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Shadows of the Mind Ch. 01

By: Itzy_Strange



Moss mixed with wood ash would make an indigo paste, my mother taught me that. Just as she taught me rubbing it into my skin kept insects from biting and vermin from making nests in my hair. When it dried, I was a richer blue than even the sky. Furs kept me warm - legs, arms, feet. Our fires, they kept me warmer. There was an art to it, the kneeling, the way to present one's self before the flame. Chin tucked when chanting, eyes half hooded. Sometimes I made faces at my older brother, my tongue red against so much blue. Only once did he ever laugh.

He did not much like me.

As the sole male, his work was hard. Food must be caught, skinned, provided, and I was too small to help. Some nights in our yurt, my mother would comb the blue mud from my hair, dust and bugs falling to be squished or eaten so fresh paste might be packed against my skull, saturating each strand. Those moments I loved the most.

Knees to my chin, I listened as she wove stories between the crackling of spent firewood and the shuck of my older brother sharpening our only knife.

I never knew where she came by such a thing, but a carved brush of boar bristles tugged at my hair. Sharp pinpricks, came with that instrument - as did story telling if I might bite my tongue and manage the discomfort.

In our mountains many spirits dwelled: water nymphs, air sprites, creatures of the earth, salamanders of the flames... all watching, all moving in some unseen balance. We kept peace with them, careful in what we took, what we demanded, and how we managed in all that solitude.

I loved my mother. Though she was not one for affection, I knew in my blood, my mother loved me.

It was she who wrapped me in fur, who beat sense into my foolishness. It was she who let me sit with my legs too near the fire, so they might almost burn in a way I found pleasing. She taught me everything I knew.

The darkest green leaves, shaped like a spear, she'd said, might heal cuts. Red berries were poison. Unless water was taken from a clear flowing source, it had to be put over a fire until bubbles battled in the liquid mass. Once cooled it could be drunk.

One night when rain drenched the outdoors, my mother, tired of reciting the same stories, offered something new - a poem of great length telling the tale of a fox that once loved a woman. Anything fresh and my eyes grew wide. The story itself I cannot remember. What I do remember was my brother across the flames, the curl to his lip.

It was not only me he disliked.

I didn't understand, watching him, seeing hate. How long had it been since he'd grown bored of fairy tales and small pleasures? Why did he scoff when she spoke of old gods?

It was the solitude, I think, that made him... unhappy.

Down the mountains, two days walk, the others lived. Those people were not blue; they did not live in a yurt. They had huts of woven sticks and pens that reeked of shit. And they were always so dirty when the men from that village dared enter our woods.

When they looked at the indigo poultice on my skin they scorned, just as I reviled their stink. But I didn't mind them. In fact, once they had been fascinating beyond my childish comprehension. Packs on their backs were filled with wonders: pottery, sharp metal edges, strange foods, a thing called cloth. Once they even brought a baby animal - a yapping four legged thing.

It died on my lap after two weeks. When I cried, my mother beat me.

I had taken the runt from the trader's hands without permission, enamored with the puffy fur... and it had cost us many sprays of ethelize flower. Thorns made the herb hard to acquire, and my punishment, beyond the death of the pet, was to replace all that had been lost. Even with a whole day of searching, I had found less than two bunches. And my hands... the skin grew angry from the plant's poison when I yanked their stalks. For two suns I could hardly move my fingers.

My brother had laughed when I fumbled things, when I couldn't pick up my food, but when my mother had not been looking, he had also smeared a mixture of mud and piss from a she-wolf on the wounds... to ease the sting.

How I adored him.

He could track anything. Twice my height, fast as the wind, he hunted while I watched. My brother could bring down the horned runners in all their beauty, the vicious pigs whose meat crackled over our fires. Bears, lions, all the things our mother told us to fear, he could destroy.

I was never scared following him through the woods.

Fear I learned later. In a fit of pique, I stole away from our yurt and left marks so I might find my way back from a place I had been forbidden to go. Down the mountains I skipped, I ate red berries and did not get sick, I wove briars, that smelled of honey into my hair, and I sought out the people whose distant smoke I could sometimes see if the wind was still.

