She felt crushed by the weight of the creature’s will, oppressed by the force in its gaze. By the time she realised something was being done to her, it was too late to resist it. She struggled to oppose the invader with her thoughts, but she couldn’t concentrate. She was losing herself.
She became aware of a change all around her. The blizzard faded, turning ghostly and powerless. The world was darker and sharper all at once. She could see details where there hadn’t been details before: the fine jigsaw of creases in the skin of the Mane’s face; the shocking complexity of its feathery irises.
There was a whispering in the air, a constant hiss of half-spoken words. Movement all around her. She recognised the movement of the Manes, prowling around the town. She could feel them. She shared their motion. And as she sank deeper and deeper into the trance, she felt the warmth of that connection. A sense of belonging, like nothing she’d experienced before, enfolded her. It was beautiful and toxic and sugary and appalling all at once.
She’d almost surrendered herself to it when she was ripped back into reality.
It took a moment for her senses to cope with the change. She was being pulled to her feet by a faceless man in a hooded fur-and-hide coat. Her initial reaction was to pull away, but he held her firmly and said something to her. When she didn’t respond, he said it again, and this time the words got through.
‘—re you alright? Jez? Jez?’
She nodded quickly, because she wanted him to shut up. He was frightening her with his urgent enquiries. The Mane was thrashing and squealing on the ground. A cutlass was buried in the base of its neck, up to the collarbone, half-severing its head. There was little blood, just a clean wound, exposing bone.
But it still wasn’t finished. Moving with jerky, spastic movements, it got its feet under it and tried to stand. Riss swore and kicked it in the face, knocking it flat. He wrenched the cutlass free and beheaded it with a second stroke.
Riss turned away from the corpse of the Mane and looked up at her. He held out his hand: come with me.
Something snapped inside her. The accumulated horror and shock of the attack broke through. She lost her mind and fled.
She ran, through the passageways between the houses, out into the blizzard. The winds pushed and battered her. Snow stuck to her goggles. She could hear Riss calling her name but she ignored him. At some point she realised that she could no longer see any houses, just endless, unmarked snow. She kept running, driven by the terror of what lay behind.
Only when exhaustion drove her to her knees did she stop. She was thoroughly lost, and all traces of her passing were being erased by the fury of the snow. She dared not go back, and she couldn’t go forward. The cold, that she’d barely noticed during her flight, had set in deep. She began to shiver violently. A tiredness overtook her, every bit as insidious and unstoppable as the power of the Manes.
She curled up into a foetal position, and there, buried in the snow, she died.
Every day since, Jez had wondered what might have happened if things had gone another way. If Riss hadn’t saved her. If she’d succumbed to the Mane.
Would it have been so bad, in the end? In that brief moment, when she touched upon the world of the Manes, she’d felt something wonderful. An integration, a togetherness above and beyond anything her human life had given her.
She’d never borne children, never been in love. She’d always dreamed of having friends she could call soulmates, but somehow it never happened. She just didn’t care about them enough, and they didn’t care about her in return. She’d always considered herself rather detached, all in all.
So
