7 – 5

My hope, upon which I have pinned our lives, is this: that in our reckless flight through this night-blackened forest, some blessing of inspiration would fall upon me. I would know what to do, and do it, and not only would we survive this awful hunt but would also turn it back and make prey of our predator. What I have instead achieved is a long and stumbling run over upraised roots and the lash of thin, naked branches. The light by which we see is a gathered fistful of silver-soft starlight, held in the upraised palm of Clarke's hand. It casts a pale and weakened glimmer against the gloom than envelops us as we run.

We flee a predator, a monstrous and misshapen thing of arms too long and legs, too short. It has a lipless mouth full of jagged and protruding teeth, ram's horns, and a mane of dead, thorning brambles. Its eight-fingered hands end in long talons with a vicious curve, each one more keenly edged than Cobalt steel. Its speed is tremendous, enough to pace a horse in the full flight of terror. Its strength is enough to tear that same horse's head from its neck in a single effort.

A lesson, taught in a taken life.

It is this, more than anything else, that fogs my mind. The intent by which our pursuer acts, which keeps it circling in the glooming dark. Our lives continue at its allowance, and the joyful cruelty of us as its game. When it has drawn every last scrap of amusement from our fear, our pain, and our desperation, only then will it demand our deaths.

Why run at all, then? Clarke chances a look over her shoulder. I'm falling behind, skirting the ragged edge of the circle of silver-soft light. She carries less injury than I. Her steps are not dogged by pain. Her eyes, the same blue as the open sky, are wide and pale. “Zira!” she gasps, voice and throat hoarse from heaving gasps of the night's cold air. She reaches for me. Would it not be better to stand our ground, to die with whatever dignity we can afford? I stumble again, struck a glancing blow by a tree trunk lurching from the gloom. There isn't breath in me to cry out.

The pain, that loathesome ache pulsing in time with my steps, brings to me some measure of clarity. Clarke slows, and I take her hand. In the dark, the monster crashes through a tree in an absence of its usual silent tread. Clarke's eyes shine in the light of her star, filled with a desperate fear. “Keep running,” I say, as hoarse and ragged as she. I don't want her to know I got her killed, until there's too little time left to be hated for it.

She lifts her starlit palm high, the silver-soft glow brightened to further push back the gloom of night. There is another sound in the dark, like a clumsy crashing through thickened undergrowth. Starlight catches in the shadowed pits of the monster's eyes, reflecting its amusement. Between us and it, a rolling trunk of a tree, bowling at our legs. It skips and bounces across the uneven ground, showing the tears of monstrous talons in its bark. Thicker around than Clarke and myself stood a-shoulder, if it strikes us it will break our bodies from hips to feet.

Why not let it? Why not give no warning, make no effort at avoidance? At least then, this pathetic farce of hunted and hunter will be at an end. There is a moment, a heart's-beat stretch of time as the trunk tumbles towards us, where I mean to. Sure, there will be pain, a great deal of it, and more to follow, but after that it will be done. We will be done, chased and frightened no more.

“Jump!” I scream, and Clarke hurls herself into the air without question. I follow, but such is the width of the monster's missile that still it clips our lifted feet. The force of it sends us spinning the air and rattles my bones. Clarke lands flat on her back, wind and starlight knocked from her, and we are plunged into darkness. I land on my shoulder, and thank the slumbering sun that it's my uninjured one. The trunk rolls away, crashing to a halt nearby against some of its upright kin. After that, the only sounds are of Clarke gasping for air and the rustle of fallen leaves disturbed.

The monster circles us. Once, then twice. Then it stops, and it seems the world does with it. I feel the weight of its hulking presence behind me. Something within me screams to run, run and keep running while something else cries out stand and strike back! The urges collide and I freeze, staring without sight into the dark, at where Clarke lies silent. The claws at the end of its too-short legs dig into the ground behind me. A long, thin line of burning cold is drawn down my back, a line that starts to soak the cloth around it with some sticky, hot liquid.

Blood. My blood. It touched me, gently, and with the very tip of a long and viciously curved talon. Keener than Cobalt steel, it cut me with the same, sickening ease it tore off a horse's head. The burning cold sharpens into the pain of an open wound, growing stronger and stronger still, until it blurs the darkness in front of me and churns sloshing nausea in my belly.

Oh, Mother, help me, I don't want to die!

The monster's tongue slithers over the bloodied tip of its talon, the sound of it a dry-scale slide, like a serpent. A haunting, hooting trill follows. Pleasure, I realize. A shudder runs through me. I start to crawl. A belabored, painful, and slow scrape of my body over the ground. Each forward reach of my good arm pulls at the weeping cut in my back. Each drag of my loose and useless arm jars the detached throb in my shoulder. In every gasping moment, I wait for another touch, another line of burning cold.

What comes instead is Clarke gasping in fright and surprise as my reaching hand touches her. It's the warm and breathing life of her, and how she takes my wrist to pull me towards her. Its in the whisper of my name, the breathing of Zira as her arms wrap around me. The night is quiet and still, and somewhere in its blackened depths, a monster prowls.

- - -

“Is it gone?” I murmur the question into Clarke's shoulder. The fearsome, horrid weight of its presence is gone from my bleeding back. It means nothing. We saw it because it chose to be seen. Now, perhaps, its amusement is best served by choosing not to.

Instead of calling starlight to her hand, she answers, mouth at my temple, “I don't – I think so.” The ice at the hollow of her throat lies dark, its pale star extinguished. Her hand presses against my open wound. I flinch, it comes away wet. “You're bleeding,” she realizes, horror painting her whisper.