Seeing their stick piles, the way animals were trapped in herds and kept to shit and piss near their homes, I gaped. Everything reeked worse than the men that sometimes approached my mother. Watching children play, the way they constantly itched their heads, I knew they were infested with the little bugs we picked from furs. And they were skinny, dirty, their teeth rotten. At the line of the forest I peeped, creeping nearer as the sun drew lower.

I wanted to join the game where they kicked a round leather thing and cheered. I wanted to know those children.

One glimpse of me, and the feeling was not returned.

That was the first time I heard the word, "witch."

Their reaction, I did not understand. I offered my wrists to show supplication like I did each morning to the river. One of the larger boys lifted a rock and chucked it at my head. Knees to the dirt, blood dripping into my eye, I cried.

More rocks came. More blood.

In secret, my brother, Uist, had followed me. Once I'd learned my lesson he dragged me off, slung over his shoulder like dead game. I wept, no matter how hard his hand hit my rump to silence me. I cried the day and a half it took to return to our mother.

I cried when she cut my face so the swelling around my eye could drain. I cried when she rubbed stinging herbs into the slashes.

I cried because I had never understood why traders came for medicine and herbs, looking down their noses, and pissing on the borders of our yard.

"Never go back there, child. You're only safe here."

The scars atop my check never faded. I could feel them each time I rubbed blue ash into my skin. I remembered.

When the men came I made them see it too. I spat at the toys they thought to placate me with. I kicked at their wretched animals. Medicines I crafted, for I had grown older, I traded for goods of worth to my brother and mother. No longer did they sneer.

As the years crawled by, the way they looked at the glory of my mother, they began to look at me. That look was hate.

Had I never snuck off to that village, I would never have known such a thing. Though I was too young to understand, I was burdened because I was too reckless to listen. I thought the world was magick, like the spirits in our woods were magick.

How wrong I was.

Proof came the morning I woke to find my mother sniffling.

"He was lonely," she said. "That's why he left us."

Looking to my brother's mat, seeing it undisturbed, I could not grasp her meaning.

"All your brothers leave... we are not enough for them." My mother shed a tear. "It was inevitable. Men must make their way, and Uist was a boy no more."

What other brothers? Chewing a length of dried meat, I shook my head, certain she'd imbibed too much herncap again. "He's gone hunting."

There were creases in the powder around her eyes, the lines of skin pronounced. "I have struggled to produce another son, my daughter. I'm too old."

Whatever male may or may not have come before Uist, I had never known. Nor did I ever ask. All I chose to accept was the reality I had seen for myself. "It's the season to battle boar, to show skill to the spirits in exchange for meat."

It took three weeks of hunger for me to accept Uist was never coming back.

Finding places to cry where my mother could not see, was easy. Feeding us was hard. I had tilled the earth, sought out herbs, special muds, mushrooms. My brother had hunted and brought game.

Traps... they kept us alive. Small birds, fish, should I find them, I provided. But the forest gave less and less. I gave more. Five times I slashed my arm and bled in the dirt.

My prayers were ignored.

All my softness fell away, my body became hard. My mother, the witch, grew frail.

Years I mourned Uist loss. How greatly I missed his sullen silences and sharp reprimands. I also missed the meat he could bring and abhorred the new necessity for trade with the village in the valley below. Where they had once come to us, we had to go to them. Always together, my mother tall in her furs, leaning on her stick, hair caked with powders the color of fog. Weeks of work, or careful cultivation, herbs hard to find and harder to gather were offered for game.

The exchanges grew poorer, insulting. What once had been a fresh lamb, turned into offered day's old scraps, bones, entrails.

Their arrogance burned me, but my mother took what she could get, and I bore the weight of our new goods home.

I grew taller. My hair grew longer. My mother, her joints troubled her greatly no matter the tisanes I might brew.

We starved the winter the place between my legs first bled, when the villager's offered meat soured to poison, and the snows lasted beyond our meager supplies.

With only the embers of a fire lighting what had become a sad home, I found my mother staring glassy-eyed where the leathers of our roof quaked amidst the blizzard. Her spirit had fled. A part of me wondered if the old woman had willed herself dead so enough scraps might be left for her child to survive.

The scraps didn't last.

Her body offered meat; grief made eating impossible. Or it did until starvation truly set in. When the blizzards ended and the snows began to melt I still breathed... and was so very lonely.

