u/Mundane_Main_2726

The houses stood dead and nameless, a country in a final plague where all was reclaimed by a cacophony of the gentle wild. Bats as nimble heralders of the black sky rushed overhead followed by silent birds, and each time she looked but never stopped. When she walked past Jonas's hut, she wrapped her arms around her ribs, the shovel tucked in with them, and felt the fur of her coat damp from the clean breath of the evening road. She was cold, but it would not make her turn back. Reflections were scarce in the washed patches of the road, and she would know the dry from the wet only when the mud sucked her boots in.

Tautgailė thought of the sun rising like seeing a friend who had gone for a while bringing something new to say, and she thought of the night, each time coming as a different stranger hidden behind masks of always wilder creatures. She thought she knew this road, but the one she now walked had come with the stranger who keeps the moon for a lantern, and the more inland this road took her, the fewer grew the houses, the wilder were the fields and the stranger was the night.

Trees began to loom over her path, and pinecones, barks and needles crackled under her step and with each crack she feared it was a snail she killed. Then wet shoes squelching, she hurried out of the trees through the grasses towards the pastures and there she feared she might step on the croaking frog, or frogs now as the herpsong harmonised in a countrywide choir. Last she heard them was when the days were still warm, she thought.

The pasture came into view, wide below the wider treeline, a field dotted by sleeping cattle scattered and still like boulders of a shapeless ruin. As Tautgailė hopped the fence, her eyes beheld the western stars low on the horizon and she smiled at them. Then careful not to wake the animals and hopeful not to walk into one, she crouched in search of her friend, and it did not take long to spot her. At the far edge of the pasture, Žibutė was awake, her head up facing a figure standing upright on the fence.

Tautgailė gasped and froze. Her eyes wide open waited for it to move, but the night was motionless in all its forms. She took a step forward, a leaf of grass wept down her face, and when she was sure enough the figure could not see her, she began her approach.

Žibutė's whipping tail was growing audible in the riot of frogs, and so Tautgailė was getting close. Then she could see the shape of the stork on the fence, absent, gazing at the woods, awfully still. Both she and cow now looked at it, and then Tautagile whispered her friend's name and pat her on the hip.

'Žibutė, come dear.'

The cow turned and bobbed her head, and turned towards the stork again. Tautgailė groand and stood up and throwing her hands in the air, she shouted.

'Shoo bird, shoo.'

Against the empty dark, the stork turned its head towards her and its eyes were of the night. She turned and beheld the sight they mirrored, grey veils creeping towards the horizon, dispersing the glow of stars. Then a wave of ruslte grew in the eastern treeline, and the woman, the cow and the stork all faced ahead as a horde of dark things glimmering poured out of the woods, coallike stars motioning the field delivering the lost summerly song of the herp.

The stork lifted off into a mad hunt, and Tautgailė threw her arms around the cow as the frogs hopped over them wetly. She felt the small legs stuffing in her ears as the creatures passed, she felt them climbing under her clothes, cold bodies crawling on her back and legs and belly. She tried to listen but the frogs croaked like the holler of rainfall. She tried to turn and see the other cows, but the discomfort of the horde kept her head buried in her elbow, and all she could see were the frogs jumping below her, and she watched them until the last one closed the wave.

The croaking grew distant, and she and Žibutė emerged and saw the stillness of night again clad in a yellowish haze that breached the veiled sky. Then a frost crept out of the trees, and went after the frogs, and Tautgailė felt how it tightened her lungs and chilled her swollen belly. She coughed a hard moisture in her throat, and waited for the frost to pass, but it would not. White clouds puffed from Žibutė's nostrils, and Tautgailė caressed her friend and felt her warmth. She hugged her and thought of the graveyard, and so when she let go, the two left the pasture and headed for the depth of the woods.

The ghost of winter draped the trees and foliage in pale outlines of cold light, and a stale scent of old mushroom and dankness carried with the breeze. The two companions were following the road, and so Tautgailė did not worry as much about what the night hid ahead. The ice hardened the mud that in daytime the dwellers of the country and the wild alike had plodded, but it was claylike enough to be moulded flat when walked.