The night's cold sinks in to me, save where she and I touch. I start to shiver. “It touched me,” I push my face deeper into her shoulder. She traces the edge of the rough circle my blood has soaked into the back of my clothes. Tension runs through her, alarm through me. “Is it back?!” I try to rise, make myself ready to flee once more. There's a strange and leaden feeling in my working limbs. They move sluggishly when speed is called for.

“No,” Clarke sounds definite, and is surely lying. “Here,” she moves so that she is on her side, and I on my stomach. My shivers worsen with distance from her warmth. “Lie still for a moment.” I don't want to, and mean not to, but her strength is greater than mine. Or, more likely, she is more hale and whole than I. Her hand leaves my back and a pale star blooms in the dark of night. There is some fragile quality to it that was absent before. It is dimmer and flickering, like a candle at the end of its wick. But there is light, and when she passes it over the span of my back, the sound that leaves her is one of deepening horror, and there are tears in her eyes. “O – oh shit.”

It's first time I've heard her swear. Though I fear the answer, there's not stopping the asking. “Is it bad?”

She swallows and shakes her head. “You'll be fine,” is what she says, instead of answering. “Just...stay still, and I – never mind.”

Her hand, cover palm-to-fingertip in my blood, reaches for me. It trembles, and only now do I see the exhaustion in her. I push up onto my side, resting on my bad shoulder. It's a mistake, but so is allowing her to continue. “Never mind what?” I ask.

Frustration sparks in her eyes. “Do you really think now is the time? Stay still, please.” She reaches for me again.

I catch her by the wrist with my working hand. It threatens to unbalance me, lay me flat on back and fill my open wound with all the filth of a forest floor. Again, I ask, “Never mind what?”

“Stop,” Clarke insists, “You've lost too much blood. I need to do this. If I don't...” She swallows thickly.

It sends little fingers of fear down the back of my neck, but I remember the rooftop. Three it took, and the effort laid us out for days. “I can't carry you,” I hiss, fixing her eyes with mine. “My arm is...” I trail off, not knowing what my arm is, apart from useless. “I can't!”

“Then what am I supposed to do?!” She snaps. Again she reaches for my back. Again, I stop her. “Zira!”

The answer comes to me in, finally, a blessing of inspiration. “Scab it over,” I say. “scab it over, and let me do the rest.”

She glares at me. “Fine,” she concedes, and I'm treated to the familiar, snowmelt-stream flow of her magic and the strange itch-and-pull of my skin beginning to stitch itself back together. She keeps her word and stops. In the pale, fluttering gleam at her throat, the shadows beneath her eyes look cavernous.

“We should go,” I whisper.

“All right,” she whispers back.

We rise slowly to our feet. My head and shoulder pulse with heart's-beat aches. The scabbed over gash in my back is better than when it bled openly, but not much. My useless arm hangs limply at my side. I no longer have the energy to do anything else. Clarke pulls me to her side, arm around my waist. Slowly, we stagger onward. Past the tree that was thrown at us, gouged and splintering. Over upturned roots and around nettles, brambles, and cutting thorns. Through the forest until, through a gap in the trees, light.

Coda

The way he sees it, he got off easy. He knew people – plenty of people – who'd come home missing fingers, toes, or limbs. People whose minds were so...shaken...by it all that even though they'd come home, they weren't really back. They got to spend the rest of their lives with a huge part of them stuck back there, in the shit. Of course, they're the lucky ones.

Most came home in boxes, or not at all. Too much of them missing to bury. What's some bad dreams, looking at that? A few sleepless nights here and there, a new habit or two. It's not quite a smile he puts the lip of his mug to, but close enough. The drink's warm in his hands, his throat, and his belly. It smells like mint and honey and almost tastes like it, too. He's got a little lamp here next to him to keep the shadows at bay and a blanket for the cold. Would he like to be in bed with his wife, hearing his daughter snoring through the wall their rooms shared? Yes. Of course he would.

Another drink of tea. Vin – no, sorry, it's Lavinia now, he's told – swears the herbalist in town says it'll help him sleep. He's not convinced, but it doesn't hurt anything trying, except maybe his sense of taste. Plus, his little girl looks proud as anything when she sees him with this mug in his hands. It's very much a smile this time, little bit of a laugh, too.

The sound of the door opening behind him gets his attention. Footsteps too, loud and obvious. One of those new habits he picked up is a powerful dislike for surprises. Everyone's been good about it, too, taking real care not to sneak up on him. “Milo?” his wife murmurs. He smiles over his shoulder at her and just...takes her in. No need to rely on memory anymore. Hair braided up, dark as tilled soil. Green eyes bright and full of worry. That part, he doesn't like so much.

“Hey, baby,” he says, softly. So soft that he'd catch no end of hell for it back in the shit. She's got a robe wrapped around her, blanket too. It is pretty cold, he supposes. It's nice, keeps him honest. Keeps him here. He reaches out and she comes, settling down next him and under his arm. He sets his nose to the crown of her head and breathes her in. “I'm alright,” he tells her. She hums and steals his tea, wrinkling her nose at the bitter taste. He smiles against her temple.

“That's awful,” she mutters.

“I'm told it helps,” he says, and she presses a kiss to his shoulder. They sit for a time, being warm and together and here, until he sees something at the treeline. It's pretty far, but it sure as anything does look like people.