“Why aren’t you eating?” she demanded, dropping her fork with a clatter.
The shadow pressed in tighter, attaching itself to the vertebrae in her husband’s neck. “I’m not hungry.”
The black shadow pulsed like a dark heartbeat.
“Why the hell not?” she snapped.
The Uninvited snaked into Klaxz’s ear.
“We always have so much food. Why not—”
“Do not say share!” Slixi shouted as she hurled her plate at the floor.
Klaxz didn’t even flinch when it smashed against the tile.
In the days that followed, Klaxz’s mood improved as his affliction worsened. Ridding himself of his possessions seemed to bring him what Slixi considered a disturbing sense of euphoria. If she turned her back for a minute, he was out the door and off to plunder something else. It was impossible to watch him every second, which was how he managed to slip out on a rainy afternoon with his pockets full of jewels.
Slixi searched the entire house before she realized he was gone, and he had already given away most of the jewelry by the time she found him in the market.
The Uninvited Guest was still in the house. And it was still hungry.
She cornered him behind the blacksmith’s tent. “Why are you doing this? Just tell me the truth. Are you under a spell? Did you forget what our life was like before?”
The Uninvited rummaged around in his head, searching for rogue thoughts of greed.
“I remember it perfectly,” he said matter-of-factly. “That’s why I’m donating all this. Our greed was a prison. I’m setting us free.”
Slixi narrowed her eyes. “Then I’d rather be in prison.”
An old goblin limped past them, and Klaxz shoved a necklace into the goblin’s rucksack. “Charity will fill us with joy, Slixi.”
Her stomach turned at the thought, and at the next one.
What if I can’t save my husband … or myself?
Days later, Slixi arrived home to find Klaxz missing and her house completely empty inside—not a sock or a loaf of bread to be found. She tore out of the house in a fit of rage.
“I’ll kill Klaxz myself when I find him!” she roared.
Slixi found him wandering at the edge of town with a handful of stones. He had given away everything they owned, and now he was handing out stones as if they were as valuable as pearls. She tried to persuade him to return to the house, but he refused.
“It’s not ours anymore,” he explained as he walked toward the sunset. “I gave it to Ripfizzle.”
Slixi never saw her husband again after that night.
But Klaxz was wrong about one thing. He had left something behind at the house, even if he hadn’t realized it.
Slixi knew it the moment she set foot inside.
That was when she felt it for the first time—an icy, slithering sensation that moved up the back of her neck. Her blood ran cold, and the truth hit her like a stone. The nameless, faceless creature preying on her husband … it hadn’t gone with him.
The Uninvited Guest was still in the house. And it was still hungry.
Slixi ran for the front door and tore into the dark night, propelled by fear and desperation. She had nothing left, thanks to Klaxz. He had given away everything.
“Not everything,” she whispered.
Slixi stumbled toward the woods, tripping over branches and vines. She found the spot and threw herself to the ground. She couldn’t see the creature, but the chill on the back of her neck told her it was out there watching her. She dug up the galleons with her bare hands as fast as she could and gathered them up in the bottom of her shirt. Her heart thudded in her chest as she rushed through the woods.
Keep going, she thought, without knowing if she would be truly safe anywhere.
As she ran past a gnarled tree, her foot caught on a root. She hurtled through the air and hit the ground hard. A wave of dizziness hit her, and she had the sinking feeling that this was the end.
When Slixi’s head stopped spinning, she took a deep breath and glanced behind her. The coins were scattered across the road, and it looked as if they were moving. Impossible. She must have hit her head harder than she thought. She looked back again, and that’s when she realized … the coins were moving in a familiar way.
They pushed away from the pile one at a time, lining up in a neat row as if someone—or something—was counting them.
One. Two. Three. Four.
The coins continued to line up.
The creature was counting them like a child learning to make change.
