The Mocking Sky
“Behold, Mother, a fae!”
Malin’s voice, sharp with certainty, rang through the thickening dusk, cutting across the hush of Blackwood as if daring the encroaching darkness to deny her joyous claim.
Vera, her arms straining beneath the weight of freshly chopped logs, shot her daughter a withering glance, the last remnants of light casting her features in harsh relief. Shadows gathered in the hollows of her face, deepening the creases of exhaustion etched into her skin, sharpening the rigid set of her mouth.
“Cease your nonsensical prattle, Malin!” she snapped, the words biting, clipped with the weariness of a woman who had no patience left to spare. The logs tumbled from her grasp, landing with a dull, heavy thud into the woven basket at her feet. “We have wasted enough time. Night is closing in, and I will not linger in these woods any longer than necessary. We must return to Myrr.”
“But I truly did see one, Mother!” Malin insisted, her voice swelling, the raw edge of indignation creeping into her tone. She gestured skyward with frantic animation, her fuzzy grey appendages flailing as though they might catch the last traces of the creature’s flight. Paw-like fingers splayed, reaching toward the darkening expanse above, desperate to grasp what had already vanished into the yawning heavens.
“It soared with such grace… unlike me,” she added, her voice unravelling into a wistful murmur, her excitement momentarily tempered by something quieter, something aching and unspoken.
Above them, the crows stirred, shifting restlessly upon the skeletal arms of the trees, their black silhouettes a writhing mass against the waning light. Then, as though some unseen signal had passed between them, they erupted in a discordant cacophony—sharp caws and ragged cries splitting the stillness, a fevered uproar that carried through the tangled wood like taunting laughter. Malin flinched as the sound rose, cresting in waves of shrill mockery, as if the birds themselves sneered at the absurdity of her longing, at the mere suggestion that she might ever take flight among them.
Vera exhaled sharply and straightened, rolling her shoulders with a wince as her spine protested the movement. The firewood basket, now filled to excess, rested against the twisted roots of a gnarled tree, tilting precariously beneath its own burden. She pressed a palm to the rough bark, grounding herself in its solid, unyielding presence before dragging a slow, measured breath into her lungs. “Enough of your daydreams, child,” she murmured, her voice no longer sharp but weighted, the exhaustion within it not merely physical. “We must finish gathering what we need and be on our way. These woods are no place to linger after dark.”
The crows wheeled high above, circling in the dying light, their inky forms shifting like smoke against the deepening sky, but it was the fire in Malin’s gaze that burned brightest—raw, defiant, unyielding.
“You don’t understand, Mother,” she said, the words brittle with frustration, quivering at the edges as though they teetered between fury and despair. “I am not like you. I am not like anyone.”
She seized a fallen branch, her grip tightening until her claws dug into the damp wood, brandishing it as though it were a weapon, a blade poised against the dark. “The fae understand me. They see something in me that you never will.”
Vera stilled.
The words struck with unexpected force, lodging beneath her ribs like something jagged and cold, something she could not easily dislodge. She wanted to dismiss them, to scoff at the absurdity, to correct Malin with the same exasperated certainty she had always wielded—but she did not. Because she could not. Because some quiet, unacknowledged part of her knew that Malin was right.
She did not understand her daughter. Not entirely.
And it was that very chasm—the distance between what was known and what remained unknowable—that unsettled her the most.
Malin’s expression darkened at her mother’s silence, the stubborn set of her jaw tightening, her beak clenching shut. She snatched up a log from the forest floor, her movements sharp, petulant, her muscles coiled with frustration. Then, without thought, she hurled it toward the basket.
The throw was reckless, undisciplined. The log veered off course, slamming instead against Vera’s shin.
A sharp cry tore from Vera’s lips as the force of the blow sent her stumbling back, her leg buckling beneath her. Pain flared, hot and immediate, spreading in bright shocks beneath her fingertips as she clutched the bruised flesh. “Malin!” she barked, her voice tangled with equal parts pain and exasperation—though whether the greater wound lay in her throbbing limb or in the words that had preceded it, she could not say.
Malin’s breath caught. The anger drained from her in an instant, replaced with something small, something cold. Regret flickered across her face, wide eyes glistening as she froze, paws trembling at her sides. Slowly, she buried her face in them, her muffled apology dissolving into the hush, swallowed whole by the waiting silence.
Above them, the crows hushed, their raucous cries faltering into uneasy quiet. Even the trees seemed to still, as though the very forest held its breath, waiting to see what would come next. The weight of Malin’s temper, her shame, curled through the air like a creeping mist, thick and suffocating.
Vera exhaled, the sound uneven, frayed at the edges. “You need to contribute, Malin,” she said at last, her voice hoarse with exhaustion, its sharpness worn down into something more brittle. “If you do not, the Stork might decide to replace you with a nicer girl and whisk you away to some dreadful place.”
