but I have seen what the darkness does

[Seraphina]

Seraphina is twisting a lock of snow-white hair around a tangle of brambles, and he is not standing in the path in front of her. She looks up, and there he is, but she didn’t hear him appear and jolts back several feet; thorns press into her side, deep enough to draw thin lines of blood. It’s cold – very cold – and her panicked breath comes out in a cloud of thick white smoke as she stares him down wide-eyed, choking on her tongue. There is something about him that feels wrong, like a violation; the youthful, unfamiliar cadence of his voice does not match his wizened frame and frail skin, and, for a fraction of a second, she wonders if he is an immortal, like Viceroy. But immortality does not work in reverse… His hair is a disingenuous tangle that covers most of his face. It puts her in the mind of a mask. He asks her if she seeks the relic of Tempus, but not as a stranger – her name is on his lips. He informs her that she has to follow him if she really wants the relic, and then he is off, disappearing into the brambles and the murky dark that has descended upon the maze like a thick fog. (It was already dark, of course, but she can no longer see the stars – she feels as though she is underground.) Before she thinks, she is dashing into motion behind him, but he’s faster than she’d expect. “Who are you?” She calls to his rapidly disappearing form, tone less imposing than usual in her confusion; he is always just a step ahead of her and then twisting a bend. No matter how she tries to keep pace at his side, she can’t catch him. A strange, prickling sense of uncertainty curls up in her chest and stays there, and, no matter how she tells herself this is just a stranger like any other, she cannot bring herself to believe it yet. “How do you know me? We’ve never met before, have we?” She has stopped twisting her hair around each turn in the maze, but she hasn’t noticed it yet.

It is important, she supposes, to acknowledge that she can’t trust her own memory, left in tatters as it is by Viceroy’s trials. You could grasp the basic form of a landscape with a thin enough blindfold and enough light, but the picture would always be distorted and incomplete, and that vague fuzziness was most of the past three years of her life. (She thinks that she’d rather not recall them, though.) She could very well have met this stallion before, she reasons, this Shaman - he could have simply been another face blacked out, ripped out of her skull by her mentor’s interference. And yet…

She feels like she would have remembered him. It doesn’t make sense, she reasons. (Unless, unless, unless…)

Perhaps it the relic were as almighty as Tempus himself, she could believe that this stallion had created this maze using its power. (But what reasonable god would gift that to a simple mortal?) Perhaps if he didn’t feel so contradictory, with his youthful stride and his ancient frame, she could have thought him just a Shaman. Perhaps if he didn’t know her – while she didn’t know him – and she didn’t feel that she should have remembered him, she could have simply walked away, or laid her pointless theorizing to rest. Perhaps if she didn’t think – know – that most people were horribly greedy and power-hungry, far too power-hungry and greedy to give up something like a relic of an almighty god, she could have thought of him as another unmemorable stranger. (She’s thinking too much.) Perhaps if she hadn’t felt so damn sentimental lately, for reasons she couldn’t completely understand, so pointless and blurry and confused – the perpetual drifter, caught between conflicting worldviews, caught between past and present, caught - and looking for something holy, she would have simply walked away when their paths had crossed, dismissed him and thought nothing of it like she would have when she was only just a bit younger. (But now she wasn’t pursuing him for the court. Now it was something else.) Perhaps she just wants him to be something else entirely, because they had been too long without ---

He turns another corner, and she is right behind him. Before she can fully process the question that is about to pop out of her mouth, it has materialized on her tongue. “Are you-?” She is cut off before she can verbalize the most important part of her question. A loud growl emerges from the darkness just behind her – how long had it been there? – and, before she can react, a massive, shiny, black creature is leaping at her, claws extended, massive jaws wide open to clamp around her gut. She hasn’t seen anything like it before, this mess of eyes and limbs and wings, and it instills in her a primal fear that she had forgotten. It isn’t about living or dying, because Seraphina doesn’t care if she lives or dies. This is pure instinct, a matter of survival; her teeth are bared and her ears clamped to the back of her skull in an instant, and the creature’s great claws only graze her before she is off in a sprint, winding through the maze like liquid quicksilver. The stallion is gone like some apparition, and she has no more time to contemplate him. Her heart thrums against her ribcage with the desperation of a moth beating at a lantern, and her breath comes out in choked pants; her lungs ache with a cold that clamps and makes her mouth taste dry and coppery, like old, dried blood. She hacks. The creature barrels along behind her, bulk filling most of the space from bramble-coated wall to bramble-coated wall. Each time she turns a sharp corner, hooves skidding to nearly lose her balance, she hopes that it will lose control of its blubbering mass and crash into one of the thorny walls. Alas, it is snakelike and writhing in its frothing composition, like a blob of slithering ink, and navigates each twist and turn with far more grace than she can imagine. When she looks back, back at those mouths full of sharp teeth and those rolling white eyes, she screams.

