A Mischief in the Woodwork - By Harper Alexander Page 0,56

say to that. “I do not find myself...so devastated,” I hazarded – for honesty had not gotten me killed so far.

It was suddenly her smoking utensil in her hand in place of the shackle, and she drew it to her lips a moment and then exhaled a puff of small minions.

It seemed the termites had been no metaphor of an over-imaginative vision. I watched them disperse with morbid fascination.

The woman watched me with considerable less amusement. Intensity, yes, but there was something entirely more dour on her face.

“Why not, Faller?” she asked coolly.

A truth came to me: “If I wept in the face of beauty, I would cry every day.” I did not know if it was profound, but it surprised me a little, composing such things under the circumstances.

Her face, dry as ice. “Interesting.”

A single termite escaped her stick, squeezing out and flitting off into the air.

The woman stood as abruptly as she had sat, and walked at me. I shuffled back, but only encountered the ravine wall; an unfriendly array of sandpaper fists pummeled against my back. The woman's gaze pressed me hard against them, and I squirmed as she came to tower over me.

In her catlike, nighttime eyes, I could see the deep-patterned torrents of constellations. This woman had stars buried deep within the windows to her soul.

By the gods. Who was this woman? What power did she possess? Meeting her gaze was like looking into space.

She seized my throat in one delicately-bony, crushing clawlike hand. In reaction, my grasp went to hers, as if I could hope to pry it away.

My fingers locked on the veins of her wrist, and a tide of visions I was never supposed to be privy to coursed up my arm and shockwaved my body. I saw the edge of the earth, a place where souls were kicked off or taught to fly. I saw the confidential documents of the heavens, the contracts of the angels. I looked Death in the face, shook Death's hand.

A deal.

I was a great black steed that herded people. My hooves pounded shackles on an anvil. I condemned people. Great seas of people. I drove them like a sheepdog, crowds as big as the ocean. They tripped and scattered and fell like the waves, but I galloped along my designated shores, keeping them in check. I struck the earth open with a hoof. I drove them into the great chasm that resulted, pushing them off the edge.

The sun rose and I turned golden, and as my mane swept across my face I was transformed. A woman now. I smoked a stick of parasites. Termites coursed in my lungs.

I was beautiful on the outside, but inside... Turmoil... Decay under my nails. The result of those humans that had struggled in my grasp.

But in the end, I always seduced them.

I...

I lurched to extract myself from such retrospect, struggling to shed the skin that I had seemingly drawn over myself. My perspective snapped back into my body like a slingshot, a painful ricochet, glancing off the back of my skull and flooding my vision with black spots.

Gold spots.

I shook my head, drunk from it, reeling like a sailor on deck during a storm – drenched and disoriented. It was so forceful that I broke the woman's grasp, staggering against the ravine wall.

She did not seem thrown off by the episode. With knowing eyes, she seized my wrist, and drew up my fingers for inspection. She looked first at the tattoo-burnt pattern on my fingerprints, then at the skin under my nails.

Her skin.

Four long welts were dragged across the underside of her forearm.

Letting me go, she grabbed my face instead, forcing it straight to consider my face. Dizzily, I sought focus on her features. There was no dignity in failing to so much as meet the gaze of the one addressing you.

Then she released me for good, and stepped back as I was recovering.

“We all have something under our nails we wish we could shake,” she said in apparent empathy.

I grimaced in recuperation, my throat feeling scorched from swallowing the visions. “Who are you?” I croaked. My noblest efforts to avoid the pitiful question had failed, and lay in a miserable heap at my feet.

It was not a response that acknowledged or even accepted the significance of her comment, but there was no need. I knew what she meant by it. I had seen it. I had felt it; the decay under her own nails. It was akin to the