Once I could make a pyre, the corpse laid out under grey sky was burned as I sang. I gathered the fragments of her bones to string together for a necklace, the precious ash I would mix with mud, moss, and water so she might still keep me safe, and I swore I would never make trade with the village again.

Had they shown honor, had the meat not been tainted, my mother would have lived.

Without the medicines I knew how to brew I did not know what would become of a people so hardhearted. If they suffered, their cries did not travel far enough up the mountain for my ears to ken. The only communication I shared with the villagers who'd scarred my face, driven my brother away, and cheated my mother at the cost of her death, was distant smoke seen from their hearths on windless days.

I refused to light my fire those days. No smoldering invitation would rise from my hills to those who sought herbs, who suffered fevers, or had children that coughed without break. I would not stand there and be ridiculed by savages.

At least that is what I swore to myself the first few years. Growing restless, tired of the sound of my own voice recounting stories I had heard my mother tell hundreds of times, I wandered near enough one day to see the edge of the village where piled stone walls corralled scrawny livestock.

They had multiplied like fleas.

The nature of their homes had altered. Stone replaced shoddy sticks, plants grew in bounty at their borders. The men no longer dressed only in wool, but wore oiled leather, bore weapons.

Warriors.

My mother had told me stories of such men. Violence and trickery were their trade. They were graspers, taking more than they needed at the cost of any who stood in their path.

They worshiped demons and spat at the land.

Leaning on my spear, a terrible weight of sadness in my chest, I listened to the distant noises of children, the bleating of goats. Fingering the bone fragments strung at my neck, whispering to my mother, I stared.

What had I done to anger the spirits? What grave mistake had I made to be brought so low while rabble flourished? Had I not kept to the ways I had been taught? Did I not chant on the proper days and bow my head to the dirt?

Hours I must have stood in that tree line, long enough at least, to see a squadron of soldiers march through the stone paved center of the huts. It was then I saw him. Hair lightened to the shade of wheat from long hours in the sun - the same sun that had weathered his skin and made it dark.

My brother.

In all the years I had journeyed down the mountain at my mother's side, never had I set eyes on the man. Yet there he was, smiling, stretching down from his horse to a little boy who reached up and giggled.

The rod of my spear, I twisted my grip on it; I ground my teeth.

Uist had turned his back on us... for this? For villager stink?

The pain where my heart beat, the way the light drained away... I understood. The villagers had not sought my mother's medicines because he had shared our ways and secrets; they didn't seek our hut because they did not need my crafted remedies.

He'd left us to the wolves, to harsh winters, to indifference.

The small boy, following at his horse's knee, called him papa as he pointed my way and cried witch.

Should I have chosen, I could have run forward and thrown my spear through my brother's heart. I could have given him the pain burning my breast. I could have taken his boy and made a companion from him so I might have another to tell the stories to, to teach of woodlands and animals.

I wanted to.

Yet I did nothing.

Uist saw me, straightening in the saddle to peer into the dark of the wood's edge. Eye to eye, even with so much distance between us, I made no secret of where I stood.

I could see it in the flick of his attention to the furs that skirted my hips, to my exposed legs left uncovered in the heat. A fixture of sappy twigs was twisted into my hair, a thick rope filled with drying herbs hanging down my back.

In that one look I knew he thought me far more savage than I found him.

I refused to flee from such aversion. Should even dark come, I would not be the first to balk. He would have to openly turn, so the spirits in the wood would know his deceiving heart.

I had loved the memory of my brother, and in the years perhaps altered it to be far more pleasing than the truth. The Uist sitting on his horse, bound in a leather cuirass, was a stranger to me.

The voice of a woman called. One word from Uist's lips and his boy ran through the stone dwellings out of my sight.

The moment he nudged his stallion towards me I lifted my spear. Aware he found the act less than threatening, a man I had once claimed as family came to the border of my woods.

"Sister, you are full-grown."

My hiss, it sounded nothing like the voice he remembered, "May you be cursed!"

A snide smile, the same I remembered from long ago lifted his proud mouth. Uist shook his head. "Mother's demons will do nothing against me. I conquered this village, these are my lands now; my reward."

