>>6253431

When the wooden door scrapes against the ground, the gaunt man checks his surroundings, holding up his lantern, casting shivering shadows into the blackness of night. He shivers as well. At least they do not speak.
He curses under his breath, and skitters on the gravel, aiming for the closest pile of wood. His fireplace has died.
Looking back and forth, he touches the necklace of bones that a merchant from the north has sold him.
Made out of the bones of the Saints, he assured her.
Gifted to him personally by the very hands of Ansàrra.
And the way he described those hands, so pale and soft, the beauty of her fiver fingers wrapped around the tinkling bones when she gave it to him— he had believed those words, he had attached himself to those lies like a shell to the back of a shore cliff.
Almost there. He stretches his hand to pick up the first wooden log—
His hand creak and twists.
Like a snapping branch caught in a gale.
He can’t even scream, only gurgle, as his tongue twists as well, folding like a piece of paper, stiff like a dead fish, bloated with brackish water.
He swings his lantern, but it’s futile. His other hand lets go, and yet the lantern does not fall: it floats, and slowly tilts and tilts and tilts, turning upside down just as the man’s bones pop and his back snaps and his neck twists—
Until, with the last of the sharp echoes of his twisted body, he stands up again, on his arms this time, his legs stretched to the heavens like branches.
The lantern flashes, the golden light of wax leaving way to a bluish white, and the faint figure of a woman appears, cast by the glow like a ghostly apparition. She tilts her face to the heavens, her hair black, a curtain of ink, her narrow shoulders exposed to show her dark skin.
Taygete, then the mouth that used to belong to the man says, folding again to make words out of silence. Is what I heard true?

[cont.]