by Sara Wolf
Wait. I’ve seen that before. Where the hell have I seen that flower before? Hours of staring out the window in too-hard-to-understand classes, staring at the green lawn and the blue sky and the people moving and the rose maze in the distance, every flower huge and gorgeous and carefully cared for by the groundskeepers -
“You,” I start. “That rose in your - it’s from the rose maze. White, with a red center.”
“Oh.” Ciel blinks. “Our American is right. Lady’s-sewing-finger. A very rare and expensive breed. Four perfect specimens of them exist in the world. One is here, at Silvere. Is that where you came from, sir?” His voice goes reverent, soft. “The rose maze?”
Alistair ignores us all, stabbing his finger in the guard’s huge chest. “What. Was. That. Thing?”
“Prickland - your jacket -” I start, holding it out higher. He bats me away with as much viciousness as he did Ciel. More. I stagger, almost falling, but Ciel catches my elbow. Alistair’s eyes just burn into the guard.
“Tell me. Now.”
We get exactly one second of rest. I get one second to bask in the feel of Ciel’s fingers around my elbow, on Prickland shoving me away like nothing more than trash. One second of stillness, and then there’s a whisper of a song-note. Furious rustling in the underbrush. I go still. Panic. Paranoia. Not again. Not just one. Too loud to be just one.
“You’re leaving, by your own feet or my arms.” The guard barks. “The forest is not safe -”
He doesn’t get the sentence out. Because from the underbrush, behind a retreating Maria and Rafe and Ana, darts four more shadows.
Not one.
Not two.
Four.
Four more pairs of glowing red eyes from the underbrush, four more jaws filled with piranha teeth, four more sets of unnaturally long limbs. Looming like unstuffed scarecrows, like dolls stretched to death on a medieval rack. They’re all around us, pinning us in. No escape. Their eyes burn like hellfire, like blood, like a curse.
Satané.
Ana’s shrill, distant scream scrapes across my bone marrow.
This can’t be real. This is a nightmare. It has to be a fucking nightmare. I bite down hard on the inside of my mouth - wake up. Wake the fuck up, Lilith! The only one who moves fast enough is the guard, putting his battered body between us and the monsters.
“Go!” He bellows.
There’s no time to think. Rafe and Maria bolt the rest of the way up the lawn, dragging a shrieking Ana behind them. They’re free to go. But not us. The shadows are all around us - four corners cornered. Four sets of red eyes, from every angle, and they skitter closer on their twisted limbs. My heart hammers in my ears, and I clutch the jacket closer like it’ll be any help when it won’t. It’s leather, not a weapon. I need a weapon. Alistair’s more ready than I am. Always. He flips his switchblade out and stands with the guard. I know I’m trembling, but I can’t feel it, can’t feel anything below my neck.
Panic flickers my eyes to Ciel. He’s calm. He’s the only one who doesn’t look scared, or ready to fight. He just stands there, staring right at the twisted shadows like they’re fascinating wildlife and he’s at a zoo. Safe. Removed. Every muscle relaxed. A smile pulls his beautiful lips, his silvery eyes crinkling.
“Well now,” Ciel murmurs to the shadow just in front of him. “Aren’t you strange and wonderful?”
The thing just silently tilts its horrible head.
“He’s sent so many tonight. It must be time,” The guard hisses in half-awe. His white-rose eye cuts behind his shoulder to us three, petals quivering. “It’s one of you, isn’t it?”
He’s sent so many tonight. The black deer statue. The man in the restaurant. The thing Alistair saw in the forest. Von Arx, screaming; ‘It’s you He wants, not Alistair!’ A flash of memory, Lionel’s watering eyes.
‘If I had known you were the one He chose, I never would’ve brought you here.’
Every breath in starts hurting, my knee aching. I can feel it. I can feel it invisibly like static, like building lightning, like the dizzying nausea before a vomit. Something horrible is about to happen.
To me.
Something horrible has been following me.
But I knew that all along.
I knew it the moment my knee broke, and my world broke with it. Everything after that has just been biding time. Waiting for the rest of me to break. To death. To oblivion. To nothingness. This is my fate. Right here, right now. I’m not meant to live past this moment.
