A Tale of String and Shadow by Evangeline Beggs || Team Otter!
(not going to lie, the first thing i thought of when i saw the prompt was the Tokyo Ghoul opening... anyways, sad to be on the final week, but i enjoyed writing these stories, as well as reading everyone else's!)
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Rerrin’s footsteps echoed loudly down the dark hallway. His torchlight shimmered and gleamed off the dusty marble walls, the flames casting unsteady shadows. His hand gripped the spool of string. It made a soft squeak, squeak as it rotated, leaving a long trail of white thread that vanished into the darkness behind him.

He wasn’t stupid. He remembered the Greek myth about the labyrinth, about the young Theseus who took a spool of string along to help him not get lost. It was the one thing that set him apart from the other victims sent to the labyrinth, or so the myth went. He was able to get through the maze and slay the minotaur. The spool of string, surely, would be the thing that made sure Rerrin got through. It gave him confidence.

That’s why he wasn’t prepared when the spool started to unravel much, much faster than it should have.

He stopped. Maybe he was just going too fast.

The string kept going.

His heart pounded hard against his ribcage. He grabbed the string, trying to make it stop, but it kept going, faster and faster, leaving a sharp burn between his fingers. He seethed with pain and dropped the spool, shaking out his hand.

Big mistake. The spool clattered away.

Rerrin felt dizzy. He sat down and braced his back against the wall. The marble felt sharp against his vertebrae.

He stared at the spool, which was rolling and bouncing away, disappearing into the darkness at the edge of his torch’s light. The sound of it skittering on the floor felt deafening.

I’m done for, Rerrin thought, his breath coming in short, panicked pants. I’m going to get lost now. Or whatever just stole my string will come finish me off before that.

He set his torch aside, clasped his hands together, and started to pray. Then stopped. No god can hear me from down here, he thought. He felt like he was going to throw up.

Footsteps.

Rerrin held his breath. The tinnitus in his ears almost drowned the sound out, but he could hear it. The soft tap of footsteps.

He grabbed his torch again and scrambled to his feet. His eyes strained to see into the darkness.

The silhouette of a person slowly emerged from the shadows.

It was a girl, holding the spool in her hand. Her smile glittered. The bloody bullet wound in her chest glistened.

“Hello, brother,” she said, head tilting. “You dropped this.”

Lerissae had died twelve years ago. Rerrin remembered it like yesterday; when the Garrison had charged her with treason, simply for her bloodline being a threat to the matriarchy, and publicly executed her. Her blood had joined that of hundreds of other children that day, all little girls with traces of royal blood, all that blood now staining the town square as a crimson reminder.

“Lerissae… you…”

“This string is important, you know.” She held it up and observed it. “You should be more careful.”

Rerrin trembled. This was not his sister.

“What’s wrong?” She blinked slowly. “You should be happy. Now you get to spend more time with me. Time that you missed out on.”

Suddenly she was standing in front of him.

“C’mon,” she giggled, blood dripping from her mouth. “Turn that frown upside down.” Her thin hands reached towards his face.

He tried running, but his feet felt nailed to the floor. He should have swiped his torch at her, but, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t do that to his own sister. Even if it was most definitely not his sister. Or was it…?

Behind her, more little girls emerged from the shadows. Varying ages, all with gunshot wounds and lonely expressions. All the same ones that had been killed that day. “Rerrin Harstow,” they all whispered. “Stay with us. Stay with us.”

“Stay with us,” echoed not-Lerissae. She wiped the tear from his cheek, her touch gentle and colder than death itself. “We’re so lonely, brother… please…”

“No,” he managed to choke out. “I—I can’t. I’m… I want to get out of here.”

Her eyes rounded sadly. Innocently. “But why, brother?”

Rerrin swallowed hard. “You know why,” he said lowly. His voice shook. “If you’re truly my sister, then you know.”

She sighed heavily, but he didn’t feel her breath. “Because you want to avenge me,” she whispered. Her hand lowered, and her gaze grew distant and sorrowful. “You want to prove yourself. You want to prove that there is life on the other side of this maze, and you want to be the one to go there in my stead.” A single tear trickled down her face and mingled with the blood on her chin. “You miss me so much.”

It really is her.

“Then let me go,” he said. “For the both of us, let me go.”

Lerissae nodded. Her eyes closed, and the rest of the children began to slowly fade away.

