The Fate That Feeds

Pain makes even the innocent man a liar, but I was no man, and I’d forsaken innocence in pursuit of something greater.

Whatever becomes of me tonight will forever be who I am, but if it is not she who is beside me, let death be kinder than I ever was.

─── ⋆⋅ ♰ ⋅⋆ ───

The Tree from which wicked roots grew started as a myth among the Shadehaven’s feminal diaspora – if entered, there was no guarantee of exiting without being… changed by it in some way. It was awfully vague, and amateur in style; no more a fable to keep us dutiful first years at the academy in line, no less a game of chance for the willing. I was the former character, or at least I’d like to tell myself I was. In reality, I was the latter stunted by great repression; like a lamb with a wolf’s mind lurking below its skin, as all great and shunned women are. English was my first choice of study. My father, bless his heart, credited himself as my guiding light, for he was the one with the library card that granted me access to my calling to be unearthed in the stacked shelves. He never knew what I found there; what fleshy words enthralled me so greatly to the point of complete carnal consumption, and what eventually led me to the woods that first night. Regardless if my soul ever belonged to the righteous, I played my part damn well. The first twenty years of my life operated within a framework I liked to call the 4 Ps: peaceful, pliant, polite, and pious. None of it was in vain, as I look back now; the stars above the trees twinkling like tears rimming beautiful eyes. 

I was a good girl… once. 

That was before she materialized into the myth as the starring role as my years at Shadehaven spanned from its inception; front and center stage, corporeal. Cassie, my roommate, first lifted the spectral curtain when she stumbled into our shared room, pale and sweaty. 

“Briar,” she panted, slightly panicked, before she fell backward unconscious onto the linoleum. Her usual crisp button down had been sullied, dark hair encrusted in a crown of twigs and leaves, and just above her left breast were two puncture wounds fashioned in a human-ish bite. As I remember it now, I didn’t fear the sight. If anything it was a curious familiarity, like everything in my life had prepared me for that very moment. She found consciousness as quick as she’d lost it, laughing as she came to. “I went to the Tree, and there was this woman, God… That woman,” she said, a little crazed. “I thought beauty that great would be a comfort, but it was a little alarming. I told her about you. She would love you, Briar,” she breathed, cupping my cheek with a muddied hand. “She told me so.” That was all I needed to hear before I ushered her to the communal bathroom to clean her up, a burning jealousy eating away at my gut as if I’d been the bitten one. I had met Cassie towards the end of our first year in a poetry seminar. She was the only one who seemed to understand her craft, and that alone was alluring enough. Yet it was Cassie herself who kept me in her orbit. We were fast friends, and even quicker roommates when year two commenced. She was everything I wasn’t – enigmatic yet approachable, self-assured, and positively recalcitrant. Cassie lived as she was, which was a rarity amongst the masses which we found ourselves thrusted into. A living streak of apathy ameliorated to my veins in the throes of vicious girlhood, and I had yet to part with it. When someone else, no less another woman at that, had sunk their teeth into her before I had the chance, something inside me withered. Whether that was a good thing, I’m still not sure.

Cassie’s nightmares began soon after her return from the grove. I would wake in the night to her muffled cries, her hands clutching at her chest as if her heart begged for something I couldn’t see. At first, I soothed her the best I could, whispering reassurances in her ear that promised whatever plagued her would pass, but as the weeks dragged on my word’s hollowed; her troubles otherworldly. By the time anyone believed her enough to begin worrying, she was dead; the cold inevitability of it both shocking and resigning. We were supposed to celebrate the end of finals, toasting to our freedom with cheap wine and fleeting, youthful joy. Instead, I listened to hushed voices in the hallway from my room recount the details: drained of blood, a smile stretched across her beautiful, lifeless face. They paused, then with a sigh laced with a lilt of finality which told me Cassie’s death would bear the cross of rapidly developing contempt, one spoke back up. “You should die happy when it is no longer possible to live in the light.”

Politeness was the first stud in my framework to collapse that summer. If I had ever immersed myself deeply enough with my peers those first years at Shadehaven, perhaps they would’ve noticed my withdrawal. My professors noticed the sharp shift in style and voice, and made their concerns heard in my flailing performance. I couldn’t seem to care, and told them as much. Piousness was next to follow. I never stepped foot into church again, but this didn’t matter once the rumors of my own persuasions reached the revered ears of its leaders. I hardened from the clay of girlhood, pliancy no longer a luxury to those who wished to shape me. My peacefulness was the last to fall with a valiant roar and a steak knife which I’d stolen from the cafetorium the Halloween night of my third year.

It is said to live is to think. When I charged into the thicket of the grove at the denouement of my second year at Shadehaven, expulsion hot on my heels, I might as well have been dead. The grove swallowed me, its cragged branches threatening to yank me into the shadows. When I found the tree, I felt as if it found me instead; waiting. It shone darker than its peers, despite the glistening moonlight bearing down on its obsidian trunk. Carved deeply into its bark, a single phrase: improbis aliena virtus semper formidolosa est. 

