Your Fur Is White

A set of heavy footsteps.

Your fur is white.

You stand in the ruins of an old cabin, black with rain rot and ever blacker with a kind of rot you can’t see at all. You can only feel it. Your breaths are shallow, each one stinging in the winter chill. Your fingers flex about the hilt of a dagger whose power you do not recognize.

Your vision is giving. It has been for years now.

He arrived at your door, late at night, in a town in the middle of nowhere. He told you he recognized your face, but you didn’t recognize his. He told you that he knew who had visited you when you were younger. You started to get angry. But he slipped from his cloak a dagger, and cast it onto the floor for you. He told you that he had the only key to your revenge; the only thing that could unlock that creature’s wretched arteries and spill its treasured blood. You believed him because you had to. He left, and he never told you his name.

You have nothing left to give this world.

You set your gun into the snow carefully. Surely someone will find it. Enchanted artifacts like these have a tendency to wind through history no matter how well you hide them. Targets to you are a blur. You can’t well use the gun anymore. But even through your bleary eyes, you take in your childhood home. The roof has collapsed, and the drifting snow settles in a thick blanket over the crumbled wood. The notes of hers you left behind are scattered and drenched beyond repair. Otherwise, it is all as the day you left it.

You aren’t really the type for vengeance.

Or maybe you are. Maybe you always have been, and you’ve been slaking that primal hunger within you all along. Vicarious revenge; on murderers, on thieves, on those within your reach. Something more worldly than that which you truly wished retribution upon.

She understood when you told her what you had to do.

She tearfully held you for a while, and you shared your last goodbyes. She has better things to do and more left to give this world. But without your sight, your skills are of little use anymore. You always knew you would end up back here eventually anyway. You’ve spent your entire life pursuing justice, it only makes sense that you would want some for yourself.

You slip the bell from its clip on your belt.

You take the hammer between your fingers, and gently begin to slide the hammer along the lip of the bell. An otherworldly hum begins to rattle the wild winter silence, and otherworldly colors begin to breach the hollow white of the snow and the petrified black of frozen, rotten wood, peeking through from the next layer above.

You’re happy with the way you’ve spent your life.

Maybe the bell took your sight, but it gave you a purpose you could never have had otherwise. Likewise, you gave her final creation a purpose. You brought as much good into this world as you could, and you, you think, have earned your own resolution. Energy begins to wind in your fingers, conveying into the hammer.

You draw your hand back, and strike the bell.

All at once, the bell is in pieces at your feet, the magic bleeding from the fragments of metal. The world around you is drowned, now. The cabin stands in an endless and depthless darkness, a void that now only you and one other share. There, across the living room, is the Husk.

It hovers, as if by the strings of a puppeteer, but it is empty. The mask has a hollow cavern in its back, where something surely must go. The two slits in its mask look through you. But after a few moments of paralyzed silence, you see a bit of light begin to flit into them.

You do not give it time to awaken. Instead, you draw the dagger and charge as fast as your ailing legs will take you. You ram shoulder-first into the husk, and pin it to the wall with that otherworldly dagger.

It does not move. It doesn’t react. The light drains from its eyes, seemingly into and from the wound you’ve created. It pours down its body slowly…

And as it touches the ground, it explodes. In a flash of bitter light, there are more of these figures around you. But they are not empty. Billowing, exploding from the back of their skulls is a kind of scrambling and horrible visage that seems to shift each and every moment. It creeps across the void and consumes it all, until you are trapped in their sensory tangle with only their thin, wiry frames outlined against the chaos.

It hurts to look at. It hurts so bad. Their vile presence digs at your eyes; they feel as if they are bulging out of your skull.

They brandish needle-like blades. You, too, wield that thorn against them, even as your reality crumbles around you. You aren't scared> You're angry.

The battle ends quickly. Of course, in your demise; but in theirs, too. You will awaken in the mists. You will speak proudly of this battle to your mother. Of all your battles.

…

She finds you there.

In that cabin in the woods, at the hem of winter and the birth of spring. Your body is as fresh as the day it was left there.

She sees the dagger. She doesn’t know for sure, but she trusts you earned your revenge. She sees the bell’s fragments, too.

She digs them from the melting snow, piece by piece.

She digs your rifle out, too.

And in the depth of the forest, she digs your grave, right beside your mother’s. She buries you with that rifle in your hands, that dagger in your belt, and the shards of the bell scattered all about your head.

She will tell her children grand stories of your heroism. The day will come that she can tell them to your mother, too.