Chapter Text
Chloe’s got a target.
This time, it’s nothing dangerous. It’s no high dragon, that’s for sure. It’s just a small creature, maybe a rabbit mutation, slowly ambling along the forest floor, munching on the spare grass that grows between the carpet of vines. It’s not quite harmless; those barbed, sharp claws show that it probably gives its potential predators a hell of a time out here. But Chloe’s beaten the Wilds, as awful as that is to admit. It won’t kill her directly. Certainly not this thing.
She almost feels pity for the thing as she lifts a hand and suspends it in a whirl of wind, listening to it shriek and cry in panic. But like everything out here, it’s just a monster, in the end. Like her. She’s just about ready to send a fireball at it when something barrels through the trees and snatches it right out of the air.
The figure smacks back-first into a tree, crumpling to the ground in a pile of limbs and feathers. It’s about human-shaped, but the arms are elongated, the bones stretched to form wings, three flexible talons on the end of them. It sits itself up with the creature in its beak, and as Chloe and it look at each other, it takes one massive chomp and slices the head right off its body, crunching its skull as the remains of the animal slide down its feathered front and leave a streak of blood.
Just as Chloe’s considering roasting this thing and having fried harpy for breakfast instead, it swallows. And speaks.
“What in the Wilds are you supposed to be?” the harpy asks, a high nasally squawking. It starts making a crazed giggling noise as it sits up and eyes her up and down. It has human eyes, green and curious.
Chloe doesn’t answer, cocking her head at this creature. She hasn’t heard anyone speak to her in months.
“The Wilds just don’t know what to do with you, do they?” the harpy continues, standing on its spindly legs and clutching the rabbit-thing’s body in one hand. “Look at you! Wow!”
Chloe hasn’t looked at herself in ages, not really, but she knows what it’s talking about. The patch of scales on her cheek. The fledgling feathers on her left arm, the soft grey fur sprouting from the other. Her ears, one pointed and high, the other shrinking into nothing. She shed most of her clothes long ago, keeping just enough to have pockets, and the same scattered transformations mark every inch of her skin. Even the claws that have replaced her nails seem to have each come from a separate monster of the Wilds. But the symbol on her arm remains intact, the four runes that signify her unique ability to control the elements. Her hair still grows bright blue, trailing down her chest at this point. Rachel’s marks haven’t left her.
The harpy starts giggling again, clutching its wings to its chest. “Wow!” it repeats again. “I’ve never seen anything like you! Give it a year or two and you’ll be really interesting.”
Chloe glares at it. She’s eaten formerly-human creatures before. Nothing to be proud of, but it’s necessary.
“Usually the corruption figures out what to do with you right away. Especially if you’re a sorcerer. But you’re not an ordinary sorcerer, are you?” the harpy continues, reaching out one hand and trailing a claw along her modified focus-sign. “If you were just an aeromancer you’d look like me right now. Well, or you’d be a vampire around here, I guess.” It glances around. “If you were in the Windswept Plains, though, definitely feathers all over. I remember when I got stranded out there, it started so fast...” It looks away briefly, and Chloe takes the opportunity to snatch the rabbit’s corpse from its chest. “Hey!”
Chloe bears her sharpened teeth at it, then sets her fist on fire and cooks the rabbit in a single hot flash. It jumps back, dropping into a defensive posture. “Woah, woaaah, okay,” it says slowly, holding its hands out in front of it. “You can have the rest there, girly.”
Chloe eyes it suspiciously as she bites into flesh. Blood drips down her body as she sits down and gnaws until there’s not much left but bone and gristle, the harpy flapping up to a branch nearby and continuing to watch. Chloe should kill it. Monsters should die. But it is talking to her. Interested in her. And it’s weird, but that makes her not want to kill it. It’s been so long since she met something she didn’t want to kill. Or that didn’t want to kill her. Or that she didn’t want to kill her.
She sets aside what’s left of her prey, licking the juices from her claws as she stares down the harpy.
“You mind if I stick around for a bit?” it asks. “My time’s coming. Soon I won’t be able to talk. You talk?”
Chloe tries to. Her throat feels dry. Not speaking for so long makes her voice sound strained and hoarse when she manages, “I used to.”
“Didn’t we all.” The harpy’s voice sounds lower than before. Like its giddiness has worn off. “You got a name?”
Chloe shrugs. “If you want. Chloe.”
“Auron. I was Auron. Air Marshall of the Primal Core, once. Got blown out of the wards by a hurricane. Never found my way back.” The harpy drops down from his branch, stretching his wings out to his sides. “Going anywhere?”
“No.”
“I gave up pretty quick, too. It’s a tangle in here.”
“I came here to die.”
“Now that one, you’ll have to explain.”
For the first day, she tells Auron nothing. They coexist, in their way, a strange comfortable silence. Hunting together. Searching for fruit and nuts. Finding lakes or, when that fails, cutting open the vines with the knife that killed Rachel and drinking the sticky green fluids inside of them. Auron tells her she’s basically just sucking down raw corruption, but she doesn’t care. Neither of them really do.