“Promise you’ll get through. That you’ll avenge us,” she said quietly, and her voice carried the voices of so many other little girls.

“I promise,” Rerrin whispered.

Then Lerissae faded away.

Rerrin dropped to his knees, misery and sorrow aching in his chest. He missed his sister so badly. And he had promised her something that, now, he would never be able to accomplish.

A tiny skittering of claws, and Rerrin nearly jumped out of his skin. What now? What ghost of his past would come to haunt him now?

A tiny gray creature appeared. Its nose wiggled, tiny whiskers shaking, eyes glowing red in the light of the torch.

Rerrin sighed. It was just a rat.

            He was going to shoo it away when he noticed something in the rat’s mouth.

            The end of a white string. And behind the rat, the spool it was tied to.

            The rest of the string led away into the darkness, just as it had been before.

            Maybe the gods did hear. Or maybe it was Lerissae.

Critique would be appreciated! I'm not sure I embodied the theme terribly well, but it's satisfying to have reached the end of the challenge.

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Spirals

She peered at the snail shell on the forest floor. Its whorl was a spiral of stripes in chalky white and glassy black. She had the impression of decay, of a whiteness that had once been vibrant and smooth to match its lacquerish counterpart.

“That’s a sea snail,” he said.

“We’re days away from the coast.” The air was thick with the moisture of the morning’s rainfall. In fuzzy lightshafts, slow steam rose from the cool forest floor as the day got on with itself.

“Carried by a bird, I’m sure.”

That brought to mind the seagulls circling the coffee shop they’d passed the previous night in their walking. She wondered if the coffee was any good in that place, or the food. They hadn’t stopped. Even if they’d stopped, they’d have no way of knowing the food’s quality. Neither possessed a body capable of touching food.

She hadn’t missed that sort of thing at first. Gradually, that was changing. This terrified her. It seemed like the opposite sort of thing to what you’d expect to happen.

“Keep walking,” he said. His voice was the whispering wind in the trees. Had the living been around, they’d have heard it and paled with fear. 

She had no spine to shiver, no skin to prickle, yet the sound of her fellow dead always made her tremble. She did not enjoy their company. That was typical, she’d long ago learned.

The entity who traveled now with her was different in that respect. He never showed distaste when she spoke. Somehow, this brought her no comfort. While her hunger and thirst for earthly needs grew with each passing day, the same could not be said for any need for human connection.

He’d told her to keep walking. She obeyed. The idea of disobeying filled her with dread and she had no idea why. But as strange as her fellow presence was, he had promised her something precious. She could not remember what this promise was, nor why she trusted it so, but belief in this promise was as vibrant and central a part of herself as anything else. And so, when he said to walk, there was nothing for it but to walk.

They climbed a ridge and found a hole in the earth leading into a stony mountain. They passed inside, hindered not at all by the lack of light in the deep, led not at all astray by winding paths as they made pilgrimage through cracks the breadth of a living woman’s finger. The eyeless vermin of the deep trembled as they passed, for animals know when the dead are near.

Weeks passed. The temperature rose, geothermal radiance humming invisibly from the stony walls. Her thirst and hunger grew. She swore there was an oppressive pressure from the stone, a heaviness bordering on pain.

Then it was unmistakable. “It hurts,” she whispered in the hissing release of volcanic gas.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Why are we down here?”

“You don’t need to know.”

“But I want to.”

“Walk!” he snapped in the cracking of the stone. “You will walk! You swore you would!”

“I don’t remember that.” The calmness of her own voice surprised her. 

“Little is remembered, but it nonetheless is.”

Then they were before a great door in the deep, round black glass wreathed in chalky white, whorls within whorls, liquid stone gyrating in the heart of a mountain.

“Tell me what is happening,” she said.

“We have reached the end,” he replied.

“Where is it?”

“The boundary between life and death. There was once a mountain that was nowhere and everywhere. All mountains were made in its image. A mountain, properly judged, is a tree stretching from heaven to the abyss.”

“Who are you? How do you know this?”

“I am no one. I was an evil man. As I lay dying, you were kind to me. You despised me. Yet you were kind. And then I was gone, and the pain that followed was… what had been merited. Yet I could only think of your kindness. Much is revealed to a man in the moment of his passing. I saw that you were cursed. In your death, you would wander the living world until the end of days.I begged my captors that I should be allowed to save you from this fate. It was permitted.”

