The silent servants come and go. The bone china of their animal masks gleams white, while their bodies eddy with star-dusted shadows. I sleep alone on my lumpy mattress, drifting in the light of the three-tiered moon. I awaken at dawn, drenched in night-terror sweat and unaccustomed still to even the faintest trace of sunlight.
There they are: my entourage of skulking spirits.
For all their unnerving presence, the silent servants are good at their job. After all, they once served Echidna, one of the greatest gods of the land.
The spirits heat milk on the wood stove, cut fresh bread into thick slices, and arrange plates of plums and figs on the table. Their movements are serpentine; water trickling over stone. I remember a time not nearly long enough ago when the spirits carried pitchers and baskets on their shoulders, the items casting shadows on a firelit stone wall. I close my eyes tight and focus on the songbirds making their racket outside my window. The spring air is infused with heady lilacs and sewage. Better than dust, minerals, and mustiness.
Better than being chained in a cave.
Breakfast is a quick affair. I gulp down my food while the shadow servants stand against the wall. Despite their looming height, they appear lost, almost small within our new reality.
“I’ll be going into town today,” I say. “Do not follow me.”
My voice is loud with authority. I revel in it. Before, even a whisper, if heard, was castigated. The silent spirits never spoke to us, but their shadow tendrils, almost like a cosmic caress down our throats, got their point across.
They crowd around me, their masks imitating the face of the cat, hare, badger, and frog. They hold a silver comb, a silk cloak. I slip into the cloak unaided, knock the comb aside. One of the first things I did in this room was shave my hair, much to their distress.
The servants shift and undulate. It’s clear the decision pains them, but they don’t come near me again. I don’t know what they do or where they go when I’m out. They followed me all the way here from the mountain caves, where the rest of the masked spirits reside, but they can’t, or won’t, return without me.
At the door I hesitate, my own mask of indifference momentarily crumbling. “Will you deliver a message?”
You. The message is for you.
The shadows make a susurrus of assent, though I forgot to word my command as such. They don’t have voices themselves, but they can mimic other people’s speech. They sway on not-quite-feet, expectant. I think of you: the cadence of your whispers; the softness of the back of your hand; the sound your chains made when they rattled against mine.
I try to speak, but my tongue tastes sharp, metallic. I can’t find the words I want to send to you, if such words even exist. So I say nothing and step out of my boarding house lodgings.
The shadow servants leave me alone, but never for long.
Stepping into the light hurts every gods-damned time. My eyeballs, attuned to nothing but low firelight and wavering shadows, feel scratched raw. Out here in the open everything is marvelously overwhelming. Even now, so early in the morning, my senses burn and blister with what the world has to offer.
People in the street stop and stare. The towners recognize me as the one who escaped the bonds of the cave. Yet they can do nothing about it, and I’m not willing to return to my old dim, dull life either. As I amble down High Street, foot traffic clears for me while carriages slow down, hooves on cobblestone growing few and far between. I pause outside the biggest clothes shop stretching an entire block. First to inspect my reflection, always a shock that I have one, then to duck inside, away from the ceaseless sunlight and the bustle of shoppers.
“Welcome,” a warm voice greets as the bell chimes.
“Hello.” My volume is off, always caught between a whisper and a shout.
I scratch at the mark that curls around my neck, regretting how vulnerable my haircut leaves me. My Echidna’s mark is pinkish-red and shaped like a cluster of serpent scales. Impossible to mistake.
“Oh, godling. It’s you.” The shopkeeper’s smile falters behind his trimmed beard.
He always calls me a godling, and in a way, I am one. A little god that has inherited the weight of Echidna’s mistakes after his disappearing act, but none of his powers.
I browse shelves and garment racks without waiting for assistance or even permission. My hands are greedy things, touching every piece of dyed fabric, memorizing each new texture. I trace a buckskin belt studded with gemstones. My thoughts drift to you again. My aborted message. You would have liked the belt, the many-textured clothing. No, that’s a lie. I have no way of knowing your preferences. I’m still unfamiliar with my own tastes, so I try a bit of everything—the styles of men and women—to see what fits this new person I’m becoming.
