It was the mystical glow that attracted her attention.

With each day that passed, her resentment of Gemini grew. Who could blame her? They may have treated her wounds, but she could never return to the little girl who dreamt of soaring through the great blue sky. Reality had come, tearing off her wings and letting her drop back to earth - and that was before her mother had come and tore her to shreds. She avoided Gemini's citizens; she did not want to talk about her scars, nor did she want to hear any terrible news about her mother.

Her mother, who was still missing.

Dusk had fallen, a full moon rising into the sky, and she had been heading to her makeshift den to sleep when the strange light caught her eye. Despite being born in a jungle full of shadows and various types of danger, there was something about this place that kept her on edge. It always felt like she was being watched, and there was a chill in the air that was a stark contrast to the humidity of Saboro.

But whatever this thing was, it was...inviting.

And she went to it.

   It's dusk, and they are just beginning to wake. Calls from impenetrable treetops echo through the dark forest, and Miasma follows the sounds until the converge around the trunk of a many-hollowed tree. Here.

   Then, she digs. Her best chances are at the highest concentrations of owls, with their carnivorous diets, but fickle digestion. Digging through the carpet of leaf matter, moldy undersides, but never delving so far as the fine dirt. Surely everything is disintegrated down there. Mushrooms and seed pods are scattered carelessly while she searches for bones.

   Owls don't caw, but she hears it anyway: the crows of Death Valley, screaming for her to go, leave, get out of the forest maze. She isn't running this time. She isn't so small for Saga's eagle to scoop her up as in so many vivid nightmares, but the piercing screech still rattles in her head over the owls she knows to be real. Wingspan shadows don't cry out, and screams do not have mouths.

   Scheherazade's favour was easiest garnered with pretty little things made by the hands of man. That's why she liked Thetis (daughter of Nevada, daughter of Tatari, son of yOUR FATHER). Such is so here, it seems, from the smile granted the sheep-woman when she gifted the Red Dragon a lantern for her fire, a cloak for her coldness.

   Miasma never had the opportunity to craft from remains, so pressed to constantly kill so Kaiju wouldn't begin to contemplate the taste of her adoptive sister. Now, she has as much of Crow's attention as he spares for his children (you're the only one that came), and Sarissa to impress.

   She collects owl pellets while the sun sets, hums to herself as the horizon goes dark.

Until tall oak trees flattened into rolling hills and gorgeous greens, the man ran with demons snapping at his ankles. He didn't even sense the transition from the dull hues of Saboro to the vibrant colors of Gemini, nor did he realize how the air seemed to practically shift in this new atmosphere to something lighter, something friendlier… almost.

There were shadows in those troubled eyes, and they sensed things beyond the physical world. Things no one else could see or hear. The whispers of paranoia coaxed him into a frenzy, and under the smoke and flames of his mind caught fire, he could hear them. They were coming. Oh, they were coming and they would kill him.

“Please,” he whispered, hoarse voice breaking in the wind. “Please, I’m sorry.” To whoever was there, to whoever was listening. “I need--” And with the crack of something breaking behind him—perhaps it was the sound of his mind, finally splitting in two—he jumped, he shrieked. 

“PLEASE! Oh, please… please don’t let them kill me! I don’t want to go back, I’ll do whatever you want, whatever you need. They’ll kill me,” he urged, staring at his company with blind eyes that would not register to whom they spoke. “Please!”

Dreams were nice. But Harpe would die.

She told little one-eye to call the chariots. That was the last thing she remembered a lifetime ago. The sickly scent she could not smell. The snap of small bones between her teeth. The sticky tack of a souring meal. She told little one-eye to drag her to hell. She told little one-eye to take her where it was dark. Where it was warm. She told little one-eye that she had nowhere else to go. This was it. This was the end. There was nothing left to back up against, nothing but that curling iron fence. This was it.

Dreams were nice.

She dreamed that she found Blade on a mountain. She dreamed that he smiled at her and called her by her name. He was happy to have her by his side. He had been lonely on the peak and nothing pleased him more than his daughter come to find him. She traveled the world in search and she finally found what she was looking for amongst the clouds. A father.

She dreamed of the girl she hated. She was a hideous, scarred thing, tattered and barely held together. What was it that kept her on her feet, she wondered, as Brushfire led them on rings, round and round. What brought her back to this place? What made her stay? She never understood. She never would.

She dreamed of a soft caress. She dreamed of her mother’s love, distant but fierce, throttling her and haunting her on the eve of misfortune, on the days that came after. Dagger held them at arm’s length, but then there wasn’t a ‘them’ anymore. Suddenly, it was one daughter. Her mother learned how to love.

She dreamed of the girl she killed. It didn’t have to be that way. She never lunges, this time. She’d only wanted to come home. That’s it. She only wanted to come home, and the daughter that lived had SOMETHING TO PROVE. Is it always like this, she asked her mother, sick to her stomach. No, her mother responded. No.

She dreamed of her grandfather who pulled her from freezing river with malice in his eyes. It was time to grow up, Harpe. It was time to move forward or die. Which path do you choose?

