Frosted

“Bloodroot and blue cohosh and bearberry,” the voice lilted. “Hepatica, saxifrage, and Jack-in-the-pulpit.” Fingers trailed over delicate leaves. Bright sprouts, desperately reaching from the melting snow, turned white, and then black.

“Oh dear,” said the voice.

Pale purple prairie crocuses lay squashed between her toes.

She bent low, staring for a long moment as the branches above groaned. In the silence of the forest, ice-melt dripped to the mud and loam below. Wind shrieked lowly. Far off, someone crept over the last dredges of crackling snow.

The slim white birch near her head juddered in time with a heartbeat. The dark horizontal lenticels almost seemed to breathe.

“Is it this one's time?” she asked, raising one pallid hand. Ragged palms and knobby fingers trailed lightly across a papery surface and the trunk swayed as though trying to escape. Sharp battered nails poked beneath the strips of thin lifting skin. With a quick flick of the wrist, paper-thin bark peeled away and ripped free.

The tree cried out with a moan.

“Shhh,” she whispered. “Doesn't that feel better? Like an itch suddenly gone?” Bony fingers dug further. The chilling numb of her skin shivered into the meat of the tree. The bright lichen at the base of the trunk started to brown. Frost gathered around her sallow, bare toes, burning the greening grass.

“Won't you come out to greet me?” The birch quivered. Thin branches flinched with the shivering wind, waving tiny growing leaf buds. “I can't stay much longer,” she said. Already the midday sun was making her lethargic, drowsy eyes and tired feet. An ache grew beneath her ribs, draining further below to her belly, sharp and hollowing. It made her greedy. Gluttonous. “Come out,” she growled, pushing her frosty bite deep.

The trunk did not open so much as it flowed from one form to another – a jerking, convulsive slide of liquid and sap and plant life until a thin female form stood beside the tree. The dryad panicked – it was a rude awakening – and tried to return to the safety of her birch, limbs stretching with a grotesque reel away from the glacial fingers creeping up her skin.

“Good morning,” said the creature of snow and ice. The dryad's fine-boned face twisted, horrified with alarm. Her pale flesh was marked by the lenticels of her tree. Mossy hair and branches of leaves tangled in a wilting mane of coiled tresses. The papery bark over her bosom was peeled up at the edges, a darkening wound slashing into the dip between her breasts.

“You're finally awake. I was getting anxious.”

The thing in front of her was a gaunt stretch of cadaverous pale skin draped over bone, a naked press of hips and ribs and spine, lips and fingers and toes all painted corpse-blue – her nose a blackened, withered smudge. Its eyes were black, empty pits. Bone-white teeth smiled with pulled back, frosted lips and the dryad could only stare on in undisguised terror.

“It's springtime,” the creature-woman said, voice slithering like the skittering creatures beneath the old soggy leaves. “Time for some things to wake, and for others to sleep.”

It leaned closer, trapping her to the trunk of her tree.

“What are you?” the dryad asked. The wind rattled her branches. The forest felt still, quiet like it was crouched in upon itself, a half-awake panic-filled creature trying to find a burrow to hide inside. Her chest ached. A frozen grip twisted itself around her heart, even as the bone-woman raised empty hands, knuckles clacking at the movement.

“What am I?” it repeated.

The creeping dread was a heavy, visceral stone in her gut. The air was too thin. The sun was too hot, blaring down, despite the freezing air. Sweat ran down the dryad's brow, sliding off the tip of her nose.

“What do you want?” she asked. The dryad's palms reached back, pressing against the peeling bark of her birch tree. She tried to slide inside.

The creature's claw-like hands lashed out, swift as a hawk, and dug into her wrists, trapping her still. The dryad gasped out a choking, heaving cry.

It felt like her sister's pine needles digging into her skin. Like when they had fought over the junco and chickadee and who could provide a better nest. Except, only much worse. The touch didn't only sting. It swept across the soles of her feet, into the palms of her hands, pinching the button of her nose, and the shells of her ears. Her teeth clattered. The shivery bite felt like the blade of an axe. Terror climbed up her throat, made it seem like it was swelling. She wished to squeeze her eyes tight, but she couldn't seem to move. Sap pounded through her chest. At her back, the tree convulsed against her shaking spine. She thought she would have fallen, wobbling, if not for the clenching, piercing grip around her wrist bones.

If she had a moment – just one moment – she could return to her birch. She could rest her heavy limbs. She felt leaves falling from her hair, from her tree, dead and dying. She could regrow them – have a late reawakening. She would miss spring, if it only meant that she could wake later on.

“What do I want?” the dead, greedy, gluttonous thing repeated. A carnivore's white smile stretched beneath grinning, empty eyes.

The dryad heaved in place. The corpse would not move. Ravenous hunger lashed against her limbs.

She could only weep. The creature continued to smile and the cruelty seemed unfathomable.

“Why?” the dryad pleaded as the frost spread up past her calves, past her thighs, past her hips, to join where her arms and shoulders already lay useless and dead, the skin slowly starting to blacken and burn. The gash in her chest left her breathless with cold.

“Because,” the creature full of blight and winter dieback said, staring at the dripping ice and melting snow and sun beaming through pale branches, “Winter is almost done, and I am still so hungry.”

Behind them, unseen by the dryad, lay the two dozen sisters she had already left in ruins.