“What’re you talking about? Who’s ‘He’?” Alistair snaps at the guard. But time doesn’t wait. Fate doesn’t wait. Shadow-monsters don’t wait.
It happens. Again.
It all happens so fucking fast - midnight blurs and the smell of rose and burnt paper mixed as one. Two of the monsters leap unfathomably high. In perfect sync they cling to the trunks of two trees, then kick off the bark as one, rocketing into the guard like missiles, latching into him with their claws and tearing at him with their teeth. Blood. But not red - green. Green and slow and viscous like sap. It pools over the guard’s skin, his mangled face, the white petals of his eye coming lose and bleeding green, too. Alistair doesn’t think, he reacts - lunges to help the guard, stabbing at the shadows with the switchblade, but they don’t even flinch. They absorb the stabs, uncaring about him, ripping determinedly deeper into the guard’s skin. The third shadow looks right at Ciel. And then it rises up. It hefts off its four legs and stands to its full menacing height on two, cocking its head deeper to the side like a bird, a curious cat, but too far. Unnaturally far, the red eyes and horrible mouth now totally upside down.
The fourth - there’s a fourth - and that’s the last thing my brain puts together on its own, because there’s something moving behind me, and I stop working. Lilith.exe bluescreens. She stops breathing, stops blinking, because on the pine-strewn ground she sees her own shadow thrown not by the moonlight, or starlight, or auroralight, but by two points of red glow lingering just behind her head.
A halo of red light.
A crown, for a doomed princess.
Alistair whips around to her, terrified face flecked with green. “Lilith!”
The last thought she has - as the air around her gets snapfrozen cold and her vision gets darker and the soft, childish song echoing louder in her ears - is that it should be harder.
It should be harder to die than this.
And then she’s gone.
36
The End (Or, How many times you have to die to move on)
??????
I do what anybody knowing their time’s come would do. I lie there. Just…lie there.
And then I start to feel things.
And it fuckin’ suuuucks.
Some Forest Giant from the DnD handbook’s taken a club to my entire body and beat it to bruised bits. My mouth won’t work. My eyes won’t even open. I can feel my battered corpse lying on something flat and hard and smooth. Which is weird, because I shouldn’t be feeling anything, really. It should be all ephemeral gooey space-void, right? With like, a light tunnel at the end?
The pain is supposed to end. When you die.
I’m dead, right?
If we follow our limited human knowledge about what happens post-mortem, I shouldn’t be feeling anything. But I extremely am. Which means I’m not dead. Or maybe I am, and God likes to play hurty little tricks on our freshly-dead bods. Except somehow I doubt that. So if I’m not dead, then where the fuck am I? Hell? Purgatory? A ghostly grocery store? Any number of hypothetical-afterlives?
Only one way to find out.
Forcing my eyelids open is like pulling apart two halves of a stone door. And my reward is coming face-to-face with a cosplayer wearing four layers of makeup and…deer horns.
“Oh, shit.” I groan, adjusting my glasses as I sit up. “Is this the part where I’m faced with all the bad things I’ve done in life? Listen, I’m sorry for yelling ‘nerd’ across the street at your convention. I was thirteen and t
hought making fun of people for caring about things was cool. Also, you were wearing the Naruto headband backwards.”
The cosplayer tilts their head, and the delicate-yet-really-freakin’-weirdly-shaped glass beads hanging in snowy threads from their antlers tinkle with the movement. Their face is pale white, but sallow and off, like there’s no blood beneath. They must’ve really caked the foundation on. But under all that makeup is a beautiful facial structure; high cheekbones, a wide-long nose, evenly-set eyes. My own eyes finally adjust; two petals of blood red lips, so bright it almost hurts to look at. So red it instantly reminds me of the stairs, of Dad reaching out for me, of the eyes of those shadow monsters -
“N-Nice lipstick.” I laugh nervously, but the cosplayer says nothing. They’re so close I can count their lower lashes, black and thick, and their eyes -
Oh. Holy hot cheesesteak fuck.