She dreamed of her sister. Of her brothers. They had been a family once, whatever family meant in the shade of that old, decaying forest. They had not lasted long. No, they had not lasted long at all. The smell of them stuck, though. She could smell it in the woods, decay, she knows it. She didn’t know she loved them until they were gone. You’re the favored daughter, did you know that?

She dreamed of her grandmother stringing entrails, garish decorations hanging and dripping from tree to tree. It was a holiday, of course. Remember that you’re the one that lived. Remember and never forget. We’ll celebrate it again next year. Hope to see you there.

She dreamed of little one-eye. They were all that was left when the nation came crumbling down. Everyone else was dead. He brought her a rat. He told her to stay. He told her to go. She wanted him to come with her. What was left but ghosts in the hollows? There was nothing. It was all gone. It was ALL GONE. Even she is nothing but bones anymore, couldn’t he see, couldn’t he—

She wakes to the fog, pungent mushroom growing by her nose. Dreams were nice. She wants to go back to sleep. Dreams were nice. The world around her felt like a blanket, warm, dark, soft. It would be easy to roll over. To forget. To remember. She doesn’t know what’s real and what’s make-believe, not anymore—and it wouldn’t matter, because dreams were nice. Even the ones that weren’t.

The fungi sing her a lullaby, and she smiles, drifting once more into the oblivion on the other side. Next she wakes, it is to digging. She ignores it. It doesn’t matter. It’s so muted, so far away, and the fog is gentle and comforting. She falls back to slumber—or perhaps she does not. Waking and sleeping felt the same anymore, like endless cycle of sunrise and sunset. They were all just days and nights, and she found she could hardly tell the difference.

”I think you have to choose,” the mushroom tells her. She smiles and shakes her head. It was easier to fall back asleep and pretend not to have heard.

”Hello,” it calls again, but not quite, it’s different, but she is far gone and can hardly bring herself to care. She tilts her head up, all sunken eyes and bony cheeks, and smiles with her teeth at the figure swimming before her. It’s indistinct and familiar, he always was a wiry thing. Long legs and big ears—she calls him by name—“Isaiah.”

Then, she forgets again.

Next she wakes, they are traveling, her and little two-eyes. Wait. That wasn’t right. She’s forgetting again. It doesn’t matter, does it? She barely remembered she could walk at all, and in truth, it felt more like the memory of walking than anything else. She feels herself asking, softly, from far away, from the bottom of someplace warm and dark, “Where are we going?”

”Away.”

They travel alone. People stare, but she doesn’t look. It is only them again in a wasting dream. Hers was the first back she curled against, spine prickling from loathing and feeling returning from winter’s cold. It had meant nothing. It had meant EVERYTHING. The Queen flees from the wall and the things that lurk behind it. In her jaws she holds her comet’s tail. In her jaws dangles something that lost its name the moment the last drop of blood wicked from severed throat to thirsty earth. In her jaws she holds the universe imploding in on itself. In the dust that follows, it remakes itself because in the wake of disaster we all must reshape ourselves.

Derringer.

She lays the thing without a name to rest in the darkness of the castle’s cavernous belly. Light filtering from cracks in stone left dust swimming in her eyes. In the shadows things with skittering legs lay in wait. She beckons. They come. She doesn’t want her daughter to see. She doesn’t want the swinging arm of justice to know what falls when the lethal cut is made. Glazed over eyes would not turn sweet wine bitter. She had a task to do. The King already attended to hers. Justice is served. The things in the dark feast.

In the hours that follow, the Queen makes trips to and from the castle depths. She speaks with no one, mouth stuffed with flowers on each return journey and empty as she ascends into the light once more. As the insects carve roads through her troubled past, she prepares a bed of flowers. She arranges her dirge in red, blue, violet, yellow, white. Hours pass and what once was ceases to be. The universe implodes. It remakes itself. What’s left in the fading autumn light filtering through the cracks of something old is what lays beneath it all. Beneath the greasy fur and sagging flesh. Beneath the gelatin and swollen things. She was just a skull, pink like a newborn.

The Queen, a mother, still-- treats her like one, gingerly pulling her from the mound of death eaters and settling her in the spiral of fleeting color and life. In the growing evening, she holds a quiet funeral. She sits, silent for a long while, setting sun sending splintered shadows over the curve of the things that lay beneath it all, in the end. She breathes in the heavy scent of flowers, brought in from miles away but with roots here all the same. This had been the dream, all along, hadn’t it? It was too late now. It was too late to show her now.

She talks to her, as light gives up its hold and surrenders to night. She’s always been known to have conversations with the deceased. Through her lashes she looks into the depths behind where eyes once lay. She stares and stares and stares and she wishes and wishes and wishes. “Derringer,” she says softly, and her voice echoes in the tomb she has made. Derringer. Derringer. Derringer.

“You were the last one,” she doesn’t smile, the pale pink jaws more than capable of sucking the humor from the room. “Sincate died to mother back then. You know that. And you, now, you were my last sister—” her voice cracks and whatever was left of her thought trails and buries itself in the ground. She’s put down roots, can you see them, Derringer? That was the dream. It was always the dream. She couldn’t show her. She could never show her.

