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" BEXLEY BRIAR "
Bexley almost trembles when the maze begins to close around her: for a minute the omnipresence of the bushes escaped her notice, blocked out by the sound of the bird catching up to her, and the frenetic whirling of her legs, and the intensity with which her heart is pounding in her chest, but now as she turns another corner she is forced to face the reality of the situation. All her paths are narrowing. Leaves whistle against her side, silky and damp before they turn to brambles - and then Bexley winces, feeling the toothy scrape of thorns across her skin as she wriggles through the tunnel. Her shoulders go damp with dribbling blood.
She pulls her chin to her chest and tries to move head-first through the bushes. Bexley feels the cold, chunky gold chain pressed flat to her throat and tries to breathe deep, to calm the wild thrashing of her heart, but instead her brain trips over itself, back to the cawing of the bird that’s getting louder and louder. The maze is filled with laughter and screams. A visceral shudder crawls its way up and down Bexley’s spine, all the way, every way, until her teeth itch.
Still she presses forward, disgusted but persistent, whorls of hair getting gently torn from the nape of her neck, the bird cackling behind her, slender body wriggling with the effort is takes to push her way through the foliage, hooves digging up huge clumps of dirt wet with rain and ice. A cold sweat frosts her golden skin; eyes shift desperately over the path to find some shred of light but fail. Her blood thrums loudly through each vein. With a last unsteady step her shoulders break through a chunk of undergrowth, and Bexley trips forward into an open clearing.
Cold air blasts her in the face, whips her white hair into a frenzy. A shiver wracks her slender body as the temperature drops at least five degrees, freezing wind whipping off the surface on the pond, sending the leaves into a cloud of dark-green movement that whistles almost carnally. A guttural, growling caw sounds through the air above her head - closer, now, than it has been in a long time. Bexley startles and leaps forward. The pond water is black as night and utterly still, its bank edged with brackish moss. Her throat is starchy with thirst, but something about the water is entirely off-putting, almost ethereal.
The moon glints high overhead, but not a trace of it is reflected in the water; another shriek sounds behind her, and Bexley. twitching slightly, moves toward the edge of the pond. After a moment of contemplation her hoof grazes the water. The bottom of the lake is lined with round pebbles that roll as Bexley puts her weight down on them, and then she’s tilting forward all at once, unbalanced, face-first, towards the surface of the water that’s still entirely inanimate, scrabbling for a foothold: by the time she finds a steady way to stand she’s up to her chest in freezing black water, gasping for breath, shocked by the cold that’s descending over her whole body. Her eyes water blindly.
She turns back toward the bank, attempting to move out of the water, and stops short. The bird has reappeared. Glowering, horrific, a shining purple shape against the blackness of the maze, cackling, chattering, those cat-eyes huge and sharp. Bexley’s heart stutters deep in her ribs. She’s started to lose feeling in the lowest parts of her legs, the water so frigid her head is going almost-black. The bird snickers. Bexley takes in a painful inhale and with incredible effort takes a step toward the bank, ignoring the part of her brain that’s begging her not to go towards the bird, but knowing she’ll freeze if she stays in here even a few minutes longer: talk about a rock and a fucking hard place. Yet still her heart thrums with a wild purpose, with a Biblically intense need to win, no matter what happens in these few feet between her and the manifestation of what she hates most.
The bird seems to grin. Sloughing through the tar-like pond, Bexley forces herself to take another step with a tingling leg, and bares her teeth, the only slash of light visible in a nightmarish, impending darkness.
