She glows. Her heavy strands of black hair slide /
like serpents over somber, blood-red plush.
☼
We should continue—
She gave no indication if she had heard him. Her hooves moved of their own volition, pushing towards the path without reservation, until the distant sound of festivities began to fade. She hadn’t heard them to begin with, really—they’d been a strange, soundless cacophony that felt faint in echo of her own thoughts. But when Avallac’h spoke her name, coming to her side with worried swiftness, she only spared him a glance.
The Hawthorne woman was ill-concerned with what dangers the path proposed. Whatever ghoul had cautioned them, it was doubtful that she would heed its warnings, and only more unlikely that she would listen to Avallac’h. A slash of her tail, much as she had given him the night prior, met his side as she wordlessly coaxed him onward. She had come here in search of answers, and whatever secrets the forest possessed, she would hold them in a fist before this was done.
Where the clearing had owned an open-aired atmosphere, one that made her lungs fill with calming breath, the narrow pathway was almost haunting. The lanterns that sparsely lit the dim trail—made all the darker by the low hanging branches and the dense overhead barriers—were an eerie, thrumming disturbance within the shadows. They set her white eyes alight with yellow, and her muzzle bowed near to the ground as she investigated one.
No matter the strange seedling of uncertainty that blossomed within her chest, she pursued the tether that tugged upon her heart, both hands fastened tight as she yanked herself forward.
Hälla only started when a feathery touch brushed her shoulder; an array of tiny fingers caressing her skin and coaxing her onward, until she jerked back a step and recoiled from the contact, the flats of her teeth bared. She nearly stumbled against Avallac’h in doing so, but remained tensely interested in the fireflies that pulsed, coalesced, and danced their way across her skin.
When they parted, she found the hollowing ache of loneliness only to be deeper. She stepped forward again.
And then the hundreds of insects were drawing together in the shape of a body: another horse, a deer, she couldn’t be sure—
Her throat was tight as her limbs froze, the specter stepping nearer to them both, its muzzle outstretched in greeting, in welcome. A bundle of fireflies broke off from the mass, creating the dancing image of a foal, who danced its way through the limbs of its lithesome parent. Entranced, enamored, her head angled to the side as she watched—
Until the two seemed to look to the side in horror, as though they were being pursued. A nudge to the foal’s hindquarters sent it spiraling forward, the alarm of its parent pulsing through the shining lights, and then the fireflies were spiriting, shapeless, into the trees. It was instinct, hunger, that made her step, ravenously, in their direction.
And then, the separate souls within her chest were torn in opposite directions, as a haunting voice charmed her back towards the path she’d nearly dared to step from.
Hälla, just her name, but sweet; spoken with the tenderness of a lover.
Hälla. Again, with more violence, until her name was just a shapeless sound within her thoughts.
The temptation to turn back was gnawing, it was soul-rending, but she turned her eyes towards the path that lay ahead, and coldly pursued the lantern dotted trail.
Her voice was throaty, hoarse, as she spoke to Avallac’h. The sound of it seemed to echo, haunting, through the woods—as though they were in an abyss, rather than a forest.
“What is this place?”
