Esper sat inside of the dark, little house, nested in the far corner on the floor facing towards the locked door. Her hands fiddled with the little necklace. She enjoyed its seemingly always cold touch on her fingers, it bit through the thick, dewy heat that always permeated the air here. It was such a strange, little thing. The process of aimlessly weaving the chain between her fingers gave her an odd sense of satisfaction. It was too dark to see again, but her fingers constantly ran over the grooves and indents of the pendant, carefully tracing every part of it into her memory.
It had been several hours since she had returned and locked herself inside the small house. Sleep wouldn’t come for a long time yet, and the next daylight would come even later than that. She leaned back, bumping the back of her head against the wall behind herself with a groan. The girl quietly mumbled her frustrations to the necklace, before tucking it safely back beneath her dress. Her stomach growled and emitted a painful twang. In a fruitless attempt, she got up and took a step over, her hands reaching out into the darkness to feel for the cauldron. There, her fingers grazed the rough metal of the large pot.
Bending towards it she reached her arm down into it, feeling once more for anything left inside. With a grunt, she bent over further, the rim of the pot pressing into her stomach and her feet lifting off of the floor, which gave a small creek of relief as her weight left it. Her nails scraped the very bottom of the pot, causing her to wince at the disgusting noise and sensation it brought her. There was still nothing left inside of it, which wasn’t a surprise really since she had just checked five minutes ago. But it was worth checking again, thought the girl to herself as she pulled back and replanted her feet. The floor creaked.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, looking down over her shoulder towards it. It was about time she guessed and bent down to grab a handful of the ashy, dark blue branches from beneath the cauldron. Once she had a large handful she placed the bigger pieces to the side and broke them down into smaller, but still sizable chunks. Grabbing a handful of them she placed them all in a corner under the pot, pushing the rest of the wood and tinder aside. Getting on her knees, the girl bent down forwards with the two small rocks in her hands and struck them against each other, her eyes dazzled by the many sparks flying wildly around the darkness.
Once more, several of them managed to find a home in the pile of wood, and once more she fostered them with a kind whisper. Soon, they flourished and began to glow with a deeply warm light. The fire was tiny, and burnt with only slow intensity. The dull orange hue it emitted wasn’t particularly bright, yet it still hurt her eyes at first. Though she quickly adjusted to its presence. She got up and took a large step over the floor towards the bed, reaching under her pillow with both frail hands, to pull out an old, worn book.
It was rough and clad in a time-stained, dried out and crinkled leather. The tattered front-cover was indistinguishable from the similar one on the back, any designs or embroidery they held were long since worn through and vanished. The spine was frayed and only holding together because of a single coarse thread, that snaked its way through from top to bottom. ‘THUMP!’ She turned to the door and held her breath, her heart jumping in her chest. ‘Thump!’ it shook again, as something once again struck it from the outside. Her eyes wide, she stood there quietly for a time. Nothing else came of it. They had never knocked before. The house was supposed to be safe. Odd.
Her beating heart slowing now back to normal, she returned to the spot by the cauldron and sitting down criss-cross, placed the book on her lap, obscuring most of her infirm legs. She bent down forwards, her back arching as she pressed her face closer to the pages to see them clearly. Gently opening the front cover, she was greeted by a page filled with a series of scrawls made by some other hand, it always caught her eye though she didn’t know what it said. The letters weren’t like the rest in the book, they looked very rough and hastily scrawled. “H- Hex- bl-blut” She turned the page. The writing changed now, it was clean and uniform and filled the core of all of the pages from there-on out, seemingly belonging to whoever made the illustrations as well.
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Esper stared at the letters and began following them with her eyes, whispering the few words she knew by heart and skipping over those that she didn't, resulting in her mumbling a collection of mostly repetitive and mostly unconnected gibberish. She repeated this for several pages and then stopped to look at the first picture. The page was feeble and thin, the ink from the other side eating its way through the paper, staining and warping the depiction of a man. His features were obscured and warped by the intrusion, giving him a strange appearance of a silhouette melting into the words. It had gotten worse. She quickly turned the page as the hairs on her neck stood up. She didn’t like looking at him.
The book was large, but not particularly long. After the initial cluster of words it was mostly illustrations of plants and people and strange things she had never seen, save for in the confines of the pages. Each page had hastily drawn scribbles and notes in a writing she recognized, different from the other two. She even knew some of the words and whispered them as well, wondering what her mother had been trying to say through them. She turned the page, pulling her face back to make room for the movement and saw the familiar drawing of the red trees, next to it three words that she had long since carved into her own memory, like the rest of these well read pages. But she was still unable to pronounce them.
Turning over the pages one after the other, she absorbed the sights hidden within. Strange obscure things, she had never seen outside of the ink bindings that shackled them to the old stained and crinkling paper. Faces of people she never met and plants she had never seen grow. Strange animals that weren’t birds and odd collections of dots and lines she could make little sense of. Many different handwritings filled the book, only one she knew the creator of. Some were wide and opulent, taking over more of the page than the core elements and others were weak and frail, as if hiding in the shadows beneath the words so that only those who sought them could then find them.
The one she recognized was curly, with long swoops on several letters, each ending in sharp and jagged points. She was almost through the old tome now. As was tradition, she stopped on a particular page near the end of the book. The paper here was particularly frail and warped from moisture. No hand dared stain it with writing, leaving only a single drawing taking up most of the page. A single human skull with deep, thickly blacked out eyes. The edges were jagged and rough, miniature spires growing out of the bone in all directions. Insects she couldn’t comprehend swarmed in and around the openings of the maw, coating some parts of it so fully, as if it were the man's own flesh.
Cocking her head she stuck out her tongue and wet the bottom of her thumb and pressed it onto the forehead of the skull, letting out the chant she had witnessed so many times “Anheischig.” The whisper thin paper gave a sharp crinkle, as the weight of her skeletal hand pressed against it, save for the center which absorbed the stain of her spit. Satisfied that her studies were complete, she gently closed the large book with both hands and closed her eyes for a moment, feeling the pangs of her empty stomach returning to her now that her mind had returned from focus.
It was still somewhat early and she wasn’t really tired, but maybe if she slept she wouldn’t feel her hunger, thought the girl, standing up and heaving the book up with some more effort than it had taken before. Walking over to her bed, she tucked the book back beneath her pillow. Taking off her dress, she took a look at the blurry vague shape of the necklace once more in the dim, dying light and then sat down on the bed. Quickly slumping over, her eyes facing the dying kindling in the center of the room. Her vision quickly gave way to the encroaching darkness and she saw nothing else for a time.