Page 6 of Feral Keep

I look at the white flower three inches from my face, and I want to touch it, and that wanting surprises me more than anything that has happened since the fence. It’s the first time in four years I’ve wanted something just because it was beautiful.

My fingers twitch in the dirt. I try anyway—an inch, maybe less, my hand dragging through the soil toward the stem before the muscle gives out. It doesn’t reach. I leave my arm stretched toward the flower I can’t get to, palm open in the dirt, reaching for something my body won’t let me have.

My eyes sting with it, that stupid, useless wanting. I don’t have the water or the strength to laugh or cry, so the wanting just sits in my chest, sharp-edged, the first thing that’s been mine in longer than I can measure.

I don’t think I’ve wanted anything except food, water, sleep, and the absence of pain since I was fourteen years old. The camp compressed desire down to a single point: live through this. Everything else—wanting, wondering, noticing a flower—belongs to a person with resources to spare, and I haven’t been that person in four years.

I lie here and these things come through, and the coming-through is its own kind of dying. The survival instinct wouldn’t let them in if it still had something left to burn.

Then the sound is heavy.

A footfall. Not the light step of an animal or the crunch of a Eunuch’s strange gait. A weight hitting the ground, transferring through the root system, vibrating through the wood against my cheek. My whole body shudders with it—not through thought but through contact, the vibration traveling from the root into my jaw, my ribs. It’s a thing that doesn’t apologize for taking up space.

Big.

Everything my mind has left, squeezed into three words: Big. Close. Can’t run.

But there’s no place to go. No adrenaline left to mobilize. No muscles that will listen even if I tried to move. This is the end. The end of running. The end of trying.

Somewhere far off, a scream is trying to build in my chest. It doesn’t have the fuel to reach my throat. It just sits there, a pressure with nowhere to go, my body wanting to fight or flee and finding nothing left in the cupboard. I have never been this afraid and this empty at the same time.

Another footfall. The vibration is closer. Heavier. Whatever is approaching is not in a hurry. It moves the way something moves when it doesn’t need to hurry because nothing in its territory can challenge it.

The musk is suffocating. Thick, dark, warm in a way the camp never was. Under the musk: the faint metallic tang I’ve been tasting for days, sharper now, concentrated. His scent. The one embedded in every tree, every claw gouge, every worn path in this territory. I’ve been breathing it for hours. Now it’s breathing on me.

I don’t open my eyes.

He’s here.

Another footfall. The ground compresses under me. Close. Ten feet, maybe less. My body has gone rigid—every muscle locked even though locking them costs energy I don’t have.

I’m a woman-shaped collection of locked muscles on the forest floor, and the biggest thing in this territory is standing over me. My eyes won’t open.

The air changes. A warmth above me, body heat, large and close, radiating down onto my skin like standing next to a furnace.

I open my eyes.

Blood-crimson.

The color hits first. Before the shape. The red of fresh blood in sunlight—arterial, vivid, the color of a wound against the green of the canopy. He fills my vision. All I see is red.

Then the details come. One at a time, because my mind can only hold one at a time.

White horns. Arcing outward from his temples, symmetrical, curving like a crown. Bone-white, smooth. The white against the blood-red is a warning I can read without knowing the language. In nature, red and white together mean do not touch. And yet he’s standing here. His heat falls across me like I matter enough to look at.

Silver hair falls past shoulders wider than the root I’m lying on, metallic, catching the gold light of the canopy. It moves in the breeze like something alive. It shouldn’t be beautiful on something this terrifying, but my mind is past filtering. The camps taught me that Shades are corruption, bodies that move wrong. And this is none of those things. This is beauty. This is the propaganda breaking apart in my vision.

Gold eyes. Looking down at me. Amber-warm, steady, not the cold predator focus of the shadows that crossed the camp sky. This is recognition. This is a gaze that knows I’m here.

Nine feet tall. His shoulders are broader than any living thing I’ve seen—broader than three guards standing side by side. His chest is a wall of crimson skin, scarred in places, muscled in a way that tells me he’s a thing that does things, not one that waits or is done to.

His wings are folded against his back—the membranes dark as the underside of a storm, the structural bone darker still, strong enough to hold a mass like his up into the air. Grown, not attached. He’s everything the propaganda said couldn’t exist.

I’m looking at the thing the camps built me to fear, and it’s looking at me like I’m something worth seeing.

Nothing about that lines up. Four years of briefings built a shape in my head, teeth and claws and a death I was supposed to recognize on sight, and the shape doesn’t fit what’s in front of me. My mind keeps reaching for the fear like it’s a tool that should still work, and coming up with nothing but confusion where the fear should be.

His tail moves first. A slow uncoiling from his hip. Crimson, tapering to a white point—the same bone-white as his horns. It reaches.