5. Gloria
The lid of the chest is very heavy. You have to lean on it to prop it up and keep it from smashing your thieving hand. As you dig through the wealth of the house that received you, you become strained. There is an exhausting element to this despicable work. Still, you showcase admirable resolve in pursuing it. You are in to the elbows, then to the shoulders.
It comes to you a moment later, when you lean deeper in, resting your hip against the edge of the chest and almost diving inside to bury yourself in cloth and gold. It's a name of that strange feeling which gripped you so tight earlier, during the feast, and hasn't let go since.
That name is disgust.
It is not a coffer you're in, but a midden-heap. It is not cloth and gold you sink into, but manure and offal. It stains what it touches; your skin burns where thievery brands it.
You didn't even hesitate much. You saw an opportunity and slid down all the way to dust where snakes and rats swarm. With scantily any shame you sought to steal from those who hosted you so graciously, who treated you with nothing but kindness. You recoil and the lid slams shut, a bang loud enough to stir others from sleep. But they just groan tiredly, still too addled by the feast to notice your crime. You crawl back to your spot, still gagging on bile.
A thief is the rankest kind of a creature, at home only in the sewage. What she touches is sullied, her name is a curse. A branch and a rope are too good for her; that scavengers even touch her unburied corpse is an underserved kindness. There is no room for her among men, because they are she is not one of them. She is vermin, and as vermin, she is met with disgust.
You are vermin.
You know this in your gut and in your bones. It's in the taste of acid on your tongue. It is in the shame that burns your skin. It is in trying to cry at your own misery and finding that tears won't flow for one such as you. Lies you've propped yourself with all your life come apart and you face what you really are. You spasm, as if trying to tear yourself free from what lives inside you. But you can't. Even if you tear yourself open, it will remain inside of you, this undeniable truth. Wishes burn through your mind: that you were anyone else, that you worn born better, luckier, saner, that you were born right. But you weren't and all you can do is concede to this notion.
A man respects the ties of kinship that bind him. A reptile abandons them and runs the wild alone. A man shows who he is openly and with pride. An insect hides her nature behind false colours. A man would sooner die than break the law and custom. A rat steals what she wills. A man knows he is a man. Vermin knows she is vermin.
You wish they'd never allowed you past the door, but how can you blame them for not noticing who you really are? They couldn't peer through skin, through lie and pretense, see the filth you feel roiling just beneath. But there is someone else under this roof, someone else who lives in this that however greater and wealthier, is a home just like the one you left behind. Someone you can't fool. You curl down, press your hands to your temples and shut your eyes tight. Your lips twist into wordless prayers for the sweet odour of her rotting flesh to stop filling the air. The Saints do not listen to you today; they pay no mind to ones such as you.
Even in the dead of the night, you can hear the flies that circling over her putrefying carcass. She is be here, as she is around any hearth and under any roof. She sees what you are and she will not allow the vermin to live among men. You will not flee from her to a fairer place. Wherever good men of law, custom and honour raise a home and farm, you will find her invited in, rotting on the floor, silver laid on her chest.
You open your eyes and see what was left of her face, lying right next to you. Lichen covers her skin, glowing faint silver and blue, and in its light, you see the squashed fruit of her lips twist and curl into a grin.
You scream at the top of your lungs, louder still. Everyone jumps awake, but before they can even see what is going on, you are already grabbing your spear and cloak and smashing your shoulder straight into the door, through them and into the open air, where her ghost won't follow. You run past the hayfield, past the fence, and into the darkness beyond.
The woods close around you and welcome you as their own.
Their hands are branches that reach to you and scratch against your skin; their caress draws blood. But even as they smash you in your face over and over again, you know that they care for you. When they see that the pace of your mad dash is constrained by that accursed dress, they make it snag on a root, bringing you down and bruising you. But when you lift yourself up, the fabric is torn, and you step lengthens. You run like a creature of the forest. They make you fall again and again, so that you wound yourself on rocks and sharp growth, again and again until your knees and hands are a mess of bruised meat. And yet you run, run until your chest burns with exhaustion, until you can barely breathe and even then you push yourself, ever away from homes of men, which will always be her haunt.
You can't see the sky when you finally fail to lift yourself up from another fall. You lie sprawled, limbs refusing to listen to your commands, twitching feebly as you try to move them. The pain of overexertion, emotion and physical hurt crashes into you in a numbing wave, and you give up on trying to rise. Blood congeals on your face and on your knuckles. There is a darkness around you, but is different than the pitch-black of a night under a roof. Even though there is no shine of the moon nor stars to be seen, the dark you are in is imperfect. It crawls and teems, like bubbling pitch. The woods never sleep and never stay still.
Insects find you and climb over the mound and valleys of your body. Birds stir at your passage and at your fail. Other beasts scream and growl in the shadows, their eyes flickering like wisps between the unseen branches and trunks. There is no doubt that when the sun comes up, there will be no tracing back the path, and there will be no return. You are lost, thoroughly and perfectly.
In a way, it comes as a relief.
It had to be some kind of lunacy that possessed you to seek shelter among men, around their fires and under their roofs. You are not kin to them, no more than you were a fellow to that drifter in a green cloak. That you pretend to be drifter, a wandering man, does not make you one. Under the cloak and wraps, there is no man, but vermin that does not belong where men dwell. Now that you think of it, it feels like something you have always known. But only she could see through your lies and chase you out to where you belong.