The road ran straight, its only branches the few and the narrow trails beaten by the wood's many hooves. The woman and the cow passed the old black poplar that in daylight watched the wanderers with its many faceshaped burrs, its branches mangled and odd. Then came the overgrown hut, its still standing beams elusively lit, a place that the history of remained a mystery. At the small glade, they chose to step off the path and walk around the edge after Žibutė's plunge found the ground to be sodden.

It was when Tautgailė saw the spilled barrel lying in the ditch that the sky spoke for the first time. A low murmur rolled in the darkness overhead, the sound of a secret shadow concealed by the absence of blaze. Soon others followed, they spoke to each other while she like an ant under the steps of a procession sped towards the barrel, and there she reached with her hands for any water that sat in it still. A scraping sound came from the inside, and she knelt and saw a tawnyowl shaking in the corner, and so she scooped some water fast so as not to disturb the bird. With her face chilled, she made for the clearing and then the mound where her sister laid buried.

Sombre and mute they warned her aware of her presence, the wooden idols, in shades of cold and crowns of sulphur, stood where the great skies always watched. They marked the memory of the dead, cut from flat plates into horned heads, horse busts, birds in flight and elaborate symbols, and then crosses like the one of the bleeding man in the chapel. Her sister's was oaken and shaped lanternlike with a heart hollowed in the middle.

Tautgailė knelt and grasped it and pulled until the soil let go. She then placed her sack on the ground and unwrapped the shovel. Then dug into the mound. Abstract faces, phantasms of history, witnessed her, and a few times she barked at them when in the corner of her eyes the gravesigns turned into tall brutes ready to howl 'graverobber' into the night or bleed her guts out right where Budrys would then dump her body in a hole.

The wind spun the damp fabrics of her clothes and so she felt as if trapped in the coils of an invisible spire. She dug the shovel deeper and deeper, and though her sturdy shape was used to labour, her belly stung where it sat round about the hips as she applied force down the blade with her foot. She would sit the shovel aside, then listen for noises down the road, and go back to digging by scooping with her arms. She would pick up the shovel again, to toss it aside once more, and coat her hands in moist layers of clay, sand and blackened compost.

The dirt she tried to pile, the gale made into a swarm that flew to her sweat like marchflies after the springrain. Through spit and scouting looks, the hole grew deeper and deeper, and thoughts of a revenant fiend began to haunt her. She thought of the oiled god, how they said he came back from the dead, how her sister had been offered to him in her death, and how Jonas spoke of powerful sorcery.

There was a thud. The shovel hit a hollow surface. She began to uncover as much of it as she could, and in doing so a barbed splinter, a whole palm long, sewed through the knifeedge of her hand. First she hissed, and when the red and brown poured towards the elbow, she gasped and choked. She twitched the splinter in attempt to remove it, but the skin and flesh stung so much it made her ill. She pulled herself up gagging until her sister's box drummed wet and her mouth tasted of clots of soured bread. Drool oozed down her chin onto her chest and then onto her hand when with cloudy eyes she looked down and ripped the splinter out. Cough overtook her, first to spit the acid, then to hoark out the cold.

Tautgailė sat down in the hole, and with her back against the dirt wall, she felt heavy legs move towards her on the surface. Then Žibutė's head gazing down cast a shadow into the grave.

'Almost done,' Tautgailė panted out, then hoarked again and spat, 'you stay here, Ill need you soon.'

The wailing wind fled to deeper corners of the woods, and in the quiet, viscous liquid splattered in the dead place below. Quickly, Tautgailė reached for the cloth she had wrapped the shovel in and tore from it, and used the scrap to bandage her hand. She loosened the knot after the wound stung like burning flesh tied too tight. Then there was an image in her mind, bloated jaws of a shadowed corpse awake, swallowing the blood like a wicked babe from a teat that left it unsated. She listened, but her sister hid in the silence.

With the shovel in hand, she stuck the blade between one board and another and levered, and with a crack the wood let go. The black gap was thin, but she dared not to let her fingers come near it. She did the same for the adjacent board, then pushed the shovel deeper at a narrower angle, and was sure she met the soft surface of dead skin. She thought of awful fingers tapping on her tool. Another dry crack, and two boards lifted when she pressed down on the shovel, and so nightly haze poured into the darkness, and before the ill face became familiar, she bashed the blade into the neck. Žibutė bellowed and ran, while in the hole Tautgailė groaned through sickly pops and wet crackles and thuds of sharpness on bone. Then the head rolled aside.

