Ties That Bind

Winter Child pt. 2

Note: Same warnings still apply- it's going to contain a ton of violence.

Falen told her to wait by the cave, and she has- but it has been days. She doesn't know how many days it has been. She has seen the sun rise and set and rise and set and rise and set. She is alone and hungry and tired and she has not had soap to bathe with, so she is smelly, too.

Falen told her to wait, but the black smoke clouding the sky has gone away, so she puts on his cloak, which drags behind her as she walks. She clutches the dagger he gave her and slowly makes her way back home to the great city of Elsterwen. Perhaps- perhaps they had just forgotten about her, which has never happened before, but adults are sometimes forgetful and need reminders.

The first thing that hits her is the awful smell, which she has no words to describe. She gags and pinches her nose shut and keeps on walking because she is brave. Panna has always told her that she is brave and so she will be brave. She will be brave, but as she approaches the crown city, she finds that she is afraid. The smell only gets stronger and memories of slick red on the ground and screaming pop into mind.

She breaches the first line of trees and comes out from between two houses, feet stepping lightly onto the cobbles. Her foot hits something hard, so she looks down and wishes she hadn't.

There is an elf man on the floor and his head is cracked open and his skin is rotting. His ears have been ripped off and he is trampled on, covered in congealed blood. He smells so so so bad and it's like that time Unna took her out into the woods and they found a dead deer that was killed by some animal. It was rotting and it smelled like this. Unna told her not to look and had turned her away, covered her eyes, but Unna is not here, so Ofelia looks.

She steps over the dead man and continues down the path, pinching her nose between her fingers with one hand, dagger gripped tightly in the other. Falen's cloak drags on the ground, catching on rubble and dragging through pools of blood and ash.

Most of the buildings are burnt. The roofs are blackened, sporting gaping holes where the ceilings fell in. Some buildings are just shells of what they were, looking as if they might crumble at a single touch. Ofelia's eyes water and she looks around, sight falling on the white castle on the side of the mountain, which has been reduced to a pile of stones.

"Panna?" she calls. "Unna?"

Her heart beats wildly and she takes shaky steps through the city streets.

"What happened to it?" she remembers asking that day in the woods when she had found that deer with Unna at her side.

Unna had taken her hand and turned her away, dragging a slender hand through her hair. "Something hungry. It is the way of the world, my Ofelia. You will know it one day, as we all do. It will go into the earth and Orian will give it a new life. Don't look at it. Such sights you will see when you are older. Keep to me, my Ofelia. Don't wander off."

She is older than she was then, but not by much. She is brave and she is older and she will be nine in the winter. She is a winter child and winter children are older spirits than all of the others- Unna told her so.

Ofelia walks to the center of town and sees them there. Five spikes, five heads. Now, she knows why they never came for her.

Ofelia steps forward, shaking. Her breaths come in short gasps, in out in out in out- and she looks up at their heads, collapses onto her knees, and pukes.

"It is the way of the world, my Ofelia," Unna had told her once. "Don't look at it."

She hears Atriel's voice in her head, feels his hands carding through her hair. She squeezes her eyes shut and shakes, heaving. "Shhh. It is just a bad dream, lilula. It is all right. Shhh. Go back to sleep. I am here."