in the darkness and cold with the wind in the trees
a girl with no name, and no memories but these
a girl with no name, and no memories but these
Flies, black and grotesque, swam laps in its glassed over eyes. A fat dribble of blood ran along the curve of its plush velvet ear and plopped into a patch of crimsoning moss. It couldn’t have been dead for more than an hour, judging by the lack of smell. The suppleness of the fur-lined flesh.
Its body was nowhere to be found.
A trail of bloody hoofprints led from the rabbit head to a pale form draped over the exposed roots of an ancient oak. Slender limbs led to a grayhound-sleek body led to a delicate, dished head. White lashes fanned out upon porcelain cheeks like downy moth wings.
A girl, it was. As white and thin as a spector. Spools of ivory hair encased her sleeping form like a spider’s silk cocoon, choking the life out of struggling ladybirds. She, however, looked almost peaceful as she stirred in her slumber.
Little Snow White of the woods. A single red rose lay crushed and withered by her head. Blood dripped down her snow white chin.
She’d killed it, hadn’t she?
Slowly, Messalina swiveled her throbbing head left to right, squinting warily into the dense foliage for signs of life. For the rhythmic thumping of a wolf’s tail. For the telltale yellow of a beastly, unblinking eye.
Nothing. Silence permeated through the wood, as tepid as held breath. There was none here except for herself. None here, she thought with slow-waking panic, to blame.
She knew—as inexplicably yet undeniably as you knew, upon waking from a horrific incident, that the severed limb twitching besides you in a pool of blood was yours and not anyone else’s—that she’d killed the rabbit. Severed its bony head from its fatty body.
As if drawn by an invisible string connected to an invisible hand that had waited for this very moment, when Snow White with the bloodstained maw woke and witnessed her sin, the rabbit head rolled over. Just a little.
Just enough for its milky, fly infested eyes to stare blank and wide and dead at her.
A strangled cry clawed out of Messalina’s throat as she scrambled frantically backwards, her thrashing hooves kicking the leering head into a thicket of thorns. Fragments of memory launched through her mind like shrapnel as her hoof slipped on the patch of bloody moss.
Teeth sharper than knives sinking through a small, struggling body. Tearing through fur and flesh and tendon and bone until jaw met ravenous jaw. Ripping and shaking the shrieking thing like a mad animal, until something gave—
She crashed to the ground with a yelp and slammed her spine against the trunk of the oak. Pain lanced like a lightning strike up her back to the base of her skull. Gasping, she turned over and shoved her muzzle into the moss, retching out nothing but air.
“No no no,” she begged, tears pricking the corners of her blood red eyes. To Oriens, to Mother, to the invisible hand tugging on the invisible string. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to do it. She breathed in dirt until she couldn't breathe anymore, and then she dragged her head up and stared desperately into the condemning gloom of the silent forest.
Everything was red. She hadn’t noticed until now, but everything—the grass, the trees, the sky—was red. Something wet dripped down her cheeks. Her telekinesis touched it, expecting shameful tears, but when she rubbed down on a bit of clean moss her touch came away red. Bloody red.
What did he do to me? Monster. Monster.
“Monster!” she screamed, ripping out tendrils of ivory hair from her gaping mouth, caught like speared fish on the barbs of her teeth. Her mouth wouldn’t close properly, and her tongue ran savagely over the rows and rows of shark teeth filling up her cheeks. Again and again, in an equal mix of disbelief and punishment until her blood mixed with rabbit’s blood and she retched into the moss again, a prick of satisfaction bubbling into her chest when, this time, something came up. A chunk of flesh, still steaming.
Monster.
A sting of pain from the left side of her neck dragged a whine out of her swollen lips, and tremblingly, Messalina flexed her neck to the right. Bit back a cry when she tore open the still-seeping wound.
Five puncture wounds, perfectly shaped to the curve of a stretched-out mouth. Leaking out not blood, but seawater.
Monster. Him. Me.
She should’ve died. He’d bitten her, dragged her kicking and screaming into the sea. The… kelpie. There had been so much blood, red blossoms of blood. She’d refused to close her eyes underwater because she hadn’t been able to breathe, and that—blossoms of blood, like roses in summer—was all she saw before she’d died—
But she hadn’t. She hadn’t. “Am I even... alive?” she whispered to herself, hoarsely. She didn’t feel alive. She felt cold, colder than the Terminus in winter. Her body ached, like it had been dropped from the black cliffs onto the jagged, ship-devouring rocks below. The feeling of drowning never left her turgid lungs.
Wincing, Messalina peeled her body off the ground and leaned against the trunk of the tree. Her vision was still a haze of red, but it was fading now at the edges. She refused to look towards the carcass, or what was left of it, and the slippery pool of blood. Refused to taste the globs stinking of iron lodged at the back of her tongue.
Instead, she traced the fringes of the secluded glen in a succession of erratic glances. She had to get away. The smell of blood was torturing her. Her stomach threw itself against the bottom of her ribs, a rabid animal wailing its revulsion and its sickening hunger. She leaned heavily against the tree and forced the bile down.
There was a narrow path leading out of the clearing, past a copse of saplings, and she began limping her way towards it. Her fall had twisted her back right leg badly in the oak tree’s roots, and she couldn’t put any weight on it lest she faint from the pain.
There was something else. Through the rapidly falling darkness, Messalina thought she heard the crashing of waves against rock. Fear ran its frozen fingers over the curve of her bruised spine.
She didn’t want to go back. Gods, she didn’t want to go back.
But... he might still be there. The kelpie who had done this to her. Left her broken, not dead but not alive either. Angrily, as she limped past the saplings, she wiped the tears from her eyes and tried to remember what the kelpie looked like.
She couldn’t remember. Not his face, not his voice. (But the fact that he was a he, she was sure of. She didn’t question where her certainty came from.) Only that… her breath hitched when a memory came up gasping for air.
He’d sung to her. Under the waves, strange and keening. A song of unmistakable mourning. Hypocrite, she seethed. When she found him, she would sink her newly acquired teeth deep into the artery of his neck. Tear it clean through with a flick of her head.
(The newfound violence of her thoughts wouldn't fully register within Messalina until a few days later, and then only with a resigned sort of horror. In the days following her transformation she’d come to believe herself just as monstrous as her maker. Perhaps worse.)
As she pushed her tortuous way out of the copse of trees, following the briny stench of sea breeze, a branch snapped ten paces to her left. Preternaturally loud, like it had been right next to her ear.
Snap! “Who is it?” Her voice came out high and keening, like a siren’s wail. She aimed her feverish crimson eyes towards a shadow taking form in the primordial darkness. Curled her lips into a snarl. A drop of blood—hers? the rabbit’s?—rolled off her muzzle and fell to the thirsty earth below.
“Show yourself.” Before I hurt you.
I left details about the actual incident vague but for reference it happened the night before this thread takes place!
