avesta the sun shines low and red across the water,
Come away. Her parents had said the word to her each time she watched the corn stalks sway in the wind like willows. Each time her bones had begged her to run among the mystery of the maze like it was a forest begging for exploration instead of just some thing sprouted out by her city in a meadow. And when she looks to her sister she knows that the corn must be begging for them to come closer, run deeper into the black, listen harder and come closer.
Come closer, come closer, come. Avesta can imagine the twilight wind singing it to her. And when Foras presses against her legs they both throw back to bay at the rising full moon. It sounds like yes, over and over, yes
Moonlight catches on the tip of her black horn when she looks at her twin. “I bet we can make it to the center before anyone else. The corn can tell you the way.” There is something wicked in her gaze when she looks at the other horses (and other children) pressing into the maze. Earlier she had heard that in the center there was some secret hidden away there and even then she wanted only to learn it. Beneath her skin her heart aches like a wild bird pressing against a steel cage. It flutters, it dances, it prepares to leap.
So she leaps, in a lion-like arc of sinew and too long hair, she leaps.
“I'll race you.” She nips at her sister's shoulder and Foras presses against his brother urging him onward too. Small leaves caught in the tall grass chase after her like fairies with wings of almost brittle yellow. Avesta laughs at the sight of them trailing behind them. Even though she knows they should be quick and quiet so no one sees them disappearing into the maze, she can't help but be caught up in the recklessness of it all (and the way it makes her blood feel like it's waking up).
The darkness of the maze swallows her up as she rushes through the crowd and still she does not pause.
The maze called to me all night. The corn sent long roots that burst through the soil throughout the court, tickled my hocks, whispered sweet and terrible words that both horrified and magnetized me. They told me how the earth tasted when it was soaked with blood. They told me of all the bones and guts and rotten things beneath the earth, and how everything alive was just recycled death.
They told me of a secret at the heart of the corn maze, and a memory of death.
I think that was the night I learned to detach myself from my terror. It was a strange thing. I recognized it there, unmistakable: my fear. Worms crawling in my belly, cold chill, frozen bones. Heart racing the way my legs wanted to, away away away. I recognized my fear but it wasn’t me. It was like looking at my reflection, at that frail, terrified, ghost of a girl, and upon turning away, I was able to leave her there in the mirror.
I didn’t say a word about my fear to sister. I knew she would want to dive deep into the maze. I knew she wanted to fight her way through it, just as much as I wanted to listen to it, lean about its stories, and then gently rip its secrets out. I suppose we both had violent intentions– Avesta the jugular, me the heart. The only difference was that I was just as terrified as I was excited. But she didn't need to know that.
She proposed a race and I smiled. I remember how easy and wicked that smile was. How easy all of it was. Life, youth, fearlessness. I vaulted after sister into the dark of the maze, nipping lightly at her flanks to say “don’t you dare slow down” just as Furfur nipped at his brother’s heels.
We skidded to a halt in a dusty, furry mess of limbs and laughter. It was the first dead end. “The fastest way is through,” I gasped. The magic was young and wild in me. I felt special, chosen. The corn wanted me to find its secrets. I glanced behind me, nothing but shadows. No one watching. So I stepped forward and parted the wall of corn with gentle-violent encouragement of my horn. I did not need to encourage Avesta’s haste. We were here to win.
we're climbing until we transcend
higher, higher to where the skies end
When the fall festival started, Morrighan felt indifferent. She was never one for parties or big gatherings of any kind. She did not stay long in the markets for the memorials, especially after the skirmish at Raum's. When she first arrived in Novus, she had a Shed Star read her cards, but it made no sense to her really. Faith and mystic beliefs were never her thing.
So the mare decided to leave the markets and avoid them until the festivities were over. She could do her own thing and pay more attention to the borders while everyone else is preoccupied. Raum may be dead but his minions most likely weren't. What a good time as any to come and cause chaos when almost the whole Court are partying for the harvest season.
