HOW THE SHADOWS FEAST
ii. the tale of a lord and his horse called midnight

the first night

❅          ❅          ❅

AT SUNSET, SPURRING ON HIS BEAST, PRINCE ROGDAI of Mavropol with all impatient haste was riding. A splash of color with his exquisite furs and a strange ray of light with his gold-ornamented saber sheath in the forbidding landscape.

There was no more to catch the eye than snow glowing crimson, cliffs as sharp as wolves' teeth, and a sea of black-needled trees. All he and his entourage could hold onto was the lone path carved into the mountains—barely broad enough for their horses, covered in treacherous virgin snow, and caressed by an abyss as endless as the depths of the underworld.

It was a place where legends were born. Of bandits killing merchants. Of malicious creatures disorientating hapless wanderers. Of unfortunate youths dying in the wilderness' clasp. Of all too many people finding their last resting place on the river bed, slaughtered in the woods or smashed in the gorge of crevices.

"Lord, are you certain we should go on?" one of his men asked shily. "Shouldn't we rest for the night?"

He, Dmitri, and one of his comrades had already been daydreaming all their way here of their beautiful Svetlanas and Olgas awaiting them home and were now eager to wash away the cold by meeting their sweethearts in sleep.

"No. I want to arrive in Schwarzhain today," the prince answered.

What would have made another man's heart quiver, set that of the young prince aflame. The danger of his journey was just one of the challenges he was hungry to master, and what could be better motivation than the young bride who awaited him at the end of it?

They said the princess was as beautiful as she was wild. Rogdai smiled. I always liked to tame me a little beast.

"Night will fall soon. It will be dangerous to ride in the dark," Dmitri said, not quite brave enough to make it sound like the objection it was. "And it's solstice. Tonight, the dead travel fast."

"Then let us be faster than the night and her dead both."

The prince spurred his black mare Polnoch. Midnight.

Today may be midwinter—the time when death gods and souls roamed the earth—but so what? Wouldn't it make him seem even braver? Rogdai had always been someone who liked to beat the odds.

Whatever monsters might come, his flintlock would take them.

Neither of Rogdai's men seemed pleased with this decision.

Since they had left this small village called Lasow and with it their country three days ago, they had not met a single soul. Even the hot touch of this Lasowian peasant girl had become a faint memory, deprived of any warmth it could grant.

The huts built at the summer pastures were all deserted now during winter time, and no merchant dared to cross the Winter Mountains. Maybe even the most ruthless and unafraid of bandits had left them to find victims elsewhere.

They might as well be the only people in this forsaken place.

However, his men feared the darkest night and all its dangers on their path more than facing yet more hours alone in the cold.

But he gave them no opportunity to protest. Their words were suffocated by the snorting horses, the hungry cracking of his whip, and the crunch of hooves in the snow. Not even a breathless prayer for their protection he allowed them to leave at the wayside chapel, passing it without casting it a single glance.

It was the horses who smelled death first.

❅

The thing that had strayed into the convent had sharp teeth. They protruded from its invisible mouth like out of the shadows itself with which the creature melted. Its eyes were soulless holes, glowing deep red like the last ember in the ashes.

A demon. A ghost.

Instantly, it sensed Saskia's presence and turned towards her.

A soft shiver ran down her spine, although she knew this one was harmless: a mere shadow, indeed, of what once was a human, a life, a soul, cursed and bound to wander the earth in search of redemption.

But such, Saskia had not to offer.

Yet, the creature looked at her with its unnerving eyes as if bidding her to set it free.

It was not so much the ghost itself that made her blood rush to her heart but the fact that it had been able to enter this place. Either one of her sisters had failed completely to light the candles and seal the doors, or someone let the demon inside. Anyway, this could not be a good sign.

"You should not be here," Saskia whispered, feeling some compassion for the poor thing. Perhaps she would become an endless wanderer someday, too—not welcome in any realm besides the very one between them all.

All the same, she wasn't particularly more desired inside these walls already than the creatures of the dark.

The ghost just followed while she tiptoed into the chapel, where they kept the little casket the rare visitors filled with a coin, once in a while. Saskia took two of them. Hopefully, Mother Gesa would not realize some of the money was gone tomorrow.