Slixi collected the coins closest to her and backed away slowly. She held her breath as she crossed a patch of moonlight, terrified the Uninvited would notice her. When the darkness engulfed her once again, a swell of hope rose inside her. She knew the creature didn’t need light to see her; it had found her in the darkness only moments ago. But the darkness provided a false sense of security, and she closed her eyes for a second to catch her breath.
Tiny pinpricks crawled up her spine, and she realized her mistake. She opened her eyes, and they darted to the road.
The coins had stopped moving.
Slixi tossed the last galleons behind her, and they landed in the patch of moonlight. As she turned to run, she caught a glimpse of a blurry form hovering over the coins—a vortex of liquid shadow stretching to lengthen and create fingers. The creature had no eyes, just two darkened hollows above an enormous black void Slixi assumed was its mouth.
Gold glimmered in the moonlight as one of the coins was pushed away from the pile.
But she didn’t stop to watch the Uninvited count them.
Slixi Boompowder ran, and she escaped that night, perhaps because she had nothing left on which the creature could feed—no money and not an ounce of greed left in her.
She settled in a tiny cottage, and of course a girl has to make a living, so Slixi did what goblins do best. She tinkered and invented something of value, at least to goblinhood: shiny, painted-gold coins that looked exactly like galleons. She stamped them with the face of the first trade prince and called them tossaways. The harrowing tale of Klaxz’s fate spread, and every goblin who heard it rushed to the market to buy tossaways from his clever widow.
The Uninvited Guest roams Azeroth to this day, so if you meet a penniless goblin, throw a few tossaways behind you to avoid becoming the creature’s next victim. Klaxz Boompowder still wanders the land as well, offering gifts to whoever will accept them. Some say that on quiet nights, you can hear an old woman’s voice reciting a familiar rhyme:
In dark of night and bright of day,
Keep in your hand a tossaway.
Guard your fortune, mind your greed,
Or else the Uninvited Guest will feed.
cold crevice opened up in the bones of my chest. Not a pain. Not a wound. Just a chasm as deep as the dark. A blue crack through which every freezing bladed wind could blow until they made a song of marrow and loss, and the song was never-ending, and the song was her last breath leaving the green world forever.
I was the Sister of Sorrow, for sorrow was all of me that remained living. She was the Sister of Courage, for courage was what had killed her.
That is what I felt when my sister died. Miles away, beyond sight or reach of sound, but her death passed through me on its way beyond the edge of sunlight all the same. A bottomless hole of ice blew through the center of my hot, bright heart. The last of my family, floating away from my outstretched hands like a red leaf in autumn. I staggered to my knees at the moment of her murder, and I think there is some part of me that never got up again. There are blows the soul cannot take standing.
Who was I, without her? I could not even remember my own name. Even hers seemed to fade like fog. They tumbled down into that sudden frigid canyon inside me. What meaning could a name have when the family that gave it life had vanished from the face of the world? I had become alone. I had become loneliness. I was the Sister of Sorrow, for sorrow was all of me that remai
ned living. She was the Sister of Courage, for courage was what had killed her.
Courage, and him.
All I desired then was to rest, or to die with her. It was much the same to me. I sought forgetfulness with the fervor of a lover. I tried to sleep, to find in unconsciousness an end to the song of the sucking wind in my breast. But the cold song would not allow rest. It would not allow sleep. It would not allow forgetfulness. When I closed my eyes, I saw nothing of the oblivion I craved.
I saw her. I saw us: Two girls, still children yet, playing on the banks of the rushing wide river that ran through the center of the woods. Past the treetops, we can see the spires of noble glass and ivory and marble towering like candles on a mage’s table. On the riverbanks, we dance and sing as though we lived, just the two of us, in the primeval heart of a secret forest.
I tossed and turned, trying to escape the memory into blessed blackness, but it would not relent.
