One month. That’s how long it took for the shadows to shift toward Ruby in some ways and away from her in others. Her days, like the shadows, blurred together into a tapestry of curses.
Shadows brewed from the MIDNIGHT card and rolled toward her through the entire length of the city—only to now claim up the High Chasm, finding homes in its hollows, sliding up to Ruby.
But competition was brewing. There were changes in the birds and shadows that weren’t initiated by Ruby. She was the one who’d set that straw worship into motion. Now that her people called her a goddess, who was she to retreat from the call to divinity? Like she’d said, she was no god, she was Ruby. She was the god, and no scarecrow would sweep her divine due out from under her.
And within the span of that one month, she went from mild jealousy to irritation to resentment…to now aiming to snuff Trey. Betrayal couldn’t be taken lightly. Fortune was a natural part of Ruby’s existence yet she couldn’t shed the film of wariness that layered over her soul, becoming part of her. All slights faced punishment.
The journey started with that “T” word—it was determined by the Cearth itself.
The tyrannous chain plastered against her aura with electric magnetism, darkness sparking from the friction of Cearth’s energy against her own. She shouldn’t have been so surprised. She was, though, as evidenced by her slightly opened mouth and puckered lips.
“I don’t accept this, just so you know!”
The dark word floated by the window, taunting her with its sinuous progress, curving upward and downward like a flexible spine. And when she went outside it hovered around her peripherals, edging her vision with murky clouds.
Ruby didn’t know what to do to make the intent go away. For one, it ruined her view. She was at the peak of The High Chasm, enjoying the clouds. She loved her perch. The clouds gave her the feeling of a blank canvas, infinite possibility. All the ways the world could be stretched before her as she allowed her mind to stir with peaceable images.
[POSTCARD] activated—from the postcard image in her mind. She kept many in her dresser drawer, a ziplock bag of sights that she dreamed about since The Stormcellar.
Yet the TYRANNY prevailed, dancing across her pink skies, her black skies, against any sky she chose throughout the course of that month.
She accepted this judgment as the days passed. The negative connotation wasn’t anything practical to concern herself with. Because the city was her’s. Cearth had decided that. And there was yet more for her to claim.
In the current state of affairs, she wasn’t the city’s leader—she was its owner. But like all greats, she had to start small.
She set her sights on the girl inside. They lived at the peak of the world and child Ruby was afraid of heights. The little girl was good at hiding it at first, but after Ruby’s promise to take Straw City “higher,” the fear became noticeable. Ruby let the people see her atop different ledges, making a point of looking down upon her ascension-driven flock. Each time Ruby stared down a ledge—usually at the edge of a massive, walkable tree branch—a shudder ran through her, one that was not her own.
“Really child?”
The girl glared from within. Yes, really.
Ruby had trouble believing that the girl in all her weakness became the Rubella Castór of now. As she spent more time with her other self, she was all the more awed by her survival. I’m truly amazing! If this is what I had to work with, my talent is one of a kind. Two, actually.
She corrected herself. Myst was out there somewhere, not by her side.
As a grace to her weaker self, Ruby explored her territory in small doses. She used the shadowclaws as a guide, co-opting their vision to learn what places were sturdy, and which areas had the steepest, scariest-looking cliffs to shock her inner self into bravery. The girl inside went mute, shaking so hard Ruby heard the bones rattle. Ruby’s body trembled as well, an annoying side-effect of being a host to a brat.
“I don’t own this fear. This is all you. Pathetic.”
The girl stuck her tongue out as she held both hands over her eyes, refusing to look.
“It’s no matter. I’ll fix you. You, like everyone else, will know submission.” Even Ruby knew it was a funny thing to say to herself. She decided that sometimes that was just what life takes, dominion of self.
Her stomach answered her. Grumbling from her trademark sugar-wraith hunger had only one source, her inner child. Ruby’s current moodiness also matched the sullen brat. Together they hungered, sleepless and brooding.
“You know I’m too old to glower like that,” Ruby pleaded with her child self. “Do you want me to have wrinkles?”
Yes, the girl said.
“You’re not cute.”
I am.
The girl was stone-faced, chiseled in ire.
“You’re scared of heights.”
I’m not!
“Cut it out, yes?”
Feed me.
