Me and the devil

*This story contains themes of suicide, blood, gore, and death. Be warned.

“This is all my fault”. She whispered. People expect that the world would shriek as it ended, a final war cry if you will. A way to know when the end is coming. Instead, it was silent. The kind of silence of pure nothingness. When even echoes die.

Leather boots treaded black earth. Little clots of ash floated off the black ground like snow falling up. She held out her hand and watched the ash coat the underside of her palm. Wind blew her hair back from her face. It was a remnant of a different time.

Standing outside a wooden porch watching the first snow fall and covering her from head to toe in snowflakes. She laughed and looked into the air sticking her tongue out trying to taste the sky. She should’ve known back then. Nothing good lasts forever.

Eyes like pools of ember staring past her rotting flesh. Red like wilted wildflowers dried in patterns over snow filled fields. Screaming like a crow’s haunting cry echoing through the blood-soaked valley.

“A tragedy,” the news reported, that so many were lost. Papers were sent through post-offices to the doorsteps of the well-endowed. People clamored to claim a distant relative or close friend among the lost. There was shouting on the streets and journalists rushed to be the first to get the truth.

It was exciting in a gruesome sort of way news often is. Nothing like this had ever happened before.

Except that they had never just vanished. Not even close. Her red lips curved into a smile. She’d been there from the beginning to the end.

The day the white wolves prowled through misty mountain sides and found the village in the ruins of a broken empire. She was playing outside when her mother’s shaking hand dragged her inside the thin wooden walls of their home.

It was so loud. Figures rushed like flack poles, dragging dark blankets made of black, provoking untouched winds to send waves through the fabric. They tied the clothes over their windows and each other's eyes. Her mother’s warm hands covered her eyes, and she could feel the black curtain being drawn over the window. It was too late.

She still remembered the sight, shown behind the dark fiber of a curtain not yet hung. It stood in the cold, Its head devoid of eyes, the sockets filled with some sort of darkness that sucked in the light, its translucent skin stretched across bone and veins. Through the last little corner of the uncovered window, its face pulled to a grin that crinkled across its skin and made its dark eyes smile.

Before nightfall the village was completely dark and all eyes were smothered in black fabric. She peeled off the cloth from her eyes and, stepping over the sleeping bodies, walked out the open door. Bare feet landed in the crisp snow. A faint red light lit her surroundings. Merry humming echoed through frozen branches. A path of icy footsteps trailed her steps. Her shadow disappeared and her footprints were eaten by the crying sky.

That was the last time I saw my sister. Frozen on the doorstep, I watched her walk away.

It was only the beginning. The door slid shut. Snow fell past the bare wooden walls and continued to paint the world in white.

The next day, after the sun had risen and painted the clear snow orange, they realized she was missing. Her mom called to arms every person in the village to scour the battlefield of broken trees. Her name echoed across the valley in bright waves to call her home, but she didn’t listen. She never did. It was too late to find her. She was gone. I started humming. The same tune I’d heard her sing the night she left.

The day came and went drifting by with the passage of time. Her mother didn’t seem to understand that time only moved one way. She drowned out her sorrow in ways she refused to talk about but that shone in the darkness under her red eyes. The people of the village tried to comfort her, giving her platitudes and gifts. None of it could bring her daughter back. In the end they left her, let her hide in her home until her fake smile convinced themselves she was alright. How long did it take? Weeks? Months? Years even? How long until she decided her daughter was never coming back? How long until her mother decided she had nothing more to live for.

Crows found her first. They flocked among the branches of the tree, one branch hung lower than the others, holding the weight of a woman. Her body swayed back and forth while sharp beaks tore her flesh apart. Her death lay at the top of the hill her daughter disappeared from 5 years ago that day.

It was dark the day of the funeral. People clad in black clothes that matched the moon-less sky drifted ghoul-like into the church filled with wooden carvings. The old man, hunched, his face blemished with wrinkles and spots, tapped up to the stage on his wooden cane. He stood there, face flickering with orange candle-light and took a breath that opened the gates to our souls.

Half-way through his speech his tear-stained face jerked upwards. His cane clunked to the ground. He hung suspended in the center of the chapel.

Splinters of wood tore through the air. Part of the church collapsed, the roof falling inwards, crushing half of the people underneath the rafters.

Reflected in the rippling holy water people ran from invisible demons that chased them through the rubble and tore apart their minds and bodies.

Screaming echoed throughout the mourning valley.

They decided to move after that. People calling the valley cursed and spitting on her mother’s grave.

A young man chased a wild boar into the side of the mountain. He said the caves were big enough to live in. All the shaky voices pleaded agreement.

A message was sent to the other town nearby and by the time the snow melted, and flowers started to bloom in the mud, the village was settled. They remained like that for years, hiding in a cave system no-one ever questioned to hide from a danger still yet un-known. The young do what they are known to do and decide there is no-longer need to hide. They sneak out under the watching eyes of stars and do whatever they please while covered by the darkness.

When red eyes begin to appear in the trees the teenagers scatter. They run back into the cover of their home. A letter is sent to a neighboring town, the first one in many years, reminding them of the danger and telling them of the eyes that hide in the forest.

When the message is delivered, they are booed out of the town with peals of laughter.

No help will be coming.

A week later the glowing eyes appear inside stone walls. The cave’s one exit gets blocked by piling bodies, and those trapped inside run for help. Some people escape past the monsters and the bodies, running past the injured people in favor of their freedom.

Those who come tumbling out of the cavern gather together with broken weapons of shovels and sticks. They watch the exit for anyone else to escape. Nobody does.

The survivors decide to travel to the nearby city, about a 3 day walk away, walking only during the day and staying vigilant at night.

They chose the longer travel time to go to a town that had not rejected them. Their final, fatal, mistake.

