The Reaping Season

by Sarah Stirling

  It shrieked in protest, satisfied when her hands shot to her head and she winced. Her resignation was unacceptable. It did not bow to the will of men. They did not. It would not allow her to just lie down and wait for death.

  “All right,” she said wearily and it felt her fatigue. Such energy flowing through her fragile human body would weaken her. Her hands shook when she pushed back her hair. “It’s funny that now, after all this time, we’re finally communicating. I feel like I should be chewing you out for all the times you wore me like a glove. But I won’t.” Shivering, she huddled in on herself, curling up on the floor.

  Cold, muscle ache, and weariness. All new, alien sensations to it. Normally these were kept at bay, a dull brush of its awareness. The tightening of the bond between them had allowed them to bleed through, more visceral than it had ever experienced before. Was this what it meant to be human? To feel such a conflicting set of ideas it drove them to irrationality and lunacy? The Rook willed to strip these burdens away but with her interference it couldn’t escape them, swirling around and around until one became indistinguishable from another.

  She was afraid. Fight, devour and take. That was all it knew. But she did not seem to find the mantra comforting. Instead The Rook felt itself be sucked into the tumble of her dream as she drifted into a restless sleep. This world was more familiar to it; like the ever-shifting currents of the home realm, nothing in this world was permanent. Falling snow became crackling flame, an old face became a new one, and the visuals changed in the blink of a human eye. This was the true rift – for it was the only way for humans to jump between realms unburdened by their rotting flesh.

  In her dreams the girl fought. Without fangs, without claws, without the manipulation of the tides of power, she used the thin shining blades that she strapped to her back. With them she could scythe through their tether to this world, on power stolen from itself. It was the only time she really, genuinely understood its mantra. The time in which they truly connected, became one of body and soul. She did not like it, bucked away from the feeling, but it coaxed her out and drew her into the ecstasy of freedom.

  “You and I,” she breathed, suddenly stopping. “We.”

  The Rook did not really understand the concept of ‘we’. It could only fathom ‘you’ and ‘I’ in the sense of itself and the enemy. It did not share. It did not compromise. But nor could it deny that it was no longer the creature it had been in the home realm.

  A feather fell from the girl’s hair, as pale as her eyes. As pale as the freshly fallen snow around them, burying her feet in a layer of blue-white. “I keep fighting you because I am afraid. Because I still want to be me. Do you understand?”

  Its grasp of self was tenuous at best but in terms of survival it could understand. Here, in this white arena, they were truly nothing but enemies fighting for possession of what the other owned.

  “Our strength comes from we. But neither of us are very good at sharing, are we?” She smiled. The Rook knew this to be a human sign of happiness but she did not feel happy inside.

  “I keep thinking it would be better if you found someone else. I tried to keep convincing myself there was another way out – but there isn’t, is there? I would die. I’m not sure I could go back, anyway.” She looked up and it experienced both the sight of her eyes and what she glimpsed through them. This place was a rough approximation of a place she knew but it kept shifting like she was an artist unhappy with the proportions. “I don’t remember who I was before you.”

  It had known, of course. That it was changing. There were warnings for creatures who spent too long in the human world and changed so much they could not return home, trapped in decaying, mortal forms that would wither and perish, taking the weakest of spirits with them. The Rook had never feared ‘death’ and certainly was not about to start now. But it was beginning to fear the change. The thoughts that did belong to it. The lingering attachment to things it should not care for. It had saved the man because she had wanted it so much that it had also desired to save him. Now he was bound to it, their fates intertwined forever more. It did not know what to do with a manservant if he was not to be worn as a skin.

  Laughter bubbled up from inside her chest, spilling out past her lips in echoing waves that had her doubling over from the exertion. The Rook could feel the tightening of her muscles and the prick of tears in her eyes.

  “You’re afraid,” she gasped between breaths. “You’re afraid, just like me. The current flows two ways and you are as lost as I am.”