The moment the words left her tongue, she regretted them.
Malin flinched as though struck. Her hackles bristled, the fur along her spine rising in stiff, uneven stripes, her beak dipping low in quiet hurt. Her hazel eyes, framed by the stark, vertical slits of her pupils, shimmered, the tears pooling at their edges catching what little light remained, turning them to fractured glass.
Then she inhaled, deep and shuddering, before unleashing a wail—a raw, piercing cacophony that split through the forest with unnatural force. It was the sound of battling crows and shrieking cats, the wretched cry of something neither bird nor beast, something wild, something uncontainable.
The crows startled, their silence immediate. Their obsidian eyes, glinting in the last vestiges of daylight, twitched toward her, wide and wary, their bodies stiff with sudden, cautious fascination.
Vera, wearied beyond measure, unwound the shawl from her head with slow, deliberate movements and bent to wrap it tightly around her aching ankle. Straightening, she pressed a hand to the small of her back, wincing as the dull ache lodged there refused to abate. Her dark-brown hair, streaked with silver, tumbled loose past her waist, the weight of it heavy against her shoulders, a mark of years that had worn her thin, carving lines into her face that made her seem more like Malin’s grandmother than her mother.
“I’m so sorry, love,” Vera murmured at last, the words slipping from her lips like an exhale too long held, too tightly wound. She swiped a damp sheen of sweat from her brow, the fevered heat of exertion clinging to her skin, though the evening air should have cooled it. Her voice, stripped of its earlier sharpness, was gentler now, worn at the edges, frayed and fragile beneath the weight of unspoken things.
The warmth of the late autumn afternoon pressed against them, thick and unseasonal, wrapping the forest in a strange, breathless stillness. It was a lingering remnant of a season that refused to yield, as though the world itself conspired to hold the frost at bay for just a moment longer. But Vera knew better. She knew all too well that winter, with its biting chill, lurked just beyond the horizon, biding its time, waiting for the precise moment to seize the land in its unrelenting grip. It would come suddenly, as it always did, sweeping down from the north without mercy, stripping the trees bare, stiffening the earth beneath a carapace of ice. And they were not ready. They did not have enough wood, enough provisions, enough time.
Despite her youth, Malin possessed a will as unyielding as iron, her convictions as immovable as the great mountain crags that loomed beyond Myrr. Vera had taken a chance in bringing her along, hoping—perhaps foolishly—that her daughter’s own desire for warmth in the bitter months ahead might translate into the practical need to help prepare for it. But it was becoming painfully clear, in a way that clenched like a fist around her heart, that Malin struggled with labors that did not offer immediate gratification. Her mind, restless and untamed, flitted always toward the distant and the unseen, toward the shimmer of things that might be rather than the cold, necessary toil of things that were.
Vera let out a slow breath, steadying herself, hoping—foolishly, desperately—that Malin would let this go, that they could salvage the moment before it shattered completely.
But Malin’s gaze, searing in its intensity, was not so easily cooled.
“You didn’t mean to say it, but you meant it!” she spat, her voice as sharp and brittle as frost-cloaked glass, the words flung like an accusation, a verdict rendered without trial.
Before Vera could reach for her, before she could say anything to pull her back, Malin turned on her heel and vanished into the trees, her lithe form slipping between the shadows like smoke curling through the undergrowth.
Her mournful howls rose in the wake of her departure, raw and untempered, threaded with betrayal, an animal cry that carried through the trees before fading, devoured by the hush of the deepening forest.
A fresh stab of pain lanced through Vera’s leg, flaring hot and bright where Malin’s careless throw had struck her, but she barely registered it, her thoughts already untethered from her body, unspooling in the direction her daughter had fled. Pain of a different sort clutched at her ribs, a thing cold and visceral, an unease that gnawed at the edges of reason. Malin was vanishing. Not just into the woods, but into something deeper, something Vera could not reach, something slipping ever further beyond the grasp of motherly hands and measured warnings.
She gritted her teeth, steadying herself against the rough bark of the nearest tree, the wood biting into her palm as she forced her aching leg forward.
“Malin!” Her voice cut through the silence, taut with urgency, though she fought to keep the desperation from creeping in. “We can’t play these games now! Come back, and I promise a treat.”
It was a cheap bribe, a weak lure, but it was all she had.
However, Malin was already too far gone, lost to the tangle of shadows and towering trunks, swallowed whole by the indifferent vastness of the waiting dark. The trees, their skeletal limbs stretched high against the dimming sky, had closed around her, weaving her into their depths, pulling her further from reach with every passing moment. The hush that followed was thick, impenetrable, a silence so absolute it pressed against Vera’s ears like the weight of the unseen. No rustle of movement betrayed Malin’s presence, no echo of her retreating steps lingered in the underbrush, only the steady, breathless quiet of a forest that had taken her in and refused to give her back.