Something creeps on padded paws around the circle of broken spears, staying right outside the light cast by the fire, and the halo of melting snow. Some of the guards swear they can see it in the eve of night but could never give a description besides that of shifting darkness.

While walking through the empty snow, faraway from all the trees, they heard a branch break. Turning around, one man is seized by mania. He sprints in terror in a random direction. His eyes are wild and filled with white. His mouth lay open as he fell to the ground, his frantic breathing slowly ceasing. Each person had a turn. Their eyes going wide, and their feet sprinting form an unknown horror. They ran from their nightmares and their pasts. Every survivor had already lost a part of themselves. They all ended up the same though, laying on the ground with their mouths frozen open in a scream and wide eyes filled with terror.

From the sky one would notice the spiral pattern in which they fell. Their bodies lay on the frozen snow in a shape curated. The bodies, frozen, buried themselves underneath the snow. From the glowing heart of the center of the spiral, lay a gem. It glowed in every color ever known and shifted so slowly it was almost impossible to tell how it changed.

I watched from the trees as the people fell. The snowfall collected on my palm. I did it. I smiled and dangled my legs from the tree. Back on that night, the night she left me and her mother, as I watched her silhouette disappear into the trees, I heard it, slight at first, a voice. He was always kind.

When her mother, who was actually mine too, told me she had nothing left to live for and left the village to play hangman with the trees, he told me how to save her daughter. I thought maybe, If I brought her back I would get a mother too. It was easy, he said, I just had to give her a proper burial. So I took her apart with a dull kitchen knife and shoved the parts in little jars that I buried among the mountain that took them both. He taught me how to carve the runes with a knife on her ruined flesh before I buried her. The body at the funeral wasn’t hers.

The old priest who gave a speech of love was a traitor. He told me as a child that I was blessed, he gave us prayers and hope when no-one else could. At her mother’s funeral he gave a speech of warning. He told that the devil works in one's own mind, not to believe voices in one's head that don't belong. I hate to say I believed him for a moment, then the walls came crashing down and over the screams of people and the preacher’s broken body the voice told me they were all traitors. He told me he would care about me, even when I was surrounded by such doubt. I’m glad I listened.

The next task was easier. I just had to find a wild boar to bear a message to the townspeople. The young man did it for me. The voice said it would be okay. He would be dead soon anyways.

The years that followed were almost unbearable. This gnawing feeling inside me tore my mind to bits. To pass the time, the voice suggested, I should carve the insides of the cave. So, I did what he asked and carved drawings into the walls until there was no more space to draw. He told me to be patient, so I was. He told me to make friends and so I did. It was nice to have someone who cared about me like he did.

I followed my friends that night out under the stars. We sat talking until we saw the first of the red eyes appear. They started panicking, but the voice told me it was okay and so it was.

From a distance they almost looked like wolves, I wasn't even close. The monsters crept closer and closer until I could make out their faces. Hunched and knobby, they were all the size of small children. They chittered together in a pack, ignoring me entirely. I crept forward, urged by some pull in my chest. The monsters parted around me until I got to one in particular.

The monster was the same as the rest, but this time I could see it in her eyes, in the way she held herself and the color of her long and greasy hair. This was my sister.

She held a gleam in her eyes that said she recognized me and silent tears traced down her painful grin. I could tell from her eyes she was begging, pleading with me to save her.

The voice told me to leave. So I did. He told me that wasn’t her, that I could still save her. I listened.

A week later, all my friends became traitors too and I carved a new set of ruins into the cold stone. The monsters tumbled through the carvings and ravaged through the cave. I looked for my sister in the chaos.

The voice told me to leave through a different entrance around the back. I grabbed a crystal that shined in different colors and walked down a path of pure snow. The crystal was buried down in the mud under the snow and covered by a gust of wind.

The voice told me to wait in a tree nearby. When the group of torches settled under the tree and I watched them spiral to their deaths I realized I had done it. I looked down where I carved a bloody painting into my arm.

The voice asked me why I’d done it. I told him I don't know. He told me he cared for me like no one ever has. I told him that's because he took everyone who did. He promised love, power, fame, and glory. He realized that I knew. I knew all along that he could never save my sister. But I could, I could save her. I pressed my hand against my arm and muttered the curse I learned through the devil.

The ground cracked and turned to black, pieces floating into the sky like a backwards form of snow. A curse to swap a body and a mind. I blinked my eyes closed and started humming through my smile.

Why did I do it? Why listen to him at all? Because through him I learned how to get stronger. The people that were sacrificed, the monsters released, they were his plan to end the world, but in that dampened cave I realized they could be used to build a new one.

My eyes closed for good, and the world went blank.

She opened her eyes, for the first time in a long while. The only memory she had from the past 15 years was of eyes that looked beyond the monster, and a face that looked like hers. Her boots fell to the snowy ground.

She walked and kept walking, smiling to herself and humming a familiar tune. As she walked, she heard the voice of her sister in her mind, recounting her adventures. Her memories of a life not her own.

She reached the old wooden house with thin wood walls at the edge of the tree speckled forest. The ground was turning black and floating into the air. The trees were slowly falling apart, their white flecks joining the rest as they fell towards the sky.

She sat there on the porch of the cool wooden house left to time and age watching her world fade to dust. "This is all my fault" She whispered. Salt colored her mouth as she cried. She cursed her foolishness, mourned her sister and in her heart, she blessed everyone who’d died for her.

The next day, the mountain disappeared along with all the houses. Anyone who could have known the truth had died. All that was left was a slight crater in the ground filled with blooming red wildflowers. Colored in red blood. She dipped her finger in the pool of blood and stained her lips. She smiled and walked away. We would never be forgotten.