Morrighan stands atop a hill of the prairie with her eyes focused on the surroundings. For now, it's just grass and more grass and the occasional breeze with the festival's corn maze further down the hills. She watches as a few horses enter, seeming all excited to explore what the maze has in store. Her eyes roll; she knows anything in the maze is all fake. It's built up to be a scary haunted attraction when in reality it just has some lingering illusion magic and dark corners. Big deal.
Unfortunately, she is not alone. Her timber wolf companion (although she still refuses to call him that), Bram, stands beside her. For now he is silent (for once) and scans the open fields along with her. Morr has somewhat accepted her fate with the mongrel, but at this point, she doesn't exactly have a choice. Caligo bestowed upon them her magic and created a connection between them. They are bonded for life until whichever one of them dies first. Some days, Bram came close to death from Morrighan's own fiery hooves.
"Heya Morr," he says to her through their telepathy. She ignores him and looks in another direction with a scowl on her face. "I know you love to ignore me, but I actually see something. Look!"
Reluctantly, she turns and follows the wolf's gaze to the side of the maze. There are two foals making their way to the entrance with two wolf pups following them.
"Just looks like some stupid kids- your point?" "Don't those two kids look like Isra and Eik's?"
Morr squints and focuses more on the foals' faces. They did seem to look like them, but why were their kids alone then and going into the maze?
Before they know it, the four have entered and are lost to the shadows. The mare grumbles and walks forward, her hooves leaving burned prints in the grass as she goes downhill. Bram follows and does his best to keep up with her pace.
"I thought you didn't care about children, or the maze?" he asks. Once again she ignores him. She isn't sure who she's more mad at - the kids, their parents or Bram, or all of the above. Why these kids were left unattended is beyond her.
When they finally make it to the front, Morrighan doesn't hesitate before walking through. She is immediately greeted by a cold gust of air that tousles her forelock into her eyes. Shaking her head to clear her vision, she hears a scream in the distance but it sounds a little too deep to be from a child.
"Alright, where are you, you little shits?" she calls out, trying desperately to figure out what direction they went. Next to her, Bram sniffs the ground and follows a scent trail along the path. Maybe having a canine around wasn't so bad after all.
avesta the sun shines low and red across the water,
Each of the leaves rushing over their skin feels to her like a kiss whispering, god. Even the thorns peeking through, left by the magic of someone else, feel like teeth carving that word god over and over again in her skin. The maze is singing a siren song tonight in the dark and the wind and the ache of the earth as their hooves sink in.
She wonders if this is what her mother hears: the earth singing to her and begging for a hundred different favors.
Aspara's teeth at her hip drive her on and on and on. Behind them their wolves are still howling at the moon in lamenting notes tinged with more winter than the night can hold. Everything in her is aching and rushing and humming for the center of the maze (and for the violence lingering metallic better her teeth). Between her chest her heart is roaring a siren song. It feels like the sea rushing out through her veins instead of blood. She runs faster, faster, faster because she's a girl with a wolf.
The wall of corn seems like hardly more than an altar whispering that word god when she presses her horn between the leaves. She doesn't wonder at the way it's so easy to whisper to each stalk and sending it off to bend forward onto knees of roots before them. And maybe that makes her terrible, this sea-foam primordial child with her endless hunger for all the world.
Or maybe, maybe, maybe it just makes her the sea instead of from the sea.
She's about to ask which way to go, once they get to the other side, but there's a cry in the air. It sounds like something dying and the sound of it should make her shiver when something in Foras cracks open and answers back. But the sound only sends something dark and electric running in roots down her spine. “Do you think that scream is coming from the center of the maze?” And even as she asks the question she knows her sister will see the dangerous current running through her blue eyes. It looks a little like hunger and a little like hope.
Moonlight catches on the spear of her horn, a reminder of all the ways in which they are both born for that whispering promise in the leaves. Below it Avesta smiles when the bent corn stays bent and awake and terrible. When she draws a line in the dirt with her hoof it looks as sharp as their wounds and their hunger, like a wound carved into the marrow of everything. She goes to move, to hurry towards that screaming thing in the distance--
But there is another sound on the wind. The corn trembles with it like sentries waking up from the deep sleep. There is the smell of char rising in the air and Avesta knows who is yelling from them. And who will take them home--
If she can catch them.
