Secret Places and Hidden Things

Chapter Three

Marelle was floating in the nothingness of space. After the confines of the helm, the stars were vast around her, and she took her time looking. The sun was bright, but it did nothing to light the void beyond. She could look at it without pain. Every detail of its atmosphere was known to her, like long, thin filaments floating their way out into the black around it.

Far ahead, the star she was chasing glowed brightly. The morning star. The star of infinite potential. The defiant star. She had watched it for a long time, but she had never known it. She had never held it or understood it. As she drew closer it became no bigger, it just brightened and fractured its light into a myriad of colors. Perhaps it was trying to dazzle her, ward her away. She wouldn't let it escape.

With a rainbow burst, and the sound of singing crystal, it split into five lights, each spinning dizzily in a different direction. Within the lights shone five realities, each complete in their own right. Bright lizards and floating jellyfish—peacocks, toucans, and ruby eyed goats—went spraying in all directions. Greedy vines and impatient trees crawled their way across her vision, vibrating with color like so many fireflies. Water and fire washed the empty spaces creating golden music and burning with the smell of winter spice.

She would not be distracted. She would not fail now that she was so close. She pulled the fox fur close around her, tumbling through the air, and in a movement she was transformed. Four legs and sharp teeth tore through the five realities. She ran atop a jellyfish road and strangled the peacocks with greedy fangs. The colors ran together and the fire chased her, lightning crackling just beyond her whipping tail. Deftly she undulated through all she saw and finally broke free once more into the emptiness, five realities dying behind her.

Still, the star was quicker. This time it became both infinite and non-existent. This might have stalled her in some distant past, but a madness had overcome her and she would never weary. The infinite could not outpace her, and the nonexistent could not elude her. Her mind was clean—purified by obsession.

The star was no bigger in her vision, but it was closer. She could feel it. The light began to bend and vibrate within it, and the sound it made was green and sweet. It was a rainbow, but softly, with colors appearing like opalescence inside a marble white. Closer, still, she came, and finally she could discern a shape. It was like a stone, small and rounded, but folded and compressed organically. A trail of shimmering dust floated behind it—a glitter of broken ice and summer sand ringing softly like sleigh bells.

As soon as she became close, she was far again. The star had changed the way space worked, distending the smallest measurement into the largest, folding the universe within itself. Still, she would not be deterred. The star could bend across any distance and she would find it. She had forever, and the possible had become inevitable.

"We are the same now," she said quietly, her normal voice lost within slavering jaws, her mind lost to monstrosity. "You will never escape."

The star did not respond. Instead, it stopped entirely.

This was its most clever trick, tapping into her greatest weakness. She understood what had happened, and she knew what could be done to claim the star forever, but it was impossible for her. She could not become still while her entire existence was driven by obsession.

She screamed in fury and tore at the fur around her, throwing it from her body like a diseased rag. She pulled a massive, glittering sword from her waist and slashed at it, slicing and shredding what she had paid for with blood and pain. It was cursed, like everything else she had.

With an almighty heave, the heavens threw her, and in a trail of fire, she ripped apart the sky. The clouds blasted apart around her, and she landed among the rocks and snow, defeated in a cold and lonely place. Shreds of fox fur fell around her wetly, the blood that was alive within it leaking out onto the ground. With nothing but her sorrow to guide her, she gathered the fur and pieced it back together, sewing the seams with her misery and regret. It was no longer beautiful, as it had been when her confidence made it. Now it was a horror, and the form she took beneath it even worse. But she needed it. There was no other choice.

The landscape was unforgiving, but she didn't care. She was also unforgiving. The snow was thick on the trees, and the trees were taller than her mind could comprehend. They stood behind her like a vast wall, nothing but darkness beneath them. The sky was churning, clouds filling in the hole she had made as she fell. Beneath her the ground was blasted, and a taste of sulfur lingered in the air, burning ashes mixing with the large, wet flakes. Far ahead, across a vast plane, massive mountains thrust upward, black and white and menacing. They marched away into the clouds, each larger than the one before it. Somehow everything was too big, the light was too bright, the shadows too dark. She might have been afraid, but she had lost most of her emotions.

She set out across the plane, the snow melting around her from the heat of her body. A smear of gore followed her as the fur bled out. She could feel it writhing in pain around her, but she felt no mercy. It was a long march, but even after she had walked for hours the trees were no less menacing behind her, and the mountains had grown still larger.

She would start here.

She had cooled enough to touch the snow, so she rolled a ball and fashioned a seat. She took off the fur and laid it over the snow, sitting delicately and crossing her legs. She sat facing south, with the trees on one side and the mountains on the other, a vast, empty plain of white between them as far as she could see. This would be her palace, this corridor between the wilds.

Yet, she didn't have the star.

How could she build a palace without potential? She had tried this already and failed. She sat quietly and thought. She had all the time she needed, now.

Then it came to her. If she couldn't make something new, she would steal. It had worked with the fox. With a fluid motion she drew the sword and slashed at the void before her. The sky fractured, the ground rumbled, and a fissure opened in the air. She could see a room made of white marble, pink and cerulean swirling in the niches, gold trimming flowering along the pillars and walls. She reached out her left hand and grasped the essence of the room. With the slightest motion she plucked it from reality like a hurricane swallowing a village. The colors and sounds burst apart and spun into oblivion.

Slashing again with her sword, she cut the fracture itself, and the cracks crumbed away into snow. Then, she dropped the room at her feet. In a moment she was surrounded by an endless hall stretching away to the south, a long red carpet running straight into infinity with massive windows to hold back the wilds. Her chair was an elegant throne, snow white quartz shot through with seams of bloody agate.

With a gleeful laugh, she grabbed the fur and gave it a single shake. Her regret flew from it like an angry bird and crashed through the nearest window to escape. The coat was beautiful once more, a golden pelt to match her dress. Her eyes flashed, and she leapt upon her throne, two legs becoming four. With a snarl she followed through the window.

She would not give up the hunt just yet.