Black Cloud

Night was dull.

The dawn and the dusk, these were the best times of day. The light would sneak and snarl between the trees, the fawns and fools would slumber and sputter awake as she sped past and she was the morning mist, the ghost of the evening, a dream and an illusion and dead and alive…

But night, night was dull. It was just blackness, and watchful warriors sneering from their nooks, and dull-witted witches prowling in their crannies, and even the dead were everywhere, constantly summoned and badgered and pushed this way and that by neurotic necromancers.

Aneira despised them all. Why did they worship the night? Why did they think this was Uir’s time? No, Uir was a trickster, she danced in many shapes and whispered to the dead - Uir lived in the between times, the shivery grey morning and the silver cold dusk. And still, still, somehow she was made to patrol in the night.

It was bad enough that they made her work. She was a daughter of Uir, a perfect dark doe who spoke with the dead and wove the light into new shapes, and yet here she was made to walk and watch and call ghosts to watch for her and it was so, so, so tedious. Huffing, puffing and scowling through the night, she prowled the woods, skirting and sneaking by the warriors and witches who wanted this onerous task.

She had to interest herself, create distractions from this utter tedium. Other nights she would drag the spirit of her familiar with her, slinking with the green-eyed, ghost-gold colt through the silver-black forests, but not this night. No, the spring was not the time for him; he had died in the Spring, he was querulous and quavering at this time of the year - no longer familiar but frantic, and the red of his wound seemed so livid that it lit the dark with blood. He would scream, as he had the first time she had found him, the wail splitting the world into pieces until she would send him back to the cold colourless world of the dead, to stand and dream of the few moments of his life and the terrific eternity of his dying.

No, this night she had the shadows for company. It was an old game, dragging the darkness with her as she walked, curling the shadows around her feet and draping them across her back. She was a darkling dream, a being of smoke and mist that strolled through the pines, shining silver in the moonlight, eyes sparkling jet in the starlight. The scuttling and scrabbling of the forest fled her, and those stupid, foolish guards and ghouls and warlocks and warriors left her be and let her to her stormy solitude.

She was an heiress of the forest, a debutante of the night; come of age and come of mind, borne by the stormy wave of irritation at the world’s inferiority. They should honour her, not put her to work, force her into this barbaric toil! But it was this, this dull meandering or worse… the turpitude and ignominity of motherhood. The damned fool King had said does of age should carry fawns - Aneira would spit in his eye were he to tell her such a thing. Why did the Queen allow this? Allow him to decide the lives of does? She was as weak and foolish as he if she did not crush these ideas into powder as soon as he gave them voice.

The shadow-cloud writhed and grew as she walked, boiling with irritation, jaws of smoke snapping at the birds and beasts that drew too close, eyes shining silver with the silent fury of the death-dream. There was nothing here! Nothing to fear, nothing to fight, nothing to scare but stupid creatures fooled by a dream of darkness and dying; no point, no meaning to where she walked or why! Here, by the Hollow, here was the safest, dullest, most dreamless and deathless place in all of the Blackwood and here she must walk, here she must pretend to care, here she must act as though any of this mattered. Here old women chewed cud and young fawns learned nothing for there was nothing to learn.

Here she would have to live if she was forced to bear a fawn as the King had ordained. Here she would have to grow the foolish brat in her slender belly, feed its ugly head with milk from her udders, teach it its name and how to speak and walk and live. How utterly, utterly unbearable such a life would be! Better to be dead, to be followed by the skeleton of a long-dead colt, to drag the reanimated corpses of score after score of fallen palefaces into the Hollow and let them fall, let their carrion smell draw the wolves and bears and birds of death, let the herd be destroyed by their own idiot dreams.

She spat, the rage cooling.

“I will kill the King before he tells another doe how to live,” she muttered, knowing the words to be false, retreating inside her illusion of smoke and silver, back into the darkness, back, back into the boredom of her life.