At the mention of demons, I gripped my spear until my knuckles turned white. "Mother is dead."

Uist's eyes darted to the bones that hung over my breast, his expression unchanging. "Yes, the witch was eaten by a bear. The prophecy was unavoidable."

I stared, the wind warning that correcting him would only bring me misfortune. The sword at his hip, it seemed ornate, as did the etchings across his chest - human finery displaying position. He had traveled far beyond the swampy human encampment.

"You have ethelize in your hair and smell of fresh cedar sap. Yet you lack a pack of goods. You have not come to trade?"

The heel of my spear dug into soft earth. "I wandered too far, nothing more."

"I'll allow you passage if you have come to fill your womb in the old ways. Here there are soldiers enough to seed you with a strong child."

My confusion must have been open on my face for Uist to laugh as he did. "I can't believe she would have left you so ignorant. Did you think you were fathered by the wolves? Old Gods? You were whelped by some mud farmer, though you have a bit of the look of the goat herder I slaughtered when he thought a club might match a blade. His daughter I took for my wife. Her hair is like yours."

The more he spoke, the more certain I was that retreating into the woods was the wisest course. "May I never see you again, Uist."

"My name is Hovren now, Chosen of Streg." Upturned eyes narrowed, fingers working the reins. Decidedly less friendly, what I had once called brother growled, "Your elder, whom you are bound by law to obey."

Laughing, the feeling of a smile almost foreign, I mocked, "I have not come here to trade. I have not come here to breed. I care not for the color of your wife's hair, or the wellbeing of your son. I offer no prayers to whatever gods put that reek in the air. May your Streg be crushed under a mountain, oh chosen one. May you be washed away by storms."

His eyes clouded over, a dark look I had long forgotten narrowed on me. Hovren seemed to weigh his reply, and then gave no reply at all. A click of the tongue and his horse turned.

What moved me I could not tell you, but I raised my hand-hewn spear and threw it with all my power. Straight through his neck my weapon pierced, my brother falling from his horse, his hands wrapped around the grossly protruding shaft.

Running as if I might catch him, I screamed in panic. His blood, I could not stop the way it bubbled, nor could I yank the spear free.

He did not look at me as he died, his eyes too busy rolling around in his skull. The body bowed, and through my hands the most terrible feeling encroached. I shook, something unseen crawling from Uist to invade my veins. A great pressure built, as if I were too small to house the something that forced its way inside.

I stumbled until fallen acorns bit into the back of my legs. Teeming with the horror I had committed a greater offence than the slaying of my only living kin, my spear still buried in the neck of my brother, I fled into the woods.

I ran, but the strangeness was still inside me... and it followed me home.

********

Thanks for reading!

Shadows of the Mind Ch. 02



No villagers came after me. The soldiers I had seen in the valley below... there was no muster, no hunt for the blue woman who'd murdered one of their own. That did not stop the way my heart raced at every noise, each snapped twig sending me into breathless panic.

What I'd done had made me unclean, impure. The woods knew. The glade in which my yurt stood had grown unbearably cold and unwelcoming in acknowledgment of my flaw. Watching my breath, far too close to the fire, I wielded a curved bear talon and used the tool to scrape off the layers of dried blue paste on my legs, arms, torso. At my side the overturned skull of the same bear waited, filled with clean water, herbs steeping.

Naked I knelt. I shivered, wishing I could wash dunked in the river and not huddled like a spooked rodent in the dark. But I needed to be clean at once; I needed to rinse off the blood and the wrongness - and the river was too swollen this time of year. It would suck me down should I have tried to enter it.

The blue scrapings piled around me, pinkened skin stinging from how hard I scoured with a rough scrap of leather.

Near as I was to the flame, I should have been burning, but a frozen draft had found a way inside my home, brushing my chilled skin, making me shudder. I felt it run up my leg, twisting over my stomach, dripping down my breast.

I grew colder.

The process of purifying one's body was complicated, and I could not reach for my furs to drive off what made my skin bump. No matter the nip, I had to continue until every trace of blue was gone, until blood no longer caked under my fingernails.

The wind unsettled more than me, it made my flames flicker, shook the herbs hanging from the canopy. My chanting, it was broken, warbled by chattering teeth. Water sloshed, ran towards the fire to hiss at the base when my hand grew clumsy.

