Even from a distance, I easily made out the genderless entity’s smile. Crammed with tall, jumbled teeth, the sickening sight widened and shrunk as gusts of air streamed through the Vacant Grave’s ancient heart.
I felt my mother stir, and I realized she was trying to get me to stand.
I shrieked, “No! No!” But her hands slid up under my arms and lifted me despite my ripping squeals.
I came to my feet, though I would not put my weight on them. I thrashed around in my captor's arms. I slapped and punched her belly. I kicked her shins and stomped on her feet. I didn’t care who she was at that moment, and had long lost any concern for why we were there. I would cause harm to all who kept me in that room, with that thing, for a minute longer.
Mother absorbed my feeble attacks with little effort. I continued my futile fight, pounding her stomach and hip with my fist even as she snatched my other wrist and dragged me further into the chamber.
“Why?” I screamed. Any doubt that my mother intended me harm had been extinguished, every mirage of safety dissipated.
I clawed at the damp stone, desperate to find something to cling to, to keep us from moving forward, but found only cutting edges that dug into my fingertips. I would find no ally here in the mountain. Still I continued to scrape at the ground.
I yelped when something grabbed hold of my foot. I twisted around to see one of the lesser spirits behind me. Immediately after, another seized the other foot. A third spirit snatched my flailing arm, and Mother handed my other arm to the fourth. She fell in behind us as the spirits carried me head first towards the pool.
For the first time since we left home, I could properly see my mother’s face. Her eyes remained fixed on the ground. I wriggled and pulled as I tried to decipher her betrayal in her features.
The spirits were not looking at me, either. Their eyes, dark and empty below crumbling brows, were trained on their destination. The corners of their mouths curled down.
“Mama! Mama!”
I screamed too long, and too loudly. My voice leaped to the top of its register and then lost itself in thick, cutting whispers. She still would not look at me.
I continued to twist and jerk. I screamed my pitiful whispers. I cried. Never had I felt so weak and worthless as in that moment.
We stopped. The spirits flipped me over, and suddenly I was facing the ground. As soon as my eyes focused on the dirt and rock beneath me, we continued moving. At my feet, I could just see my mother’s legs, and to my side, the translucent, naked legs of the spirits holding me. I struggled and squirmed and strained to escape, and still I felt no sensation of the ghosts laboring to hold on to me. I would not find freedom easily, and I would never wish for it as fervently as I did that night.
We inched closer to the pool, filled—I finally saw—with red fluid. We continued forward until my whole body, writhing hysterically, hovered just inches over the reservoir. The force of my attempted screams caused the liquid to ripple while the spirits ripped my clothes away. Silence eventually defeated my raw, hard throat. I could only relent and watch the shifting horror float to my side in the reflection of the pool's surface.
I didn’t have time to consider what might happen next.
The slicing began at the base of my neck. As I felt my skin being cut down the length of my spine, my mind spawned a new fear, full of terror and pain: I was being diced and carved, to what extreme even my imagination could not fathom.
Just when I thought the procedure was going to continue around to the front, the agony temporarily abated. My naked body dangled helplessly above the pool of red, still suspended by the spirits’ formidable grips. Blood slid down my ribs and dripped into the pool, and still my mother did nothing.
My cries finally crumbled to weak whimpers. At that moment, I knew myself to have been abandoned. At that moment, I could not have been further away from anything resembling goodness, light, or love. Or so I thought.
There was one more step towards complete hopelessness, and I didn’t know I had taken it until it happened.
The demon who'd torn the flesh along my spine began to move once more. Down towards my feet, near my mother.
Metal slid across stone. Before I could register the slap of something hacking into her back, my mother’s body convulsed. She dropped her torch and sank to her knees. We finally locked eyes. Hers were flung wide from the despair of fading life, as mine were no doubt filled with the fear that my own end was near.
The shade moved again, hovering before my mother, and then it sliced her neck deeply and wide before shoving her forward to spill her blood into the pool. I tried to scream again, but the spirits released my limbs and dropped me into the pool.
They held me down, completely submerged. My mother’s blood mixed with the blood already in the pool, all of it seeping into the slash in my back as I splashed and flailed and drowned.
I don’t believe I truly died—not fully—but cannot say for certain. My memory returns shortly afterwards, as if I had woken from a night’s sleep. I recall no dreams or feelings of lethargy, nor restfulness. Nor do I remember feeling fear or desperation when I woke up, despite still being surrounded by the entities that had caused me such horror. My mother, alive or dead, was nowhere to be seen. My head pounded as I sat up in the now-drained pool. The blood on my skin had been dry for some time; it cracked and flaked with each of my movements. My exposed