“Starve you twiggy little bone-maiden.”
A pause. That was a little mean…
“More than that, little girl.” Ruby gestured toward the air around her, a stray “T” and “Y” from her new favorite word. “Count your blessings that you’re with me. When it’s time, you’ll feed forever.”
The girl grimaced. That’s why Myst won’t talk to you.
The girl rubbed her belly. Ruby felt phantom fingers across her own stomach, thin and scratchy.
“I’d cut you out of me if I could.”
I hate you too.
“Tell me something I don’t know. In fact, say nothing.”
Together they sat there, feeling the hunger. The cramps seemed to double. There were two of them, after all. But while the inner girl crumpled into a heap, Ruby was long used to the discomfort and placed a hand on her chin, pouting, scheming, brainstorming ways for her powers to surpass her pesky girl-shaped hunger.
Ruby stared at the horizon. The wheat fields, the city’s primary blessing, disturbed her. Swishy was out there somewhere, an indisputable life-giver. Her eyes drifted to the clouds below. It was a long, long way to the ground.
The inner girl cowered—Ruby sensed her shifting.
“Don’t you dare tremble.”
For once she listened.
“Good.”
(…)
Ruby started taking her broom rides. The fall-down-fall-forever fears corkscrewed through her insides—but the outer her was the boss. The inner girl got with the program. A little at a time. But progress was progress.
“This isn’t so bad, now is it drama-baby?”
Child Ruby kept her hands over her eyes still but offered the grace of spreading the fingers of one hand open, peeking at the broom-riding horror.
“See? You’re a brave dear.”
I hate it. The fingers closed rank again.
“Have it your way,” Ruby laughed, then spiraled. And spiraled. And spiraled again. Her stomach sickened but she loved every second of it.
The woman was a hurricane. At least that’s how she propelled the broom—by conjuring a shadowy rotor along the tail end. When she needed to stop, she slowed that rotor and created another one in the front end that spun in the opposite direction, a counterbalance of sorts. Physics—or any education for that matter—wasn’t her thing. When it came to magic she went by feel, then reverse-engineered the specifics. So maybe Ruby was a scientist, after all. A witchy one. The thought warmed her insides with glee.
There was nothing better than soaring. She gazed at the darkest clouds, searching for Myst, wanting to fly with her.
Ruby drifted at cloud speed, traveling in a lazy orbit around the town-sized tree.
The High Chasm was magically rich. The energy continuously pulsed, a phenomenon that made sense since heartbeats never stopped—until they did. And Swishy’s burrowed heart was going strong. The curses flowed through the township of a tree in a predictable circuit, just like the circulatory system of a living body. Their cyclical progression was accompanied by the same rhythm of emotions as well. Once they came fresh from the underground heart they ascended with pride and euphoria, running off the high of the potent energy, and when they reached the tree’s peak and came back downward they calmed from their mania. The downswing featured a mix of impatience, agitation, and even agony. It was the worst in the tree’s midsection, the area where the upward-flowing curses experienced their strongest hit of Swish-spirit, and the downward current was crushed in despair and ennui. The extreme presence of each spectrum threatened to be overwhelming.
Even Ruby hated sticking around the center for too long. She wished the downswing would be a little more patient. A part of her always knew that they’d achieved their blessings with unusual speed. All the immigrants from the past couple of decades were proof of their blessings.
The midsection was chaotic, though, a mix of winners and losers—even though they all had won and were guaranteed to win if they’d just sink into acceptance and gratitude.
Flying by the middle made her miss Myst the most. Now it was her impatience getting to her. She’d succeeded with Swishy’s harvesting. Trey was managing the boy and helping grow the next heart. Everyone enjoyed the fruits born from the magic seed. Nothing was bad and everything was good. In theory. In literal math. But Ruby couldn’t for the life of her decipher the unsettling feeling that she had.
The air was full of words, spelling Ruby’s emotions. TRIUMPH, SUCCESS, GREATNESS, and TREEHOUSE.
Where did that last one come from? Whatever it’s cute!
She’d reached the point where her presence was so powerful that her aura activated the enchanted energy of The High Chasm. There was no need for a card, her altar-begotten items. The world reacting to her was pleasant. It was a blessing for a chosen one. Yay, she thought to herself.
