One Night Ago, Ess’Sylantziis

I shivered in the humid evening air. Dampness clung to my scales like an open sore, and I tried to sink into the mud of our current hideaway, deep since the last rain.

Kyrae would get us food—I just…couldn’t. Not since that night we lost our home. My power—my curse—was a wild thing, and it didn’t like being ignored.

I feared what I would do, and I knew Kyrae did too, even if she didn’t say it. The past… I don’t know how long, two days maybe? my eyes had stayed black.

In Ess’Sylantziis there was no escaping the shadows. Even during the day, they taunted me from under buildings, cast by roofs and oozing out of alleys.

As my mind swam, I felt myself start to get pulled under. I pinched myself again, finding a spot that wasn’t too sore already. For the time, it worked, but my eyes were heavy and my damp lower body was even heavier. Despite all this, my hearts beat fast and I jumped at any sudden movement.

Across from the nook I was curled up in, I watched a river snake pull itself out of the canal. Through the arm-length gap between the buildings, I could see the slow, muddy water drift by. Moonlight illuminated the area faintly; it was a good place to rest my gaze, even with the new arrival.

The snake and I locked eyes, its slitted orbs barely colored above the dark of late dusk. It flicked its tongue out at me, but I just stared. The little river snake, perhaps as long as my arm, was something to look at.

Something to hold my thoughts in place.

We stared for a long while, until my powers started to pull at me from places unseen. Unlike the skittish creature it should have been, the snake—brown as mud except for dark yellow eyes—continued to hold my gaze.

I almost had the feeling it wanted something. Maybe it pitied me.

I broke off first, blinking and looking away, back down the alley where I’d felt a shadow reaching toward me. When I looked back, the snake was gone. How long was I looking away?

I didn’t want to be alone tonight. Kyrae didn’t either, but something else had gotten to the last of our food and she was the only one who could get more. I just had to make it through tonight and then maybe, just maybe, things would get better.

Could I make it?

Would it matter?

Kyrae was getting worse too, but was the cause her or was it me? If I made it through tonight, there would be tomorrow. And the next night. And the next and the next and the next.

I stared hard at the moonlit gap in the buildings, watching the canal water slowly drift by.

What is my future?

Do I have a future?

How long can I keep this up?

How long can I hold out?

The answer was so close…

I tried to focus against the increasing chill of the mud. Far away from sunlight and my sister, I felt myself slackening. My heavy lower body got heavier and heavier until I couldn’t hold my upper body up anymore. I felt cool mud on my cheeks.

The shadows weren’t any darker than the moonlight, the more I stared at them. My arm wouldn’t move much, but I didn’t need a pinch anyway. Cloying darkness reached out toward me, pulling me down into its embrace.

Hungry.

Tired.

Cold.

***

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I forced my eyes back open. I can’t lose focus now—

The alley was gone. Everything was gone. All around me, the cold pressure of the void of my dreams pushed down.

And I felt exhausted.

But in my sleep, I couldn’t truly sleep. Every moment I spent without struggling, the cold ran deeper. Whatever this was—wherever this was—was killing me.

I thought of Nyss’s death, of the warm lives on Founding Day, and of how my curse loathed that warmth. I thought of the desire to smother it, to drag it down into the void that assaulted me every time I closed my eyes and let my mind drift away.

The darkness had me. Had a part of me or my mind or all of my mind or part of my mind or something of what made me me.

This time, I tried to sprint away, my tail sliding as if against slick mud. I felt like I was pushing into solid earth, and even without breath I felt like suffocating.

I don’t want to die like this. I don’t want to leave Kyrae alone.

So I screamed. I shouted. I lashed out and bit and swung my body at my prison.

At first, nothing happened. I spent energy I didn’t know I had doing something I knew would only hurt me. Moments later, I realized the gravity of my mistake.

I wasn’t alone.

And the moment I realized as much, I wished for the comforting embrace of the alleyway I’d lain in just moments ago. Whatever I’d gotten the attention of was massive. Impossibly massive: of a scope and scale I could never possibly grasp.

