9 – 6

Weight from above; pressing down, pinning, stunned breaths pushed between dirt-stained teeth, dull pain blooming from the pointy jab of knee, hip, or elbow into softer, more tender skin. Lines of muscle, locked in sharp protest, a keening rise from shoulder to neck. Limb and joint turned to the very edge of their limit, begging to be set right. The voices of older wounds lift, yellowing bruises and scabbed over cuts, refusing to be drowned out. Yet they are. The mind to which they call out their miseries is lost.

Yes, it is hard to breathe. Who is it that struggles?

Yes, there is pain. Who is it that suffers?

Yes, there is a rumble in the earth, the steady roll of some great approach. Who is that feels?

A name, echoing from shorn, gossamer threads: Clarke. Is is her, then? Is it she?

No, not Clarke. Clarke is soft and small and blue, blue eyes. She is hair the color of ink and a cold, distant star at her command. The other, then. The one who is bony and long and her mother's eyes. She is hair the color of rich honey and a long, winding road at her feet. She is not Clarke, of that she is certain. Who, then?

With a low, mournful groan that weight which presses down rolls away. Cold air rushes in with a deep gasp. It comes with panic, with terror, and with such fury and hatred that it makes ashen embers of everything else. She-Who-Isn't-Clarke rolls over onto her back, pushing a scab's sharp edges into the tenderness of a long and opened wound. She opens her eyes and lifts her head, asking more from locked, protesting lines of muscle. There's a house, one wall destroyed. A small, empty shed, in whose shadow a child-queen cowers. She knows them, their name and title. It's there, between her tongue and the back of her teeth.

There's a small, sad arc of wood, an unfinished circle. She lies within its curl, as do the rest: Clarke herself, blank in face and distant; a wounded man, dark of hair and eye, a stained and naked sword near his hand; a woman, gray and still and not dead.

Then there is the thing. It is the steady roll of some great approach, a nightmare of thorn and smoke. Its thin, pale hide is laced with cuts, each one oozing some thick and foully stenched substance. Sixteen long talons, possessed to the last of a vicious curve, trail through the frost-glittering grass. Several are broken, including the shortest and thickest of them. It staggers and stumbles, lurching hideously on with no regard to the torch buried in its eye. Its head and shoulders are scarred with burns, and in every line of its cruel bearing is a breathtaking hatred. She finds her eyes falling on the knife embedded to the hilt in its chest.

Her knife. There's a vengeful pleasure in the sight, and the devastation wrought across the thing's body. It's not enough, not for her. It still stands, still possesses a wretched semblance of life in its pulsing veins. She sits up. There is more pain, and she ignores it. The swordsman groans again and lifts his head. He looks at her as she stands and says, “Zira?”

The name rings like thunder, like great bells of brass. It howls like wind and those shorn, gossamer threads waver and sway in the gale. She'd quite like her knife back. Has some ideas on what to do with it. “Who's that?” she asks, not looking back.

The man coughs. He struggles to move, to stand, maybe to stop her. If he can, he's not fast enough. She's moving, step-by-step, eyes on the thing she hates with all her being. “Wh – You are,” he says, concern clear. Kind of him, to worry. He asks, “What happened?” but not to her, so she doesn't answer. Just keeps walking. She's as slow as the thing.

“I'm going to gut you,” She tells it, and its a quiet, hoarse, and lovely growl in her throat. More from behind her. The scrape of metal across cold-hardened ground. The thing answers her not, just lurches forward with its pathetic, staggering steps. Its legs are too short, and oddly bent. “Will you scream?” She asks it. She hopes it will. Screams echo in her ears; hers, Clarke's, and the child-queen whimpering in the shed's shadow. The gray and still woman didn't scream. Didn't make a sound, did she?

The thing stumbles, off-balance by the shift of its own weight. Her lips curl. Wrought quite the ruin here, haven't they? Where is its blinding speed, its rending strength? Where is its joyous cruelty, that makes a game of pain? Where is the nightmare? All she sees is lurching smoke and a hollow, empty eye.

The scrape of metal across cold-hardened ground. Steel against her boot. She looks down at it, at the black-stained sword pointing back at he who pushed it to her. He rests on his elbows, sweat matting dark hair to his brow. His injuries are many, though none threaten his life. Not like the woman, gray and still, next to him. That name leaves his mouth, the one of thunder and bells and howling wind.

Zira.

I pick up the sword.