The sight was vile, but she knew it had to be done. Things wake in the dirt sometimes, and she did not want to give it that chance. Tautgailė knelt and reached for her sister's head through the gap, then set it next to her. She tried to lie down to grab the shoulders next, but her womb was too swollen, and so she stepped inside the box instead and reached for the stiff corpse. She pulled but it would not bend to pass through.

She grabbed the lynxclaw necklace that had slid when the head popped off. She climbed out and looked around, and saw Žibutė standing on the road and staring ahead. Tautgailė tried to ignore her friend's curiosity.

'Come here you.'

Žibutė looked to the graveyard and back at the road again then bobbed her head with a huff, and rejoined her friend.

'You keep looking at things. Come, I need your help.'

Tautgailė drew the rope from her sack, and wondered if it was robust enough, then tied it around the shoulders of the corpse and fashioned a yoke around Žibutė employing the shovel as well. It all was shorter than she had hoped, but it had to do. The cow pulled, and the sister's headless body began to emerge from the box. The flies that stayed loyal to Žibutė through the cold were soon drawn to a new host, and they swarmed Tautgailė in their frenzy as well. Her sweat had mixed with the dirt and blood, and they all came together so as to form strands like growth rings on split wood.

The sister's burial gown hooked onto the broken planks and they began to shred it and pull the threads, and then they scratched and cut at the skin too, so that when the body dragged through the grass, its surface was marked by patterns of white, black and red and thorned by splinters like a thistle leaf.

The clouds boomed again, and blurs of bolts crested bluely the dark pine crowns overhead. In the broken light, Tautgailė recognised her sister's face. The hair felt brittle and sad in her hands, and the skin was purplish and bloated, the only sign of wrinkles was the fading print of sunburn. The eyes sat buried under swollen lids, and then there was the mouth gaping, the dark lips oozing a tarlike clotted phlegm.

Tautgailė undid the makeshift yoke and lifted the body onto the cowback where she used the rope to fix it in place. After covering the hole in the ground, she stuck the shovel by Žibutė's ribcage, adjusting it so that it did not poke her friend. She took the gravemark too, and placed it with the body, and spread the cloth over the freight. The sister was shorter now but the fabric was not enough to fully hide her, and so she folded it and tossed in the the sack. The head was the only thing left then, and she decided to carry it in her hand.

Tautgailė laved by wiping wetness from the rotted wildflowers that stayed in the barrel onto her palms, and she noticed the owl had left.

Whenever the sky did not thunder, the ill buzz of flies feeding filled the silence. Their drone drifted with the waves of wind, dispersing them before they regrouped. The pineneedles blown into the air imitated their swarms. Through the crack in the crowns that ran above the road, shadows of crying birds flashed with the blaze, and each time they were different tribes.

Nausea spun her head again, and she felt her bowels knot from emptiness, and so she stopped for a moment. She reached for her bottle, rested the dismembered head on the ground, then drank and wished she had fresh water instead of the gėra. The first sip she could not stomach, and flushed it back inside, while the second was easier and it helped rinse her throat. When she laid her eyes on the road again, she remembered the something that caught Žibutė's interest earlier. The grove was distant still, and she hoped no beast would try to delay them.

The foliage hissed with urine when Tautgailė lifted her dress and she heard a quiet sky again, and realised it had been so for some time now. She collected herself and set back on the dirtroad where all was truly dark once more, and she wondered if the next light would be the warmth of the pyre.

Owlsong reached her from beyond the gloom of trees, lone hoots that played their own echo. Tautgailė looked between the pines, a place so desolate yet dense and barred like the abyss of seafloor which she dared not access if not through imagination.

'Come closer.'

Tautgailė halted and stepped back in haste, the soft voice reached her from the near distance ahead. Shaking, the grip around her sister's hair sat wrong and she dropped the head and it rolled on the ground. When she went after it, the head rolled back to her from the darkness.

'My skin did not touch it.'

Frantic, she grabbed the head and moved away trying to locate the stranger. Then to the side of the road, she saw what she had thought an oak trunk rotted and mossgrown, and realised it to be a figure cloaked in rags so thick and heavy to the point of burial.

'Frighten not', the figure did not move, not even as it spoke, as if an alien voice conjured in the air before it. In stature, Tautgailė would have assumed the stranger to be younger than herself, taller though hunched, but the voice was old, like that of the undead, she thought.