"You cannot stay here. Please, go," she said, carefully placing the copper coins in the demon's discarnate hands, "and do not come back."

The creature took it and crept towards the door, slowly vanishing outside in the dark. Saskia's eyes followed flickering to the rhythm of her pounding heart. Only when she was sure it had vanished she finally closed the door and sealed it with runes again. Outside, she thought to hear the demon wail.

❅

The hind was not simply slaughtered, it was cut in half meticulously as if its limbs and bones were severed by the strike of one gigantic sword. In the middle of the road it lay, its blood coloring it a rusty red as if to bar their way. Thus far shall you come, and no farther.

"We ... we should find another way," Dmitri murmured, glancing toward the cadaver and then back to the darkening sky. "We should—"

"No."

"The God of Death is angry—"

"Quiet!"

Rogdai Bogdanovich had never been defeated in his life; neither by men nor by nature, and he was not willing to let this happen now. So, he forced his mare that shied at the carcass to move forward.
"We won't stop."

Although an icy claw clasped his chest and suffocated his heart the second his mount's hooves had passed the bloody line the hind's body had drawn, he spurred it further.

Dmitri was the first to fall.

As if struck by an invisible bullet or sword his eyes widened and froze, while all fear and life left them. He slipped from his horse with a throat opened to release gurgling blood into the snow.

Only seconds later, his friend found the same unpleasant end, the name of his sweet Svetlana who waited for him in lands afar still on his lips like a last, hopeless prayer.

"An assault!"
"Bandits!"
"Demons!"

Their shouts mixed and became one seething terror.

A foreign fear he had not yet met in battle crept icy like the river gurgling near through the prince's veins and straight into his heart. It already knew what his mind still denied. This enemy they could not fight and defeat.

All his weapons—sharp saber and knife, loaded gun carved with notches—were useless shiny toys and no more. Still, Rogdai unsheathed his sword, his eyes jumping over the woods drowned by night. They did not find an aim.

"No, please ... Master of Death, please ...," one of his men, only a boy of seventeen, whispered, staring frantically into the dark as though seeing something that stayed hidden from everyone else. Whomever—or whatever—he spoke to, it did not listen for it spared him not.

The youth was the next and third to be slain by this invisible hand, some force driving through his heart, leaving nothing but a gaping hole.

Rogdai screamed orders, the horses bolted as if knowing more than their masters, and the remaining men eventually flew, driven by wild panic. Even those who had known nothing but loyalty in their bones forgot about their lord when they felt the cold touch of death.

You ought not to have come here, a voice whispered in his ears, no, resonated in his bones.

"Bright Mother help us!" Rogdai breathed, praying for the first time to the goddess worshipped so rigorously in these cold northern lands in case his own gods had not followed him here.

Without looking back at the dead and those he abandoned, and his whip thrashing, he drove his panicked horse on. Farther into the night but farther from this sacrificial altar of violence, too. It swallowed him like a sinister jaw, but he did not stop riding.

Despite the deadly abyss beside him and the slippery snow—these dangers were all but forgotten in the face of this inhumane being that slaughtered his men.

Behind him thundered hooves as if an entire army followed, and Prince Rogdai prayed that his black mare called midnight was truly fast enough to outrun the night and all her monstrous dead.

Somewhere far away, bells chimed.

❅

When Saskia entered the room, she found Katinka kneeling in prayer. Her chestnut hair unraveled, cascading down her straight back; her face lifted but her eyes closed; pale lips breathlessly mumbling.

There was something strangely pure in everything Katinka did—the way she held herself, the way she smiled, the way she looked at her even—and it had always pushed Saskia back as it had drawn her nearer to her.

They were different as day and night, and she could not quite understand what a pious girl like Katinka saw in her. The intruder. The mad woman. The demon whisperer. Yet, Katinka Goldhirsch was the only one of her sisters who never judged her.

Sometimes Saskia thought that made her the true lunatic of them both.

Even before she could take in the room—only beds, altar, and window—Saskia could feel Katinka's presence. It filled the tiny cell with life and light and the smell of white sage and juniper, burned to keep demons away.

Katinka did not stop, neither did she look up, until the last word of the prayer sprung from her lips. Only then did the girl turn around to Saskia.

