Sleepy Fox Hollow Kumbricia

@Ambrosius <3 forward-dated some!

02.04.2025

"To the grim poor there need be no pour quoi tale about where evil arises; it just arises; it always is. One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her — is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil?"

— Gregory Maguire

Days slid into blackness; each second seemed another century in itself, every minute an agonized exercise in forbearance. Begging for an end, stepping mulish and melancholy into the future anyway, regretting it, reveling in it. Thoughts formed only in wild clumping spurts: snow gathering, melting, gathering again into muddy banks of despair. What was she but the bittersweet end of it all? What could she ever be if not this?

The lone wolf was a waking horror now: a nightmare spun into flesh and blood, all gaunt and pale and feral eyes too focused, too fogged. The dark and damp had rendered her furs limp and brittle. When she stepped into the light, she flinched from the sun as if she'd never known its touch. Then she fell, weeping, while the many failures of her life flurried around her and filled her lungs: daughter; mother; wife; lover; murderer.

Perhaps the hunters had taken him by now.

But it wasn't him she saw in her mind, no, not that wretched creature. She saw who she had always seen in every bright thread of joy, always, always since the day they had met. She saw her love, saw him laughing and embracing his children, saw him growing old and fading into memory and earth and moving on. Wasn't it time to move on? Didn't she deserve that, too?

And the whispers of loss were lifting from her lungs, far above her head, moving on. And the last of the snow was melting, and the sky was darkening, and the world was moving on. It never had a choice.

…

When Marina finally woke, the sun was harsh and hot on her face. Water, she thought, and lifted herself with a little cry of pain. She couldn't quite remember how she had gotten so hurt. It didn't matter. The hunt for water was all-consuming; Marina flitted between the dark skeletons of sleeping trees in a frenzy.

But she felt relief, at least, when she could plunge her face into the icefanged slurry of a half-frozen pond. Her face, then her neck and shoulders, all of her into the water. She couldn't even feel the cold. For a few long moments she thought that, perhaps, she would stay there forever; let the water have her soul, too, and the hateful child she felt warping her body already.

Then she stepped from the water and shook out her fur into sodden silvered silk. It clung to her flanks when she'd settled, highlighting the thinness of her body and the subtle swell of her belly which might have otherwise hidden for some weeks yet. Reclining against a barren tree, she started to groom her wet fur, and chased every errant thought from her battered mind with a single promise to herself: it is time to move on.