'Come closer.'

'I dont want to.'

'But you need to go through.'

'We will take the woods.'

'I need to drink. Come and you will go on the road. I dont want to hurt you.'

The ring in the stranger's voice, vaguely akin to her mother's, made Tautgailė guess it was an elder woman.

'Do you have to drink.'

'Yes', and Tautgailė reached for the bottle, and was about to hand it to the stranger.

'Dont', from the rags emerged an arm likewise wrapped, and such was also the mittenlike hand that held up a bowl. In the movement rose a smell like that of wet dog.

'Pour in this,' the woman said, 'yes. Thats close enough. Pour now.'

When the bowl was full, the woman brought it and emptied it where the mouth must have hid.

'Its good.'

'Yes. Our making.'

'Ah. Its good', she sipped some more. 'Theres only been boiled pondwater to drink here.'

'I see.'

'Yes.'

Tautgailė looked at the woman, the folds and stitches of fabrics sat as if the whole body was misshapen, swollen and wrinkled. She realised the sister's head was still in her hand, and so she tried to hide it behind her back, but at last placed it behind Žibutė's leg.

'Do you have to eat,' the woman asked.

'Im afraid not.'

'Thats too bad. Theres only been berries here, and bird and squirrel. But berries are withered now, and squirrel sleeps in the cold. And bird flees.'

'Theres frog.'

'The frog is a thing foul. You cannot eat the frog.'

'I see.'

The flies that had distributed themselves from Žibutė onto the dead sister, began to rest and shimmer on the stranger too, as countless vagabond eyes.

'Milk is good. And cheese when its smoked. Do you milk the cow', a faint twitch in the cloaks made Tautgailė think the woman gestured at Žibutė.

'Shes too young. We hope she calves next autumn.'

'The calf is good when you roast him.'

'Im sure. We will go now, yes.'

'Yes. Thank you for the drink.'

'Youre welcome. Health now, and goodnight', she picked up her sister's head.

'Health.'

Tautgailė and Žibutė went past the old woman, and Tautgailė still wondered whether it is not best to make a turn for the trees and reach the grove in hiding. She glanced back a time or two, and saw the old woman slowly walking into the woods, merging with their blackness, and so she decided they would keep to the road.

The hour passed but the sky did not show it. In time the woman and the cow reached the fork and took the narrower side, where the living forest was younger. Where it grew among the roots of fallen gods.

There was dustfine sand instead of the beaten dirt of the mainroad, and the brush of whortles instead of ditches along the edges. But the path was wider than she remembered, and so the woman and the cow chose to walk side by side to draw comfort face the unseen and the unknowable.

She thought of her first memory of the path and the grove, and the pyre's tall tongues and their stink of smoke. She was a child then, her mother's hair was chestnut still, and the legless seamster had died. Others had come to see the pyre, whole families, and a little Budrys among them. Now their faces were cloudy. Then six summers ago her friend died from consumption and there were four people in the grove to watch the fire take her. She had not been to it since.

The small ghost of a light shone and ceased in the foliage ahead.

'I saw people', she backed her hand for Žibutė to stop.

They stood idle and she wondered what to do, and every gentle hum of the forest became deafening. Sleepless animals unseen and the uncouth motions of breeze took the shape and sound of watchful strangers, and harm carried with them. She was sure the light's bearer hid in the trees, and their steps were shrouded in the soundscape.

The light came about again, larger this time, and it moved irregularly, flickering as it passed behind shrub and tree.

'Whos there', she shouted, and the light came to a halt. Tautgailė watched it, then four figures flashed when the light vanished in an audible blow. Boots on duff began to approach.

Tautgailė backed away, 'Who are you, I said. Dont move', and the steps did not listen. 'Ill kill you if you touch me, Ill kill you, I swear it.'

'We will not', a harsh voice spoke when they stopped.

