❦ The dead were put to rest. Their bodies were sealed and left in the Helbowen with its Staargir. Their souls were saved from an eternal wake in the Mirror World, as it was meant to be. By the time the second body was preserved, the sun was well on its way to reaching the horizon. Mere minutes after that the treeline would swallow its light, replacing its shining glory with the night's favorite palette. Purples, pinks, then blues, then black as midnight. Only the Staargir ever humored prayers--whispers and songs--for their chosen god. For their souls to truly be saved. But if salvation ever really came with so much as a whisper, it would only be the deceased who would know it, and perhaps the pious men and women who were ready to sacrifice anything to get their answers. Only moments of speculation would quell the minds of the living. Faith that those prayers would be answered, and that the horrors of the victims' last moments would be no more than a blur, forgotten as their spirits enter the promised paradise. The afterlife. Many heads were turned that day. Some searched for answers, some sought divine strength and peace, and some declared war with daggers for eyes. Despite all their different nuances, they all held one thought. Monster. Monster. Because only something inhuman could deliver this death scene; a scene the very earth could talk about if the grass had lips and the trees had eyes so that they, in tandem, may spill the story. Two lives were taken in the fields outside of Gammalstan, a refuge to many, and with seemingly no cause. However, when it came to monsters, they didn't need a reason to take the lives of innocents. Their desires know no limits. So the village talk goes, anyway. The Helbowen was rampant with gossip, rumors, and stories pinned to the one survivor that came along with the dead as they were carted past the gates. The girl with white hair, muddled with dirt and blood, marched a solemn line behind the cart containing the bodies. Walking between the wagon wheel tracks, a good ten feet or so at its tail end, she said not a thing. Some said she marched with a smile on her face that dripped with pride. Others said she drank the blood that dripped off her skin and basked in its fresh taste. Because that is what monsters do. That march was the second longest march she could remember. The second, and the most recent after the first. Flashes of a mountain valley from her past returned. Clumps of ice, thick and sharp, that pricked her skin through nightfall reminded her again what it felt to wear on her skin. Spruce trees cut her with their frozen branches. Her ankles sank into the snow while her perilous journey through the night continued on. No more than an apparition of the past, but a past she couldn't escape. Now it wasn't ice that stuck to her, but the blood of innocents. The voices of the people alive to witness her return flooded her mind, too. Look what you have done. Beast. What a terrible word--and yet it was their favorite. It hammered into her brain, again and again, a dull thrum that soon brought an ache to her skull. Justice was demanded long before the night ever came. The people would never let her walk free without consequences. Something to remind her of the terrible things she has done. An eye for an eye. That was their desire. That is just. But to let the Great Born have it easy? To them, it was too easy to take her life as she had surely taken the lives of their family, and their friends. She would pay, but she would not be given the mercy of finding death just like that, where her fate was already promised to be a terrible one. No, to punish a killer, you have to make them wish for it: for their end to come so their mortal suffering might finally cease. Any voices that spoke against this cruelty were washed out. This is just. Just. The torches were lit one by one until they formed a circle of hot orange light. A collective of shadowy faces came together as one voice to present their judgment. Many against one. Old against young. The buzz of their many words tangled, hammering into her head again, and again. She could not decipher all their words--they spilled over too fast, too angry--but she could locate some. Traitor. Murderer. Monster. The torches cast them all in a haze and blur until the first blow came. It struck her right side, then another came from her left. Two came for her back and struck between the shoulders. She fell in a matter of seconds. Shoulders lined up with each other leaned in, forming a dome around the wrongdoer. Screams were lost in the air. Calls for help were moot and they never came. But her screams... Her screams were enough. The blood she spilled, the dirt she was forced to eat--it was enough. ❦ Darkness came over her early in the process. By the time she woke, they had all left her there in the street. Alone, left to feel her wounds and lick them herself. It was perhaps the night that saved her. They couldn't see in the darkness without their manmade fires, but she could. She was made to survive. Surrounding her was a whirlpool of shoeprints that stomped over each other, leaving few--if at all--decipherable prints to make out. The torches left on the walls remained alight but dimming. The air was cold. But the cold she knew. Colder, in fact, she'd known even better. Some part of her knew, then, that this cold air would not be the first and only time she would feel it. A voice, small yet mighty in her head, knew it. Survive. A single word it repeated to her, like a whisper. At first estranged, now comforting. That voice was all she had. Her fingers dug into the dirt beneath her so she could push up and stand. They were slick, still covered in fresh blood. Her blood. The tossed dirt stuck to her skin but she couldn't bring herself to wipe it off just yet. There would be no use in it. No bath, for now, she could run to and stay in for an