Weekly Writing – December 7 2024

He had tasted of rain and blood and not at all as she’d imagined a man might. And when his stiff surprise had melted back into motion, he hadn’t pushed her away.
If morning would bring punishment or a return to smothering normal, why not make the most of the night? She had never thought that way before, of chasing time for all she could take from it, and she’d surprised herself with just how vigorously she could do so.
He must have been using her for something, too. Even if it was just another diversion from the night and the horrors he’d gone through – they didn’t know each other well enough to be two figures entwined in a painting. But if there was one thing she’d learned in her life, it was that actions didn’t have to be animated by feelings. She had crashed down on the bed beside him afterwards feeling as if she’d done something right for herself, only herself, for the first time.
And now…
Now, she was cold. Colder than any room in the manor, and there hadn’t been a window in the guest room for him to open. Even if he had swept the covers off of her while she had slept, she shouldn’t have…
But she wasn’t lying and shivering in a bed. She was sitting in a sore, stretched, unnatural position, on the back of a horse, she knew, in the moment before she started upright and opened her eyes and saw it to be true.
On the back of a horse, with the sturdy, confining support of another person riding in the saddle just behind her. Rain blew in grey curtains against the path ahead, pooling in clefts where the rock shivered under hoof and gale. Pouring in rivulets over the edge of a misty nothing, a forever of wailing wind and watery echoes.
She tried to twist in the saddle, to see the man she knew she would, riding behind her. But her wrists were bound tight to the pommel, and she could see only his arms braced on either side of her, commanding the skittish horse deeper into the storm.
She threw herself against those arms, trying to rock and twist herself free, but neither they nor the rain-swollen rope showed the slightest slack or pity. She might have been riding in an iron carriage, caged in on every side, staring wildly around at the world outside the manor grounds for the first time.
“Where-” she gasped, her voice as slippery and swollen-seeming as the rope. “Where are-”
“I’m sorry.” It was his voice after all. No longer a guest – how had he slipped out of the manor? How had he managed to secret her out with him? “It was a cruel deception. But I doubt I would have had any chance of removing you from that place while you were awake. It was her will working through you, wasn’t it? This mistress of yours.”
All her thoughts seemed to have scattered, swept from the mantel of her mind and shattered. She had no words, no way of being in this place. No patterns or orders. What was she without them?
“Please,” she whispered, and the wind shrieked, as if laughing at the idea that such a quiet plea could be heard. “Why are you doing this? Why…?”
Why had he come to her home, truly? Could it have been for her, somehow, all along?
He spurred the horse on faster still, and her heart seemed to teeter at the edge of that endless drop. The way he had described his lost companions’ screams, dwindling away to whatever lonely grave the mountains would make for them…
“I suspect she will still be listening through you, trying to discern the same thing,” he said. “But she will guess it soon enough regardless. What is said to be at the summit of this mountain is a grave. To describe the creature resting there would take more stories than I have the time to tell, but suffice it to say she was mighty, and it is said that her soul never left. It clung even to rotting flesh and bare bone. What my companions and I carried into these mountains was meant to be a fitting vessel – a means for her to return to the world below. When that was lost, it seemed to me our hope had gone with it.”
Perhaps she was a fool. Perhaps only a fool would have found herself riding there, soaked through her thin cloak, in the arms of a strange man who surely meant her harm. But she knew how to listen and keep close account of what she heard, and how to put things in order, like trinkets on a mantelpiece.
“You think I don’t have a soul,” she guessed. “You think it was only my mistress speaking to you all along.”
The rain whipped and wailed against his silence. It was true, wasn’t it? He thought he had been speaking to a puppet, telling his stories to an empty thing, a pretty mask. He would think nothing of whatever harm he had in mind for her.
“I’m certain you have a soul somewhere,” he said, with the care of handling a doll he had cause to want unbroken for now. “They cannot be destroyed, after all. But, having observed you and your mistress’s other servants, I’m confident that soul is not within you. She must have great power of her own – enough to extract the souls of her household for other uses and animate their obedient bodies by her own will. If we rode far enough from her and this place, your body would fall into torpor. That you are still alert now tells me one of two things – that she is even more powerful than I estimated, or that she is following us.”
“But I’m speaking to you now,” Trina pleaded. “It was not her choice to go to you last night. It wasn’t her choice to stay with you. I’m not empty. I’m here right now, begging you, please…”
She would have known if she had no soul. If she were nothing but her mistress. She wouldn’t have been bored with her work sometimes, or wondered about that outside world, or made up stories about the sculptures she dusted to pass the time. Would she? What was a soul, if not all those small boredoms and wonderings put together?
“Consider it this way,” he said. “As you are now, you are her prisoner. You can never leave her service. Only imbued with another soul can you be free.”
Free to do the bidding of another soul? Of whatever lay dead atop the mountain, whatever creature, he had called it, not even a woman at all? She wrenched at her bindings again, kicked at the horse’s sides, but it minded its master well enough to ignore her completely.
“Was it some other kidnapped woman you were carrying up the mountain, then?” she demanded, her voice ringing through the rain as it never had through the manor. “You told your story in a way that begged so much pity, but all along…”
All along, it had been pitiless sacrifice they’d been riding towards. Had someone just like her cried over the pommel of his companion’s saddle, or…
Or had they found a less troublesome vessel to steal from the world below? As she panted over the pommel, with no tears in her eyes, it seemed to her she could almost see it. The horses rearing when that stone guardian had set upon them. The rain spraying like blood from the stone as its first blow missed all else, the second splitting his companion’s horse open so that panic had spilled out, and as it reared and stumbled and slipped from the edge of the mountain…
As the doomed man had reached up towards the pitiless summit, the bundle he’d held to his chest for all that miserable journey had begun to unravel. White cloth opening to the sky in surrender, showing just a glimpse of the death-serene face inside, the tiny body of a stillborn, soulless infant, before all had plummeted to the depths together.
She saw it all as if she had stood there with rain sluicing from her shoulders. As she seemed to see herself now, and the man riding behind her, as if she were standing just ahead on the trail. Riding towards herself – as the stone guardian straightened from where it had hunched like just another boulder, shedding the rain from its enormous height, and raised its axe to split the smothered dawn-light in two.