Land of Shadows and Thorns Chapter 1 (Rough Draft)

The room stank of decay. It was the kind of scent that is known innately, even by those who had never experienced it before: an acrid stench of rot in the splintered wood beams that crisscrossed overhead and a mildewy dampness that permeated from the neglected bed. The wallpaper, once so pretty and fresh with its little pink rosebuds against a sheet of off-white, peeled away in weathered strips like tainted skin falling from the bone.

Gone was the vast, thriving forest that stretched much further than what Mariela could see from her window; replaced instead with an arboreal graveyard. The distorted branches reached up towards the night sky in a thousand bent, knotted fingers to claw out the stars and the moon.

This wasn’t her room. This wasn’t her home.

Mariela’s gaze tore from the window and darted around the room, her heart racing in her throat. She searched for something familiar, something that is as it once was—but the vanity where she sat that morning to apply her makeup was covered in dust, devoid of any cosmetics or her glass perfume bottles, seeming as if it had never been touched before. The armoire, where Mistress Morrigan helped her dress every morning for her entire life, stood with its doors wide open and cavernous maw empty of gowns.

 In the strip of moonlight that fell in through the dirt-crusted glass balcony doors Mari saw the carpet of dust that settled over the wood floor. It was flat and perfect. Undisturbed. As if she hadn’t just walked across it to go to bed that night.

She might as well never have existed at all.

Body shaking, Mari pressed her hands to her face. How had it come to this? One moment, she was readying herself for bed like any other. She had donned her pink nightgown, brushed her hair until it was perfect and smooth, settled in with a good book. She remembered falling asleep with the book open on her stomach. When she woke, she did so gasping and sweating, her heart beating so fast she thought for sure she would die. There was no book anywhere in her room. She was in a plain blue gown with little silver roses for buttons up the front, not her pink nightgown.

She was dreaming. She was dreaming. She was dreaming and this was just some nightmare conjured by too much late-night reading and soon she would wake up and she would tell Liliyana all about it and—

Liliyana.

Mari pushed herself from the edge of her bed, but the moment she put weight on her legs she went crashing to the floor. She hit with a gasp and, as the dust poured into her lungs, a cough more violent than any she could remember. It wracked her entire body until she was a ball on the floor. Tears misted her eyes and pooled in the outer rims. The harder she fought to breathe the harder breathing became. There was just so much dust.

Liliyana.

With a final gasp, Mari clawed her way back up onto the bed. The sheets—the sheets that once felt like clouds and smelled like the wildflower aroma that blew in through the windows were flat and rough to the touch and reeked of stale moisture. Neglected. Forgotten. Derelict.

Liliyana.

“Liliyana!” Mari howled into the darkness. She coughed at the hoarseness of her throat, the way her voice seemed to scrape against the sides as it came out. For a second, she almost thought she tasted blood. She coughed again, then gasped. “Liliyana!”

From the other side of her bedroom door, Mari heard a distant “Mari!”

Tears loosened from her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. Regardless of anything else, Liliyana was all right enough to speak. Liliyana was alive.

Her bedroom door came open with a screaming of rusted, underused hinges and Liliyana rushed in. She and Mari might as well have been mirror images of one another—they had the same thick black hair, the same pointed ears and pale skin. Liliyana was just smaller, younger, and had a fierceness in her pink and purple eyes that challenged the world to just try and knock her down. She fell to her knees by Mari and threw her arms around her big sister. Even Liliyana, who Mari had been sure went to bed in her own nightgown, wore a cream colored dress with red lace around the edges so faded it almost looked pink.

“You’re alive!” Liliyana cried, her voice wobbling. She would fight her tears tooth and nail. “You’re alive!”

Mari wrapped her arms tight around Liliyana’s little shoulders and squeezed. She indulged in this one quiet moment, this one little piece of normalcy, lest it evaporate. Mari wasn’t like Liliyana. As hard as Liliyana would fight to not cry, the tears came quickly and easily to Mari. She buried her face in Liliyana’s greasy hair and tried not to think about how it had been soft, lush, and clean only a few hours ago. She tried not to wonder how it had gotten so filthy in such a short amount of time. Tried not to let herself remember that it wasn’t possible.