But somehow the automatic magic was bothersome in equal measure, an unreachable itch within the folds of her psyche. Ruby suspected it had to do with the darkest words, the black alphabet’s addiction to her.
She wanted to talk it over with Myst. They’d been friends for so long. Sometimes she thought of her like a mom. Other times an aunty, like when she started to joke and prod at her. Then a sister, definitely a sister, a jerk honestly—just like Ruby.
Darkness swelled below. “Are you ready?” Ruby said to herself.
The child trembled and glowered.
“I already told you those faces give you wrinkles.”
Pwoosh! Ruby plunged downward on her broom.
Fast, fast, faster.
Bliss to her system—and a shock to her skinny little friend.
(…)
Days of flying, days of studying the lair’s shadows, and days of unexpected letters—blessed outcomes but cursed words.
The witch increased her knowledge and power, arming herself against the coming threats.
As Ruby progressed in a myriad of ways, more words joined the TYRANNY. Lowercase and dark, other truths such as jealousy and thoughtlessness and callousness clung to the underside of the massive word as its flock. The words were shaped into “V” patterns, stick-figure birds that flapped around the windows, fogging up the glass with their wing tips.
A new large word was forming nearby. The first letter was “C”.
Ruby was shocked and hurt by the phenomenon. But as a master spin artist, she considered the partial word as hope in reversing the situation. It was only one letter. Not a whole thing. The judgment, the astute determination of Cearth, was yet incomplete.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
Okay, let’s fix this, shall we? Watch me make the world better.
“A” immediately appeared. It didn’t even come in gradual and thickening smoke. It was just there, insulting her.
The woman’s mind clung to Myst. She couldn’t look outside without thinking of her. Myst was everywhere and nowhere. That was her most flaunted ability.
She went inside, calming down. The dark letters tended to stay out of the house, something that Ruby suspected had to do with her aura extending in a bubble around her home. Whatever the case, she was glad for it.
Until her house greeted her. Cards slid from the decks in the drawers and shelves and books, rising upward or sticking to the walls. LONELY displayed itself in multiples. POSSESSIVE appeared several times over. JEALOUSY cards formed a house on her coffee table.
Ruby stared at the “C-A” outside, wondering if another letter would come at this moment.
She stared and stared.
Nothing came, sparing her for the moment.
T-Y-R-A-N-N-Y swam on by as its other lowercase judgments soared in its tailwind—meanness and cruelty were the newest additions.
It didn’t help that Ruby hadn’t slept. It’d been a week. No fatigue, no dark circles under her eyes, only the constant humdrum of thoughts—mostly insecurities.
And it was the lack of a Myst visit that made her most uncomfortable.
The crushed altar was placed back together over a matter of days. The birds were surprisingly good puzzle-makers. But it wasn’t sturdy. Shadows quivered around the rocks. The original scarecrow shape was formed but the structure was crumbled and cracked and—strange as it was to say about stone—traumatized.
Ruby had screwed up. It happens. The darkness has its methods of repair, of balancing, and she expected that this personified balance, Myst, would show up. When she didn’t Ruby got concerned.
What was she doing? Who is she with?
Ruby’s emotions swung. She wasn’t in a self-examination-type of mood but the cards in her home lit up, illuminating her negative traits. She shut her eyes, her magic, her senses. The woman didn’t need the truth right now.
Yet her stomach growled. A warning. But she couldn’t distract her mind from her train of thought. Where was Myst? She had her suspicions. The shadow woman was helping the others. And coming to the aid of others meant hurting Ruby.
As Ruby’s thoughts embittered, the girl inside whimpered from the next wave of hunger. Each thought launched another pang. Trey, who never liked magic, gained spells—with no obvious costs paid to the altar. There was Bristles, a wrathraven who’d grown intelligent through the darkness, something that Ruby knew Myst had a hand in.
But it was Swishy and Myst that was most bothersome. The blackwheat came from Swishy, something that Ruby had a great time weaving into foods and potions and creations, and it wasn’t lost on Ruby that that was something Myst would take interest in. She spied through the bird’s eyes, keeping a lookout for her friend. When the massive Straw Guardian was erected in the woods, she felt the marriage between soul and straw.