  The Rook did not understand why this was funny but it could understand why she thought it was funny, in some strange conflicting way.

  “You’re afraid that you and I might become we.”

  Like a tear in its consciousness, it could feel itself unravel, spooling out the threads of its identity it had known for so long. The ground began to vibrate, building from a gentle rattle into a tremulous quake, snow falling thick and heavy from the spindly hands of trees that had suddenly appeared. This girl could be dangerous, in the home realm. Such infinite willpower was a hard trait to come by, but like the ebb and flow of time on the physical world, she was wearing it down. Soon, if it was not careful, she would be the one to rule it rather than the other way around.

  After all, she had been the one to invite it here. She had lured it in and it had thought her easy prey. But she did not succumb easy. This sentiment it tried to push upon her, shoving it through the cracks in an eggshell sky.

  Fight, devour and take.

  “Should I take this as a sign?” she shouted. Even in her own dream she could not see it directly, only the rough approximation of its tangible form she had conjured from her imagination. A white rook with pink eyes and a sharp grey beak, in the image of her understanding of the word. She had willed it to be Rook and so Rook it had become. “Should I take this as a sign that you care about me? I must confess, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, to have you care whether I live or die.”

  Its indignation was an automatic response. It did not care about its host. That was all she was, nothing but a vessel for which it could exist in the human world. That was all.

  “Thanks,” she said, face breaking out in a grin once more. Snow faded into warm sunshine and the open sea, the salt breeze tickling the tangle of her hair. “I appreciate it.”

  You and I. We. It did not understand but it also did. Nothing made sense in this world. How were these humans not constantly distracted by their imminent deaths, spilling out like sand in those glass contraptions they used to measure their human conception of time? And yet there was a resilience deep within, perhaps because they knew it was coming. A need to spark into greatness before the flame was quickly snuffed out. Hissing, it flapped its wings in frustration. This was her dream and it was confined to her parameters. All too often this seemed to be the norm.

  The boat holding them upon the expanse of ocean rocked back and forth. The sun turned pink, staining the sea the colour of blood. No matter how it tried it could not sculpt her dream, at the mercy of her will in this small pocket of a realm not quite its and not quite hers. You and I. We. She had been the one to take its name when they had first met back in the southern snows, but when it came down to it, it was no longer sure who truly owned it. The Rook and Rook and everything in between, trapped in a boat in a sea of blood.

  “Acceptance goes both ways, you know. I’m not the only one who has resisted this long.”

  Acceptance of a human vessel was absurd. She was supposed to serve its whims, not the other way around. It could not be plucked for power whenever she grew desperate enough to tap into its source. But existing in this fugue state was exhausting. For the first time it thought it might understand decay as it wilted underneath her will, losing itself piece by piece. Compromise was not a concept The Rook really understood beyond how Rook understood it. But acceptance, true acceptance, could prove even more fatal.

  “Are you really that afraid of me?” She said it w
ith her eyes closed, face tapped to the sun. “All this trying to convince me when the one you want to convince is yourself.”

  You and I. We.

  Mountains appeared on either side of their vision, giving context to an infinite sea. Between them lay the gulf of their indecision, the scene of their battle. Not a battle as The Rook knew it, of fighting and scrapping and stealing energy, but a battle of wits and argument. Someone, somewhere, had to give. She had leverage it did not possess, for she could die and take with her the body it had used to enter her realm, casting it back out to the currents of the home realm, so much like these bloody waves on which they rocked.

  In the canyon of their dreams a centre had to be found before they could truly awaken. Open your eyes, she whispered and if it could have sighed it would have. She was standing on the edge of the boat, peering into the endless depths of crimson waves. Only in her dream did she not fall. In the end it came down to what The Rook knew: survival at all costs, even it if had to cannibalise itself in the process.

  One word. We.

  Rook jumped.

  Her laughter chased it back to consciousness.