“To wicked men the virtue of others is always a matter of dread,” a voice purred, low and honeyed. In this moment, it felt as if stories had shifted, and in place of Briar Karsten stood Eve, bare toes digging into the woods’ floor, meeting a shadowed serpent.

“Virtue is no concern of mine,” I said, tracking the shadow as it slithered closer as if I wasn’t anything but prey. Her movements were preternatural; water flowing over stone. Fear should have consumed me – perhaps it did in some foreign reach of my mind. Instead, fascination overtook me as her glowing eyes raked over me, old and hungry; not cruel, but knowing. 

“You don’t run,” she said, observingly. 

“The chase is the least fun part, you would agree, no?”

“I have a feeling we would agree on many things,” 

“Like?”

“You don’t belong to this world anymore than I do,” she murmured, stopping just short of touching me, lifting the hand holding the knife that had slowly made its way there from my boot. “Understand this before we begin, you will bleed tonight.”

“I’ve bled for worse reasons, I suppose.”

Her smile widened as she descended upon my neck. I woke the next morning at the roots of the Tree ravaged, drunk on blood loss, and afflicted. Nightmares did not plague me after. That autumn I dreamt of the woman, whatever that meant for myself I did not know. What I did know was I needed to stay at Shadehaven. I appealed the case of my gross performance in the predating semester as symptomatic grief spurned by the sudden death of my friend in the spring and won back my good graces. In all honesty, I barely thought about Cassie after that night. All I thought of was her. 

The grove looked different in the frost-bitten grip of winter. My breath hung in the air as I returned to the Tree. 

She was waiting, perched on one of the low-hanging branches. Her silhouette, riddled with dips and curves, was sharp against the paled, moonlit sky. “I do not have time for things with a soul,” she said, plummeting down clumsily from where she sat. When I met her eyes again, her gaze pinned me in place. It was not the same beauty that met me once before, her hunger evident. It was like looking at the remains of a sunken ship beneath the waters that claimed it, the monstrosity of it awe inspiring. “I am hungry,” she grumbled. “And you taste… different.”

“Does different mean bad?” I asked, taking a step closer, trying not to sound too eager to please her, but I was. God, I was. 

“No,” she said, her expression faltering. “That’s the most confusing part.”

“And that leads you to believe I have a soul?”

“What else could it be?”

“The very opposite.”

She sighed. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“But I am.” I scrunched my sweater sleeve to expose my wrist. Her eyes darkened, locking in on the steady pulse. “What is your name?”

“Lydia.” There was a pregnant pause, and I watched as the ice began to thaw.

“Drink,” I implored. I could not stand the wounded animal standing in front of me for a second more. She surged over to me and took my arm delicately into her cold hands, but I pulled back before she could make quick work of me. “All I ask is that you don’t hurt anyone else at Shadehaven,” I started. “And you let me watch, Lydia.” 

The remainder of my third year was a blur of similar dalliances in the abandoned grove which all ended the same: she drank, I watched, we talked until the sun crested over the valley beyond the grove, and I would return to my room, barely having time to get ready for class.

“Do you ever wish you could leave here?” I asked one night. 

Lydia, satiated and lounging between myself and the Tree’s twisted roots, glanced in my direction with a bemused smile. “To where, exactly?”

“Anywhere, everywhere,” I said. “I used to be okay with the way Shadehaven felt like a cage, but now it’s as if the stars have reached down from the sky and have pulled my heart and mind in any direction it could lead them.”

Her face dropped. “I’ve lived long enough to know there’s nowhere to run, this whole world is a cage. Everywhere you go, you’re only trying to outrun yourself there. There’s billions of people out there, but it’s unbearably lonely.” 

“It doesn’t have to be that way,” I said. She only shook her head.

I moved into an off-campus apartment my last year at Shadehaven, and Lydia began visiting me there instead of our spot beneath the Tree. Her movements around me became less skittish and more languid, and in the midst of the transformation we fetched the love in us tucked far, far away and brought it back for each other. 

The knock at my door that night was urgent, cutting through the quiet hum of the life we started building together. I opened the door to find a girl from my cohort who lived across the hall standing there. Her face was pale and blotchy, eyes rimmed red.

“It happened again,” she whispered. 

“Jesus, Annie,” I brought her in quickly, stomach dropping. “What the hell?”

“Another girl,” she choked out. “In the grove. By the Tree.”

I heard Lydia pacing in my bedroom. 

“Is someone here?” Annie glanced nervously down the hall, then back at me. 

“Just a friend,” I assured her. “What… what happened?”

“They found her this morning,” she said. “She was torn apart and her head–” she broke off, swallowing hard, and trying to steady her trembling hands. “It was barely attached to her body.”

