❝ Anitchka, Anitchka, will you not invite me in? ❞
In which a girl is indebted to a wintry demon for saving her life, and the gold from her fingertips is a magic whose price she must repay tenfold. Unless she guesses his name first.
| loosely based...
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SHE FASTENS A DARK cloak around her shoulders, standing outside the mansion. Light snow dusts her hair, an unstrung slew of pearls disappearing into her strands of obsidian. Anitchka had reconsidered her actions, and in that span, the evening had pushed itself into the folds of the night.
Dmitri voices his concerns with each of her steps towards the edge. "This won't do."
Anitchka's goblin attendants accompany her, their gnarled hands twisted before them, clasping each other. She doesn't understand why they take her word, listen to her, but perhaps it is the order of the Count.
The tunnel she had entered this kingdom through has its thorns protruding, claws waiting to push her away. They are a mesh of branches that twitch to separate the line between the dead and living. It hollows towards the pathway that leads to her home, its haggard roots buried in the depths of the white ground and its canopy looming overhead. Anitchka begins running, dragging her feet through the snow. Her band of creatures follow her as the tunnel spirals and spirals with dead branches that seem to close in. They spin around her, twisting and turning as she brushes past them. She thinks that she sees the faintest glimmer of the other side, and yells, "We're done – we're almost there."
That is her first mistake.
Then, she looks behind at Olga, Helga and Dmitri, and it is her second mistake.
Don't look back. He had said that to her once, in a dream perhaps. Don't look back.
Darkness filters ahead, the spiralling thorns endlessly long. Still, she runs and runs. Anitchka stumbles over the branches, as though they had grabbed her by the ankle and pulled her down. Dmitri hops before her, worried. "Bones, Bones?"
"Mistress, are you fine?" Olga asks, kneeling at her side.
The end of the tunnel has closed, swallowed itself whole from the void of darkness into the mess of dead, branch limbs. There is no end and there is no beginning. Merely the shadows that consume her, and the weight of winter that chills her to the bone. Anitchka rises to her feet, adjusting her eyes to the darkness. She inhales slowly, looking around her. All she sees are the devilish branches, and the curtain of darkness that shrouds them.
Anitchka rushes to the curve of the tunnel, digging her fingers through the branches, and pulling at them. "We can get out of here." The rotten twig ends snap and fall to the ground, but they never cease. As her fingernails chip, bruising, the spiny things seem to grow over and over. The more she attempts to rid of them and find a way out, the more they crawl and weave into a nest.
Those dead branches are living.
She pants, fingers still uprooting the edges of the tunnel.
"There's nothing you can do," says a voice from behind her, and she freezes. Neither her goblin attendants nor the winged creature she knows speak. Anitchka turns, suddenly pushing herself into the very thorns she had been tearing apart.
