[P] black rabbit in the alley.

[Nicnevin]

WHAT HE IS CAPABLE OF, YOUR MIND,
in the moment, scrambling to revise what you thought you knew of him and how with what you now know

When my father passed, his soul became a tree.

I was away, when he died. When I returned, tear-stained and weak at the knees, the priestesses woke me up at the crack of dawn and led me into the woods – deeper and deeper, until we stood in front of a small sapling, so small that it could barely even be called a sapling at all. I assume that it was my old, laurel-wreathed friend who told them to do it. When my mother passed, my efforts to find her were foolish and desperate.

At the time, the sight of the sapling offered me no comfort. Even now, as a grown tree, I am not so sure that it does; I can stand among my father’s roots, and I can look up at his canopy of leaves, but I can no longer speak to him, or see his face. We have passed far beyond the realm of understanding – two points with no intersection, no longer a father and his daughter.

So long as the tree is still living, I will not speak to my father again.

(I will not speak to my father again regardless.)

The trees in this “swamp” are not like my father. They are, in most cases, charcoal-black, and, more importantly, dead. It is hard to parse what that means; after all, I have been “alive,” in a sense, and inanimate, lingered in my own corpse – down to the bone – after my own death. It would explain why they are still standing, watching over the dull waters and moss-stained rocks like some silent council. They are dead, but with each creak of the wind or crumble of bark, they seem more like they are asleep, as though they could pick up their boney roots and walk out of the damp soil at any moment. The forest is quivering.

It is unnerving. It isn’t unnerving at all.

The birch trees attract me both because they are alive – unlike so many of the trees that line the path (likely choked out by persistent rainfall and standing waters) – and because of their color. I recognize them, loosely, as birch, but they are bone-white, and I feel some pull of familiarity from the look of them, if not their form. I am halfway to the trees when a flock of starlings dart from the brush, barely missing me in the progress; over the shudder of their wings and the panicked screech of their voices, I manage to make out a few words.

-that I don’t care what you think?

The voice is pretty and faintly caustic. I press forward into the trees, urged by some measure of curiosity to find the source.

There is a girl, there – she reminds me of a bird, and for more than just the ash-grey feathers that sprout from her hindquarters and the mask that obscures her face. She is grey all over, and petite, and probably younger than me, and, though I don’t have a clue how she sees out of it, she moves with a precise elegance. Her hair is milk-grey and long, interrupted here and there with braids. She is remarkably lovely, in a way that I find unusual among outsiders; I am not sure how many of them are comfortable with wearing a dead thing, least of all as anything but some trophy, but she seems to wear that dead-mask like she doesn’t much think of it at all.

But – my attention is quickly distracted from the girl. My skin crawls, and I feel myself bristle at the sight of the deer. (The knight-in-me grasps for her blade; the part of me that was once-a-sword pulses with ugly familiarity.) The deer is black as night, nearly depthless, with blinding-white antlers. That itself is unnatural, but it is his eyes that are worse, infinitely worse. They look like they should be blind, and yet they move, and yet they see- and they don’t see at all in the way that a deer should see.

Sometimes you look at something, and you know that it has lived before, because it moves in its body like it doesn’t belong there. I am still clumsily adjusting to my new skin; but I have let go of my other selves (as much as they can, when they still compose so much of my memory) in favor of this new one, this Nicnevin.

The priestesses warn that not everyone can. They warn of the consequences.

The deer looks like a deer, but a deer should not look like his teeth are sharp.  A deer should not look like it would devour you, happily, and anything else with it-

There is something deeply, deeply wrong with that deer. So deeply wrong that it makes bile rise in my throat; makes me want to retch. Regardless, I stand my ground, and I look at the girl instead.

I settle my face into careful neutrality – tinged, perhaps, with a healthy amount of concern. “Are you alright, Miss?”

(What I mean, technically, is do I need to get rid of that creature for you?, but I possess just a bit too much tact to say it out loud.)

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@Maybird || aaaaaaaa we're threading again?!?!?! | "the older boys," grady chambers

"Speech!" 

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