An Eternal Wintre

Chapter 18

Pain seeks Anai out in her sleep, making her go through her mother's abandonment, through the pain of realizing what she isn't, the pain of knowing all the people she's betrayed and will most likely kill. She wakes sweating and panting, her hair sticking to her forehead, the wool shirt stuck to her sweat soaked back. Her throat's raw –screaming?

It's morning and a pile of snow sits under her open window. Cursing, she trips out of bed and closes it, worried that a maidservant would come, that Ruby would grow angry when she remembers none have come to help her and Ruby's away.

She looks at the pile of snow and comes up with an idea. Finding a bucket in a cupboard in the bathroom, she packs the snow inside and then dumps it into the bath, going back several more times before all of it is transferred into the tub. She then turns on cold water and urges the snow to melt but stay cold. It welcomes her greatly as she slides in.

Her eyes close voluntarily and she leans her head against the edge, breathing in the coldness. Anai's mother's face is a dull memory behind her eyelids. A blur. A splash of color. Mostly red. All she can attribute to her mother now is blood and betrayal. "Where is the trust?" she whispers to herself as the bath starts freezing over, encasing her in a comfy, ice coffin.

Ice, it seems, is what could be the only thing that will never turn its back on Anai. It's never been there in the past to betray her but now, where can it go? Taking the medicine would take it away, but what would the blue container do?

Finishing up her bath, she wraps a towel around herself with her wet hair tickling her back. Her wet feet pad over the wood to the bedside table where the two containers sit side-by-side. Picking up the blue container, she looks at the label. It reveals almost nothing as did the orange one so she attempts to peel it away. Just like the orange one, another label, the real one, hides beneath the almost blank one. Truth serum. Able to force a person to speak only the truth when asked and to erase what has been said soon after. Deadly. Manage doses responsibly.

Air can't seem to fill Anai's lungs as she drops the container. It rolls under the bed and lodges itself in a low crack. Her knees hurt as she falls on top of them onto the hard, wooden floor. They ache but she doesn't get up. Her eyes go dry but she doesn't blink. Liars. They're all liars! Her mouth opens into a small 'O' and she laughs humorlessly. I'm a liar. I know it. They know it. She laughs again.

She gets ready for the day in a black dress with long sleeves and a lower cut, lacing black ribbons in her hair, her shoes a bloody red color. Her lips are already a dark red, but she applies make-up to make them even redder, that of the color of her own blood. Her eyes are almost white, like ice. Her skin burns from how cold it becomes as her anger builds and continues.

Retreiving the container from under her bed, she spies the cake and pulls it out as well. Setting the container back where it belongs, she sits at the window and eats the cake. Her gaze focuses on the men in the training yard across the ways.

They run, fight one another, sweat beading on their brows. She watches them work tirelessly, the prince amongst them. He works just as hard, maybe even harder. She finishes her cake.

Anai's stomach rumbles unhappily and she rushes to the bathroom to throw up. A girl's tittering laugh scratches at her ears as she peers up to find Corax leaning against the doorframe. Her eyes are endless pits of despair and Anai finds it hard to look away.

She gets up and wipes her mouth on a towel, tossing it aside and looking at the girl. "What is it Corax? Has something happened?" Anai asks. "Is the clan coming tonight?" But the girl never answers and instead, turns in a circle and walks into the bedroom.

Suddenly angry, Anai follows the girl, her fists clenched, hidden behind the folds of her dress. She finds Corax looking at the labels of the two bottles, the top layer and the hidden one. Her face is impassive, expressionless as she reads them. When they bore her, she tosses them onto the bed then starts to jump on it. Her childish demeanor angers Anai even more. "Enough!" Her fists are white with frost and shaking. Icicle daggers point at the girl as she stops jumping. She laughs.

"You threaten my life after I've come all this way to give you a message from Cain?" she says, her accent otherworldly. Anai's daggers don't disappear but her hands unclench ever so slightly.

