A cave? A dream?
Or something else altogether? Some kind of magic.
Voices came from the walls, from the ground, from the ceiling above. They were stone, darkness, but they were more than that.
These voices were old. Something evil. Something hungry.
“Lost soul. We see you.”
The shadows thickened, darkness in all the shades of insanity oozing around me, dripping into my ears, my eyes, my lungs. I struggled to sit.
“Soul-torn wanderer. We have seen you. Bleeding your sorrow.”The voices drew closer, pulling out of stone, squeezing through the pores, the cracks, the shattered, spreading into the breath of this place.
I pressed my palm upon the ground, cold and sharp, the sting of razors cutting my skin. I staggered to my feet, squaring toward the voices that seemed to come from everywhere.
“You may see me,” I said, blinking hard and scanning the darkness, “but I cannot see you. Show yourself.”
The air was cold, cold, cold. If I could see, my breath would be a frozen cloud. Frost crawled across my skin, ice gathered in the folds of my clothing.
“Hush, hush,”a thousand voices whispered from around me, a scrabble of nightmares, a chorus of horror. “Wayward soul. Hush, hush, hush. Mother comes. Mother Hush. Hush, hush.”
There was no light, but my eyes were adjusting. Just enough to make out jagged edges, stone.
And then there was a new voice.
“Here now, broken marrow.” The voice was solid, the strike of a hammer on the roots of an ancient tree, the shriek of claws scaling obsidian cliffs. “I am here.”
All other sounds extinguished, and the cavern filled with eerie light.
Mother Hush appeared.
She was tall, taller than me—
—a tatter of bones, a ruffle of wings, spider silk for skin, and starlight eyes—
—tall enough she should have had to stoop in this small cavern. But the shadows were a part of her, shifting and parting so she could have space among them.
The queen, the creature, the…
…Mother Hush…
…Mother Hush wore leaves and slices of stone and agate that clattered and shushed in flowing layers. Lacy, luminescent lichen drew delicate, glowing edges around her, illuminating her face.
She was—
—terrifying—
—beautiful and horrifying in a way that hit my gut and made the hair on my body rise.
Her eyes were wide black orbs. Her too-small mouth and blackened lips curved in a sharp, pointed jaw. The entirety of her face was hard, angled, and too long.
White hair floated away from her skull, and when she lifted her hands, one had too many fingers, spider-like, the other too few.
She was vaguely fae, vaguely insect, wholly unfettered magic of the old worlds beneath.
“Hush,” I whispered, and all the voices in the dark moaned.
“You know my kind, ragged bones?”