They sleep up in a tree, Auron’s wings stretching across her chest. The vines don’t try to choke her anymore, but it feels nice regardless.
On the second day, she talks. She talks a lot. She talks about the shaper girl who changed her life, the one who loved her, the one she loved back so fiercely. She talks about the witch who cursed the shaper, she talks about the sorcerer who abused Chloe in her own home, she talks about the academy that kicked her out. She goes back and forth in time, from Rachel’s scream that shattered the protections of her hometown to the young diviner girl who’d been Chloe’s best friend and vanished into a bigger city five years ago. Everything that made her decide to walk out into Hell and try to find the strongest thing out there.
Auron talks back. He seems like he needs to because he knows all his memories will die soon. He tells her about the war with the warlocks, he tells her names and habits of the dead, he tells her of a battle that sent dozens into the Wilds never to return. He talks of a flight out of the Windswept Plains and into the Marshlands they wander now, seeking the corpse of Naut, the old god of water. Just to see it. Aeon’s body was an interesting time, he tells her. The old titan of air had huge hollow bones, made into havens for the creatures who breathed the corrupt winds of the plains and turned into avian freaks like himself, messages scrawled on the inside from the minds of mangled men. He wonders what Naut’s bones are like.
They find out shortly after his curiosity spreads to Chloe. The vines grow thicker and thicker, and they realize they’re heading for the source. Naut’s bones stick out of a swamp, scattered and rotting in the great marsh that formed when his blood spilled onto the bruised earth below. They try to find some meaning in the bones, some pattern, try to find out if they can reconstruct him from bones the size of houses. But if they fly above the treeline, they can’t see anything at all, like he’s gone forever.
They do find his head. The lower jaw’s sunken into the red bog, but the eye sockets and nostril slits are visible above the waterline. Vines crawl out of every crevice of that black skull, writhing in the darkness, growing and growing and growing as they watch. They perch atop his scalp and watch the Wilds begin to sleep, as much as they ever do.
Chloe ends up on her back, staring into the canopy above and pretending there are stars there.
On the third day, Auron’s eyes are pure red. He shrieks and claws at her with his talons, scarring her face. She roasts him alive and plucks the feathers from his corpse. He tastes like turkey.
She keeps walking. She’s not sure if she’s even heading in a singular direction. The Wilds are a tangle, even as the vines grow thin and weak and the earth becomes solid beneath her feet. She’s entering Kit’s realm, she knows. She wonders what the Old One of earth has in store for her, what his remnants will do to her flagging body.
What she doesn’t expect is to see a human.
She pushes through a thick, thorned bush and finds herself in a clearing, and there she is. Her hand rests on the outside of a great standing stone, one of many in a large circle surrounding a tent and firepit. As she drags her hand down the side of the stone that faces outward, red blood smears its surface in a regular pattern. A rune. The blood flashes in bright blue light and vanishes.
Her blonde hair hangs down past her shoulders, fluffy and beautiful, and her dress is simple, modest and brown, and her feet are bare. Chloe feels ill. A simple stone charm dangles from the human’s neck, and it’s there that Chloe’s eyes focus, there that she feels the most sickly. Something inside her wants to run, to never see the faint blue that’s emanating from every inch of the stone circle, that shines faintly on the charm. Something else is drawing her in. Staring at her face, her soft lips, the peaceful expression on her face as she appraises the stone.
So Chloe stays frozen right where she is, unwilling to breathe. If she shifts forward, her body revolts. She thinks about just leaving. Just running. But she’s been running for so long.
And more than that, this girl is so young. Maybe Chloe’s age or a year younger. Chloe’s trying to work out what she’s even doing out here when the girl’s face turns and spots her. But there’s no disgust or laughter. Their eyes meet across the clearing.
“Do you need help?” she calls.
Chloe bolts.
Once she’s clear of the stranger, Chloe tries to keep on her trajectory — whatever trajectory it was. But the aura around the clearing keeps turning her around, turning her back, twisting and pulling sensations in her muscles. The inhuman parts of her ache when she draws near, her claws tingling, the patches of fur, feather and scales burning. She circles for what feels like hours. Might be hours, actually, because it seems somewhat like night time now. It’s always hard to tell, but the light filters out of the clearing and through the dense canopy, and now it’s turning orange.
Despite her body’s protests, Chloe sleeps just out of sight of the clearing, right where she can feel the energy pulling at the corruption within her. Because it’s strange, but after waiting so long for something to kill her, she’s gotten tired of things trying and failing.
When she awakens, something on the back of her neck itches. She reaches back, and her claws rake over fresh scales. Something inside her snaps. She remembers Auron’s screeching assault, remembers his red eyes, remembers the taste of him, and she doesn’t want to be that. She can’t. She’s thinking, In a year you’ll be really interesting, and she’s imagining that horrific creature roaming the Wilds and killing innocent people and she tears. Blood pours down her back as she pries the patch of scales off, tears stinging at her eyes. She lets it fall to the forest floor and buries her head in her mangled, misshapen hands and sobs.