I’ve been thinking of renaming myself. No one has called me by my old name in years. In the cave I didn’t need to be anyone, just be.
I don’t have any money but the shopkeeper, like the rest of the towners, lets me take whatever I want. He looks almost sad when I wave goodbye. He waves back with something like guilt as I head out with my loot.
Idly, I wonder if he was one of the towners who dragged me to the cave in the mountains and chained me up against the wall.
The sun has crawled over the midpoint in the sky, slanting down at a punishing angle. I refuse to wear my stolen pair of smoked lenses. Hiding myself from the sun feels like a failure. So I squint and frown and learn to bear its flaying light.
My wandering feet take me to the outdoor marketplace. Despite the press of bodies, being here doesn’t feel claustrophobic. Colorful awnings shield me from the worst of the sun’s blaze. I weave between stalls and shoppers, snatching a handful of walnuts from an overflowing burlap bag here, a sticky piece of honeycomb there. The first time I visited the marketplace, I was pushed out of the way of a frenzied donkey. My heart danced and my skin pebbled, but I wasn’t averse to those newfound sensations.
I reach for a pear next, and the burly stall owner grabs my wrist. Her fingers clench manacle-tight. “Listen here, you little thief…”
The woman trails off. Her eyes widen with fear or respect, which is better than pity. I smirk and jolt out of her grip. Pear juices run down my mouth as I saunter away, my Echidna’s mark on display. That’s when I freeze, my heartbeat not a dance but a stampede, beads of sweat pooling across my body. It’s not like the donkey incident. I feel the opposite of alive.
A pair of tall, slender shadows shop a few stalls down. Their bear and fox masks are white as bone, meant to contain and control the spirit forms underneath. They examine the fruits for bruises or discoloration before lovingly placing them inside woven baskets. The towners don’t demand payment from the silent servants either. Stall-owners avert their gazes from the masks’ empty eye sockets.
Bear and Fox’s slithering grace brings them nearer, and I flinch on instinct although I don’t recognize them. They must belong to a different cave. Echidna, the Serpent God and Troglodyte King, needed one hundred shadow servants to help him shed his skin, or so the legend goes. He’s gone now, out of reach, but has left all his servants behind. This is why there are so many spirits, so many caves.
Bear and Fox aren’t here for me. I’m not going back. I refuse to be blinded by the darkness.
Dropping my half-eaten pear, I stalk away, no longer hungry.
The dawn-peach bathwater is scented with oils and salts. One day I’m going to stop comparing every color to the sun’s brushstrokes across the sky. The sunlight will not be a novelty, but taken for granted.
Did you know the towners can tell the time by the position of the sun? Time didn’t exist for us in the cave. The silent servants fed and washed us, moved our immobile limbs and rubbed sensation back into them, then put us to sleep. When we were awake, and they were out of earshot, you and I talked in hurried, feathered whispers as the softly burning fire lent our prison the appearance of a beehive. Flaps of leather fastened on either side of our heads like a horse’s blinkers prevented us from seeing each other—why be allowed to love or need someone else when that would mean loving or needing the spirits that tended to us less? Our bodies were chained to alcoves in a row, but if we reached out across the cave wall, our hands touched each other, fingers secretly entwining.
Thinking about you reminds me of the towners’ guilt. I dive under the fragrant water, past floating herbs and bobbing petals, to cleanse the ghosting memory of you.
The silent servants pour more hot water into my steaming bath. The clawfoot tub wasn’t in the room when I first moved here, but the proprietress had it delivered to me together with the lavish soaps and sponges. Guilt, always out of guilt.
Soon the water darkens with the grime of the marketplace. The silent servants scrub the dirt from under my nails, wipe the juice residues off my face. I lean forward and hug my knees so they can sponge the jut of my spine. I am infinitely vulnerable like this, but they won’t hurt me. Direct violence goes against their very nature. They want me back in the cave with the rest of their catatonic prisoners. Safe, they think, protected. Ours. They may not talk, but their desires are almost tangible at times.