Whispering and wailing. Howls of wind in the chamber between life and death. Resonance in the hollow chambers of a heart under a mountain’s heart. The voices of the dead thundered in quiet agony and the living did not hear them.

He continued. “I was given the secret of this place. I was told my suffering would be far greater than yours, for with every passing day as a shade, I would feel the absence of life all the more. It would take centuries to find you. But find you I did, a newborn shade pulled from her corpse, absent of memory or self, whimpering and battered about by the four winds.”

“You promised to show me the way?”

“And you swore to follow. We are here. I will soon return to torment. It is a better fate than this.”

“But you say that I was a kind person?”

“I do not know. You were kind to me in one moment, and I was granted imperfect knowledge of your future. Who were you? That is for you to learn.”

A wind of terror tore at her essence. Would she go to a reward? To torture? To oblivion?

But she remembered the gyrating darkness that led to the heart of the mountain. She remembered the isolation, the hunger, the thirst, that would grow and grow till the end of days.

“Thank you,” she said, and gave herself to the maelstrom. She unraveled piece by piece and no longer stood on the boundary between life and death. Whatever came after, the curse had been broken.

                                                  A Cry in the Dark

       Winter made the pregnancy easy to hide. Hoodies. Flannel. Heavy jackets. Nobody at school knew. Nobody. Mom and Dad were on a weekend getaway. All I wanted to do was get this day done and go home.

       “Hey Hailey,” said a voice as I reached for my history book. Lila and Jasmine from cheerleading stood by my locker.

       “Hey guys, what’s up?” I asked.

        “Hey, Hailey,” Lila said as I opened my locker. “You look… fuller.”

        My stomach tightened.

        “That’s a nice way of saying fat.”

        “She doesn’t mean it like that,” Jasmine laughed nervously.

        “I’m kidding,” I said.

        “Right,” said Lila.

         I shoved my biology book into my backpack and closed the locker harder than I meant to.

        “Hey Red!” called Mrs. Haggerty. “Are you ready for the test?”

         “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be back. I need to go to the bathroom.”

         “Make it quick,” said Mrs. Haggerty.

         The bathroom door opened.

         “Oh, my God. Did you see that?” said a voice.

         Lila.

         “She’s wearing, like, three layers.”

         “It's February, what do you expect? It's supposed to be a blizzard tonight,” said Jasmine.

         “She was wearing layers before she hurt her ankle,” said Lila. “Like, in September.”

         “No one is that cold. She looks… puffy.”

         They giggled.

         “Seriously, though, Jasmine. When she was reaching for her books, I saw her belly.”

        “What are you talking about?”

        “I think Hailey is pregnant.”

        “What?”

        I flushed the toilet and opened the stall door.

        “Hi, girls!” I chirped.

        They jumped a little.

        “Oh—hey,” said Lila.

         I washed my hands.

         “So,” I said, smiling at them in the mirror, “am I getting fat or pregnant? I want to know which rumor we’re going with.”

          Lila and Jasmine exchanged a quick look.

         “We didn’t mean anything by it,” Jasmine said.

         Lila grabbed her backpack. “Yeah… we should get to class.”

         They slipped out of the bathroom.

         I turned sideways. For a second, I saw what they saw. A curve beneath the fabric.

         I sucked in until my ribs hurt.

         Flat enough.

        “Don’t worry, sweetie,” I whispered to my belly. “They still don’t know.”

         My lower belly tightened like a menstrual cramp, then it faded.  

         I got out of the bathroom and ran to the car. It was time to leave. I didn’t stop for anything.

         I looked down at my belly. The little one was going to join me soon. I smiled.

         “Don’t worry, sweetie,” I said in my baby voice. “Mommy has strong belly muscles. You’ll be okay.”

         The next wave hit harder. I let out a small giggle through the pain. Then the contraction faded. I sagged forward, laughing.

         The statue smiled at me.

         I smiled, took a drink of water, and controlled my breathing.

         I panted. A deep gasp and pushed hard.

         I saw my belly flex as I bore down. My God was giving me strength. I bore down harder and growled with the push. The statue was glowing when I looked up. I wiped the sweat from my brow and controlled my breathing.

         “HRRRRRPH!!! UUUUNNNNGGGG!!!”

         The child slipped from under me.

         Ten fingers, ten toes.

         “Praise Mireth!” I screamed.

         The slick newborn baby cooed. It was a boy.

