Blood Bond

The day of the ritual comes with the clearest sky they’ve had in a long time. Alicia and Orion prepare together, not saying a word. Tears dry on both of their faces, a sensation neither of them have experienced in years. Orion throws up outside while Alicia covers her eye bags with pencil and powder. The outfits chosen for them are itchy and uncomfortable, hardly suited for the long hike through the woods that awaits them.  

When they finally step outside, cloaked townspeople paint both their faces and pull veils over their heads. A lump forms in Orion’s throat, and Alicia’s fingers tremble where the hilt of her sword would normally be. 

Unknown hands much larger than theirs draw a knife across both their palms. They murmur a prayer, backed by the other townsfolk droning an old hymn under their breath. “We send the children of the Castillo’s for your choosing. May the harvest be bountiful. May the blood welcome you.” 

The townspeople repeat the sentiment. Red drips onto the ground, and those same hands push and guide them towards the entrance of the woods. 

Alicia glances at him through the black mesh of her veil and offers him her hand. He takes it, their blood mingling, sticky and wet. They step forward as one, trembling radiating up the other's arms. 

Darkness enshrouds them the moment they step into the woods. The townspeople disappear in their wake, the heat of familiarity gone with them. Alicia walks cautiously, pulling Orion behind her until her foot catches on a root and she stumbles, yanking him with her.

“Let me go in front,” Orion mumbles. 

All his midnight hunting sessions make him surefooted as he plots out the path ahead. No immediate response comes from Alicia as she follows, and he refuses to look back at her. 

There’s no specific direction towards the center. It was repeated a thousand times in their youth, to walk until whatever’s in here decides they’re ready. The forest is quiet, but Orion isn’t unused to it. In fact, he finds a misguided peace in it, despite knowing what waits for them. Everything is larger than they are, and they wade deeper and deeper into the ocean of a forest. For once, Orion is more in his element than Alicia.

It feels like drowning, existing somewhere this expansive. Alicia’s eyes are wide, flitting from the gaps between the trees, but Orion trains his gaze on the ground. Her breathing devolves into short gasps the longer they walk, and she grips his hand like a lifeline.

Thick groves of mushrooms grow on the bases of the trees, and Orion has taken to following the thin stream of water that cuts across the ground. He doesn't dare drink it, he’s not that much of a fool, but water always leads somewhere. It’s better than nothing. 

“How do you know so much about the forest?” Alicia says quietly. “We haven’t gone out exploring together in…a long time.” 

The lump in Orion’s throat swells, but he doesn’t stop walking. “I found a gun in one of the shipments from out of town. I wanted to learn how to use it. I-” he swallows, eyes burning. “I didn’t want you to know.”

“Oh.” 

He assumed she would ask why he didn’t tell her, but she doesn’t say anything. They just keep walking in silence. 

The woods grow thicker, and if possible, darker. Tree trunks the size of houses take up the forest floor, branches stretching up beyond their vision. They walk for hours, or maybe days. Neither of them stop. The ground grows tenebrous as Alicia locks eyes with every prey animal hidden in the brush, and pressure builds at the back of Orion’s head that he wishes was from dehydration. 

At this point, Alicia is nothing but a shadow behind him. The blood between their palms dries as time goes on, their wounds connecting and scabbing together. If she’s still breathing, he can’t tell. Her hand is calloused in his, and he can feel the edges of her fingernails bitten to the quick. 

His eyes blur, vision going in and out of focus. Everything starts to bleed together, and his mind fogs over. Alicia drips with perspiration, her hands trembling wildly. 

The trees show no sign of thinning, and even Orion starts to see pricks of eyes in the corners of his swirling vision. He’s never ventured this deep into the woods before, never crossed that invisible line that separated him from whatever’s out here. Sweat trickles down his back, but there’s no hope of a breeze down here. The air feels like it hasn’t moved in thousands of years. 

Alicia stops dead. “Orion. It’s close.” 