The spirits need me, but I don’t need them. I repeat the mantra in my head until the words lose all meaning.
The cat mask that belongs to the spirit stoking the stove is cracked, a river-delta fissure that starts at the chin and spreads upward. It causes the shadow to limp, movements jerky and erratic. When I look too closely, the darkness oozing through the mask draws me into a black vertigo. So I peer down at my body soaking in the water instead, immaculately clean and pampered soft. I wiggle my toes and fingers and barely recognize my limbs without the cuffs encircling them.
“Bring me a glass of water,” I command the crumbling feline mask.
The shadow complies at once. The glass is cool with condensation. I inspect the heft of it in my grip, then upend its content into the warm bathwater. Fast as a snake striking prey, I smash the glass against the edge of the bathtub, so that I’m left holding the biggest, sharpest shard. I could slash at the cracked cat mask. Break it for good, see what happens. But even here, where I’ve convinced myself I have the upper hand, I hesitate. For lack of a better option, I cut a long, jagged line across my own palm. The silent servants remove the makeshift weapon from my grip. I let them, a naughty child gently, swiftly chided.
Blood drips sluggish from the shallow cut. I watch with morbid fascination as it crawls down my palm, pooling scarlet in the water. Proof that no matter what I do, the shadow spirits won’t allow me to get hurt. I’ve tried finding a dagger, but it’s the one thing the shopkeepers won’t let me steal. No towner is foolish enough to cross the shadow spirits, not even the men with teeth like yellowed lace who peddle their illicit wares outside the marketplace.
The silent servants work with quick efficiency: they clean the blood from my palm, apply a stinging salve, and dress the wound. Lastly, they kiss it better. Their touch is a cold mist through the gauze.
I shiver, pulling away.
“What a terrible thing, to be without purpose of your own, always beholden to others.”
I aim for callous, but compassion creeps into my voice nonetheless. Echidna wove his servants to life from nothing but shadow, to guard his kingdom and cater to his every need. When he disappeared without warning, the shadows were left with nothing again. They had to make do with smaller gods: the children born bearing Echidna’s mark. And they made sure we couldn’t run away like he did.
In a way, I feel for the spirits, as well as for the prisoners in the cave. You especially. But I’m not going back into the darkness. I ran toward the sun the moment the opportunity presented itself. I tried to grasp it with my numb hands and fling myself into its light. The ones I left behind were an afterthought, burned out of my corneas by that blinding blaze.
Even you, yes. Even you.
We used to sleep inside narrow chambers built into the wall. The stone absorbed the heat of the fire always burning in the middle of the cave, a paltry imitation of the sun. The silent servants arranged our limbs into an approximation of comfort and cradled our heads on their shifting laps until we fell asleep. Sometimes they sped things along, their version of a lullaby.
When I feel the hazy fingers of mist touch my temples, I bark, “No!”
The silent servants slink around my room. Agitated, they twitch with longing. When they try to tuck me into bed, I hiss and swat them away. I rarely sleep easy, but I don’t want their aid, even if it means staying awake until dawn. Their mist that brought dreams also brought oblivion. The more I stayed in the cave, the fewer things I remembered from my short life before. I want my memories intact, so that I can’t be tricked into returning to Echidna’s old kingdom. And I want, selfishly, my memories of you.
“Leave,” I order. The eyes behind their masks are bright pinpricks in the dark. “Stop hovering. Begone.”
There is another prosonym for Echidna, our God and Serpent King Errant. Mother of Monsters. This, another way he is known around these parts. Birth-giver of the silent servants. The red-marked children. All of us, beasts abandoned to wander a starving word.
Alone for now, I look out my window at the three-tiered moon. Its light is more forgiving than the sun’s. The three sections swing like slow pendulums across the sky, casting gentle shade and silverbright streaks, like scales. I would have liked to feel the breeze on my skin, enjoy the lack of onlookers in the streets. However, nobody ventures outside after dark. For all the times she has indulged my quirks, the boarding house proprietress is adamant about night curfew.
