1: She Told Me To run

Also available as an audio episode on YouTube.

Part I: Transportation

The thick brush scraped my legs as they slammed into the muddy, slick with moss, stones that lined the wooded path. Thorns and branches tore tiny rips into my muscular calves. My chest was heavy from the percussion of my feet as I raced through the forest floor. The night sky was barely visible through the crimson autumn leaves that would soon litter the ground. I gagged as the smoke filled my lungs. The smell that curled into my nostrils was a foreign choking scent. As it burned my airways, I mused that the aroma of my burning homestead, every belonging I ever had, held no familiarity.

I couldn't smell the scent of the herbs my mother hung in the kitchen. Nor the earthy sweet hay that filled my mattress that I would fling my body into, after collecting and preparing those same herbs. Nor could I smell the balm for the pain my father worked into his rough farmer's hands or the bread my mother had just slid into the dutch oven moments before I arrived at home. All those familiar smells were replaced by ash, accelerant, and sickeningly of all, by the smell of burning meat, which I couldn't identify. I was sure, truly sure, that my home was destroyed. Nothing would be left. Not a home, not a building, not a loved one.

I couldn't see as the smoke started to mix with the darkness; I didn't sense the direction I was running. I knew only that I needed to be away, far away as this body could take me from that fire, far from that beast. So I ran in whatever direction took me farthest from the horrific scene that was once my life: a simple life, but one I treasured with every bone in my body. I turned my head back just for a moment, thinking that maybe, just maybe, my father, my mother, or at very least our sweet sheepdog Nell might be running with me. But in the distance was a shape, far too large, far too hellish. The beast's body was too elongated to be human, limbs at painfully wrong angles. Menacingly it reached its large, twisting appendages out, wrenching its demon-like claws into the air. The roar that escaped the beast's mouth, filled with gnashing serrated fangs, sounded like an unholy choir. It screamed for me.

Illustration by Ana Kajaia

"Where are you, child? Stay! There is nowhere to go, no place you can hide from me. I am everything and nothing. I am in the wind and the darkness, and you will break—"

A feeling of sickly weightlessness cut the beast off as I dropped into an unforeseen pit. My heart and stomach felt as though they were pushing up through the top of my throat. I fell far too long. Every second that passed, I expected that I soon must be hitting the bottom of wherever this pit led to.

Was I falling or flying? I bobbed with some invisible current, helpless to its ebbs and flows like a jellyfish.

Maybe I had died. Was this a purgatory for a life not lived? I hadn't done much in my twenty-three years as an adult. I was not a child as the beast had screamed. Anything looked tiny compared to its heinous form, perhaps an easy mistake. Maybe I deserved this. Had the beast gained on me in some bending of time and space and taken me from the mortal coil? The answer came violently, painfully, and unexpectedly as my head smashed into something sharp and hard. Blackness filled my field of vision as warm wetness poured from my skull- despite the pain, it was not unwelcome silence that befell me.

I awoke abruptly, disoriented, with a searing pain at the very back of my skull. I reached toward the nape of my neck and felt the massive amount of blood that had leaked from a wound that felt so deep, and I dared not test the depth of it with my hands. I had no idea how much time had passed, it was oh so dark, but I didn't think I was under the night sky, as the air smelled stagnant and damp. A cave? Had I fallen into a cave during my escape?

The land around my home had such rich soil, fed with sub-terrain springs and all the life in them as it was born and then rotted again in some endless cycle. That cycle filled our land with all those essential nutrients for our crops. My family assumed the ground had always been so fertile because of those hidden rivers, our farm so blessed with abundant harvests. That was the rumor, at least, a series of snaking underground rivers and lakes. It had always seemed like a magical and impossible idea before I fell, before the beast. But, as I sat in the stagnant cold cave, the word magical didn't seem right for this space. Terrifying might be better. I indeed hadn't fallen that far— I wouldn't be alive. Although part of me still questioned whether or not I was. 

What was worse? Death at the hands of that beast or slowly bleeding out here in this earthen prison- trapped. Part of me wished that my death could have been brought swiftly by the beast's claws if I could not escape this darkness.

My racing thoughts quickly became searing pain as I attempted to hunch my shoulders forward into a seated position, red flashing behind my eyelids as the pain blossomed all over my stiff body. Slowly, I righted myself, realizing that I sat in a shallow pond. Again, my body seared in pain. The water level raised to just below my thighs, maybe fed by those ancient springs. The water was certainly cold enough to suggest that.

I was lucky. Lucky that I had landed on my back, I would have easily drowned in my unconscious state. My head throbbed again as I raised my hand to it. I laid back gingerly onto the jagged rock, the same rock that I assumed had split my head. I needed to focus. What steps could I take to help me out of this dangerous situation? I was never prepared for even mundane inconveniences, let alone the life-threatening predicament I found myself in now. 

They were gone. My mother, my father- I had them for twenty-three years, and it wasn't enough. I was sure no one could have survived that. What was that monster that so quickly dispatched everything I love? What had my mother done to anger him so? I needed help, and I surely would fade soon, bleeding in this cold pool. I needed to get out, get help. It was so incredibly overwhelming—I began to cry. I wasn't sure how I hadn't let these tears out yet. The tears dropped into the frigid pool; rubbing my hands into my eyes, they stung with blood and muck. 

"I need to get out of here!" I said aloud. My mother had gifts, and she could have tended these terrible wounds I received in the drop into this pit. Although she never called herself a healer, the village knew she was. They sought her out whenever anyone needed help—her potions and poultices all grown on the farm. I would give anything to smell those herbs, although I don't know what I even possessed left to give. "I don't know what to do, I need help!" I sobbed as I pounded my first against the water, small wakes forming as a reaction, billowing out from my clenched hand. 

The energy shifted quickly, the wish forming in my mind and making its way out of my lips. My fingertips felt it first. The small thrumming of electricity shot up my arm, leaving sparks in its wake. Flashes of white and pink light swirled up from charged and warming waters. The water's surface tension pinched and lifted into the air as it turned into tendrils that snaked around my hips, curling over my breasts and stopping directly between my collarbones. The tip of that tendril of water warmed suddenly. A thin red fiber appeared below the surface of the pond. The water looped around the twisted yarn sparking the fiber loop with some unknown magic. The string burned for a moment, smelling hot metal and then unraveling.

As the thread broke, light from the water magnified to an inferno as bright as the sun— the slight feeling of sparks in my arm buzzed into tinny electric pulses overcame all of me. I was being lifted from the pool in that cloud of energy, vaporizing the water into fine plumes of mist. 

I was falling in reverse. My limbs were held immobile by some unseeable force. I slammed my eyes shut as the light became so bright I feared it would burn my vision in some irreparable way. My nervous system was completely overloaded. I could do nothing but wait until these lights and energy released me from its grip. 

Or until this magic consumed me entirely. 

Without warning and with the sound of a cracking whip, the energy stilled. Darkness filled my field of vision. I was not unconscious, though— I could feel soft winds pushing me up. I was rising again, further yet. I prayed it would bring me to the surface again, pleading with every part of my being that the beast would be gone. My eyes still glued shut from fear, I took the first breath I'd taken since the electrical magic had started pulsing through my body. The smell of pear blossoms filled my lungs. White flashed into my eyes- the magic buzzed and vibrated along the nape of my neck, near the injury I had sustained.