A Bedtime Story
I want to tell you a story.
A bedtime story?
Yes, it can be a bedtime story if you like.
What's it about?
Hmm. It's a story about mud…and feathers and bones and blood. It's a story about monsters and family curses, about secrets…and love.
Sounds scary and sappy.
Quit it, King.
…
The story starts in a tower, in the black of night-
I think I might know this story.
Then you know how it ends?
No
Do you want to?
In the top floor of the tower, in the black of night, the skitters of rat claws were barely audible above the noise of the wind, come in from the east, whipping about outside. The creature, however, had impeccable hearing, and possessed long ears capable of distinguishing between the slightest of sounds. From the rustle of hot, furry little bodies, to the soft sway of the floorboards, to the minute sifting of stone against stone, as the building deliquesced into the bones of the Isles. The distant noises of the Other One, just outside its territory, always on the edge of perception. Those ears could pinpoint them all.
Fortunately for the rats, the creature was asleep.
Talons quivered, and raven black feathers, which shone liquid in the moonlight, shifted as the creature dreamed. The twigs forming the large nest, compressed through heavy use, made little cricks and cracks when the creature moved about in slumber.
Between the creature and the nest, there was barely any space left available in the room at the top of the tower. The only other object present, besides the occasional vole skull or stray bit of vegetal matter used to pad out the nest, was a long white staff. Slightly beaten-looking, with patches of dirt marring the ivory surface, the staff leaned idly against the wall opposite the nest. Just within sight of the creature.
At the top of the staff sat a delicately carved white raven.
As the rats scurried, and the wind whooshed, and the tower creaked, and the creature dreamed, and the Other One cackled, the white raven kept silent vigil.
It, alone, was still.
Lilith was surrounded by blackness.
Her dreams often began this way. With the sensation that she had been moving or running, and was now still, supine on what she supposed was a bed- though she did not feel the give of any pillow beneath her head. Nor the comfort of any sheets. Nor the support of a mattress.
It felt vaguely like she was floating.
She could not remember how the dream began exactly, or where she had been running from, or to. She rarely ran in general, and couldn't think of why she'd be doing it. She only knew that the inky blackness heralded a moment of clarity. Clarity and stillness.
Stillness, for she found she could not move. Spirit did not call to nerve or to muscle- there was the definite sense that she had a body, but that she and it were quite separate. She had the feeling of being able to move her eyes a little- or perhaps not to move them, but the choice to look, or not look- that was hers.
Confined to the role of witness, here she was, laying in the dark, with the faint notion that there was something she needed to remember. Some thought that was vital. If only she could grab hold of its cord, tracing its form through the inky black.
She felt like maybe she had done this before, and that this was always the place she came back to. She wracked her brain, traced the cord.
Nothing.
And then a tug.
And there it was.
The memory, and the memory of the thousand times she had remembered it, and the shock of regret of all those remembrances.
She snapped her eyes shut as the horror of the moment dawned on her, petrifying her consciousness in cold ice.
No.
She wished she had not remembered.
Not this. Not this.
She had to look. Emperor, why did she always have to look?
Knowing, and not looking? Impossible. That might be the only thing worse than what she needed to bring herself to do now.
It wasn't with a scholar's curiosity that Lilith let her eyes fall open, but with the sick dread of a child peering under the bed, with full knowledge of the monster lurking beneath.
Directly above her, as if suspended from a ceiling, Lilith saw her own body.
Deathly pale and eyes wide, Lilith's own face stared down at her like a death mask. Wearing her everyday witch's robes, flat against an invisible roof, the body's arms were by its sides. The fingers twitched; stilted breathing came in fits and starts. The legs jerked, fitfully.
The sight flooded Lilith's consciousness with paralytic terror. She couldn't look away now, even if she wanted to.
The green eyes of the figure above her bulged, expression pained. Blood seemed to be collecting at the edges of the mouth, the tear ducts, sticky trails sliding from the ears and matting in the black hair and sweat.
Finally, an awful, hacking cough erupted from the throat. A fistful of night black feathers tumbled forth from the straining mouth.
Another deep grumbling came from within the chest, and more feathers poured out and out and out.
As if catapulted back into her body by sheer panic, Lilith found herself able to move her limbs again, and flailed, both against the presence of the monstrosity above her, and the sudden sensation of sinking. Her body- the one she currently inhabited, not the one on the ceiling- was in a pool of something cold, and thick, and heavy. She felt her hips and elbows being swallowed up, and looking at her hands found them covered in liquid brown. Mud.
Try as she might, there was no purchase to be found, and as the pool reached up past her shoulders, brushing her earlobes and the tip of her chin, Lilith felt herself scream.
The sound that came forth was an animal screech.
It was her own shriek- an eldritch thing, strange, a thing of nightmares- that woke her.