MABEL
Maybe her compassion for the monsters was borne out of newfound loyalty to the Voice, and because she pondered over the livelihood of beasts experimented upon, only to be discarded. Amongst and amidst the first beasts unraveled from the Bright One’s contortions, deemed failures, despite their continued aspects of life, despite the ripple of talons and claws through the LongNight void. And what would it be like, to be so potent, powerful, and forgotten, left out to wander? To merely take and take and take as they saw fit? To trick and deceive? The things they once feared as little children, and now, amongst and amidst the same contortions and bloodlines?
Evelyn’s maybe likely meant no; but Mabel would keep it in the back of her mind, for safekeeping in the harsh revolutions breathing outside closed doors. More wood to place within the sled, the creeping hollowness becoming lighter and lighter as the vacant corners were filled, gloved hands digging through the snow for hidden boughs and limbs, while her twin hummed and mulled, made a decision for them.
The certainty thereafter made her arch a brow, dropping another log. “Okay. I don’t want to stay at the farm either.” Enough years, months, days, and hours spent there, and something about it crept into her blackened heart, rooted it to her chest; as if the creaking floorboards, the vestiges of their family’s decay, hung there like a noose. They’d made sure not to walk those same gallows. “Then we’ll go to the College.” An affirmation, a nod, the decision cast about in the snow.
Evelyn’s maybe likely meant no; but Mabel would keep it in the back of her mind, for safekeeping in the harsh revolutions breathing outside closed doors. More wood to place within the sled, the creeping hollowness becoming lighter and lighter as the vacant corners were filled, gloved hands digging through the snow for hidden boughs and limbs, while her twin hummed and mulled, made a decision for them.
The certainty thereafter made her arch a brow, dropping another log. “Okay. I don’t want to stay at the farm either.” Enough years, months, days, and hours spent there, and something about it crept into her blackened heart, rooted it to her chest; as if the creaking floorboards, the vestiges of their family’s decay, hung there like a noose. They’d made sure not to walk those same gallows. “Then we’ll go to the College.” An affirmation, a nod, the decision cast about in the snow.
I bare my teeth
and stretch my claws out
and stretch my claws out