All around me, something shifted. The pressure increased tenfold; air that didn’t exist was driven from lungs I might have had. Despite the fear that gripped me, I had to see what this presence truly was—I didn’t want to end without knowing exactly what I’d called down upon myself.

Somehow, I forced my head up, staring out into the black abyss. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t see anything. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I didn’t know what I hoped to see or that I’d even understand it if I did.

To whatever had me here, I was nothing. Unfortunately, I was nothing that had just shouted enough to be worth a fraction of its attention, and that weight alone crushed me.

I couldn’t scream. It wouldn’t matter.

Cold and dark and freezing wet suffused through me. Tendrils of nothing grabbed at me and boulders of pure pressure shattered my scales. Around me, the void pulsed and shifted as if alive, as if my existence was like a splinter under a scale. I couldn’t know if this presence might have been alive or if it simply was and I was not.

Not yet.

Through all this, through forces that should have ended me—snuffed me out in a moment—I felt that something was wrong.

This void was wrong.

Whatever presence had noticed me was something I couldn’t see. Maybe that was because there wasn’t anything to see. Thoughts and memories started to crack in my head and I had the manic flash of an idea that maybe I was still thinking only because the presence around me wasn’t.

Even still, I was fading. I was fading and sliding along through the blackness toward some horrible fate.

Thoughts slowed. Motion slowed. I can’t do this anymore.

I had nothing left.

The slide lasted longer than I could count, and I grew weaker each time my mind surfaced enough to think of how miserable this whole situation was.

I didn’t really notice my movement slowing. Wherever my end was, it was close.

Until the first mote of light shone in the dark, I didn’t notice the void fading—the stars shining through. Once I saw, I stared at them in wonder.

Gorgeous.

They were the only thing I had seen in what felt like forever. All my memories were eons ago for how bright and blurry the stars were as they narrowed to a single band across my vision.

And then they too faded. I slipped back, but with a hint of warmth and a feeling, briefly, of a hand, warm, small, soft, and familiar, holding my own.

I shook my head. Tried to clear my thoughts. Whatever I’d seen, its attention had passed. Once again, I was floating in an all-too familiar, all-too terrible nothingness.

Nothingness.

Nothing! The pressure—the attention of that thing was gone.

Compared to what I’d been through the last eternity, this cold emptiness was almost soothingly benign. Hissing in concentration, my fangs bit painlessly into my lower lip as I forced my teeth together. I focused on my memories: bad or good; I focused on anything I could find.

Time again wore down my strength. The stars and the warmth were fading into memory when I heard something.

A whisper of a shout.

Issa.

The voice was familiar. My memories told me so. My tail twisted and coiled, numb like an arm slept and drooled on by a dear sister. Voice as my only guide, I pushed toward the echoing sound with everything I had left.

Then, like falling upward through cold water, I felt myself surfacing. Progress burned like sharp rocks on my scales as feeling I’d long since forgotten came burning back. Ever so slowly, warmth returned.

“Issa!” I felt a warm body fall over me, squeezing feebly.

Other shouts, unintelligible, reached my ears.

The warmth was pulled off and I missed it, reaching up with numb arms toward where it had been taken. Soon, it returned, more slowly this time.

“Kyrae,” I whispered, certain.

“Issa!” Kyrae cried again, her voice a hoarse whisper.

I didn’t say anything—I just held my sister, afraid to open my eyes. The lids stuck when I tried, and flickering light poured in like the sun the moment I managed to crack my eyes open. The blur above me moved closer and something wet landed on my cheek.

I blinked, and the first thing I saw was Kyrae’s face, tear-streaked and gaunt. Her emerald green eyes were blurry with tears, but her face held a smile so wide it looked like it probably hurt.

“Green,” she whispered.

“Huh?” I coughed, my throat so dry that the single syllable hurt to say.

Kyrae sniffled hard, not bothering to rub the snot from her face. “Your eyes are a beautiful green.”