The Secret World of Briar Rose(67)
Logically, she knew she was still trapped in Autumnland. Yet as snow poured from the sky and the air turned cold enough to bite into her bones, Corin felt like she had been transported somewhere else. She shivered in the moonlit dark, then forced her chattering teeth to stop when she heard whispers. A crowd of them, each one speaking over the other, but none whose words she could distinguish.
Then the sound of a woman wailing split the air.
Her moans sounded so pained that Corin moved instantly, following the source. She winded through trees, panic pushing her forward as the woman continued crying. No matter how quickly she ran, she couldn’t find the woman. The snow blinded her, a world of black and white. The sky only turned red when the woman let out a dying screech. Corin jumped as the crowd of whispers turned into a chorus of screams. Several winged creatures appeared through the trees and ran toward her. She tried jumping out of the way, but they flitted through her like ghosts. A baby wailed in the distance, the sound deep and guttural, teeth scraping against flesh. It struck fear in all the creatures. Part of Corin was scared, while another part of her recognized the familiarity.
She ran forward, calling for Malicine. Stars bled from the sky while snow turned to ash. Three figures appeared from the trees, and something wet struck her, burning her skin. She screamed and fell to the ground. Blisters formed over her arms and face as she writhed on a stone floor. The three women surrounded her like a cage. One of them held the bucket, dripping with bleach.
“Monster! Demon! Freak!”
Their voices drilled into Corin’s ears even as she clamped them shut. Her body drowned in a lake of acid, melting her atom by atom until nothing remained. A terrible feeling overcame her: She was alone, and always would be. A creature abandoned by their world since birth. They might as well listen to the voices and die too.
Where did this despair come from? Had it taken root in Corin’s heart, or had she intertwined with another? She could not tell. Whispers grew louder, urging her to follow death’s path, while she resisted by clinging to a different memory, another pattern, a sense of recognition.
Whenever Corin drowned, it was always Malicine who came after her.
Different voices clawed at Corin, reminding her the kind of person she was. She had once abandoned allies, fled toward safety while bridges burned behind her, leaving others for dead. Regret twisted in her stomach and lived in her bones every day since she lost Harlow, her friends, her Elly. She did not save them.
Maybe this time, she could save someone.
Her eyes burned as she forced them open. Bleeding stars painted the sky red, silhouettes of gnarled branches twisting around her vision. Some of their shapes looked like horns. In one of the branches, a warning signal came from a raven. Corin pulled herself from the ground, hand desperately reaching for the bird.
“Talon!” Her voice echoed Malicine’s. The raven flapped his wings, ready to take flight. Strangled noises came from his throat. Poison spewed from his beak. Talon fell from the branch and into an open cage, where the iron bars grew smaller until they crushed his bones. Corin cried out, but the tears weren’t only hers. She could feel Malicine somewhere. The demon’s nightmares had imprisoned them all, but these scenes, this anguish, were too detailed to exist in mere imagination.
Corin knew how Autumnland tortured people within. The island used the truth.
“You gave the creature a name. How quaint.” A deep, distorted voice echoed in the darkness. The island sucked away every tree until they turned to stone columns. Corin blinked at vaulted ceilings, a slab of a stone table, an overturned goblet where poison dripped from the rim. Talon lay limp in his cage.
“I was the one who created him. Yet someone like you gives him a simple little name, and he follows you around like a dog.”
Corin turned to the baritone voice that reverberated through her bones and hollowed out her body. A skulking shadow of long limbs and gnarled horns emerged. Scales of green skin, thin like paper, had cracks over protruding bones. Every nick and notch from centuries of treachery sank into his face. He was immortal, yet dead in every way, an emaciated corpse who refused to pass. Draped over his scaled chest was an amulet, one with a shape and hue just like the one embedded in Malicine’s staff.
“I’ve reigned over this world for as long as you can imagine. After a while, one grows tired. It doesn’t change the fact that the world you left behind is rotten, that the people who wronged you are still prosperous.”
He paced around, leaving ash in his footsteps. The circle of soot contained perpendicular lines, drawing a symmetrical pattern that looked too complex for Corin to discern. She heard the rattling sound of iron chains somewhere nearby.
“I realized it’s not enough that I go back to your world and cause destruction. That doesn’t make things even. I need to change the tides altogether.”
Corin realized he wasn’t talking to her. She looked around the darkness for Malicine as the sound of scraping chains grew louder. In her hazy vision, she finally made them out. A bruise had formed on the back of their head. Their limbs twitched with unnatural movements, like they were fighting to regain mobility. Even their attempt to lunge for him proved useless. Iron chains violently tugged their body back to the chair, their head knocking against the curved bones of the throne.
“You’re not real, Oleander,” they hissed. “And I’m not interested in revisiting this memory.”
Malicine was here. Not part of a mirage, like the other demon was, but here. Corin banged her fists against an invisible barrier and shouted for them, but Malicine was too far away, trapped inside their own nightmare.