Chapter Text
You’re playing hide and seek when it happens. You’re 17, she’s 12. She is going to stay that age forever, you aren’t.
It’s not supposed to happen like this, yet it does.
And it’s all your fault…
Isn’t it, Vesper?
You should’ve known better.
You had known better.
You knew that your parents were making stew for dinner. You knew your mother was going to make you an older brother. You knew Esther wasn’t good with directions. You knew you were the faster runner, and you knew how to conceal your footsteps better. And yet, and yet.
You ran into the woods, and in a burst of petty impulsivity, you pretended to venture further in. At the last minute, you turned around, and sprinted all the way out, in the direction you were so familiar with, that you had treaded so many times when you were her age. The direction that she’s never gone before, because she was more afraid than you, shyer, less willing to explore than you ever were.
Vesper came out of the woods that day an only child, and he only knew a week later.
What a miserable life to live, to have killed your sibling. To have their phantom blood haunting your hands, turning into red, red, dripping down from your arms and knees.
You’re still trying to scrub it off every night. They say pain dims with age, but as an elf, it really, really doesn’t. It never quite goes away. It lingers like the aftermath of smoke from a fire, the ash scarring the ground even as new things sprout on top.
“We were playing hide and seek, she just didn’t stop going deeper in, I couldn’t find her at all, she just disappeared!” You say at dinner, when one of the seats around the ancient wooden table is empty. It’s something you repeat at breakfast the morning after too.
Even when you knew she was seeking, not hiding. You had been the one who led her in on a funny whim, a practical joke and now the joke has gone too far.
You were lauded for being a good storyteller once, now you use the gift like a lifeline.
When she comes back, it won’t matter.
“I’ll watch out for her because I’m her older brother. She’ll come back, I know it!” You proclaim, 3 days later at the dinner table, when the seat remains absent. This time your smile is more forced. Your thoughts are more desperate. You aren’t confirmed to be a murderer yet, there are still chances for forgiveness.
“Esther, come back, please. I’m so sorry, I’ll do better. Mother and Father are worried about you. Please. I will never do it again.” You say, into the air at night, as you kneel against the hard wooden floor. Your knees feel cold, before the bruises start to burn like invisible brands across your kneecaps.
A week later, your prayers are answered, and she comes back, as a cooling corpse still some stages of decomposition left to go.
Her blood soaks your pajamas in the early mist of the early morning, more so late night as you drag her maggot infested body from the periphery of the woods into somewhere just a little deeper in, where your parents won’t see, won’t smell the flesh of a rotting carcass. They won’t know if it’s somewhere where even the light of the stars cannot penetrate.
They haven’t woken up yet, you’ll let them sleep.
They don’t need to know, they’ll never know. This is your burden to bear. As an older brother, and a murderer.
Esther’s corpse is a small, small thing, but it’s fresh. Although it’s already been out here a couple of days, the old coagulated blood is mingled with damp forest soil, and the guts have turned from a fresh red into something brown and viscous. Fluid drips down your fingers, something waxy and yellow is getting caught under your fingertips.
The smell is terrible. Like soured milk and rotten fish but worse, with undertones of mildew from the forest and some sort of sickly, putrid sweetness that just won’t go away. Your back hurts from the strain of lifting a body, that’s both paradoxically as heavy as the sky and as light as a feather. There’s been so many parts taken away, muscles ripped so forcefully from bone and cartilage, you can’t tell which is which.
Her face is a mottled mess of bruises, and clawed open wounds. Some of the deepest lashes go to carve so deeply, old fat and shredded skin parted so sharply, you can see soft, bloodied lines across the bones of the skull. The flesh is so red there. As you try to lift her, dragging the body by the shoulders, because you don't know how to do this properly. The head lulls and flops over, from where the tendons in her neck were severed and messily clawed apart. At one moment, you were forced to drop her because she was too heavy, and the bloating flesh was too difficult to look at; you stare into the empty eye sockets, where a couple colonies of off-white maggots had taken room, and you could almost imagine this is yourself you’re killing.
Maybe that would make it a little easier. Make this penance from the gods for you, and not an innocent victim.
Stop. Stop thinking of her as innocent. Gods, nobody related to you could be innocent. All of you are tainted. At least this fact is easy to bear.
You can’t help but compare the wounds on the body, and the stomach, the guts, the pebbled fatty tissue from the kidneys and tattered remains of the diaphragm, to the chicken your mother taught you how to butcher last week. She said that you should learn to provide for yourself in the family cottage.The hen’s name was Daisy, for your sister’s favorite flower. You made such a mess for your first time killing something already dead. Your blade not snapping the bone as cleanly as hers had, as you hacked away at its pimpled neck, plucked clean. When you helped her with making the soup later that evening, you had found shards of bone inside the broth, and you said nothing.
You pray Esther was treated better, but she wasn’t. (All because of you.)
They look so alike… yet the body, it’s been rotting a couple days now. The chicken was clean, plucked and washed thoroughly of grime. And then thrown into a soup when all the excess parts were disposed of and the pieces methodically sliced up.
This body was not treated with the same level of dignity, or sanitation for that matter. Some of her toes are missing, delicate parts of the ligaments in the fingers corroded away into some patch of soil somewhere, bones snapped where escape was attempted and failed. The shape of her mouth is screaming, you can tell that much. But you don’t want to. And yet you do, and you don’t stop dragging your sister’s body into the place where she died.