Orion snaps back to reality, haze clearing from his mind. For the first time, he turns to look back. He hasn’t taken the time to really look at her in the past few years, but even in a glance at her now, it takes him by surprise how much she’s changed. The ceremonial veil over her face is torn from sharp branches, revealing the gauntness of her face. Her eyes are wider than Orion has ever seen them, her pupils blown impossibly wide. 

Every detail of her body or face reminds him of their childhood. Vividly he remembers clumsily shearing brambles and thorns out of her hair, messily cutting it to a jagged bob around her ears. She cried holding the pieces in her hands, and Orion can’t remember it happening again since then. It’s never grown past her ears in all the years since he first cut it for her.

Hidden under her clothes is a scar that wraps from her hip up her chest. It’s a scar that should’ve been Orion’s. That hunt is nothing but a memory of blood and fear in his mind. He had been waiting for the blow with a sick satisfaction, hoping maybe that would lend some credibility to his name. It took him so long to realize that the pain was never going to hit; Alicia had taken the wound for him. Bitterness curls through him, but guilt pools behind it. She saved him. By all rights he should be grateful, but some small part of him still wishes that scar was his. 

He snaps out of reverie when she jerks his hand hard. 

“Did you hear that?”

Glancing around wildly, he looks for some beast or creature and instead meets the eyes of a doe. With a sigh of relief, he stills and points it out. 

“Look. I bet there’s a fawn nearby.”

Alicia loosens the death grip she has on his hand. The doe bolts into the trees, hoping to lead them away from her baby. Orion hadn’t realized how fast his heart was beating until he feels his own pulse in Alicia’s palm. She breathes out shakily and shakes her head as if that will dispel the fear. 

Still half in the middle of looking for the fawn in the underbrush, it takes him by surprise when Alicia speaks again.

“I can barely breathe in here. How did you come out to practice every night without suffocating?”

He shrugs. “Didn’t notice it, I guess.” A lie, but hopefully a harmless one. The air was so thick when he came to hunt that he spent days doing nothing but relearning how to inhale. He aligned his breathing to the cicadas and crickets, and taught himself to calm down that way. There are no cicadas here. There hasn’t been a single chirp or insect song since Alicia saw the deer. 

Alicia’s head jerks up. “It’s here. Run. Run!” 

She flies in front of him in a single bound, taking off before he has time to react and disappearing between trees and brush. The movement rips the scab forming between their palms off, and Orion winces for a split second too long. She disappears into the treeline. 

“Come back!!” He tears after her as fast as he can. When he rounds one of the massive trees, he becomes aware of what exactly Alicia was running from. 

Or rather, running towards. 

What he immediately fundamentally understands to be the Creature in the Woods, the Patron of Vasttrial, looms before him, Alicia folded in its wings. She’s not struggling, and instead reaches a hand towards the horror. 

At just a glance it could be mistaken for a stag or bear, but the moment Orion starts tracking the details of its body, his stomach curdles. Its wings aren’t like any Orion has ever seen, rotting and molting and regrowing before his eyes, black like mold. An agglomeration of roots spread from its chest in a vague circular shape, but there’s no physical form beneath it. Just roots and bone and rotten wings. 

The skin on its face sags, more like hide draped over a skull then flesh. Antlers crest from the creature's head, with more points than any he's seen on a normal stag. Gray spanish moss dangles from its face, and at the edges its body seems to merge with the foliage behind it.

Wisteria dangles from its mouth, but when he looks closer, it doesn't look like there’s an opening in its face where the flowers are. He follows the blooms until, in the shadow behind them, he sees bone-white canines. Its deer head is nothing more than a mask; its mouth is not where the flowers are. 

Orion’s breath catches in his chest and the creature’s maw cracks open. Alicia goes limp, her head snapping backward at an unnatural angle. Her eyes are wide, flitting around desperately before landing on him. A broken noise comes out of her throat, a ragged gasp or the beginning of a scream. 