She feels other things move in the darkness, too; hisses and growls, groans and roars, the flutter of wings just above her head. (Occasionally, she swears that she feels the brush of feathered wings against her spine, then dismisses them as the touch of brambles or leaves because she sees nothing.) Sometimes she feels her skin crawling, like worms or beetles are running across it, but if she looks back, she sees nothing but the predatory smile of the creature as it hunts her down, like a victorious, gluttonous fox about to corner a rabbit – its skin bubbles, like tar. She keeps running, but she doesn’t know how much longer she can. When she feels her legs stumble or her pace falter for even a fraction of a second, she can hear Viceroy in the back of her mind, telling her to keep running, and she finds herself sprinting again. (He’d never been the type to save her.) The brambles catch in her braids and pull them loose of their constraints, allowing the full length of her mane to drag out behind her in a thick mass of tangled white, dragging leaves and small branches of bramble along with her; her skull prickles. The beast takes advantage of the fuller length and swipes at it, claws clamping in her silky tresses; she jerks away, lurching the full weight of her body to her front hooves and kicking blindly at its paws, but loses a few tangles of hair in the process. (Nothing, she imagines, that she’ll miss. Needs to just cut the lot of it off.) She runs. She runs like she only ever remembers running on the last day she saw her mother. She runs until her lungs think that they’ll give out, until her legs feel like they will seize or else turn to putty. She doesn’t know how long she’s been running, or how far she has disappeared into the maze, or how far she is from her target. She only knows that she can’t keep running for much longer. Seraphina casts a final, frantic look back at the hulking mast of beast; it seems to have moved closer, not father, and it threatens to overwhelm her, to swallow her up. Its mouths are open wide, its eyes watching her from all angles, all those odd wings and limbs and angles and it’s about to bite and-

Her hooves aren’t on solid ground.

She falls; she doesn’t know how far, and she can’t judge from her injuries because she falls into water, black and rippling with specks of pale light like a star-filled sky. This is fortunate, initially, because it breaks her fall with little more than a smacking pain, but then she finds herself sinking below the rippling black surface. Seraphina has lived her entire life in a desert, and she has cultivated her skills accordingly – she never learned to swim. Her head sinks below the water, and she’s breathing in water, and it stings; she wants for oxygen, but only dirty black water enters her mouth and lungs, sucked up in waves that leave her choking and coughing on more water. She manages to kick to the surface, limbs flailing wildly, and sucks in a frantic gasp of air before she sinks below the surface again. She manages to drag herself to the shore in this manner, finding the small, but deep, river(?) to be surrounded by solid ground and tall crags that lead back up to the maze; Seraphina does not see where the river goes or where it comes from, even as she tugs her waterlogged body onto the bank. It emerges and disappears into darkness. She hacks up a mess of bloody saliva and dark water, legs trembling beneath her weight as she struggles to stand; her hair lays straight and heavy down the side of her neck, dripping a steady stream of water. Seraphina feels cold, so very cold. Her entire body quivers with it, jaws trembling and teeth knocking together. Her breath comes out as steam, and she feels nauseas, but the creature hasn’t chased her down – for now.

She is faced with returning to the upper portion of the maze, and finds, to her relief, a steep, thin path cut into the crags of the cliffside that stretches up in front of her. She stumbles to it, and practically drags herself up it, long legs trembling with each narrow stride for all of her polished musculature and training. (This is likely pure adrenaline.) When at last she reaches the top of the cliff and finds herself surrounded by walls of pure bramble once again, she swallows down a suffocating sense of fear and glances back at the opposite side of the crevasse. The creature is gone.

She hopes that it has returned in the direction that it came.

Returning is no longer an option, but she knows that she has lost the Shaman. She stands alone in the dark, deathly silent, her body quivering and dripping with cold, dark water; it takes her a few moments of this eerie return to quiet to muster up the capacity to speak, though her tongue feels bloated, and she feels like she’ll swallow it when she opens her mouth. “Hello? Are you…still around?” Of course, no response comes from the brambles, and, still trying to catch her breath to proceed through the maze, Seraphina stares up at the cold, dark sky, wishing that she could see the stars. (What she wouldn’t give for navigation; she’d lost her path what felt like long ago.) With nothing else to do to calm her frazzled nerves, she resumes her quiet, nonsensical singing, pacing a bit in small circles to try and shake the cold. She’ll proceed in a moment, wander further into the darkness of the maze – perhaps her steps are a bit more uncertain than before, weighted with a caution that was not present when she entered. Once you touch fire, you don’t forget that it burns.



@Random Events - I took...lots of liberties with the whole 'reality-warping maze appears out of nowhere' thing. hopefully this is fine? excited to see where this goes, in any case <3