The partnership of Swishy and Myst created a complex mood. There were feelings—most of them bad. Ruby suffered through the wave of hunger and emotion, from which she found a succinct way to sum things up.
Myst’s altar-less freedom…Ruby didn’t like it.
Through the shadowclaw’s eyes she couldn’t get a solid look at Myst, a clarified sense of her presence, but the dark powers that Swishy wielded had Myst written all over them. He was such a potent curse. The darkness was strong and controlled. The curses complimented him, craving him, even promising to serve him.
That made Ruby tense.
The atmosphere of darkness was a feature of the city that predated her arrival. But they’d always loved the way her soul tasted, and even described the edges of her aura as ‘crispy’. And within the orb of her influence, her spirit was soft and all-encompassing. Ruby stabilized and energized the nomadic curses, becoming a refuge to many. As long as she was in Straw City, she could call on cursed power at any given moment, darkness offering its allegiance.
They now found a second home, their Swish-savior.
This feeling was cemented during a night ride. She’d seen madness through the wrathraven’s eyes, but she had to see for herself. She didn’t broom-ride long before finding the latest curse haven, the [Straw Guardian] standing taller than the trees.
Ruby watched the curses crawl along the Straw Guardian monument, admiring the blackwheat along with the occasional nodes of gold-straw. Pleasant surprises awaited them within the weaves. The curses adventured in Swishy straw. And Ruby now was stricken with a type of longing she hadn’t felt before. She missed the curses. She wanted them to come home.
Inside, her spirit was offset. A little bit by her account. But it was probably more.
C-A-L…her word-in-progress was awarded a new letter. The “L” conjured from the top bottom like an unraveling scroll, a banner that matched the height of one story of her house.
Goddess Ruby rolled her eyes; Girl Ruby closed her eyes to sleep.
H-U-N-G-E-R thundered through them both.
(…)
Birds began to die.
Or people—whatever. No difference to her.
Sometimes she caught glimpses of the action through the reports of her birds. Or staring into their souls and seeing through the darkness of their feathers, the portals of their eyes. There were fires in their vision and blackwheat in their bodies. The state of their experiences flooded into Ruby’s mind, something that she saw like a split screen. As a woman who always contended with the girl inside, living multiple lives at once was a standard feature of her existence. Splitting her attention, the burden of her consciousness, was something she easily did.
Even as she was blasted by the force of a bird’s death, she felt it as a sudden attack of heat followed by a flash-freezing of soul. The most intense moment of one’s life. And then the forever frost of becoming nothing.
It was something she didn’t feel like dealing with. They’d handle their own problems. And Ruby needed to tackle this one: making a better world.
Ruby focused more on the blackwheat, cultivating the best place for the darkness that she could. That was the goal in the first place. When she cast the [Midnight] spell, she’d invited legions of shadows to gather and migrate to her land, to feed off a Cearth that was sustained by Swish-hearts.
Ruby wanted to say that it was the altruistic impulses that moved her, but it was a transactional one. This was one thing where she behaved as the altar, providing the gift of straw heart energy while she received a payment. Those payments were the shadow bodies, whatever they had of souls.
The formula remained the same: souls feeding the heart and that heart feeding the souls.
Her dark engine had always been the plan so why must she worry? Nothing changed.
But something had changed. Ruby was uncertain about her place in the engine she was making. The more she heard that the shadows were gravitating toward Swishy, finding a home in him—being invited by him to stay—Ruby worried. And she knew that these sentiments were fueling the black language bound to her aura.
It was an odd feeling to create your replacement.
He was an empty vessel. She was an empty vessel. Swishy created—and Ruby was his crea-tor.
But as she inhabited bird after bird, she confirmed that straw was life, straw was the cure, and straw was everything that Swishy was and that Ruby was not.
The Cearth and its dreadful words knew it.
The curses had begun the process of knowing it.
And Myst, an absentee friend, balanced the scales away from Ruby.
Ruby gritted her teeth. She pressed her face against the window. Something must be done. The High Chasm may not have needed her but she refused to let it move on without her.
The sullen girl inside nodded in agreement.
Ruby and her inner self gazed into the night and shared the tightest of smiles.
On the night Ruby finally attacked, she was at the end of her rope. She didn’t know. Pain and inconvenience were normal. Hunger ravaged her insides. And she was convinced these things were nothing.
