Page 10 of All Hallows Fate

Instead of confirming that, she set off walking, the gleaming red of her eyes casting the tiniest bit of light. Enough that I saw her turn away from the direction I’d been going in. Typical; I wasn’t even going the right way.

“I wouldn’t have guessed I was horsey, but I definitely know how to ride,” I told her, needing to fill the silence. I’d been alone in my mind for too long, and my thoughts had grown thorns. Every barb gouged my sore brain, demanding answers. Who am I? Where did I come from? Did I have parents? Siblings? A boyfriend? A best friend? Was I famous? Was I a hermit? Was I an ornithologist?

I certainly had a strange wealth of knowledge about ducks, so I must be an expert. Maybe that was who killed me. Maybe it was a duck-induced death. But that didn’t feel right, and I could almost grasp the memory of sharp lemon and sweet mint.

“You must have a name,” I said to the horse, patting her neck as she picked up her pace. “I’m Cat. I bet you have a really fearsome name like Dismemberment, or Uppercut.”

She tossed her head, a certain level of sass in the movement that made me smile. “Too gruesome? Of course, you’re a girly girl. You’ll have a cute name. Like Sunshine. Or Buttercup. Your rider should get you pretty bows for your mane, you know. They’d suit you.”

Sunshine-Buttercup stopped and pointedly turned her head, nudging my knee with her nose.

“Oh.” I blinked, digesting that. “I’m your rider?”

She took off again, faster, her hooves eating up the darkness until the crimson gleam of her eyes bounced off the void around us.

“Well, that explains why I know how to ride,” I muttered, my body doing its own thing as she kicked into a sprint. I knew how to shift my weight, when to sit up and when to drop back down, when to lean flat to her back. As if someone had taught me. I frowned, the tiniest glimmer of a memory trying to break free, but all I caught was the word beautiful. Which made sense, because the horse was gorgeous. At least as much as I could tell in the dark.1

A pinprick of light split the dark canvas. I tightened my grip on the reins. “That’s the way out?”

She ran full-pelt towards that gleam, her hooves devouring the distance until the pinprick became a window, and then a wide slice of moon-pale light that we ploughed into, through, and out the other side.

Scents broke through first. The crisp smell of snow. The cloying taste of smoke. Earthy trees and dirt.

Well, the good news was she wasn’t taking me to hell, or I’d smell rotting corpses, fire, blood, and brimstone.

Yet when she raced through the slit in the darkness, a land wreathed in mist lay before us. And it was… familiar. Enough that I knew it wasn’t meant to look like this. This place wasn’t the white realm I’d left behind. There was supposed to be colour and community and streets full of lopsided buildings, chimneys puffing soft curls of grey smoke. Not all this… fog.

“I’ve been here before,” I told the horse as she slowed, plodding down the cobbled street, avoiding the craters where cobbles had broken or vanished altogether. The brick houses were much the same, some missing chunks of stone, others with whole walls collapsed, roof tiles sagging. Cracked slivers of slate were scattered over the pavement, fog swirling among them.

And every fragment of destruction made my chest squeeze tighter and tighter. Not unease or anxiety. Pain. Seeing this village in ruins hurt.

“Is this where I lived?” I breathed, waving a hand through the eddying fog so I could glimpse what waited atop the cobbled road my trusty steed aimed towards.

“Oh, you really are beautiful,” I said when I got a proper look at her. She was as black as the void we’d just passed through, with a stately neck, intelligent eyes, and a mane groomed to perfection. Dark flickers of smoke seeped from her hair, scattered black wisps into the dense fog. “Should you be leaking black smoke, though?”

I reached out, trailing my fingertips through it, and my chest jolted, the hunger for justice and revenge soaring inside me, stronger than ever. It wasn’t smoke; it was power. A question answered by my own magic.

“I think I loved this place,” I said after a long silence, only the abandoned village below us and the cobbled street leading higher, higher. “I loved it, and seeing it in this state… I can’t stand it.”

A lump pressed against my throat, growing until it hurt, too. “Trust your bonds,” I reminded myself. Maybe I was bound to this village. There was certainly enough emotion packed into my chest to suggest it. My ribs strained to fit everything, the skin over my throat made thin by a lump the size of a golf ball.2

“I hope you know where we’re going,” I told the horse as the ascent turned ever steeper. A phantom ache burned in my legs muscles, as if my body remembered walking up this hill. I could almost feel the laboured rasp of my lungs, working overtime to suck down oxygen. “I can’t see a thing in this—”

A voice sliced through the fog, cut a slit in my chest, and drove into my heart like a lightning bolt.

“Cat! Cat, where are you?”

“Um,” I said to the horse. “That’s me. Right?”

The horse answered while I was still reeling from someone calling my name. She let out a loud, rallying whinny and put on a new burst of speed, until I had to flatten myself to her back or risk falling off.

“Fuzzball?” someone cried, a different voice, this one brighter, sharper, and alive with emotions. Whoever spoke, it sounded like he’d just been crying. “Guys, that’s Fuzzball. Maybe she found our—”

He cut off when the horse burst through the layer of fog at the top of the cobbled street, and the mist thinned in places, allowing me to see the castle that loomed over us—wrecked in so many places that it looked like the ruins of Whitby Abbey—and the five men who stood in the once-great castle’s courtyard.

They surged as one the moment the horse, Fuzzball, apparently, and I became visible. I waited for the crash of recognition through my chest, waited for enlightenment to pierce the shadowed pit in my mind. But these people were strangers, utterly unfamiliar.

I tightened my hands on Fuzzball’s reins, motioning for her to slow, to stop, and threw up a hand in warning to the men, coils of magic around my hand, wrist, and arm. A threat I would discharge the second those men came too close.