The door slides open and it becomes almost immediately apparent that it wouldn’t have mattered if the little man forgot to bind her in place, keep her a prisoner inside her own body. It is enough for her to see him, enough to take in that pale face hidden beneath the strands of dark hair. It is enough to recognize him, to remember what he did before. She would have been frozen in her horror and hatred even if he had not subdued her with the filth of his dirty magic. It takes a long moment for that initial shock to fade, but when it does she notices a few new details that she had missed as that last flicker of hope had been blown free from her chest. His hair was long and unkempt, his face gaunt even now as he calmly closed the distance between them- and when he reached out to stroke her face she could see traces of dirt crusted around the edges of thick fingernails. He was a shadow of who he had been before, and she felt a dangerous flicker of pleasure in her belly that he looked nearly as ruined as she felt.
His hands linger on her face, those slender fingers - fingers meant for taking things apart, and they trace the band of black that set her eyes like raw emeralds in a burned earth. His eyes drift to hers and his face is almost reverent as those fingers slip to follow the smooth, arching curves of her horns. The ache in her chest to run him through is almost unbearable, but still his magic holds her quiet so she is only calm, only obedient. He pulls a halter from somewhere and she would have balked if she could, certainly would’ve buried a horn in his throat to rend flesh from muscle, muscle from bone. But instead she is compliant as he slips it over her head and fastens a cold, metal buckle near the curve of her throat.
With a tug she finds she can move again, but it is not her will that her body follows. It is the half-man with the smile that makes her nauseous. She follows him quietly, placidly, finding that she could not turn her head to glimpse the faces of those she passed. But maybe it was better this way, there was nothing she could do now if she found a face that meant something to her. Her body belonged to him in a way that her soul never would.
The aisle opened up into a large room, and for an instant it was just a chamber that was cold and lit with dim lights, surrounded by walls that were made from stone and steel. But then she blinked, just closed those eyes for one treacherous millisecond, and when she opened them the room had morphed. Gone was the rock and metal, gone were the dim, flickering lights. Instead she found a scene that was entirely too familiar, the same kind of familiar that Grumblesnakes had been when he filled the open doorway of her stall. The room was a bedroom now, pink and bright and so large that it reduced her to the size of a toy.
A toy.
It felt like dying, like drowning in memories and suffocating on the pain that filled her up inside. Everything was identical, the three wooden toy chests, the garbage sitting in the corner- and she wonders if she opened them, would her friends still be heaped inside in a ruined pile? She tries again to pull away from the fairy, to rip the lead line through those long, delicate fingers. But he isn’t there anymore. The halter is still draped across the curve of her face, she is still physically quiet and placid, still subdued against her own iron will, but she is alone. She doesn’t have a chance to wonder if alone is worse, because a pair of hands reach down to pluck her up. While she is not quite as small as she had been before, much closer to the size of a lazy house cat, those long fingers still close around her neck and her belly and lift her carefully to the center of the room. She doesn’t try to fight him now, doesn’t beg her mind to allow her to use those legs because she knows it won’t work. This is not new, it is not different, it is exactly as she remembers and she remembers that there is no room for hope.
Grumblesnakes sits cross legged on the floor, perched in the center of the room with toy-sized Malis blue and perfect and trapped immobile in his lap. There is a smile that spreads slowly across his face, a smile as, with a flourish of his hand, her body tears open in a hundred places. “Oh dark one, do you remember that game Nerissa played with you?” Malis does, she remembers being torn apart and then rebuilt again with pieces of her friends, it is not something one can easily forget.
It was just a dream.
Malis doesn’t bother to answer him, she isn’t sure she could have through the pain of a thousand severed nerve endings. But her body begins healing immediately, sealing those thin, almost surgical wounds in a way that felt like time was lapsing around her. He frowned and tutted as though he had forgotten she could regenerate, as though he was displeased by how inconvenient she was being in this moment. But it is his magic buried in her veins, his, and she knows he hasn’t forgotten this. His fingers twitch again and the wounds reopen, blood gathering like unshed tears within the lip of each cut. Another twitch of his fingers and there is metal buried in every slice. She can feel it lodged within her bones, can feel the edges peeling her flesh apart when she breathes. But the metal isn’t buried only beneath the surface, pieces protrude like blades and plates and spines across her body like a grotesque armor. “See now, isn’t that better!” He beams down at her as he picks her up with careful hands and places her on the floor. She stands there in a moment of frozen agony, of shame, until he points one finger at her and gestures in a slow circle. Her body reacts immediately, the muscles loosening so that she can walk in a circle like his favorite toy on display. The movement is agony, trapped inside a body that is simultaneously healing and tearing, and she roars her dismay. The sound is pure fury, but it is sound not thought, and there is some small amount of relief that even if he won’t let her fight, he will let her cry.