It's so funny to think about it that way, but it's not something you can deny. She ran the woods and you feared them; she lived as a boy would and you put every effort to be the girl you should. And now you are lost in the realm of wild beasts, where monsters make their lairs, where there is no law and custom, and you know it is the only place you are safe from her.
In the end, were you really the good one of the two? When the family asked, she obeyed, she abandoned what she loved and she did her duty. You never saw her hesitate nor question, not even when it led straight to her death, valued at three hundred ounces of fine silver.
In the end, isn't what being the good daughter means? That you couldn't bear the thought of it is proof enough for you to accept that you were always a fake. You could have pretended, but the moment you were put to a test you failed, and you don't even regret that. You wish you could. You hate yourself for that, but deep inside, you
know that it was never really a choice.
Maybe going into the woods is death. You have nothing: a spear you don't know how to wield, a cloak you shouldn't be wearing, a brush and a mirror of a woman that you are not. Those are no tools of survival. But it is on your own terms. Unlike living there, with always by your side, reminding you always what goodness in the world is. Three hundred ounces of silver over a rotten corpse. Peace over untended graves.
It is what a good daughter want, but you take comfort in the notion that as vermin, nothing stops you from hating it to the core.
Exhaustion of your mad dash spreads through you like a soothing balm, purging the lingering bile, the taste of disgust. Here, you can be a thief or you can be yourself, and the wild beasts will not judge you. Here, you can be the worst monster, and you will be at home. You don't move and allow ants to crawl over you; you listen to owls hooting, to distant howls of wolves, you listen to the buzz of night flies.
When the light comes, first you spend a while just lying on your back and watching the sun philter through the canopies above. Here, the trees grow tall and wide. Their canopies tie together, a vaulting of sorts. The morning barely reaches the forest-floor where you rest. Only a few scattered rays of summer make it through. It's so different than the woods yesterday. It's so different than sleeping at home.
After you are done, you shake the night's detritus from yourself and take the knife to what remains of your dress and cut it at your knees, making it like a shirt. Then, you unwrap the mirror and stare into your own reflection for a while. Even past all the grime and blood covering it, it's still a womanly face. If you clean up, put on new clothes, no one will see anything wrong with you.
This has to change.
It's not easy, cutting your own hair. You try to hold the mirror in one hand and the knife in the other, but then you find no good way to catch your locks on the blade. Then you try to prop it against a rock, but it balances poorly and you can't really get a good look at yourself. Somehow, even with what you are doing, the thought that you'd make a hack-job out of it bothers you.
She manages to sneak up on you during this struggle. You don't notice her until her quick hands dart under your arms, and close around your wrist. You drop the mirror and open your mouth to shout, your heart coming up to your throat, but she snaps a green bracelet around your hand and the scream comes out as a quiet sigh. You calm, all worry gone in an instant. She comes into view moment later, lifts up the mirror and brings it closer to you, so that you can finally see into it easily. But you are too curious to finish what you were doing and instead give her a solid look.
From a distance, she would be easy to mistake for a human, but humans don't have curved horns growing out of their foreheads and don't have teeth that are all sharp and jagged. Humans have feet, not cloven hoof on legs that bend the wrong way. Humans speak, and she just stares at you, baring her fangs with something that may be a smile. Whatever that expression means, it feels warm and you yearn to trust it.
She waits for you to appraise her, even as your eyes slid down the oddly slim frame, covered with a tattered remains of a cloak and a shirt; beneath it, you see ink staining her skin, painting it with vivid reds and greens. She appraises you in turn, squinting. You wonder what she sees in you, but her eyes are a barrier you can't get past. Nothing about her seems familiar: even the way she holds the mirror strikes you as old, long fingers smudging the polished brass as she lifts it to your eyes.
The thought occurs to you that she must be a Malefactor, then, an evil spirit sent after you. Fitting, then, that she is here to help you with what you are trying to do. You have always been rather proud of your hair: they were a mark of care you put in yourself, and a distinction of womanhood. You cut them close to the skin, as evenly as you can. She watches you as you do, patiently keeping the mirror up, moving it so that it is always in front of your eyes and in turn, you politely try to ignore the fact that her tongue slips from between her lips to lick them ever so often and that there are morsels remaining stuck between her teeth that look like raw meat. You can't think about that. You have something else to focus on. When you are finally finished, she puts it down at your feet, then shakes her head, frowning. Her hair grows long and lush.
You guess you she doesn't like the look. You shrug, then crouch to pack the mirror back. You don't want to lose it. It's a small surprise that you don't even feel that much of a loss when you look at your hair littering the underbrush. You'd have expected getting rid of them to feel like something bigger, but as is, it barely gets a rise out of you.
It's a really calm day, and in truth, you feel light as a feather. Birds sing praise of the world above and the forest-floor is soft under your feet, like a bed of feather. Even the splinters of old bones you step around do not menace; they are just an ornament, nothing more. You linger down for a while, allowing this peace to seep into you, wash away all that sadness and all that rage you feel.
When you raise your head, she is gone. You blink, then notice that her hooves left clear impression in the soft underbrush, easy enough to follow. You rub your temples, the bracelet she gifted you scraping against your skin. There is something you feel that is slipping your mind, but you are not sure what it is. Likely some dregs from the night, some lingering fears you should better leave behind. In any case, she seemed kind, and maybe you should follow her? It is not like you know your way around the woods, so some guidance would likely help.
[ ] Follow her trail.
[ ] Focus! Something is wrong.
