Faithful Pebble

Part One Hundred and Fifteen

Her fingers were a sticky red. They were wet and filthy, yet she didn't cower, Pebble. Blemished and tainted, the girl, who was used to such things, quickly skinned the rabbit in her hands. It was the third one she'd caught that day. It was the thousandth—no, the hundred thousandth—she'd caught in her lifetime. But this was the first—well, the third of the first—that she could honestly say she enjoyed the killing...

Almost.

Pulling the skin from its ears, she sliced through the dying inners. With her claws, she carefully removed the unwanted bits, the heart, the stomach, the spleen. The simple task brought on a sense of relief, a sense of ease that lingered as it grew. It was a feeling she wasn't prepared for, Pebble. For seven years, she fed on garbage and rats, blind creatures lost and lonely and distinctly untamable down in those underground mines. She had gotten used to their stench, their filth, their darkness, her darkness. She had gotten so used to it, in fact, that she'd forgotten the joy of the hunt, of searching the vegetation, aiming her arrow, and launching her shot. She'd forgotten how it felt to see the poor beast run and watch with satisfaction her arrow hit home. The stroking of her pride felt good, exhilarating even. There was excitement in the task and comfort in the small details, in the cleaning and preparing of the meat. It was enough to make her vision swarm...

"No," she sighed.

She breathed, Pebble. Instead, she...

Let her mind wonder.

How long? How long had it been since she was able to see her prey? How long had it been since she was able to eat it cooked? Much longer than those seven years, she knew. Much longer, she reasoned, than she could safely remember. In spite this, another feeling hovered on the edges of her heart. It was quaint but persistent, the feeling of unease, the feeling of fatigue, of uncertainty for the future. Dread accompanied all of this. It intricately tangled each feeling, creating a contradictory knot that she refused to acknowledge. But the thought they produced stayed. It lingered plunging its sticky wet fingers along side her own. Those ripped and tore. Those twisted with sneering menace. They were being watched, she knew...

And she knew who...

And she knew why...

The girl sighed as she let her shoulders slouch, as she let herself plan and think. Pebble tried not to compare the rabbit in her hands to the doe the wanderer found the day prior, nor to the man that the rabbit reminded her of once more. She stared at its naked flesh with cold eyes. Distracted, she stopped cleaning it.

Yesterday, in that meadow with that deer, she heard a man, their enemy, break a branch above their heads. She'd heard footsteps follow them ever since they entered the forest. Yet, she couldn't determine whose they were or how many. But, she could guess. It wasn't a difficult one. She knew the risks and what could invariably happen. Still, at first, she hadn't been certain. She would stop and the steps would stop. She would go and the steps would go. Through those long, meandering hours, even with her mind focused on her tale, successfully keeping the trailing wanderer preoccupied, Pebble couldn't account for the slight stagnation. Sometimes, a step continued while the others stopped. Sometimes, they started after the others began. It made the sound of the footsteps increase in volume and frequency. It made them sound more than they were and yet less. With that one extra step, they became unknowable, innumerable and undistinguished. So, she waited. Patiently, Pebble listened.

Once they reached the house, Pebble eventually noticed that the steps causing the stagnation had vanished. She only heard one set follow her to the bathing stream. They were light and unfocused, clumsy almost, which didn't alarm her. There wasn't a threat in their gentle grazing, like there wasn't a threat in the way they followed the wanderer into the violet clearing. Its innocence could be heard. But the branch that broke above their heads, the wanderer's, the girl's and their clumsy guest's, held a kind of malice, the kind that she had experienced once before. IT wanted to be heard. Just like when the bigger steps attacked and ate the smaller steps today, THEY TOO, wanted to be known. THEY didn't hide, because THEY didn't have to. THEY knew her and she knew THEM.

Pebble closed her eyes. Hidden but not invisible, she felt her pulse rise. He was coming and she knew it, the knight from the well, but she wasn't scared, not like last time. This time, she was determined. Pebble opened her eyes and looked down at the catch beneath her hands. It was perfect, ready to be cooked and eaten or smoked and saved. It would be his decision, she decided. The wanderer, he would choose what to do with it...

If he returned, that is.

I don't need you.

She tried to not think about the night before.

Nor the harsh words she had uttered in her frustration. She meant them, but then again...

She didn't.

I'm not a child.

The words hung heavily.

I lived fine on my own.

"I lived... fine." Pebble sighed. She remembered. She thought and reflected as her gaze lowered. Her fingers unknowingly squeezed the rabbit beneath their bloodstained tips. With her claws, she absently pierced its decaying flesh.

Still, in that unexpected, expectant silence, Pebble rose to her feet. In response to one singular thought, she slowly gathered up her bow and their unnoticeably rotting feast. Casually, she walked back to the hut with the feeling of a certain confidence rising in her heart. He would return, she decided. Of this, she daringly, ignorantly forced herself be to certain. She had to. It was the only thought that gave her leave to move, unfortunately.