Blue. The brightest blue I’ve ever seen in my life - like those Bahamas calendars in dentist offices with their overdramatic photoshop oceans. It’s that blue. Unnatural, never-nature blue. But only on the outside. In each eye, around the iris, is a pale ring, and the closest I can think of are those cut-aways you sometimes see of Arctic ice - translucent, glassy turquoise that glows in the sun. It all melds together in the middle, smooth and hypnotizing.
These eyes aren’t real. They can’t be. It’s like looking at a dream - slightly impossible, all beautiful. And the kicker is, this ain’t even the first time I’ve seen eyes like this.
“You’re - ” My throat stops up. “Von Arx?”
Blue, not green. Still. Still, those eyes with the pale rings are so distinct I know they can belong to only one person in the world. The cosplayer tilts their head the other way, the accoutrements on their antlers clinking wildly as they lean in closer. Too close.
“We are not the Keeper. But we know of her.” The voice that comes from their too-red lips is musical, lilting, almost as if a harp is being played in another room. “She tried to send you to us too early, to suit her own desires. We ignored the first sending, but could not ignore the second.”
I brace for their breath but it smells sweet and musty, like they’ve eaten old, dried flowers. I wince away and wince again when two piercing pains rake complaints across my shoulder. Backstab? Twice? Is that how I died? I crane my neck and barely catch a glimpse of dark, leaking red. Fuck. Blood. Not great. Except I can’t see it unless I crank back. Which means no panic. Good. Also, it’s not bleeding all that hard. It should be - the holes are fucking huge. It should hurt like hell, I should be screaming bloody murder…but it’s just an annoyance. A dull ache. And then there’s the minor fact the blood seems to have glitter in it.
Yup, nope. It’s not the light. My wounds glitter. Every crimson fragment of broken skin I can see glitters. Who knows? Maybe in heaven blood glitters. That tracks. God turned a woman into a salt statue and covered the whole world in water. Glitter blood’s way easier than that, I bet.
“Apologies, of course, will be made,” The cosplayer’s blue-blue eyes roam over my injured shoulder. “The echoes were so zealous in bringing you here that they harmed you. That is not protocol.”
“It’s, uh,” I struggle. “Echoes. Like - are you saying those shadow monsters did this to me?”
“We thought that much was obvious,” The cosplayer says, blood-red lips splitting in a smile, and my skin instantly tries to crawl off my own body. Most smiles are inviting, welcoming in their own way. But this one is the opposite. Everything about it is a silent scream to get away, to leave, to run and never look back. To get the hell outta Dodge Charger while I still can. At least they have a normalish amount of teeth. That’s a step up from the last few minutes.
I reboot my brain, refresh the page. Okay. So. So. I died. I must’ve. The double stab wounds (like snake-fang punctures, I realize with a dawning horror) are too huge and deep not to have killed me. But that doesn’t explain where I am. Or how I am. Or why the shadow monsters decided to stab me with the entire Michael’s confetti aisle. Either I’m dead and stuck in a weird purgatory with this creepy-beautiful cosplayer, or I’m alive and stuck in a weird purgatory with this creepy-beautiful cosplayer. At the very least we can upgrade the emergency from ‘possible murder’ to ‘possible murder yet definite kidnappery’.
There’s no blanket covering me - only a leather jacket. Alistair’s. It came with me into death, I guess. Weird. But I’m not complaining. Hell, my clothes are even still on. Dope. Step in the right direction, frankly. Except that means the best pizza sweatshirt on the planet now has bloodstains on it. Balls.
Lilith, please, I beg my brain. Priorities.
I decide to get answers fresh from the source.
“So,” I start. “Where am I, exactly?”
I tear my eyes from the cosplayer’s face for the first time. What I can see beyond their many-layered outfit of messy, stained lace looks like a cabin of some sort. All wood. Not polished wood, like Silvere, but the raw-ish, natural shit. Except the usual straightness of cabin logs, the stolid architecture - none of that’s around. The walls…aren’t really walls. They’re hundreds of thousands of raw branches woven together in a dizzying pattern, letting in what looks like pale winter sun between the lattice. Built for aesthetics, obviously, not to keep the cold out, because it’s fuckin’ freezing in here. It almost feels like we’re baby birds, suspended in a giant, chilly basket of some sort. My knee’s fine though, buried beneath Alistair’s jacket. The roof is made of the same sun-shot lattice, but it’s got spires of brittle, curly moss and emaciated tangles of berry-bush vines and wild bursts of dead, dried flowers hanging from it. All kinds of flowers - but roses seem most common. A dead garden. On the ceiling.