“They’re gone, Mari.” Liliyana whined into Mari’s shoulder. She was losing her fight. Mari knew Liliyana better than she knew herself. She knew when those strongly held defenses were beginning to fail. Liliyana pushed herself back, and Mari’s heart cracked in half at the shine of tears on Liliyana’s face when she leaned into the moonlight. “Mistress Morrigan, and Mistress Lightfoot, and even Mistress Swann—it’s like . . . it’s like they never existed. It’s like they were never here!”

A chasm opened up in Mari’s heart, like a death. Portly and sweet Mistress Morrigan, with her shining eyes and warm smile. Slender and clumsy Mistress Lightfoot, her mind always far away somewhere else. Tall and sturdy Mistress Swann, unrelenting in her pursuit to educate the girls and tame Liliyana’s wild nature.

Gone. All of them. As if they never existed.

Something in her face must have betrayed her misery. Just as she knew Liliyana better than she knew herself, Liliyana knew Mari just as well. The younger sister’s face crumbled bit by bit until she threw herself back into the safety of her elder sister’s embrace, all the cries she fought so hard to stomp down coming up in a great and drowning wave.

“It’s like your dream, isn’t it?” Mari asked as she stroked Liliyana’s hair. The dark strands fought to move between her fingers through the tangles and the grease. “When you said you woke up just like this before—and you couldn’t wake me up too.”

Liliyana shook her head. “No—before it was like you were dead. Your body was here but I couldn’t wake you up. But them . . .I told you, it’s like they never existed! They don’t even have bodies, Mari! There’s nothing in their rooms at all! They’re just—they’re just—empty rooms!”

  Both sisters screamed when a roar from outside shook the house. The wooden bones ached groaned, and the dirty glass in the windowpanes shuddered. Mari and Liliyana tightened their grip on one another. They both cried harder.

It seemed like an eternity before the silence of the night crept back in. Before Liliyana pulled herself away from her sister and went to stand by the balcony door. She opened it a bit and a warm rush of summer air rolled in. The dust on the floor kicked up into a small cloud.

“We can’t stay here,” Liliyana said.

“We can’t leave!” In with the breeze came Papa’s voice in Mari’s head, warning them of what was beyond that door. There are dreadful, horrible things out there. Starvation, disease, wild animals, men who want nothing more than to torture you to death or worse.

They came with images—they were formless monsters, gelatinous black globules in her mind that she couldn’t comprehend, but of which she knew she should be afraid, and afraid she certainly was.

“There aren’t any other options!” Liliyana shouted as she whipped back around to face her sister. Misery had transmuted into fury. Wild, panicked fury. “What else can we do? Sit here and wait for Papa to come back?”

“Yes! Exactly! If we stay right here, he’ll come back and—!”

“And what? Look around! Look at all this dust! He isn’t coming back, Mari!”

The words were a physical blow. Mari cowered away from them.

“What do you suggest, then?” Mari challenged. “If—if—we leave, where do you propose we go?”

“We—we—we could—” Liliyana’s gaze moved around the room as if the answer were something that simply needed to be seen. As if it was waiting on Mari’s dusty vanity table or her empty armoire. Then, at last, she landed on Mari. “I don’t know, all right? I don’t know where we should go but I know we can’t stay here!”

“We can’t—”

“We can’t stay here! How long until we starve? How long until whatever that was—” she gestured at the glass doors, from whence the roaring had come. “Gets in here? Are we going to just sit here and wait to die?” She dropped her hand back to her side and clenched her fists. “Well, I’m not.”

Before Mari realized what happened, Liliyana ran out into the hallway.

“Liliyana! Get back here! Wait!” She pulled herself up on wobbling legs, legs that struggled to carry her as she stumbled across the room. She had to stop Liliyana. She couldn’t let her—she couldn’t—

Mari staggered out into the hallway. Decay had eaten it as much as it had her room, with the dust having fallen in a fine powder across the landing and down the winding set of stairs that connected the upper floor with the lower. The little paintings she and Liliyana had done on the walls were gone as if they had never been done in the first place. As if those days Mari and Liliyana spent in the golden afternoon sunlight with paint brushes in hand, decorating the walls with their masterpieces to while away what at the time felt like endless hours. She could see those days as she followed Liliyana’s footprints down the stairs, see them standing on ladders to reach the higher parts of the wall. It was as if the mausoleum of a house was filled with their ghosts.

Liliyana took off across the vast expanse of flat clearing around their house. Ever fearless.

From the doorway Mari watched Liliyana grow further and further away. Her mind narrowed until nothing around her existed but the sight of her sister, her baby sister, the little one she cared for since she was born, the one she helped raise, reaching the distant tree line.