My shaved scalp prickles without warning. The silent servants are gone, but still I sense another presence in the room. A dark silhouette extricates itself from a murky corner. The silent servants have been the objects of my fear and fury for so long, I almost forgot there are worse things out there: the maskless ones, the darklings. And now one such spirit has come for me.
It gropes its way toward me with inelegant menace, teeth and claws no less sharp for being made of shadows. The monster’s bare face consists entirely of a mouth, gaping open and darker than the space between stars. Tangled in my bedsheets, I raise my bandaged hand to shield my eyes, because I need them to see the sunlight again. The darkling licks my healing cut from beginning to end. Its tongue is tentacle-long and coarse, so cold it burns. The white gauze flutters to the floor, the wound reopened, new blood welling up from the browned scab. Breathy groans escape the monster’s maw, as if my self-inflicted injury tastes of candied fruits rather than iron and salt.
I could sick up my heart and it would keep pounding bloody and frantic on the floorboards. Perhaps then the darkling would let me go. I screw my eyes shut as it makes a grab for my throat, but a whoosh of air makes me look again. The silent servants are an impenetrable wall between me and the darkling. I didn’t call them, but they were still summoned from the ether by my distress. Dizzy with relief, I scramble out of bed, hitting the floor with knees and elbows, then cowering in the far corner.
The animal masks glimmer iridescent in the moonlight: hare, frog, badger, and cat. The vein-like cracks now swallow the entire feline mask. My assailant attempts to retreat into the night, but the silent servants are merciless as they wrestle the darkling into submission. In the scuffle—a mass of writhing darkness—I can’t tell the spirits apart. Each of my silent servants seizes the cracked-mask darkling and pulls its thrashing body taut in the space between them.
The dark spirit isn’t silent. It screeches as its own kind tear it apart limb from shadowy limb.
Since Echidna’s disappearance, the silent servants can only maintain control of their sense of self as long as they have someone to look after. If not, they become the dark shadows lurking under the pendulum moon: howling their desolate grief, hungry for ichor.
The rogue spirit is a smoking stain on the floor. I crawl toward the silent servants on scraped knees and elbows. My chest heaves. Shock overtakes my body, intact thanks only to their swift intervention.
Grudgingly, I let the silent servants hold me and sing me to terror-free sleep like they used to. I’m not proud of it, but sometimes the face of my mother—chased by guilt out of town with the rest of the parents who condemned their children to the caves—blurs into an animal mask; her touch becomes cool mist.
The shadow puppet troupe is back in town, assembling their velvet-curtained stage amid the main square. I hide my Echidna’s mark under a hood and hang back as the young spectators crowd the stage. My eyes search the local children’s bodies out of habit, but none carry the distinctive birthmark, the same wine-red as the serpent god’s scales. If they did, they would have been already hauled to the maze of caves where Echidna was born, and bore his shadow spirits. The silent servants can’t harm or imprison us, but the towners can. We, Echidna’s distant kin, are handed over to the spirits’ care. This way, the town has the silent servants’ blessing and fewer darklings haunting the streets at night.
The town wins. The spirits win. We lose.
The puppet troupe is good, I’ll admit. Their props get the cave layout mostly right. The articulated kidskin puppets projecting their shadows against the scrim move almost as fluidly as the silent servants. The hidden candles could pass for the flickering flames of an everlasting fire, if I squint just right.
“Shadows come to life don’t cast a shadow of their own.” The puppeteer’s hypnotic whisper echoes as she skillfully manipulates her puppets: spirits carrying baskets and pitchers on their shoulders, prisoners strung out like fish for sale across the back of the cave. Echidna is heard—a hissing sound effect of scales rasping together—but never seen. How fitting.
When I close my eyes, I remember you beside me. I could recognize the rhythm of your breathing among the other prisoners, your diminutive sighs. The town’s children watch the puppet show unblinkingly, at once scared and delighted. They will go home and think about the magic of the show, not the harsh truth behind the storytelling. I don’t know why I come here, week after week. A reminder. Perhaps another self-inflicted wound. And it’s still not enough to make me go back.