- - -

The last of the magic's shorn, gossamer threads leave my mind. Milo's sword is heavy and cold and very, very real. I hold it tightly, it and my name. The blade's point digs into the ground, the bramble-beast's foul blood sliding slowly down its length. Lifting it makes my strained arms tremble and my abused shoulders burn. I don't know how to wield this, nor do I have the strength to do it. My knife is still buried in the bramble-beast's chest. Its heft is lighter, its edge Cobalt-keen. I should use that, instead of this.

I should, and yet I can't unwrap my grip on the worn leather wrapped around the sword's hilt. It's fear that keeps it in my hands, fear that if I should let it fall, it will take my name with it. To be She-Who-Isn't-Clarke had been to be horribly lost in my own mind, imprisoned in cell woven from gossamer threads. Going back to that, where all that I am and know is just out of my grasp, fills me with a different kind of terror than the bramble-beast's threat of death.

“Zira?” Milo asks, his voice a pained rasp. At the sound of it, the bramble-beast stops its slow, lurching approach. It turns its empty eye to he who had hurt it so ruinously, now flat on the ground. How it holds itself changes, shifting in such a way that I can only name Caution.

“Yes.” I answer. I daren't look back at him.

He gives a great, heaving sigh of relief. “Blessed sunrise, you're back. What happened?”

There isn't time to tell him, even if the words should come to me. The bramble-beast takes a single step forward. It braces itself on one of its arms and lifts the other, eight-fingered hand splayed wide, to grasp or strike at me. “I don't know,” I spit the words out in haste, and there is no more time for talk.

It is a grasp that comes for me, a palm wider than I with fingers long enough to fully encircle me. There's no grace left in my body, so when I move to the side to dodge, it is more a trip and stumble than anything else. The upheld sword wavers and dips low, and I realize my mistake.

There is nothing to stand between the bramble-beast and Milo, Adelaide, and Clarke. It tricked me, and I fell for it. I would swear that lipless mouth now leers in a smile, jagged teeth pleased and gleaming. Clarke sits still, blank of face and with lost eyes. Milo scrambles to cover his wife's body with his own, pulling himself atop her with what little remains of his strength. It is all he can do to defend her; dying first in the hope that she might live.

Sunlight bless Adelaide. If she had not blinded it, not burned it, then Milo could not have fought it. Hale and whole, it would still have had its blinding speed, and all effort would have come to naught. Instead of this chance of a back-turned moment and a pointed blade, we would all be dead.

I don't know why the bramble-beast turned its back to me. It doesn't matter, and I don't care. A snarl curls my lips, and I move forward. The whole of my body is a resounding of pains; of tender joints and exhausted muscle, of blooming bruises and weeping cuts, and a loathing, desperate mind to keep it all moving, forward, for just a while longer. I lift the sword up and up again, black-stained steel rising over my head, as the bramble-beast looms over Milo, Clarke, and fallen Adelaide. It stills a moment. Even now, it pays heed to its lust for cruelty, to the pleasure of taking its time.

Milo's eyes flicker, away from the towering nightmare and onto me behind it. Only for a moment, and I should think that if it were less consumed by its need to play, the bramble-beast may have noticed. As it is there is nothing, not in all of the world, that stops me. I aim to drive the point of the sword through an existing cut in its back, to let the blade's own weight and that of myself plunge it deep.

I say nothing, for there is nothing to say. The point falls, and I along with it. Together, the sword and I impale the bramble-beast through the back. The foulness that passes for blood erupts from the other side, spraying the huddling three. Milo gags, but keeps his gorge. Clarke doesn't, and returns to herself as she vomits down the front of herself. “Zira!” she shouts, eyes snapping around for me, even as she coughs on acidic bile.

The bramble-beast bucks like the brave horse it slew the night before, and it is all I can do to hold on, all I can do not to bite my tongue and keep my feet on the ground. Its long, long arms reach behind itself to pry me loose and fail. They cannot bend deeply enough to reach me. How unfortunate. But there is more I can do, more pain I can inflict. “Clarke!” I shout, careful of when and how, “the sword! Light it aflame!”

With eyes tightly closed, I can't see the protest forming in her mouth. It's too hard to control, she might say. It could kill us all, she might say.

We'll die anyway, I might reply.

Her magic blooms, weakly pale and wan. The black-stained blade of Milo's sword, embedded to the hilt in the bramble-beast's back, erupts in sky-blue flame.

O, how the bramble-beast screams!