Graveyard Children

The Dark Entrance to Dawn (cont.)

There was wrongness in this animal, as the bear had cried, and now she knew it too by the way it stayed. She was beside the animal, close enough to see the starlight in its eyes. The eyes were huge, solid black, and seemed to come out of its head towards her. Just like the rest of the animal, the eyes, too, were wrong; misshapen when they should have been perfectly round, shining, and wet. Instead, they were frozen, made of blown ice where soft, warm eyes had once been. The reflected light gave the eyes depth, and she could almost see something looking back at her from inside them, though it could have been herself. The fur on the stag's face had fallen away in places, left bare where dark lines crept out from around its eyes and nose and mouth. The articulation of some decay or buried pathogen traced weblike under its usually light skin.

A small shudder rose behind her teeth, filling her tongue with some impulse that might have been nausea, but she was not truly repulsed, only meeting something she'd never known before and prompted to growl at it. She stared, and stared, and wondered how she was still alive, while this animal had died, frozen on its feet when she had survived buried in the ice. Why the animal had been walking in the snowstorm, she could not guess, but she wasn't of a mind to wonder on strangeness now. The sight of death by cold made her remember where she was, and how close she was to becoming a dead statue against glass trees just like the stag.

She backed away then, as the imagery of herself frozen caused a lurch of instinct within her. It nearly made her stumble backward, a mishap that may have cost her her life had she not caught herself. Her joints were dangerously chilled and inflexible, and she wondered if she could become so cold that they would, in fact, snap like icicles snapped. She took a smaller step onward, cautiously, looking back at the deer one last time before returning to the bear that refused to approach.

She hadn't seen the others until that last backward glance. One of them was half buried in the snow, its male antlers poking up like fallen branches some few paces behind the standing statue. Another, smaller deer standing much the same as the first one, though less masculine, was dead on its feet, posed and shining, as much as anything made of glass, but alive with the shine of starlight. There were other shadows farther away, none of them moving, and she wanted to go and look but knew her fate would be the same if she did not turn away and move on. It was a struggle as if to resist hypnosis, staring at the bodies of the night animals. Had she lingered, it would have been the end.

She walked on, single-mindedly repeating to herself that she needed to get down the mountain, all the while trying for all she was worth to erase the scene from her mind, but the images stayed there as she descended. The night animals seemed half a nightmare glued to the underside of her eyelids, and the questions they began in her mind were questions she was unsure she wanted to ask. In her imagination, they did not die, as the doe had not died. In her mind, she could hear them breathing inside their glass skin, trapped in their bodies on that mountain. Her memory of them put ghosts in their eyes.

Time seemed to exist around her but not include her body, rolling over her skin as wind, no longer constant but in small gusts. Even as the sun rose and steam leaked out of her fur she not did notice that the day had come, nor felt the ebb in the cold. Her only thought by the time she was down the mountain was a single, repeated refusal to dare to turn back around, for she knew, in that way the mind makes things true, that if she turned around the frozen stag would be there, and it would become real that she had never left. It would become the nightmare that she envisioned, that she had, in the actual line of time, not turned away from that frozen stag or his procession of dead followers, but had only blinked long enough to have imagined sunlight.

She'd stopped walking. Something inside her was uncurling, stretching its long unused limbs and glowing with the daylight. The sun was on her, but she wasn't quite done refusing to believe it. She breathed in deeply, feeling as though she hadn't drawn a full breath for a very long time, knowing that she was still truly on top of that mountain, frozen, forever staring into the stag's starlight eyes.

She blinked in the sunlight as her head faced towards it. The sun.

"The sun," she exalted, realizing it was there. She could finally feel it, really feel it, and it was beginning to thaw her back to the memory of herself. The lowlands were in sight almost, just beyond those trees and down, where it was all green leaves and the simplicity of rain, and home.

She had tried to find them a new home, and she had failed, but all she felt was sunlight and relief. She was safe to look back from here, and she did, turning to the white mountain and letting the clouds of her breath blow over it in front of her eyes. It was a smaller peak than it had been when she had stood here before, weeks or months ago, on what she imagined could have been the former side of winter.

There was a haze in her mind like the journey could have been imagined. When she started to remember the cold she remembered other things that might not have been real. It seemed impossible, but somewhere in those white fields above there was a red hole in the snow, where a doe lay unable to die, and just down from there a stag with something living inside it stood entombed. It was just a feeling, but all of her senses were speaking to her, telling her that there were things in the forest, things about the woods and what lived there that even she, who had lived among trees all her life, did not understand. She would do better to take her chances against steel and the tame wildness of people, instead of against the feral mechanics of the places she did not belong. She would not return to this northernland, not while the valley below her was still a manageable kind of perilous.

Days later, the bear finally parted ways with her at the stream when she stopped to chew the little nourishment out of dandelions and watercress. He had different foods in mind and also disliked the part of the forest where he knew she was going; the part that smelled like fire and people. He crossed the other way to where the heinous lowland berries would be lingering at the end of winter. She let him go and knew he would be there when she came back for him. By the time she reached the Burahm camp she was fully immersed in imagining the taste of those bitter berries, envisioning the feast she might make of them.