This is who I am. Coward child of a coward god. Runaways, the both of us.
I’m about to head back when a hand slips into mine. Slender, warm, familiar. It’s attached to a body, which wears the face of a stranger.
A pink mouth opens to expel the hushed words, “I found you.” The movement is jerky, like a puppet working its loose-hinged jaw.
“You did,” I reply at last. You did it.
I watch, and you watch me back. Your being here is a shock but not a surprise. The why is self-evident. The how is more concerning.
“Did you run away like we practiced?” Only it doesn’t make sense. When I did it, I had the element of surprise on my side. The silent servants must have prepared for all tricks and ploys after my escape.
“Walk with me,” you say, already down the winding road toward the marketplace.
Although you’ve just left the cave—your bare feet caked in mud and pine needles from the journey through the mountain—your gait glides easy. It’s been three months for me, but my body has yet to adapt to moving on its own; my muscles forget how to support my weight, turning to molten honey. Your waist-length hair flickers like dark flames in the periphery of my vision; your Echidna’s mark is a red stain coiling around luminous coal eyes.
I think of all the messages I almost sent you. At night, in the safety of my head, I wove speeches addressed to you: the nameless, faceless one I knew by touch alone. They were love notes or apology letters, sometimes both. I try again but I can’t loosen the knot in my throat that tastes like mineral dust and sunless stone.
“Are you here to punish me?”
Your hand tightens around mine, fingers drumming an absent beat. “No.”
Your voice is a whisper still, although it doesn’t have to be. Don’t you know? No one can silence us here under the sun.
Together, we enter the marketplace. Yet you don’t seem dazed by the merry-go-round of colors or the bright scents of spices. Perhaps I haven’t yet learned to read your facial expressions, but I will. By sight and touch combined, I will become an expert in you.
“You’re safe here,” I say. “I’m going to keep you safe.”
I will push you out of harm’s way if another mad donkey gallops toward us. I will shield you from view if a silent servant appears. But as I scan the busy stalls, I find no dark silhouettes or pale animal masks. Only the towners’ wide eyes, more fearful than curious this time around. And we are the cause of it.
My skin prickles. Everything is wrong. I want to get us out of here quick, find you some clothes so you don’t stand out. I shove a few morsels of food in my pockets, and the stall owners recoil, gazes averted.
“Come on.” I tow you along toward a network of vacant back alleys. Still, the feeling of wrongness in my center remains.
Runoff water drips onto broken cobbles while rats chatter from the roofs above. I peer into hidden dark corners, the hairs on my body standing on end. I’m not sure what I expect. More masked shadows perhaps, or even darklings ready to attack despite the sun’s reign over the sky. The boarding house isn’t far. I could call my silent servants for protection. I gather breath into my lungs, then bite the inside of my cheek. Hard.
They need me, but I don’t need them.
I face you, blood in my mouth. “Were you followed? When you came here?”
Memories of my own escape trickle back. I had begged you to come with me but you hesitated. I pretended to faint, hanging limply from my restraints, giving the shadows no choice but to untie me. After checking my pulse, some dispersed to comfort the other prisoners into oblivion, while the rest slithered about making compresses to cure my mysterious illness. The moment I was free I ran, and I stumbled blindly, feeling the burn of the immortal fire as it licked at my heels. I cut my shin open on a sharp stalagmite—a different kind of burn. Finally, as I raced up the steep incline on wobbly knees and burst out into the real world, I experienced sunlight—most painful, blissful burn of all.
“No,” you say. I have to blink to bring you into focus. “It’s only me here. And now you.”
I squeeze you tighter against my side while I lead us out of the alleyway maze. Despite your words, I’m not convinced we’re free of the shadow spirits. They can’t take us back, can’t hurt us, but they watch and they wait.
They follow, always.