Four figures stood hard to tell apart from the shadowed shapes of the wood, uselessly outlined by rogue starlight. They were all greatly cloaked, and motionless like trees. One of them Tautgailė initially thought a giant, but noticed his height was exaggerated by the tall furhat on his head. By his build, she assumed him to have been the one who spoke, and there were creaks of metal about where his hands hung obscure. To the tall man's left was one whose face was wrapped in rags, tufts of hair poking out like straw through a sack. He donned a hat too, and it was squarelike, and the robes that hung from him akin to Budrys's, but coarser and patched. She could tell another man to his left, but could not see but a glimmer of gold things on his drapes, and so his shape was a secret known to the dark. Last, to the giant's right was a fourth man, a clublike tool in his hand, his broad build made grotesque by the ragged hood and cloaks that rendered him a thing of the wild.

'A terrible cold will come', spoke another, and there was a dialect about his voice.

'Ah so, it will.'

'It will be tonight.'

'It seems so.'

'And youre about, walking too far than one would need. Why.'

'You too it seems.'

'We are of this place.'

'I wish to go now.'

'No.'

'You said you didnt want anything from me.'

'I said we wouldnt touch you.'

There was a pause, leaves rustling and the elusive flap of batflight.

'Are you with that woman back there,' Tautgailė then asked.

'Yes.'

She stared at the wights, and they stared back in silence, pale gleam where they had eyes, and the man with the club had only one, she saw.

'Let me walk. Please.'

'No.'

'What do you want. Speak so we may go.'

'We need food. The terrible cold has the voice of beast, and it spoils all, and we wont find any. But we have been praying the good god so that he delivers us some, and the good god, he listened, and delivered us food.'

'I dont have any food.'

'You do', an arm moved forth from the trees, and it pointed at Žibutė.

'No. No, you will not have the cow.'

'We will, graverobber', a darkness above erased all shapes as he spoke, and the sky shattered and it pronounced a monstrous echo of the man's words

'You wont have her I said.'

'There are plenty where it came from.'

'Shes my friend.'

'Thats very sad then. We will have the cow.'

'No. Wait. This, have this cheesecake, yes. Its good', she reached into the sack and brought forth the small pastry.

'The babe inside you would not be sated with that. Therefore. The cow. Leave it here, and we will let you go', she saw the glimmer in their eyes extinguish.

'I have lard too, I', she paused and an ill cramp made her fold, 'please, have the lard instead, yes. I beg you, I', and puke splattered on her feet, and the sound prolonged with a pelleting of ice on foliage.

'You will walk now, and the cow stays behind. If not, we will kill you, so to spare you the pain. And then we will have the cow. And if we want to, we will eat you and the unborn too, and we will toss that corpse that sits on the cow for the wildpig to come eat, and when he does, we will kill the wildpig and eat him too.'

'Go to the village. The village, its close. The folk there will let you eat. And you leave us.'

'We cannot come near the villages.'

'Why.'

'We would bring death', he spoke with thunder and the four men walked out of the trees.

Tautgailė yelped and slapped Žibutė on the back and the two of them ran, and the ice fell sounding like the woods shattering around them.

First they ran the path, and she could hear the men's step grow too close too fast, and so they crossed into the trees. Thunder boomed and in its flashes they saw the labyrinthian pathways that engulfed them. Then came the hollering wind. It ripped a tree out of the earth and the tree roared in fall, and birds and rubble lifted as more were torn.

The wavering lantern lit up again and was somewhere behind her. She could see its yellows shine on the deadleaf under her feet, how it moved up and down with the limp of its bearer.

Spiderwebs stuck to Tautgailė's face as she ran into them, and she hit the sharp wood of a broken branch with her teat and arm. The flayed strap of bleeding tissue at the bosom rubbed against the gown, and she was sure it was a nipple mauled gruesomely. As if forcing her lungs into the bowels, the flesh at her chest weighed her pace down, drenched in cold sweat the skin at the folds on each side burning feverishly as it tore.

Failed by the undercloth, she put her forearm up about her chest so as to lift the breasts steady, but soon after, her elbow struck against the coarse surface of a tree. Tautgailė sprung her arm forward then, and when she collided with the trees, she was able to push herself away and branch into another of the myriad of trails unbeaten.

They ran through polypodies and horsetails rustling, and the foliage echoed behind them when the four wights crossed it too. In the blue of lightning she saw her legs deep in moorgrass and so she drifted left hoping it was not where the water laid. She ran through the duff, Žibutė stomping next to her bellowing. A fallen conifer came standing in their way, a barbed barricade densely green. Tautgailė grabbed the rope on the cow and rushed along until they reached the other side and blinding patches of flaxen light began to stretch over them like a web engulfing moonlit fish.

