The forest had always whispered her name ~ in the slow hush of wind through hollow trunks, in the soft murmur of leaves brushing together high above the earth. It was a sound that drifted through the dark like breath from something vast sleeping beneath the roots.
Tonight the whispers followed her.
Rue ran.
Branches clawed at her arms as she fled deeper into the ancient wood, their shadowed fingers snagging her sleeves and hair reluctant to let her pass. The air tasted wrong here ~ wet, metallic, thick with the scent of moss and something ancient.
Her lungs burned. Each breath scraped her throat raw like swallowing glass.
Behind her the wind moved again.
A soft stirring through the trees.
Rue…
Perhaps it was only the leaves.
She should never have followed that thin ribbon of moonlight winding between the trunks after twilight bled out of the sky. Should never have ignored the way the forest leaned inward as she walked, the branches arching together overhead like the ribs of some titanic carcass.
Listening.
Waiting.
The whisper came again, faint as memory.
Then~
Pain.
A crimson starburst bloomed between her collarbones.
The arrow tore through her throat with a dull, wet thud. Air fled her lungs as her body pitched forward, collapsing into the moss that carpeted the forest floor. The earth received her with unsettling gentleness, as though it had long expected her return.
Her trembling hands rose to her throat.
Feathers brushed her fingertips.
The shaft quivered where it had buried itself deep in flesh, and when she touched it warmth spilled through her fingers ~ thick blood sliding between them in slow, glistening ribbons that steamed faintly in the night air.
The forest inhaled.
Above her, the branches creaked softly.
Rue tried to scream.
What escaped her was a wet, bubbling gargle that spilled crimson over her lips and down her throat. The sound seemed swallowed by the trees, absorbed into the endless hush of the woods.
The wind shifted.
This time the whisper lingered longer, curling through the canopy like breath through an open grave.
Her strength ebbed.
She sank back into the damp cradle of moss and stared through the torn lace of branches.
The sky stretched above her in a vast and merciless abyss. The moon floated there, pale and distant ~
It watched her the way deep water watches the drowning.
Around her head the flowers swayed.
Pale blossoms trembled in the wind, their hollow sockets glistening with crimson where her blood seeped into the waiting soil. Their thin petals brushed together with a dry, whispering sound.
They had bloomed here before.
They had fed before.
Beneath the lovers who strayed too far from lantern light. Hunters who believed themselves masters of the wood. Wanderers who followed the wrong path beneath the wrong moon.
Something stirred beside her.
It peeled away from the gloom and took shape.
The creature descended.
It settled lightly upon the arrow still lodged in her throat, its talons curling around the shaft.
Feathers hung in ragged strips, sloughing away to reveal yellowed bone and glistening sinew beneath. Its ribs arched outward like the warped bars of a ruined cage, shifting softly whenever it breathed.
And it did breathe.
A slow... macabre rattle.
Alive in a way that mocked the quiet graves beneath the trees.
The creature tilted its skeletal head.
Its empty eye sockets caught the moonlight.
Her vision blurred. Tears slid across her temples and vanished into the moss as blood pooled thick and metallic in her mouth.
Each faltering heartbeat sent another warm tide across her tongue.
Copper.
Salt.
The taste of endings.,
The bird leaned closer.
Its beak opened slowly.
No cry escaped it.
Instead a thick droplet gathered at the tip ~ black as the space between distant stars.
It fell.
The liquid touched her lips and slid across her tongue like cold ink.
For a moment nothing happened.
Then the whispers began.
Not in the wind.
Not in the trees.
Inside her.