Down mountain paths, through a pine forest, toward the long, winding road into town. The walk blistered my feet and dug stones under my toenails. Even then, when I could feel the rustling undercurrent of their despair, the masked shadows tended to me tenderly. They cleaned the blood and fixed a pine-sap paste for my wounds, helped me look for drinking water, then followed me into the boarding house, where I demanded a room.
“You’re lucky you found me,” I say. “I’m going to take care of you.” Yet a part of me knows luck had nothing to do with it.
We make it inside the clothes shop. The shopkeeper’s wave freezes midair when he notices you, leaves tangled in your hair and a simple beige tunic hanging over muddy knees.
“Godling,” he says behind his quivering beard. “There’s two of you now.” His customary guilt gives way to discontent, clear across his face.
When will the towners decide to take matters into their own hands? It won’t be long, if more of us god-touched scapegoats break free. Less helpless prisoners to care for means more spirits turning dark and roaming the town at night, hungry and out of control.
You pick at our marketplace spoils with little interest: cheese, grapes, lamb pie crumbs littering the floor. My uncoordinated feet take me around the shop, where I gather bolts of fabric and extravagant accessories.
I position us both before the two-sided mirror. “What do you like? We can take anything we want, and they’ll let us, you’ll see.”
Eyes glazed over, you inspect the fabric. Your tunic, sullied by the forest and the marketplace, pools around your dirty feet. You pull a similarly cut muslin dress in a dull mouse-grey off the nearby rack and over your head.
“This will do,” you say, perching on a stool with a curt nod.
I’m left alone with my reflection. Although I know I’m not a child anymore—neither of us is—I’m still surprised whenever I glimpse my body. A part of me still thinks I’m thirteen, as I was the day I was taken.
“I’ve been thinking, lately, of change.” My neck cranes sideways the better to look at you. “I don’t remember my name from before the cave.” My past self is a distant, foggy thing. I can slough it off into obscurity, pick a new skin that is me.
No response, not even one of your throaty whispers. I ask: “Don’t you want one?”
An aloof head tilt. “Hmm?”
“A name. I could help you find one that fits.”
Standing up, you brush crumbs away from your new dress. Your feet remain bare and filthy, looking so small under you. “I don’t need one,” you say, a soft murmur that leaves me shivering. “I’m going back.”
“To rescue the others?” My voice drops to the whispered tones of the cave, where sound echoed and voices could be stolen.
“I’m going back, and you’re coming with me.”
Halfway to the boarding house, your hand worms inside mine. Can you feel how clammy my skin is, the tiny tremors rippling through? The kernel of wrongness grows bigger and heavier. My mind wanders unbidden to the traveling troupe’s puppets dancing against a pale scrim—the reenactment of Echidna creating his servants in particular.
What if this is all you are? A phantom with a human mask rather than an animal one, mimicking my cavemate’s whispered voice, fluttering touch. A ruse woven out of shadow, here to coax me back into the cave and the silent servants’ loving, loathsome care.
Of course, there is a different possibility. I abandoned you and our fellow prisoners for fear I would be trapped again. I don’t know how many of us there are. When I ran, I couldn’t bear to look back. In that way, I am not unlike our disgraced serpent god. But maybe you want to rectify the mistakes we made, help me repent by saving the rest.
We sneak inside through the service door to escape the proprietress’ keen-eyed attention. I brace myself, but the silent servants are nowhere to be found. I still feel them nearby. Watching, waiting. Their desire to feed, bathe, and spoil us smothers the air. Tonight, however, the spirits are keeping their distance.
You sit on my lumpy mattress as I fumble with food preparation, burning myself on the hot stove. I stick my fingers in my mouth to taste my own charred flesh. The salve and bandages have vanished from the cabinet, so I abandon dinner and draw us a bath instead. The water is lukewarm, devoid of the salts and scented oils I’ve grown to expect, but it’s all right. I’m breaking free from the role I was allotted, the marionette’s predestined choreography on a candlelit stage.
The silent servants need us, and they’ve made it so we need them too. It’s an ouroboros of survival, with Echidna himself its accidental demiurge. What a terrible thing, to be a necessity but never a choice.