         I held him against my chest. His skin was warm, slick with birth, his tiny fingers curling against my arm.

        “Shh,” I whispered. “It’s alright. I told you Mommy was strong.”

        The wind howled against the house. Snow struck the windows in soft bursts. I turned toward the altar. The statue glistened in the candlelight, damp as if it were sweating. My mother had told me the moment would feel heavy. Sacred. She was right.

        No hesitation.

        I carried him to the altar and kneeled.

        The baby quieted as I lowered him toward the bowl.

        “Nothing is lost,” I whispered. “Only returned.” The room fell silent except for the hum of the heater and the wind outside. Steam drifted through the air.

After a moment, even the crying stopped.

        The front door opened just after dark.

        I heard my parents’ voices first—low, tired from the drive, carrying through the house like any other night. Snow clung to their boots as they stepped inside. The wind pushed at the door before Dad shut it.

       “Haley?” Mom called.

       “In here,” I said.

        I was sitting at the kitchen table. The house was warm again. I had cleaned up, showered, and changed into fresh clothes. My hair was still damp against my shoulders.

      Mom and Dad walked in together, setting their bags down.

      For a moment, neither of them spoke.

      Mom studied my face. Dad’s eyes drifted down the hallway toward the stairs.

      “Did everything go smoothly?” Mom asked.

      I nodded.

      “Yes.”

      Dad let out a slow breath, like someone who had been holding it for hours.

       “And the offering?” he asked.

       My hand rested on the table. I could still feel the faint ache deep in my belly.

       I smiled.

       “Mireth received it.”

Mindstorm, by Allison Crandall (Team Otter)

- Critique is welcome 🙂 

- May cause sadness

I'm alone, in a small rowboat in the middle of a raging sea. Thunder cracks in the crushing darkness, illuminating the water around me. Wind tears up the waves, knocking the air from my lungs and nearly capsizing my boat. I grip the oars harder, trying in vain to hold myself still against the currents of the ocean.

 The frigid water is pooling in the bottom of my boat, my feet and legs have already gone numb. Salt burns my eyes, blurring the dim lines between sky and sea. I cry out, but can't even hear my own voice over the wind and waves.

I'm fighting a storm. On my own, just trying to survive against the crushing forces surrounding me.

My mind is darkness. I'm drowning in a stormy sea inside, failure and disappointment crashing over my head. I have just enough air to survive, never enough for a deep breath.

 My body is numb. I'm alone in a bubble of intangible mass; stuck in a one-sided mirror, outside of time, cut off from life.

My ears ring with a constant, distant hum. White noise buzzing around the back of my subconscious. I can see mouths moving, forming words that I'll never hear.

 I'm slipping away. I know I can't survive on my own much longer. I'm unraveling slowly, falling apart. I'm stuck in a constant war, but the thing I'm battling is my own mind.

 I don't even know who I am anymore, who I've become. My reflection is foreign, the girl on the other side a complete stranger.

I scream out from the depths of my soul, a silent, desperate cry. Hoping someone, anyone, will care enough to save me. 

A wave crashes over me, throwing me into the unrelenting waves. I fight to break the surface, but the turbulent currents grasp me and pull me deeper in. I try to break free, but I'm too disoriented to tell which way is up. Panic grips me, driving the air from my lungs and stars crowd my vision. My lungs burn, eyes drifting out of focus. I close them, breathing in a lungful of salty water. I'm choking, suffocating, my whole body screaming at me to keep fighting. I close my eyes and tune it out. I'm done fighting a war I can't win.

 I let my body go slack, sinking deeper in the ocean's embrace. The world goes silent and still all around me. I drift, following whatever current pulls me. I hear my lungs exhale one last time. My spirit fades, finally snuffing out.

My empty body sinks, drifting slowly to the ocean floor. For the first time, I can't feel the weight of fear of failing or disappointing everyone, I no longer have to worry about letting anyone down. I didn't have to feel the guilt of hurting someone, or causing sadness. 

Someone calls out far away, but their voice never reaches me. Someone jumps in to save me, but they are too late. Anyone who dives in after me would run out of air themselves long before they ever reached the bottom. I am no longer a part of this world, I left it behind. I have gone somewhere far away, somewhere no one can follow. 

My hair drifts around my still face, my eyes closed, body at ease. I look like I could be sleeping. Here in the dark waters of the deep, in my grave, I have finally found peace.