The Mora

Chapter 2

the end

Sometimes, she still pretends she can dream.

She closes her eyes and imagines and pretends the images fool her, that she doesn’t know they aren’t real. She focuses on the faces with their smiling eyes, on laughter, on planning for a future that had not yet disappeared. She imagines pear blossoms floating like champagne bubbles on the effervescent air.

And in some ways, the pretending really is like dreaming should be, as she always returns to the knowledge that she is not in control. Even in the middle of her deepest imaginings, her scars ache, and the Face is there, somewhere inside her mind, pulling strings like an invisible puppetmaster. Shadows coalesce around her like a cocoon, tightening like ropes, and her eyes snap open, because she cannot bear to remember any longer.

The world around her is almost like a dream. The shadows on the walls speak to her, their voices soft and distant. There was a time she would have been able to make out all they said, but they have been fading away as surely as she has.

The Face is a blacker shape in the deep darkness, watching, compelling. It has the form of a woman, impossibly tall and unfathomably beautiful, but a woman it is not.

Bring him,>> it says in a voice that is not a voice, reverberating in her bones. Bind him.>>

Her soul flutters inside her like moth wings, fragile and powdery, and she knows, someday, she will obey. She has no choice, though a slave can conceive of no greater sin than to bind another to the same fate.

She watches the shape until it fades again into the night, leaving her as alone as she is able to be. The memories that come now are darker:

The man’s face. The man’s fists and boots. Loose ribs bending and swaying like tree branches, the feel of liquid in her lungs. The fury and madness rising up like bile, and that word circling around and around, chaining her and filling her…

Rusalka.

Fire under her skin, burning the madness away, raising the scars she would never be rid of.

Her freedom the price for her soul.

The dreams and dreams and dreams, never ending, how worthy it had seemed, the least of evils, best possible captivity. To keep the world turning, ensure the sun would rise and set. To be imprisoned but useful, surely that was better than to be damned, a mindless tool of eternal vengeance.

Who is a girl who dreams forever? Who is a girl to whom time is without meaning? Forever a child, eternally young, lost in shadows, suspended between life and death. How worthy it had seemed to never die, to sustain the earth with her sacrifice.

But the years were dark, and the scars still burn at times.

And freedom is so far away.