"What is the message?" Corax jumps once into the air and floats down to sit cross-legged on the bed, her head cocked to the side like a curious bird.

"Army fleets are arriving in a couple days from Ulikar to aid the king here in Lutenia against the shape shifters. The humans feel something deadly in the air and with the humans here knowing of the imminent war soon coming, they want to be ready. Cain has sent letter to a clan in the south to help us, but the fact remains if they'll even help. Clans don't tend to help one another in case of one falling. How selfish are we shape shifters." She smiles nastily. "But you humans are no better with your justice and prancing around like the light is you."

"I'm not one of them and you know that Corax," she bites. "I'm a Nymph."

"Oh, yes, yes, quite right. You are a Nymph aren't you? Tell me Nymph do you know how a Nymph kills her prey? Do you know how they live? Do you know what they can truly do? Do you know what they eat?" She practically bites the word 'Nymph'. Her eyes widen with each question, two black pits where her eyes used to be. "Do you know why all those men came for you and your mother?" At the mention of her mother, Anai's room starts to freeze.

The window's glass cracks and freezes, the doorknobs crystallizing, the bedspread and canopy frozen into place, hardening. Excitement crosses Corax's face at the sudden anger of Anai, growing once again. "Those men came to use you. To rape you. If a human male rapes a Nymph, she is his slave for all eternity –more or less. Sadly, mortals and humans never understand that once a Nymph is soiled, they become mortal and powerless. Ironic, isn't it? Now why would mommy dearest betray her only child? Oh." She looks over Anai's shoulder at the wall, her eyes unfocused. "Mommy dearest wasn't any mother at all. She kidnapped you, you know." Anai's frozen in place. She can't breathe.

The two containers of medicine freeze to the bedspread, solidifying into small rock-like shapes. The vanity mirror shatters, glass shards showering down onto the vanity's top and onto the chair and floor. "Your mother, a random woman named Kellsie, just found you one day. She lived by traveling with her lover all across the world, their last spot the village right before The Teeth that separated your homeland from the humans'. I was there, watching. I'm everywhere."

Anai's shoulders start to droop, her ice crumbling and shattering. Corax continues her harshness.

"She found you at the shore from The Teeth, a small baby floating on a block of ice, naked. She was barren and couldn't bear children but when she found you, she thought her prayers were filled. She took you back home with her to the little village with a pond, but it soon turned on her. The lover had an affair and ran away with a neighbor. They both died at sea months later. Kellsie, alone with a baby that wasn't her own, made friends with another neighbor over cups of warm tea and the fact that their children were so young. Little Cain and little Anai, children together. Everything was fine, but then she found out. Oh, mother found out.

"Cain and you were playing one day, you were barely a toddler, and you saw your mommy burning with fever. She collapsed in the snow. Cain helped take her into your house and left to get his mother. You held her hand and, feeling how hot it was, cooled her down. That's when she knew. That's when she wanted to kill you. Get rid of you."

Everything thaws and melts into nothing, leaving the room completely normal as if it weren't frozen over moments ago. Hearing where she's from makes her happy but finding out she's just a being created out of thin air makes her feel less human, less normal.

Anai's hollow as she walks around Corax on her bed, picks up the containers, and places them on the bedside table. "If..." she stutters, swallows. "If that's all that Cain has to say, then you may leave." But Corax already flew out the window.

She leaves the window open and fixes the bed before moving over to clean the glass. She catches her face in the leftover shards of glass still in the mirror, splintered and broken. Her face appears in several different places. In one shard, she looks like a young girl, smiling. Another, she's a human, another where she's a grown woman with a family. The next where she shifts into a wolf with Cain by her side, both running through the deep snow in a race. The last and largest shard shows her how she is now; disheveled, hair almost white with frost, eyes wild –pupils almost nonexistent- her entire body a shade of blue and pointed teeth with fangs. Her nails are long, pointed into sharp razors.

Looking at herself, she cackles, sounding almost like Corax.