“Holy shit,” I breathe. “This is - this is basically an elf house from Rivendell.”
“You speak amusingly, even if I do not understand the words.” The cosplayer leans back from my bedside. They sit in a chair made of the same delicate-spun wood as the cabin is. ‘Sit’ is definitely a word for it, but not the right word. They squat on it with dirty-smeared, bare feet. They shuffle their legs, cock their head this way and that, twist their arm around the back of the chair so far it looks painful. It’s almost like this person doesn’t know how to sit in a chair. Or sit still at all. Like an impatient child, if said impatient child was also a contortionist. The shadows. They did that twisty shit too.
You’re not Bianca, Lilith. Understanding is for smart people. People who aren’t dead.
I grip the bed below me - a thick layer of fur. The real soft stuff. Angora rabbit? Mom loved to make a big stink out of seeing some of that in the craft store.
Mom.
Fuck. If I’m dead, she’s alone. I promised her I wouldn’t leave her alone and here I am, half-awake, half-alive, all gone.
“I’m not, like, forreal dead. Right?” I ask the cosplayer. The glass bells on the bottom of their layered skirts chime as they turn to face me. With their whole neck. Upside down. I almost flinch back but stop myself at the last moment. I may have died a rude little shit, but there’s no better time than eternity to start over a new leaf.
“Not quite.” The cosplayer smiles, white teeth peeking out over red lips as they adjust their neck back to normal. “Though to some humans, we are sure it seems like death.”
“Uhh, okay.” I quirk a brow. “Listen, thanks for staying with me until I woke up and all, but if I’m not dead, I gotta get back to Silvere. They’re probably freaking out.”
There’s a silken pause, thin and strong. For a second my brain wanders - which way even is Silvere? - and then the cosplayer stands up from their chair so fast I get a little spooked.
“Do not fret. Silvere is in agreement with us,” They say. “They will know what has occurred. It has happened before, and it will happen again.”
“Agreement? Like my school agreed to let you stab me?” I scoff. “Good one.”
They tilt their head, glass beads tinkling. “We of fair cannot lie. The agreement with Silve
re was made many centuries ago.”
“What are you -” I look around suspiciously. “Are you the only one here? Where are the freaky Longhand McShadow things?”
“You speak of the Nightrose’s echoes. Fret not. They have no jurisdiction here.”
Nightrose. That was the name of the deer statue in Von Arx’s office. The ‘He’.
“I’m gonna give you two seconds to stop talking like a magic eight-ball,” I offer. “Or I bounce.”
“We have tried,” The cosplayer says. “But you humans do not bounce well.”
I swing my legs off the bed, and swing Alistair’s jacket on my shoulders. “Cool. Bye.”
Or, it would be ‘bye’, if there was a normal thing like an exit in this ethereal basket-building. There’s no door I can see - just woven branches and latticed light and dried-up, dead-ass flowers. On the far side of the room is another bed, and a lumpy shape in it like someone else is sleeping. On the wall to my left there’s a circular window carving through the wood. A way out? I squint (at least God let me keep my glasses) into it. Blue. Nothing but sky blue. Hell is red, traditionally. Wherever I am, at least there’s still sky. No clouds. Can’t see a seam of a horizon either, and no sun. Which is only mildly concerning.
“You cannot leave.” The cosplayer drifts - ‘walk’ doesn’t do their feather-light footsteps justice - over to me. Just close enough to catch that too-sweet, cloying dried flower smell. Too close.
“I have this weird thing,” I carefully angle around them and make my way to the window. “Where when people tell me what not to do, I’m immediately and viscerally obligated to do it.”
The cosplayer is suddenly at my side again, way too fast (fast like Von Arx around the desk), and this time they look wildly concerned. Unhealthily concerned. Their gorgeous blue eyes look like I just told them I murdered their favorite anime character. Their pale, powdery eyebrows knit, their lips pull into a macabre-colored frown.