Again and again she circles, until blood runs in ruby rivulets against the blue, until she thinks she might leap into the black that lingers at the edges of her consciousness. But she doesn’t scream again, won’t, because she thinks he must want her to or why else would he have freed her tongue. He must lose interest, because with a sigh and snap of his fingers, the metal is torn free as though the room around her is suddenly magnetic. She cannot stop this scream when it comes, when it rips like solid anguish from her wheezing lungs. At this he smiles again, and with a blink the bedroom is gone and she is standing back in the stone and steel room at the end of a rope held by Grumblesnakes.
He reaches out a hand to touch the curve of her cheek, and she finds that they are back to their normal proportions, that she could trample him if only her body would cooperate. But it doesn’t. Instead, he touches a finger to a wound on her face as it knits together and smoothes over like nothing had ever happened. With the tongue he had loosed, she says, “I should have known you weren’t finished with me yet, why else would you leave me frozen as I was when you first took me.” He says nothing, but his hand moves to her neck as though to soothe her in the most demeaning way he knows how. She flings her head away from him, away because there is something unexplainable preventing her from spearing him through the chest. “It’s not nice to pick favorites, you old fool.”
He gives a quiet smile and pats her nose, “ Ah, but how could I resist saying hello to such a dear old friend?"
She blinks and the room changes again- well, not change exactly, but it shrinks until it is a third the size of what it was before. There is a glint of color on the floor at her feet, and when she drops those ragged green eyes from him she finds that she is standing within the four lines of a small, painted white square. He follows her gaze and with a tone she thinks he meant to be gracious, he says, “You can move now, Malis, but only within that space. Go ahead, stretch your legs.” But she doesn’t move, doesn’t blink, doesn’t react, just as she had refused to take the food he had offered. She doesn’t want anything from this fowl creature. Home, Killdare, her children. These are the things she wants, the things she sorely doubts he will give her.
Grumblesnakes sighs at her silent refusal. “You see, I need to break you to make you bigger, but Malis my dearest, you are already a little bigger than the rest." The fairy man strokes his chin as though considering this predicament. “I could burn you, I suppose.” And in the next instant the air within her small square was all fire and flame and she could feel her skin charring and melting and healing all at once. She inhaled to scream but it was fire, not air that snaked its way down into her lungs. “But we both know you like this pain, you can heal, so it doesn’t scare you.” The fire vanishes and in a few moments she is smooth and blue and as flawless as the day he first found her. Adrenaline pounds through her body, fueled by fear and rage and years of being trapped inside memories like this one. Her dark eyes are molten gems when she fixes them on his pale face, but she is silent because he is right, because he knows her perhaps more intimately than even Killdare does. He is silent for a moment as he considers, and she can almost see the ideas as they flicker through his eyes, rejected again and again and again for their impotency. She thinks of all the faces she had seen in their stalls, thinks of her large, dark neighbor and those glowing red eyes, and a pit appears in her belly. Malis might exist for a life of ruin, she might love the pain in some dark, twisted way. But she was certain that they wouldn’t.
His eyes light up and she is startled to find that she can taste her own horror as she watches a smile curl his lips. “How about a box?” And she might’ve laughed if not for the cruel way his eyes slid like razors over her dark indigo face. It would not be the first box he put her in, why did he assume this one would break her. She blinked, and when she opened her eyes again the world had been reduced to a small, wholly dark box that was only just big enough to fit around her body. She was laying down now, and she wasn’t sure when it had happened, but it didn’t seem important so she did not dwell on it. When she moved to lift her head, she was rewarded by the slap of solid stone. She thrashed again, finding that her body was at last her own, but there was no room to rise, no room to kick and fight, there was only a stone grave and she had been buried alive. A bellow erupted from her lips, a scream and she thought her lungs might rend apart with the sound. This earned her a chuckle from him, and when he spoke it was through her thoughts. She was entirely alone. “I have killed those you love. Your precious king, your children, they are gone. You might say his fury was volcanic. And now I will keep you here in this place so that it can be the only thing you think about until your body starves and deteriorates, until even you cannot live. Malis, my malis, this was always how it would end.”
He was gone then; she felt it when he faded away, when he pulled himself from her mind. Dark swept in like a tide, it lapped at her sanity until even this stoic blue beast found the only thing she was still capable of was grieving the loss of everything she had ever loved. Of her beautiful children, of a king who was better than anything she had ever known. She raged and she wept until the impossible pieces she had managed to glue back together came undone, until every part of her fell away. Time passed but it was impossible to know how much; time was irrelevant when there was nothing left to live for. Instead she drowned in what felt like a forever of numbness and starvation, of a loneliness she both hated and craved. This became her only reality until at last she felt him in her head again the moment before he spoke. “Hello Malis, are you still in there?”
She would’ve turned away from him if she remembered how, but her wasted body only lay there, her spirit wholly crushed. “No,” she whispered back instead, her voice ragged from so much silence, “Malis is gone.”
MALIS
makai x oksana