My sister dances up ahead of me, fearless through the long grass. The wild white roses and glowing crimson bloodthistle lick at her bare feet. She carries a crown of them in her hand as she leaps easily across the smooth stones in the shallows of the water. “Wait,” I cry after her. “Wait for me. I’m only little. I can’t catch you!” And she does wait, laughing, beckoning me close. I crouch down next to her. I hear nothing of the sounds of the great city. I see nothing of its bustling shops and excitement. I have ears only for her quick, light breath and spirit only for her sparkling, mischievous gray eyes as we bend our heads together, her hair like the sweet flesh of late-summer apples, mine the white of starlit snow.
“Let me show you something,” she whispers.
She relaxes her long, lithe body, from the crown of her head to her naked toes. Her face becomes so soft and sweet I feel as though if I touch it, she will melt away under my fingertips like honey in the rain. Even the angle of her chin is suddenly so peaceful and kind I can hardly bear to look at it. And just when I am about to burst into tears, my sister tenderly, slowly dips her hand into the river water and scoops out a brilliant silver-white fish. I think it is a mithril-head trout, but it is only a baby yet, and it’s hard to tell. It stares up at her with dark eyes and nuzzles into her palm, suckling against her flesh. Water drips away through her fingers, back down into the rushing current.
“Is it magic?” I ask breathlessly.
She shakes her head no.
“What, then?” I say, barely able to breathe, in case my stupid coarse breath breaks the spell. “How did you do it?”
“Gentleness only,” my sister says.
“Well, I say it’s magic,” I insist stubbornly.
“Perhaps,” she answers with a sad half smile. “But the world thinks not so.”
She watches the fish gasp for water, finding only air and love. It does not struggle; it wants love more than life. But the thrashing of its silver tail is slowing down. And perhaps she watches it gulp and twist a little too long.
“Let it go,” I urge her. “We can’t take it with us. It’s against the rules. Besides, Mother would never allow it.”
My sister laughs. The moment bursts like a fall of plum petals. She lets the little trout slide easily through her fingers and back into the river. It darts joyfully away into the green deeps. She begins to stretch her legs—and stumbles on the slippery river-rocks. I reach out my skinny arms without a thought, so fast it seems to happen before the stumble ever came. And I catch her, pulling her back from the churning river as I could not when we were grown. I was so far away when she slipped for the last time.
My sister laughs again. She places the crown of wild white roses and glimmering bloodthistle on my head and kisses my nose, and then she is gone again, running ahead, into the brilliant pale sun—
—and I woke screaming, and she was still gone, and the river of our childhood games was a long-dead scar through a shattered city, and the little trout and all its descendants had gulped and twisted their last on the desolate land.
I gave up with the sunrise. When I emerged from my tent, the war camp lay silent, dreaming their own dreams no less miserable than mine. I felt nothing for them any longer, or for the war. It would burn on with or without me. If Courage could not stop it, then Sorrow had no hope. I had nothing left to fight for, nothing beautiful to preserve from the ravening. Only the crack in my heart. Only the memory of her, raising that tiny glittering fish out of the water over and over and over again until I thought my mind would break under the weight of her knowing gray eyes.
If the song in my shattered breast wanted me to listen so fiercely, well enough. I would follow where it wound. I stilled the sounds of my mind and my silly, insignificant duties and worries and ambitions, the way I once, when I was young, stilled the sounds of a bustling, thriving city. I opened my senses only to the blue chasm and the freezing song of wind slicing down the glaciers of my grief.
The song led me far from the fighting plains, into forests so dense and deep the only light was fireflies dancing. The forests then became deserts, the earth red and cracked and peeling as a laundress’s hands, and not a drop of water to slick my lips but my own tears. I grew lean in those places. I lost the hardness and thickness of a soldier. My skin sank in against my bones. I ate no noble pilgrim’s waybread, but only what ran or swam or flew slower than myself, and to each of their bones I sang a hymn. When the desert broke itself on the banks of a vast river, I gorged myself on water until I was sick. When the current proved too furious, I hewed a raft from fallen boughs so as to cut no living limb. And when the river wizened to a stream, I kissed the silver wavelets in thanks for their company and put my knees to the great mountains.