"Where have you been? It's already dark outside." The worry was so evident in her dark doe eyes it felt like a cool blade to her throat.

"In the chapel," she said, and if this was still not enough to dispel suspicion and concern, she added: "Praying."

A frown curled her sister's brows. "Something happened."

Suddenly, the smell of sacred sage felt heavy in the room, burning down Saskia's gorge and immediately choking her like it wanted to scorch her tainted soul.

She swallowed hard. In the last few hours, she had been sold to a prince who would soon arrive to take her away, received a deadly divination, and found a ghost in the convent.

Telling Katinka would have been the right thing to do, the honest thing.
However, she never was one to make the right decision. Even if she had wanted to, Saskia simply could not. There were no words for her fear and sorrow and even less so for a farewell like this.

After all, though they all called themselves sisters, Katinka was the only one who truly was.

"Mother Gesa was angry with you again, right?" the girl asked and released Saskia from the pain of the silence that grew like cancer.

She nodded. "Yes."

"You should not dare her, always," Katinka sighed and rose.

"I know ... I know." On another day, she might have argued about that, but not today, with the fear still carved into her bones.

How could that ghost enter the convent? What did this prophecy mean? It sounded like nonsense altogether. No one could pluck flowers in winter. Certainly, Saskia would not choose to crawl into a wolf's jaw. And never could her soulmate be a devil with no heart.

That was, if not...

Prince Rogdai? Saskia shivered, thinking about how tomorrow, or maybe even tonight, this devil could arrive at the convent and take her with him.

But the most important question remained: Why, by Perhta, was she still alive? Perhaps she truly was mad, and this—a prophecy not meant to survive—was the final proof that all those shadows belonged to her alone.

"You feel it too, don't you? Tonight, something is ..." Katinka's gaze flew towards the small window for just a heartbeat. The candle's light made it a pale mirror anyway, obscuring anything that lay in the darkness behind.

For a second, Saskia thought to see not them both in its reflection but a horse chasing through the endless night, carrying an angry rider at its back. Blinking, she cast the image away. Shadow and light could play strange tricks on the eye. As could mirrors. Her mother had always told her better not to trust them.

"Something is different. Evil. It feels like something dark entered the convent," Katinka said, finally.

Maybe that dark thing was her, the very one who had broken at least one of their sacred rules.

"If so, Mother Gesa would have noticed already, don't you think?" Saskia asked, stripping off her veil and robe. She had always wondered if Katinka was able to see the creatures, too, and just did not dare to acknowledge it. At least, she seemed to sense them.

"Maybe ..." Katinka mumbled, and Saskia felt the sudden sting of her own deception.

After a short last prayer at the altar, already freezing in her shift, she huddled under her rough blanket and waited for Katinka to slip to her underneath the covers. The Daughters of Perhta were thankful for their separate beds in the hottest days of summer. In winter, however, one was often left abandoned for the sake of warmth.

And it held more power over all of them than the most violent dislike for a fellow sister and roommate could have.

Saskia closed her eyes, a desperate plea to Perhta to keep this strange prince away silently on her lips. Make him give up on this journey. Make him fall in love with a forest maiden or flee from the chatezh's terrifying noise.

A chilly wind, like the world itself letting out a quivering breath, ran through the room and extinguished the candle by the window.

Katinka froze beside her.

"It was just the wind," Saskia reassured her. Was it? Or was it a sign of her prayers being answered for the first time?

Shivering, her sister lit the candle again, carefully sealing the window and door with even more white runes than she already had done, as if she feared the same shadows that haunted Saskia to come for her someday, too.

Saskia fell asleep, the words of that dreadful prophecy on her mind, while outside, deep in the woods, her betrothed ran for his life from deadly creatures.

just before round 1 ends, i managed to finish this chapter, the first sentence of which is a little altered version of one from lermonotv's "demon". So maybe you can guess what awaits Saskia's betrothed.

lasow—my setting for last year's onc
—also got a little mention, even though is set way after the happenings of WDCT.

my writing schedule this time is even more chaotic than last time, but at least the next milestone doesn't feel that far away anymore.
how was that first round going for you?

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5400 words
milestone 2 ✗