There is nothing worse than this hunger, she thinks, as the others find their way through the forest and into the clearing. She sees Warship first, his eyes initially locking on Weaver’s and then her own before her knees begin to buckle. She sees the big, spotted man go to stand over the flickering filly. Relief fills her when she sees the chestnut boy, too, finally make it through the woods. He’s soon followed by the older woman (who’d fought bravely for the blinking girl) and the last child (who collapses against that same red and green girl). She sees everything happening around her, but distantly and in a green haze. As if she is falling, or if the world itself is falling away from her. As if she is stuck in a funnel, being drawn down, down, down to her death.
Death would be welcome.
She thinks she’s on the brink of it. She thinks she’s becoming fast friends with the grim reaper. He stands next to her, invisible but tangible all the same. One of his bony, thin hands grasps her throat, squeezing off her windpipe from the air she thirsts for. The other hand reaches under her belly (what’s left of it) and punches up, making a concave hollow of the stomach she cannot fill. Just take me, she thinks as her stomach churns with its own acid. But then he seems to move in front of her with nauseating speed. A quick sound like the flapping of a dove’s wings sounds in her ears, in her head. His eyes aren’t black buttons like she thought they might be – they are nuclear-waste green.
And she remembers.
Just have to hold on a little longer. She does, somehow. The forest comes back into focus. Just have to stop the world from ending. Right. No fade to black just yet. The faces of her comrades – her friends – become clear once more. And they are enough to pull her all the way back. Because they have been successful in their plan to surround Famine, and that success implies another – that they’ve all acquired their own pieces of the third seal. It must be what is weakening him, the black and white girl thinks. It must have saved me from Death’s cold hands. She’d been so close. She doesn’t realize she will be even closer, very soon.
When the last seal breaks, it is a muffled, non-threatening sound in the distance. It gives no indication of its worth; it does not tell them that it carries the harbinger of doom and expiration along with it. Famine’s responding grin is as sharp as shattered glass. Titanya can almost smile right alongside the green-eyed behemoth, because it is ludicrous to imagine that they can take on more. As if they aren’t being eaten from the inside out from the monster ahead of them. As if they aren’t hounded by his two brothers, War and Conquest, both circling in the forest nearby. She pictures the creature of sevens stepping on that last seal, zipping into view with that same, somber, one-track focus. Sure, go ahead Lamby – hit us with all you’ve got.
They had been foolish to think they could cut the chaos off at the source. Good-hearted and well-intended, perhaps, but foolish all the same. Titanya looks across the slope of Famine’s back, regaining whatever strength she had left in her reserves when her gaze lands on her comrades. There are less of them than when this all began. In some small corner of her mind, she worries for the ones that have vanished into nothingness (pulled back into Beqanna or flung further down into Hell?). But mostly, she’s worried for the five horses around her and Beqanna as a whole. It’s far too easy to imagine what the four behemoths will do once unleashed on the sunrise lands. She sees the fires spreading, the gore of the immediate war. She sees sway-backed stallions and ribby, starving children. She sees the apocalypse they haven’t stopped – her family torn apart (her brother halved, chewing his own entrails with pink, foaming lips).
Famine’s words cut into her like a lover’s caress. Run.
To stay still is to die.
She runs.
Before, she’d thought she was going to die but hadn’t. War’s teeth had nestled into her back, ripping and pulling and tearing and leaving her muscles like pulled meat. She’d thought he would reach her vertebrae and rend her nerve from its bony cradle with the ease of a bird pulling a worm. One more bite and he might have. She’d said her goodbyes then. She’d pictured her mother’s face and forgiven her. She’d meet her father soon enough and tell him all about the family he’d been taken from. They’d watch over them, together, from high above the clouds. She’d wished her brother a happy and healthy life without her to lean on. It is never fully goodbye with twins, she’d thought – they’d always have a part of each other, even in death.
But now, after all she’s been through since (after surviving so much more than she’d thought herself capable of), she doesn’t want to die. She wants to feel the burning of her legs, her heart, her lungs and soul as long as she can. She wants the joy of a successful fight (of stomping the mutated peacock), the red-flash of anger in the midst of it (when survival is all that matters, when whether you live or die is still in question and wholly dependent upon your next move). She wants to see the colors of the real world again (the autumnal spread of the great forests, the iridescent, shifting hues of the waterfalls), more than just the flashes of Beqanna overhead. She wants the others to survive almost as much as she wants herself to. What good have they really done if they aren’t around to see it? What use is saving the entire world when they are merely ash and dust on its surface? So Titanya runs like the devil is after her, runs to life and to save her own skin.
But she is not the only one.