“Liliyana!” Mari screamed after her, her mind distorted into a shallow tunnel that was dark on all sides and blocked out the entirety of the rest of the world. She dove headlong out of the house after Liliyana.

Each time she stumbled she clawed her way back up. Each time she fought to draw in a haggard breath she found a way to manage. Each time the tears in her eyes blurred her vision she blinked them away. Nothing mattered but Liliyana and watching her vanish into the forest. Mari never hesitated. She surged in after her sister and chased her through the creaking tree trunks with their gnarled branches with nothing but the faint white moonlight to see by.

Twigs snapped against her arm in brief flashes of pain. She stumbled backward as overhanging limbs draped across her path came into view at the last second and landed on a bed of pine needles. A tight breath sucked in through clenched teeth and she was back up and running. She couldn’t let Liliyana get away from her. Couldn’t lose her.

“Liliyana!” She screamed again, her voice bouncing off the shadowed pines that stretched up like gnarled fingertips into a sky blanketed in stars. Mari skidded to a stop and turned around and around, looking for any sign of the direction Liliyana went.

Silence, filled only by the flutter of unseen wings. By distant howling. By Mariela’s own breathing.

“Liliyana! Where are you?” Mari called back, hot tears blooming in her eyes. They fell down her cheeks in fat drops. She battled against her fear to breathe, to keep from shaking, to keep a level head until she found Liliyana. Her mind kept slipping. Kept stumbling over itself as her eyes scanned the sentinel trees bathed in an ocean of shadows. She stepped sideways toward an outstretched branch and gasped at the dew which slid from the wide green leaf onto her skin. “Liliyana!”

“Mari!” Liliyana’s scream sliced through the dark.

White hot panic erupted inside Mariela, beginning first in her chest then blooming out until her entire body was flush with sweat and she could barely stand. Where was Liliyana? By the Gods, where was she?

Unsure of where she was going, Mari took off straight ahead. Standing still was worse than trying to ferret out the source of Liliyana’s screams. She had to find her. She had to.

“Liliyana!” She screamed as she fell through the dark, coming away with scratches and cuts on her hands from trying to guard against unseen hurdles. Her foot slid over the smooth surfaces of rocks embedded in the dirt. “Where are you? Liliyana! Answer me!”

Mari’s hand came down hard on a tree trunk, the bark rough and sharp against her soft flesh. She pushed herself away from it and the scent of moss from the opposite side. The stench of earthy fungus filled her nose.

Assaulted by unfamiliar sounds and smells, Mari twisted and jerked away from threats imagined. Monsters summoned by Papa’s stories lurked in the shadows, licking their lips, waiting for the moment to strike. What if they already got Liliyana? What if they grabbed her with their sharpened claws and tore her to shreds? What if—

No. She couldn’t think like that. She had to get herself together. Had to gather what remained of her wits and find Liliyana at all costs. She was okay. Liliyana was okay and soon she would find her and they would go back to the house together and—

A scream tore from Mari’s throat as she ran headlong into a spiderweb strung between two trees. She clawed at her face to get off the thin threads strewn across her eyes and nose, eyes shut tight against the threat of spiders. In her flailing, Mari tripped over a protruding root and fell.

The air rushed out of her lungs as she tumbled down the slope at the bottom of the small protrusion of earth where she’d been. Pine needles stabbed into her skin as she fell, rolling against stones and through a deadfall of rotted branches and twigs between two thick trunked trees. When at last she rolled to a stop, Mari coughed and thought she tasted blood. She tried to stand up, to call out for Liliyana again, but her brain rolled around in her head like the last pea in the can. She couldn’t make sense of where she was or what had happened.

It had to be a bad dream. It just had to be. Soon she would wake up back in her bed and she would smell the breakfast Mistress Lightfoot was cooking downstairs and—

But if this was a dream, how could she be in so much pain? How could her body ache with such ferocity if it was just a play put on by her own mind?

And besides, as she laid staring up at the stars and unable to understand that was what she was looking at, she realized that she never actually remembered any of her dreams. Never felt like she had any.

Her head lolled to the side. Less than a full arm’s width away was a patch of glowing red flowers. Small tendrils grew out from around the larger petals and reached towards the dark. She smiled. There were worse last sights in the world, and at least Mari’s would be a pretty flower.

Then came a rustling in the underbrush.