Foras presses closer and winter nips at her hocks with the touch of him. Avesta can feel his thoughts more than she can hear them, it feels like war pressing towards her in the dead of winter. He's young but when he smells the wolf, just a wolf, behind them there is something ancient in him that starts to call. Come It's telling him, over and over just as the leaves had whispered to her, come
“We can't let her catch us.” A whisper, softer almost than the rustle of her corn army. Because she's worried that ancient thing in their wolves might open up something in their young hearts that will never seal shut.
Avesta starts to gallop through the maze leaving a trail of woken up stalks in her wake.
As we ran I reached my magic deep into the soil, where dead roots dream of earthworm kisses. With a whiplike crack of my magic I demanded their stories. I command them to tell me what it is they tempted me with all night, tripping me as I walked down the marketplace, filling the air with doom and dread.
And I learn: the maze wasn’t always made of corn.
It was once a hedge maze, with walls as tall as the court proper. There was magic in its veins- there were talking statues, and strange lights, and a queen who turned the flowers to daggers. Our mother. I cleaved my mind; half of it was demanding more and more of the earth, the other was running deeper into the maze, hot on sister’s silver heels.
I felt like a criminal sometimes, a little robber girl. Mostly I felt it was my right. To stealing stories like a god. To command the dead and deathless.
“What happened here” is the question I pound into the earth. Until it tells me.
“Someone died here,” I gasped. “Mama was there--”
And then we heard the scream, and my magic faded into the night sky. In the eery silence that followed (the silence no one else heard, because they could not hear its opposite), Avesta and I met eyes..
Oh, I love that raging sea look in my sister’s eyes. I loved it then, and I love it now. I would move worlds for that wild-magic gleam, if I could. And I hated that I couldn’t. It was maybe the only thing in the whole entire world that I hated. So I bit my lip and I nodded and I kept my hate close to my heart, so close maybe sister would not see it was there. We knew each other in, out, upside down, but I was clever and private and could keep a secret, even from her, if I put my mind to it--
right?
She wasn’t afraid-- of course she wasn’t afraid-- but I was. I steadied myself by leaning against her hip and feeling the earth steady beneath me, but I still felt cold-blooded with fear and, although it was premature, grief. I knew too many stories of death, too many gastly grizzly details. I was not afraid for us. I was afraid of what we might find, how it would hurt my heart.
“Yes, the center. Hurry, maybe we can-” Maybe we could do what we did to the wolves. What Avesta did. Save them. Foras and Furfur howl, my bloodsong, and then there is the undeniable presence of a third wolf.
“Aunty Morr,” I exhaled into Avesta’s dappled skin. There was nothing else I needed to say. I did not want to get caught, if only because of the indignity of it-- we belonged wherever our hearts took us. It was our right to roam where we pleased, and no one should be allowed to take our freedom from us, even if it they thought it was for our own good.
So I plunged headfirst into my terror, toward the dark heart of the maze which both drew me in and revolted me. The corn looked so odd, the way it bent back from my sister, like bowing. We ran, closer and closer to the heart of the maze, and our wolf-brothers howled, and
I fell.
And, not because it hurt, but because I was so damn tired of falling, I began to cry. Another skinned knee. Another inconvenience. Would I always be slowing my sister down? “I’m s-sorry,” I whispered into my sister’s skin. But my self pity was quickly forgotten. As I struggled to my feet, between sniffles I heard a loud rustling in the corn ahead. I didn’t know what else to do but lean against sister and put my head down, angling the twisted blade of my horn toward the center of the maze
we're climbing until we transcend
higher, higher to where the skies end
When she hears the scream in the distance, her heart catches in her throat and she quickens her pace. Morrighan is already annoyed at the kids, but the last thing she wants is for them to hurt themselves or be in danger. It's unclear where or who the scream came from and she's not about to take any chances.
Her and Bram travel through the maze with the wolf focused on tracking them by scent. The mare doesn't know anything about navigating in here, so she just follows her companion and hopes he knows where to go.
"Any luck?" she asks him, her patience wearing thin.
"I have their trail, but we just need to keep going," the wolf replies, sounding just as annoyed as she is. He then stops short, sniffing more intently at one spot.