Many of them take off into the forest towards the clearing. Warship is the first but she loses sight of him quickly in the dense underbrush. The other black and white girl, Weaver, is the next to go. Titanya doesn’t follow either of them. If they all split up like before, maybe a few of them will make it. If most of the fragments are recovered, maybe they will still save the world. Even if the plains of hell stand between them and the clearing. Even if the king of hell – the last freed behemoth – waits for them on the other side, they still have a chance. And they have to take it. Branches tear against her already tattered sides, reopening wounds that had begun healing with the latest piece of seal. Each fresh pain is felt less than the one before it. Her entire body aches and creaks in a way no body should, especially one so young. She wears a sheet of blood and hurt; she thinks nothing can possibly add more to her ensemble now.
She is slow, though. Her left leg shudders each time she is forced to move it, making her pace a largely three-legged attempt. The injury costs her, because all too soon, she hears hooves obliterating the leaves and fallen twigs behind her. They are too loud to be one of her comrades (and secretly, she’s glad they haven’t followed her – two horses of six would be a target impossible for the behemoths to ignore). Instead, she has drawn the attention of one of them. War, Conquest, or Famine? She wonders how she would like to die: injury, illness, or the total starvation of her body and mind?
Be mine, the whisper says in her head, and she knows. Bow, submit, surrender to me.
“No,” she whispers, but she slows her hobbling effort of a trot. The world flickers like static around them. The forest lights up and breaks apart; she hears a roaring and wonders if it is the Falls just beyond or the sound of her own blood whooshing in her ears. The fractured view remains, far longer than any time before. It draws both of their attentions away: Conquest’s towards Beqanna and Titanya’s towards Conquest. She sees the hunger in his yellow-sulfur gaze, the promise of plagues and viruses eating up all the plants and animals just behind his eyes. She turns to run on, but the worlds close into one. And with a snap, he is on her again.
Conquest leaps against her, his chest bumping into her flank and shoving her off balance. She starts to fall (her left hindleg screaming in protest) but miraculously recovers before she hits the dirt. Let’s try this again, shall we? And while she is pulling herself upright again, her muscles straining for all they are worth, he latches onto her shoulder with his teeth. The fever sets in immediately, but not to the degree it reached before. He is weaker – they all are, monster and equine both – and he does not sicken her like before. But she is still woozy enough for the forest to spin around her. Still smart enough, too, to make it work to her advantage. Titanya sinks down the rest of the way to the ground, her eyes fluttering and unfocused. She keeps the white-hot anger in check, somehow, tamping it down long enough for her idea to work. Conquest peers at her with the intensity of a wolf to an injured elk (she half thinks he’ll finish the job here and now). But his impatience wins out quickly, and he leaves her to die in the woods. There are other survivors to finish off.
The sabino smirks when his earth-shaking movement moves far enough away from her. She rises to her feet, shakily, and glowers at the place Conquest disappeared into the trees. Take that, brawny asshole. But his attack had not been without consequence. Titanya makes it through to where the trees begin to thin out at the conclusion of purgatory’s forest, but it takes her an excruciatingly long time. Long enough, it seems, to leave her the last to arrive. There is a blank stillness in the air (more than ever before) that makes her sound as loud as one of the monstrous horses. There is only an injured, weasel-like beat slow-crawling towards her in the tall grass just beyond. Even from here, she sees that he will not make it in time – his back legs are flattened and drag in the grey wheat behind him. There is a piece of a seal (the last? she shakes her head at the thought of being the only one left) buried in a sandy rise nearby. She stumbles over to it, reaching down to grasp it between her teeth. The young mare misses on the first try, her depth perception altered by Conquest’s lessened curse.
“Shit.” Her voice seems to echo in the clearing and fear works like a needle into her heart. She pauses, and sure enough, a loud thundering starts behind her. Who will it be this time? But she doesn’t waste any more time. Titanya reaches down and manages to latch onto the fragment. It absorbs into her with an iciness that soothes her heated body. It feels like forever, like an eternal, unescapable cold. Like death. She shudders and turns. Because just then, she wonders if it is from the seal at all. Just then, Death is inside of and in front of her all at once.
He doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t have to.
She knows what he is thinking as he watches her, impassively. I know your father, his eyes seem to say. I know he died in agonizing pain. He saw your mother just before he choked on his own blood, just before his heart was ripped out and eaten by a wolf-horse. He knows all of the skeletons in her family. He tells her all about their suffering without uttering a word. He promises her some of her own - eternal, unescapable - unless she submits. And dies. Let me have the world. Let Beqanna end in hellfire. It will be so easy to bow. Come, let me show you.
He doesn’t say anything.
His radioactive-blue eyes say everything.
Famine had told her to run, so she stands instead. It makes it easy for him to reach her standing figure (so easy). He rears up before she can react. His hooves flash into the silver, silent air before she can move to defend herself. She feels the promise of the four seals within her. They are the latticework holding her broken body together, along with the fire that has never left her. Because she will not run – she will not give him the satisfaction. She will die so the world can live. She will protect whatever parts of the seals she can. Maybe someday, long after their world is dust and gleaming bones, the pieces will be reunited. Maybe someone braver and stronger will make it all right again. Maybe her death will not be in vain. Titanya forces her eyes to remain open as his hooves fall against her forehead.
Death takes her, but she does not bow.
Titanya