It was a normal day at home. Birds died; curses died; and her enemies down below were afraid to die—as they should be. All would be dealt with in her time.
A wide broom wound up in her hands. She didn’t know if she grabbed it from the kitchen or if one of her birds had fetched it for her. All that mattered was that she had the oversized broom—a walis tambo—in a sure, practiced grip. She swept and swept, one-two, one-two, a perfect technique. The swishing sounds gave her such serenity. She dragged the broom across the floor with added pressure, feeling the bend of the bristles, the sweet curvature of cleanliness.
The dust flew up and found itself out the window.
Ruby hadn’t used a dustpan for years. No need. When the dust was gone, dark speckles rose from the ground, her aura washing over it. Just seeing the effect of her motions soothed her beyond understanding.
And then the harmony vanished. Calmness wasn’t allowed for her.
The cards told the truth. JEALOUSY awakened all through the house, every hall, every drawer. Underneath the floor tiles and carpets and even within the walls. She had so many cards she didn’t know what to do with them so she’d had them to the shadowclaws to deposit throughout the house. The fortification would come in handy one day, she believed.
From somewhere down the hall, a SUSPICION card lit up.
“Really? What holy book is giving power to a word like that, huh?”
She waited for a beat—she didn’t mean to but when she caught herself she stopped.
Myst wouldn’t answer her. Not these days, the way they’d become.
Ruby thought back to when she spoke with Swishy and Trey in the Curseworks, the firm warnings, the not-so-veiled threats. Trey’s magic had Myst all over it. And Swishy also had something of Myst inside him, a heart that had her shadow friend’s traces all over it. The nagging idea came over her that perhaps Myst was now competition. She didn’t know what a shadow woman would do with Swishy’s heart but it seemed like something she would want. The way she moved and joked and played. Everything about Myst’s communication suggested that a heart belonged inside her.
Belonged. Ruby was stuck on the word choice. She knew. She couldn’t fool herself. Myst was competition. And Myst likely had the greatest claim to that heart. Forget that Ruby wished for a savior from the altar, that she’d paid in countless ways to birth that little straw boy, but Myst wasn’t in the altar anymore.
Ruby wondered how much freedom that shadow woman had. If Myst even had to listen to Cearth. Tremors ran through Ruby’s body from the thought of going against Myst.
Then another thought came, one more bothersome than the practicalities of farming Swishy.
Why hasn’t she visited? We’re friends, aren’t we? Come on lady, I miss you.
“You hear me, Myst? I miss you.”
New black letters crackled all around. Ruby, again, wouldn’t look. But her soul crackled against each one. The truth hurt—it didn’t move her but skin and emotion prickled from the injury.
Ruby soon received an answer to her call—from the shadowclaws. Loud, loud, loud. CACAW needed its own word in the dark. Ruby was caught in the storm of noise, something she was used to from The Stormcellar winds. But she didn’t want to hear it now. She knew what they wanted. The temperature changes of their deaths were constant irritations. Why did they die? Who were they to burden her with their weakness?
Just win and leave me alone.
Birds flew around her. They wouldn’t leave her alone. Normally they were pretty decorations but now they followed her around the house as bundles of nerves. Even their souls cast off feather-shaped pieces of aura.
There were three. She didn’t know which ones these were. Names had become obsolete long ago. These days she didn’t even know if they were sugar wraith souls that were piloting the birds or if these were true shadowclaws whose souls were affected by her OBEDIENCE spells—though she liked to consider them as honest-to-goodness pets.
When they were crying so hard that is.
She calmed down. Focused on the good. Muting herself to the noise, she gazed at their feathers. Their purple tones were lovely. And there was bonus loveliness in that such a thing was her property.
A shadowclaw perched upon her shoulder and buried its head in her neck, brushing against her eggshell-colored pearls. It crooned softly. The vibrations of the utterance sent moderate ripples beneath her clavicle and into her soul, parting the sea with a message.
Our flock is less now. There’s something out there hurting us…
It’s the savior, this…Swishy.
Please, can you help us? Can you stop them already?
Ruby bit the inside of her cheek. Why would a house pet interrupt her with something like that? Her perspective on the defeated birds was that this was a standard fact of life. Living, dying—or being killed. Nature simply went this way. Did that not expect the wild to act as such?