On wet hail she slipped and fell forward and her teeth cut deep into her tongue while a revolting pain shot up her belly, her sister's head pushing into it. Through exhausting tears she grabbed onto Žibutė and rose up to her feet, and they kept on running, and she wondered what she will do once they reach the grove.

A heavy shape hurled to the ground when Žibutė ran into and shattered the decayed stump of a tree. The cow bellowed and whined, and Tautgailė knelt by her side trying to calm her and pull her up.

'Get up. Get up, now', she spat out through a bloodied lisp, and saw Žibutė's coat revealed as the lantern came nearer, 'my flower, please get up.'

The four stood as apparitions of the light and one of them spoke, 'You will not see us kill your friend. Go', and mittened hands grabbed onto her friend as the cow whined.

'No. No. No. Leave her. Ill kill you, leave her. Leave her', Tautgailė pulled on the ropes, but she fell again when the strangers overpowered her, and they began to walk away with the raging cow, cast in warm mist. The man with the furhat knocked the gravesign to the ground and turned towards her when he did. Rags drumming ghostly on his mountainous form. His features drifted with shadow drawn by the windspun light, and in it, she saw the two halves of his face were different people, both overgrown by dark boils. The falling of the lost stars circled him as snow shone, revealed in the lantern. Then he turned and the astral glow died, and the wights became one with the night again, and Žibutė with them.

Tautgailė curled on the ground and cried her eyes red, strings of snot pouring on her lips and chest, and she felt some of it turn to ice. She hugged her sister's head close to her womb as if she could draw warmth from it. She reached out her hand to grab the gravesign, and saw her fingers dark and purple as she could barely fold them, snowflakes resting on them unaltered.

She failed to stand up, there was viscous wetness going down her thighs, and so she began to crawl through the ice, the snow and the foliage, and then the birds. A dense murder of birds thundered down crying a wild song of every tribe, and in their fury darkness was born in flesh.

They tore down whichever branch was left after the hail and they wrecked the ground and replaced the surface. She thought she heard distant screams of four men in the distance, but the wild sound erased them soon. The murder tossed her around and pecked at her and her sister's head, and she thought she saw some red bird take one of the sister's eyes. The fowl became one with the blizzard, they banished the last of the hail that still fell and blacked out the light of thunder, and whenever light did break through, it would but reveal this madness of flight.

Tautgailė hollered at them, and the swarm welcomed her voice as one of its own. Beaks on scalp and on knuckles and fingers incited her to holler more and louder in tones ever new, and she did, but still pushed forward.

'Flee monsters, away', she coughed out the spell, but the monsters did not listen, 'flee monsters, away, flee monsters, away.'

From a torn nose, blood leaked onto her mangled lips and on them was the hybrid taste of foul iron with the bitterness of birdshit. Her hands grabbed onto shrub and root and stump and bird. Then her fingers sat in a bowl carved in rock.

Quickly she rose to her knees with her arms around it. Old rainwater was frozen inside, and so she pressed her hand against the ice so as to melt it, and the ice burned her hand raw. She reached into her sack and drew the flint and scraped at the ice, then scooped the powder. As her skin was cold and dry, Tautgailė rubbed the ice dust into it until it wept down her face, and then she crawled into the invisible grove.

The grove sat where the cavern of the nightsky was deepest, a darkness so terrible things could only be known by touch. Wings and feathers and small legs slid between her fingers, and then her hand felt a hard frigid surface of a boulder, and she knew it was sacred. She laid at its feet facing the stone and for a moment she was safe, she lied to herself. Countless beaks and talons pulled her, she felt it was to bring her face into the air so they may eat from it. But her face was turned to the stone still, she knelt by it with her head low, and brought forth her things so that the god of fire would come.

On the stone she placed the gravesign, and holding it in place, she used the flintblade to make shavings, but the birds dispersed any she made. She tried again and made a pile where the shape of a heart had been hollowed, and covered it with the bandaged hand. With the help of feet, knees and the other hand, she drew the cloth she used to wrap the shovel in, and fashioned a headscarf on her sister's head, then hung the lynxclaw around the forehead. The hardness of her sister's dead face was so cold that her fingers glued to it, so she clenched the head between her knees instead, and reached into her sack to find the straw. Inside, the shards from the shattered pot of lard cut the fingers, too frozen to bleed.