The last time I had been so cold was the night my mother died.

"Enough!"

At my shout the breeze died, my things ceased clattering about, and I could feel the fire's heat again. Swallowing, I dipped the leather scrap back into the upturned skull. Starting at my toes, I washed up my leg, over a hip, belly, breasts, and neck.

The blood was gone.

To the remains of water I added the last precious handful of my mother's ashes; I mixed in moss and all the things necessary for protection. The resulting paste I rubbed generously over my naked flesh until I was fresh blue, until I was clean. What I had scraped from my skin, the piles of pallid dust were burned in the fire, along with a garland of herbs to scent the air. The ritual had slightly calmed me, the fire had driven the chill from my bones, and I sat for hours, humming and combing out my hair so it too might receive a fresh measure of poultice.

Worn, I reclined on my furs so the fire might dry the matted paste against my scalp. Watching the flames, clad in nothing but the bones of my mother strung about my throat, I touched her remains, each worn edge known to me. That night, as I lay caught in-between mourning, regret, relief, and anguish, I traced the lines of those bones until my eyes grew heavy. Sleep came only to torment me. The dreams I had, I'd rather not speak of. The screams, the voices shouted near and far... a vast quantity of strangers asked me my name, wanted to know where I was. Some were threatening, others scarier still in how they thought to seduce with soft whispers.

All of them were wicked.

I woke in the dark, shivering. Pulling my warmest fur across my shoulders, I offered a prayer to the gentle spirits who watched over my yurt and asked for warmth. Cradled against the earth, surrounded in great beasts' skins, I faded into silence and dark, dreamless slumber. Such thoughtlessness was bliss; it moved through me, it gave the oblivion of mindless comfort. A feeling I'd never known before made me hum, my back stretching as it built beautifully in my belly. So very comfortable, I heard my intake of breath even before morning brought me fully awake. Fractionally parting my thighs, inviting more, another sound came from me - a moan... not born of pain.

Drowsy, I blinked and found my hips rolling against whatever had brought such sensation. Something moved under the fur, tenting the skins, undulating. Finding myself sprawled, I leaned up on my elbows and stared at the bulge, startled. Had some animal come in and sought shelter from the cold? Was I about to be bitten unwittingly for disturbing them?

Throwing back the fur, looking down between my legs... there was nothing there. But I still felt something, I felt it part the seam where I strangely ached, I felt it twist and tug my secret flesh. More so, I saw I was swollen - puffy pink lips shocking as they peeked from painted blue.

Over the years I had paid no more attention to my neither regions than I had my elbow, unless I bled and needed to tend the mess. Never had I seen what opened like an orchid and glistened with dew.

Unsure why I felt a touch, why it seemed those lower lips parted, I threw back my head when friction roused that pink little nub sticking from its fleshy hood. Ready to scramble back, I squirmed once before my body was slammed against my pallet. The weight of nothing pressed my every limb and I could not move. Like being buried in sand, I struggled, panicked, and watch my breasts shift when unseen touch gripped them. Nipples pulled to the sky, flesh visibly kneaded, more of that unfamiliar pressure grew between my legs, mingling with my fear into confusing intoxication.

An unseen great chasm lay before me. I felt it, some burgeoning power shoving me toward the edge.

Panting, feeling something spread my thighs wider, whatever prodded and traced through my slippery heat, began to work my opening. I lurched and screamed when pleasure stole my breath, fluttering never used muscles, making me quake.

I had to be dreaming, that was the only way to explain such magick. Rosy warmth spread from my belly to my fingertips and toes. Vision bleary, I looked around the empty yurt and hardly understood why my knees were obscenely parted to kiss my shoulders. Again I felt prodded below; I felt something far more substantial poke at the place where so much bliss pulsed in time with my heart.

In a jolt, the unseen thing shoved inside me. Grunting, swallowing a cry of pain, I snapped out of listlessness.

Still I could not move, though something moved me - rocked my body roughly and brought pain where there had been decadence moments before. Frightened I tried to claw away; I screamed fury and called out to my spirits. All that came was the force of being flipped on my stomach, of that feeling jabbing in while my cheek was pressed to the furs.