But a part of her was undeniably smug about it. Couldn’t be me, not I, Rubella~. The singsong in her brain brought the smile back to her lips. She petted her concerned little bird.
“Poor thing. Go out and learn some spells. Bigger animals win, yes? The stronger ones? Be strong. You have numbers. You have magic. And you have time. Work it out, you have the tools my feathered little treasure? It’s a wonderful thing to have tools.”
A caw, a nuzzle, and a pleading look.
“Now go on, my spoiled pet. I have things to do. My abyss won’t last forever.” Abyss—that’s what she called the non-hunger. A scary word to others but heavenly to her.
The bird flew out the window, joining their flock.
Tonight, Ruby followed. Why not? Flying was fun, and stomach-twisting her morose passenger was even funner.
“Let’s ride!” Ruby declared, jumping onto her levitating broom.
I can’t take anymore, said the flight-adverse girl.
“Hurtful but you’re fine. You don’t die. You don’t even starve to death for real. Be like me and ride with grace!”
I hate you.
Ruby laughed. And out the window she went.
“Y” and “R” jetted after her.
The other five letters were around somewhere, hidden behind clouds and phasing through hard surfaces.
The word was glued to the edges of her aura, at least 25-30 meters from the main body. As she flew upon the broom, the letters followed her like a dark cloud, leashed to her soul. They swam within the fishbowl of her energy, absent-mindedly drifting.
Way down on the surface level, chaos abounded. It had to be the madness of the others, the frenzied populace that brought the word—not her. Ruby knew better than that, though, because the intent followed her. She even felt the letters touching her energy, a static pop released with each movement. Why isn’t the word down there where all the craziness is?
“A” and “N” blasted holes through nearby clouds.
“R” soared through a clear patch of sky like the world’s only black comet.
The second “N” was off to the left side.
Both Y’s clung to each other on the far right.
Ruby squinted, narrowing her vision. She didn’t want to see the “T”. Even though she knew it was there her mood didn’t want that right now, not while she flew, indulging in her greatest joy.
The woman sensed the T shape on her aura right at her back, speeding, poised to spear through her body.
Emotions roiled within Ruby, a thousand flavors of agitation, and thousands more of resentment of her position.
Anger brewed again. She told herself not to get so fiery. That repose was the greater part of valor, and better yet the greater part of being a lady.
Spending many days like this wasn’t for her, she’d decided.
It can’t go too long like this…can it?
But the word had no sign of fading. Ruby, once again, had underestimated the degree to which she was cursed.
Until now she found her shadows swallowing Trey’s body; she found Swishy’s soul snapping from the tiny gold form to somewhere far off; and she found a collective of scarecrows around a bonfire, performing a strange, aura-rich ritual.
She tuned into the birds. Co-opting dozens of consciousnesses at a time. The frenzy managed to affect her, ravaging her mindscape. There was so much anxiety. There was worry. There was fast-fast flight. One of the birds writhed on the ground, gold pins stuck inside its pupils. Swishy’s gold.
Ruby’s eye throbbed. A dribble of blood ran down her cheek.
She’d done her make-up that day. She knew she was gorgeous. Why couldn’t she have this? What kind of savior makes her bleed? There was no sacrifice card at play. No rhyme or reason for her hurt. It was just meanness. Straw-bound wickedness.
She wiped the blood away with her finger and tasted it. She allowed her palate to muse over the flavor of iron and insult.
What to do? What to do? What to do? What to do?
The world she built was slipping away yet she still didn’t fathom why. She hated asking why. Why was a victim question—and she was Ruby, a victor, a queen, and now a goddess.
The C-A-L word gained letters—Ruby ignored them. Whatever caught against her aura was just synonymous with power. And that was good enough.
The first portals were made, collecting around Swishy, Trey, and the scarecrows too.
It was crushing time. Destroy and rebuild time.
She would rebuild—because that’s what goddesses do.
And Ruby had a ziplock full of postcards to do it.
(…)
A cloud changed its shape, morphing into arms, legs, and the whole body in between.
Blackness closed over what seemed to be...a heart.
Elegant fingers ran along the edges of Ruby’s “T”.
“You,” Ruby said.
And then—in her glory and beauty and betrayal—Myst came into focus.