Adult dark fantasy, 1.5k
- POV character uses they/them pronouns. Content warning for gore.
The only home they’ve ever been welcome in is a hovel. This little hut of splintered, unfinished wood, crudely hewn from logs, mud in the joints and thatch on the roof. The eaves are always greasy with fireplace soot, layered so thickly in the corners of the room that strands drip like spiderwebs soaked in ink.
But that’s only true of this newest life. They know the shape of manors and palaces alike. They’ve felt damask and silk in their fingers, sat at tables laden with exotic game and fruit and spice, watched silver forks clack off gilded china.
Even so, the first meal they remember being served—that they didn’t slaughter with their own claws, crouching in the dirt and tearing out bloody mouthfuls that grew colder with each bite—was in this home. Amna’s home. And there are thousands and thousands of Amnas, have been and will be. There was an Amna in this house three generations back, because peasant families are at least as bad at passing around the same few names as nobility. No culture, out here in the dirt.
But plenty of fear. Fear of the strangers that are, in every meaningful way, exactly like the locals. Fear of imagined horrors lurking in the wilderness that no man has seen—because they don’t exist. Not in the scraped-out, scraggly copses of brush picked clean of firewood by generations of grasping hands.
What poor, silly things are men! The true face of their troubles is their own, so they imagine marauders and criminals and monsters, heap vitriol on them as thick as tar so they can point to that muck and call themselves immaculate by contrast.
Want begets terror. Amna was terrified, when they first met. Her sunken eyes were dull and wide, pupils swallowing her dark irises, cracked skin around her lips and cheeks pocked with old scars. She looked at the indistinct coils of their form, the hollow edges of bristling fur and sliver-thin flashes of fangs, and knew them to be her doom.
Even as weakened as they were, they could’ve slit her throat between one ragged breath and the next. They expected it with the surety of sunset. Amna would scream, she would aim a feeble blow, or lunge for anything she could use as a weapon. Their claws would plunge into her throat, maybe face-to face, maybe slashing along her jawline as she tried to flee. They’d squelch through stiff cartilage to the hollow damp space within, gristle unpleasantly crackling, made worse by the way her lungs would convulse and suck in air through her gagging mouth and open wound.
But she made no pretense at power or violence. She knew herself to be a rabbit before the wolf. With the clarity they’d grow to love, she shared their vision for her last few precious seconds. And then, in the next moment, she told them something they didn’t know: her name.
If they had not been so tired, so weakened, shedding smoky wisps of their core—well, things would have gone very differently. It doesn’t bear dwelling on. They respect those humans who lack imagination, because they believe that to be their own singular good quality.
Amna made them thick, doughy wheat dumplings, with boiled carrots and an egg and a single strip of fatty, oversalted pork. Her table was rough wood laid across an old stump, her dishes were cracked earthenware, and she did not have any forks at all.
They devoured the meat in a few snaps, then set to the egg. Amna did not edge her way towards the door. She did not fool herself into thinking she could run. She sunk down with her back to the wall and cried as unobtrusively as possible, shoulders shaking, wispy bangs plastered to her forehead.
So they offered her a boiled carrot.
She said that they could kill her whenever they felt like, so she might as well take the damn carrot—a statement that was obvious and true, qualities that normally evade humans! It was that moment they knew her for the treasure she was.
Along with that first meal, they shared a new clarity together. The nearly-barren earth stretching away from Amna’s little hovel was rich indeed, with the bones of those who passed unknown. Their own bones—that knobbly, pale core and Amna’s eggshell skull—would one day settle into that dust too, and the world would be no different after.
Out of those thousands of Amnas, this one remained theirs: over years spent dredging sooty hearths and boiling eggs, picnicking on torn mats in scraggly brush, butchering fly-ridden corpses for mutton to salt, scraping shards of glass out of the dirt in case they could prove useful later.
Living Amna’s meager life with her became a game. And, after they walked into her house on stolen legs and smiled at her with their own cracked lips, they tried new games together.
They did not miss their voluminous, ebon form. There are many ways to be dangerous, but only a few to be discreet. The challenges presented by paper skin and pottage muscles were a grand occupation, tantalizing puzzles to pass the crawling hours.
In the midst of these abject days, Amna married, of course. Her husband moved into her little hovel, so they made themself scarce, finding reasons to bide time pacing through the strings of stone-and-mud towns that squat in the thin soil of these windswept plains. The silly people that Amna was so unfortunate to share a world with thought they were a ghost!
They did not abandon that itinerant lifestyle after Amna’s husband disappeared, off on his own misadventure. Even before his final vanishing, they returned for visits more faithfully than he would. There are no other wonders in this corner of the world to keep their attention, not for homeless, penniless peasant women like the one they wear as a suit.
Not for Amna either. She would never have anywhere to go, and they would never leave her. This is not their last visit by choice.
It’s their last visit because she lies crumpled on the counterpane. She sucks air through her gagging mouth, not from claws embedded in her throat, but because of the fluid pooling in her lungs. They passed through dozens of towns filled with thousands of humans stricken by this same sickness. But this one is theirs.
They’ve talked about ending her. She shares their clarity; a quick death would be kinder.
The reason Amna has forgone a quick death, the other clarity they share, toddles over to the bed on limbs that should be fatter. The child can’t pull herself up to her mother’s side, so they lift her by the armpits and settle her against Amna’s back, so she can enjoy the last bit of her mother’s fading warmth.
Amna would know what her husband named the child. But it’s not important, so that’s not what they ask. “How much longer?”
Her breath pops and bubbles in her lungs. She coughs. Her daughter closes her eyes and presses her cool, smooth cheek to Amna’s side. She was feverish, they remember. She was feverish first, and Amna tended her through it with thin broth and cold rags pressed to her forehead. They ranged far and slaughtered a deer, dragged its corpse home so the child could taste venison, and she got better.
They still have more than half that meat, salted and yet to dry, but Amna’s fever will never break.
“Nothing is long to you,” Amna says. They appreciate that she shares their knowledge of this. “But, not long now. Not even for her.”
They sit down next to the child. They comb their fingers through Amna’s hair, with the barest prickle of ethereal claws, kept carefully sheathed. She hums pleasure at the comfort. Under her daughter’s curious eyes, they wind tight, neat braids in Amna’s hair, baring strips of smooth brown scalp. Uncharacteristically, they wonder if Amna’s husband ever did this for her.
“I don’t want you to go,” they say. This is also uncharacteristic. The world is what it is, and only the fools and madmen humans birth pretend otherwise.
“I know,” Amna says, and this surprises them. They didn’t tell her. “I want to thank you again. For staying.”
They don’t care anything for Amna’s thanks, except that it comforts her to give it. “Of course,” they say, dragging nails down her neck, light and affectionate. “I know she needs me. Fragile lamb. I’ll raise her like my own.”
Amna understands this is a joke—demons do not raise their children, they devour them—and they share one last, rasping laugh with the child cradled safely between them.
- I wrote this in 2018, to experiment with tone before embarking on another novel-length manuscript. The larger story is about Amna’s daughter and the family she builds in the midst of an all-consuming war.