Something icy stroked my back, drew my hips high. There was a pull on my hair, a pounding foreign presence moving inside me... and I had no idea how long the invasion continued. The ache wasted away. In its place blooming feeling consumed until I could hardly take it. Close to that precipice again, muffling my cries in the furs, everything stopped.

I found myself pressing my hips back against nothing but air.

As if it had never been there, the alien weight was gone. What had stretched my insides had vanished. Reaching between my legs I found traces of blood mixed in the shine of slippery fluid.

Terrified, I threw on my furs, wrapped my feet, and in a panic tossed random items into a bundle. What had mounted me was watching me. I could not see it, but it was there whispering words I didn't know. I fled my home with no weapon but the long-treasured and now detested knife my brother had left when he'd abandoned us. I ran from the unseen demon into the trees, rushing in any direction that did not feel of it.

Going here and there like a startled rabbit for five days I wandered. The trees became unfamiliar, the paths unknown to me. I had never been so far from my home... or so lost. On the cusp of my senses lurked the dark presence each time I turned the wrong direction. It taunted me. To avoid it, I'd force my body to run.

Hungry, I devoured nuts found on the ground; I tore berries from plants and swallowed stems in my hurry to keep moving. Ragged, legs shaking with fatigue, I collapsed each night at the base of a tree, hardly able to draw the markings in the dirt around me that would keep beast and evil at bay before sleep overtook.

I dreamed of feeling between my legs. I dreamed I enjoyed it.

Each morning there was wetness between my thighs and an itch of foreboding that the world was very wrong. But it wasn't the world, it was me. The forest chattered with birds and the life that lived under its canopy; the waters I found when I thirsted were clean. Thinking myself crazed, I stopped midday to listen to the woods and reflect on what I was doing. Resting on a fallen tree, taking account of my sprint, I made myself be still.

Head in my hands, hours passed... until I felt him again. Behind me cold approached and I was in its reach before I recognized the need to bolt. My hair was yanked until my throat grew exposed, my body bowed against a force I could not see.

Under my furs my nipples pebbled, aggravated by the scrape of leather.

Soon enough they were soothed when frozen touch descended; soon enough my breath clouded and my bleary head rested back on its own. Like invisible mist, cold seeped under nearer my most intimate places, touching me everywhere, rolling and swelling until I could hardly breathe.

The fault was mine. In a stupor, I had sat too long - dark had come and I had been found. Finding my back against the tree, my lower coverings gone, in went the unseen instrument that had made me bleed days ago.

I felt too full.

The days of my journey had given me time to ruminate on what had taken place in my yurt. I knew how male animals mounted the females... and had come to understand what had been done to me.

The dark thing was rutting me, making me cry out as it did as it pleased.

There in the open, where the forest spirits could see, I writhed, my hips seeking absolution. There in view of nature, my legs were spread so all might witness. It continued through the night. By morning I felt as if my soul had been stripped bare. I had cried out so many times my throat was hoarse, I had spent my energies in drug-like passion. Meager sunlight broke through the trees - my body sprawled on the ground, aching from too much pleasure. Crawling to my knees, whimpering from how much the joining had scratched at something gratifyingly deep inside me, tears fell.

Sobbing, I plodded on. There had been no sleep, no food, and the neglect of my body took its toll. I hardly noticed when I trudged through swamplands that should have been avoided; passing beside bears hunting fish, hissing snakes, gave me no concern. I was too frenzied trudging from raw feeling as fast as shaking legs could carry me.

It was many more hours before the daze broke and I realized my pack had been forgotten by the fallen tree.

I had no weapon.

I was going to die in those woods and my body was going to be consumed by what stalked me. Stumbling into a field of tall grasses, trees were left behind for an endless sea of waving gold. I limped and ran as if deliverance waited should I chase it.

Little did I know, but not one step I had made since fleeing my yurt had been to freedom. Herded, that's what the demon had done to me. It had driven me forward on a path of its choosing, and I had walked right into its trap.

"You came just as he said you would, witch."

Turning towards the booming voice, I saw what waited... soldiers... the one who'd spoken wearing the same armor that had engulfed my dead brother's chest. From behind, a net fell over me. Tangled before I might cry out, the ropes were gathered and I was dragged to be dumped at the feet of a man grinning madly.