HOW THE SHADOWS FEAST || ONC 2024 ✔

xii. where flowers bloom from blood

Swallowing hard, she battled her way through the calf-high snow to the dying animal as fast as she could. Now there was only one thing that mattered: Being faster than death just long enough. For whatever Anyan had done, it would not save her forever.

Painfully clumsily she plucked one of the flowers and wanted to run. However, she felt herself turning back and softly pressing it against the stag's nose, so its lazy tongue would lick it up and heal its wounds.

The animal's glassy eyes met hers, sending a shiver down Saskia's spine.
"Please forgive me, Bright Mother ..." she whispered, even though she had long lost the hope for true redemption. Not suffering alone was all she could still wish for.

With something like a prayer on her lips, she turned to the last flower. Another hand was faster than hers, violently ripping the flower from the frozen ground where it just had grown and bloomed.

Saskia looked at Silvan with surprise and found only the shadows in his eyes that had taken root in him. Not so much those of demonic possession but men's old greed for power.

"Don't—" Saskia whispered.

"Spare me the laments of a cursed girl engaging with demons," he answered, swung himself on Polnoch's back, and spurred her. With him, Saskia saw her hope disappear into the night.

Next to her, Anyan was already waiting on his Rusa, hand reaching out for her. "He won't be faster than us," he simply said, and Saskia did not dare to doubt that when she allowed him to help her mount the mare.

"We don't even know where he's going ..."

Anyan spurred Rusa, giving Saskia the slightest of smiles from over his shoulder. "Where the shadows won't find him."

Some sacred grounds ...

And on the horse that drowned, they chased right after him, the night and all her dead at their back who came with their weapons and hell-breathing beasts to hunt down their felonious target.

Saskia wondered if they both were prey now, too or the head of the hunting party.

Before the snow had melted, she had found a soulmate in a devil with no heart, crawled into the jaw of a wolf, and plucked a flower from Zlatorog's blood. Now she was beyond prophecy, and there was nothing to hold onto anymore.

The first rays of dawn began to soak the clear sky in red—a bloody scenery fitting the bloody deed they had done, and were perhaps yet to do. It painted even the white walls of the little sanctuary red that came into sight as though the halidom wanted to stand as a warning for every murderer setting foot into it.

Saskia dreaded the thought that punishment could await her exactly there when she had almost reached her aim. To Silvan, it seemed to promise salvation for he drove Polnoch on even faster to reach the sanctuary and bath in a holy light that would wash the sins from him.

Polnoch was fast—but not faster than the Wild Hunt, not faster than divine punishment could be. The closer the cracking whips came the more panic seized her, and Saskia feared for the mare to stumble and break a leg.

Before that could have happened, a spear pierced Silvan's chest. It did not look like the deadly strike of a weapon but more like something not quite real slipping through his body, drenching him from life and freezing the prince in time.

The infernal pains that had tortured herself just a moment ago, came to swallow him whole. Saskia barely realized that the scream that rang out in the night was her own.

Silvan's hands clenched the reins once more, then flagged and he slid down Polnoch's back to land in the snow—just inches in front of the holy ground that would've saved him. Thus far shall you come, and no farther.