But it isn’t real. Malis knew this once, and she knew it intimately. A world upturned once, twice, until she no longer recognized it when the dust settled and all the things fell back into their places. She had been broken so many times, so many different ways, and this Malis would never be able to fit into that same space she had been torn from. She was a ruined version of herself, a broken version, and she belonged nowhere. But somewhere along the way she had allowed herself to forget this, to ignore the illusion of peace and believe in things like happiness and safety. She found what felt like home, what felt like love. She found Killdare, and a family in their children, comfort in a Kingdom that would only ever betray her.
It wasn’t that she had forgotten the past- that would be impossible. A girl and another, hands and horror and a body turned plastic to trap her inside. A girl and another, hands and horror and a mind blown to dust until all her pieces scattered in the wind. Things that were impossible, nightmares made so real that they replaced brown with blue, mortal with immortal. Dreams that weren’t dreams at all, but she would pretend they were because it hurt too much to let them be real. Pollock had been real, his weight against her back, his horns and hooves buried in the brokenness of a body he meant to ruin. A body that could no longer be ruined. He was real, but it didn’t make the rest of it seem any less so. But it had to be. Impossible things.
It was easiest to pretend to forget, to hide the memories of how it felt to have hands crushed around her body, of how it felt when they found her again so many years later and she killed them both. Of how she loved the warmth of the blood in her mouth when she drank her betrayer dry. It was easiest to call it a dream and claim the choices weren’t hers, that the feelings belonged to someone else.
But this lie unraveled as all lies do.
She opens her eyes and the world is dim at first. It feels like blinking but she knows it’s impossible by the wood box she finds herself in when only a heartbeat ago she had been nestled alone in the trees near the base of the Chamber mountains. There is some part of her that understands immediately, that remembers even though she’s tried so hard to forget, and this part turns as cold as ice, as death. This wrongness is familiar, these things she’s never seen but somehow has names for. She’s been in a box before, different than this but still dark and wrong and strange. There are others here though, when there hadn’t been before, and they are loud when they scream, louder still when they throw themselves against the walls of their magical confines. Malis does neither. She might have once, might have seen these walls and tried to pry the boards apart with the points of her dark, obsidian horns. The difference is that she knows something that most of them will not, a secret they’ll unravel soon enough, but not soon enough to help them. This part, being trapped and alone, it isn’t the worst part. This is the best part. It is was comes next that they should dread, she is certain of this, and yet they scream and they fuss and they draw attention to themselves when all they should want to do is hide away in the backs of their stalls and pray that they are forgotten.
But time passes and the noise does not fade. Some of the screams come from elsewhere, from a place she cannot discern in the dark. But someone comes for them every once in a while, the thump thump of feet against the stone aisle tell her this, and then the screams redouble with a horrifying newness she thinks will be branded against her thoughts for all eternity. There is food for her in the corner, it smells sweet and fresh but it turns her stomach and she can’t even look at it. She doesn’t want it, she doesn’t trust this food. The water smells even better, cold and clean, but she refuses to take anything from them. She’ll starve eventually despite her ability to heal, but it will take a long while and she doubts that it would kill her anyway. Nothing has so far. The only indication of the passing time is the fuzziness of her thoughts as she listens to the hum and whirr of worried voices, and the tightening in her belly as it groans and begs her to eat. But still, she refuses.
There is a thought that settles in dark behind her eyes, a worry and it feels just like when Pollock had played among the organs in her belly. Without a sound, because the heart makes no sound when it caves in on itself, she moves to the front of her stall so that she can see more easily down the length of the cold stone aisle. Some faces peer back at her, and she knows the horror she finds in their eyes, knows the fury and fear that bellows in their minds as they try to discern real from dream. You’ll never know, she would tell him if she could, if she could find the strength to speak beneath the weight of knowing that crushes her. Instead she shifts to the side to view her neighbor, but they are quiet like she is, buried and dark in the corner of their stall and she wonders if they know like she knows. She shifts to the other side, turning her dark, horned head to find a pair of strange red eyes glowing back at her through the dimness. For a long moment they remain that way, locked together in their unease, but then he looks away and she does too, because he isn’t hers. None of the faces had been hers, and this is the only thing that brings her any comfort.
Maybe they hadn’t taken anyone she loved.
She is quiet when she disappears back into the dark at the rear of her stall, quiet, though she could feel the slow burn of fury filling her veins the longer she stood there. She was a fool to think she would ever escape this life, a fool to think she would ever deserve happiness. This was the only life such a broken beast could have, the only space she would ever fit into again.
The sound comes again, the one that turns her numb and cold, the thump thump of feet against stone. She waits for them to pass, but this time they don’t. There is a rattling sound that fills her ears, a whine of metal against metal as the bolt of her door comes undone. It slides open and she finds that she cannot move. This immobility is familiar in a painful way, in a way that threatens to unravel her now as it had so many years ago. In an instant she is wild, she is pain and fury and years of coming quietly undone, and she is trapped again inside a prison of her own body. You fucking coward, she seethes within her own mind as she thrashes like a wild animal trapped inside the shell of a body that no longer listened.
MALIS
makai x oksana