Holding Alicia in cloven hooves and tattered wings, the creature brings her to its mouth. It makes eye contact with him as its roots wrap around her, winding across her body. Orion hasn’t seen her look this small in years, and that unsettles him more than anything else. She’s perfectly still in its arms, nothing but a low groan indicating she’s even alive. 

Then it speaks. The sounds coming from its throat don't sound like words, but instead like syllables screamed out and spliced together to make a word. But Orion understands. And Alicia understands. 

“Rarely indeed, that a second child suits this fate better than the first.” It pauses, listening. “Perhaps you will last longer than the others.”

Alicia realizes what it's going to do before Orion does, her body seizing like electricity runs through her. Another noise cracks from her chest as though her ribs are constricting to push the sound out, and the creature’s mouth opens wider. He screams in tandem with her as it pulls her head into its mouth and bites down. 

His body stops working, ground yawing open beneath him as it eats her. There is a horrific cracking of bones and squelching of flesh and then it's just Orion and the Patron of Vastttrail. It looks at him, muzzle wet with blood, and the absence of Alicia stands stark between them. 

In a split second, all of Orion's fear turns to fury. On instinct he reaches for his gun, and the realization that it’s not there only enrages him further. 

He rushes towards the beast, but it lets out a screeching, disjointed noise that he places as a laugh. Orion flies into it, ripping at the pelt draped across its skull. His fingers bore through rotten flesh, digging into its body as though he’ll find Alicia buried under its skin. For every layer of tissue that he pierces, however, it undulates and grows back faster. 

“Give her back!”

Orion doesn’t notice the hand around his throat until it hauls him up and away. A moment ago he would have sworn it was a hoof, but he’s undoubtedly suspended by thin, emaciated fingers that recede into a body of writhing undergrowth. 

Its mouth opens wide, rancid breath rolling over Orion in a wave. An eerie, scream-speak emanates from its throat, but the blood in Orion’s skull pounds too loud for him to understand what it's saying. Whispered syllables and howled consonants fill his head as the creature glitches. Its body contorts, spasming into something smaller and unfamiliar, then jerks back to its previous form. The hand on his throat convulses, for a moment no longer flesh but a cloven hoof wrapped in roots. 

Suddenly it releases him, its body snapping and seizing. Orion grasps at his throat, heaving for air. Dizzy from lack of oxygen, his mind can’t put together the pieces of what’s unfolding in front of him. 

He could swear that it’s Alicia standing in front of him for a moment, with terrible wings binding her like a nervous system to the forest. Then it’s the Patron before him again, with its massive maw split open. The sound coming from its mouth crescendos until Orion has to tear his gaze away to cover his ears. 

It just keeps screaming, howling louder and louder as Orion squeezes his eyes shut and covers his ears. The sound is inescapable, searing through his body until his ears bleed.  

Blood thunders in his head as his heart beats a prey animal’s hymn in his chest. All he can find the strength to do is press his ears harder over his head and hold his eyes shut. He doesn’t know how long it is that he stays like that, how long it is before the creature starts speaking.

“O-Orionnnn.” It shudders the sound out, the syllables rattling through its throat like wind through the grass.

“Oriiiiiiion,” it says again, and this time he can hear Alicia’s voice under it. 

He keeps his eyes shut as she- it, he forces himself to correct, rasps his name in Alicia's voice. 

“Loooooook at me,” it groans, each word dragged out like a body on stone. “Orion. Orion. Orion.”

Each syllable joins together to what he knows is his name, but the emphasis on each part is wrong each time. OH-rion. O-RI-on. OriON. But it's uncanny imitations inch closer to reality until it’s speaking in Alicia’s voice. 

“Orion.”

He knows it’s not her. He knows. He just heard the damn thing practicing her voice. But the possibility is too much. 

With a pit yawing in his stomach, he forces himself to look. Alicia stands in front of him, her shirt ripped away to reveal her scar peeking from under it. Eyes brown and bold meet his.