"What? What is it?" Morrighan asks with desperation in her voice.
"They were here, I think they made this mark in the ground, but then…" Bram then looks up, eyes scanning the corn stalks as if he's trying to see through them. His ears are perked forward like he's trying to listen for something. When he turns to look at Morrighan, there is amusement on his face. "They're running. I can hear them up ahead."
"Of course they are," she grumbles. There's a reason she doesn't want kids of her own.
The pair pick up their pace while still following the scent trail that Bram's detected. A few moments pass before they hear a thud followed by crying. Morrighan feels her emotions bubbling up again and she has half a mind to burn the entire maze down just to get to these shitheads.
Thankfully, when they round the corner, she can see the two foals and their companions. One of the kids is on the ground crying and it looks like she fell. Serves her right for running away in the first place.
"What do you kids think you're doing? Don't you know this place is dangerous?" the Warden scolds them while her hooves burn the ground beneath her. Her eyes almost look like the fire she can conjure with how furious she is. Bram stands nearby, but keeps his distance from the mare. He knows better by now.
"Aspara, what happened? Can you stand back up?" she asks the filly, her tone settling only slightly. It's hard for her to shake off the fury and just be concerned. At the same time, she feels Isra would kill her if she were to find them all like this right now.
In the distance, another scream can be heard. What the hell is this place?
avesta the sun shines low and red across the water,
This is the moment, that pivotal moment, where girls decide to be something worse than holy.
Avesta comes to the decision no less suddenly than all the young, feral hearts before her. Like a wave, like a tide, like an arrow made of moonlight, it rushes over her and through her. It tastes like freedom, and religion, and the sweetest sort of horror. The heat of it, the gore, runs through her blood with a feeling not unlike her mother's chain-mail pillows when she slumbers upon then. She relishes it, she welcomes it, she says a prayer to it with every violent part of her sea-stained soul.
And so she becomes it. All at once she becomes it.
This time when she lays her horn on the ground that has once more tripped her sister, the touch of bone to loam has nothing to do with magic. It has everything to do with promises, with marks that live long past the death of a soul. Her mind, her thoughts whisper to the loam and the garden. I will consume you.. Avesta is done with this earth, with the way it whispers to her sister of the past like it loves her. She might be young but she knows this is not love, this is teeth at your jugular pretending to be a poem instead of a death. And she knows that she must consume the world, devour it, take it, make it bend, so that it won't devour her perfect sister whole.
One of them was fated to be wrong, there is too much sea and magic running through their blood for them to be right. And this is the moment. This is the moment. This is the moment. She is all the terrible parts of her mother who was in the maze when someone died, and this is the moment.
“You are never to be sorry again.” There is only sharpness in her voice, only the echo of that same ancient thing that is opening up in girl and wolf. Her words make her feel like she has a mouthful of bones, and each one is sharper, older than the last. She feels like a thing unleashed, like Fable is not the real ruler of the sea. She is, she is, she is and this is the moment.
Avesta turns towards Morrighan, and inhales her char and her smoke. She inhales it and lets her heart, her blood, her horror make another promise. Always now it's going to be promises with her, pounds of flesh that she's hoarding like grain in the winter. Her mouthful of bones wants to shape itself into words, into weapons, into things more dangerous than her voice when she says, “We did not need you to tell us that.” And in the flash of her eyes there is the suggestion that soon, someday, there will be nothing more dangerous in the word than her.
At her side Foras growls low and pulls back his lips in a way that fills his look with more bones than flesh and teeth. This is his moment too, the darkness and the screams calling to him in the same way a dark wood calls to a normal wolf. This is his wild, his law, his religion. This is his freedom and he takes it just like Avesta is deciding that she will take everything else.
Morrighan steps closer to her sister who is still struggling with her sobs despite the way she's happy to tilt her horn towards the screaming center of the maze. But Avesta isn't looking at the maze anymore, or the corn bent back around her like disciples. She is only looking at Morrighan when she puts her body between her sister and the Warden. Foras has not settled and neither will she.
And the tilt of her horn, in the way of unicorns and girls counting the world by the weight of its flesh, says this is mine.
