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Logline
The death mage, a trans woman in a fictional world, has to heal from the dead who haunt her in order to preserve the land from a foreign warlord.
Blurb
Flickers of fallen people haunt this death mage--kings, queens, and boys buried in the blue ocean. Years ago, she fled those figures, to a house isolated in the tundra. There, she rebuilds herself from the boy she used to be--between the blood of badly done curses, the Skeleton Cook dancing in the kitchen, and the ice of darkest winters.
But in the snows of her garden one day, she finds a magical egg, the size of a skull. Journeying to discover its origins takes her to the royal city, where she must choose to aid the queen in battling for her stolen palace; or take the hatching, violent creature (wanted by enemies in the city) and vanish back into the wilderness.
~Chapter One (her, alone)~
Aquamarine blood drips off the contours of my face, the scent like salt, like ash, joining the trickles of bright ink in the sink. From the bandages in the cupboard--darkly matching my skin and jaw--I squeal a wide roll between my fingers. Rip the strip off. Plaster it to my cheeks, my chin, all above my mouth where the blood breaks out of my body. Nostrils flaring, I set the bandages back in the wood cabinet, at my side.
Then I check the broken mirror, fragments of my eyes and nose and bandages over my mouth glimmering back. Too many sticky ridges stand out like hills on my skin so my fingers flatten them as hard as quakes--but they rise back up. Defying me. Decrying me in this bathroom where I and my reflection war, this blood an incurable truce between our deadly mouths.
I retreat, over the floorboards, to the bed, tiptoed feet stepping just close enough to the trail of blood spatters to make the liquid bend toward my weight.
I stop beside the bed frame. On the pillow, an aquamarine spiral's staining the pale cover. My fingers curl into claws, and magic draws the blood up into the air, pulling it clean from the pillow, erasing the evidence of this lost battle.
The blood ribbon dances after me down the creaky wood steps, to the kitchen. I stream the liquid down this sink, far away from a mirror my hands have cracked too many times.
The Skeleton Cook clanks up behind me, rising from the tile by the fridge. He tilts wide eyes at me, asking if I will eat today, and I don't have to muffle a word for him to tilt his head the other way, all concerned like I'm eating enough.
Of course I'm not. I shudder at the prospect of food flavored with the tang of my leaking blood. I squeeze around him to bend over the metal stove frame with the old rock in the depressed tile floor. And I pat the air radiating with heat from the old rock, a thank you for keeping me from making fires, filled with haunting figures, even if I'm not eating today.
