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chapter seven. worms in the brain
Sleet grey sky. Time that felt neither day nor night. The air threatened rain. A mysterious fog, from an unseen source, drifted through the crowd gathered beneath the archway. Beneath their feet, unnoticed, or ignored, was the girl.
The rags stuck to her skin, they were scant of thread, a warm tub would have disintegrated them to little more than memory. Her hair dark was matted at the scalp, raw in parts, she had scraped shins and her arms told of welts, fresh and aged. Aside from what sat atop her skin, she was little more than skin and bone.
The girl was begging, or postured like she was. The metal dish in front, with her last coins, but she had stopped looking at the faces, couldn't take the disappointment, burning like hunger in the hollow of her stomach. The Upper City appeared soft in the distance, as if seen through a frosted pane of glass. She could not see her father's home but she could feel it, omnipresent as the gods. A gust of wind rustled leaves against the stone, a rattle, her mother's rattle, the phlegm and mucus in her chest, and lungs.
Clang, clang.
A woman had dropped two pieces of gold. A chill ran through her bones. The girl looked at the cold coin in the cold dish. Gold could buy food, medicine, it could buy potions, books; it could not buy warmth.
True warmth, warmth of the blood; Fallon's blood was not warm, it was something else. She blinked and she had done it. A ribbon, where the woman's coat, clothes, skin, flesh, muscle, had all parted.
How cruel, the girl thought to herself, for her earnest attempt to have failed, for what had spilled forth was not blood, but pure, airless, shadow.
Fallon awoke with a jolt. She groaned. Her back was stiff with cold, the grass beneath wet with dew. She rolled up, catching sight of a confused Marth. He approached her, water skin in hand. They were a few degrees past dawn.
"Gods, I was worried. We went looking for you last night but you were nowhere to be seen. Did you fall asleep out here?"
Fallon forced herself to nod. Groping at her side, she found her journal, clasped and prim. The previous night flooded back to her. Had she fallen, hit her head, dreamt the whole thing? Her stomach told the truth, the lingering satisfaction of a full belly. She had eaten, drank, and spoken with a devil.
She massaged her own shoulders as Marth passed her the water skin. She realized she still hadn't spoken. "Apologies," she said between sips, "I must've. I was quite exhausted."