It hurts so much. Everything’s hurt so much for so long that Chloe thought she was numb to it. But sitting here on this branch, back slick with red, hunched over and horrifying, it all comes back to her. Everything she’s seen, from Rachel’s slit throat to a monstrous bat sucking the blood from a stray dog to Auron’s final loss of self, it rushes into her thoughts and leaves her weeping for everything she’s lost.
She wants to die. She’s wanted to die since she saw Rachel’s corpse. Further back than that, if she’s honest with herself.
Maybe her claws are sharp enough. Or she could slit her throat with the same knife that killed Rachel. Yes. It’s obvious the world doesn’t intend to kill her. It intends to change her into something awful instead, so she has to do this herself.
She pulls the knife from her pocket, positions its curve along her throat. And then all her muscles seize at once.
The knife falls to the ground as a soft voice says, “You’re still here.”
Chloe looks below her in a panic, and there she is. She’s tiny. But it’s her, and Chloe’s mind starts processing everything she’s seen as she takes a step closer and sends a jolt of lightning through her bones. The simple clothes, the bare feet — she’s a druid. Her charms ward off corruption, that’s why it hurts so much the closer she steps. Chloe’s body works against her, baring its teeth and flexing its claws while Chloe panics inside this vessel of evil. Is this what it was like for Auron? Is she gone already?
“Can you speak?” the druid asks, stopping for a moment. Chloe jumps down off the branch and takes a few steps back, and her body feels like it’s in her control again. She pants as she stares down the girl. She remembers the last time she talked to someone. Where it all lead.
“Your eyes are still human,” the druid continues, clutching the charm around her neck. At this distance, Chloe can see the cross etched into it. “I can help you.”
I don’t deserve your help, Chloe thinks. She takes another step back.
“I—I know it hurts, but please, come closer, I can—”
Chloe runs. She can’t listen to this. She can’t want this. The last time someone worked to help her, she ended up dead. It must’ve been Chloe’s fault. Must’ve been some consequence of what Rachel did to mark her like she did, some sacrifice that she should’ve never made for someone as worthless as Chloe.
But Chloe keeps watching the clearing, all the same. She can’t help it. And now she’s lost the knife, so how can she die? Maybe starvation. This close to that druid’s circle, nothing will come by for her to hunt. It’ll be a slow death, but a certain one. In the meantime, she can watch.
At twilight, she peers through a bush and spots the druid standing just at the edge of the clearing. With Chloe’s knife in her hand, she slashes a clear line across her wrist and lets the blood drop into the corrupted earth of the forest floor. A bloom of red and white petals sprouts into being, a clutch of flowers growing right up from where her blood fell. They’re so small. The druid reaches down and brushes her fingers across them, then heads back into her tent.
The next day, Chloe goes to find where those flowers formed, but they’re gone. She looks up towards the circle and sees the druid sitting at her firepit, a kettle steaming on the coals. She lifts it off, then pours whatever’s inside into a small clay cup. Their eyes meet again, and Chloe dashes up into a tree, scratching into the bark with her claws. She can feel the druid approaching.
“I know the magic is too strong for you near my charms,” the druid calls into the dark. “There’s too much corruption in you right now to power through. But drink this. It’ll help.”
Chloe waits until the aura’s receded, then hops down from her perch and eyes the cup she left on the ground for her. The liquid inside of it is a brownish-red, the cup hot in Chloe’s hands as she plucks it from the grass. She eyes it suspiciously. But, well, if it’s poison, then she’ll be dead. Not so bad. Chloe looks over at the druid.
“Please,” she mouths from behind one of the stones.
Chloe takes a careful sip and everything inside of her burns.
She falls to her knees, dropping the cup and letting the remainder of the drink spill as she clutches at her throat. But it’s already swallowed, already inside of her, and it’s doing something. It feels like she just ate the druid’s charm. But as she curls herself into a ball, the sensation starts to fade, pushing out from her stomach and into her fingers and toes. She coughs once, then wipes her nose.
Chloe casts a hateful glare at the druid. “I promise, it will help you,” the druid assures her, pouring another cup. “I can...I can give you more...”
Chloe stands up and walks away, further into the forest. She sits down against a tree. She rolls her tongue around her mouth, trying to understand the flavor, when something shifts. She pokes and prods at it, loosening the fang further and further until it detaches smoothly. She spits it into her hand, wondering at the blackened root. The other fang follows a second later. She prods at the holes with a pinky-claw, scraping against bone there, a new tooth growing to replace it. Not sharp.
She goes back and finds the cup waiting for her right where the flowers had grown. This one she’s careful with, sipping, letting the burning blow through her, sipping again, until the cup’s empty. She leaves it where she found it and steps back into the Wilds with sleep aching in her bones. She finds a soft nest of fallen leaves, and waits to see what changes may come.