The trees changed from generous, thick-leafed oaks to thin, miserly, needled pines whose first branches did not begin until they’d soared ten feet off the ground. And then the pines disappeared too. Though it was summer yet, frost prickled the earth, and then snow, heavy and without forgiveness. Still I listened to the hole my sister had carved in me and pressed on, on and up. Much as I wished it, I had not passed beyond the needs of flesh. I did as flesh must. When I found the gates of black glass, it was with the taste of white bear in my mouth and the fur of black wolf on my back.
I could go no farther on; I could go no farther up.
Wind keened and bayed, not only through the blue chasm in me but through glassy volcanic crags ringing a lonesome graveyard like a crown of night. Scattered tombstones and deep mausoleums rose up from the winter hardscrabble in twin curved rows, arching out from a pair of statues in the center of that abandoned place. Elven women, sitting back to back on the ground, legs drawn up to their chests in grief. One was carved with long unkempt hair, tangled with stony ivy and chestnut burrs, her head sunk miserably in her elbows. Her left arm lay limp and listless on the snow. Her right arm rested on her frosted kneecaps, reaching hopelessly toward the west wing of graves. Short, neat curls framed the face of the other woman. She folded her arms thoughtfully across her knees and perched a deftly sculpted chin on her crossed wrists, staring toward the east wing with a resolute expression. Snow piled up between their granite fingers.
In the folds of their chiseled gowns their names were carved: ACCEPTANCE and REGRET.
No flowers or fruits decorated the monuments. No keepsakes rested against the doors to the crypts. No one had journeyed here to weep for a long, long time.
At last, the song in my bones was silent. But for hours, nothing took its place save the slow, inevitable encroaching of ice and my own blood beating in vain against the thick, tantalizing sleep of the cold.
Finally, a voice rose out of the storm. A voice, and then a body, blue as death and the sky, wrapped in white silks that snapped like war flags in the wind. She opened her pale wings so wide I could not see their end; her bare blue toes did not touch the earth. A great hood shadowed her face, and beneath it she wore a blindfold of ivory linen. But for all that to hide it, her face was the twin of the statue watching thoughtfully over the eastern tombs.
“My child, why do you weep? It is not yet your time,” the watcher said in an ice wine voice.
I was never a fool. I knew what she was at a glance. Anyone who has fought in battle and seen her companions take terrible enough injuries has heard those tortured lips speak of the winged ones that stand between us and all that goes beyond.
“You cannot even see me. How can you know?”
“I am blinded so that nothing can distract me from my service. I need no mortal eyes to smell the spark of life in you still flaming, dear Sister Sorrow, or to hear your breath cry out in anguish, or to taste the salt of your tears thickening the air, and were I to touch you—” The spirit healer swooped down toward me with unearthly swiftness and took my face in her azure hands. I gasped at the hiss of her cold skin against my warm body. “What sight would tell me more of your sad tale than the pulse of your shattered heart, cracking your veins like river ice? You have the favor of Elomia. Now speak, as you have come so far to do.”
All those long steps across the plain and marsh and tundra, out of the oak and into the pine, I had planned my beautiful speech to whomever I found at the end of my pilgrimage. I would break their heart with the perfection of my words, with the precision of my grief. I would make them live in my palm like the tiny mithril-head trout, suckling wild against my hand for a taste of the love I had known. I would make them see every inch of my soul and the soul of my sister, feel every ounce of the injustice on their own backs until they held up their hands and cried, No more! It is too much to bear.
I whispered the only lyric the song of the chasm ever had: “I want my sister back.”
But in the end, in the embrace of the spirit healer, at the top of the world, hungry and exhausted and gasping for release, I forgot it all. My body crumpled, from the crown of my head to my toes. I hung limp and gentle from her great heavy hands and cried like a child. I whispered the only lyric the song of the chasm ever had: “I want my sister back.”
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