After our bodies are clean and our bellies filled with days-old bread, I blow out the candles and pull back the bedcover.
“Close the curtains,” you say as you climb onto the mattress. The wooden skeleton creaks under our combined weight.
I pretend I don’t hear your order.
The moon bathes us in polished silver light. Come morning, a different light will follow. Bright, scalding, beautiful.
With eyes closed, I sense the silent servants shifting nearer. They’re haunting us, or maybe themselves. I don’t know their game, nor yours. We’re not in a cave anymore, yet we are all still trapped.
I dent your bare thigh with my fingertips. Who are you? What are you made of? You seem real enough, but I’ve only ever held your hand in the dim dark, heard your voice half-lost in the hiss of fire. Perhaps anything can feel real when all you’ve known is shadow and flame.
“There’s no guarantee the rest of the prisoners will follow us,” I say.
After all, you refused to run away with me. After experiencing the sun, you and I will be blind again upon returning to the darkness. The others will think us harmed and resist our attempts to force them into the light. I’ve seen how this world works in the few months I’ve been a part of it. Gods disappear without a care about the chaos they leave behind. Humans hurt humans and name it common good. The town will never welcome us godlings back with open arms.
You press your cool mouth over mine to quiet me. Stroke the velvet bristles of my scalp, and it’s the first touch I’ve felt that isn’t mist or shadow.
“Sleep,” you say serenely. “You’ll need your strength for the mountain hike tomorrow.”
I had hoped it wouldn’t be so soon. Then again, who do I have to say goodbye to? The towners only tolerate my presence to soothe their own guilt. They did this to us as much as the shadow spirits did. As much as Echidna. The town deserves every theft.
You fall sleep by my side as we used to, your breaths familiar like a ghost. The prisoners, too, are submerged in their magical mist dreams. The silent servants never sleep or otherwise rest. They care for others but never for themselves. Something howls outside; a darkling, grief-mad with no one to look after and no meaning assigned to its solitary existence. I think of a cat mask cracked, shattered.
To soothe myself, I hum a half-forgotten hymn. Soon, you’re soft and heavy against me, your closed eyelids an impossibly pale contrast to the wine-dark Echidna’s mark around them.
“How did you manage to escape?” I ask again without expecting a reply.
The nape of my neck itches, urging me to run and never look back. Is this what Echidna, the Serpent God and Troglodyte King, felt like when he gathered all his great scaled coils and vanished without a trace?
I pretend I’m back to wearing leather blinkers so I don’t have to look at you. The dark spirit raging outside becomes my sole companion through the night. Searing pain flares up from my Echidna’s mark, but I remain unafraid as my skin chafes and peels.
I lie between starched bedsheets.
I leave my body behind like I’m shedding an unnecessary layer.
Both states exist, contradictory, complementary.
Up in the sky, I weave between the three-tiered moon’s pendulums. Nothing casts a shadow here. Stardust and dark matter churn in my veins, my body expanding, elongating, until the sun comes into glorious view. Brighter than ever before in the deep dark, it burns, bubbles, and blinds until skin and eyeballs are born anew and my celestial body starbursts with scales. The feeling is ancient, and right. Echidna is here, invisible but never silent. Writhing coils rasp together, a forked tongue hissing in my ear the secrets of the universe. I see the grand staircase made of beams and rays, and I know what it would take to ascend it.
I could pluck the sun from the sky like I’m stealing a ripe fruit from the marketplace, clutch it tight in both my greedy hands. I could share its light, or hoard it: unhinge my jaw and cradle the sun inside my belly, basking in heat from the inside out, light shining out of my seams as I slither out into the wide world.
It’s going to be a long while until dawn.
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Avra Margariti is a queer author and Pushcart-nominated poet with a fondness for the dark and the darling. Avra’s work haunts publications such as Vastarien, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, F&SF, The Deadlands, PodCastle, and Reckoning. Avra lives and studies in Athens, Greece. You can find Avra @avramargariti. |