hour. She would simply have to wait. Both feet find their way beneath her and, somehow, she rises again. Left in the middle of that circle of judgment, alone. By now, her snow-white hair was not very white anymore. Dried blood turned black, dirt stuck in tangles, and her blood stained it all together. Her clothes were torn, but it was not the mob that ruined the fabric by much. She was already a walking shell of a girl when they arrived some hours ago. Now she was still that shell. Just a broken one. Though her body was broken, her mind didn't yet break. That small voice strung itself together, resolute, forged by an iron will. Her's, perhaps. She always wanted to be known for it--a will that does not bend regardless of the hardships thrown her direction. At the age of twelve, you don't expect your hardships to be so brutal. Yet she was never one who got away with fantasizing about a life she could have. If anything, this mob of justice was a check of reality. That voice in her otherwise quiet brain would hold onto it for her. With a sniffle, she dragged her feet, legs aching, back the way she came. Past the gate, out into the wilderness where only she could possibly survive all night. It was a night like this one, her mother always said, that Halfvel brought them into their life. Her birth was a challenge. Her mother's cries brought wolves in around them from the forest in their quaint hamlet, but they watched from the treeline. And Halfvel's cloth was with her, ready. What a majestic thing. A story to always remember. It was surely something to keep a hold of in one's memory. For her, it was one of the only stories she could remember her mother telling her. Both her mother and her father held such pride in her, such hope that she would unravel into her true potential and be something great. Great Born. If she had made them proud yet--or her true father--she hadn't found the signs in her walk back into the forest yet. Soon roads became dirt, then grass, and then she passed the civilized route and entered past the trees and into the dense woods where she was discovered with the two bodies. Even now, she could smell the signs of dead bodies there. The ground was firm and the further she walked in, the muddier it became. Claws raked up the land all around her. Blood dried on blades of grass and sprayed the trees, the closer ones. Something wild had come around not too long ago. Something hungry. It must have left when it found nothing to scavenge. As the hours passed, some of the birds returned to their nests. Owls hooted on occasion: it was their hour. Their occasion song truly added to the ghostly scene she found herself in again. Hilda, Bo. Her knees buckle and fail beneath. Both hands reach up, pushing against her eyes. Don't cry. Don't think about what you saw. The tears come anyway, mixing with all the grime. They come with a broken, mangled cry that tears itself free and fills the woods. She collapses onto her side, curling in the fetal position, and all she can do is hold onto herself and cling. Her fingers press in as hard as they can into the skin, grip at the elbows, and don't let up. You did this. You are beautiful, Astrid. The voice of her late mother returned to her then, overpowering the small, mighty voice she had left. A memory she had tucked away and almost forgotten. Such was the effect of nondescript, everyday experiences that you could afford to lose if the memory didn't matter to you then. But now... that sentence came back to the forefront of her mind. That word, a word she hadn't heard in what felt like years, cemented. An odd, unfitting post in the middle of a desolate and dark place. 'Beautiful.' You are smart. Her hands peeled away from her eyes, and fall down her smeared cheeks, to look at the hellscape she left behind. It reeked. All around her, it reeked of death and bodies that were torn apart. The wild would claim it before long. That was the power in nature: taking what was left and hiding it away forever. In her midnight observation of this ruined patch of woods, she could only wonder if she was as smart as her mother said. You are strong. A twelve-year-old can't grasp what those words mean. Astrid certainly couldn't then, caged in the aftermath of her own undoing. The words were fleeting, gone as soon as she remembered them. Remembered the face of her mother smiling down at her with smile lines and crow's feet. A caress of her hand against Astrid's cheek, where it held with love. So much love. The last time she would ever feel it again. "Hilda, Bo..." Hilda's soft hair was strawberry blonde and wavy. Bo's eyes were a dazzling green. Pained, stammering cries poured out of her only to be interrupted by coughs. Running herself breathless. Her hands gripped her chest, desperate to feel her mother's hand again, desperate to feel what it was like to be in her father's arms again. She ruined them, Hilda and Bo. They were gone. And now, like before--when her mother and father died--she was left alone. The swells of the mob's buzzing voices and shouts flooded her ears again. She put all her power into not screaming. It was the only thing that could be done. The night surrounded her like a blanket. This would be the only comfort she would have. This, Astrid knew. Her eyes closed and she prayed in a quiet corner of her mind that someone, something, would save her from her own mess. But of course, no one came. Those voices stayed right with her, melding into a message that would last for as long as she lived. She was not beautiful. She was a beast. Smart enough to survive, but never smart enough to outclass the watchers. And strong? Strong enough to make nightmares in many lives. It was something that any child in her place would have to make peace with. Night fell with her hopes for a brighter future right alongside it. Astrid slept in the dirt, in the aftermath of her own carnage.