When she placed the straw in the heartshape, she grabbed the head too and wrestled some immense bird that tried to snatch it. Tautgailė held down the head and scooped as much of the loose lard as she could and spread it on the wood and the straw and her sister's face and headscarf. Last she placed the stale cheesecake and covered the shrine with her whole body as the birds swarmed it.

'Why, why are you dead to us,' she began to recite in weak whispers, 'why oh why. Was there not food or drink for you. Why then are you dead', a sick cough silenced her, 'why oh why for us,' flint met steel with each word uttered, 'Did you not have a family', and she broke up again and yelled and felt her thighs wet again and her belly tighten and bones frozen from pain.

'Did you not have bounty in cattle,' she howled the words and suffering was in them, 'did you not have bounty in chicken, did you not have beauty in bronze, did you not have warmth in the house.'

Little suns flickered and hissed. She panted into the low light, and saw it grow hotter quickly, crackling and sizzling. Then it blinded her and tongues of flame wrapped around the sister's head. The fire hummed and erupted into the night and Tautgailė fell to the ground with eyelashes scorched, and the cursed flock above set ablaze, a bright tower of frenzied sparks. The creatures rose into the sky wailing, their light shrinking in the distance where fragments of warmth came to lay.

She was too hot. Her wintered face stung, and so Tautgailė crawled away from the snowbare circle to where the orange light was dimmer. A thin tail of invisible blood dragged behind from her groin.

They were the countless heads of a dragon spawning, a plentiful clutch hatching from a sole egg. The burning snakes twisted in volcanic hues, spectral when rising into the dark, igneous in mass, and blackish feeding on the embryonic shell repurposed. Through the lampreyish motion burning out of the sockets, the dead one stared as the living sister coiled in pain.

Tautgailė went to feel her groin, and there was a tiny foot, wet and cold, poking out. She pulled on it but it would not budge, and the pain shot up her entire body. She brought her hand into the light, and saw it husklike and swollen, and none of its colours were those of her skin. She brought the hand down again to wipe on the liquid that had poured along the thighs but it sat crustlike now. Moistening her hand with dry spit, Tautgailė pushed inside and blood trickled to the ground. Howling she stopped at the wrist, and moving her fingers around felt the shape of a small belly and a thigh. Twisting, another thigh sat into her grip, and she felt as if a dented blade split her from the folds all the way to the chest, all viscera erupting in mass and hardness. Her hollers cut sharply, and she uttered mute syllables instead.

Tautgailė pulled and pulled and gagged, and pulled again until the graveborn babe tumbled somewhere in the dirt by her feet. It laid silent, and she cried brutally in its stead. She felt a twitch in the muscle but her leg sat still when she tried to feel out the little corpse and bring it close enough to see it.

All feeling was removed from her body, swept by the wind and lost in some dark corner of the landscape. Earthlike and stiff, her body existed anomalous among the wilderness for as long as the dark sky lasted, the only brightness the god of her ancestors watching over from the fire.

A pale haze blinded her when she woke. She saw the country became winter. Her first breath was a white cloud, and so was the second. The ground right beneath her was warm, and in the stillness of snow she heard a low flame crackle on the boulder next to her. Things around her emerged from a blur and her thoughts did also, and she felt her forehead fiery and could not tell if it was a fever.

Tautgailė rose her head and it ached sharply in the back, and she saw a dark and shrivelled cord that carried from where it laid crusted to the thigh into the snow. She pulled herself up in haste and scratched off the bloodied tissue from her leg, and began to dig in the snow. The white alternated with a layer of motley feathers, but there was no trace of the babe.

After she collapsed a few times trying to stand up, Tautgailė was on her feet. In the remains of the pyre laid ardent bronze and flaming fragments of bone. The fire was invisibly pale in the brightness of morn. Her bottle laid by the rock, and though the gourd had cracked, some gėra still sat in it. She held it up, and drank a sip and it was warm like soup. Then she poured a careful splash around the burning bones.

'Why then are you dead to us', the words came out as gibberish, and she sat back down and drank the last bit of the gėra, and fell asleep again.

She dreamt of a stork swallowing the babe as if it were a frog, and then the bird crawled inside her, and she woke up. The light of winter was bright the same, and she did not know how long she slept. The fire went out, and ash hissed in swirls on bronze and bone as the breeze caressed it.