“I’m sorry,” she starts again. “For the things I have done.” Her sister once apologized to her. She hadn’t accepted it. “For the things I allowed you to do.” The comet flew on, and behind her the tail did things. Horrible things. Unspeakable things. She would live with that for the rest of her days. Derringer no longer had to. “I’m sorry that this is how it ends,” she continues, softer still, a faint buzz settling against the drums in her ears. “Though it always had to, one day. Didn’t it. Didn’t it?”

She blinks her eyes, and for a time she is silent again, alone with the flowers, the severance, the tears heavy on her cheeks. There was so much to say and none of it really mattered. This had not been the final chapter she would have written. This was not the parting pages she had asked for. But it was done. She told her daughter who signed the warrant that she would have done the same.

WOULD. SHE?

“I… wanted…” so many things “To LOVE you. I WANTED TO LOVE YOU, DERRINGER!” It was true, she knew it as she spoke, voice ringing and rebounding back on her, jarring and settling with the buzzing. “You never let me, you never wanted it, and here we are, because!” Because in the end, neither of them could change. They wouldn’t. They could be sorry. They could forgive, or they could not. One could chase the other, on and on into eternity, but that was the funny thing! Eternity was a LIE they told themselves, because all things come to an END.

There is nothing eternal in Derringer now. She is finite. THEY ALL WERE.

“Would you have mourned me?” she asks. She has a lot of questions. They weren’t answered before. They aren’t answered now. There is no voice lurking behind her ear to ensure she stays on her toes. But it doesn’t matter. She knew the answer. She’d always known the answer. To this and more, to things she did not know, she knew it no longer mattered. There was nobody in this world that would mourn Derringer as the sister she hated most would. That much she knew without asking.

Morning comes, and with it, her private memorial ends. There would be no more verbal spars. There would be no more subtle (and not) challenges. There would be no more warm backs on the bitterest night of winter. She rises, and with her she carries the things that once were, leaving the wilting flowers of summer to lay as testament to their final conversation. It had been as one sided as it always was.

She ascends to the castle courtyard, moss eaten walls and muted sunlight her pallbearers. She sits, weary in body and soul. She lays her sister to rest at her feet. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs once more, for her sister’s ears only. She knew Derringer would not like the days to come. It didn’t matter now. She has to remember that. IT DIDN’T MATTER NOW.

She takes a deep breath. She weighs her choices. She knows the next step along the path, but in knowing, she knows the way is treacherous and the stones sharp. There were easier roads. Dark, comforting places where she might lay with her sins a while longer. She itches, ferociously, a thousand burning white lines on her skin. That is not the right choice. That is not the right choice. BUT IT’S THE EASY CHOICE.

Not for the first time, she forges on. She chooses life.

She calls to them. The ones that must see. The ones that must know. The Arbiter. The Executioner. The Witness. This was their burden to bear, this coffin heavy with the story thus far and the chapters yet to come. They had to come now, they had to take their share of the weight, because she knew, as readily as she knew Derringer would have never put herself in her sister’s place—

She could not do this alone.

Paws carried her where they willed, and she did well to follow as she found herself traveling south and west, south and west. Every morning the sunlight bathed her in sheets of amber warmth, easing her from empty sleeps and dreams alike. As ambitious as she was, she also found a sort of hollow pride in treading through all sorts of terrain. As though, by merely passing through, she were laying some sort of half-assed claimed itself. A shell of her former self.

But for now she made her way to the decadent forests, brimming with life and early morning glory.

Silently she would assess the terrain, finding it rich in life, but the aura of its life could not mesh with her own. As much as she could acknowledge the importance of having a sustainable food supply and a healthy territory, there was also that terrible nagging deep inside - anything less than theatrical and intriguing would not settle. So she would find herself mingling through the woods, debris shifting under each step as the soothing ambience around her fell upon deaf ears. There was nothing here for her other than meat to fill and empty stomach and the peeking sun to warm her flesh; nothing more than a tool to fulfill her needs.

A fledgling robin stumbled down a winding tree as it attempted to follow its parents, weak and half-feathered wings flapping uselessly. The warning calls of its parents echoed above the beast, whose darkened gaze zoned in and focused on the easy prey. Before the fumbling babe could even make it to the ground, massive jaws lurched out and snapped shut with a sickening crunch. High-pitched screeches from the robins above rang in her ears, but their fury was naught to the wolf. Her tongue lapped and wrapped around the bite of flesh as she forced it down her throat in a messy swallow.

With a nonchalance that perhaps mocked the youth's death, Rita continued to weave between the trees, ignoring the birds as they fluttered and dove against her. Wickedly-flapping wings and pecking beaks doing nothing but irritate the predator. After a minute or two of her unintentional followers, the wolf would swing about and, with bared fangs and a deep, impatient grumbling, snapped her fangs once more, this time at the mortified parents. With terrified squawks they fluttered and fled, perching from afar to continue their verbal assaults.

The Mother who'd borne many claimed the life of one more child, today. 
Feathered or furred, what difference was there in her effect on them?