  *

  Rook crashed into waking with the cry of gulls ringing outside. For a moment she simply remained in her knotted position, letting memories stream back to her like sand trickling in an hourglass. Eventually the pain became too much and she had to stretch out her cramped limbs, groaning when her back cracked and popped under the pressure. Bars across the window cut the ray of light pouring across her body and she shifted over to feel its warmth on her face. Something felt different but she couldn’t put her finger on it. It took her some time before she heard the distant echo of footsteps some corridors away and shivered as the sound pounded in her skull. Even from such a distance she could hear breaths, two sets, one a soft pant and the other a heavier wheeze.

  Startled, she tested the feeling by flicking her finger against the iron bar she leant against. The vibration reverberated through her, tickling her senses with the sound. “Is that you?” she murmured, grasping for The Rook. Her senses seemed so much more acute than before, like her previous enhancements had been witnessed through murky glass and only now had the surface been scrubbed clean.

  The bond between them flared up without any challenge. The Rook was no longer fighting her. Her eyes widened when she felt the strange, alien presence, much stronger than before, frantic energy an alarm bell in her mind. Something had startled it and now it was trying to warn her. Bemused by this revelation, she was too distracted to pay attention to the sound of people approaching. With so many sounds amplified by the enhancements to her senses it was all too much to keep track of, her mind reeling.

  A zap of energy jolted her and she gasped, gazing around her. “I don’t know what you’re trying to say! I don’t understand you.” It never spoke to her, not like some of the more powerful riftspawn. But for the first time it was trying to. She did not understand why now, of all times, but she couldn’t help wondering whether it meant something.

  The echo of approaching people – soldiers – stole her attention from The Rook and she pushed to the back of her cell to await their approach, heart thundering traitorously. She knew she had stayed behind to let Janus and the other one away but when she tried to remember the incident itself there was nothing but a hazy cloud where the memory should be. Eventually her body had given out under the force of such energy flowing through her. The Rook had piloted her like she was nothing but a doll for it to drag around, unaware of her human limitations. After she had passed out the soldiers – the ones still alive – must have found her and brought her back here.

  Rook gulped as the door down the corridor swung open, her breath snagging. She had killed them in their hordes. With a numb conscience she had struck them down one by one and savoured the taste of it as she did. Fight, devour and take. Words that had never been her own. Perhaps the only human concepts The Rook had been able to convey. That this was all they shared saddened her but less so than normal, as if that part of her had been sanded down by the creature’s morals.

  In the gloom of the corridor beyond her cells the soldiers appeared, the one at the front looking back at her companions before she unlocked the cell, approaching with ginger steps. In the hands of the man behind her was a box shaped item that he carried with care and Rook’s eyes immediately latched onto it. It felt like nothing was coming from it; no threads of energy existed anywhere around it. Like a vacuum it seemed to suck the energy into it and reflected nothing back. It filled her head with crackling.

  “Come with me now or I will make this difficult for you.”

  The challenge sent a thrill down her spine. The Rook’s influence. Maybe. It was difficult to tell. Rook’s eyes flickered from the woman to the soldiers behind her, each levelling some kind of weapon at her. Six of them in total. She cocked her head and considered the implications. They were afraid of her.

  Fight devour and take.

  “Now is not the time,” she murmured, glancing out of the corner of her eye where she could see a flash of white plumage and silver smoke.

  The woman halted, looking alarmed at Rook talking to herself. Frustrated, she wanted to protest that she hadn’t gone mad but it was hard to explain to the sightless what it was like to know a whole other world. To have a constant companion in her head, whispering, thirsting for violence. Violence she had committed again and again and now she had to answer for it. There was a price to pay for her actions and the time had come to collect the debt. The sand had fallen to the bottom.

  In her ear The Rook cawed in protest. It wanted blood, death and vengeance. She pictured a door shutting in her mind, closing off the connection as best as she could. So soon after their fledging trust in one another it was probably not a good idea. Even through the barrier she could feel its ire, threatening to break free.