Tautgailė broke the gourd so that it would be a bowl and placed the ash and the bronze of the necklace inside it. She touched her head, and felt some of her fingers stripped from their nails and most of her hair gone, and her scalp raw.

No songbird saw her home. Avian traces of a silenced madness followed her, brought into the light by the groove of her stride. The white coat of the forestfloor laid otherwise undisturbed.

The fog of gentle snowfall rendered the sights narrow but the path came to her eventually, and then the road, where she chose to walk in the trees alongside.

She could not feel her feet when the cloudy shapes of gravesigns emerged from the haze. She crossed the fence walking like an insect on hind legs, and stiffly knelt by the sister's empty mound. Scooping the snow, she revealed wet soil and dug into it, and placed her sister's remains in it now that the fire had shaped them alike, where the charred bronze lies to this day.

No prayers left her frozen lips, though she tried. She walked out of the graveyard like a rogue corpse, and when it disappeared from view, she realised she forgot to lave before she entered and after she left. She kept on walking, her mind too spent to form bad thoughts.

Out of the woods, on the road through the fog came strolling the shape of a man with two dogs.

'Good day,' he said and lifted his hand, and she was going to mumble for help when he was close enough. The man froze and nearly fell when turning around in flight, then yelled, 'Vampyre, the vampyre, good god save me', and the dogs followed him, and his pleas vanished in the eversilent winter. She did not recognise him, and was sure neither did he.

A dark veil was rising from the opening in the roof when she reached the house. Tall snow that slid from the straw circled the house and she would have to shovel it, she thought. She pushed the door open with her shoulder when her arms failed her, and the hut was warm and smoky. She took a seat by the hearth and stared with empty eyes where a black log of driftwood pulsed with ambers.

Time went by and she did not feel any better, and the house was as mute as she was. With heavy steps she walked towards the bed, and saw the quilt rounded where her mother laid still. She sat by her side, and waited for the mother to wake, and as the hour passed, Tautgailė realised she would not.

For my C., who makes the night warm and its monsters idle.

>NO AI: I, the author Lucy June, do not consent to the usage of this work for AI training or AI input. Furthermore, no AI was used at any point of the creative process.

I got into an argument with her over this a while ago.

We both love literature and in fact, I guess she was the one to get me into reading in the first place when I was a kid. We're both writers as well. The thing is, she has really bad media literacy.

I have a younger brother, in his early 20s, who lives with her still. I was visiting that time and he was telling me how he's getting into literature, and been reading classic russian authors. My mother told him he should check out Nabokov, and specifically one of her favourite books which is Lolita.

And she started talking about the book. She said how she knows by heart the opening line, which she recited in this weird sensual voice. It made me sick and nauseous and I told her, maybe a little too expressively (I didn't yell, I was just sickened) not to do that.

She found that upsetting, that I overreacted. I don't know girl, controversial, but I think that reciting a passage about a minor, told by a pedophile (Humbert Humbert, not Nabokov) in an erotic tone does call for a strong reaction.

We got to talking, and I explained that the book is meant to be disturbing, it's written from the POV of an unreliable narrator who is a pedophile and kidnaps a little girl. My mother seems to have not understood that, and believes that it's actually an "unconventional love story" between this middle aged professor and a little girl infatuated with him, whom she related to in the past (and currently as well), in her attraction towards older men, which she justified as having grown up without a father. DOLORES IS NOT ATTRACTED TO THE NARRATOR WHAT THE FUCK.

My mother did have a brief somewhat relationship with a family friend of ours (never fully confirmed but I'm almost 100% confident this is the case), who is like 26 years older than her (she was in her late 30s and 40s when this happened). She now has a boyfriend who is just a couple of years older than her.

I just find this all so foul and disturbing, yet somehow I'm to blame for having been upset over her being apologetic to pedophiles. I said how, if I were a mother and my daughter got kidnapped, or abused by a rapist, I would really really want to have revenge over that. And somehow this made me a monster, because I'd be so careless and quick to hurt another person.

On a completely unrelated note, by coincidence, she believes that Elvis and Priscilla were in love, when some time ago I said that Elvis Presley is a disgusting monster who is tragically still celebrated as a great artist despite being a horrid groomer.

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