“Do they know… what killed her?”

Annie shook her head, a bitter laugh escaping her lips. “Do they have to, Briar? It was just like Cassie. You two were close. Did she ever talk about someone she met out there?”

“No,” I lied. 

She buried her face into her hands. “God help us.”

I walked Annie back to her apartment. I should’ve tried to comfort her, but the words selfishly stuck to my throat as I hoarded them for myself later. When I returned, I found Lydia near the doorway, arms crossed and her face pale. 

“What the hell did you do?” I seethed.

Lydia blinked, startled. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t act like you didn’t just hear that,” I snapped. “The girl? The one they found in the grove this morning?”

It would’ve hurt less to slap her. “It wasn’t me, Briar,” she said with an incredulous edge. 

“You promised me,” I hissed. “No one else at Shadehaven. No more deaths.”

“And I’ve kept that promise,” she said, growing more frustrated by the second. 

“Then who?”

“I- I don’t know.”

The image of Cassie and the girl meshed in my mind, beheaded smiles and sallow skin. “You expect me to believe that?”

“I do.” The pain in her voice took me back to our first encounter at the Tree, but we had traded places. I hated how pathetic I looked when she wore me. 

The doubt was unrelenting. “I think you should go.”

“If that’s what you want,” she said, leaving my life as quickly as she appeared in it. 

I expected the nightmares to come in the months after she left, but they never did. Instead, the field of dreams I had of Lydia became engulfed in fire, leaving me only with smoldering ghosts. I graduated and left Shadehaven. Kind of. I took a job at a small newspaper in the neighboring town. I had escaped the Tree’s wicked roots with a love that defied God himself, yet still lost the game of chance. What were the chances? 

─── ⋆⋅ ♰ ⋅⋆ ───

The headline first fluttered across my desk this morning, innocuously. Suspect Charged With the Murder of a Shadehaven Student. Minutes passed with an hour’s measure until I could read further, each word a hammer stroke as I accepted my imminent death: 

A. man. has. been. charged. in. connection. to. the. killing. of. Shadehaven. student. Clara. Kirby. 

A man… A man! Relief so sharp flooded through me, weakening my knees. I sent the story upstream, barely reading the rest, and abandoned my desk.

The grove sat in a plaintive stillness, the Tree looming before me. I didn’t wait long until a twig snapped behind me, the foot deliberately announcing their arrival. I whirled towards the sound to find her there, emerging from the shadowed safety of the burgeoning canopy above. 

“You came,” I said, dumbfounded. 

“I never left,” Lydia replied, softly. Weariness flooded her tone, manifesting as slow, undecided movements. “Why are you here?”

“To know the truth,” I said, taking a step closer. “About you. About us.”

“You don’t trust me,” she said, quietly, lips pressing into a thin line. 

“I need to hear you say it,” I answered, voice trembling. “I don’t know what is real anymore.”

Her gaze snapped to mine, wounded. “I’ve never lied to you, Briar, and maybe you’re right to think I killed her. But if I never wanted to care for someone like you, don’t you think I would’ve drained every ounce of life from you – this creature who can look at me and see both monstrosity and muse? Do you know how terrified I was waiting for that scale to tilt?”

“I was scared too,” I admitted. “Scared of myself. When I realized Cassie was after you, I didn’t care about her death. And when I thought you broke your promise to not hurt anyone, that was unpleasant, yes,” I paused, not quite believing I was saying these things out loud. “But I couldn’t stand the thought of her watching as you drained her.”

“What do you want, Briar? I want to hear you say it,” she said, amorously.

“All of this,” I breathed. “You told me you didn’t have time for things with no soul. Make time for me, then..”

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” she argued, unconvincingly. 

“But I do,” I insisted. “If you are not mine, I am afraid I will spend my entire life dead. To be wicked is to be alive. I want to live, ardently, with you. ” 

She hesitated, her gaze searching mine one last time. Then she met me, cupping my face in her hands; the chill felt like freedom in the oppressiveness of spring. “If I do this,” she murmured, a small smile playing on her lips, “there’s no going back.”

I leaned into her touch, my heart dancing for it as it always had. “I’m not going back.”

“Then lay down, Briar,” she said, voice thick with reverence; her voice like a silk tie unraveling. “It will hurt,” she whispered, her lips curling into a small smile.

“I’ve hurt for stupider reasons, I suppose.”

With a final kiss to my forehead, she brought her wrist to her mouth. The sound of her sharp teeth piercing her skin filled the suspended silence between us. Then, she offered the wound to me. “Drink.”

And so I did, the taste unlike anything I’d ever known – the sweetness of stolen fruit, iron, and a thousand lives before me, and the thousand more it promised. 

Above, peeking through the trees, the stars spelled out my fate before me like pins marking a map’s destination; constellation roads which only led to her.