  “I will come with you,” she said, rising slowly.

  The woman startled, stepping back and then narrowing her eyes suspiciously when Rook held her arms out for cuffs. After a glance at those behind her, she sidled up to her and slapped her arm in chains whilst one of the other soldiers released the chain around her ankle. With her wrists bound Rook followed the woman, flanked by soldiers on both sides as well as behind. It was almost flattering, really, just how much they feared what she might do. She couldn’t remember the killing clearly but she could picture the bright flashes of blood staining a grey floor. Perhaps they were right to fear her. She was a monster, after all.

  When she walked too slow those behind her prodded her between the shoulder blades and she stumbled forward, the feeling of the chain around flesh so imprinted in her mind the ghost of it nearly tripped her up. Her ankle flared with pain, still swollen, but they had no sympathy for their inflicted ills. Up the stairs they went, marching through the airy hallways above ground with the same staccato pace. Each rhythmic echo of their footsteps sent chills down her spine, gooseflesh running down her arms. That might have been simply anticipation. Walking to one’s death was a peculiar feeling.

  Stepping outside was a momentary breath of relief, raising her head to the morning sun on high, burning up a clear blue sky. The ocean breeze kissed her skin with salty breath, teasing at her hair hanging loose around her shoulders, still matted with brown blood. She wasn’t given time to enjoy the moment, however, immediately shoved forward so she would not disrupt the pace of the soldiers. Gulls circled overhead, screeching at one another as they fought over a hunk of bread they had scrounged up from somewhere. Rook drank in the sights with the eyes of a woman who might never see again. Her mouth had gone dry, all the moisture in her body feeling like it had been redirected to her clammy palms.

  Would they really do it out in the open, for everyone to see? That was how they had done it in Nirket but here there had been little indication of trouble. Not the same riots, nor the same fear of rifts and spirits. She could feel the rift bulge and stretch, the veil so brittle it could shatter at any moment. Energy spilled
out, various lines of power tangling and weaving outwards from a concentrated source, like veins carrying blood from a pulsing heart. Except this heart wasn’t healthy. Soon it would rupture and creatures of all natures and abilities would be able to cross into this world with ease. But it wasn’t her problem anymore. Too many failures had stacked up.

  A hand halted her in the middle of the central plaza. The space was so much larger than the square in Nirket, stretching out so far it made her feel exposed to the watching eyes of those in the grand buildings that gazed upon her from all sides, windows glinting in the bright sun. Despite the early hour there was heat in it, bearing down upon the small stand that had been made up especially for her.

  There was no crowd. If an announcement had been made, apparently these people did not thirst for blood. It might have been an indication of the Sonlin’s popularity here, or it might have been merely her imagination attempting to cushion the anxiety bubbling up in her gut. She hadn’t felt afraid until now, but now facing the image of her imminent death, she found the fear flapping its wings, taking flight deep inside her. At least the others had got away. There was a small mercy in that. She had saved her friends, even when bequeathed to the creature inside, and that meant one less failure to add to the endless charges against her.

  I did my best, she thought. Sometimes the best was not enough, not when she was taking lives instead of saving them. Not when feathers fell from her hair, tufty like those of a baby chick. Not when her eyes were so pale they appeared colourless and her nails had grown tougher like the talons of a bird. Not when she had lost sense of herself. The Rook’s own desires and instincts warred with her own. They couldn’t keep co-existing, no matter what her dream had suggested. It had just been a dream and nothing more.

  As one of the soldiers grabbed her arm and hauled her up to the platform, her vision was taken over by the image from her dream of the boat on a red sea, The Rook hovering above her the way it always seemed to linger. Stumbling on the step, she crashed to the ground, wincing at the pain. She couldn’t see what was really in front of her, the yelling of the soldier and the pain of his grip barely registering when all she could see was herself from another’s eyes. Standing tall, defiant. Daring The Rook to accept her.