Page 10 of Embers of Midnight
The trees thin. The sound of water unspools to the right, not a roar, a steady hiss. My tongue feels too big for my mouth. Every breath drags over it like sand. I imagine sinking my face into cold, the burn turning to bite, the bite turning to relief. I imagine it so hard my knees go weak for a step and I have to plant myself, horn tilted down, breath loud and fast until the dizziness drains.
My mind keeps replaying the alley like a spiteful loop. Brick. Hands. Knife. The wrongness of heat opening like it was always there, patient, waiting for a password written in blood. The way the men smelled when my flames found them. I try not to think their faces. I try and fail and try again. I refuse to let their last expressions set up house behind my eyes. They can live somewhere else. Not here. Not on my side of the glass.
I can’t cry like this. I try. My body is too busy being an oven to spare water for grief. Maybe that’s mercy. Maybe it’s theft. Either way, I owe myself a breakdown and it can stand in line behind everything else.
There is a new smell under the water and the sap and the metal and the shame. Cold stone. Wet wood. Silt. It gets stronger with each careful step, and hope arrives in my chest so abruptly it hurts. Hope, that petty little candle. I didn’t invite it. It came anyway.
I angle toward it, careful now, feeling out each patch of crust before I put weight down. Heat gutters down my flanks and the snow at my ankles gives up the fight, turning to slush that I carry for a step and then leave behind in messy, cooling scallops. The horn’s pressure eases a fraction, like it also wants the water.
If I can drink, I might be able to think. If I can think, I might be able to find the thread back to hands. If I can find hands, I can find clothes, and then maybe the part where this is a nightmare instead of a life can take a number and wait its turn.
The sound of water is close enough now that it’s inside my ribs, vibrating there. My throat tightens with a want so sharp it could count as a new injury. I lower my head as I walk, as if posture alone could promise the creek I won’t ruin it, as if asking nicely ever worked on physics.
I stop at the lip of a slope where the dark under the snow changes texture and I know, the way my new body knows things I didn’t grant it permission to know, that the bank is below. One more careful descent and I’ll see it. I’ll have it. I can rinse the alley out of my mouth. I can cool the horn until my skull stops ringing. I can try again to fold myself back into a shape that fits the girl who owns my name.
I stand there for one long breath and let the idea of relief move through me like a small, tame animal that doesn’t trust me yet. I don’t trust me yet either. We can learn together.
Then I take the first step down toward the sound.
Whoops, My Bad
Seraphina
The slope gives under my weight, crust breaking in tidy little snaps that sound too loud in the dark. I ease down sideways because hooves plus gravity feels like a prank, and the air ahead changes—colder, sharper, a steady hiss like someone shredding silk forever. Water. Close.
Steam starts before I see it. It feathers up from the dip at the bottom of the slope, curls into the trees, and beads on low branches. The snow under me turns to slush with each step and refreezes behind, a trail of ugly scallops. My breath drags. It’s too big for this body; it comes out like a forge trying to be polite and failing.
Be less. Be cooler. Be anything but a walking blowtorch.
I reach the bank and stop so fast my front hooves skid. The creek is narrow here, black and quick, edges furred with ice that throws a low cracking sound into the night like tiny bonesresetting. I lower my head. Heat pours off my muzzle in waves I can feel on my forelegs. The water responds by making a dramatic exit. A thin skin of vapor leaps up where my breath touches, then thickens until the surface is a rolling white mouth.
Great. I found water and turned it into soup.
I push closer, slow, trying to trick physics by pretending I’m not here. The steam thickens anyway. My own reflection flickers and vanishes and my brain is grateful because the last time I looked at me, I had opinions.
I open my mouth and try to drink the way instinct says. Lips lower, tongue reaches, the cold should cut sweet and clean.
It doesn’t. The water hits air near me and boils. A shock of heat hits my teeth like a slapped nerve. I jerk back with a sound that would look like a laugh on paper and feels like a swear in my throat. My tongue throbs. I try again from the side, stretching farther, angling so my breath skates away, holding air like I’m a gymnast and oxygen is optional.
The water still goes to steam. It hisses in my face and kisses my eyes. I blink hard and choke on frustration because thirst is loud and I hate losing. I pull away and pace three tight steps, hooves punching slush, horn dragging a pale line through the air that hums along my skull.
Bank the fire. Come on. Bank it.I picture a stove door, heavy iron, the kind with a creaky handle and a rude temperament. Ireach for the heat sitting everywhere in me—ribs, hips, spine—and try to shove it down behind the door. Close. Latch. Behave.
For one heartbeat the air around my head cools enough that frost reaches for my muzzle like it’s brave. Hope jumps, stupid and sweet. I lower to drink and the frost snaps back to water and water leaps to steam again like it was waiting to be dramatic. I pull away with a growl that rumbles too low to belong in anything with knees.
Fine. We don’t drink. We lick snow like a deer and pretend this is a plan.
I step back up the bank and scoop snow with my lips, let it melt on my tongue in fast, mean drips. It’s something. It’s not enough. The knot under my ribs—hunger’s sullen cousin—tightens fresh. I swallow hard and feel it all the way to the line where the horn grows, a bright ache that knows the shape of heat too well.
I follow the creek anyway, keeping it at my right shoulder like a quiet friend I don’t want to ruin. The trees lean in and then open, and the night keeps editing itself around my body, clearing space I didn’t ask for. Every time my mane flares, snow lifts from a branch and rains down with a sound like soft applause. I imagine the forest clapping sarcastically.
Congratulations. You invented steam.
The bank rises. The creek swings left through a spill of rocks, little frozen tongues hanging where the flow had been indecisiveearlier. I try the shift again because I’m either stubborn or stupid and the difference is academic at this point. I breathe in slow, picture hands, picture skin that doesn’t hum, picture a throat that makes words and not smoke. I tug at that internal zipper I felt in the alley and in the trees and earlier on the hill when the world tried to be kind.
Something listens. The horn’s pressure eases a finger. The fire settles like a cat told to get off the counter.
Then panic darts up from under everything and kicks the shelf where I keep self-control like it’s a habit. The heat surges back up my spine with a greedy hand. My hooves scrape forward and I swear at myself in my head because I miss words and this is the only way I get them.
