first walk anya

It’s dark here. It’s wet here. You feel the eyes of unknowable creatures on you. The breathing of creeping things down your neck, crawling on your back, and you’re not sure if you’re imagining it or not. This place with ash-choked sky and darkness is almost reminiscent of Livensluji, but you somehow know it isn’t. You can’t feel the leylines of darkness and wetness under the loose, swampy soil like you could when you had to go there.

You think about the black markets. You think about what you could find there, if this were that dark place.

You think about how that selfishness is what got you almost killed. You thought you cared about others’ independence as much as your own. But when it came down to it, you let your people, the people who wanted some nobody from the desert to lead them, form bands of murderers and you went to chase down a catfolk who had every right to not want to stick around for your selfish desire to love her. Because everyone else was useless. Because the only one who could get her back was you.

You think about how you heard your sister was on her way to meet you as you selfishly chose to find the catfolk you considered lost property.

Maybe property isn’t the word, but you’re not sure anymore.

Maybe you really have lost it like she said you did.

Maybe you hate that fact.

Maybe you hate yourself.

Everything hurts, even parts you didn’t know you had. Even parts you’re pretty sure you’re imagining. One of your horns is stuck in a tree and you’re too tired and beaten to dislodge it. The shadows move like the creatures of Elpis, and you feel pretty sure you’re going to be eaten sooner rather than later.

For as useful as your big stupid wings are, your muscles are built for flying, not pulling yourself out of the trap your stupid fat big-mouthed head stuck you in by being big and stupid and unwieldy. Only now, as you’re stuck here, do you start thinking about people you thought you cared about. You will never see Midnight again, and you’d be surprised if she wants to after you basically kidnapped her because you thought she needed to see a medical professional.

You will never see your sister again, and she will collapse when she realizes you’re gone. You remember hearing about her having been found trying to drown herself in the oceans, and that was with you alive. You won’t live to stop her when she finds out. That thought terrifies you. You need her, you’ve come to realize. You need her possibly more than she needs you. For all your insistence on self-reliance, you can’t stand the thought of her being dead.

It crosses your mind, if you live through this, to keep her alive by any means necessary. You can learn necromancy in those swamps. You can bring her back when they find her body. Nothing will be wrong and you can make sure she can never try to kill herself again.

But that’s your selfish brain, and you know it. How happy would she really be like that?

Does it matter how happy she is as long as you have her?

Of course it does, shut up selfish brain.

None of it matters if you’re not going to live through this, anyway. That thought scares you just as much as the thought of your sister dying. You don’t want it to end like this. You didn’t want it to end at all, but so much for that.

You manage to dislodge your horn from the tree it’s caught in, but the force sends you sailing over into another tree, and you’re back where you started. Flying things loose from the branches and sail on their wings into the dark, ashen sky.

It’s hard to breathe here. Everything tastes like sulphur and ash-tray. It’s terribly quiet, only the sounds of swamp creatures and the buzzing of diaphanous wings filling your sensitive ears. You’re being bitten by insects you’ve never seen before. It itches and it hurts and you worry about catching some horrible disease.

Gently, you manage to dislodge your head from the trees around you. It’s almost a relief to you that at least you won’t die at the jaws of some predator in the darkness. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll have a chance to live to see another day. Within all the relief though, you feel a spark of despair and fear, that almost doesn’t feel like it’s yours. Now that you can see more than what your stuck idiot head lets you see, you notice odd spires of what look like organic metal in the distance, and see the towering of a volcano beyond it.

You don’t know where you are, but you know what your home looks like for sure.

You aren’t on Chrontomus anymore.