After the creatures had their fill of flesh, and her chest was nothing but a strewn mess of knotted gnarled organs with a cracked open ribcage, freshly dissected by the wild, you could still sort of identify some resemblance of lungs in there, or a stomach, or a handful of this or that. But sisters are not supposed to be anatomy lessons, and you should never have learned as much as you have today. Lacerations from curious claws draw across her, from neck to hip, and much of the flesh, from her body, her arms and upper thighs, has been already processed by hungry snouts, leaving no decency for her, the girl who had wandered too far, because of him.
Were the creatures cruel, when they did this? Were they haunted by their own consciousness? No, you’re the monster. They were just hungry. You chose to leave her behind.
You wondered, if the creatures were more clever, would they have cracked her femurs, and sucked out the bone marrow clean too? There are other living things constructing a home inside her ribcage as if your own ribcage didn’t feel like it was collapsing. They are making something more out of death, something you can not do.
If they cleaned and diced everything apart like a surgeon, or a butcher, or even a mother providing for her own children, instead of slobbering over it with vicious teeth and terrible paws; would you feel better?
Would I feel better if they left, instead, a pile of cleaned bones refusing to rot, not this mangled shriveled thing?
It would be lighter to bury an empty skeleton, physically. But it would not weigh any lighter on your conscience.
What you’re doing, or more accurately, what you have done, is something that sinks its fangs into your soul, then covers it with corrosive saliva so the bugs would know it’s not safe to eat. You are rotted, rotting away with her in the ground, from it.
She spent her last moments afraid, now you are spending your first moments of being afraid, and you know it’s not going to stop. Not till you’re dead, but that’s far away.
You have to live with your choices. You have to keep up the lie. you have to tell your parents to never go into the woods again lest they smell the blood and the ghosts reeking off their own son.
You use your father’s gardening shovel to dig the hole. You know after this, you would have to throw the tool into the hole in the ground together with the horrible, infested carcass. You would have to cover up the hole with your hands, manually using palmfuls of dirt to attempt to obscure your worst sin. More worms and warm fluids and moss would cover your fingers and dig into your elbows and soak your linen clothes. But that’s okay, you’ll just bury it or burn it all away.
You can’t burn it all, you must let yourself soak in the coagulated blood and squirming beetles and mites. Let them cover you, let them think you’re dead, too. Soaked and breathing but, so, so, dead.
Bugs crawl across your mottled, sweating, viscera covered skin, and you don’t kick them off; you’re covered all over with them. The buzzing from flies is almost as loud as the buzzing inside your head, they only synchronize with one another like the universe’s worst funerary music. You can feel the wriggling worms crawling into your throat and consuming the bile, excreting their slimy mucus to muffle your screams. You want to vomit— there is nothing coming out.
You are rotting, just like her. But you keep breathing. You breath, and breath, until you suffocate on dry land.
(No parents should bury their children, so you don’t let them. You’re taking care of it. )
It might be hours until you are done covering up the body. You’ve heard stories of realms where there is a sun in the sky, and the air is warm and humid instead of cold and empty.
You are almost glad that she at least rots a little slower here, unlike in other realms, in the forever dark skies of Achenar and its lack of sympathy; her corpse eroding slower gives you more time to enshroud it, (more of something to haunt you, something to answer your questions.)
You stumble out of the woods like a new-born faun, knees wobbly and steeped in blood and entrails, having “lost” your father’s favorite gardening tool. You have too many ghosts, and too many lies already half-constructed in your mind. It’s as if you too have been birthed again, but this time without a mother’s love. It’s like the water and blood mixing together, leaking from a cut open womb, but it’s a wound that would never heal.
You wonder if your parents can love you anymore, but you don’t think they can. You won’t let them. How could they bear such a terrible thing that cannibalized the only other thing that cared about it?
Mother hasn't awoken yet from her sleep, Father hasn’t either, being typically woken by her. They’re elves, they don’t need to sleep—only trance, but you suppose the stress you’ve caused them earns them some extra rest. You still have time to take a shower before breakfast. Tear off your skin and scrub it raw until there’s nothing left. You’ve been at this for hours, likely; you never slept.
When they place the porridge onto the table the coming morning, with the milk and honey, you would refuse the honey, refuse the fresh cut fruits on a nearby platter too. Say that the dark circles under your eyes are from worry over your sister’s whereabouts.
You would suggest that they put up missing person posters for her. You would say you don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know. Deny everything; say, “leave it up to the Lightwatchers”, even though you know this isn’t the Lightwatchers’ area of expertise, and the fact that you did know.
You just needed them to never, ever find out.
The lies would sweeten the breakfast better than any honey or spices ever could.
Your mother, to your suggestions, would respond:
“Oh, what a good son you are, to care so much for Esther. We’ll make sure to keep an eye out.”
Your father would say, while reaching out to ruffle your hair before rescinding his hand just before reaching your head,
“Hopefully she comes back soon, our table is so empty without her.”
Then they would leave together for the temples to go and pray, they would leave the deputies and sheriff to plaster up posters searching for a corpse. They could make sure the news spreads to everyone in town and beyond by the afternoon.
Meanwhile you would look outside the window, sitting at the empty breakfast table, ignoring the thin lines of dried waxy red and yellow gore underneath your chipped nails, ignoring the cooling untouched porridge in front of you, and see the sky.
The stars sure are beautiful today.
You would note out loud, as if you weren’t the one ruining everything.
Shame that your sister has been murdered. Shame that the evidence is still on your hands.