Unfortunately, it was there, at the apex of that decision, when she began to enter the meadow. Absently, she trudged down the slope and sauntered over the worn, moss-eaten logs. Perhaps, it was there when she shouldn't have let her mind wander. Maybe then, she would have noticed the unfamiliar quiet in the clearing or the unusual number of indents in the tall grasses about her. In hindsight, she recognized the changes, noticed them in theory as her mind registered her mistake. By then, however, it was too late.

He was silent and still, unexpectedly expectant. He was so still, that even she didn't hear him as she meandered up the stairs and ambled distractedly towards the rotting door. She didn't feel his presence as she placed her clawed and scarred and blood-stained fingers upon the cool metal of the knob.

Pebble turned it.

She sighed.

And then, she pushed.

She didn't notice him, Pebble, but he certainly noticed her. Even as he waited in the dark, their dark, it was their darkness now, he felt the familiarity of her presence, her anticipated fear settle into the coarse hairs cloaking his skin. Her eyes gouged him. He didn't need to see them, hidden as they were, veiled as they were. He felt them, the Knight. He savored them. For a second, they met, green and violet. He remembered they were violet, a striking violet the color of the mountains in winter or the irises ringing about her home, the color of the tree outside the mind or the poison that dripped from each flower intoxicating his home, his sword and his life. Violet, they were, the color of the maiden in whose story they constantly played. Snow White, in his mind, that was what her legend wore. It couldn't possibly be anything else.

The thought of her, them, THEM, twisted his upper lip. He watched the last two of his men slam the door behind her, Pebble. They wrestled her to the ground sending her things, the quiver, the bow, and her catch flying across the room. The rabbits landed in front of his booted feet. He watched them as he stood up from his chair. It was once in the living room, but now, because of him, it was placed across the door. Now, because of his sojourner friend, SHE was lying on the floor before him. The knight smiled...

Almost...

He sneered...

Most certainly.

In silence, he placed his booted foot upon one of the rabbits' broken necks and slowly crushed it beneath his weight. He could feel the disgust in her gaze as she watched him. In his mind, he could see her so clearly, the girl he pushed down the well. Like Snow White, her skin was white as ice. Like the dame, her hair was ebony, black like death, black like the grave, like the mind and its darkness, their darkness. He'd removed her veil that day and her image etched itself into his memory as permanent as the forest and as alluring as the sky. In the dark, he looked down at her wishing to see it again; her image, her beauty, the red blood of her lips and the wet scent of her fear.

The Knight, her hero, frowned at this. At this thought, he knelt to her level there on the floor. He didn't feel the blood of her kill stain his perfect armor. He won't have cared if he had. His thoughts were pointed and singular. Even his men, the two left of his brothers, even they vanished into the background until all that was left was her. It had been seven years. He too wondered what she looked like. Was she still beautiful, still... he reached forward seizing the moment. Pebble immediately cowered. She fought his hand, but he was undeterred. His men grasped her harder, pushed her down and kept her still long enough to allow him a fistful of her cloak, her brown and tattered and retched, dirt-soaked hood. He wretched it from her head revealing...

He squinted...

He leaned down for a good long look glimpsing only a dark outline of her hair. It was too dark, her ebony tresses, black like death, black like the grave, dull like a clouded sky. His frown deepened. He grabbed her shoulders with two hands and pushed her up until her face was outlined in the sun, in the light falling through the door. It was there he saw it, the horns, her skin. She was white, sickly pail unlike the maiden in the story. Out of her lips, red with blood, grew tusk-like horns, mirroring those protruding from her temples. In the darkness, he couldn't see them clearly, still he wanted to feel them. He reached out, his fingers grazing a tip. They were hard like bone. He grimaced suddenly and dropped her. He barely heard her cry as her head hit the floor. "Burn it," he cried. His wail was ten times the volume of hers. He ordered and his men obeyed. "BURN IT!"

It was only when she felt herself thrown into the closet did she realize that he didn't mean the house. Pebble, it was only when she smelt the smoke did she realize he was talking about her.

"We must burn down the house!" She heard the hero say. Through the door, she heard him. His voice was muffled as if it was coming through stone and wood. He must be outside, she thought. She coughed through the smoke. It was getting hard to breathe.

Somewhere, she registered another voice beyond the door. It was screaming as loud as it could, "Please! Don't! If you do that, she'll set Dinah after you!" It sounded like a girl's voice. Was it her own?

There was sudden silence and Pebble thought to herself, "I wonder what they will do next!" After a minute or two, she heard movement about the house. She heard the Hero say, "A barrowful will do," but his voice was off. It sounded different from before, higher and more nasally. Pebble banged on the door, tired to pry it with her claws. She screamed, but no one heard her.

"Yes, a barrowful of what?" Pebble thought, but she didn't have long to doubt, for in the next moment what sounded like a shower of little pebbles came rattling through the windows. It hit the door. "Put a stop to this," she exclaimed. "You'd better not do that again."

No, it wasn't her. It was the girl, the voice on the other side of the door. It was crying. No, she was crying. They were crying. It was the last thing she remembered. The sound of their tears.

It's been months. I'm sorry. Proofing this thing was a bear. — Calla